Blood Meridian in General

I am still so pissed I am spitting snakes.

After writing for three hours, microdick decides my version of Word 2007 is ‘Retired.” And refuses me access to a document I had been working on for three hours. I couldn’t even copy and paste down to wordpad. My only option was to pay that assbag in Washington 70 bucks to reinstall Microdick office. And guess what? The document I was working on is nowhere to be found, and believe me I tried. So another three hours of trying to recreate what I had already written.

To calm myself, I put away the Halloween decorations and took the Christmas tree out of the attic. The day after Thanksgiving is my rule.

The low angle of the sun this time of year doesn’t help my mood. Anytime I sit down to do school work I turn on every light in the house. I might need a sun lamp this year.
Today was the one day of sun in the next week, then back to the gloom.

By last count I have five stories right now. Some I have been hacking at for twenty years and some are relatively new. I do believe it is safe to say they all are within the realm of speculative fiction.

Celeana is a Vampire/Conflict/Fantasy/Love Story. Within that story I am trying to incorporate a lot of mysticism from the vampire lore. I have a huge book on Vampires and it is fascinating how the lore is part of almost every culture. What are they, why are they.

What are the rules. Ann Rice played fast and loose with some of the genre rules, vampires that can live in sunlight. Richard Matheson in I am Legend implied the entire assumed vampire rules don’t exist, some being based on the person before they “became.” In this story I have a much larger conflict going on that deals with the almost cultish nature of so much of humanity, and I am trying to apply it to a series of groups where much of the rules of being human don’t apply. Celeana can move, and uses that as a survival mechanism. Feed. Move on. Her Galère, her group can all do the same. But there is another Galère that is stuck to place and it makes them absurdly jealous of those who can move. There I am trying to show conflict while staying within the genre. Then I introduce James. Profoundly injured in more than one way. His replaced joints preclude her from feeding on him, and that fixes her in place. For lack of a better term, he is a hiccup in her software. She becomes fixed because of him. Her inability to do what is her nature causes her to become more human.

Caretaker 4 is a SciFi story. Currently what I am intending for my final thesis for this course of study. Still within Speculative Fiction. It is a story of a man who decided to chance a life on another planet while leaving the love of his life behind. I haven’t fleshed out why earth needed to be abandoned, or why Celia decided to stay behind. I am hard pressed to come up with a reason why someone who was so in love could chose to leave his wife behind to do a thankless job caretaking on a ship to arrive on a distant planet alone. I am trying to stay within my trope concepts. Isolation, loneliness, oncoming obsession. There is also a sentient computer system watching him. It is only after I started writing I realized there was more than one aspect of HAL-9000 from “2001 A Space Odyssey” in Monitor. I stay safely within SciFi with that one. Ability to adjust the ships interior gravity, flex with a myriad of “mid course corrections.” Pondering regarding life on a new planet that is not well understood. I am trying to insert an element of a crime drama in as well, but that is not working out.

Rain is a SciFi story of a group of special operators sent to a planet to kill or capture a rebel leader. In terms of tropes, it includes a lot of technology and military jargon. As with a lot of my stories there is a twist, as the leader of the group accidently kills a woman he later finds out is his sister. I am unsatisfied with the arc of the story, because it is too heavy on tech and too light on why.

Lila – and I will apologize for my tendency to use the primary female character’s name as my working title in pretty much everything I write. When I was a child there was a wildly believed myth that every ten thousand years or so the earth flipped axis. The North Pole was now on the equator, and Wichita Kansas was now at the North Pole. It had something to do with the way the magnetic core of the earth shifted around. My 2AM mind one night combined that story of an apocalyptic scenario with a rapidly shifting genetic mutation that was making people feral. Then I threw on the fact that world temperatures could fluctuate by three hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Then I threw a bunch of tech on it, because that is what I do to solve problems. And again threw a love story into the mix. I think I managed five tropes just in that synopsis.

Xray Alpha is a apocalyptic fiction story, again speculative fiction. A staff member on a Navy Battlegroup staff finds himself alone as the crew on an aircraft carrier keeps finding ways to leave the ship. His preeminent job, once he abandons the battlegroup and ship is get find his way back to his fiancée and his family.
If I could find just one of these to concentrate on, I could fall into that world for a while.

And I am on the hook for garlic mashed potatoes for Thanksgiving. Not keto at all! Well. There is always the first of December. Start again.

Last updated November 23, 2019