Updates and More

Two months?

Hard to believe I haven’t put anything up here in two months. Anything new happening? Trust me it hasn’t been a matter of nothing going on so much as it is time has managed to slip through the matrix… again.

Time for an update just to let you know I’m not dead yet, and things are happening.

On the Thrice Publishing front, we are hoping to put out another '“lost classic” before this month is out. Our first offering of the Thrice Library was WE by Yevgeny Zamyatin, probably the premier dystopian novel, maybe even the first of its kind, originally produced by the author in exile in the 1920s. If everything goes right, we should have RALPH 124C41+ ready to roll soon. RALPH (by Hugo Gernsback) can best be described as “the Plan 9 From Outer Space of science fiction novels.” On one hand… let’s just say it… it’s bloody awful. One of those “so awful it’s good.” But what it lacks in skill it more than triples in prescience. There are so many “inventions” mentioned and alluded to that pre-date their actual arrival in reality that it is mind boggling. Gernsback posited devices that, when he wrote the book in 1911, seemed impossible, only to have them come into actuality within the next hundred years. So many, in fact, I can guarantee that the reader will be dizzy by the time they finish the book. If not from the sheer quantity of wild devices, then certainly in, shall we say, his particular “talent.” Such as it is. It is an old-fashioned fun read and hasn’t hurt anybody since the early part of the long dead 20th century

On a personal note, I still have one novel and one novella making the rounds. This year saw AlienBuddha publish DRAINMAN, my post-climate change, forget-about-saving-the-world-it-is-too-late-for-sirens, novella. There will be an upcoming article in Becky Tuch’s Lit Mag News, probably December, and sometime next year I will have a story in Exacting Clam magazine. I can’t promise to keep up with time here on substack, but I’ll do my best. In the meantime subscriptions here will always remain free. There’s no point on trying to put a price on the muscle here when I keep forgetting it exists.

And an observation on the process of writing.

I’m convinced that living the everyday life with all of the personalities one engages with through the years, paying the bills, going through all the arguments, all the occasional boredoms, the politics, the controversies, and especially the mundane parts of life, driving the car to all the usual places and the things one does on automatic day after day, deadens a key synapsis in one’s brain. The channels we use in the brain for imagination, so full and firing when we’re young, shrink and calcify over time if a person isn’t careful. We seem to need these pathways less and less as the years progress. I believe these “lines and terminals,” so clouded, open up with the use of psychotropics or anything that can be used to change brain chemistry. Huxley and Michaux knew this, or discovered this, well enough. I am convinced that a lot of the ideas, situations, metaphors, and scenes I’ve tried to put on paper over the last 35 years would never have occurred to me without the availability of the cure until all that remained to do was to make the crazy readable. Write high, edit sober. I make no excuses. Feel free to comment, if you want. But I stand by my argument.

That’s all for now, my lovelies.

Subscriptions are and will always remain free