Category: Rambling, duh

Well, of the times I’ve had to write the date so far, I’m batting a thousand for writing 23 instead of 22. I’d say I’m off to a good start, but the week is young. I’m fresh off a well-earned end of year vacation and ready to do things and be better.

We’ll see, ha.

Against type and tradition, I’ve actually made some resolutions for this new year, and I mean to keep them. To that end, I made them simple, ha. Easily memorable. My wife got me an hourglass the size of my head, so that’s going to help with one of them.

If it feels like I’m being vague with my resolutions, it’s because I’m being vague with my resolutions. A good half of them have to do with me and my writing, and the other half concern health and stuff, so yeah. Nobody needs to know all the latter, and I said I didn’t really want to blog about the former. I still don’t, though I’m really goddamn tempted.

(To that end, I’ll probably be seeking out interviews and such, because there’s a new book, and will be at least two this year, and goddamn I got to get out there more to move some units. So.)

Anyway, if you’re here and reading this, I hope your 2023 has started off well. And some of you who aren’t here and reading this, you, too. See? I can be magnanimous. -TB

I still don’t want to write about the writing, but there is something I need to get out, because I don’t know what the right answer is. And yes, I know this is basically screaming into the void, as nobody really knows this blog exists except me. (I’d say my parents, because they maintained a presence on the web, but they’re ghosts now.)

On social media, since the beginning of the month, I’ve been pushing the new book, and while it feels like I’ve been making small steps (sales are in the double digits, and three times as many as the entire Century series, and as of this writing, there are already two (2) five-star reviews) but it feels like if I keep going on in this vein, small steps is all I’ll ever make.

To that end, I think I need to build a street team. Small steps, but in multiple directions, right? Right. I was on the street team for Black Label Society way back in the way back, and all I really got was some stickers. One or two for myself, and the rest to plaster all around, which I did. (Maybe, maybe I kept more than one for myself.) I think maybe I could do the same kind of thing, except maybe with bookmarks? Book cover bullshit on one side, web address and maybe a QR code on the other? Send a really nice one for the street team member, and a stack of ones I won’t feel bad about giving away en masse for distribution? That’s the only real idea I have right now.

I’m open to suggestions, obviously, even if I’m really of the opinion that nobody is seeing this, lol.

Anyway, that’s where I’m at, here at the end of the year. I’m grateful for the things which went right, and I’m not bitter anymore about most of the things which went sideways, and I guess that’s as good as it’s going to get, since the PCH Prize Patrol isn’t on their way to my house today, hehHA.

In the words of Jerry Springer, ’til next time. Take care of yourselves, and each other. -TB

Last time I posted, I said to myself, “Next week, I’d like to talk about Tesla.” I am, apparently, a goddamn liar. Or I don’t own a calendar. Make what you will out of that.

To many minds, Nikola Tesla was the father of the twentieth century. The Industrial Age would not have been the same without the fruit of the fertile mind of the Serbian-born genius, and it’s a damn shame that for a very long time, kids didn’t learn anything about him, getting instead the propaganda from the Edison camp.

(That’s what Thomas Alva Edison was good at. Two things: swooping in on patents when inventors were down on their luck, and PR. Everybody “knows” Edison invented the light bulb, right? Gah.)

But there are other articles on the War of the Currents, articles that are both better researched and better written than what I might have for you. What I wanted to talk about mainly was how Tesla acted. He was a strict man, and when he gave his word, he kept it to the best of his ability. He expected the same of you, and it was quite often he didn’t get what he was expecting.

(But no, I’m not ranting about Edison. I promise.)

Instead, this short blog will be about Tesla’s ethics. I know my last blog was mostly the same thing, but I seem to be stuck on this, still. Why now? I couldn’t tell you. But it seems appropriate, so here we are.

Had Tesla wanted, he could have cashed in on all the patent money he was owed by the Westinghouse corporation and driven them into bankruptcy. That is amazing, that one man had so much hold on the technology of the day, he could have broken the company he was working for, just by getting his due. Instead, he took just enough to keep his experiments going, and even at the end, when his financers backed out on the free energy project (sad, though Tesla might should have seen that coming) and everything collapsed like a house of cards, he didn’t take what he could have from Westinghouse.

