Currently reading: The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward 📚trying not to read at night. Too scary.
I don’t follow Twitter too much any more. But the Magic Realism Bot account is still one of the best. “A library floats on an ocean filled with gin.” That’s the latest entry. Twitter Archive
Finishing Up and Starting Again
Hello! It’s been a while since you’ve received a newsletter from 500 Words. I’ve been working on things, work-work, fun-work, and also creative work, and finally, it’s time to let some of that stuff out. Surrender I’m closing in on publishing my science fiction novel Surrender. I’ve sent it around to readers, to a copyeditor who did some developmental work on the book, to a line editor who did more work on it, and I’ve just about made all the fixes and addressed all the notes.
Things Must End to Make Room for New Things
Some news of changes around here: The FutureX network is closing down, and it will evolve into a new project, called FutureX Studio, with a different set of goals. Since Ever Gonzalez and I founded FutureX in 2019, the world has changed a lot. We wanted to create a podcast network that was event-driven, featuring live podcast performances. We planned to build sponsorships around those live events to support the network.
Currently reading: The Glass Sentence by S. E. Grove 📚
Although novels don’t work in linear time, and when writing one, you can’t think in straight lines, I have found mind maps to be helpful when I need to keep track of things.
When you want bombast, you need Hans Zimmer.
He could have told George he was writing about the hostage to bring him back, to return a meaning that had been lost to the world when they locked him in that room. Maybe that was it.
When you inflict punishment on someone who is not guilty, when you fill rooms with innocent victims, you begin to empty the world of meaning and erect a separate mental state, the mind consuming what’s outside itself, replacing real things with plots and fictions. One fiction taking the world narrowly into itself, the other fiction pushing out toward the social order, trying to unfold into it. He could have told George a writer creates a character as a way to reveal consciousness, increase the flow of meaning. This is how we reply to power and beat back our fear.
By extending the pitch of consciousness and human possibility.
– Mao II by Don DeLillo
Keyboards
I first wrote about input in this post about keyboards. I’ve always liked typewriters, or so I thought for the longest time. I had a beige IBM Selectric that I wrote TV scripts and documentaries on in the 1980s. After following a tip from a friend, I bought it off the back of a truck in New York, in Hell’s Kitchen, and it was most certainly stolen. The Selectric came in a bloody box that recently held dead chickens, judging from the feathers inside and sticky red stuff that looked like blood.
Okay, last night I gave Everything Everywhere All at Once at try. I’m a big Michelle Yeoh fan. The acting was great. But I felt like I was watching a really loud YouTube video that went on for hours. I’m sure in another universe there is a version of me who liked it more.