Anyone who’s ever perused my Amazon wishlist has probably noticed that it features a lot more weird, nerdy things than the expensive “luxury” things most guys seem to like buying for sex workers. That was true even long before I retired, and it’s even more so nowadays. The reason, as I’ve explained before, is that I put things I actually want on my list, and my tastes run to the odd and nerdy. In the last couple of weeks, several of my generous readers have sent CDs and DVDs from the list, and several of the DVDs were of old movie serials. I’m quite pleased about that because, as some of you have noticed, I’ve increasingly turned my back on the modern world this year. Now, a large fraction of my TV and movie viewing has always consisted of things that aren’t current at the time I view them, and I rarely read any fiction written after I was born (and almost never after I graduated from high school). But since early summer that’s even more true than usual, and probably half of my current entertainment was created between 1920 and 1960. Part of the reason is practical; the new adventure fiction series I’m working on takes place in the 1920s and ’30s, so immersing myself in period fiction helps with mood and color. But the rest of it is purely emotional; this blog and its attendant social media focus mostly on current events, and I needn’t explain how absolutely awful those events have become. Simply put, by the time I’m done with blog writing every day, I am so sick of 21st century political atrocities and media enshittification that I cannot handle one more minute of it. So to those of you who have indulged me with these gifts, please accept my heartfelt gratitude not merely for the kindness of a gift, but also for helping me find temporary solace from a world which feels increasingly hostile to me.
Archive for the ‘Fiction’ Category
Diary #804
Posted in Current Events, Diary, Fiction, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged imaginative fiction, nostalgia, Presents, psychology on November 24, 2025| 1 Comment »
Until the End of Days
Posted in Fiction, Music, tagged imaginative fiction, Lost Angels, New Orleans on October 3, 2025| Leave a Comment »
If you read this blog regularly, you already know I’ve been working on a pulp-adventure novella featuring characters based on Grace and myself; their chemistry and repartee are based on ours, so much that I often cried or laughed while writing and proofreading it, and many of the characters and places are based on ones from my own life. Now at last it’s done; it will be the centerpiece of my next collection, Lost Angels, which is beginning to look like it will be published in late spring or early summer. But in the meantime, I’m happy to share an excerpt introducing the main characters; if you’re a paid subscriber and would like a PDF of the whole story, please email me; the rest of y’all will just have to wait for the book!
Friday, October 23rd, 1931
It all started one night at Lulu’s. Diane and I had taken my Tante Mathilde to see the new Marx Brothers talkie, and we decided to have a drink before taking her home. Well, to be honest, Tante Mathilde insisted we have a drink, and she had not accepted “no” for an answer from anybody since her husband died 33 years before. She was the family matriarch, my paternal grandfather’s younger sister, who had already outlived him by 23 years and Maman, my paternal grandmother, by 13. She was under 5 feet tall in heels and under 100 pounds soaking wet, but she conducted herself like the Empress Dowager and kept up with popular culture better than a lot of people half her age, which is why nobody who knew her would’ve been surprised to see her with her grandniece in a speakeasy.
I had a Brandy Alexander, which is what I always had in those days; Diane had a highball, which is what she always had after it became impossible to get decent bourbon; and Tante Mathilde had a Bee’s Knees. It may seem strange that I remember that over thirty years later, but it’s because Diane hated lemons and had apparently made some sort of comment about it while I was in the Ladies’, and when I got back to my seat my aunt was pontificating about how Diane didn’t “know what’s good.”
“Honestly, I can’t leave for five minutes without coming back to static.”
“It ain’t my fault if your aunt’s opinions are still stuck in the 19th century.”
“And it’s certainly not my fault if your friend there is a bumpkin.”
“Who you callin’ a bumpkin, you old crow?”
“Waiter! Another round please!” I wasn’t actually worried; they always sounded like that. It was just their way, and they actually loved each other as much as if they’d been blood kin. They practically were; Diane’s father had worked for Tante Mathilde’s husband his whole life, and she made him the general manager of the sugar cane plantation after the old man died in ’98, so she’d bounced Diane on her knee from the age of three. Of course, nowadays the size differential was almost the opposite: Diane was a tall, solidly-built woman of 5’9″ with long, straight black hair and strong features that hinted at her Houma ancestry, and she had a husky voice which made my aunt’s thin soprano sound childlike.
Anyhow, I wasn’t in the mood for their shenanigans, so I figured I’d throw some cold water on it. But my aunt was not having it. “She doesn’t even like ‘Stardust’. Who doesn’t like ‘Stardust’?”
