Veterans Day finished like this:
At home following the command of Watch the Killers Pay Tribute to Warren Zevon at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame 2025 Induction Ceremony (Pitchfork)
Submitting stories, also. CLOCKHOUSE and Procrastinating Writers United got "Coming Home". "Agnes" went to Double Dutch.
CC stayed over another night. She made a little progress with "One Dead Blonde".
I had more revisions to the work for MW.
Stevie Wonder, Jennifer Hudson & More Pay Tribute to Sly Stone (Rock Hall 2025 Induction)
I worked on the computer until my eyes felt like burning slits.
Wednesday was like this:
I was grumpy most of the day. MW was still getting grief from the court clerk on the appeals. I spent the morning communing with 2010 for his blog. My pretrial detention journal entries resume 12/6/2025.
Everything got screwed up - that is my plans for the day.
CC reorganized the kitchen, did the dishes, and decided that she needed to go back to her boyfriend. Not a bad idea. This place was gotten so I could get work done and no one would think of moving in. CC was throwing off vibes that she was thinking of doing so. She is good about not bringing her addiction around me, but it is still out there. Long term co-habitation requires her to be clean. Feeding her is fine. She falls asleep for hours and hours and hours. That makes it easy for her to to stick to my rules.
MW and I talked. One error corrected. That went better than expected.
We had lunch at Casa de Sol on Walnut Street in Muncie (great food), then she went back to her boyfriend.
I headed back home, playing with my new camera.
Back to working on my pretrial detention journal.
In my email came a response regarding Indiana redistricting:
Thank you for your message and for sharing your thoughts on redistricting. I appreciate you taking the time to express your perspective.
The topic of redistricting generates strong opinions, and I understand the concerns you raise about timing, cost, and the importance of maintaining public trust. With a special session called by Governor Braun approaching, please be assured that I will consider your comments as discussions on this matter continue.
I value hearing directly from constituents like you, and I encourage you to continue reaching out on issues that are important to you. You can contact our office via email at H33@iga.in.gov or by phone at (317) 232-9751. I value your input and look forward to staying in touch.
Sincerely,
Representative J.D. Prescott
District 33
Indiana House of Representatives
Why do I not feel confident that this politician has no qualms about gaming the system for the preservation of his party's power?
And also came rejections.
Thank you for sending us "No Ordinary Word."
This particular piece did not work for us, but we were impressed by your writing. We hope that you will send us something else. Our submission schedule can be found on our website at http://americanshortfiction.org/submityourwork/.
Sincerely,
The Editors, American Short Fiction
Also for "No Ordinary Word":
Thank you for submitting to Belmont Story Review. We received many submissions and, unfortunately, decided not to publish this piece. Best wishes on placing your work in another publication, and please keep us in mind for future submissions.
Sincerely,
Istabra Elmi
And:
Thank you for sending your work to Narrative. We are always grateful for the opportunity to review new work, and we have given "Theresa Pressley Attends Mike Devlin's Viewing" close attention and careful consideration. We regret, however, that "Theresa Pressley Attends Mike Devlin's Viewing" does not meet our needs at this time. We hope that you will keep us in mind in the future.
Sincerely,
The Editors
Thursday, so far, has been more rough and tumble.
I missed the bus for my medical exam. That is rescheduled to next week, Then I decided to go to Payless for Coke Zero. That did not turn out so bad. Back here, I went back to the pretrial detention journal. That also did not go so badly. Going to Ball State reminded me this was the 13th.
I decided to go to the Journalism Building to check out the print sale and then to the arts building for the two exhibits I have meant to see with CC. I got to the sale and I had enough of college kids. They were not taking plastic. I had to go to the library to find a usable ATM. I gave the two handling the money a twenty. I had to total up the amount being paid them - $13. As I watched one of them start to grab bills to give me change, I had to stop them from giving me a ten. How is it possible to be in college and being unable to do simple math or make change? My mother would have been going off like a rocket - when I was around 10 years old, she taught my sisters and myself how to make change after the waitress at Dog and Suds could not do so.
