The Book of Dark Wisdom Rejects...

The title says it all, folks. The Book of Dark Wisdom rejected a story of mine. "Codependent Traits" is a good story. Not great, not earth shaking, but I like it and it's good. Maybe it has some issues, maybe it wanders at one point, but I like it. The editor at the Book of Dark Wisdom said it didn't fit in the magazine, which may or may not be true. He said he liked the story, which also may or may not be true. But it was a nice email and that's the thing that gives you hope, that makes you think maybe he did like it and it just didn't fit what he was doing. That's okay. That means my story might be good after all, even to someone other than myself and my girlfriend.

The thing is, he sent me a nice rejection that was personalized and I realized that indeed he had read my actual query letter and also that he put that together with the fact that I had sent him another story after not hearing back from the first. He was very gracious about what is normally a faux paus: Multiple submissions. I would never intentionally do that unless a magazine said it was cool. But I hadn't heard back from them and the editor said they are behind so I can understand that. Things happen, schedules suffer.

The thing is this. I feel better about this week's rejections because at least I've sent some things out, at least I feel like I'm working at it rather than wanting to work at it. There's nothing wrong with wanting it but don't say you're doing it if you're just wanting to. That's a fault of mine. I might go through a dry spell and not write or edit for two months or longer but still consider myself to be doing rather than wanting to do. Well, now, folks, that just ain't how it is. But I'm working on it, I really am, and ANY feedback is better than sitting at home thinking that some day you could write some cool story and get it published. Better rejections on fifty bad stories than one acceptance on your only story...

Jb

Cemetery Dance Rejected The Storm Chaser...

Checked my mail today and there was an SASE of mine from Cemetery Dance. For whatever reason, when I see one of those, I always know it's a rejection slip. It just is. I guess maybe in my deluded mind, it would have to arrive in my mailbox to the accompaniment of a brass choir heralding its greatness. And so, as of yet, I have not heard the golden notes of heaven's instruments. Fuck.

The blog title says it all. CD rejected The Storm Chaser, a story of mine. A little less than three thousand words, dark and moody, suspenseful even. The only thing wrong with it, as far as I can see, is that it's written first person and for whatever reason, some folks HATE that. The idea is sound. I know it is. Waterproof even. What the fuck?

Now, I love Stephen King's work and I love Brian Keene's work and Gary Braunbeck's and Brian Hodge's but I sure as fuck hate competing against it. Motherfucker, what do I have to do to make my shit acceptable?

Granted, I'm no expert and yes, most of the people who have read and liked my work are people I was already acquainted with prior to them reading my work. But damn it, I've been reading since I was 8 and I know when something is fucking good and when it blows and my stuff is...fair. Okay, so it's not the best I've ever read. I'm no John Updike and don't want to be, or try to be, or think I should be.

I've written one novel that sucks ass and I know it. Amaturish, bad pacing, hanging plot lines, spoiled metaphors, etc. But it's a hundred thousand words. I've started no less than three novels with the two unfinished ones standing at forty thousand words or more.

I've also written 25 or so short stories and although five or more of them suck balls, at least 12 of them are strong, with good pacing, impeccable style, and real characterizations. The rest are average to good. So why in the fuck won't people buy them??? Beats the shit out of me. Remember when Charlie Brown would be getting ready to kick the football and Lucy, as always, would pull it out from in front of him at the last instant? Of course you do, it's one of the great tragi-comedic scenes in American culture. And then he's lying flat on his back in the grass and says, "I Can't Stand It!"

Welcome to my world.

I've written at least four hundred thousand words of fiction and although that's not a ripple in Stephen King's pond, it means something. I've written well over five hundred thousand words of journal entries. Let's face it, it's not prime reading material, consisting mostly of "Fuck the Police, Fuck the Police, Fuck, Fuck, Fuck the Police" type entries...but it's still me, putting words on paper and I can do this. I write, in one way or another, on a daily basis and although only a smart part of that is fiction, I think I can adequately express an idea with words and...

