1. I’ve been kicking tires and shifting things and getting the new Astro installation for this site fully operational. I think it’s pretty close now. I had to fix a million broken links and then knock around a bunch of build stuff, but that works now. I also have a bunch of static pages for books and stuff that are in the process of being moved, so stuff like Atmospheres mostly works now. If you find broken things, let me know, but I’m not investing a ton of time in chasing down broken external links from 2002.

2. Atmospheres rerelease: already posted about that, but check it out if you haven’t already.

3. I talk about the book cover a bit in the Editor’s Notes, but that text got locked down before I actually finished the cover. I’d started the layout with the same graphic from the 2014 edition, which is some clouds and smoke from Maui in 2013. When I started messing with the cover, the art looked way too noisy and weird, and hitting that fictional enhance button in Photoshop wasn’t doing anything. I swapped out a different picture, but totally forgot to mention that in the text. So, addendum to the addendum.

4. The new picture is from my 2022 trip to Denver. I was on a walk before dinner in the abandoned industrial park area of Centennial, and the sky suddenly filled with dark, intricate clouds, the precursor to a massive thunderstorm. I turned around and headed back, but shot away with my Canon 5DS and the 24–70 f/2.8L I’d bought that very day. I only had that 5DS for two trips (this and Sweden), and I was fighting it constantly to get okay shots. So, I’m glad I got a book cover (spoiler alert: or two) out of it.

5. I’m back on editing Atmospheres 2, and I’m maybe 25% through what might be the last draft. I’ve been struggling to get this book out basically since 2014, and I really need to get it done. Going through it right after editing the first one is pretty interesting. I think it has the same feel or spirit to it, but it’s much longer (140,000 words versus 60,000), and probably has more of a structured plot, although it’s still not plotted like a murder mystery or a Pixar movie. Hoping to land this thing by the end of summer.

6. Still riding my bike every day. I also just finished some work on my Cannondale Topstone 4, the gravel bike. I switched the drop handlebars for a carbon fiber straight bar, which might be considered sacrilege to many, but my neck and shoulders could not deal with drop bars. This required changing the gearshift and brake levers, and I ran into cable trouble, but I think everything’s fine now. The bike is now ridiculously light compared to my daily, and will be a lot of fun off-road.

7. The cats had their first vet visit. I thought Zuzu would be trouble, because I can’t even get within ten feet of her most of the time. Four of us were able to get her wrapped, inspected, and injected. Diego was 100% noncompliant and we had to skip him. He also gashed my pretty good in the hand, and it looked like I slashed my palm to take a blood oath with someone. The doctor gave us drugs (for him, not me) and we’ll try again later. We did a dry run last night, giving him Gabapentin in a treat. He ate it, but wasn’t entire into being knocked out. I did at least weigh him, and he’s now 14.5 pounds. So I’m expecting the same diet-and-exercise lecture every single doctor ever gives me, even though my current BMI is probably below normal now.

8. I try not to go to the mall that much anymore, but I went to Stoneridge today and the JC Penney there has closed. This really throws me off, not because I needed to buy some Arizona jeans, but because by default I always park in front of that store. Now I park there but have to walk over to the next entrance, and the whole thing throws me. I think far too much about this, and how I always park at the same exact place at every mall I’ve ever regularly visited. Like at Concord, it was at the Wards by the door closest to the Automotive entrance. At University Park in Bloomington, I always parked by the Sears on the west side. That mall is still there, but the Sears is long gone, razed and replaced with a Fresh Thyme grocery store and a little row of outward-facing shops. University Park Mall in Mishawaka, I always park north of the JC Penney. I don’t know why I always have to park in the same exact spot, and if other more sane people just park at the first place they can find a spot or what. Anyway.

9. I’m now at the part of the trip cycle where I’m clamoring to take another vacation in a few months, but don’t know where. This is a long and multi-dimensional decision. Whatever you were about to suggest, probably not there.