Eventually, his patent money dried up (the stuff he was collection on) and he was left more or less high and dry. Oh, not right away. He had several rather wealthy and generous investors, one of whom he did kind of… well, lie to. John Astor gave Tesla a lot of money to develop one thing, and Tesla used it to develop something else. This strikes me as odd, having read what I have of Tesla’s life, and it makes me wonder what the hell else was going on in his life at the time.

I guess that just goes to show, the guy was human, for all his genius. He had his faults. Besides the OCD, he was also a proponent of imposed selective breeding. Yeah, I know. You don’t have to tell me that’s fucked up. But anyway. As a scientist, he was occasionally close-minded, which seems odd to hear about such a maverick.

Tesla ended up living poor, giving the occasional (and unusual) statement to the press and trying to find investors for whatever he was working on at the time. Because of the mostly unfettered vision Tesla had, it was hard for him to find money. He’s the original Mad Scientist, you know? When he said things like, “I can make your motors more efficient,” investors threw cash at him. When he said things like, “I can talk to Mars,” mmm, not so much.

He died penniless and in debt, his largest project, that of wireless energy transmission, a failure.

Unfortunately (for both of us, me writing and the one person reading) I don’t have a life lesson tucked away somewhere that will help make sense of all this. Nor do I have an upside. For the most part, Nikola Tesla did what he said, or did his damnedest to, and in the end, he was a broken old man, whose best friend was a pigeon. (No shit, look that up.) And the first person to royally fuck him over lived a good life, active in the community and with awards named after him until he died of diabetes. Rich as sin.

Maybe there is a life lesson there, a kind of truncated Golden Rule: Do unto others.

How does that make you feel? It makes me feel old and cranky, so I guess I’ll stop here. Next time (not next week, I know better than that now) I’ll have something slightly happier, I hope. Maybe something about writing? I know, I said I wouldn’t, but recent developments have decided otherwise for me.

Be seeing you.

Alice Cooper is everything that’s right about rock and roll.

It almost seems like he’s the hard-rock equivalent of Savoir Faire. Everywhere you look, if there’s a trend, odds are good that Alice Cooper was there first. Marilyn Manson and Rob Zombie in particular owe a lot to him.

But, for a moment, let’s put aside his rock-awesomeness. Recently, there has been a lot of stir on Facebook and Twitter and across blogs about shoddy and shady practices by some publishers, and that is what really sparked this blog entry.

For all the controversy and furor Alice Cooper has sparked, for every set of parents whose teeth he has set on edge, for every time a politician has called for his act to be banned somewhere (and that has happened a lot) there is a good deed hidden somewhere in A.C.’s wickedness.

In the late 70’s and early 80’s, Alice Cooper was something of a drinker. In an interview, he’s said he doesn’t remember much of writing, recording, or touring behind a couple of albums from 1982 and 1983. Recognizing he had a problem, he checked himself into a sanitarium and got off the sauce. Since then, he’s been something of a one-man outreach program for other rockers and metalheads, most notably for Dave Mustaine of Megadeth. Who better to understand the rigors and stresses of the road than one of their own? In 2008, he received an award in recognition to his efforts to help his fellow musicians and showmen.

Another thing that sets him apart is the name, Alice Cooper. He was born Vincent Furnier, and the band name was Alice Cooper. After some time, he legally changed his name, and after going solo, has continued to pay an annual royalty to the band members to use the name commercially.

What?

That’s right. Instead of waging legal, lawsuit war over the name (Pink Floyd) or just out and out screwing his former bandmates (Ozzy Osbourne) Alice Cooper did it the right way.

Which brings me to the writing/publishing fracas. I’ve always been reluctant to talk about it in anything but broad strokes, but I will say this much: don’t be that guy. That means you, up and coming writer, and it means you, small-press editor/owner whatever. There is a lot of opportunity in this business to do things in an underhanded way, and there are a lot of pitfalls for novice writers, and it’s a shame when the two intersect like they have been.

Writers, do your homework. And read your emails and contracts. Publishers/editors, however easy it is to make changes and send them off without offering a proof, or to push an anthology through to meet a deadline, or to slip things into a contract which (how do I put this gently?) fuck the author, I implore you, don’t.

Be like Alice Cooper. Enrage the masses, scandalize the establishment, entertain the buyers, and watch out for your fellow writer/editors. Face paint is optional.

