Alex Wilson

This MOC came about because I had frustratingly few of these 1x4 offset bricks for a previous project, so I placed an order on Bricklink for more than I could ever need. Stacked them all together for storage, and found I could give them an interesting bend.

I've never seen this used as a building technique, so I thought I'd give it a shot with a Lego Waterslide.

Click on any of 'em for larger view.









And the individual 1x4 offset bricks (I got the name from Peeron, but there's gotta be another way to identify them) look like this:

It occurs to me that I talk about caffeine in the same way that real writers talk about heroin.

I've seen a neurologist. I have post-concussion syndrome. What a relief, just having a name for it.

No consensus on prognosis, because the brain's such a crazy place and no head injury is exactly alike. I've definitely shown improvement since December (yay!) but most people show more or complete improvement by now (boo! I mean: good for them, but boo on my own progress). "It takes as long as it takes," is both the general and the Alex-specific prediction, which is exactly as much as I knew before seeing the neurologist, which makes the neurologist bill that much more of a joy to pay.

Studies vary, but it looks like I have a 90%+ chance of fully recovering by the end of the year, and there isn't anything I can do to increase those chances or hurry it up. I'm assuming they've considered heroin.

Had some dental surgery in the meantime. As long as I'm useless/recovering, might as well be entirely useless/recovering all at once. Among the problems with my teeth: I've had two baby teeth in my mouth with no adults ever growing underneath to usurp them, so those babies have been ready to go for a few decades now. I have had them pulled and have begun the 16-week implants process. I should probably figure out whether pudding qualifies as a liquid before I get on my plane to WisCon, huh?

Probably should've waited until the post-surgery drugs wore off before this unaffiliated citizen early-voted in his first ever Democratic primary, but ya gotta do what ya gotta do...

A bit behind, but only a bit to report...

Submissions 511-514

Writers of the Future (my 19th sub there)
Fantasy (5th)
Cabinet de Fees (1st)
Apex (3rd)

Rejections 371-375

Clarkesworld (82 days)
Polyphony (83 days)
Mineshaft (101 days on 3 poems)

Of Interest

Still couldn't close the deal on the story I was writing for Writers of the Future at the end of December, so again I send them a slightly older story last quarter. High hopes that I'll be well enough to complete it (and a few other things) by June.

Twenty-six pieces currently in circulation. Been a few weeks now of nothing in, nothing out.

A few submissions have been pending for longer than the average bear, which can be a good sign (held a bit for rereads/consideration, etc) or a bad sign (post office taken over by Visigoths so the subs/rejections never arrived, etc).

Or it could mean nothing. And I'm saying nothing. This has been a good use of your time.

Reasonably Clever hosted a Lego challenge last month: create a Steampunk "impulse buy" set, 50 pieces or fewer, just like they used to have in hobby shops and toy stores near the chashier. I made myself a Steam Dart (click for larger):





Loose homage to my favorite impulse set of all time (says a lot coming from a classic castle gentleman like myself), set 6824 : Space Dart (1984).

I liked this better when it was written by Daniel Keyes.

Yeah, I was doing better for a while there, huh? If any of my previous journal entries or emails or conversations have been coherent, gotta give props to medicinal amounts of caffeine. Phasing that out again has been like watching my IQ drop to day-after-head-injury levels again.

With less-to-no caffeine, doing this whole listening-to-my-body song and dance, my brain gets taxed very quickly, so things like working on my taxes (there's a pun there, but I can't make the words go where they should go) for half an hour or conversations with insurance providers have exhausted me for most of the rest of the day. I've sent out emails, called people back, when I can, but I'm still pretty far behind there.

Monday I bumped my head in the shower. I've bumped my head half a dozen times on the small doorframe of the Prius since February, and even with caffeine it always makes me useless and nauseated for the rest of the day. This was a worse bump, but I managed to get taxes and Telltale contributor payments out at least. Still not feeling so good.

