As we bid a fond farewell ...

Fri, 19 Feb 2021 16:52:34 -0500

… to the friendly sphere which has been greeting the visitors to this nearly empty blog

we say hello to the new look and …

… and notice that it looks friendly in its own way. He does seem happy to see you. Not a perfect match by genre - I’m likelier to write dystopian fiction than supernatural horror - but it did fit in with the title of my blog.

It will be replaced, later, after I download some half-way decent photoshop clone and have a chance to do some photomanipulation. It’s going to decorate the sidebar. I still have to find a good favicon.

I want to argue with him, but I really can’t.

Fri, 19 Feb 2021 16:41:20 -0500

patzelenkaguitar:

I want to argue with him, but I really can’t.

Hey

Fri, 22 Jan 2021 11:43:02 -0500

There will never be a face reveal on this blog. So many good reasons for this, but one will suffice: I start my writing with a lot of observation and journaling, in order to keep what I write closer to life. If people know I’m observing them, their behavior will be unnatural, and so will the writing I get out of the process of observing them.

No, I’m not violating the privacy of those I observe. I do so in public places like coffeehouses, which I never name, and you never see the journals. You just see stories (or, more likely, scraps of stories) which I write after I watch, and absorb what I’ve seen, in an attempt to keep my characters from turning into psychological clones of myself.

Lately, the never ending Covid lockdowns have shut down most of my real world observing, which was hitting a snag even before March of 2020, because I have the misfortune of living in Chicago, a city that has been turning increasingly anti-social over the years, I find. For the most part, when I’ve gone out over the last few years, in the places I’ve visited, the clientele has done little other than stare at screens, type, and consume food and drink in silence. Not just bad for journaling, really, bad for living. I can’t begin to imagine how anybody meets anybody in this overgrown Puritan town, and having met them, what they would do for fun. Getting drunk together would seem to be about it.

I intend to move out, where to, I don’t know, yet. A smallish college town, maybe? I can’t drive, so a truly small farm town would practically turn into a prison for me, but lately, that’s what major cities have become, so what is the better option, I wonder. I’ll have to work on that.

A Shadow's Tale

As we bid a fond farewell ...

I want to argue with him, but I really can’t.

Hey