Sunday, April 18, 2010
Another New Published Story
It took four shots but I've finally found a home for this one. Please check out "Some Pardigms Don't Shift" at http://www.aphelion-webzine.com/index.html.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
So What Happened to Dobja?
Several people have actually asked me what happens to the character Stefan Dobja after the end of my short story Doctrine so I thought I would address that. www.allegoryezine.com
Ergo: SPOILER ALERT! (Unless you don't care, then read on.)
The easiest answer is I don't know. I tried to write a sequel twice and I never got past page 2 either time. It isn't because I don't care or I wouldn't like to do so someday, it's just that there are a couple of obstacles in the way that I don't know how to get around.
Problem 1 is what to do about a sequel. Most publications want short stories to be 5K words -- 8K tops. So I can't add much more to the existing story and wrapping things up in about 3,000 words would be too rushed and truncated. I could just write a new story as a sequel, but how would I provide context? With 5,000 words you can't waste time doing much background and without background no one would know what was going on, least of all the editor you are trying to convince to publish it.
Problem 2 flows out of where I wanted to take the story. My two abortive attempts at the sequel began with the bandits waking up in the meadow the morning after the slaughter in human form. The story was then going to follow the bandits as they search for a cure to their disease/curse (whatever you consider lycanthropy to be) and as they gradually begin to lose their humanity under the stress. That would parallel Dobja's hunt for the killers and build to a climax for the final encounter.
The problem here is the level of research that would be necessary to realistically depict Transylvania and Romania/Wallachia in the 1850s. God is in the details and never more so that when you are writing historical fiction. You have to get the period right -- the clothes, the weapons, the locations and even with the blessing of the Internet, you can't always find what you need. A lot of stuff is in old books and you have to try to find them at bn.com or through inter library loan. And then you have to read them and take notes about what you need if you are lucky enough to find it in them. That's before you start to write and it takes a lot of time. Too much time given that I am trying to make my internally imposed one-year deadline (the end of May) to finish my novel. And that I have another 450 page novel that I was in the middle of when I kicked back to my current project (the rationale being that project was actually finished and copyrighted and just needed to be revised - substantially revised rather than completed created from scratch). And that I have ideas for two or three other books that I like better right now.
Thus, the sequel is on the way back burner because I don't have the time to do it right.
As far as the final encounter between Dobja and the bandits, I sort of envisioned the build up as him slowly whittling down their numbers, sort of like Predator, before a final confrontation. Dobja is driven by revenge and a conviction that he is fighting evil, but the bandits aren't really evil any more than a bear that attacked you in the mountains would be. They're petty criminals who were robbing a gypsy caravan and it got out of hand and a few gypsies got killed and someone cursed them. But they aren't really evil -- they fear the full moon as much as the peasants do. I don't know how it would come out but I like Dobja better so I assume he would have gotten over somehow. Maybe someday I'll get around to writing it.
Ergo: SPOILER ALERT! (Unless you don't care, then read on.)
The easiest answer is I don't know. I tried to write a sequel twice and I never got past page 2 either time. It isn't because I don't care or I wouldn't like to do so someday, it's just that there are a couple of obstacles in the way that I don't know how to get around.
Problem 1 is what to do about a sequel. Most publications want short stories to be 5K words -- 8K tops. So I can't add much more to the existing story and wrapping things up in about 3,000 words would be too rushed and truncated. I could just write a new story as a sequel, but how would I provide context? With 5,000 words you can't waste time doing much background and without background no one would know what was going on, least of all the editor you are trying to convince to publish it.
Problem 2 flows out of where I wanted to take the story. My two abortive attempts at the sequel began with the bandits waking up in the meadow the morning after the slaughter in human form. The story was then going to follow the bandits as they search for a cure to their disease/curse (whatever you consider lycanthropy to be) and as they gradually begin to lose their humanity under the stress. That would parallel Dobja's hunt for the killers and build to a climax for the final encounter.