“When did I say I don’t like ‘Stardust’?”
“Just now, when Angela was off to the loo.”
“I said nobody can play ‘Stardust’ like Armstrong, is what I said!”
“Well, the band here did a lovely job of it just now.”
“It had no damn pep at all. Them cats play jazz like they was playin’ at the Frumps and Fogeys Society.”
“Nonsense!”
“Really, Auntie! Diane knows more about jazz than both of us put together.”
“Especially since she don’t know beans about jazz.”
“C’mon, Diane, you’ve gotta admit Auntie’s pretty hep for eighty-one.”
“Nobody who can’t dig Cab Calloway is hep in my book.”
“I think Mr. Calloway is a fine musician, but I also think all his nonsense singing is silly. All that scooby-doo and hi-dee-ho foolishness, what is that supposed to be? Why can’t he sing sensibly like Jolson?”
Diane had been rolling her eyes while my aunt opined about scat, but in response to that last question she suddenly stopped, looked at her as though she had just upchucked on the table, and stated matter-of-factly, “The only word for Jolson is ‘grotesque’.”
“Grotesque! You want grotesque? I’ll show you grotesque!” With that she reached down as if she were going to get something from a bag that wasn’t there, then said, “What am I doing? Of course it’s at home.”
“What is, Auntie?”
“This simply awful thing I got at an estate sale this morning, and meant to give you.”
“Um…thanks?”
She laughed and patted my hand affectionately. “Oh, I didn’t really mean it was for you, but I thought your Mr. Girard might like it, since he’s a connoisseur of the outré.”
“Which is probably why he likes Angela so much.”
“Look who’s talking!” I said in mock offense, but Diane and my aunt had apparently left off of teasing each other to have a giggle at my expense instead. At the time, Armand Girard was my sugar daddy, and though Diane sometimes joshed me about him, Tante Mathilde had no room to judge because his age exceeded mine by exactly as much as her late husband’s had exceeded hers. Plus, he was basically the only thing standing between me and penury at the moment, and Diane was especially fond of him since he’d given me his “old” car – a 1927 Packard Custom Eight sedan – last year when he replaced it with a new Dusenberg Model J. That of course meant she got to tinker with the Packard, and let me tell you, she had that thing purring like a kitten when it idled and roaring like a lion when I stepped on the gas…
I’m sure you won’t consider it a “spoiler” if I tell you that the “simply awful thing” Angela’s aunt bought led our intrepid heroines into the greatest adventure of their lives, one that required all of their wits and derring-do; I hope everyone who reads it has as much fun as I had writing it!
Diary #793
Posted in Diary, Fiction, Philosophy, tagged imaginative fiction, Lost Angels, New Orleans, psychology on September 9, 2025| Leave a Comment »
I’m finally almost finished with “Until the End of Days“. I finished the rough draft late last week, and on Sunday I wrote the prologue; it may seem strange to non-writers that I saved the prologue for the end of the process, but it was necessary because the story is told in first-person, and I wanted to know everything that happened in the tale (which grew in the telling) before I tried to introduce it. Part of the reason was practical; if there were any important details I had not managed to fit into the narrative, I wanted to mention them in the prologue. But another reason was that I wanted to be able to identify as fully with the POV character as possible, since I wanted the tone of the prologue to be more personal. The word count is now in the vicinity of 19,000 words, and I still have a bit of editing to do, (such as describing three major characters more fully), so I think it’s fair to call it a novella. I’ve really worked at developing the characters’ world, so much so that I already have the fragments of two prequels and a sequel in my head, and that’s good because spending so much time in that fictional world of the past makes the pain of my real-world present much easier to bear. The irony is almost too perfect: after spending most of my life living in a future which never came to pass, I now find comfort living in a past that never was.
