Category Archives: writing

I Get a New Desk

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Hopefully life will get a little less painful after today.

At my day job where I work in a cubicle, the desks are adjustable for height. There’s a neat little button off the left edge with which you can raise the desk all the way up to a standing desk or lower it enough for a wheelchair user. For most of the time, this has been a godsend. During working hours, I had the desk at the height that was right for the dual monitors I needed to perform my processing. Then on lunch I raised the desk so that it was ergonomically better for spending an hour working on my laptop.

Then the desk broke.

At first when I lowered it, sometimes it wouldn’t stop and just lower all the way, forcing me to scramble out of its path lest my leg get squished. I could then raise it where I needed it, but eventually the motor lost its function and would only lower it, always to the bottom setting. I had to force it up and disconnect the controller. The desk is now at a height that’s right for neither work and is particularly bad for my laptop work, inducing terrible neck pain.

That’s right, it’s literally a pain in the neck.

It has been like this for months, first because the people who maintain the desks couldn’t get the parts they needed, and then because they couldn’t get what they needed to simply replace the desk. Well, today I should be in a much better situation; I am moving to a new cube.

I got to pick out the cube I wanted, making sure I am not next to any of our large windows in the office where intense sunlight could induce a migraine and still positioned well enough away from most of the rest of the floor so it will be quieter for the most part.

With me about to embark on a new novel, this comes at a perfect time.

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The Hardest Aspect of Writing a Novel

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Now, this is going to be different for different writers. Some will find the plotting to be the mountain that they must conquer; for others it will be the dialogue, and others constructing the actual sentences, or crafting interesting characters, even just finding the time to get the damned words down on paper or in the processor. I have often said that the hardest part of writing is butt-to-chair, fingers-to-keyboard—actually getting started with that day’s production of prose—and I stand by it. But today I want to talk about not the actual words-in-a-row challenge, but a different challenge: writing with the goal of traditional publication.

It is not the novel manuscript itself. Not to me. Outrageous Fortune clocks in at about 96,000 words, and I produced that volume in about six months. Once I hit the first 6,000 to 7,000 words, the work becomes self-generating, and I almost never had a manuscript die once that threshold was reached.

Ahh, but after that comes the really hard writing: the query letter and the synopsis.

The query letter should ideally be under 300 words; agents are busy and don’t have time for lengthy missives—rambling in your query won’t inspire confidence in your fiction. In that letter you need to give the basics of your work: genre and word count, a paragraph that conveys the story, the character, the conflict, and the theme, along with a closing that details your credits (if any) and why you’re the right person to have written this novel. Remember: you’re doing all this—displaying your voice and uniqueness as a writer—in about 300 words.

The synopsis has the benefit of needing only the story, but it’s still a maddening challenge. Now, in about 400 words, you need to tell the core story of your novel, the characters, the challenges, the themes, and exactly how it all resolves—ideally with some stylistic flourish. My novel required 96,000 words to establish who everyone is and why they act as they do. Hopefully, the characters come across to readers as believable people acting in a manner consistent with their nature. I have managed to produce a synopsis that is under 400 words and I think it’s good, but man, so much of what makes this story work is not in that bit of text.

Will it work? Only the agents can tell you—and waiting for their response is the second hardest thing about writing.

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Sometimes You Miss The Obvious

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I got a little feedback on the opening chapters of my gay, 80s, cinephile, horror novel and it caused me to see something pretty important that I had missed.

The feedback thought that the opening chapter needed a little more of the world and a little more of the character’s interior life. These were both fair critiques. In all honesty, when I wrote the chapter originally, I hadn’t formed a solid conception of the character and just what was going on. After all, this was the first time I had ‘pantsed’ a novel and those elements developed later. While in editing and revision I had taken care of plot details that would pay off later, because the character was now so well defined in my mind, I failed to edit to that image. So, I began revision but not fully rewriting the first chapter, opening up the main character’s thoughts so the reader met him more fully, and adding color and detail to the San Diego of 1984 that would be accurate and informative.