The problem here is the level of research that would be necessary to realistically depict Transylvania and Romania/Wallachia in the 1850s. God is in the details and never more so that when you are writing historical fiction. You have to get the period right -- the clothes, the weapons, the locations and even with the blessing of the Internet, you can't always find what you need. A lot of stuff is in old books and you have to try to find them at bn.com or through inter library loan. And then you have to read them and take notes about what you need if you are lucky enough to find it in them. That's before you start to write and it takes a lot of time. Too much time given that I am trying to make my internally imposed one-year deadline (the end of May) to finish my novel. And that I have another 450 page novel that I was in the middle of when I kicked back to my current project (the rationale being that project was actually finished and copyrighted and just needed to be revised - substantially revised rather than completed created from scratch). And that I have ideas for two or three other books that I like better right now.
Thus, the sequel is on the way back burner because I don't have the time to do it right.
As far as the final encounter between Dobja and the bandits, I sort of envisioned the build up as him slowly whittling down their numbers, sort of like Predator, before a final confrontation. Dobja is driven by revenge and a conviction that he is fighting evil, but the bandits aren't really evil any more than a bear that attacked you in the mountains would be. They're petty criminals who were robbing a gypsy caravan and it got out of hand and a few gypsies got killed and someone cursed them. But they aren't really evil -- they fear the full moon as much as the peasants do. I don't know how it would come out but I like Dobja better so I assume he would have gotten over somehow. Maybe someday I'll get around to writing it.
Sunday, January 10, 2010
The Old Bowls Were Better
Let me preface this by saying that I'm in favor of a playoff system. All of the arguments against one are inherently flawed and put forth by stakeholders who have the most to lose from the triumph of common sense. I'm not going to demolish the logically invalid crap that the BCS Conferences and their weak-sister enablers at the NCAA put out. That isn't the point and you can get that anywhere you want. My point here is that the BCS is so fundamentally flawed that the system it replaced was actually better. Never mind our faith in progress and evolving processes, we've actually gone backwards as far as college football is concerned.
It seems heretical to argue that things were better in the old days of back room deals when you weren't guaranteed to have the top two teams meet in an annual ultimate game, but I think it's true. Some advance the theory that the unusualness of a do or die
The reason the old system was better is because some of the other bowls actually meant something when it came to determining #1. Take away the proliferation of lower tier games matching up .500 teams that finished 6th in their conference. Take away the destruction of New Year's Day as the best day of the college football season by moving name bowls as much as a week further out. Other than the BCS Championship Game and maybe the Rose Bowl or the occasional
At least back in the day, if you didn't have #1 vs. #2, you might have #1 vs. #3 and if the top team went down, #2 could win it's bowl and end up with a National Championship. If things broke right, #3 or #4 might even have a shot or #1 and #2 might tie and who knew what the voters would do. Was it unsatisfying on a variety of levels, especially when many bowl match-ups were set before the end of the season? Hell yes it was! Nobody enjoyed the 1990 Orange Bowl which was supposed to be Notre Dame vs.
If the bowls end up dying out, I'm sure they will blame it on a playoff system, but the BCS will bear a large proportion of the blame.
Friday, January 1, 2010
New Published Story
I am pleased/happy/proud to announce the publication of one of my short stories in a very prestigious e-zine in the fantasy/sci-fi/horror genre. (Please bear with me because I don't do promotion or P.R. very well.) I'm really excited to have one of my works accepted by Allegory E-zine (formerly known at the online publication of Peridot Books) and to actually get paid for it. "Doctrine" is something I wrote way back in a creative writing class in 1994 and it's gone through several evolutions although the ending has always been the same. I did a minimal amount of research in the first iteration and then a significant amount more for the updated 2006/2009 version. I updated it several years ago and submitted it to a Writer's Digest online contest, but the story wasn't what they were looking for and didn't make the top 100. So I dusted it off again this fall, did more revisions, tried to develop the ancillary characters a bit more and submitted it again. Thankfully, the good people at Allegory liked it and here we are.
The story is available at http://allegoryezine.com/ in the Fall 2009 issue of Allegory which was published today (1/1/2010). So if you get a chance and care, go and take a look and let me know what you think. (Even it's only "You Suck", I still can use the feedback.)
The story is available at http://allegoryezine.com/ in the Fall 2009 issue of Allegory which was published today (1/1/2010). So if you get a chance and care, go and take a look and let me know what you think. (Even it's only "You Suck", I still can use the feedback.)
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Why Banks Fail
I spent six years working at a credit union so I've got a pretty good sense of the basics on how financial institutions are run. At least on a micro level - I don't have much experience with reverse repurchases and making loans to Brazil and Donald Trump, but then again, given their track record the banks don't seem to be very good at it either. But that's not the point.