10. There were only nine things. There were three posts this month, though. That’s progress. The last time I had four posts in a month was 2024. August 2023 had seven posts in a month, which is unusual. I remember various times I thought about posting every single day, and I have no idea how I’d ever do that, short of quitting my job and making this my main project.

I’m happy to announce that I’ve re-released my 2014 book Atmospheres on Rumored Books.

TL;DR:

• Print: Amazon.com
• Kindle: Amazon.com

This was an interesting one. I am approaching the end of writing Atmospheres 2 and figured I should probably have the original one in print too. I dusted off the old Scrivener file from twelve years ago and gave it a quick editing pass. (I didn’t change content, and mostly fixed dumb comma usage and a few typos.) I also finally ditched that stupid CreateSpace-generated cover.

In doing this, I dug around for old drafts and tried to research the genesis of this book. The original was published on March 2, 2014. Because I write in Scrivener and constantly refine a single document, I don’t really generate discrete versions or drafts. I knew I did have working drafts I sent to someone in PDF format from October 2013 and January 2014. But when looking through old email, I was astonished to find a May 2013 draft I sent to Ray Miller, when the book had just been named and was only 5,000 words long. It amazes me to read those early snippets, really just bursts of ideas with absolutely no structure or routine.

I combed through the six drafts I found, and wrote a bit about the development of the book, my process, and how the drafts mutated into what I ended up publishing. I’ve also included some never-seen-before outtakes from the early drafts, including a bunch of that email to Ray, plus a few segments that were dropped from the first edition. It’s about 40 pages of new material.

Atmospheres is one of my favorite books, along with Rumored to Exist. I think it’s one of my most “Konrath” books, and I can still turn to a random page, read a few lines, and find something hilarious I completely forgot about. I’m glad to have it back in print on Rumored Books. And I can’t wait to finish the sequel.

If you’re new here, maybe I should back up and explain this. Here’s the post I originally made back in 2014.

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About a year ago, I started writing this experiment, which was a collection of almost ambient scenes, brief snippets of no story, just outbursts of emotion or scene. I wanted to eventually link them together in some way, but it became more important to simply generate the pieces each day. When I worked on finishing Thunderbird and doing all of the steps of publishing it, I needed to continue writing something, and that’s where the beginning of Atmospheres started.

I’ve always had a minor obsession with Jim Jarmusch, and I often listen to the soundtrack to Broken Flowers when I’m writing.  One of the songs on there is an edited clip of the Sleep song “Dopesmoker.” I’d been vaguely familiar with them from a million years ago when I used to write about death metal, but wasn’t fully aware of that particular album. I’d read an interview with Jarmusch where he talked about being preoccupied with that song, so I got a copy, and then I became locked into it.

If you haven’t heard it, the album is one song, a 63-minute stoner metal number that’s essentially a single heavy riff played over and over, while talking about a caravan of weed-priests crossing the desert to Jerusalem with their magical hashish. The lyrics are corny, but the song itself is an hour of pure hypnotic sludge, and puts you in a trance mode. And while I did not imbibe in the titular substance discussed in the song, I made it part of my process. I’d sit down every day, put the song on repeat, and completely lose myself in it, writing about whatever escaped from my subconscious thought onto the page.

Within a few months, this brought out an incredible pile of 500 word chunks, some perfect stories, some absolute junk.  But it amazingly brought out some common threads through the manuscript when I pushed them all together.  There’s a scene in the Naked Lunch movie where Ginsberg and Kerouac (or facsimiles thereof) go to Interzone to visit Bill, and  find an apartment filled with scattered random notes (and heroin), and that’s what the book read like before I started editing.

This is by far the most challenging read of any of my books.  It has a story arc in three acts, but it doesn’t have a conventional plot, which will throw a lot of people.  But it contains a lot of brutally honest writing that cuts deep, and it was a lot of fun to write. If I had to compare it to anything I’ve done, it’s a lot like Rumored to Exist in ways, but I think the pieces are darker with a lot more thickness to them.