The print sale was mostly disappointing. I thought there might be posts. No. Then it seemed to be a lot of anime and comic book inspired work. I got two prints. That was all I found of interest enough to buy.
I left the Journalism Building wanting a cigarette. Not seeing a bus on its way, I headed towards University Avenue and snapped photos along the way. This gave me a chance to smoke.
Back here, I listened to videos and finished off the pretrial detention journal entry I started this morning. My eyes started feeling tired, so I took a nap. CC called and that ended that. We talked about her meeting with her lawyer.
While working on on my pretrial detention journal (look for those posts starting on December 6, 2025), I found the following.
Gore Vidal’s Essays (Jamie Todd Rubin, 2022)
I can’t yet say what I think of these essays, but the fact that I can’t stop reading them must say something. There is a rhythm to the language Vidal uses that I admire, although it isn’t my style. It might be the opposite of, say, E. B. White, in fact. But that’s a great thing about writing. Style has an affect separate from content. I can say that I am enjoying this book, even when I am not exactly sure what I am enjoying. I suspect that as I move into more familiar territory, later in the book, things will clear up for me a bit.
Mr. Rubin's blog continues, and I like what I see from the skimming I did.
How Gore Vidal Taught Me To Love Essays (Abhinav Tiku, The Phoenix, 1996)
Essays can be vulgar, unruly pieces of rhetoric that, if deftly handled, can cut themselves close to the heart of a topic. They can be as personal and shameless as the frivolous Snapchat; as erudite and stylish as the polished novel. They don’t have to be literary tedium. They can be literary firecrackers. Under Vidal’s pen, a luminous fireworks show is always waiting to be enjoyed with either a cappuccino or beer at hand.
Rereading Still Life With Woodpecker by Tom Robbins (Pickle Me This, July 18, 2010) does torpedo one of my favorite novels, but her doing so reminds me how I grew disenchanted with Robbins about the same age age as she did. I started reading Robbins again when I got into prison. I found him a joyful presence - there is a bit of the wayward and the anarchic in him. Now, I am not sure that he does not belong to a certain time period - today's younger generations are so conservative and tight-assed - to which I am more attuned. No, he is not Tolstoy, nor Hemingway. He never aspired to such heights; I would rather read him than John Updike. My friends and I thought of him as a successor to Kurt Vonnegut. He did that job in his own way with elan.
Rereading this book at 31, I see how far I’ve come, and how my literary judgement has sharpened, because the book is terrible. My political judgement has sharpened also– the Woodpecker is an anti-feminist, libertarian, but I would have noticed neither of these details then. Robbins’ prose is an orgy of play, but his language means nothing beyond its frippery, and it’s not even that funny– the only time I laughed out loud was when somebody sat on a chihuahua. I was bored reading most of it, and so bored out of my head by the end that I was only skimming. The sex was awful and gross, and not remotely sexy. The vagina euphemisms were totally disgusting, and I’m not sure why that didn’t put me off first time through.
I’m glad I reread it though– there were sparks of how brilliant I used to think it was. I don’t know if I’d ever read anything that interesting before, and it might have liberated me as a reader in the same way it did in a more general sense. And I wasn’t wholly cynical about its message. Even now, the idea of having CHOICE guide one’s life is very important to me: “To refuse to passively accept what we’ve been handed by nature or society, but to choose for ourselves. CHOICE. That’s the difference between emptiness and substance, between a life actually lived and a wimpy shadow cast on an office wall.” Rock on Tom!
I wonder if Kurt Vonnegut might also be suffering a decline in readers as they get older.
I lost track of Bruce Sterling. Turns out he is on Medium. I had to check out one of his posts: R. U. a Cyberpunk in 02025 AD? I found it amusing.
Speaking of Kurt Vonnegut, I also found The Vonnegut Review. Specifically, I started reading Fictional Humans and Humanist Fictions by Wilson Taylor. So far, I find much of what Mr. Taylor wrote very interesting, while also reminding me how long it has been since I read Timequake.