I was in a US Bank today to get something out of my safety deposit box and my wife asked one of the loan officers/member service reps/non-tellers for a rate sheet to show CD rates. We have a CD that's getting ready to roll and we wanted to see what options they had. You would think that providing a list of deposit rates would be a fairly innocuous process. Either they have the things pre-printed or they can print you a copy right away. Not there -- it took about five minutes to get a copy, but that's not why US Bank failed today.
They failed because the loan officer gave us the sheet and said "Have a nice day" and then it was goodbye. Which was nice and polite and all, but it didn't do anything for the US Bank bottom line. Now I don't like being marketed to and I don't like sales, but I imagine that the bank's stockholders do. I'm not one of those people making tons of money writing books on how to sell things, but I don't think I'm going out on a limb here and saying they missed an opportunity today.
The person who sits in the branch and opens new accounts, etc., generally has some type of sales incentive program or commission built into their compensation. So you want to be pushing product and you want to do it in a smart way. The person who is opening an EBT account solely to get their SSI benefits probably is not going to be interested in your tiered money market rates. However, someone who is actively asking you about CD rates probably has more than just an academic motive for doing so. It's an easy sale and when you have money riding on your sales performance, you should actually make more of an effort than handing someone a piece of paper and saying goodbye.
It's not just a US Bank problem either. When my grandmother passed away in 2008, she left each of the grandkids some money that was in CDs at Wachovia. So I went to Wachovia to get my money and they gave it to me and that was it. Goodbye again. While I appreciate the promptness of service, what the Hell were they thinking?
It wasn't a huge amount of money, but is your bank really doing so well that you can let a sizable CD walk out the door and not even try to keep it? I mean, I was pretty flexible about the whole thing and if they had made me a good - a decent offer I was amenable to keeping the money there. But they didn't even try and US Bank was the (perhaps undeserving) beneficiary of their laziness.
When I canceled my AOL account back in 2002 I had to run a gamut of account reps begging me not to leave the wonderful world of dial-up. I still get e-mails from the Book of the Month Club asking me to come back. When I go to Sonic or Einstein's, the cashiers are trying to sell me extra cheddar peppers and coffee and they probably don't even have some type of incentive stake in the matter. But some entities are proactive and some are, well some are banks. And that's one of the reasons that banks fail.
Friday, December 25, 2009
Token Holiday Post
Ho, ho, ho. Christmas posts are required for any blog, but I don't have any really appropriate writing I've done and most people don't want to read about a zombie throwing it's head like a Nolan Ryan fastball on yuletide. Thus, I'm going to digress a bit. A quick post on football, genius and media hypocrisy all of which interest me.
There's been a theme going around lately about the "Maddenization" of the NFL. The great website www.profootballtalk.com and the Sports Guy have both taken coaches to task for unorthodox and somewhat reckless decisions in recent weeks. The sort of thing a kid playing Madden 2010 would do. Of course we're talking about the infamous 4th and 2 that Bill Belichick went for against the Colts earlier this year and Mike Tomlin's surprise onside kick last week in the Steelers - Packers game. You can add to this another surprise onside kick Josh McDaniel ordered for the Broncos against the Chargers back in November. All of these moves went against the conventional wisdom and all were routinely condemned. Why? Because they all failed.
The Patriots didn't get the first down and Peyton Manning quickly drove the Colts to score on the short field. The Steelers gave the Pack the ball in great field position and had to rally to win on the game's final play, which spared Tomlin the 24/7 media crucifixion that Belichick endured. McDaniel's decision came with Denver trailing 13-3 early in the third quarter. The ball skipped through one of the Broncos hands and the Chargers ending up scoring a touchdown that put the game away, although with a 32-3 final it's hard to see how much the decision really mattered. Coach McHoodie flew under the radar nationally, but he took it pretty hard locally from the legion of Denver Post columnists.
In all three cases, the proper or safe play would have been to kick away. Defeat still could have been the result, but it would have been an impersonal loss that really was no one person's fault. Baseball managers have known for years to go by the book -- if you bring in the lefty to face Ryan Howard or David Ortiz, you can't be criticized. If you leave the righty in to face the left-handed power hitter and he gets taken deep, it's all over the papers, the blogs and talk radio. Going by the book leads to safety for the head man because if the move blows up, it isn't his fault. It's the player's fault for not getting the job done when he was put in a position to succeed by his boss. If either of the three coaches above had just kicked away, no one would have said boo.