This is my tenth book, which is a strange milestone to reach.  And every time I finish one of these, I fall into a deep depression and a brief panic, first as I wade through all of the production steps of releasing one of these things, and then as I try to start the next project.  And I have no idea how to sell this book or what’s next, so I’m not prepared for this. But, I need to keep working, so I will.

Anyway, check out the book, and let me know what you think.

After switching to WordPress almost 17 years ago, I’m done. Out. Finished.

In 2009, WordPress was The Thing. Prior to that, I had a homebrewed static site generator, more or less. It generated the index pages and slapped a header/footer on each generated page. Although I used various iterations of this for a dozen years, it had major shortcoming. I had to mostly edit posts by hand; images were a major pain; and the look and feel of the thing was not great. I also had to be in front of my laptop at home to edit a post.

I think I’d already been using WordPress for my music review blog (which died quickly, don’t ask) and after a big painful import process that involved too much use of the sed program and the ugliest shell script imaginable, I got everything into a self-hosted WordPress install.

WordPress had its advantages. Themes were great. It looked modern. I could easily log in from work or my phone or anywhere else and peck out a post. Things like comments were already included. And when I had a multi-person blog for the old publishing company, it wasn’t too terrible to set up other people to also edit things.

WordPress also had many fatal flaws. First of all, it was basically a vector for every possible Russian hacker imaginable, who were constantly on a global hunt to crack every WordPress site they could and turn it into a boner pill ad. This happened a few times on the old PL site, and luckily not at Rumored. You were also at the whim of the WP developers for updates and changes. When they switched to a more WYSIWYG editor with “blocks” in it, I almost jumped ship, until I found a way to turn back on the legacy editor.

I think the biggest pain in the ass was the perception that you could do anything with WordPress and it had a rich ecosystem. But any time I wanted to switch themes, I found most free themes were garbage, years old and unmaintained. Paid themes, sure. But I’m not paying thousands of dollars for a personal blog only three people read. Also there was this plugin architecture, and you’re supposed to be able to totally customize your site, but once again the freemium mode was a curse, and if you added more than a couple plugins, your site would slow to a crawl.

Another big thing was that I had all my posts in a screwy database format, and any thoughts about exporting them to another format to make a book or another site involved a graduate-level computer science project, or a plugin from someone in Yugoslavia that simply did not work.

So, done.

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I’ve been doing the Markdown thing for a decade at work, writing with little symbols for italics and bold and headings, then using a static site generator to convert all of that into HTML and pour in templates and indexes and such. So I’ve thought about switching to a SSG for a long time. But the longer I waited, the worse this proposition got. I think there are about 1500 posts here, and 1.25 million words. So it’s not an easy lift.

I originally started using Jekyll at work in 2015, which suffers from the same WordPress freemium problem for themes and such, and definitely does not work well at that scale. Hugo is a bit better, but I never got it to look great. I use Gatsby for my other blog and that’s okay, but I kept sleeping on this for a while.

Anyway, I eventually thought about Astro, and that seemed to tick most of the boxes. I got a download of the WordPress export of this site, then broke it up into Markdown with a script that actually worked. After a quick setup and maybe two days of messing around, I got everything pretty much running here.

Another change is that I moved my hosting from AWS Lightsail to Vercel. And the actual files here live in GitHub. So Vercel watches the branches there and automatically does the builds and deployment. Easy stuff, and it wasn’t hard to get that running at all.

There are probably a lot of little things I need to fix here, broken links and style problems and such. There aren’t comments, and maybe I will add them back. (Or maybe not.) I need to spend some time on this, but I also need to say “done” and leave it alone.

The one disadvantage to this whole system: I’m now editing and publishing in the same tools I use at work: writing in VSC, testing in the command line, pushing changes with GitHub. Leaving work and then trying to be mindful and write, but sitting in the same exact programs is going to take some getting used to. Maybe I’ll write in something else, then paste it in here.

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Other news is that I got another draft of Atmospheres 2 done, and I hope this is the second-to-last one. After I left it ferment for a week or so, I’ll start a heavy edit pass and hopefully get that done soon.