A central component of the inauguration of counter-histories is the weaving of new narratives to sustain them. Literature, Vonnegut suggests, must realize itself as a counter-hegemonic current of redemption in order to redeem the human. Anesthetizing pleasures, such as television, recapitulates the banality of capitalism into the consciousness of its viewers. Aesthetic pleasures, such as literature, instead cultivate the interiority of the human as a counter-hegemonic and redeeming force. If imagination and awareness is the most intrinsic component of the human, aesthetics can endeavor to re-imagine the human and the world. The counter-hegemonic potential of literature exists in its cultivation of new narratives and new consciousnesses. Through his fictional narratives, Vonnegut weaves eschatologies and ontologies of freedom.
Literature must realize itself as a transgressive and subversive force of imagination. Vonnegut has always battled political conservatism and censorship, as his transformative vision for the American self and society offer radical revisions of the status quo. Vonnegut is an author continually banned in schools, and he critiques this unimaginative and reactionary posture in Timequake. “In the slavering search for subversive literature on the shelves of our public schools...the two most subversive tales of all remain untouched, wholly unsuspected,” he writes with passion. “One is the story of Robin Hood... And another as disrespectful of established authority as the story of Robin Hood...is the life of Jesus Christ as described in the New Testament.” Vonnegut celebrates the historical and counter-hegemonic Christ in Timequake, and the radically transformative dream of the Gospels inspire Vonnegut’s own fictions. Vonnegut’s messianic narratives are potent enough to blast out of Benjamin’s continuum of “homogenous and empty time” and inaugurate a new history and a new humanity. History is first absurd, but also offers, again to quote Benjamin, “gates through which the Messiah might enter.” And Vonnegut’s telegraphic schizophrenic literary mode, replete with fissures and cracks, offers innumerable messianic gates.
Timequake’s narrative fragmentation reflects Vonnegut’s hermeneutics of suspicion — his weary skepticism toward the accepted and anesthetizing narratives of contemporary quietism, toward tired myths of progress or false myths of prosperity, toward the voracity of consumerism, toward the banality of American culture and consciousness. Vonnegut marries his postmodern critique with a transcendent humanism, and his suspicion gives way to sacrality. Vonnegut deconstructs the world in order to construct the human anew. Timequake is both anti-novel and self-conscious memoir — Vonnegut stitches meditative scraps and aborted stories into a bizarre collage redolent of the contemporary American consciousness and culture. Only through these fragments is it possible to present a truly critical vision of unrealized future, which, as Marx suggests through Hegel, can only be imagined as a “negation of a negation.” Vonnegut’s shattered fictions represent a shattered world, and, more importantly, suggests that the world can again be made whole through imaginative and ontological engagement. In this way, Vonnegut’s “telegraphic schizophrenic” literary mode is actually a mysticism of sorts, yearning for unity after fracture, for redemption after the fall.
From what I can see, the Review is not currently publishing, but it does have an essay on each of Vonnegut's novels.
I also tried to keep trimming the flow of email. Crime Briefs had two items that I just had to read.
Olivia Rutigliano's Ryan Reynolds is remaking Thunderbolt and Lightfoot has the same reaction to this remake as myself. Thankfully.
It’s a classic of 1970s crime cinema. Why anyone would want to remake it… I don’t know. But apparently it is in the works. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Reynolds’s production company Maximum Effort has teamed up with Amazon MGM to get the ball rolling, and is reportedly collaborating on a script with Enzo Mileti and Scott Wilson (Season Four of Fargo). Shane Reid, the editor of Deadpool & Wolverine, will be making his directorial debut.
Reynolds will likely star… my money is that he’ll want to play Lightfoot, opposite some heavy as Thunderbolt. The same Hollywood Reporter piece speculates that Reynolds might try to cast Hugh Jackman (his screen partner in Deadpool & Wolverine), which would definitely increase the film’s audience interest.
So… we’ll see what happens. Will anything be as good as the original? No. But I suppose… “in for a penny, in for a pound.”
