Weekly Round-up, July 13, 2024

John Winkelman

The bloom at the top of a six foot tall thistle plant in our back yard.

[The bloom at the top of a six foot tall thistle plant in our back yard.]

This past week was, like so many of the previous weeks, too busy to do much beyond working, working out, and the myriad maintenance projects which come with owning a house.

Reading

I am well on my way through M. John Harrison’s Viriconium, and loving every page of it. The writing therein is difficult to read quickly, and Harrison’s prose worth lingering over, so this might be another month-long read.

Writing

My world-building documents grow in size and number, and I have taken up, as a writing exercise, writing and re-writing the first paragraph or page of Cacophonous. I think of it as revving my engine, in the hopes that one of the revs will turn into a launch. If nothing else, I will have a SMASHING first paragraph.

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Cyborgs, Apocalypse
Setting: Wilderness
Genre: Science Fiction

Listening

This song came up in a Metafilter thread discussing an article on the use of ChatGPT in religious institutions. Given the writing prompt I generated for the upcoming week, this seems particularly appropriate.

Interesting Links

  • Book Marks – A new review aggregator site (think Rotten Tomatoes) for books. A project of Literary Hub. Browsing through here brought to my attention a new book called Black Pill by Elle Reeve. A quick search of “black pill” brought me to the following link:
  • “Misogynist Incels and Male Supremacism” (Megan Kelly, Alex DiBranco, Dr. Julia R. DeCook, New America) – Because it needs to be repeated ad infinitum, any time a member of an in-group thinks their problems are caused by members of the corresponding out-group: Never in the history of the USA have men been systematically oppressed or marginalized for being men. To believe otherwise is ignorant. To act in support of that belief is cowardly.

Weekly Round-up, July 6, 2024

John Winkelman

Baby rabbit in our back yard.

[A baby rabbit hiding behind a weed in our back yard. Since the major landscaping work last year, the flora has rebounded astoundingly, and this has brought an influx of fauna, like the wee beastie above.]

Oh, what a week. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s recent decision, the USA is now officially a monarchy. The USA has always, thanks to our style of capitalism, been a neofeudalist country, but the confirmation that the President can do no wrong (as long as his actions align with the wishes of the religious and moneyed interests which determine who gets to hold which office) makes the USA no different from any other failed state run by a dictator. And the difference between an authoritarian democracy and a straight-up monarchy is really just splitting hairs.

Reading

Many years ago I picked up M. John Harrison’s Viriconium. I thought I had read it cover to cover, but upon re-opening the book I realize I never made it through the first section. This is unfortunate, as Viriconium is currently one of my favorite reads of the year.

Writing

I had the week off from work, and I managed to sneak in some writing time, mostly world-building and some thoughts about the recent confirmation by SCOTUS that the USA is, in fact, a fascist state.

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Language, Politics
Setting: Wilderness
Genre: Solarpunk

Listening

William Elliott Whitmore, “Old Devils”

Interesting Links

  • “How white victimhood is shaping a second Trump term” (Zack Beauchamp, Vox) – This is an interesting title, because never in the history of the USA have white people been victims because they are white. Never in the history of the USA have white people been repressed, oppressed, or marginalized for the color of their skin, in any context, at any level. Never once. The white supremacists and christian nationalists (who are really all the same people) at the core of Trump’s fan base are indulging, as they always do, in “DARVO” (Deny, Accuse, Reverse Victim and Offender). But since the American version of conservatism is nothing more than the continuation of the Confederacy, which itself was nothing more than the continuation of European Feudalism on American soil, the white supremacist mindset is at the heart of every conservative idea and action. If that were not the case, there would be no uproar about the teaching of Critical Race Theory. QED.

IWSG, July 2024: Tools of the Trade

John Winkelman

A meadow in The Highlands at Blandford Nature Center in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

[A meadow in The Highlands at Blandford Nature Center in Grand Rapids, Michigan.]

After many months of burnout, distraction, sleep deprivation, and something which is almost certainly depression, I have written some words.

Not many, granted, and those words will almost certainly be swapped out for other, better words at some point in the future.

But for now, I have written some words.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for July 2024 is: What are your favorite writing processing (e.g. Word, Scrivener, yWriter, Dabble), writing apps, software, and tools? Why do you recommend them? And which one is your all time favorite that you cannot live without and use daily or at least whenever you write?

The first draft of most of my creative work starts in one of my journals. For poetry, journals are where I create first, second, and sometimes even final drafts. Sometimes, naturally, the first draft is the final draft, never to be touched again.

For prose, journals are where I write outlines, snippets, character names, and descriptions, and so on. Again, many times that is as far as things go.

But for those ideas which have promise, I exclusively use Google Docs.

I use Google Docs for everything, for the following reasons:

  1. It is online. I don’t need to install anything
  2. Auto-save (!!!)
  3. Stored remotely. A computer crash or errant cup of coffee won’t erase my text
  4. Easy to export/download in a variety of formats, if I need to pull the text into a more feature-rich tool like Scrivener or MS Word.
  5. Can access my files from a variety of devices.