You know what? It doesn't make a fuck to me whether CD buys my motherfucking story. Except, it does. Brutarian, many, many, many years ago, rejected my first piece of submitted fiction--rightfully so--and I knew they would. I knew the rejections would come. Now? I've had about forty, and two acceptances. When lord, when's my day? I'll keep writing because I can--my wrist surgery and 8 weeks in a full arm cast made me realize how miserable I am when I can't write. But damn, I don't know which is harder on the ego, competing with the big dogs or competing with the lap dogs.

Jb

Finished a new story.

I just finished a new story! I have been thinking about submitting something to Wicked Karnival for their October issue and the thing is, the deadline is August 1st. Therefore, I figured I'd take something I had already written and shape it a little, maybe put it on a high-protein diet and hope it gained some muscle...most of my stories seem to have thin calves. It takes a lot of work with heavy weight to add calf muscle but I figured I could do it by August first.

Then, this morning, I'm up and starting my daily journal entry and for whatever reason, a story comes to me. BAM! Soon it's 90 minutes later and I'm working on the last page. These are the ideas that I like the best, the ones that sneak up on you and punch you right in the mouth. When my girlfriend got up and I told her the concept, she was really enthusiastic. After I finished the last page and printed it out, she loved the written story and suggested only a couple of minor clarifications. Did I mention she reads a lot? She reads horror and all kinds of fiction, which is one of the reasons why she's a good first reader. Anyone who reads a lot will get a good idea, I think, of what works and what doesn't. Even if they don't like a particular piece, they'll know if it's well written. My Gf will always give me positive comments--that's a given--but she will also share her negative comments with me. Of course, only AFTER the positive comments.
She's a jewel to be prized above all others.

I love having a new finished story. I mean, I love it. You then take the story and move it from your regular folder that's just titled "stories" to the subfolder titled "finished". That's where I move everything that has total content from beginning to end and has withstood at least a first read with corrections and spellcheck. Now I have another one to add, which brings my total up to quite a few...that hang together and read well, I think anyway, and that I'm proud of.

I just love that Aha! moment when something works and you're not quite sure why but it just does and then you have a good story. This new story tops out at about 3600 words but I'm hopeful that I can cut at least 300 words, possibly 600, and maybe clarify a couple of things.

AND I also have an idea for a mythos I created in another story of mine called Spillage...Darrell Schweitzer at Weird Tales gave me some great criticism on the story and while I agreed 100% with it, I wasn't sure how to fix it. BAM! Like a fist in the mouth, I have a solution.

Anyway, I'm out of here. I work tonight and it's one in the afternoon and after writing for three hours or more today, my neck is tired. I'm out of shape for writing but it's kind of like lifting weights, gradually it comes back. Muscles have memory. And so do writing muscles.

Jb

Petit Gods Accepted. Gun Control is Victim Control.

I just got an email from Michael Pederson, editor at Nth Degree magazine, accepting my story "Petit Gods" in their online version, Nth Zine. WOOOHOOOOOOOOO!

http://nthzine.com/

That's so great! I had one story accepted before but the anthology folded before it got printed, which means I got nothing, and I was really hoping for that kind of exposure. The thing is, it's a good story. So what now? Now I don't know. I have sent it out to different places but have yet to hear from them. The title of the story is "The Pusher". But then, I have several good stories--at least, I think they're good and of course I'm 100% objective--that I haven't been able to get into print.

As I said in my first entry here on blogger, I really didn't intend to join the blog community. When I finally signed up, I figured, maybe I will be more careful in a blog rather than just throwing down words in a journal. Hell, in my journal, I've done 12 and 14 thousand words a day. I can blast out 4k words an hour when I'm journaling and that's with a five minute break for more coffee every fifteen minutes. But it's gibberish! It's all my fears, my insecurities, my anger and my rages. It's not readable and only serves to relieve my internal conflicts. Half the time, I'm afraid that I'm spewing all my emotions there and that is why my fiction suffers. The other half of the time, I figure at least I'm writing and any writing is better than no writing. Probably, I'm correct on both counts.