Which is ironic, because the sports media likes to pretend that it celebrates genius and risk-taking. Bill Cowher pulled a surprise onside kick in Super Bowl XXX that got the Steelers back in the game. Andy Reid did it against the Cowboys back in 2001 and set the tone for a successful season. Both were celebrated as moments of genius, high-stakes gambles that paid off in spades. Both were celebrated because they succeeded.
Pro football tends to be criticized for being conservative and its coaches are castigated as Birchers, the NFL embodiment of George Wallace or Pat Buchanan. Media types (whose jobs used to be much safer before most daily papers started circling the drain) scoffed at guys who coached to save their jobs and protect the status quo. Field goals were derided, running the ball was derided and the XFL actually banned fair catches on punts and started each game with two guys wrestling for the ball, rather than a coin toss. You would think that anyone who actually rolled the dice and gambled would be celebrated, but that's not the case. Not if the gamble doesn't pay off which happens frequently because, you know, that's kind of the definition of a gamble.
So I guess that's my point. I don't deny going for a 4th and 2 on your own 28 is pretty risky and that I'm not sure if I would even do it in a game of Madden. But if you are going to sing hosannas if the move works, then you need to heap similar praise on the gamble if it fails. The act itself is what matters and while the outcome is important in the context of the game, none of these guys take the risk planning to fail. If it's a good move if it works, it's still a good move even if it doesn't work. Sometimes you have to roll the dice but whether they hit a seven or snake-eyes shouldn't change the evaluation of the event itself since the same person threw the damn things to begin with.
There's been a theme going around lately about the "Maddenization" of the NFL. The great website www.profootballtalk.com and the Sports Guy have both taken coaches to task for unorthodox and somewhat reckless decisions in recent weeks. The sort of thing a kid playing Madden 2010 would do. Of course we're talking about the infamous 4th and 2 that Bill Belichick went for against the Colts earlier this year and Mike Tomlin's surprise onside kick last week in the Steelers - Packers game. You can add to this another surprise onside kick Josh McDaniel ordered for the Broncos against the Chargers back in November. All of these moves went against the conventional wisdom and all were routinely condemned. Why? Because they all failed.
The Patriots didn't get the first down and Peyton Manning quickly drove the Colts to score on the short field. The Steelers gave the Pack the ball in great field position and had to rally to win on the game's final play, which spared Tomlin the 24/7 media crucifixion that Belichick endured. McDaniel's decision came with Denver trailing 13-3 early in the third quarter. The ball skipped through one of the Broncos hands and the Chargers ending up scoring a touchdown that put the game away, although with a 32-3 final it's hard to see how much the decision really mattered. Coach McHoodie flew under the radar nationally, but he took it pretty hard locally from the legion of Denver Post columnists.
In all three cases, the proper or safe play would have been to kick away. Defeat still could have been the result, but it would have been an impersonal loss that really was no one person's fault. Baseball managers have known for years to go by the book -- if you bring in the lefty to face Ryan Howard or David Ortiz, you can't be criticized. If you leave the righty in to face the left-handed power hitter and he gets taken deep, it's all over the papers, the blogs and talk radio. Going by the book leads to safety for the head man because if the move blows up, it isn't his fault. It's the player's fault for not getting the job done when he was put in a position to succeed by his boss. If either of the three coaches above had just kicked away, no one would have said boo.
Which is ironic, because the sports media likes to pretend that it celebrates genius and risk-taking. Bill Cowher pulled a surprise onside kick in Super Bowl XXX that got the Steelers back in the game. Andy Reid did it against the Cowboys back in 2001 and set the tone for a successful season. Both were celebrated as moments of genius, high-stakes gambles that paid off in spades. Both were celebrated because they succeeded.
Pro football tends to be criticized for being conservative and its coaches are castigated as Birchers, the NFL embodiment of George Wallace or Pat Buchanan. Media types (whose jobs used to be much safer before most daily papers started circling the drain) scoffed at guys who coached to save their jobs and protect the status quo. Field goals were derided, running the ball was derided and the XFL actually banned fair catches on punts and started each game with two guys wrestling for the ball, rather than a coin toss. You would think that anyone who actually rolled the dice and gambled would be celebrated, but that's not the case. Not if the gamble doesn't pay off which happens frequently because, you know, that's kind of the definition of a gamble.
