Getting Closer

Last week I told about a dead body I found in a truck wreck but didn't have more information because the local newspaper was a day late. To follow up on that, the driver was a man aged seventy According to the one of two local papers, he was known to smoke marijuana and drink alcohol every day. The adolescent bumper stickers all over his tailgate lend credence to that. A pipe with marijuana residue was found at the crash and is thought perhaps to be a factor in the crash. Last week I speculated that the man could have been there all weekend. It turns out the last time anyone talked to him was 11:30 p.m. the night before I found him. The story was too small for me to be interviewed by either paper.

There's a saying that every article in the paper is accurate except that rare one about which you have personal knowledge. The articles in both papers had the basic facts like the time and condition of the crash wrong. Based on my observation of the scene, the man could have survived and died of exposure either overnight or during the day. I noticed that neither article said he died of wounds sustained in the crash the way they usually do, which makes me wonder if he did die of exposure while people were driving or jogging past the wreck. There's no way to know. Maybe it just means no one did an autopsy to find out. There was no obituary, which makes me wonder if he had any close family in the area. It was a sad thing all around.

Book stuff

Let's get away from real life and on to fantasy life. I've thought some about the new series idea I had last week and have written down a few ideas. I'm not sure when I'll get to work on that. I haven't yet had the idea that puts it all together into a really good story form. I have the beginning, middle and end, but there's a lot to fill in about the world in which its set that would make it all work and make good story sense. The idea right now does not lend itself to a series. It may end up being a solo book.

On the other hand, I think I may have had the idea that gets me close to solving the book 2 problem. A while back, as a break, I wrote a little over half of a science fiction style Messengers book set during the time of Calan Sterrit, the man Kayley rescued from the cave in Call to Selah. In past blogs I've referred to that book as the space novel. Another project I've thought about but haven't been able to come up with the plot points for is the Calliope novella. I think I have a way to combine the Calliope novella into book 2 and link the space novel to it via Messenger time travel. Several Messengers from the time period of the first series appear in the space novel, but due partly to spoilers about the B'vellah series, I had to put the space novel on the back burner. It's theoretically possible that I could write the end of the space novel and the new book 2 simultaneously or nearly so and have them come out close together. As a bonus, the cover for the space novel would be dead simple to paint.

What I'm working on now is a way to put the parts of the unwritten Calliope novella that didn't appear in The Rise of Aethan Lightbringer into book 2. Instead of a novella with all the details that would involve, that story would be told from the Messengers' points of view instead of Calliope's. I wouldn't have to show things like her bored in school. Could I do it in such a way that I could still write the novella later? That's something I have to solve. Linking the space novel and book 2 is pretty easy. All I have to do is write one or two scenes from the perspective of the people in each book. It would be the same scene(s) in both books but from different viewpoints.

Before pulling book 2 off Amazon, I had already written almost half of book 3. Part of figuring all of this out is taking that into account. I like book 3. It needs to stay as much the same as possible.

Have a great weekend.

Truck Wreck

Since I don't have a car, I'm at the mercy of other people. This is going to be a short one.

It's been kind of a long week. The big news was that I found a dead body this week. I was riding on the passenger side looking out the window and saw a truck that had gone off the road and down a short drop off at the edge of a field.. The grill was smashed into the ground. As we were riding by, I couldn't see anyone inside, but I saw a small ladder that had been thrown past the truck and into the field. The way the truck was smashed made it look like it would be hard to get out of it but not impossible. I told the person who was driving me that I'd seen a wrecked truck. We decided to go back and check on it to make sure nobody was inside.

It turned out that there was one man inside. It was too steep to climb down the drop off, which was maybe 15 feet. There was a way to drive down into the field where the truck was, but I called 911 instead. In the very few minutes it took a fire truck to arrive, three teenagers jogged past and never bothered to look over to see what was going on.

I think the crash happened well before I got there, which was Monday. There was no steam coming out of the engine. It wasn't making ticking noises the way they do when they cool down. There was no smell of gas or fluids. There were no skid marks. The man inside could have been there several days with people driving and jogging by not bothering to check on him. This was on a dirt and gravel road. Any skid marks would have taken a while to be driven away by other cars. He could have been there all weekend.

Unfortunately, the local paper didn't come out on Wednesday the way it usually does, so I have no info on who it was. The license plate was for the next county over. People use my road as a "short cut" sometimes. I'm guessing the man was flying down the road and went off the side in the dark, but I don't know for sure.

Not very uplifting this week. The good news is that I had an idea for a future series. It'll take more thought to really flesh it out. 

Have a great weekend.

1937 Chrysler Royal Business Coupe

I saw something scary the other day. I can't help but wonder how that's not a type of mutilation. How is that going to affect those babies once they're grown? The appendix was once thought to be useless, but now we know that it's part of the immune system and has a function. Are we going to find out later that those babies need that part they're cutting?

I also saw something awesome, a 1937 Chrysler Royal Business Coupe. It was parked at the Captain D's I was visiting. I was in the drive-through. It was parked off to the side where pickup trucks pulling trailers or small campers park. The color was matte black with a red interior. The wheels looked modern with the rear wheels being a little bit larger than the front. I wouldn't have done that personally, but the size difference wasn't great.