The character is gay, and the mid-80s, while better than the decades before it, still presented a strong homophobic culture which I utilized to reveal character—the ‘Chick Tracts’ left at his theater and other minor elements. Thinking about the Fundamentalist mindset, growing in power at the time as the nation sprinted towards Reagan’s 49-state sweep, and how it felt to be a gay man in that time focused my search for details that both reflected the world and how the character felt about them.

And that is when I realized I had missed something BIG.

The novel covers a period of time from June 1, 1984, through mid-July of that year and somehow, I managed to forget entirely about Pride, the remembrance and celebration of gay culture commemorating the Stonewall Riot with a march and often a lot of partying. Even if nothing takes place at the march and the character is far too entangled with supernatural threats to be partying, Pride is going to be a vital part of the background for those couple of weeks of the novel.

Now I am revising the first third of the novel, adding in the details and color of Pride week and its aftermath, making the novel better.

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A Fairly Pleasant Week

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After weeks of working overtime and feeling the crush of massive amounts of work, I decided that my mental health required a break and this week I took off Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.

Now, these days were not entirely my own, but what appointments I had were short and not too troublesome. Monday required a visit to the dentist to have an impression made for the crown of my latest tooth implant. Thanks to the wonders of modern science this time I did not have to hold my mouth closed over a bunch of gunk as it hardened. Instead, they scanned the inside of my mouth with a laser-based measuring device and recreated the contours that way. Very cool.

Tuesday, I visited a speech therapist for techniques that might help control and mitigate the persistent cough that has pestered me for two years.

Wednesday, I took my Kia Soul to our local mechanic for a tune-up as the little car is just about to hit 100,000 miles.

At home during those three days I relaxed and worked on my query letter and I think I have had a breakthrough. The roughest parts of the letter, which is ideally kept to a single page of text, is the paragraphs where you actually pitch the novel. Until this breakthrough I had been focused on describing the plots of the novels I pitched, but I think this theme focused approach might work better. Here is the pitch for the current novel Outrageous Fortune.

In San Diego in 1984 Dave Ludendorff lives a charmed life and is a good man. In spite of being a gay teenager in the ’70s he has never been taunted, hounded, or beaten for his orientation. The arthouse theater he inherited, that Dave has made a sanctuary for the queer and the outcast, thrives. Even with the resurgent Moral Majority of Reagan’s America, his life is good, blessed with friends and health.

The facade of Dave’s life crumbles with the discovery of a film depicting his grandfather leading a human sacrifice, a ritual that brought Dave this preternaturally charmed life. Now, with his grandfather’s cult pursuing him and murderous ghosts unleashed, Dave uncovers that everything he understood about his life, and perhaps himself, is a lie. Only by uncovering his family’s buried secrets can he hope to survive.

The truth, however, forces a terrible choice on Dave. He can accept the benefits of that human sacrifice, preserving his charmed life, but with the knowledge that like his grandfather and father before him he is the sort of evil man who profits from the suffering of others. Or he can destroy the cult, naively face the world without supernatural protections, enduring “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” and in truth become the good man he always imagined himself to be.

I am going to do a little more work on it and then we’ll see if this draws better results than the previous version.

Last Sunday was a particularly nice day here in San Diego and my sweetie-wife and I made our regular visit to the zoo. Because we are zoo members, we could ignore the nasty new regulations that are charging people for parking at the Zoo and Balboa Park. With the sun out and hardly a cloud in the sky I brought along my camera and snapped a number of pictures. Here are two, the first shows just how damned nice the paths through the zoo were that day and the second of a hippo, in greyscale, looking like something from a horror film.