Something fun tomorrow or Friday, we'll see how I'm feeling. Seeing a neurologist next week, so let's talk about other things until then.

Submissions 508-510

ChiZine (my 6th sub there)
Interzone (4th)
Strange Horizons (17th)

Rejection 370

Eclipse Two (16 days)

Pulled/No Reply/Publication Folded 61

Noctem Aeternus (1st sub)

Of Interest

Among my three subs this period is my first real work completed (from conception to submission-ready draft) entirely after my head injury. Reeeeally needed that.

A personal note about the Noctem Aeternus closing, which was a pleasant way to get the unpleasant news. The first issue showed a lot of promise, I thought.

Speculations/The Rumor Mill 1995-2008

I was still in college, didn't know a thing but thought I knew everything when I started my Speculations subscription with the print issues. Told me of Clarion, among other things. The forum/community introduced me to some of my first writer-friends. I let my subscription to the magazine lapse a few years after they stopped publishing articles (leaving only the market reports) and the signal-to-noise ratio of the forum wasn't what it used to be, but this was my introduction to the world of science fiction writing. I was so lucky to have it as a guide. Any mistakes I failed to make, I owe to Kent Brewster & co. Thank you.

Gary Gygax 1938-2008

If some of my first exposures to fantastic fiction hadn't been participatory--creating characters for Dungeons & Dragons adventures--I don't know that I ever would have thought to write the stuff. For a long time my biggest sale was an AD&D game supplement in Dragon Magazine. Why hasn't anyone ported the old Strategic Simulations (SSI?) games to the Palm platform? Seems ideal, and I doubt my PDA will crap out of me just before I save game like my Commodore 64 did all. the. time. Focus, Alex. I've held on to more D&D books than I will ever possibly use. Thank you.

Arthur C Clarke 1917-2008

In high school, I got into science fiction through the short stories. There was Vonnegut. There was Bradbury. And there was Clarke. Thank you.

Eras end.

Obligatory head injury tag.

My friend Steve turned me on to Jimmy Amadie, a jazz pianist with tendinitis and nerve damage so severe that he's "unable to play for more than five or six minutes at a time, on a piano whose keys are specially weighted to cushion his touch" (from a review of Amadie's Savoring Every Note). It'll take two years of working in these increments before he'll compose, record, and finish his album.

With considerably less talent and with large concentrations of caffeine, I can manufacture (almost consistently) a similarly short period of relative lucidity/productivity each day, so I can steal back my productivity from the twin gods of STFU and Convalesce. This is how I've technically written something every day this year with unbelievably little to show for it.

This is because the same rules apply as before the head injury: some writing days are (relative) winners, most aren't. It's just that now the writing windows are smaller and foggier. I'm never near my peak performance. And for the most part, words and thoughts still just won't do what I want them to do. Stupid words and thoughts. Would I be the first to write with colors?

Not entirely convinced these last ten (!) weeks wouldn't have been just as well served had I purchased a video game console in December, but I have trouble seeing the difference between that and giving up. I owe too much of my sanity and identity to reading and writing. And if I understand correctly (and ha! that's unlikely these days), the athlete who fully rests after an injury comes back nowhere nearly as strong as the one who works at rehabilitation, pushes herself, and exercises those stubborn muscles.

Which brings up the big assumption: that I'll come back from this. Except for those caffeine-grabbed moments (which hell can't be good for me in the long run), my ability to think clearly is worse even than it was last month. Now, that could be a perceptual issue; of course normal seems worse compared to the caffeine high. But even if I'm not getting worse, it's become pretty hard to believe I'm still getting better.


Even assuming I could be good at something else... it's only because I've put nine years into it that I'm on cusp of being good at writing. My father died at 53 (and his father at 52), so that doesn't give me a lot of time to practice a second calling. On the other hand? If I'm ten years away from making headway on my next big pursuit? I should probably get started on that ASAP, huh?