Anyway, there are probably tens of thousands of blogs out there by aspiring writers and many more tens of thousands by aspiring musicians, artists, etc. But I did get a story accepted, my second accepted story, and that might not mean anything but it's been about a year since my first story got accepted. Had I done more in that year, hell, I might have all kinds of acceptances by now. I'm so fucking lazy sometimes. If I put the same energy into writing that I do into gun practice and sending letters to my representatives, I'd have finished a novel by now.

The thing is, I think I lost the most important element in writing. I stopped reading. I read fiction very rarely now. Oh, I still read. And write. But it's mostly on internet forums and magazines related to guns and politics. See, in addition to being a writer, I'm also a Second Amendment proponent and handgun enthusiast. I believe anyone who isn't barred from owning a firearm should be able to keep one, carry one, conceal one, and that's that. As is so often said in the gun forums: What part of 'shall not be infringed' don't you understand?

Anyway, so I've got to get back to reading more fiction and I've done that some. I just read a book called Nightspinners by Lucretia Grindle (sp?) and liked it a lot, mostly because it was about loss and family...well, loss AND family. But maybe with this new acceptance of the story, it will give me a chance settle down and do some more writing. Who knows?

Oh, for those of you interested in the right to bear arms, here are some links:

Packing.Org

GlockTalk

GunFacts

That last one, gunfacts, is absolutely the most important that you will find. It refutes a lot of the anti-gun propoganda that's floating around out there. If there are any of you out there that get to Brian Keene's blog, Hail Saten , please review back a few months and you'll see my guest editorial that he was kind enough to allow me to share with his readers.

Remember, criminals prefer unarmed victims. Anyone who advocates gun control doesn't understand that criminals break the law, therefore no law on guns will stop them. The only thing to do is allow honest, law-abiding citizens to protect themselves. It's obvious that with more and more states allowing concealed-carry of handguns, the national crime rate has been going down for more than ten years. There are a lot of factors involved, like a good economy for starters, that decrease crime. Well, except in places like Washington, DC, and Chicago, where even protecting yourself with a firearm is a crime. However, property crime like theft and vandalism, have not decreased with the same speed as people-on-people crime. Why? It's easy to steal a VCR. Try stealing a 5'1, 105 pound woman holding a S&W .357 magnum with the hammer cocked and that big ass hole at the end of the barrel staring you in the eyes. In the future, I'll post some links here that show why you can't depend on the police.

Here's a teaser: The police have no duty to protect you. According to repeated rulings by the Supreme Court starting over a hundred years ago. The only people in this country they have a duty and obligation to protect are 1)prisoners and 2) mentally ill folks held against their will. If you don't believe me, look it up. This blog is my opinion but the above sentence is a fact.

Oh, and btw, "Petit Gods" has nothing to do with guns or gun control.

See ya,
Jb

Broken promises of wireless internet.

Back again. I just spent $160 on a Cingular pc card made by Sony Ericson. The new technology is called EDGE and it's faster than dial up, which I've been relegated to since moving to the country. Edge averages 100 to 130 Kbps downloads and has bursts over 200Kbps so I figured, what the hell, three times faster than dial up, give or take. That's all well and good...or so I thought.

Well, the unlimited service, and trust me, you want unlimited access, costs $79 per month plus a buck or so in usage fees passed on to the consumer by regulations imposed per our great government so poor fucks in poor towns in poor states can afford phone service. Still, I figured, more than worth the price of admission, especially since the card has a rebate for $150.

Well, to start with, on my new Toshiba, when the card gets a signal, it disables my touchpad mouse, which means a USB mouse is required. Now, I spent over two hours on the phone with tech support at Cingular AND Toshiba. The guys at Cingular were clueless and eventually, when everything else failed, they said my bios had to be upgraded. The problem was clearly related to the signal because the mouse locked up at the exact second I received a signal, EVERY time. MY bios had nothing to do with it.

