So, in 2021, I unpublished all of my books and stopped writing. There were a few reasons for this. Maybe there’s a post in that. Bottom line though is that I’ve been trying to get back out of that and write again. And as I do that and try to figure out what to write, I’m trying to figure out what to do with the 17 books I’ve published since 2000. I have 1073852 words and 3649 pages in purgatory right now, and probably the same amount in never-published projects.

I’m slowly trying to work through this. In reading a few of my old books and thinking about it, one bit of low-hanging fruit is 2018’s Book of Dreams. When I gave it a quick read, it was 99.9% solid for me. I didn’t find it particularly problematic for me, especially when it comes to persona and general flow or structure of the book. I love the cover, done by Casey Babb. And when I read through the whole thing, I found maybe a dozen bone-headed typos or little nits that could be fixed in three keystrokes, but no major issues.

I mentioned this in my original announcement for the book:

I think this book is slightly less “Konrath” than my last few books. It’s not as manic or as fast-paced. NyQuil and Mariah Carey are not mentioned. It still has the same kind of humor; it just doesn’t lean on the persona as much, if that makes any sense.

I think that’s the key. And the fact that it’s all dreams is a big point for me. I write down my dreams a lot, whenever I can remember them, and I always find great stuff in them. I’ve snuck dream journals into a lot of zines and small collection books, and I use them as parts of ideas for stories.

Anyway, the book is live here. It’s in print and kindle. If you already have the 2018 version, there is no need to get this. The only thing that has changed are a few stealth edits, and a ”, 2023” on the copyright page. Same ISBN, same page length. The price is slightly higher for print. $9.99 is not the end of the world. I’m done trying to competitively price my books at 7 cents more than the print cost. Publishing is dead and I don’t care if it sells. That’s not why I do this.

I need to go through the rest of the books. I really wanted to do some special edition of Rumored because I love that book, and then I was reading through it last October on vacation and thought, “oh shit, that’s getting me cancelled” about 19 times in the first 20 pages. I don’t know what to do about that. (I’m not asking for advice. I’m never asking for advice.)  Dealer Wins is out because it’s 100% obsolete, and was largely filler in the first place.   The Necrokonicon (aka “the glossary book”) is more of the same. Memory Hunter - nobody got the joke, and I wrote my most structured book ever and people bitched about the lack of structure, so that one is dead.

I have a sequel to Summer Rain in my head that would probably mean a quick edit to the original and both of them going out at once, but that sequel has been languishing for years. I also have a sequel to Atmospheres in its fourth draft, which is roughly twice as long. I would love to fix the cover of the first one, do a new layout, add some bonus material, and release it at the same time. That’s a plan, but an uphill battle. The sequel needs maybe a year of full-time work, and I’m not working on it right now.

I reread He and thought it was horrible. It has incredibly inconsistent and cringey writing, and nobody got the concept (which came from a Hubert Selby book.) All the “little” collection books (Ranch, Help…, Thunderbird, etc.) have good and bad stuff. Maybe a bunch of that could be rolled into one omnibus. Maybe not. Maybe I should be writing new material instead.

Failure Cascade is probably the next-closest to being republishable. I like the cover, and I gave it a re-read and it was decent. I think almost nobody read this book, and it died right out of the gate. I’ll need to read it again with a thing of sticky flags and see what it will take to get it in shape.

I’m reluctant to write about exactly why I quit writing, but maybe I need to get that off my chest soon.

So I finished my MBA. Did I mention I was doing an MBA? I should probably write a larger post about this. But I completed my final capstone project in mid-October, then spent a week or two in administrative purgatory, and now it’s done. It feels odd to have this giant framed thing saying the trustees have conferred on me blah blah blah, but here it sits. I didn’t even think about having an MBA until maybe this spring, and it’s over. I am an MBA. I can read a statement of cash flows. Ask me anything about Pareto charts. But make it quick, as I will forget most of this in a month.