That's what I call balanced reporting!



(click to enlarge image)



http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/03/06/clinton-leads-obama-in-texas-caucuses-count/

My flash fiction (non-genre) piece "Contents" appears in the March-April 2008 issue of the literary magazine The Rambler, and I've just seen the first copies at Weaver Street Market, the local food co-op.

"Contents" appears on page 48, but, ironically enough, not in the issue's table of contents. Available in many independent bookshops, campus bookstores, and Barnes & Noble chains. Where to Buy.

Submissions 498-507

Fantasy (my 4th sub there)
McSweeney's (Quarterly) (6th)
McSweeney's (Books)</a> (1st)
Zombie Inside (1st)
One Story (1st)
Weird Tales (8th)
Silly Fantasy (1st)
Glimmer Train (4th)
ChiZine (5th)
Eclipse Two</a> (2nd)
Apex (2nd)

Rejections 356-368

Tin House (68 days)
Pseudopod (2 months)
F&SF 9 days)
Zombie Inside (1 day)
The First Line (18 days)
F&SF (9 days)
Writers of the Future (48 days)
Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award (Semifinalist, 134 days)
SFReader Contest (50 days)
Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine (74 days)
Fantasy (20 days)
Mythic Delirium (55 days)
ChiZine (2 days)
Eclipse Two (22 days)

Of Interest

My 500th sub was to One Story.

Here's my Zombie Inside thing, with more info.

Looks like I won't be able to vote in yet another SFWA election. Even if I made my third SFWA-qualifying sale today, I doubt I'd get the contracts in in time.

Still having a lot of trouble with the head injury thing, but I'll talk about some ways I've been able to adjust this week. I have a bad feeling this is gonna be with me for some time, so... Since I get new emails about it with every mention (and keeping up with email is difficult for me, even if the emails are absolutely appreciated), let's just make a brain injury tag.

February was almost entirely spent on a story for Shimmer's "Clockwork Jungle" issue. I wasn't able to get it to a nice enough draft to submit, but that could've been the case even if I was at peak performance and actually could read the entire 2-2.5k word drafts in three sittings or fewer.

As suspected, my little novelette that could did not make it to the finals in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award thing. But I'm quite pleased with how well it did. Instead of collecting digital dust on my hard drive for the last few months (setting it aside while I worked on other stuff, so I could come back to it fresh for revisions), it collected a quite generous Publishers Weekly review.

And I think the good the PW review will do in my cover letter outweighs the negative of telling agents or editors that they aren't the first place I've sent a work. Besides, that damage is pretty much already done with the title of the work so easily available online (try "Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award" in Google; I'm like number 4, after Amazon, Penguin, and The New York Times. Had no idea my blog was that popular, though I don't suspect that search placement'll last as they gear up the publicity machine/the contest reaches its climax, and as I start shutting up about it). I knew that'd be a risk, and that's why it's the only unsold work (I think) I've ever named in my Submission Log.

Congrats and good luck to the three finalists I kinda know: online friends Ruth Nestvold and Tom Pendergrass, and fellow Carrborian (Carrboro-ite? Carrborean?) Erica Eisdorfer.

Of course I'm incredibly grateful to everyone thoughtful enough to give the excerpt a read and/or to write up comments (though I'm quite glad I erred on the side of minimal publicity this time and didn't beg friends and family for reviews or anything, thus saving most of my Annoying Publicity Tokens for another day/project). You'll hear about Pinocchio again, and more annoyingly, when I place it with a publisher.

Hmm. Carrborean, definitely. Carr-BOAR-ee-uhn. It ain't no "Cimmeria, Land of Darkness and the Night," but Alexander the Carrborean coulda been one of Robert E Howard's unpublished tales, dontcha think?