In essence, Cingular said that even though I had bought a new computer--and the pc card was older than my laptop--that my bios was still at fault rather than the card? And I'm the only one who has had this problem? This was the first thing 4 (four) specialists had heard of it after reading "articles" on issues for two hours. Shit.

Finally, after hours and hours of frustration, I plugged in an external mouse and it worked. Yee-fucking-haw! Once I got an external mouse to work, I got online finally and did a mobile speed check. 125Kbps. Not bad but that was with a 100k file size and the bigger the file, the more accurate the speed test. 200k file? 137Kbps. SWEET! Then I tried to check my email. It wouldn't go anywhere. Anywhere at all. Nothing. Did I lose the signal?

No, I had four signal bars, with five being the most possible, and my Connection Manager showed I had Edge service coverage. So what was the problem? I don't know. I did finally discover that you angle the antenna on the wireless card to be parallel with the keyboard of your laptop and then crank down the sensitivity of your touchpad--and have to use a heavy hand on the touchpad--but you can actually use the touchpad . Then, all transmission stopped as if it had never been.

Now, I'm not an idiot and had done everything the Cingular guys told me to do before calling them and it still didn't work when they had me repeat it. And they didn't know about the trick with angling the antenna, I got that from a manager at one of the nearby stores...

The bottom line is, the card isn't working at all--much less as advertised at 100 to 130K--and in the morning, I'm going to call Cingular and ask them what the deal is. I mean, I'm not paying $79 a month for a service that I can't use. The only reason I went with it is because the guarantee 100 to 130K in their entire EDGE coverage area, which covers all of Arkansas and because after buying AT&T, they will be offerring UMTS, which will actually be true broadband for wireless data at 700Kbps up to 2Mbps. But that's a long way off and I signed a 2 year contract with Cingular at $79 a month and can't even use the service.

"Wait," you say, shouldn't I reserve judgement? Unfortunately, the longer you wait in something like this, the less likely you are to get a full refund. It looks like my options are:

1. Keep the device and always keep a USB mouse handy with my laptop just in case the card locks up my mouse and I can't reboot at that time, hoping against hope that the network actually works.

2. Cancel the service, return the card, and save that $80 a month for seven months and purchase a satellite system, once I put in a post and dig a trench from behind my barn to my house so that hideous dish isn't a eyesore for everyone who drives by my home and so that I can build a deck without worry about cancer from RF signals being beamed into outer space from near me.

Otherwise, I'm stuck with dial up until SBC offers cable internet (they are my only cable provider), until SBC gets DSL in my neighborhood (they're the only line holders in my area as far as I know), or until UMTS takes off and that will be least 2006 at the earliest, more than a year away.

What a bunch of bullshit. All I want is a fast, dependable internet connection that can go faster than dial up. I don't need 400Kbps but something better than 49Kbps is going to be required.

Well, I don't know what I'll decide, I only know that I'm tired and that the whole mess is a lot of hassle and time on the phone for something that's looking more and more like it's going to be a collossal waste of my time and money.

If you don't live in a major city you can't get WiFi and if you don't live within so many feet (I forget how many) of a switch or a hub or something, you can't get DSL and until cable modem moves into the country, I'm screwed. What sucks is there are people who less than two miles from me who have DSL.

I spit on their high speed access!

Of dogs and vets...

My dog, Rocky Brown, is half-lab and half some other things and is smarter than the average dog. He turned one year old yesterday and although he looks great in the picture, this post is a warning to start your dog on heartworm preventative at the age of six weeks--or as soon as they are heavy enough to tolerate the smallest dose of preventative. (See your vet for details.) Checking for heartworms prior to starting Rocky on heartworm preventative turned up a nasty little surprise...he already had heartworms. So, now he's being treated. Based on his age, the life cycle of heartworms, and local mosquito season, he got infected as a pup, probably around six weeks or so of age.