And that’s it, because the whole mess makes me sad. I had a lot I wanted to say about how inspired I am by Alice Cooper’s music and thematic albums and the way he’s changed with the times but still remained himself, but no. Thinking about all the business has depressed me.

Be seeing you. -TB

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a Star Wars fan. In fact, the only story which took hold in my brain before George Lucas’ space opera ripped it open was The Hobbit. Oh, I read all about Encyclopedia Brown and Bunnicula, but I knew and loved the adventures of Luke Skywalker and his merry band of Rebels better than anything else.

As a matter of fact, I can only remember six of the VHS tapes we had in the house during my formative years. There were others, many others, but the six constant tapes were Conan the Barbarian, Ghostbusters, The Blues Brothers, and the original Star Wars trilogy. Those movies were imprinted indelibly onto my growing mind. Even today, I could sit and watch any of those with the sound all the way off, and no one in the room with me will miss anything anybody has to say. It’s annoying as hell, too. So I’ve been told.

Fast-forward to early 1997, and the movie theater on base in Pearl Harbor had just finished being remodeled extensively. One of the things they had done was to put in a THX sound system, which meant (ah-HA!) they could show the theatrical re-release of the Star Wars trilogy, which they did. For free.

As a young sailor, this had staggering implications for me. I was broke all the time, and I had just gotten someone to agree to go to the movies with me. And she was alright with the base theater. And, she was excited to see Star Wars. Be still my beating heart. I was really enjoying myself, until something happened that ruined our date. (Well, it ruined it for me; I can’t speak for the unfortunate girl who was stuck with my company for the rest of the evening.)

Greedo. Shot. First.

I was apalled. I was aghast. I was… some other word, also appropriately alliterate.

There were other things in the movie that were, you know, effing awesomesauce. The revamped special effects were spectacular, and the additional scenes were icing on the cake, but come on. Han shoots first. Everybody knows that. That was firmly planted in my psyche. Rooted there.

I can’t really put it into words how much it bothered me. (Yes, I know, I’m a writer and occasional poet. The irony does not escape me.) When I was a pre-teen, just a wee baby, I wanted to be Luke Skywalker and run around the galaxy with my laser sword and fight bad guys. When I got a little older and started to notice girls, I wanted to be Han Solo. A scoundrel.

And Han? Hell. Han is the guy that shoots first.

Except now he didn’t, and I know I’m beating this with a dead horse, but I’m trying to make a point here. And I’m about to jump a gap to the other part of this here blog.

My parents were very Catholic people. One of them was Irish and the other Mexican, the perfect storm of Catholicism. I’d learned from a very young age that, where the Bible was concerned, it was best to sit down and shut up.

Not from my parents, by the way. Whenever I had questions about that big-ass book, my dad did his best to answer them, and my mom referred me to the mysterious ways God has. No, the repression came from the nuns. As a young proto-person, I went to a Catholic school in Chicago, and I guess it was a pretty good one. (I know this because one year, I went to public school, and the teacher consistenly mispronounced chameleon as “CHA-ma-lonn.” Yes, I got into trouble there, too.)

One of the things that bothered me was that the many policies of the Church didn’t actually come from the Bible, and I think I was too young to understand that. But I was old enough and had enough reading comprehension skills for the other thing that bothered me, that the Gospels didn’t quite agree with each other all the time, and the other contradictions between the Old and New Testaments.

I sat and thought about it for a long while. To be honest, I can’t remember where I’d heard this, but the idea was floating around in my head that the Bible was the inerrant word of God. So, how could it be wrong? Or, how could it even contradict itself? Or, how could this happen in the first place?

As I got older, I became less and less worried about who I upset and began to ask these questions out loud to people who I thought should know. Some of them were helpful, some were condescending, and others outright furious I could even entertain the notion. Mistakes, please. You must be defective.

One of the arguments I got quite often was, “If God took the time and effort to give us the Word, don’t you think He would take steps to prevent its corruption by the hand of man?”

My immediate response was that time and effort wasn’t anything to an omnipotent God, but I learned sooner or later that didn’t really move the conversation forward, so I swallowed that one. My follow-up question was usually something along the lines of, “Maybe that’s what God is doing, what with the finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls and all.”

