• Space Cowboys

• Steampunk

• Historical Research and World building

And the folks on the panel are way above my level of experience, which will make them interesting. David Boop, the editor of one of my favorite weird western anthos, “Straight Outta Tombstone,” is moderating us unruly cowboys, which includes two friends, and David Bock. When asked about successful SF westerns, I’ll be pointing at Rick and Dave. And a friend, who couldn’t make the Con, . 😁

H.P. Holo is moderating the Steampunk, which should make it a very entertaining experience. Plus, I’ve always planned to return to my own steampunk tales. If you’re curious about those, check out ’s “Raising Steam” anthology from 2024. 🚂

[Apple really needs a dirigible or airship emoji to up the cool factor. 😎]

Finally, Daniel Allen Butler, who moderated last year’s panel on alt-history, where I did not distinguish myself at all well 🤦‍♂️, will moderate the historical research panel, a topic that I have a lot more experience with.

“Matt? Why are you researching Dusenberg automobiles for a cat detective story?” 🤨

“The question should be ‘Why wouldn’t I research Dusenberg autos for a cat detective story set in San Francisco in 1930?’” 😉

What’s also cool about that panel is SM Stirling, an alt-history novelist whose work I have enjoyed since his first novel “Marching through Georgia,” will also be on the panel.

Anyway, here’s the schedule, as it stands now, if you’re wanting to see me do my impersonation of a deer in the headlights 🦌😁 or hang out.

It’s in two bits because I removed the opening ceremonies to save space.

The rest of the weekend, I’ll be hunting up Bill Willingham to get my copy of the Elementals signed. 🕵️‍♂️ Or hanging out in the hotel lobby, talking with friends.

Hope to see all y’all there. 👋

You get the hair, the period t-shirts, and the leather jackets. 😁

Mind you, I’m not in California, but you don’t want a fast beat driving your heal right past the state trooper’s speedtrap. 😉

All y’all have an awesome week! 👋

“Discarded Surprise“

What?

A kabocha pumpkin blossom doing its thing. It may become a pumpkin if pollinated.

Why?

My wife scattered seeds from a pumpkin that she cooked up for me in an awesome tempura. She didn’t have much hope it would grow, but those huge leaves, each bigger across than your hand, soaked up the Florida sunshine and rain.

Occasionally, I’ll end up with sentences or scenes—heck, even a whole story—that doesn’t fit my vision.

But I don’t delete them. They go right into the “Folder of Forgotten Files.” I wish I could claim the credit for coming up with that one, but a writer on the WriterDojo Facebook page did. 🫡

Anyway, I’m planting them to see what grows up later.

Readers questions: Do you discard or save the things that don’t work out at first?

Hope all y’all had a great week. Enjoy the weekend. 👋

And he’s writing a trilogy of books for my favorite indy publisher, .

“Honey? Where are those copies of “The Elementals” comics I bought in high school?!” 🤔

So, I’ve been searching and packing and packing and knocking down chores to get the house in order before my trip.

I did manage to knock out a few books in the meantime.

***

I finished Over My Dead Body, as mentioned the previous month.

Poul Anderson’s New America

That one was a fascinating collection of short stories set around the theme of the American experiment. Not much action, it being more of a treatise on colonization and how the colonists went about developing and maintaining freedom on an alien planet several light years from Earth.

The remainder of the book is filled with short stories and novellas that I’ve read before. I’ll hit it when I have the skull power.

***

A Yankee Flier in Italy

This is a kids book from the 1940s, part of a series I enjoyed back in junior high school when my aunt gave me a copy of A Yankee Flier in North Africa. This series has a trio of pilots, an American, an Irishman, and an Englishman, facing down Nazi pilots and engaging in commando-level derring do.

Sadly, they’re long out of print unless you can find someone offering them as print on demand.

But if you do, don’t expect deep characterization; these are boys adventure tales running faster than a Lockheed P-38 Lightning in a power dive. 💪

***

Next up, I jumped into Flare by Roger Zelazny and Thomas T. Thomas.