Diary #787
Posted in Diary, Fiction, tagged imaginative fiction, Lost Angels, New Orleans, psychology on July 29, 2025| Leave a Comment »
As I mentioned in my anniversary column a few weeks ago,
…my Muse of Fiction wants my attention again; perhaps she feels I don’t need her when I’m happy. Whatever the reason, I’ve written three new stories since finishing Who in Review, and I’m starting on a much longer one than I’ve ever written before, in part as a tribute to Grace…
Because I did want to write a much longer story than is typical for me, I’ve had to develop a new technique; typically, even my full-length short stories come into my head almost fully formed, and all I need to do is write them down and fill in a few details. But that won’t work for this one, which is currently over 7000 words and only in the vicinity of half-done (generally speaking, anything under 10,000 words is considered a short story; longer than that is in novelette territory). So what I’m doing is writing each episode of the tale as it comes into my head, then fitting the pieces into the larger whole and editing as necessary. The first scene I wrote was a pivotal one perhaps halfway through the narrative; I then wrote the first full scene, then the climax and denouement, and now I’m beginning to fill in. The characters are based upon Grace and myself, the setting is New Orleans in 1931, and the genre is adventure mixed with black comedy (which is why I recently re-watched The Avengers and watched The Thin Man series for the first time). I’m enjoying the process, and writing action and dialog for Grace’s character is almost like having her nearby, which is part of why I’m doing it. And I’m already thinking of other situations for the characters. So even though the word “therapeutic” is probably overused in this sort of context, it’s the right one. And I hope it will give my readers a little (fictionalized) taste of Grace’s personality, and the chemistry that made us such a great team.
Diary #782
Posted in Diary, Fiction, Philosophy, tagged Grace, imaginative fiction, Lost Angels, psychology, recipes, Sunset, Who in Review on June 24, 2025| 1 Comment »
We had another unusually-chilly spring this year, so I didn’t trust my tomato plants outside until this past weekend; if they can’t survive in the first week of summer, I’ll just have to throw up my hands in despair. But though the temperatures haven’t been quite summery, even by Olympic peninsula standards, the days are as long as they’re going to get, and that means my seasonal anxiety is back. As I’ve noted in the past, it isn’t nearly as bad since I moved to Sunset as it was in Seattle, probably because the quiet of the countryside counteracts some of it, while the noise and commotion of the city aggravates it. But this year, it sneaked up on me because I’ve been attributing my emotional stress to grief. It wasn’t until a week or so ago that I asked myself why that should be worse now than it was immediately after Grace’s death, or in the first few months afterward; I only just realized that as is typical for me, the anxiety runs under the surface and breaks out at weak points. Expressed another way, the anxiety is acting as fuel for my grief, making it just as intense as it was in January and February, and more intense than it was in March and April. But now that I’m done with Who in Review (and have even set up my store to sell autographed copies), I have time and space in my life to do some creative writing again. I’ve already written two new stories for Lost Angels, with a third probably coming this week; it’s percolating through my brain, going through the alchemy by which grief, loss, and pain are transmuted into art, much like a compost heap transmutes organic garbage into humus for growing new plants. When the tomatoes are ready, I’ll use some of them to make salsa from the recipe Grace and I developed late last summer. And when Lost Angels is published, the pain I’m enduring now will have given rise to beauty I can share with the world.
Diary #777
Posted in Diary, Fiction, tagged imaginative fiction, Reviews, Twitter, Who in Review on May 20, 2025| 2 Comments »
I finished the rough draft of my seventh book, Who in Review, early last autumn, but Grace was diagnosed with cancer just a few days later so I was much too busy caring for her to have any free time to do the proofreading. After Frank & Olivia’s visit I was able to motivate myself to start the proofreading process, then last week I got the physical proof in and have been doing the third and final pass. I proofread my books three times: once as a Word file, then as a “virtual proof”, and finally as a physical proof. Typically, I only find two or three errors at most in that third pass, but this time I’ve already hit nearly a dozen in just the first few chapters; I reckon it’s because, unlike my previous books, the contents of this one came from an epic-length Twitter thread rather than this blog, and that change in format was bound to generate more errors than usual with fewer opportunities to catch them in the pre-manuscript stage. But in any case, it’s almost done and should be available by the end of this month. In case you missed previous mentions of the project, this book contains my reviews of every single televised Doctor Who story for the first two incarnations of the series, Classic Who (26 seasons from 1963-1989) and New Who (13 series from 2005-2022), plus some speculation, a chronology of the Whoniverse, and more. Judging from the amount of positive feedback I received from the first version of the thread on Twitter in 2021, and the revision on Bluesky last year (actually ending only a couple of weeks ago), you won’t want to miss this one if you’re a Doctor Who fan. And with any luck, this will draw attention to my earlier books from folks outside my established readership.