Regarding point 4, I have almost never needed to use a tool more complex than a Google Doc. If I create an epic fantasy novel, I imagine Scrivener will become vital.

Happy July, everyone!

 

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June 2024 Books and Reading Notes

John Winkelman

June was a busy month, so I didn’t read as much as usual. But what my list lacks in quantity it makes up for in quality.

Acquisitions

Books acquired in June 2024.

  1. Voices 2024 [2024.06.08] – Acquired at the 2024 Dyer-Ives Poetry awards
  2. Silvia Federici, Patriarchy of the Wage: Notes on Marx, Gender, and Feminism (PM Press) [2024.06.15] – Purchased at Black Dog Books and Records in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
  3. Maya Schenwar, Joe Macaré, Alana Yu-lan Price (editors), Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? (Haymarket Books) [2024.06.15] – Purchased at Black Dog Books and Records in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
  4. Kathy Acker, Hannibal Lecter, My Father (Semiotext(e)) [2024.06.24] – Ordered from MIT Press.
  5. Christian Marazzi, Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War Economy (Semiotext(e)) [2024.06.24] – Ordered from MIT Press.

Reading List

Books

Books I read in June 2024.

  1. Glen Cook, Shadows Linger (re-read, e-book) [2024.06.03]
  2. Jason McBride, Eat Your Mind: The Radical Life and Work of Kathy Acker [2024.06.14]
  3. Voices 2024 [2024.06.15]
  4. Glen Cook, The White Rose (re-read, e-book) [2024.06.19]
  5. Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography [2024.06.29]

Weekly Round-up, June 29, 2024

John Winkelman

The view west from the new GRCC parking ramp on Lyon Street in Grand Ramids, MI

[The view southwest from the new GRCC parking ramp on Lyon Street in Grand Rapids, MI.]

Not much to report from this past week. Many distractions intruded into my life and left not much room for relaxing and enjoying the little things. Like sleep. And silence.

Reading

Just before this post went live I finished Tim Marshall‘s excellent Prisoners of Geography. The ideas therein will be quite helpful for the world building phase of my current work-in-progress.

Writing

I didn’t write much this past week. Work tasks, an unexpected power outage, and cat drama used up most of my free mental energy.

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Spiritual Beings, Cyborgs
Setting: Library
Genre: Procedural

Listening

After discovering that Soul Coughing is touring again, I went back and revisited some of their tracks. They are still excellent!

Interesting Links

Weekly Round-up, June 22, 2024

John Winkelman

Green Darner dragonfly on a sandstone slab.

[A Green Darner dragonfly, soaking up the sunlight on our front steps.]

For this whole past week, the daytime temperatures were at or above 90°F. And at night the air seldom dropped below the mid-70s, and that usually around dawn. The humidity has been 80% or above, so even with the cooler temperatures and windows open, the air was sticky.

So I haven’t had a lot of sleep this week.

But insomnia has benefits. I have managed to read a little more, and some of the knots in my muscles have relaxed in the constant, sauna-like air.

Reading

I finished Eat Your Mind, the Kathy Acker biography, and it was most excellent. I also finished Glen Cook’s novel The White Rose, and am now reading Tim Marshall’s Prisoners of Geography. I have put Capital Hates Everyone on hold until the air cools off and my brain can handle works of that complexity.

Writing

I’m doing some world building for my NaNoWriMo novel-in-progress Cacophonous, and have identified a place where it could be tied into the work from the previous NaNoWriMos, Up the River to the Mountain and its sequel Racing the Flood Down to the Sea. While the “vibe”, characters, and approach to storytelling are different, they could all take place in the same universe, and indeed, in the same city, and using some ideas from the earlier stories could plug up some potential logical holes in the world building for the current story. So I feel tentatively optimistic that I can knock out a new first draft by the end of the year. Or earlier, if I get laid off from my job, which is always a possibility.

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Addiction, Music
Setting: Lost City
Genre: Utopian

Listening

After a week of 90°F and above, I’m happy that ’tain’t no sin to take off your skin and dance around in your bones.

Interesting Links

 

Weekly Round-up, June 15, 2024

John Winkelman

Some beautiful leaves in the morning light.

[Closeup of one of the plants filling our landscape.]

I spent some time over the past week updating the AI Notebook page. I looked specifically for articles comparing corporations to AI (a la Charles Stross‘s idea that corporations are “slow AI”), and instead discovered articles about AI incorporating itself, which was disturbingly familiar, as in one of Stross’s earlier books, Accelerando, AIs incorporating themselves is one of the early stages of the singularity.

Reading

I just finished Jason McBride’s biography of Kathy Acker, Eat Your Mind. It was a hell of a good read. I was aware of Acker when I worked at the bookstore in the mid to late 1990s, but only by the titles of her books, not Acker qua Acker.

Writing

Came up with a few more story ideas based on previous writing prompts. Also did some worldbuilding for one of the previous half-finished novels, which might go somewhere at some point this summer. And I knocked out a draft of a poem about ageing, which makes me the first middle-aged  dude to ever write a poem about getting old. And not one word in it about how I wear the bottoms of my trousers. Take that, Elliot, you hack!

