Payoff.

(British Formula Ford. Wiki Commons 3.0)



I want it all. You remember me. I was the kid who wanted to be a professional scuba diver, and a private detective, and a cowboy, or rather, a gunfighter/rancher. I was the kid who wanted that 1967 Triumph Spitfire, for only $350.00 way back when—I was sixteen, and I had my license. I’m the kid who wanted to play ball, and hockey, and God knows what all. I’m the kid who wanted the parents to drop everything and scrape up $1,400.00 for the Jim Russell Racing School.

Yeah, I’m the kid that wanted to be an archaeologist. As I recall, I was going win the Medal of Honour, and I’m the kid who wanted to invent his own religion.

I’m the kid who had tennis lessons, and swimming lessons, and sailing lessons, and Saturdays at the YMCA climbing up ropes and jumping over saddle horses, and I’m the kid with the new red bike.

I’m the kid who had those long summer vacation drives to a campground way off in the middle of nowhere, with little brother, little sister, feuding in the back seat while necks and faces became heated and voices were raised in the front seat. Some kids don’t even get that, when you think of it. Travel does broaden the mind, that much is true.

I’m the kid who sent off, long before the internet, for information on how to stake a gold claim in Northern Ontario, and I’m the kid who wanted to run off and live in a cave and feed myself with a muzzle-loading musket and black powder. I’m the kid who grew up in a house full of books, music, and adults with brains in their heads and some ideas of their own…

I’m the kid who should have taken flying lessons, I suppose. I’m the kid who was actually turned down by the recruiting office—not quite so much demand for cannon fodder back then, and I’m the kid who went off to be a newsman, and I’m the kid who went back to school fifteen times and still never finished. Yeah, I’m the guy who wanted to be a wildlife photographer, and I’m the guy who was planning to buy a sailboat and live on a desert island somewhere. I probably should have taken in a good university or two along the way, but of course I was too busy wasting time.

All that precious time.                                                                                              

I’m the kid who still has that grubby coin collection, and a few stamps. I’ve still got that pocketknife that my Uncle John left behind.

I think at some point that I made up my mind that I would never get married—otherwise, how in the hell was I going to find time to do all these other things? People just laughed. Look who’s laughing now, for surely you people are the ones doing all the interesting stuff, all of the above in fact, whereas I’m still sort of hung up on what might have been. You even got some posterity to show for it.

I suppose at some point we just have to let it go, and get on with what’s left of the rest of our lives.

You want to know something funny? I still want it all. It’s true. I even think I can have it all; I mean, when you think of all them kids around the world who will never have what I have had and enjoyed. I guess that’s maybe the lesson in all of this—shit happens and we make the best of it. Yet the streets really are paved with gold around here. I firmly believe that. It’s a question of what do you want to do?

There’s nothing stopping me from taking flying lessons, or canoeing to Belize for that matter.

It’s a question of how bad you want it, and how hard you’re willing to work for it. It’s a matter of how much you are willing to sacrifice for it. And I guess I sacrifice much for the dreams that I do still cherish.

But I will tell you this: if this really is a business, that is to say the business of writing books, which I have set myself to do, then at some point there had better be a payoff. Because anything else is just nonsense.

“Oh, the vast bulk of writer’s have unreasonable expectations.”

Yeah, they do.

But I don’t.

I think it’s a perfectly reasonable perception, and that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it through thick and thin.

Why are there so few atheists?

 (Henri Rousseau.)



Why are there so few atheists?

Atheism is the toughest religion of all. It demands much of its practitioners, not the least of which is the ditching of sentiment and a linear, logical approach to all things in life. A life which is completely subjective, based on sensations, based on raw emotions, and as some would have it, one that is hallucinatory at best. Some people believe that, or at least they say they do. They never really live that way, do they? Everything is an illusion, they say. My opinion is that therefore they cannot possibly have any knowledge, but that doesn’t hold back the tide of their opinions, does it? It’s not going to hold mine back either.

To be an atheist is to always be alone, without even God for comfort. You think about that for a minute—even the smuggest hypocrite secretly relies on God’s forgiveness, for surely He understands when no one else could. When caught, (in anything,) they hang their head in shame.

Surely they must believe at that exact moment in time. Otherwise what are you ashamed of?

Partly because of its intellectual rigour, and possibly because it claims no higher source of knowledge, law or even succor, detractors would state that atheism is completely amoral and therefore without worth. The fact is that the sacrifices demanded of the individual atheist are many. Some of them are quite onerous.