By Non-fans, For Non-fans
Posted in Favorites, Fiction, Miscellaneous, Philosophy, tagged Hollywood, imaginative fiction, psychology on October 14, 2024| Leave a Comment »
It’s one of the ironclad rules of media journalism that all “100 best” lists are bad. Certainly, some are worse than others; some are merely skewed, while others cause the knowledgeable reader to wish they could reach through the screen or page to repeatedly slap the compilers while shouting “WHAT! THE! HELL! WERE! YOU! THINKING?!?!!” Nearly all of them are biased toward the last 40 years prior to their compilation (for obvious reasons) and most of them seem to be compiled by committees which include at least one, and sometimes as many as a majority, of individuals who absolutely should not have been included due to such factors as A) conformism; B) contrarianism; C) inexperience; D) ignorance; E) lack of taste; F) stupidity; G) crippling bias; or H) any 2-6 of the preceding. Today’s example of the genre is Variety‘s new list of the “100 Best Horror Movies of All Time“, whose chief flaw is summed up by the title of this column: it seems to have been composed by a group composed of 1 serious horror fan, 1 casual fan, 2 fans of adjacent genres, 3 non-fans, and 1 person who does not actually like horror movies, for the consumption of Variety readers who are not actually horror fans per se. Now, before any of y’all accuse me of bias, let me get this out of the way: de gustibus non est disputandum. There can be considerable disagreement between aficionados of any genre about which examples are best, much less the specific order they should be arranged in. I’ve already written about my own favorites, and about my philosophy of the genre, the most important principle of which is that slashers are not horror:
Slashers are actually more closely related to porn than horror; both genres grew out of the exploitation films of the 1950s, which featured both gratuitous sex and gratuitous violence. Those in turn were essentially cinematic Grand Guignol, whereas true horror began as filmed “ghost stories”; the former are theatrical, while the latter are literary. Expressed another way, slasher films are designed to shock the body via intense imagery, whereas horror intends to shock the mind via terrifying ideas.
So right off the bat, the Variety list fails by putting a slasher in the top slot; the top ten are further puffed out with a satirical black comedy, a couple of suspense thrillers, and a literary exploitation flick. And the rest of the 100 are similarly heterogeneous; there are lots of horror and slasher movies in the list, but also lots of suspense, psychological drama, tense sci-fi, monster movies, dark satire, black comedy, and other types of flicks which may indeed be entertaining and exciting and even thrilling, but are not horror. 34% are from the past 40 years (not bad as “top 100” lists go), but 14% are from the 21st century (not exactly a notable period in genre history). So, go take a look at it if you feel so inclined; you may find a few things there you’ll want to see, even if they aren’t “the 100 best horror movies” as advertised. And try not to get too annoyed if they ranked your favorites much too low.
Unblocked
Posted in Fiction, Miscellaneous, tagged blogging, games, psychology, Reviews on July 15, 2024| 1 Comment »
For six years, from the summer of 2010 to the summer of 2016, my creative output was like a geyser; I had no trouble producing hundreds of new essays a year, including a new short story every month. But then life intervened, and sapped my creative energy so that it became harder to think of new nonfiction and much harder to think of new fiction; even semi-retirement did not bring back that old energy. But then in January of last year I started a new solo D&D game for Grace, and it seemed to free up some long-idle creative gears which had rusted through disuse. Of course, my brain being what it is, I had to look over a bunch of old materials and decide that they all needed to be revised, updated, or added to; for the first time since I started this blog, I started taking a little time for myself every week to work on my game world; that was what inspired me to write this essay a year ago. But I’ve finally finished most of what I’ve needed to finish, and I’m working on turning my enormous Doctor Who review project into a book as I’ve planned for three years. Then a couple of weeks ago, on the second day of summer, a new story came to me; by the time y’all read this I may have even started writing it. And though most of y’all will have to wait until the long-delayed publication of Lost Angels to see it, my subscribers can read it now (as soon as I’m done with it, that is) as a “thank you” for all your unflagging support. So if you’re a subscriber or frequent gift-sender, and would like to read the story, shoot me an email and I’ll get a PDF copy out to you; it might even inspire me to stop procrastinating and get it done!
Yes, They’re Still Tweets
Posted in Biography, Fiction, Miscellaneous, Philosophy, Tyranny, Words, tagged abortion, Alabama, animals, artificial stupidity, asset seizure, blogging, Bluesky, censorship, consensual crime, cops, drugs, fascism, Idaho, imaginative fiction, internet, language, law, lawheads, left-right myth, marriage, politicians, pragmatism, prisons, propaganda, psychology, recipes, restaurants, robots, social purity, STEM, Twitter, violence vs. sex workers, yellow journalism, yin and yang on May 24, 2024| Leave a Comment »
In Flux
Posted in Fiction, History, Miscellaneous, Philosophy, tagged acting, imaginative fiction, psychology, Reviews, United Kingdom on April 8, 2024| 1 Comment »
It’s been quite a while since I wrote my reviews of series 12 of Doctor Who; I saw series 13 with Lorelei Rivers only a few months after its initial broadcast, but I really wanted to see it again with Grace on DVD before reviewing it, and I only accomplished that a few weeks ago. Yes, I said “weeks”; I have rather been dreading tackling it, because it ain’t pretty. Series 13 consists of one six-part story entitled “Flux”, and given its low overall quality I think it best to handle it as I handled “The Trial of a Time Lord” or Torchwood‘s “Miracle Day“, in a single review covering all of its manifold problems.