So I guess that's my point. I don't deny going for a 4th and 2 on your own 28 is pretty risky and that I'm not sure if I would even do it in a game of Madden. But if you are going to sing hosannas if the move works, then you need to heap similar praise on the gamble if it fails. The act itself is what matters and while the outcome is important in the context of the game, none of these guys take the risk planning to fail. If it's a good move if it works, it's still a good move even if it doesn't work. Sometimes you have to roll the dice but whether they hit a seven or snake-eyes shouldn't change the evaluation of the event itself since the same person threw the damn things to begin with.
Monday, December 21, 2009
Welcome to JRC Writing
So this is my first shot at having my own blog and I kind of feel bad that I don't fit the mainstream media profile of a blogger. I have a job and I don't live in my parents' basement. Actually, I've never lived in a basement because I'm kind of afraid of them. I mean, my grandmother's basement always terrified me as a kid and still gives me the creeps as an adult. Even during the year when I lived with her after college, I stayed upstairs in my old room rather than have the whole basement to myself. It was sort of retro and cool during the day, but I had no intention of being there when the lights went out. The thought of trying to sleep down there was horrifying. When I was a little kid I had a nightmare where the Frankenstein monster and other nasty looking things came after me out of the boxes in one of the back bedrooms. I have a hard time remembering the names of people I met a week ago, but I still remember that dream.
That's either dark, weird or embarassing depending on your point of view, but it indicates the general vein of my writing which is horror or fantasy. I like traditional horror and things that go bump in the night like vampires, werewolves, ghosts, the living dead, animated corpses sitting next to your bed when you wake up, that sort of thing. Maybe it doesn't make me sophisticated and maybe I'm heretical, but I like plot more than I like characters. You have to have both, but the most interesting characters in the world don't matter if your story is about them sitting in a cafe and eating. Unless you're trying for something artsy that would impress your creative writing professor.
(A brief aside, but I actually really liked the prof who taught my creative writing class in college. We had to write two stories during the semester and for the first one, it seemed like half of the class wrote about some mundane childhood incident like riding in the backseat of their parents' car. Most of them were boring as hell and he pointed out that since it was a creative writing class they might want to be, you know, actually creative. Of course, there was the redneck guy who was working on the novel about the Vietcong taking over south Texas and the local citizens having to resist. He should have called it "Yellow Dawn". I thought that was pretty creative in a John Birch Society kind of way, but the prof didn't agree.)
Anyway, this is my blog and it's here to give me a platform for my writing and stories and to force me to write more. I'll post at least weekly and I will post some of the stories I've gotten published in the past. I'm always interested in feedback, even if it is to tell me how dumb I am so for the one's of fans I have, comment away.
Thanks,
JC
That's either dark, weird or embarassing depending on your point of view, but it indicates the general vein of my writing which is horror or fantasy. I like traditional horror and things that go bump in the night like vampires, werewolves, ghosts, the living dead, animated corpses sitting next to your bed when you wake up, that sort of thing. Maybe it doesn't make me sophisticated and maybe I'm heretical, but I like plot more than I like characters. You have to have both, but the most interesting characters in the world don't matter if your story is about them sitting in a cafe and eating. Unless you're trying for something artsy that would impress your creative writing professor.
(A brief aside, but I actually really liked the prof who taught my creative writing class in college. We had to write two stories during the semester and for the first one, it seemed like half of the class wrote about some mundane childhood incident like riding in the backseat of their parents' car. Most of them were boring as hell and he pointed out that since it was a creative writing class they might want to be, you know, actually creative. Of course, there was the redneck guy who was working on the novel about the Vietcong taking over south Texas and the local citizens having to resist. He should have called it "Yellow Dawn". I thought that was pretty creative in a John Birch Society kind of way, but the prof didn't agree.)
Anyway, this is my blog and it's here to give me a platform for my writing and stories and to force me to write more. I'll post at least weekly and I will post some of the stories I've gotten published in the past. I'm always interested in feedback, even if it is to tell me how dumb I am so for the one's of fans I have, comment away.
Thanks,
JC
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