I did not know about the possibility of Jackman. He might be able to do justice to Eastwood's role. But Ryan Reynolds as a substitute to Jeff Bridges? Naw.
The second was Meagan Church's Silence That Screams: On Hysteria, Hauntings, and Why Every Story Is a Ghost Story. I can agree with the following because it does fit in with the several reasons I have for writing fiction.
We write to make the invisible visible. To give language to the silenced. To acknowledge the lives that were overlooked, misdiagnosed, or dismissed. And when we do, we bring them back, not as phantoms, but as voices reclaiming their truth.
So yes, I suppose I do believe in ghosts, the kind that linger not to frighten us, but to remind us why we write, why we read, why we keep searching for meaning in the shadows. They ask us not to turn away from the dark, but to listen and to tell the stories that will not rest.
The Caffeinated Writer's What to Write This Week: An Exploratory Writing Exercise in Rhythm and Repetition has an interesting idea that should be read, even though, you cannot see how to use it in your work. I cannot - for now.
Listened to a video about Egyptian history:
Alan Rickman doing The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe - a voice, actor, person missed.
Worth reading and thinking about - the harm we have done to ourselves, the harm we let be inflicted upon us: On David Graeber’s Ideas About the Structural Stupidity of Bureaucracy
Graeber believed that the most basic level of being is play rather than economics, fun rather than rules, goofing around rather than filling in forms. If only we were intelligent enough to realize our own stupidity, we might enjoy our lives more. But we aren’t.
Trump is having problems. If I am correct about Trump being D.C. Stephenson for the whole country, then this may be the end for him.
I never knew Shelby Foote was a novelist before he wrote his Civil War histories until I listened to Writing Out Loud--Shelby Foote. He has interesting things to say about Faulkner, Walker Percy, Eudora Welty, and Southern writers in general.
Inside Ball State's Journalism Building is a small art gallery. I spent some time there. Several pieces were interesting. Others seemed to be slight, not even with any sense of humor. However, there was one piece that I found interesting. It was several large sheets of paper put together with lines of varying colors. I thought it an interesting abstract work until I read the note next to it. The colors represented responses from a questionnaire about what color they would assign to a particular decade.
That got me recalling a headline I had seen earlier in the day: What is time? Rather than something that ‘flows,’ a philosopher suggests time is a psychological projection. I had not read it then. What if instead of color, we assigned smells to a time period. Then came images, followed by Proust's Madeleines. Well, it is another idea for "Chasing Ashes".
As for the article:
How much time elapses between events, and what time something happens, depends on the observer’s frame of reference. Observers moving relative to each other will, at any given moment, disagree on what events are happening now; events that are happening now according to one observer’s reckoning at any given moment will lie in the future for another observer, and so on.
Under relativity, all times are equally real. Everything that has ever happened or ever will happen is happening now for a hypothetical observer. There are no events that are either merely potential or a mere memory. There is no single, absolute, universal present, and thus there is no flow of time as events supposedly “become” present.
Change just means that the situation is different at different times. At any moment, I remember certain things. At later moments, I remember more. That’s all there is to the passage of time. This doctrine, widely accepted today among both physicists and philosophers, is known as “eternalism”.
Lawyers figured this out a long time ago; it is why we distrust eyewitness testimony.
The passage of time is inextricably bound up with how humans represent our own experiences. Our picture of the world is inseparable from the conditions under which we, as perceivers and thinkers, experience and understand the world. Any description of reality we come up with will unavoidably be infused with our perspective. The error lies in confusing our perspective on reality with reality itself.
For me, it is the clock ticking away while I write this instead of revising my fiction!
Bellingham Review rejected "Learning The Passion and Control Twist":
Thank you for sending us your submission. Although it wasn't quite a fit for us at the moment, we wish you the very best in placing your work elsewhere. Thank you for your words and your support.
Sincerely,
Sam X Wong - Managing Editor
I am going to read a little of the The Times Literary Supplement, then go to bed.
Hopefully, you will something of interest here.
sch
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