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Went to Maui last week. This was our fourth trip to this island; we also went in 2013, 2015, and 2017. We stayed on the windward side each time previously, which is nice but very touristy. (Complaining about the Four Seasons being full of tourists is like complaining about Disney World “selling out,” but the combination of tripping over octogenarians at every turn and getting charged ten bucks for a baby-sized bottled water does get old.)

This time we stayed at a yoga resort in upcountry, which was a few clicks south of Mama’s Fish House on the north shore. It used to be a bunch of indigent housing built by the Baldwin family (farming magnates that owned half of everything at one point) and it was used for military training housing during the war, then plantation worker housing, then it sat empty until someone restored and reconfigured it in about 2011 to make it into a bougie new-age yoga retreat center. It’s a semi-circle of bungalows with decks on the front and rear, a big courtyard in the middle, lots of trees and landscaping and the occasional fake buddha statue. There was almost nobody there, and although they offered various yoga and meditation classes, I didn’t go and I actually didn’t even see them happening. When I booked the place, I had the fear that some new age zombies would start chanting at four AM every day and try to beat some cult veganism in my head if I left the house, but there was nothing like that at all.

The rooms were cool. The whole place had high ceilings, big wooden ceiling fans, and old, dark wood furniture. We had two big rooms and the bathroom, plus the front and back decks. Lots of hammocks overlooking the ocean in the distance. The whole thing looked like a French plantation in Vietnam from the 1950s.  No AC. No TVs. No espresso machines. No wall tablets and room service intercoms and everything else you find in modern hotels. I always hate it when I go across the country and check into a Hyatt and it’s the same exact Hyatt I’d see in Denver or Chicago or San Jose. This was very distinct, so that was cool.

Being upcountry was generally 10-15 degrees cooler than being elsewhere on the island. Lots of trees, too. Unfortunately, walking was not great there - a winding road with no sidewalks or room for pedestrians, and nothing in every direction. I still got my 10,000 steps a day in, and we saw a lot of other areas on the island, so that worked out. The place had a small restaurant where the food was decent, but it was usually two or three couples sitting on the porch for dinner, and a server and a chef, and they would just say what they were serving and we said “ok, cool” and they brought it out. I like that a lot, though. Also went to a good Italian place, and actually a tiki-eque lounge a bit further south.

No real big adventures while we were there, just a lot of chilling out, walking, and eating. No work. That’s the most important part. Usually on these trips, it’s a big thing to come up with an itinerary and activities, things. Zip-lines and jet skis and museums and shops and statues of dead people that you must see. I think we’ve covered most of that in previous trips, and it was an opportunity to just do nothing. So, that was good.

There are pictures, but honestly I haven’t even sorted out my Denver pictures, and that was like three trips ago. I’ll get to it when it starts raining and I can’t go outside anymore.

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Now that school is over, I’m trying to write. I should probably make this a separate post and explain it fully, or maybe I shouldn’t talk about it at all. But I completely quit writing fiction just over a year ago, just a sudden rage-quit “I can’t do this anymore.” thing, and it was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever had to make, and it was probably the wrong one.

Right before I doused every bridge with gasoline and lit them on fire, I wrote some notes on exactly why I stopped writing. And at the time, I thought these issues were insurmountable, and maybe some of them are. And maybe it’s impossible to write fiction in a world when everything has become TikTok-ified. I don’t know. There are a lot of other major obstacles that I have to figure out. The big one is I simply do not know what to write about anymore. I’m out of ideas, and I can’t keep repeating myself.

So I’ve been chipping and trying to get started again, trying to figure out which way is up. I used to write daily, and for almost ten years, had to write something every day. I always had this strong belief that if I stopped, I would lose momentum, and then the next thing I knew, years would go by and I wouldn’t even know what went wrong. That’s basically what happened. And starting from an absolute dead stop has been difficult. I have a feeling it will take me months to get back to the same cadence I was at a few years ago. But that’s the goal.

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Nothing else going on. Lots of other stuff going on. I should write more about the writing thing later. And the MBA thing. Stay tuned.