I started all of my reviews of Series 12 in much the same way as I did every review of a 6th Doctor story: by saying something good about it, so as to force myself to be as objective as possible. And while I’ve already blown that in the previous paragraph, I think I can be forgiven considering what I had to work with here; still, it’s a practice that proved its worth when thinking about those other two collections of execrable rubbish, so I’m going to give it a go here. First, “Flux” isn’t unremittingly bad; two of the episodes (a third of the story) were quite watchable, and I’d go as far as to say chapter 2, “War of the Sontarans”, was actually good if one disregards the Flux-related crap, which isn’t difficult to do. The concept of the alternate history where Russia is inhabited by Sontarans is weird, but fun, and we’e seen similar historical screw-ups created by time-tampering before. Chapter 4, “Village of the Angels” had too many problems to be really good, but it was watchable and the flaws wouldn’t have been irremediable if worked over by a decent script editor; it also featured the only really interesting, engaging guest character of the whole 6-part story, the psychic researcher Professor Jericho, who would not have been out of place in a 3rd or 4th Doctor adventure. That’s certainly appropriate, given that the episode is set in 1967, but also surprising, given Chibnall’s apparent inability to dependably create interesting characters while also serving as showrunner.
The rest of the characters are, as is typical for Chibnall, more like descriptions than personalities. Many of the cast are probably very competent actors, but even the finest thespian can’t conjure Hamlet out of lackluster dialogue draped carelessly over a checklist. Dan isn’t a strong or interesting enough new companion to balance out the creepily-codependent Yaz; Vinder and Bel are just collections of lines rather than actual characters we might conceivably care about; the dog-faced boy oscillates between annoying and silly; and none of the villains go beyond “generic baddie in weird makeup” except for Snake Dude, who doesn’t seem to actually have a dramatic function except to complicate the already-convoluted plot even more unnecessarily (but maybe might have something to do with the Mara if Chibnall had the sense to actually connect his stories to the Whovian canon instead of merely sprinkling random references to past characters & events into his script while trying to invalidate the framework in which they were embedded). And though in the past Doctor Who was known for making even minor characters interesting, in here they might as well have script names like “Dan’s sweetheart”, “psychic woman”, “little girl”, and “old people” for all the development Chibnall gives them.
And then there’s the titular Apocalypse of the Week, the Flux, which manages to be dreadfully boring despite supposedly wiping out half of the universe. Part of the reason is that Doctor Who has steadily inflated its threats for 60 years, and we’ve already seen “malevolent Time Lord unleashes a chaos wave that destroys much of Creation” way back in 1981’s Logopolis. Another part is that it doesn’t actually make much sense; Chibnall seems unsure of exactly what it’s doing or how it’s doing it, which is why it can somehow be stopped by a wall of interlinked spaceships built by an advanced-but-not-remotely-godlike alien race we’ve never heard of before despite their supposedly being linked with humanity on some deep level. And why didn’t the Flux destroy the sun and other planets, when it sure looked like it was doing that in other parts of the universe back in Chapter One?
The real answer is, unfortunately, that the Flux is a naked metaphor, an in-universe representation of what Chibnall is trying to do with the Whoniverse: utterly destroy it in order to create his own, new Whoniverse without the slightest regard for anything that came before. Tecteun is thus revealed as a sort of self-insert character, a deranged control freak who, after failing to remake everything in her own image and likeness via more modestly-megalomaniacal means (Tecteun via her creepy spook “Division”, itself a blatant ripoff of the Time Lords’ Celestial Intervention Agency, and Chibnall via all his Hapless Child monkeyshines), decide to just destroy everything (including, in Chibnall’s case, Gallifrey itself) out of spite. “The Flux” is thus the culmination of a trend that started with mere spoiling, progressed to outright vandalism, and eventually arrived at wholesale arson of a venerable and beloved mythos. Was the extended metaphor intentional? I honestly don’t think Chibnall is that clever, but if it isn’t his subconscious was tattling on him. 
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