This one is straight up, near-future SF that really grabs and holds your attention. When I read this one the first time decades ago, the depiction of orbital mechanics mixed with VR simulations stuck with me. Even influencing my own “Journeyman” from the Minstrels in the Galaxy anthology.

Anyway, this tale holds up very well since that first read.

***

Next I dug up a collection of short stories from Roger Zelazny, My Name is Legion.

A fascinating, and relevant, tale about the digitizing of all personal data across the planet and one man who decides not to accept it. All kinds of fascinating tales about the man’s adventures.

And I ran out of time this month due to travel preparation, except for my Royal Road reads.

***

Warby Picus’s “Sky Pride” and ’s “Deadmen Dungeoneers.” They still rock hard.

***

These are the fiction books I pulled off the top of my teetering TBR pile in May.

All y’all have a great evening. 🫡

Deep Purple’s “Highway Star”:

The vinyl version:

Oh, what the heck, check out the awesomeness of a live performance, the compiled concerts version:

All y’all have an awesome week! 👋

“Delivered Beauty“

What?

Last week I shared the photo of an invading flower beginning to unfurl its flower. Last week, it finally unfurled. And, boy, was it awesome.

Why?

Growing plants and writing require a lot of patience. Sometimes that flower doesn’t bloom because of storm, caterpillars, one of the four-footed toddlers knocking it over, or dozens of other factors.

It’s the same with writing. As I’m creating this Post, I’m finally finding my way forward on a middle grade GameLit novella I’ve wanted to write for over a year. My ideas are finally blooming enough that I can plant them at the proper story beats to build towards that finally moment when tension, characters, emotion, and events finally bloom.

But I don’t know how that final climactic moment will bloom. That will come with time. 🙂

Readers questions: What awesome thing has taught you patience?

Hope all y’all had a great week. Enjoy the weekend. 👋

Anyway, since Friday I’ve had ’s “Fringes of Freedom” album on continuous loop, getting ideas on how to polish up my three short stories set among the Appalachians during an alternate American War for Independence.

My favorite song is “Cursed Twisted Guns,” the tale of the battle of Kings Mountain. I got to visit the site twice, the first time they were closed for a holiday, and walked the hills where the battle was fought. Hard men, brave men, ran that hound Ferguson down and showed the Crown that the free men of Sycamore Shoals wouldn’t submit.

While you’re at it, check out the whole album.

Fringes of Freedom

All y’all have an awesome week! 👋

“Invasive Beauty“

What?

Our neighbors planed this right on the edge of our property, and it keeps creeping under our fence line. Right through the metal plate that runs a few inches above ground and several more underground.

When we get one, my wife pulls it up, puts it in a pot and lets it grow. Persistence, since it’s not a weed, should be rewarded.

Why?

I posted this one for two reasons:

1. Organisms are persistent cusses, busting into new environments to colonize the crap out of it. Kudzu, snakehead fishes, African killer bees, etc.

2. We should always be open to beauty. Mind you, the examples I gave above are ugly, vicious, and in many cases outright dangerous. But, despite that, there still remains an honest beauty to them. And allowing ourselves to see the beauty opens us up to opportunities. Like the continual attempted colonization of our backyard. 😁

We’ve shared those flowers with a couple neighbors who are hoping to fill up the little garden spots in front of their windows.

Readers questions: Are there any things that many people find annoying that holds beauty for you?

Hope all y’all had a great week. Enjoy the weekend. 👋

However, my free time’s been spent consuming martial arts movies and books after a comment posted after ’s interview with , specifically whether had considered a pulp martial arts antho.

Personal answer: Heck yeah! 👊

I’ve been a fan of martial arts since the 70s when my family would watch Bruce Lee movies on Black Belt Theater coming out of one of the Philly tv stations on Sundays. And, when I was old enough, I enjoyed the Destroyer series by Murphy and Sapir. Hollywood bought the rights and made the “Remo Williams, the Adventure Begins” movie. A total disaster. 🫤

Who the heck hires Joel Grey to play a Korean martial arts master? 🤦‍♂️

“Breathe, Matt. Breathe. You’ll get through this.”