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Empire, Cryptids
Setting: Urban
Genre: War

Listening

I listened to a LOT of Moby at the start of my career as a web developer. Play had just been released and every song on it was, by the standards of the time, a banger. “South Side”, in particular, struck a chord with me. This version, featuring Gwen Stefani, is particularly good.

Interesting Links

  • US supreme court unanimously upholds access to abortion pill mifepristone (PDF of decision here) in the case of FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine. Given that the court decision rested on the plaintiff’s standing, not the merits of the case, there is every possibility that the Christofascists will try, yet again, to reduce child-bearing people to the role of expendable incubators, which is the sole purpose behind every attempt to limit access to, or outlaw, abortion.

Weekly Round-up, June 8, 2024

John Winkelman

A Thistle plant in the morning sunlight.

[A thistle plant in our back yard, lit by the morning sun.]

The schools are out and summer is in full swing for the next two and a half months. I have arranged some time off from work at the end of July, and now my partner and I can begin to plan an adventure of some kind.

This past Wednesday was my fifth-fifth birthday, which means we are probably approaching the middle of the of the Age of John, or the Winkelcene (not to be confuse with the Winkelscene, which is my yet-to-be-created slam poetry/martial arts cafe, where any disputes between poets will be handled in the ring).

Reading

I’m bouncing back and forth between two books. My daytime reading, usually during breaks at work, is Capital Hates Everyone: Fascism or Revolution by Maurizio Lazzarato. I have read other of Lazzarato’s works in the past – The Making of the Indebted Man and Governing By Debt. Both are excellent. And, so far, so is Capital Hates Everyone.

The other book in my currently-reading pile is Eat Your Mind: The Radical Life and Work of Kathy Acker, a biography by Jason McBride. This book fits well with Twentieth-Century Boy, the collection of Duncan Hannah‘s journals which I read last summer, as well as John Giorno‘s autobiography Great Demon Kings. A lot of the same names pop up in these book.

Writing

Writing has gone surprisingly well this past week, thanks to a concerted effort to spend less time fucking around online and more time being of use to myself. I have a folder with a document for each of the weekly writing prompts here, and I have been going back through and jotting down story ideas for each of them, three or four or five a day. Some of the ideas resonate, and may well be turned into full stories when I get the time. But for now the ideas are captured.

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Cryptids, Aliens
Setting: Bar
Genre: Fantasy

Listening

Interesting Links

55, or 11×5

John Winkelman

Happy birthday to me! I am now officially part of the “55 and older” cohort, which both simplifies and diminishes the experience of no longer being young here in the 21st century.

Saint Petersburg, 1994

30 years ago, as of this post, I was in Saint Petersburg, Russia, celebrating my birthday with friends and classmates in the restaurant of the Hotel Rus. The above photos is from that trip, when we visited the prison where Dostoevsky was held just prior to his mock execution. I am just to the right of the window, with glasses, shaggy brown hair, and a black shirt.

This trip, more than anything else at that time, seemed to be the dividing line between my young life and my adult life. I still pull out the photos once in a while, and I still have the dozens of books, all in Russian, which I picked up on that trip. Can I read them? Not really. Not any more. My Russian is almost nonexistent at this point. Had I time and energy to do so, I would start learning the language again. I know just enough Russian to be able to pick out the line from The Master and Margarita which became my first tattoo.

If my fifty-third year was one of re-emergence, this past year was one of re-connection. I have made contact with a number of people I have not seen in years or decades. It has been a wonderful experience, and from what I have seen of the next several months, is a process which is likely to continue for quite some time. I have heard it said that as we get older it becomes progressively harder to make new friends. This may be true, but as we get older, if we are lucky, we have more and more old friends with whom we can both share old memories and make new ones.

And now, off to work. Only ten more years to go until I retire, and I am counting the minutes.

(If you are looking for my IWSG post for June, it is here.)

IWSG, June 2024: What To Do?

John Winkelman

Pepper, doing the best impression of the Sphinx, with a mlem.

Today (June 5) is my birthday! The above photo is Pepper, expressing her excitement at the thought.

May was another busy month, though the writing was sparse. I spent some time reviewing some old manuscripts and rearranging my virtual space so I am ready to begin edits on the more promising of my many, many drafts. I feel like this is a make-or-break year for my writing, for no specific reason. I need to get out of the habit of confining all of my creative writing to November, and the best way to do that is to just start writing. Again.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for June 2024 is: In this constantly evolving industry, what kind of offering/service do you think the IWSG should consider offering to members?

I view the IWSG as a support group more than a resource, though I am probably in the minority here. That aspect of the group is invaluable.

For me, the biggest industry change over the past several years is the advent and growth of ChatGPT and related tools. Therefore perhaps the most pertinent offering would be a list of publishers which expressly forbid the submission of AI-created content.

Happy June, everyone!

Insecure Writer's Support Group BadgeThe Insecure Writer’s Support Group
is a community dedicated to encouraging
and supporting insecure writers
in all phases of their careers.