I just got back from another walk around NAS Alameda with two of my film cameras, the Vivitar point-and-shoot and the Canon QL-17. Nice weather for a walk, although there was some event going on and the west side of the island was far too busy for me. I should probably get used to that, because at some point, they’ll tear down the old barracks and put in live/work condos and it will always be this busy.

Shooting with that Vivitar is always weird, because sometimes I forget it isn’t the same one that I bought in 1993 and had back in the 90s. When I’m walking around the Bay Area with it, it’s a strong memory hole back to my first trip to California in 1996.  Looking at grainy, faded analog pictures (like the one above) reminds me so much of that trip, and the late 90s San Francisco, and it makes me wonder what it will be like in 2045, looking at 20-megapixel DSLR images on whatever crazy 3-D 200K screens we’ll be staring at by then. (Provided I still have vision in 25 years. And will still be alive.)

I made a vow to not buy any more film until I shot everything I have on hand, and I did that today, minus the 20-some shots of black-and-white still in the Canon. I’m expecting some crazy supply-chain stuff that’s going to completely throw that off, though. I haven’t bought any film since 2018, and I’m sure things have changed. I’ve got a dozen rolls waiting to be processed, so maybe when I drop those off at Mike’s Camera next weekend, I’ll see what they have in stock. Or, it’s off to eBay.

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Writing is still going nowhere. This week, I was revisiting a book I started writing in 2012. I’ve tried a few times writing a book that is basically a Summer Rain prequel, that takes place in the summer of 1989, between high school and college. I’ve had at least two false starts totaling maybe 100,000 words between them, and they always die about halfway through. I started a very Raymond Federman-esque book in ‘12 that was about the attempts to write this book, and the problems therein. It came from reading Double or Nothing too many times.

I thought I’d revisit it, thinking about how I look back at that era as a 50-year-old, and all of the problems I have now with nostalgia. And maybe a meditation on the need to write a memoir, and why it’s a bad idea, or has been distorted or changed in recent years. I think when I was living in that era, and a bunch of stuff happened that summer, I always thought, “this would make a great book,” because it all lined up so exactly with the traditional novel plot curve, and the events were so extraordinary or traumatic or whatever. That was before I considered myself a writer, and back then, writing a book was a giant, insurmountable goal, like climbing a mountain or running a marathon. The idea of “getting published” was such a high bar, a lofty thing, and I always thought maybe someday I would.

Now, I’ve published so many books I can never remember how many and have to look it up any time someone asks. (It’s seventeen, more or less.) Anyone can publish their own book in five minutes. And the national zeitgeist isn’t about publishing a book, because nobody even reads books anymore. It’s about going viral, making a fifteen-second video that catches on, or whatever. Old man shakes fist at air, I know.

The other main reason I need to put this down is I know I have some deep, unsettled trauma about those years. It’s not like Trauma trauma, like I watched my parents get killed after going out to a movie and had to become a crime fighter dressed as a Chiroptera. But there’s some heavy unresolved something there, something that’s best left alone. Nothing specific, just generalized. I don’t want to spend my time going back anymore. But it’s a problem that when I’m faced with a blank page and no ideas, that’s where I go.

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Nothing else. I wasted about half of today trying to figure out how to roll over an IRA from Schwab to E*Trade. That place I worked in Denver got bought by McAfee a long time ago, and I had like a month of 401K stuck there, which got moved to an IRA, and they mailed everything to my old address and it got lost. After much phone tag, I found it sitting in an account at Schwab, then promptly forgot all about it. I just remembered, and 25% of it is gone because of fees. I thought transferring it would involve actually finding a fax machine in 2021, but it appears they take a PDF by email. Fingers crossed.

I am sort of done with the Random Life project. There are 100 videos there now. It was fun digging through some old stuff, but I got almost zero reaction from anyone out of it, and maybe it was a dumb idea. Oh well. Maybe in two or three years, I’ll look at it again and it will be interesting.