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A Thematic Problem with The Red Shirt Issue

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Yesterday evening, I came across a post from a friend online that expressed their middling reaction to del Toro’s Frankenstein prompting a return of my own thoughts that del Toro had worked so hard to make his monster sympathetic that no one of consequence died at its hands, a major deviation from the source text.

del Toro’s use of nameless crew to be killed in a thrilling and exciting opening combat scene with an unstoppable monster makes for a great opening to his luscious film but becomes hollow when the rest of the time the monster is presented melodramatically sympathetic and without emotional or ethical flaws. One could be forgiven for forgetting that the movie opened with mass murder. After all, they were literally nobodies.

Now, I have written about this before calling it his ‘Red Shirt’ problem. For those who are unaware, ‘red shirts’ refers to the often unnamed and wholly uncharacterized extras presented as security officers in Star Trek. These day players came onto the scene and in popular (but exaggerated) opinion died in droves.  The essence is still on target, they were essentially nameless characters brought on to dramatize the danger of that episode, a necessary evil of the time as no network program could go about killing its major and central characters. (This was decades before Game of Thrones would make it a drinking game.)

Western literature and oral tradition stretching back into prehistory is corrupted with a nasty little idea, that some people are simply born better than the rest of us. The nobility deserves their castles, their rich food, and the product of our labor, our bodies, and our lives because of the blue blood that courses through their veins. The ‘Chosen One’ narrative so popular in everything from religion to Star Wars is a product of this form of thinking. Luke and Aragon are good people because they were born to it, not from choice, not from making a decision to be good, but by their very blood. The force and the right to rule flows from their heritage and not their choices. We, the non-chosen, need to step aside and let out betters make the choices that will rule our lives. Our duty is to serve and to be thankful.

And here is the poisonous subtext in the ‘red shirt’ problem, it perpetuates this division of people into those worth and deserving of sympathy, consideration, and ultimately power from those lower, nameless people of the great ‘unwashed masses’ whose existence only matters in the moment that it impacts the monied and good-blooded people worthy of names. There are your ‘betters’ to whom you must defer with titles such as my lord, sir, mister — and to whom you must pay your obedience or suffer the lash and then there is everyone else, ‘red shirts’ to be used and discarded either on the battlefield or the factory to advance the lives and lifestyles of their ‘betters.’ The subtext of nameless victims in horror and action movies is that some lives are inherently more valuable than others.

“Red shirts” are not only a lazy and cheap play for a short cut to dramatic stakes, the practice subtly subverts the egalitarian ideals that all lives are valuable regardless of the accident of their birth or their importance to any particular narrative by regulating some characters to nameless and forgettable disposal.

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The New Year, as We Reckon it, Has Begun

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I think it is important to remember that the dominant calendar of the world, this Gregorian Calendar is not the only marking of the passing years utilized on this planet. While it is the new year for many of us it is not for all of us. But still, it is here in the United States and so I am observing that personally while keeping in mind that my perspective is not the rules of the universe.

I am not one for making resolutions at the turn of the year. It has never held a great deal of weight for me and the few times I have done so the matter was quickly discarded or forgotten. In their place I like to put objectives that are measurable and within my control but do not attempt a ‘re-invention’ of oneself. I also like to look at achievements, even if they are small from the previous years.

2025 was not the best year I have experienced but by far it was not the worst. I completed the first novel where I used no outline of the plot or characters. Now, I am not proposing that writing a novel without an outline is superior to one that was carefully plotted. Both approaches are valid and what matters is if the process works for the author. Outrageous Fortune could not have been written sans outline if I had not written so many novel projects before it with careful outlines. Structure, the use of five acts, a sense of pacing dictated by the flow of the plot, all came from experience that had been born from those outlines.

With Outrageous Fortune completed, edited, and proofed by my lovely sweetie-wife, I have yet another novel to try and win me an agent and another shot at traditional publication.

For 2026 I endeavor to write a new novel, but I think I shall shy away from a concept that I love but do not feel ready to tackle quite yet.