Think of a lifestyle with no Halloween, no Easter, no Christmas. Think of a belief system with no angels, no demons, no vampires, no cupids, no goblins, no spirits and no ghosts. Think of a belief system that pays no credit to miracles, accepts no divine intervention, no revelation, and has no dogma. It has no ritual, no candles and no prayers, no hymnology, no great body of organ music, no vast literature of analysis and criticism. It has no sects, no cults and no schisms—and it is my belief that these are vital to the survival and growth of any religion. We have no one to point a finger at and say, ‘This is wrong, this is immoral, this is evil, this is unjust.” We have nothing to go on and nothing to back us up.

It is a system with no priests, no interpreters, and no obscure and irrational points of crossover into another realm. We have no Heaven, no Hell. No Purgatory. No resurrection. No redemption. No sin, no guilt, not even the original kind where billions as yet unborn must pay the price of future mental slavery because of a mistake long in the past in some mystical garden.

We have no cathedrals, ladies and gentlemen. We have no mythology, no pantheon.

No cutesy fucking icons.

Think of a mind-set where empirical facts rule and the demands of the majority don’t matter because factuality, empiricism, is not a democracy, and doesn’t rely on mass opinions for its validity. Think of a belief system which doesn’t pay any heed to prejudice, sugar-coats nothing, and panders to nobody.

Atheism has no fortune cookies, no gambler’s luck and no horoscope. There are no mediums, no prophets, no visions, no speaking in tongues. There is no smoke, no incense, no magic incantations. We have no tenets of social control or persuasion. Nothing.

It is not for the masses. It promises nothing to its practitioners, and justifies nothing for its abusers. Atheism excuses no prejudice and allows for no form of discrimination which can’t be justified by some arithmetical measurement from some verifiable factual baseline.

Atheism conducts no seances, communes with no dead spirits, and accepts no superstitious folklore bearing glad tidings of future pie in the sky. It worships no ancestors. If atheism can be called a religion, which it really isn’t, it is one that has none of the pretty trappings, no spooky ceremonies, no symbols, no decorative icons on the wall that the ignorance of the perfumed masses demand and have come to expect. We have no costumes and no robes. We have no special shoes.

In a world where the Disney acquisition of Lucasfilm is seen as worthy of comment by the most popular pundits, atheism doesn’t have much to offer except to say that tales where good always triumphs over evil are a bit thin on the intellectual meat and defy the reality on the ground.

What will the Disney acquisition of Lucasfilm do for science fiction? Nothing. Nothing at all.

But of course that isn’t their purpose.

It is why folks take the kiddies to the next summer blockbuster film, and woe betide those who don’t, for their children are deprived of the most basic element in their education—a belief system which accepts, accommodates or even demands the fantastical. We can even justify it.

We are stimulating the children’s ‘imaginations.’

You will always do better by telling people what they want to hear. And who do those children grow into?

When grown men can’t wait to go see the warm and fuzzy Koogly-wooblies save Oscar the Penguin from The Grinch who stole Halloween from the Big Pumpkin, and are willing to spend hundreds of dollars to do it, an atheist turns away with a shudder of revulsion, and if not careful, gets trampled in the stampede of mouths, eyes and stomachs.

There but for the grace of wit and knowledge go I…what else can I say?

Some of the words, some of the basic concepts we need to express ourselves haven’t even been properly invented yet.

There is much work yet to be done. No one among us can say who is fit to lead, or even whether it’s strictly necessary. But holy crap, there’s just no way I’m going to follow.

I don’t rule out the possibility of love. If we have one rule, it would be tolerance, which implies a kind of forgiveness. What’s lacking is condemnation and retribution, a remarkable oversight by any standard. It’s a hard sell, as you can imagine.

http://i.imgur.com/U2R35.png

http://i.imgur.com/U2R35.png

Also, what he said: (Guardian, U.K.)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/dec/24/christmas-atheists

Marketing image progress.

I'm working on this marketing image for an upcoming project, which is bass-ackwards compared to the usual process. This one's not quite right, but we're getting close.

Soon I can format the story, which is 6,000 words, and get an ISBN to go with it.

This story will be out by December 1, 2012 on Amazon, B & N, Kobo, Diesel Books, Sony, etc, although it takes some time to filter down through the Smashwords distribution channels.

A science-fiction allegory of the writing life, the story asks the question, 'How much of who we are is wrapped up in what we know?'


Trapped in the game space, they don't even know their names, and a piece of knowledge may be worth killing for.

Someone will have to make the experiment.

New Image: 'The Paranoid Cat and other tales.'

(This is the new marketing image for 'The Paranoid Cat and other tales,' but I'm having trouble loading it to Smashwords.)



Marketing Images.

We're working on some new marketing images.

This is a rough idea of what they will be like.

This may take another day or two.











'Core Values.'