I was referred back to the mysterious ways, which frustrated me to no end.

Well, that’s not true. The end was when I stopped chasing the truth of the Bible and gave up the whole mess for other people to worry about. I had other problems to worry about besides that, most of them from all the different views of God that were being jammed down my throat by well-meaning friends and pastors and youth ministers.

I think it was about this time I found my dad’s copy of Chariots of the Gods?… but that’s a blog for a different day.

For a long while, I went through the motions to keep my mother happy. I played guitar in church, I did all the… the… I even forget what they’re called now. Sacraments? I went to catechism and got Confirmed, and then after graduation from high school and joining the Navy, never stopped to think about God or any of that unless someone else brought it up.

Still, I’m always curious as to what happened. Not just what happened back then, in 33 A.D., but what happened to the gospels and letters and books, and who changed what and why. All that. Every time there was a show on TV about it, I’d watch it. Not only am I intensely curious about all this, but I had to keep loaded up on things that make people mad. Am I right? Of course I am. With that in mind, I read a book by Bart D. Ehrman.

Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why.

This book was excellent. It set up scenarios, and explained not only how the Gospels were being copied, but by whom, and how that led to the first changes, intentional or not. It’s a whole big thing, too big for this blog, and if you really want to get into it, the name of the book is right above this paragraph.

What it really did, though, was make things okay with the changing Star Wars universe.

Going back to that. Since 1997, Lucas has changed other things in his grandest of works, and I don’t think any of them have been received like he planned. Greedo shooting first, the original thorn in my side, was altered yet again to have the shots coming almost simultaneously, and that helped a wee bit. Other changes included dubbing Temuera Morrison’s voice over the original actor’s who had played Boba Fett (Jeremy… something? See, I’m slipping.) which I could live with, and putting Ian McDiarmid’s face in the hologram for Empire, and that I could live with.

The changes became more loathsome to me when we got to Return of the Jedi. You know the one I’m talking about. Ghostly Hayden Christensen. I know all the rationale behind it, that Obi-Wan said Darth Vader “betrayed and murdered” Anakin, and the ghostly version is of the young self because that was the last time he was Anakin, I get it. But I don’t like it. By changing that, Lucas was saying, “Hey, yeah, he redeemed himself at the end, but he still wasn’t my Anakin.”

I used to get mad about this kind of thing, and about how after approving storylines and official history for the Star Wars Expanded Universe, Lucasfilm trampled all over it, but now? I’m okay. Seeing the changing face of the Bible and the gospels over the course of their early lives made me see how things we take for granted as fixed and immobile aren’t really either, as goofy as that might seem.

For now, I’m looking forward to what else the Gospel of Lucas (According to Walt) will bring.

I’m in man-love with the Green Hornet.

The Green Hornet, if you didn’t know, is Britt Reid, a rich newspaperman that has had it up to here with corruption and crime in his city. Aided by his mechanical genius/sidekick Kato, he takes on the persona of the Green Hornet, a maverick operative in the Underworld, dedicated to bringing it down from within.

Wacky, right? I love it. I always have. When I was a wee lad, I caught an episode of the 1960s Greenway production, the same company that brought Batman to the television screen. I was dumbfounded. I was appalled. I was amazed. I asked my dad who that was, and he just smiled. I mean, this guy had to be the real McCoy, right? He had freakin’ Bruce Lee as his sidekick!

Fast forward about ten years, and NOW! Comics had started their own line of Green Hornet comics, and I devoured them whenever I could… which wasn’t very often at all, unfortunately. In my most important formative years, I lived way deep in south Texas, in a little town (?) called Falcon Heights. The nearest place to buy comic books was in the mall in McAllen, Texas, a drive of seventy miles. And since I had no license, no car and no money, well… it might as well have been a mall on the moon.

Even later, once I had joined the Navy and had a pocket full of jingle-jangle, I didn’t have a lot of time to read comics, but I went to the shops anyway, just to see if they carried back issues of all the stuff I’d missed. More often than not, they didn’t.

It was as if the universe at large was against me, determined to stand between me and the Green Hornet. And much like everything else from that time in my life, it got put aside as my career as a submariner got underway. (See what I did there?)

