Today is my birthday. Usually, I don’t bother noting that on the blog. But I have blogged in a few weeks and today’s a pretty…
Another Obscure S-List Writer
Herbert Nowell Posts
Today’s samizdat is an excerpt from Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22 that serves as an excellent stand-alone parable about how such insane judgments take hold and how one person can end them in two words.
This week for Samizdat we have the real thing. Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote this essay in 1974. It circulated in Moscow among disidents. It is dated February 12. The same day he was arrested, again, and exiled from the USSR.
I do not want to live in a world where samizdat is the only way to learn things not in the official story. USA Today, Twitter, and Facebook either have never heard the term or think that world is a good one. They have the ability to make it so. In that case, I’ll publish it.
This week is Black Tape for a Blue Girl. I saw them live while Sam and Lisa were still married. Lisa was very pregnant. My biggest memory of that show was the DJ set after and Elysabeth Grant dancing in the crowd with the rest of us.
Time for another round of sharing. This time it is the opening to a short story I’m aiming to finish this week. The story was inspired by reading the complete collection of Elmore Leonard westerns and a favorite 60s folk song.
My father died at 73. I will be 54 in five weeks. If I live as long as him, I have twenty years left.
I came close to finishing up a new story whose working title is “The Trap”. It is science fiction horror in the same broad setting as ”The Visions of Cireb”. I am working towards having enough stories set in the growing Portuguese space empire to select the best for a collection of 6–8 stories whose length is 40,000 to 60,000 words.
So, here we are, a quarter of the way through The Illiad and we have characters I can support. I know the fate of all the major characters well beyond The Illiad for those who survive. Currently, it seems only Hector, his wife and son, and Helen whose fates are undeserved.
The idea was for 30 days to use a small set of sources picked according to Jeff Rient’s “Alchemical Proposal” to create an RPG setting from scratch. I never finished it, but I think I did make a few very creative elements. This is one of my favorites.