Anyway, how about some music while we meditate and cultivate positive energy..

All y’all have an awesome week! 👋

Which seems to be my motto for the year. 🤦‍♂️

April was busy with taxes and research on aircraft and weapons systems from the Great War. I’ve been highlighting passages in books with names, places, and events that I need to research further to give my upcoming alternate history setting the breath of reality that I need.

I even snagged a digital library book, The Unknowns by Patrick O’Donnell, to help me. It’s a good book, well worth the time spent.

Though there was one reference to a Filipino kris cutting a man in half. 🤨

As far as fiction books, I’ve been working through

First up are three books by Jerry Pournelle, set in his CoDominium MilSF/SF setting:

The Mercenary

This one contains the first and last stories of the Falkenberg’s Legion series. Loved every bit of it. The descriptions were sparse, but enough for a reader to fill in the gaps.

Which isn’t something we get anymore. We get tons of description that buries the action, the characterization, and dialogue in many cases.

West of Honor

This book shows the first time Lieutenant Hal Slater meets young Captain Falkenberg. I loved this one. So much more of Falkenberg and the fog of war where trust is hard won, especially in the CoDominium.

The Prince

The last book of his I read this month. It starts off reprinting the short stories I loved in The Mercenary and continues on to a tale that Jerry Pournelle and SM Stirling collaborated on. When the setting shifted to the Sparta system, I DNFd. 🫤

Little details appeared in the new work that weren’t present in the original work, like Falkenberg suddenly growing a pencil mustache and the Legion suddenly having French kepis. 🤔

Those original stories rocked for their tautness, IMHO, and adding details robbed The Prince of that.

***

The Land that Time Forgot

I didn’t start with the first book I began reading last month, because the writing dialect and stylistic conventions were too alien for me. 🫤

The story is great. Even the movie couldn’t mess it up.

It’s that the story builds so slow, spending a lot of time deep inside the viewpoint character’s head while fascinating things are happening outside his skull. 🤷‍♂️

Anyway, I set that one aside to try again in a few months.

Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe mystery Over My Dead Body

I started reading this book at the end of the month. The Timothy Hutton tv show inspired me to read it again based upon the entertaining two-part episode, which is one of my favorites from that show. Even though Hutton’s portrayal of Archie Goodwin doesn’t come close to the character in the book, IMHO.

Anyway, I enjoyed the book. Murder mystery, international espionage, and more of Wolfe’s mysterious background.

In the remainder of my free time, I’m still reading chapters from two serialized fiction novels on Royal Road that I’ve mentioned before.

Warby Picus’s “Sky Pride” and ’s “Deadmen Dungeoneers.”

They’re both worth the time, IMHO.

***

These are the fiction books I pulled off the top of my teetering TBR pile in April.

All y’all have a great evening. 🫡

“From fruiting to Bounty “

What?

Knowing how I enjoy peaches, my wife bought me a peach tree that we planted in a huge flower pot in our backyard. It came with just the bare truck and clean roots.

She got the green thumb and got it planted and watered. And we waited and hoped.

That first year, it grew leaves and grew taller, pretty close to my height. But no fruit.

Next year, it had two fruit, but the dang mockingbirds got at it, pecking holes in the peaches like they did to our raspberries.

The year after that, we had the fruit in the first photo. And it grew enough to give me a big enough peach for me to enjoy.

And, boy, was it tasty.

Why?

It takes effort—constant, often painful effort—to produce bounty. And success doesn’t automatically follow success because the peach tree hasn’t had any fruit this year after the early spring storms hit. Right now, it’s sitting under an awning to see if we can avoid the heat knocking all the leaves off the tree.

Readers questions: What accomplishment in your life took a lot of work and time to reach?

Hope all y’all had a great week. Enjoy the weekend. 👋

At the end of that research trip, I’ll be in Chattanooga for LibertyCon. Visiting with friends, hopefully on a few fun panels, and, with luck, giving a reading. Not to mention, I’m looking forward to meeting Bill Willingham and getting a comic book signed if he has the time. I suspect he’ll be pretty busy getting the word out about a trilogy of fantasy novels. 👍

Anyway, about the time I started reading Bill’s comics, one of my favorite songs came out.