Been insanely busy with a big work release, and that’s finally done, but I haven’t been back on the horse with anything writing since then. It’s the time of year where I start to panic about not getting a book published this year, since the last year I had nothing published was 2010. But I’m in a weird place right now, where I am having a lot of trouble writing anything cohesive. I am just repeating myself at this point, and I really don’t like what I’ve been doing the last few books. And a lot of people agree, based on my sales numbers. So who knows what I will do. Maybe I will pull something together in the next 96 days. Or maybe I will pick up this writing thing after I retire. I really don’t know.

• • • For whatever reason, I started programming again. One of the three projects I always take up when I think I’m going to learn programming is writing a Zork-like game, a text-based RPG. Yes, I could just use Twine or some other game engine to do this. I mean, I could just play Zork. This is mostly just a dumb hobby for me to do because I can’t write, I don’t want to spend two thousand dollars on a gaming PC, and I am not about to start playing golf.

So I started writing this game in straight vanilla C, with nothing but the standard library. I still know a remarkable amount of C, given that I think I learned it thirty years ago. What I didn’t remember is that C is such a pain in the ass to work with. Every data structure that isn’t an integer requires you to either write or steal a library to do it. Dynamic arrays? DIY. Binary trees? You’re on your own. It all involves pointers and malloc’ing memory, and every time I would write ten lines of code, I’d think, “well, that’s going to break in actual use” or “that’s completely insecure.” I got a few hundred lines into the thing before I decided to switch to using Ruby.

I guess Ruby is now an inherently uncool language. All the cool kids use Rust, or JavaScript, or maybe Python. I first started messing with Ruby in the context of Rails development in 2006 or 2007, and spent a couple of years doing a ton of it, on a brief  sabbatical from tech writing. Haven’t done much since then, but I thought maybe I’d do this game in Ruby, no Rails, no ActiveRecord, no crazy gem dependencies. I think it took me about 25 minutes to redo the couple of days of work I did in C.

It was easy to get lost in this, but I also ran into a few issues. The first is the constant though of “nobody uses Ruby anymore.” The other is thinking that some bit of code is a very un-Ruby way to do things. I started reading more about Ruby, and it sort of drove me nuts because the Ruby way to do stuff is usually inherently unreadable. It’s neat and cool, but in my mind, doing a “if this thing is nil, do something else” is more readable than “do something else unless this thing is nil.” I realize I’m probably losing all of you non-programmers here, and I’m being pedantic, but I have some basic fear of writing this thing, publishing it on GitHub, and then having a seasoned veteran look at it like I’d look at a Reddit DIY post about some idiot who proudly enlarged their living room by removing every load-bearing interior wall in their house.

Also I get to the “why are you even doing this?” point. And the fact that I’m relaxing after a dozen of hours of hacking away at unreadable garbage in the Atom editor and pushing it to GitHub by spending a few hours hacking away at unreadable garbage in the Atom editor and pushing it to GitHub. So, yeah. How much does golf cost?

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I bought this “Pocket Computer” - a Sharp PC-E500S. It came out in 1995, and has 32KB of memory. It’s roughly half the size of an iPad lengthwise, about 9x4 inches, maybe 3/4-inch thick. It has a 4x40-character display, LCD, and more or less a full QWERTY keyboard, except plastic little keys like a calculator. You can write BASIC programs in it, but it also has a bunch of crazy engineering software in it, so you can do integral calculus or pull up a periodic table of elements. It runs forever on four AAA batteries.

I don’t really know what I’ll do with it. I won it on a lark - made a hail mary offer on it on eBay, and the seller accepted. It has a serial port that uses a connector I’ve never seen, and a cartridge port for proprietary memory cards that are impossible to find. It is slightly more useful and interesting than the Casio FX-7000GA I have from 1990, which currently spends its time in a storage container in my closet. I need to keep in mind that buying things doesn’t really give me the joy I think it will.

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The helicopter picture above is apropos of nothing. It’s from my Alaska trip in 2006. I think I’m at the point where I want to go back to Alaska, and I’m currently stuck with a bunch of Alaska Air credits I can’t use, but who knows when it will be safe to get back up there. I sometimes think it would be cool to go further north, head up to Fairbanks, but I don’t know the logistics of it. Maybe at some point.