Rocky's an outside dog and loves nothing more than chasing rats by the barn and wading in the pond, neither of which he can do right now. See, come to find out, despite all the advancements made in heartworm treatment over the years, it's not really a whole lot different than what your dad had to do to Ol'Buck when he got heartworms back in the day.

Rocky got treated with Immeticide, which is an arsenic derivative given in two interlumbar muscle injections, one a day apart. The vet that told us about it and assured us it was good because 1) there was no longer a need to take a daily pill and 2) he wouldn't have to be restricted like in the "old days". Now, this wasn't our favorite vet and really, a little more information would have been helpful. Because 1) even if you're not taking heartworm treatment daily, your dog typically will be on some kind of anti inflammatory medication, such as prednisone, daily for probably ten to 14 days AND will be on probably a single aspirin a day for a month. You have to keep your dog up, also...not up as in awake but up as in contained where he won't get excited and be barking. Most web references refer to it as making your dog "quiet" but don't specify much more than that.

Now, he's the real reason for this blog entry. I'm no heartworm expect and no dog expert. I'm just a nurse with a little background in physiology and pharmacology. And yet, after speaking with the vet PRE-treatment, I felt let down POST-treatment. A little more information would have been helpful and a lot more information would have been preferred. It wouldn't have affected treatment but it would have made us more comfortable.

Oh, and as with all medications and just like in humans, you have to watch for a change in normal activity. Rocky's been house broken since he was a pup but has pissed on my bed and three rugs because he has such increased urine output, possibly from the prednisone and increased thirst from the inflammation caused by destruction of the heartworms.

Heartworm treatment can make a dog sick as hell--and that's my professional opinion--and for a good month, you and your dog can be most miserable but if I had known going in, had not been so uncertain, the misery would have been more bearable.

So, the bottom line is this: Get your dog checked, get them started on preventative, and ASK. Probably, with both my girlfriend and myself working in the medical field, we might not ask as many questions as someone who has no clue about medications and illness. You would think it would be just the opposite but we might think we know more than an average person when in fact, we're just dog owners and not dog nurses.

Until next time, Free the Three...

Jb
www.wm3.org

My First Blog...

rse--for my mom to stick with my first lock of hair, my first time writing my name, my first clay elephant ashtray and all the other first time stuff in my life. Probably not.

I signed up for this blog mostly so I could respond to the comments on Storytellers Unplugged. It's a great site, by the way, if you're into writing, writers, or dark fiction. It has great articles by some top names in dark fantasy and horror and even if you're not into writing or dark fiction, most of the articles have enough humor to make it worth your time reading them.

The name of the blog? Malcolm Station. When I first started writing, I didn't differentiate between genres and wrote whatever came out on the page. "The Avenues of Malcolm Station" was a sci-fi novella that petered out about a quarter of the way finished, maybe 20k words, and I still go back and play with it at times. Malcolm Station was the name of a huge, dilapidated, outdated, mostly uninhabited space station orbiting earth in the far future where outcasts hide out when they need to drop off the official radar of government and private enterprise.

The address to the blog? benaires.blogspot.com (I think anyway, remember, this is my first time). One of the main characters in my story "The Avenues of Malcolm Station" was an older gentleman, gray haired with a widow's peak, tall and guant. A real ruthless, arrogant bastard of a guy named Hecter Benaires who specialized in corporate security and edged weapons. This was about the same time I got online, give or take nine years ago, and so I started using the name benaires. Sometimes, I break it down into two names, Ben Aires. Something I have found, though, is that other people are stealing my creation, using the name benaires as well as Ben Aires. So if you ask someone where they came up with that name, and they don't answer with the character description above, you must smite them in all haste.

Who am I? Jerry Brown, registered nurse, writer, photographer, firearm/handgun enthusiast, ex-weight lifter with a wrist injury that prevents me from lifting anymore, ex-adult website content producer, and all around nice guy who hates all things elite and authoritarian.

I guess that's it for this blog entry. I swore I would never enter the blog race but hey, why not?
Jb