Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! Writing a novel is often a question of timing and willpower. I’m at that cross-roads right now. I’ve been putting together the collage of pieces and the opening is taking firmer shape with later chronology tightening. I’m beginning to do pieces of connective writing and elaboration. My pre-story …
Continue reading Willpower, Timing, and a Return to Strange Highways
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! Last couple of days to snag a cheap kindle version of The Killer and The Dead! “Get them while they’re cooling on the slab!” Mortuary joke. The lead character works there, when he’s not, you know, offing people to keep his family fed. The ungrateful swine. Happy Hallowe’en …
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! I have a cold. I’m still writing. Four more collage pieces since the last blog. The book is beginning to take shape. Key moments have received their first pass. The act of writing is the act of decision making and consciously or not, plenty of decisions have been …
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! Pool and life, pool and writing, it really does offer a lot of lessons/provide interesting parallels for me. Thank you to some of my regulars here who said hello over there on my pool playing diary! It really is just me talking to myself in public, which I …
Continue reading Writing, practice, and Mindfulness: A Meander
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! Dio song as origin of this blog's title. I took an unannounced week off here, because I took a week off there, in work-land. I had high hopes for this week. My pool game continues to improve. I really need to start blogging about that so I can …
Continue reading It’s like broken glass, you get cut before you see it…
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! This quitting/cutting back on the internet is hard. The algorithm loves me and wants me to be happy. Just one more video related to one of my previously documented obsessions. Look, it is slightly different than the others. Oooh! An update! New recycled content about Alien!! Updates on …
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! So nice to see you! I blog therefore I am. You read (and like) and therefore you are? I have no idea. But I’d like to hope you are real: an audience of bots and AI scraping around for usable data that isn’t already AI generated would be …
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! Pusillanimous. A long time ago a girl asked me what word she was thinking. I said pusillanimous, thinking it a fancy word she’d be deeply unlikely to be thinking (and which I didn’t understand the meaning of, I just liked the way it sounded, an upmarket purple of …
Continue reading Hyperfactual transmission: A new origin for an old phrase
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! Last week I talked about trying to remove yourself, or at least your ego, from your writing, to embrace the other, to try to express viewpoints alien from your own. This week, I will entertain a rather different idea. That you cannot escape yourself: that everywhere you go, …
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! I have not made much progress this week. My day job has been rather more demanding recently, but that isn’t the excuse. Or if it is, it’s a bit lame. The book is ready. I have progressed with formatting, but not enough. And the fact is I’m not …
Roderick T. Macdonald 