In 2001, I got a desk job at a training office in Pearl Harbor, Hawai’i, and most of what I did was… bowling. Seriously. I was supposed to be coordinating an apprentice program thing, but since the civilian side of the shipyard was heavily unionized, over half of the things the participants of the program had to do to complete it wasn’t allowed because it was someone else’s specialty. So I bowled a lot.

I also discovered eBay.

All of a sudden, I could find (and afford) all those things I had to put down earlier, like finding every Destroyer novel, or whatever Grendel merchandise I could… or the Green Hornet comic books. Yesss. So I bought them all up and devoured every last four-color panel. (Or whatever they’re in. Shaddap.) And for a while, I was happy.

Holy crap, ten years went by. 2010 was a good year for the Hornet. There was a new series of comics from Dynamite! as well as a movie in the works. In the intervening decade, I had ahem picked up copies of the television show’s entire run, as well as the two movie serials from Universal and all the radio shows I could lay my grubby mitts on.

And then… and then the mountain came to Muhammad. I got an email from my good friend, Matthew Baugh, with whom I share space on six tables of contents, at last count. An outfit he was on good terms with, Moonstone Books, was putting together a prose anthology of Green Hornet stories, and he said he would put in a good word for me. As it was invitation-only, I didn’t get my hopes up, and I think Matthew had mentioned me in an editorial manner, as perhaps someone that would do very fast and well-done line edits. (Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. I still do that.)

Imagine my shock and surprise when I get an email that says Moonstone got too many people and they’re putting out another volume, so get your pen ready! Cue dancing for joy.

(I’m still not talking about writing or the process, so I’ll skip ahead here.)

At this point, I should thank Joe Gentile, Matthew, the late CJ Henderson, and the several other authors that signed the hardcover copy I shipped around the country. It made my father proud.

And then the movie… I’ve already gone on record as saying that adaptations are always a mixed bag, and one should realize that the book is the book and the movie is the movie, and should never the twain meet, it should be no surprise and get over it, already. So that’s what I did. I put aside my reservations and watched Seth Rogan’s version of The Green Hornet, enjoying it for what it was. For the record, Kato was completely bad-ass.

Some time later, Moonstone put out yet a third volume, The Green Hornet: Still at Large, of which I am pleased to say I am a part.

My wife, Kitty, understands my incredible fandom, and for one of those holidays where you get gifts, she gave me a replica of the Black Beauty to put on the shelf alongside the other cars of legend, the Batmobile, Ecto-1, and KITT.

I guess I said all that to say this: the Green Hornet, to me, will always represent the best of a hero. The character is brave, uncompromising and full of conviction. He commands loyalty of those around him and earns it. He’s got the right amount of gadgets to get the job done, but not so many that they’re plot devices. (I’m looking at you, Knight Rider.) And he gets the job done, by cunning and wits or two-fisted action (four-fisted, if you count Kato, which you fucking well should). If I had to pick a hero to emulate, it would be the Green Hornet. He’s the best of them.

(Now, take all that, and apply it to the Lone Ranger. Same, same.)

Be seeing you. -tb

I don’t want to talk about writing or the process. There, I said it.

Here’s the thing: everybody (writerly types) who has a blog eventually goes on about the writing process, and how things have to come together for them, or the importance of readers that aren’t family or friends, or the importance of the support of family and friends, or whatever. There are posts about the importance of networking, and the pitfalls of being distracted by it, and by the Internet as a whole. There are a lot of really good writers with excellent blogs, all full of that stuff. Whatever I may have to say about it will seem dull and uninteresting by comparison.

So let’s talk about something else instead. And I say this in all sincerity:

My first boat was haunted.

I was stationed on the USS Tunny (SSN-682) from mid-1996 to mid-1998. During that time, we did one WestPac (a western Pacific deployment) and a decommissioning. Between the two, there was some war games and a Tiger Cruise, where we took friends and family on board and steamed from San Diego to Bremerton, Washington. The ship was commissioned in the summer of 1974, and was the second submarine by that name.

Being so old, the boat had a long and storied history, most of which I knew goddamn nothing about. It didn’t matter to me; at the time I was busy trying to get qualified* and doing all the new-guy stuff. Being the junior-most member of Electrical Division, I had a lot of fun stuff to do. One of those things also stemmed from being the skinniest, and it involved getting stuck inside a large DC motor. But that’s a story for another day.