I'm doing better gradually, and I'm mostways able to function like a normal person in spite of my focus issues. Reading and writing are the last holdouts. I've been reading Raymond Carver's intro to John Gardner's On Becoming a Novelist over and over, and I'm able to get to the end without forgetting what I've read only when I tackle it in two and three paragraph chunks over the course of several days.

Went for my first brief run since the accident. I haven't been in this out of shape since the days after Clarion (when my pathetic ten runs and minimal pushups/situps over six weeks conspired with the quality of campus protein and veggies to sacrifice to the Clarion gods any muscle mass I pretended to have). I'm hoping the current 24-hour headache, worst in at least a few weeks, is unrelated to the workout; my body can't take much more inactivity, and walking just isn't scratching that itch anymore.

One of the things I can do: Clean out my junk mail folder for the first time in a while. Best find: "Turn $2400 into $1000!" It's like they're not even trying anymore...

Oh and memory. Memory's another holdout and, no, I'm not just being cute. I thought of memory only after checking and rechecking this entry for grammatical errors. Guess I could have inserted it in the first paragraph, but okay maybe I am being cute. Maybe I can't help being cute. It's a burden, really.

In my ongoing hunt for bitty projects I can actually work on while still dealing with my head injury (focus problems, mostly), I sent this little piece of reanimated iambic pentameter to Zombie Idol yesterday. Didn't make the cut, so here's the only other thing I can think of doing with it...


Balcony Scream from Romeo and Julienned Brainstuff
by Wild Bill Shakespeare and Alex Wilson (glorified typist)

But crunch! What scent through yonder cranium wafts?
It is fresh meat! And Juliet, the meatbox!
Arise, ye mostly dead, and cleave the skull
Whose cup o'erflows with that electric food
Which sparks our own undeadly minds to move.
O be not gentle with that pretty flesh
Or vestal liver tempting freshly greens
Away from grayer matters. Spit it out!
We seek the brainstuff! O, the one true meat!
O, all she's ever known must wet our teeth!
She screams, her tongue insipid and distracting.
(I'll yet bite, though tongue's a waste of gnashing.)


FWIW, they're still looking for entries for "round two." Alls you do is insert a zombie into a good text and try and make it gooder.

Submissions 493-497

Clockwork Phoenix (my 1st sub there)
Noctem Aeternus (1st)
F&SF (21st)
Fantasy (4th)
Eclipse Two (1st)

Rejections 346-355

Clockwork Phoenix (6 days)
Strange Horizons (27 days)
SXSW Film Festival</a> (89 days)
McSweeney's (121 days)
Shadowline/Image Comics (multiple pitches)
First Page Challenge Thing

Of Interest:

Should hit my 500th sub this month, even if I'm unable to write another word.

The McSweeney's rejection at 121 days was the shortest response time I've ever gotten from them, and it included an apology for the delayed reply. So it goes.

For anyone interested:

Chords are G Bm Em C.

Bridge is Am C G.

Just sayin.

Google video version (which includes Quicktime/iPod video download if, like me, you don't play well with Flash Video AND if, like me, you're more interested in the song than the music video because it's easier to extract the audio that way):

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6626015481685587523

Lyrics, etc:

www.yeswecansong.com

Am I the only person who thinks every book should have a theme song? I've almost changed my own mind after hearing the results of this one.

Love Theme from Pinocchio is Punching You MP3.

Other formats (Ogg Vorbis, AAC) here.

(It so wants to be "You are the last dragon/you possess the power of the glow..." Let's not let the novelette get any further or else I'll be forced to create a music video.)

Okay, last blog about Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award for a while, likely until ABNA announces the next cut.

Obligatory links to Pinocchio is Punching You (free excerpt at Amazon) and all my PIPY/ABNA journal entries.