...and below, 'Heaven is too far away,' the first is horror and the second is a WW I memoir of aerial combat and the hunt for the Red Baron.

What makes a character resonate?

What makes a character resonate?

What makes a character resonate, is that the reader can identify with them in some way.

For example if Isobel is having computer problems, and isn’t necessarily an expert, this may cause some tension and angst with the character—and the reader. Especially if she’s just spent the last six or eight hours doing it, although making a reader go through six or eight hours of realtime is inadvisable for those who would write.

Unfortunately, it isn’t always that simple.

While Isobel can search the internet, and ultimately decide to download Adobe InDesign SC6 in order to make the book covers for her urban supernatural fantasies, and suddenly discover that she really has no idea of whether or not her system has the requirements, in this case a Pentium 4 processor and Windows XP, and a processor of 233 mhz, she doesn’t even know if it will work. Imagine her tension when the thing takes four hours to download. Imagine how it feels within her, when the screen flickers.

Is this normal? What if her computer crashes? What if she can’t make her book covers? She’s already under the gun. What with deadlines, and a sick kid in bed, and having to take time off from her real job to look after Mellie.

And what if Isobel is a left-handed German-speaking Haitian quadriplegic lesbian with red hair and a penchant for biting the big blue vein in a giraffe’s neck for her daily sustenance?

Well, we’ve lost a few readers there, haven’t we? Because we don’t have enough in common. And what kind of a name is Mellie? That’s no name for a kid. She has a big blue Afro—running down her neck and back.

The problem is that some of the readers are male, very few of them speak German, and there isn’t enough back-story to hook the reader. Never mind that Isobel has found out the thing doesn’t work, and the uninstaller she downloaded for free some time ago now wants money to take Adobe off of her computer. (This writer would submit they probably want money to take themselves off of the computer.)

(Take that, you beast, PerfectUninstaller.)

So maybe the reader can relate to that, but the other stuff is perhaps harder.

Perhaps the writer should tell the reader right up front that Isobel was trained by birth by the Sisterhood to be a stealth, and a spy, and a courtesan. She’s here on Earth to destroy the book.

Any books, really.

And that she was blown up real good in a tank battle—sea tanks—on Betelgeuse’s fourth planet in the eighth dimension. This was some years ago. Now she’s struggling along on multiple revenue streams of micro-finance, if you know what I mean. That’s because her government has collapsed and hasn’t contacted her in some time.

Maybe they should know that, eh? And maybe, Isobel should try just using her Control Panel's feature, 'add and remove programs,'  to uninstall a few things, including that fucking PerfectUninstaller, to uninstall Adobe. Yeah, it’s too bad Louis went out tonight and left this imaginary character to screw around with his computer.

Boy, is he ever going to be mad when he comes home, eh?

Hopefully Mellie will be better after a little irradiation. Louis and Isobel adopted Mellie, who resembles nothing more than that weirdo Ugh-Kuthwaq or whatever his name was in ‘The Star Fox.’ (Sorry, as a fictional character I can’t recall the name of the author. Louis is better at that than I am. Oh, and I think the proper form is to put the title of the book in italics, but what the hell.) Should there be a question mark after 'hell?'

Who cares.

We’re on the internet, now. Watch out, world, here we come…to uninstall something after a tea break.

If, you know what I mean.

And it looks like poor old Isobel is looking at a long night, of uninstalling stuff, and waiting for crazy old Louis to come home.

He beats her, you know.

(Editor's Note: Don't hate her because she's beautiful. We're dealing with a very special persona here.) 

Synopsis: Horse-catcher, a science fiction novel.

    Ark One is returning to Earth after a failed colonization attempt. Due to the fact that they have an unanticipated 20,000 cryo-frozen colonists aboard, as well as livestock embryos, tools, implements, and supplies, they don’t have enough reaction mass for a conventional return.

     Astrogator Dooley Peeters has planned a low-speed, long duration course, intercepting the predicted position of the solar system in about 12,000 years. The slower you go, the less fuel you burn. The crew is put into emergency cold-storage, and individuals are only awakened for routine maintenance duties and careful checking of the navigation programs. Dooley has decided to use ‘mass-braking,’ or ‘gravitational braking,’ which is described by him as, “Passing a Nascar driver on the outside, beating him into the apex of the turn, and then using his brakes to slow you down.” The ‘Ice Queen,’ Captain Sandra Jensen, cuts through the consensus-building process and plays a hunch. “Just do it,” she says, in spite of or perhaps because of a strong sexual tension that exists between them.

     Poor old Dooley is really suffering. He fell head over heels for her, love at first sight, when attending a recruitment or job fair. But since she’s the superior officer, she can’t fraternize with Dooley, and as a subordinate, he’s totally at a loss for what to do about it.