2026 will also see a fresh assault from me and my doctors on this persistent chronic cough left over from my COVID infection of January of 2024. Towards the end of 2025 I seemed to be responding to therapy, but a sinus infection has wiped out all the progress we made.

I also will try, depending on schedules and such, to attend more meetings of the San Diego chapter of the Horror Writers Association. They are good people, I have kept my membership active, and post on the Facebook page but attended zero meetings during 2025.

This is my look forward to 2026 and I hope that yours is kind, good, and happy.

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Hogfather, Outrageous Fortune, and the Unexpected Connection

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This past couple of days my sweetie-wife and I watched the Sky One production of Hogfather, an adaptation of the novel by Terry Pratchett, as part of our holiday traditions. The other holiday movie we often watch at this time of year is Rare Exports from Finland.
After Susan, Death’s granddaughter, has rescued the Hogfather—a Santa Claus analog—from the beings that wanted to destroy him and through that action destroy humanity’s capacity for imagination, she is told by her grandfather Death that humans need to practice believing in the little lies, like the Hogfather, to be ready for the big lies like Justice and Mercy. The theme, stated quite plainly as television is wont to do, is that without imagining such things as justice, how can they be real?
This year this ending and theme struck me quite differently. I had finished my horror novel Outrageous Fortune just a few weeks earlier and its themes were still fresh in my head. Part of the novel’s philosophical grounding is that the universe is utterly indifferent to human existence. It would be wrong to describe the universe as cold, as that implies at least some consideration. It is indifferent, not capable of having any consideration of human behavior and by extension no possibility of punishment or reward. There is existence and only existence as far as the universe is concerned.
Morality, the novel puts forward, is purely a personal perception, but it is also a trap because once it is perceived and recognized, then that knowledge is imprinted permanently on the perceiver’s mind. To recognize that an action is ‘immoral’ within the perceiver’s subjective understanding means it will remain immoral to that person. Whether you do or do not perform that action, the morality of your action is yours to carry as part of your identity regardless of the universe’s indifference. One does not ‘create’ justice; one recognizes it in oneself, or one is ignorant of it.
Pratchett’s work stipulates that belief creates an objective morality, but mine postulates that it never exists objectively but only subjectively, which is the only way we really experience life anyway.

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The San Diego I knew and used in Outrageous Fortune

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My latest horror novel, Outrageous Fortune, is not the first time that my adopted hometown of San Diego, California has been used as a setting for one of my fictions, but it is the most extensive and all the other projects were short stories.

Part of the reason I used San Diego for the novel is because the principal location, the Kensington Theater is a fictionalized version of my favorite theater, the beloved Ken Cinema.

I came to San Diego in 1981 when I was assigned by the US Navy to the USS Bella Wood (LHA-3). At that time this city had a ton of movie theaters, from grand palaces like the Loma out in the Sport Arena area to the grindhouses downtown that played the most interesting exploitive fare 24 hours a day. However, the Ken, a part of the Landmark Chain, was quite special.

The theater was a revival house, played older films in double features that changed on a daily basis and arthouse and foreign films that played longer engagements. From its worn, hard seating, I watched a number of films that became favorites. A double feature of It Came from Outer Space and The Creature From the Black Lagoon, both presented in their original 3-D format. It was at the Ken that I was exposed to David Lynch with a double feature of Little Shop of Horrors(the non-musical original) with Eraserhead.

Such a beloved and treasured space made a natural setting for my story of cursed nitrate film and the ghost trapped in that celluloid.

In the forty-four years that I have lived in this city I have resided in a number of apartments and houses, nearly always with dear friends as roommates. Nearly every apartment that appears in Outrageous Fortune as a character’s home is located in a complex where I lived. These places are vivid in my memory as is Balboa Park — its trails, museums, and eateries — another aspect of my decades living in San Diego.