Submissions 482-492

Clarkesworld (my 5th sub there)
Shadowline/Image (1st few subs)
Apex (1st)
Highlights for Children (2nd)
OSC's IGMS (4th)
Nathan Bransford's Surprisingly Essential First Page Challenge (1st)
The First Line (1st)

Rejections 340-345

Aeon (51 days)
Helix (just a few hours)
Space & Time (exactly 2 months)

Apex (8 days)
OSC's IGMS (exactly 3 months, as usual IIRC)

Fantasy (26 days)

Of Interest:

From Cat Rambo @ Fantasy: "This was close, but in the end we've decided to pass." Noooo!

Found out about this contest too late to do much damage myself, but for those interested: Shadowline/Image is looking for pitches until the end of the month for a 3-issue miniseries. Found out about it by happy accident as I'm preparing a regular sub to Shadowline presently. A pox upon my fellow aspiring comics writers who were being so tightlipped about it! Not very sporting, is it? Not that I'm any better help, a day before the deadline...

Link to the Nathan Bransford contest. I entered the first page of Pinocchio is Punching You.

And, yes, if most of my other journal entries this month haven't made it clear, Pinocchio's a current semifinalist in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award (ABNA).

Not too unproductive a month for a guy who has trouble reading his own journal entries once they get this long. I pushed myself a little too hard in the last few days working on the above comic book pitches and a musical treat which I hope to release tomorrow. I'm hoping that's the reason I'm so exhausted, and it's not that my head's getting worse.

"In this funny sendup of the classic fairy tale, Pinocchio, having been made a boy, wants one more thing: to be made a ninja. Pinocchio hangs out at the mall, where a bully convinces him that ninja mastery can be had-at a price. The story sharply outlines the oddity of pre-pubescent boys' fixations (ninjas, zombies, petty theft and bra straps), and its playful blend of realism and fantasy is just right. The author has a sharp ear for dialogue and for the unusual highways and byways that adolescent conversations take. It's a clever idea executed ably; lots of laugh-out-loud moments and off-beat humor pepper this fun, inventive romp."

Pinocchio is Punching You!

Cool, I might be able to sell this. (The above review is based on the entire novelette, not just the posted excerpt.)

...had I known I'd still be recovering from this head injury a month later.

1. Head injury? What head injury?
2. What are you talking about? And how'd you get in here?
3. I can't hear you over the bats anyway. You see them, too, right?

(There are times when I feel like I'm myself again, and I feel like my mind should be able to do everything it used to do... but I'm quickly proven wrong, and I think that's the most frustrating thing.

Recovery is gradual, but it's happening. Most importantly: focus is starting to improve. I'm able to read up to a page at a time before--usually--needing to start over. And if I can write an entire story in under 300 words, I can often keep all the threads in my head at one time. So... outlining and writing up pitches, mostly. A journal entry like this one will now take me less than half an hour, and I'll catch more typos now.

So watch out, world! Alex'll be back in the game before you ooooh look a shiny penny!)

(Press Release by entrant Matt Musson. Thanks, Matt! And congrats to friend and fellow entrant Mike Jasper, whose novel The Wannoshay Cycle comes out today!)

Several Carolina authors have been chosen among the contestants moving on to the semi-final round for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, Amazon.com's first writing competition in search of the next great novel.

Each semi-finalist has a dedicated web page for their submission on Amazon.com, where customers can now download a 5000 word excerpt of the entry to rate and review.

The Carolina semi-finalists are:

Mike Jasper of Wake Forest
Alex Wilson of Carrboro
Erica Eisdorfer of Carrboro

Betty Cloer Wallace of Asheville
Lockie Hunter of Asheville
Douglas A. Sanburn of Asheville

Matt Musson of Charlotte
K.F. Jones of Charlotte
Mai Christy Thao of Charlotte
Lena Joy Rose of Matthews
Nicole R. Dickson of Greensboro

Lou Dischler of Spartanburg, SC
Katherine Guckenberger of Charleston, SC
Susan Sloate of Mt. Pleasant, SC

These Carolina writers are hoping to survive to the next round when the 100 Top Semi-Finalists will be chosen from the regular semi-finalists. The top 100 will be selected by Penguin Publishing taking into consideration Publishers Weekly's ratings of the author’s works along with customer evalutions and ratings of their excerpts posted online.