They recently changed the formula of Coke Zero to make it “more like regular Coke.” It tastes like a mix of Listerine and cloves now. The only thing is has improved is my ability to quit soda, which hasn’t happened yet, but probably should.

I would normally be more upset about this, but I ultimately have no time to care. I drank a case of it and can’t tell the difference now, so on to the next problem/outrage. I used to be much more upset when a company made a lame decision like the discontinuation of Surge, the dropping of the Taco Bell Mexican Pizza, or the fact that I’ve eaten the same exact oatmeal every morning for twelve years and they decided to stop selling in packets. Life is too short.

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After dumping all the money into my car over the last month, I had a fun experience with it. I was driving off to the mall a week ago, and after I got up to highway speed on the 580, every warning light in the dash came on, and the info panel said “HYBRID SYSTEM FAILURE - PULL OVER IMMEDIATELY.” The dynamic braking stopped working, and the EV system went completely offline. There was a Toyota dealership just past the next highway exit, so I swung in there and dropped it off. They said they’d get to it on Monday.

This began a weekend-long spiral into figuring out if I needed to buy a new car. The hybrid system is still under warranty, so if it needed a $5000 battery, that’s covered. But I figured the dealership would add a $4000 spine reticulation charge or whatever the hell, or take six months to fix it. The car’s probably worth about $7000 in good condition. When the Yaris reached the end of the line in 2014 and had unknown wiring problems only fixable by a dealer, I brought it to the sales counter and they made me a good deal on the trade-in, so I figured I’d do the same. They don’t make the Prius C anymore, and the Camry and Corolla hybrids are honestly better cars than the Prius, so I burned a lot of cycles pricing this stuff out, trying to figure out what I wanted to pay, what I wanted to finance, etc etc.

Monday morning, they ran the diagnostic and said it was just the ECC lost communication with the system and threw a few codes, so it shut down the entire hybrid system. (If you stumble across this in a search, the DTC codes were U0140, U0073, and U0126.) The only obvious culprit was that I have a ScanGauge II plugged into the ODBII port. I have since I got the car; it’s a holdover from when I had the largely-gaugeless Yaris. I don’t really use it anymore, and the tech theorized that maybe the cable got bumped, or something else happened. He cleared the codes, unplugged the ScanGauge, and no problems since. No charge on the scan, either. So I saved $200 plus another $25,000 on a new car.

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I’ve been having a lot of trouble getting anything going writing-wise. In a fit of “do something completely different,” I did a Ctrl-C Ctrl-V on the project file for my first book, and started on page 1, taking notes and editing things. I’ve had this stupid idea to write a thirty-years-later sequel of the book, and I thought I came up with a good gimmick to get it going, but I needed to go through the old draft, partly to get it all back in my head, and partly to George Lucas in a few minor changes to get the two books to line up correctly.

It’s an …interesting experience to read writing I haven’t touched in over twenty years, especially when it’s a radical departure from what I’ve been writing ever since. There’s obviously some very wooden writing, and little bone-headed typos abound. The usual complaint about the book is that it’s too long, and generally plotless. I could see trimming the book slightly, tightening up things. But for every subplot I would think about trimming, I think there’s another that could have been explored more. And it surprises me now that there are so many characters, so many subplots. It also follows an overall arc more than I thought.

After I got about a third of the way through it, I got disinterested with the idea, though. I can’t go too into it without revealing the gimmick, but I wasn’t interested in writing that book. And it’s been a long time since I’ve put a lot of focused thought into Bloomington. I haven’t spent more than a few hours in town since 1999 when I stopped there for a few days on my move east. Writing a sequel would need some solid reason to be there, and not just the main character wandering around having regrets about every person he dated a million years ago, and being amazed at how all of the stores at the mall closed. Maybe at some point I will visit again and get the spark to write this, but who knows.

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Speaking of, I’m still on for the Seattle trip in two weeks. I have been working on a list of what to do, but I haven’t done any heavy research yet. I just now started thinking about what camera or cameras to bring, or if it’s time for a new one, and I need to shut down that conversation before it starts.