Sometimes I watch old movies from the 40s and 50s and even older. When I first saw the car, I knew it was old, but it didn't look very familiar. I studied it as I waited in the drive-through and decided it had to be from the 30s or possibly older. I guessed 30s. When I got closer, I could read the 1937 on the corner of the license plate. I patted myself on the back. I also wondered if that meant I've seen too many old movies that I can tell when a car's not from the 40s.

On the whole it was a bad week. I was very discouraged at life. Nevertheless, I was able to make progress on the cat painting. It's fighting me. It's so close to working, but it doesn't. I also think I have a concept for the cover for the mystery/romance that I think I could paint. I'm not very good at the human figure, but maybe I could do someone who's squatting down and get it right. I've had to do a lot of fiddling with the cat painting that makes me think it's possible.

I'm still struggling with whether book 2 can be saved or needs a complete re-write.

Have a great weekend.

Struggling With Book 2

I've been wrestling with book 2, trying to figure out what to keep. I've been going through it fixing things and making some changes. The farther along I go the more I wonder if I should just start over with it. I'm feeling more and more disconnect with it from what it needs to be. One of the fixes was for the definition of nephilim. For a while it's been accepted as fact that nephil comes from the Hebrew word nafal, which would make it mean fallen ones. There's new research that says it comes from naphiylim(sp), a word from another language and not Hebrew, and means giants. It's translated giants in the Septuagint, which is seen as a confirmation that it never meant fallen ones. It's interesting. Some of the ancient documents that have never been translated are being translated now, and it's giving insight into what things in the Bible we didn't know we didn't know actually mean.

Speaking of religion, there's a heavily atheist state in the union. They're having problems and more problems. In my state we had a drought, and the governor called for prayer. The drought went away. Atheism doesn't work long term.

Something I often lament is how inferior American culture is today from when I was younger. The number of insane things I see keeps rising. Somebody showed me a "game" this week that was a button masher. There was no gameplay to it. It was just a button masher. It had a row of buttons. Pushing the first one would cause a counter to increment. When the counter reached a certain number, that would allow another button in the row to be pushed. When the counter on the new button reached a certain number another button would become active and so on until the end of the row. Scores of millions of people are "playing" what are called clicker games. I don't get it. Atari was better than that. I remember when button mashers were considered the worst of the worst.

But I think I have a theory about these clicker games. When I was younger in the 80s, it was a much more peaceful time. We needed excitement, so the video games were geared toward that. As an example of how peaceful it was, when a serial killer popped up, the police alerted the news media. It became national news until they caught the guy. Today, there are so many serial killers that the police don't bother to tell the press any more. They work the cases as best they can. Here's my theory. Kids today are overloaded. Drugs. Gender dysphoria. School shootings. Vicious politics. Etc. Clicker games give Millennails something mindless and repetitive and peaceful to do as a break from all the excitement in real life.

I was recommended an article that goes along with this idea. I didn't read it. I tried skimming it, but ran into vulgar profanity, which goes along with my statement about inferior culture. The article claims that the American Dream is "killing us," because the average American is worse off than a generation ago. Well, duh. As the culture declines, the country will decline along with it. I've seen a number of these articles. They all miss the fact that our culture is degrading. They focus on economics and sometimes blame a political party. That misses the point. Our culture is collapsing. These articles are all signs of it. I could go on and on, but it's kind of depressing.

Be counter culture. Be a decent human being.

Have a great weekend.

Undeserved Victory

In baseball playoffs there's something called a wild card team. A wild card team is a team that's not good enough to make it to the playoffs. But for profit reasons, they're allowed to play a one game, winner-take-all game. Whoever wins goes forward. That format is inherently unfair and stupid and contradicts the regular season during which there is never a one-game series, as well as contradicting the spirit of the game.

This years the Washington Nationals won the World Series. They were also the winning wild card team. The only reason they won the wild card game is because of an error the other team made. This is why a one-game series should never be allowed. The Nationals then played the Dodgers in a five-game series and won. I'm not sure how. The Dodgers were the better team. While that was going on, the Braves were playing the Cardinals. The Braves should have won, but their star rookie made two mistakes in game one that cost Atlanta the game and ended up costing them the series. The result is that the Nationals, who made it in through an error, ended up playing another team who only made it that far through another team's error. The Nationals somehow beat the cardinals in a seven-game series and went on the defeat the Houston Astros in seven games in the World Series. I watched some of it but not all of it.

There's a life lesson in all this. The Nationals didn't deserve to be in the playoffs. They should never have defeated the Dodgers. They should have lost to the Braves, whom they never got to play because of those rookie mistakes in game one. They should never have defeated the Astros, a superior team. MLB.com had a contest to pick the playoff winners. I don't watch American League baseball, but somehow my bracket was perfect for that side. On the National League side, errors by the Braves and the Brewers blew it in the first round.

There's this bit of wisdom from the Bible that sometimes the tail ends up being the head or the head ends up being the tail. That's what happened this year in baseball. Sometimes, life just works out that way. Sometimes, you win even though you don't really deserve it. Sometimes, you get the break you shouldn't get. Sometimes, things just go your way in spite of yourself. When that happens, I think you should enjoy it. Don't get proud and act like you did it yourself. Enjoy it, but stay humble enough to know it wasn't really you. There was something else at work in it.

Have a great weekend.