Additionally, customers who rate and review at least 25 semi-finalist excerpts will be entered in the ABNA Customer Review Contest for the chance to win an Amazon Kindle. The three Customer Review Contest winners will each receive an Amazon Kindle, a $2,000 Amazon gift certificate and a Hewlett-Packard.

From these top 100 Semi-Finalists – 10 finalists will be selected by Penguin. Excerpts from the 10 finalists will be posted online and Amazon.Com customers will vote to select the Grand Prize winner who will receive a publishing contract and a $25,000 royalty advance.
( Read more... )

As soon as I'm driving again, this is what I'll drive. (And as soon as I get my camera back, I'll take a real picture.)

My novelette Pinocchio is Punching You is a current semifinalist in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, which puts it in the top 17% or so, and in the running for the next step: Top 100, to be chosen about four weeks from now.

You can read and review the first 5,000 words of Pinocchio, and your comments/rating (along with a to-be-posted, likely-weighted review from Publisher's Weekly!) will determine whether it makes it any further in the contest.

ABNA is offering some reviewer incentives, and has posted general guidelines about "what makes a good review." To these I'll just add: Don't assume negative reviews are all from shills for other entrants who want their competition to look bad, nor that all positive reviews were written by members of the author's cult. Both will happen, neither are worth anybody's time. Let Amazon sort it out.

Much obliged for any reading and/or reviewing you feel like doing, and I think these fine friends o'mine would be, too: Ruth Nestvold, Michael Jasper, Bradley P Beaulieu, Tom Pendergrass, and Laurel Amberdine (whose note on a forum tipped me off to the contest in the first place).

A few years back I narrated Sherwood Anderson's The Dumb Man, released it free with a Creative Commons License. I did it because it was interesting, because I was never sure what to make of something so strange and elusive, complete with a mysterious form (riddle? prose poem?). Of course I got a bunch of emails asking what the hell it was, and I never knew what to say...

Except that if I ever thought it was a silly exercise, then today I'm reeeaally glad I did it anyway.



Multimedia artist Lainy Voom contacted me last week with what she was working on: she's used it in a Second Life machinima, and it's astounding (and I'd agree with Cory Doctorow's comment: "the most beautiful machinima I've seen to date").

Love, love, love that I could be a small part of something like this, and that a seemingly incidental CCL-licensed work could have such a life beyond what I did with it. Thanks, Lainy!

Submissions 476-481

Fantasy (my 3rd sub there)
Helix (1st)
Mythic Delirium (4th)
Polyphony (2nd)
Strange Horizons (16th)
Talebones (6th)

Rejections 335-339

Fantasy Magazine (33 days)
Interzone (74 days)
LCRW (35 days on an illustration)
The Sun (110 days)
Talebones (93 days)

Acceptance 72


"Contents" to The Rambler (70 days)

Of Interest


Finally learning how to do Track Changes in Word for the Shimmer story copy-edit. I'm such a luddite!

The no from Fantasy included editor Cat Rambo's note: "mainly because I've got something that's a little too similar in the pipeline," which tells me I'm getting closer there.

Should find out today or so whether my entry into the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Contest (ABNA for the Google-watchers) made the first cut. Odds are in my favor (taking up to 20% of the entries) compared with most slush piles I end up in, but I've got no expectations. As mentioned here, I mainly submitted it because I needed to set it aside for a few months before the next revision... and always better to let something wait in a slush pile than on my hard drive. Still dealing with the head injury so I'm still happy to let it sit.

A few weeks back, during my Christmas convalescence, Amazon.com uploaded a handful of excerpts including mine.... and then took them down quickly. It's as likely that these were used as test entries as it is an indicator that they've made it on some preliminary list, but I wouldn't put money behind either guess.