There was a night where I was on watch as Shutdown Electrical Operator. That was a watch station that was manned from midnight to six, mostly (I think) to keep the Shutdown Reactor Operator awake. But I had things to do, and every hour I was supposed to go around the engine room and get readings on a bunch of stuff for my logs.

This night, the ship was berthed at Yankee 23 (or 22) on the sub side of Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard. I think. The particulars have gotten fuzzy with time. Johnny was the SRO, and Skipp was the Shutdown Roving Watch, both guys that had been on Tunny for an appreciably longer time than I had.

It was at 0200 that I went into one of the compartments of the engine room, Auxiliary Machinery Room II, Lower Level. The layout was odd, because there was a set of threaded pillars in the middle and a control panel at the aft end, which were bracketed by a pair of large motor/generators. In front of all that was another panel which effectively blocked the rest of the compartment. (I would include a diagram to clarity, but I don’t know if the United States Navy’s thunder brigades would come down on me like a ton of National Security bricks.)

It was quiet, like you’d expect it to be at two in the morning. I stuck my face up to the plexiglass cover of one M/G, looking for sparks at the brushes, and I thought I saw something move out of the corner of my eye. I stuck my head up. “Skipp?”

There was no answer, and I thought maybe Skipp was messing with me, so I ignored it. I went around the aft end to the other M/G to check it for sparks, too. As I did that, the movement from the corner of my eye repeated itself.

“Quit fucking around, Skipp,” I said. And again, there was no answer.

“Whatever.”

Tossing my clipboard up to AMR2 upper level, I took a last look around lower level, making sure I hadn’t forgotten anything. Someone would be up at 0300 to check our logs, and the person that night got testy when I forgot stuff, which may or may not have been often. Meh.

The ladder leading to upper level was straight up and down. I started climbing it, and felt a tug on the pants of my uniform. I looked down; there was nobody there. “Hello?” I said. Shrugging as best I could while halfway up a ladder, I looked back up and started again.

There was another tug on my leg, harder this time. I looked back down, checking to see if my pants were caught on a valve or support strut or something; no dice.

And then I saw my pants leg move on its own.

I shot up out of AMR2LL and ran to Maneuvering, where Johnny was stationed. He was sitting in there, talking with Skipp, and I knew.

“So neither of you guys were in Machinery Two, Lower Level just now?” I said.

They looked at each other, and son of a bitch, they knew, too.

“I don’t go down there at this pier,” Skipp said, and they took turns with how long AMR2LL had been haunted, or why it was only at this pier, if it had been a shipyard worker that bit the dust, or another sailor, or whatever. I didn’t have a lot to say for the next hour or so, which I’m sure shocked both of them.

So. That’s my story. I still don’t know what to make of it, and it’s one of those things I feel stupid bringing up to the old crowd… most of them are on Facebook, and it wouldn’t even be a thing to start a thread in the SSN-682 group, but I just don’t want to. Why not? I don’t know. Maybe I’m afraid I’m remembering it wrong. Or right. Or maybe it was a practical joke and they just forgot to tell me this whole time. Whatever it is, or was, I’m leaving it alone.

Be seeing you.

_thom

*: Being qualified, for submariners, is an important thing. I still have my “fish,” or Submarine Qualification insignia, in a place of honor. I also wear it on the back of my hardhat at work, and other people know what it means to me. It may or may not be a tattoo in the future. -tb

So, I’m going to populate some of this here web log with older Notes from goddamn Facebook, provided I can actually find them. The geniuses over in FB admin have made it next to impossible to do so, but I am, if nothing else, headstrong.

All the scrolling, scrolling, scrolling turns me into a grumpy fucker, but what the hell else do I have to do? (Yes, this is where I quietly ignore my giant fuck-off list of things to do. Ha.)

Every day, though? No, no. I have a lot of rambling tumbleweeds which just roll through my head from time to time, and you lucky shits, you get to see them here. Sooner or later, I’ll probably say something which might get me cancelled, but only in the Right Now, not in the future. See, if I die or whatever, as soon as the website stops being paid for, that’s the end of the blog, hehHA.

I keep going back and forth on whether I should try to maintain a blog of some sort, and it appears sanity has lost once again. Wish me luck, I’m really very bad at this. Ha.

More later as I… uh… figure out what I’m going to blog.