During 1984, the novel’s setting, I was already a performing member of the shadow cast that participated in the Rocky Horror Picture Show experience at the Ken every Saturday and Sunday. It was among that group of oddballs and misfits that I found a real community where I fitted in with them like they had been a family from which I had merely been absent and not one newly discovered. Once, at a breakfast/brunch with many of them, someone commented to Goldie that I was shy and she exclaimed quite loudly “Bob is shy?” I am quite shy around people I do not know and also in situations that are not a good fit for my personality, the people of the Rocky crowd were not that at all.

So, amid the death, the ghosts, the vengeance, and cultists murdering to advance their twisted and selfish goal, Outrageous Fortune contains love for cinema, for San Diego, and for the Ken Cinema.

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The Neglected Blog

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I have not died, but I have been very tired. Each year from October 15th through December 7th is the Annual Enrollment Period (AEP) for Medicare Advantage plans. It is the period when people who are not new to Medicare can enroll, disenroll, or switch their plans, and my day job deals with those changes, making this time of year a quite busy one. Usually, the workload doesn’t become large and overtime is not offered until later in the AEP, like early to mid-December.

Not this year.

I do not know if more people are retiring early, losing their jobs, or whatnot, but right from the start of the AEP our work queues grew exponentially quickly. I have been taking advantage of the sudden overtime, working 10 hours a day and half a day on Saturdays.

That is not the only reason my poor blog has been neglected.

I have also entered the revise-and-edit phase of my 80s gay cinephile horror novel Final Reel.

Editing and revising is very different than drafting. Now my brain isn’t trying to conjure something from nothing, but rather shape what is already there to the image and form that now exists in my head. This process for my other novel has been mainly one of fixing sentences and paragraphs with minor plot and story changes. Final Reel wasn’t written with an outline—I made it up as I went along. This produced a manuscript where the back half doesn’t fit with the front because it wasn’t until then that I truly understood what I was crafting. So, editing and revising has a lot more revising this time around.

That said, I am extremely happy with it so far, and I think this may be my best novel yet.

However, this poor blog will continue to be neglected for the next several weeks.

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The End of Drafting and the Beginning of Revision

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Friday, the day we honor and celebrate the Norse goddess Freya, I typed the final words of the extremely rough draft of my 80s gay, cinephile, San Diego, cultist, horror novel, with the draft clocking in at a respectable 89,000 words.

As I have written before, this novel I composed without the roadmap of an outline or even hardly anything of a plot in my skull. I knew a few aspects of the project: that it would take place in the mid-80s (I settled on ’84) and in San Diego. In addition to that, it would deal with ghosts in some manner, magic that had been bound to old cellulose nitrate movie film, and use a fictionalized version of the Ken Cinema, a theater that had once been the heart of revival and art house screening in this city, but closed forever in 2020. That was it. That was all I knew about the project when I sat down and wrote the opening scenes and the first chapter.

Characters were invented as they stepped onto the ‘stage’ and ones I thought might be major elements never quite got there and characters I thought were minor became major movers of the plot as it evolved. The plot slowly congealed from the disparate elements that erupted from my brain like Athena from Zeus’ forehead. But as a firmer, clearer, and more consistent picture of the plot emerged, earlier elements did not fit anymore. However, I did not, at that time, go back and either remove those ill-matched elements or revise them, but, like some sharks, I kept moving forward because backwards was death; the novel would only live if I maintained its momentum and reached a satisfying end.

Now that satisfying ending, with themes and plot that emerged organically from the process, has been reached and the task of revising has begun.

Already my opening line has changed to match the new core conflict, and the first chapter now reflects a deeper understanding of the character’s history as he understands it. Much like The Marathon Man, part of the character’s journey is discovering that nothing he thought he knew about his family is actually true.

I think the most important lesson I learned writing Final Reel in this manner is that I must never go back and revise while drafting. It’s easier, more efficient, and ultimately better for the final manuscript to let the inconsistencies live in the text while I discover what it is that really needs to be there.

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