     Since Ark One has no way to replenish her reaction mass tanks, any fuel savings, as little a tenth of one percent, may save their lives. Anything is better than jettisoning 20,000 colonists into space and making a conventional, faster-than-light return.

     The original mission was conceived as a way to save humanity. That’s because of climactic collapse, and a financial/economic crisis, which has doomed the remnants of the human race to mass migrations of peoples, wars, famine, and endemic disease. Society has gone back to the dark ages. What is surprising is that they don’t go back to living in caves, or swinging on tree branches. After 12,000 years, they have risen again to various levels. The Kitchi-lao have water power, telescopes, and walled cities. They are experimenting with hot-air balloons for military purposes. The Pentapolis are nominally democratic city states. The cultures are uniquely human achievements. There are no aliens as such in this book. Just like present-day Earth, various peoples are at different levels of social development. I’ve simply constructed a different reality for the characters. The Kirtele are sedentary farmers, but they are also literate sedentary farmers, with a rich heritage of story-telling, songs, and political oratory. No one in the book is truly evil, or truly faultless. There are no ‘Conan-the-Barbarians’ in the book, bulging with muscles and traipsing around in S & M garb.

     The Kitchi-lao Empire is just that—an empire. The Pentapolis is made up of five city-states who have banded together and outlawed war amongst themselves, and they have a ‘chair,’ instead of a president. The Kulutawas are pastoral herders, with a loose political structure; the Mittaini have a hereditary constitutional monarchy. The lakes tribes and plains tribes are tribes, the Kirtele Nation is a republic. The Spy Guild and The Brethren are world-wide organizations. The Brethren in particular are interesting due to their attempts to preserve and understand the old knowledge, and prepare for the second coming, presumably.

     This is all very impressive—I’m certainly impressed—but it’s actually a very simple book. Kjarl is a horse-catcher when he isn’t busy farming. He hires Akim because Akim can read and write better than he can. Brother Raffin ministers to his flock in a loving and caring way. Talmotek of the Pentapolis goes to war to cement his hold on The Chair, and found a dynasty. Helios II knows war will come with the Pentapolis and he prepares the Empire accordingly. Mittaini Prince Nodrakis just wants to look at the cosmos through a telescope and ask, “Why?” His mentor Tsernalik’s radical theory challenges the assumptions of religious revelation of his time and place. Princes Kvetchen and Uttaris lead their armies into the field. Everyone gets sucked into a war that is continental in scope, centering largely on the Mississipi and Ohio river valleys.

     And when Ark One’s shuttle lands in the middle of a battlefield, the entire course of future history goes out the window. Simply put, I have sci-fi on one hand and fantasy—without the magic—on the other. That way all the characters in the book seem to follow a consistent set of rules. As usual with me, the genre and the plot are really just vehicles and stages for very real and very human relationships.

     As a writer, I don’t much like magic for some reason, and I don’t much like heroes who can fly through the air, unless it’s presented in some ‘credible,’ believable fashion. But if you don’t believe in magic, you shouldn’t try to write it, in my opinion. I suppose lots of people believe in their books, and for a so-far unsuccessful author, the very act of writing books is a kind of fantasy escape. We believe that we can change the future, if only our own.

     Fantasies are just that, an escape from reality. The notion of the collapse of modern society, and a return to some form of barbarism, is a little too real. In the book there is a distinctly male-dominated society, and I suspect a lot of readers would object to that on misunderstanding; or philosophical grounds.  In that sense, it’s not a fantasy, ‘femmes fatale’ such as Zenobia of Palmyra; or Cleopatra, or Queen Elizabeth I notwithstanding.

     This book combines the best elements of fantasy with the best of science fiction, in a winning package, and it’s nice and short, which saves money on paper and ink.

     My first few books were all funny. In this one I really tried to get serious and write a book that no one would have to be ashamed of—not the writer, the editor, the publisher, the seller, and not least of all, the final purchaser. I remembered that when I liked a book, I put it on the shelf and planned on reading it again, over and over in fact. I still had a lot of those books when I got flooded out a few years ago. In a sense they were irreplaceable.

     In a noted opinion on the subject of fantasy, which I read somewhere, perhaps the SFWA website, author Poul Anderson says that a lot of fantasies fall down on historical grounds, and often even on simple, practical grounds.

     Sword wounds get infected, and that sort of thing—you don’t just bind it up with a hanky. You are going to die.

Author's Note: As soon as I'm done writing and editing 'The Art of Murder,' I plan on editing and publishing 'Horse-catcher.' This one ought to be in stores by Christmas, barring unforeseen eventualities..