I’m sharing this because a good friend, , Outlaw Author, just started a kickstarter to fund an awesome story setting inspired by the “Holy Diver” song.

If you can, head over to Jesse’s ‘stack and see if you’d like to join in on his Holy Diver stories. 👍

All y’all have an awesome week! 👋

“Yellow Rose, Green Leaf“

What?

Over two years ago, I took this photo of a bloom from my wife’s new yellow rose with my cellphone. This bloom had struggled to bloom past the forest of leaves and thorns.

Why?

Yellow and green. Light and dark. Furled bloom and spread leaves. Focus and blur.

When you contrast two objects, two characters, two places, etc., in more than just one way, you increase the tension between the two and build up towards the inevitable climactic conflict.

Also, the bloom and leaves have commonalities. They’re parts of the same rose, made from similar components.

Spider-man and Doctor Octopus.

Thor and Loki.

Gandalf and Saruman.

Readers questions: What characters have you enjoyed that had strong contrasts and a few commonalities?

Hope all y’all had a great week. Enjoy the weekend. 👋

The original setting and characters first appeared in my short story, “Journeyman,” in ’s Jethro Tull anthology Minstrels in the Galaxy.

If you’re interested, click on the book cover above to check out kindle samples of the anthology series.

I originally thought about serializing the novel on Royal Road, but the story works better for Middle Grade readers looking for adventure, wonder, horror, and humor.

Anyway, I needed a new opening scene to show the main character’s motivations and challenges and was drawing a blank. Until I found a CD-ROM that held the data from an MRI scan I had last year. That whole experience was claustrophobic and noisy. What would a nine-year-old would make of it? And how would he get through the whole experience?

Well, it turned out the main character’s father sang David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” as a lullaby. And the rest of the scene worked out pretty well.

Here’s one of my favorite versions of the song.

All y’all have an awesome week! 👋

“Focus”

What?

A lily in a garden in San Diego a couple decades ago. I don’t even remember where I took the photo, but it felt perfect to me.

Why?

The focus, the light, and the color stood out in the garden. I could force the focus through the camera by varying the F-stop, the focal length of the lens, etc., but I couldn’t alter the light or the color.

Well, I could play with the light if I wanted to put up an opaque tarp and find a light source to approximate the sun.

But that would take too much effort for a snapshot. And it might come out fake.

Writer friends, have y’all ever forced the characters and/or plot to bend in artificial ways to make them work for the story?

I have, and the story sucked because of it. I spent months working on a short story last year. Even after all the research needed for it. I forced the characters into a conflict that came out rushed and artificial.

“But they have to fight!” My inner writer being petulant, his lower lip sticking out.

“No, Matt. Not yet. Not here.” My inner critic being right this time. “Stop forcing it. Let it happen.”

In the second iteration, I did, and it worked a lot better.

Readers questions: Have y’all ever read a story where things seemed rushed? A romance? A conflict? An ending?

Hope all y’all had a great week. Enjoy the weekend. 👋

🤣

Example #67,882 of why AI truly is GIGO.

“Garbage in, garbage out.” If you start with lame instructions, you get lame output.

Case in point, I asked for flintlock muskets.

Instead, I got modern firearms that look like Salvador Dali was doped up on psychedelics. Maybe that’s why the swampdoodle has a mushroom growing out the top of his head and the Feline-muse has five paws? 🤦‍♂️

I’m pretty sure you can tell how the Feline-muse feels about that from her expression.

Anyway, let’s get to the music. released a song back in March that caught my attention:

A song about a rifle. Ain’t nothing more American than that. 🇺🇸

It also fits the main character in the alt-history stories I’m editing. A young man with a ‘spitfire rifle’ fighting the good fight to preserve liberty. 💪

All y’all have an awesome week! 👋

You always need water.

What?

This is a water meter cover on Nantucket Island. Back fifteen years ago or so, my mother-in-law, my wife, and I took a trip to Nantucket.

I used to watch the tv show “Wings” back in the 80s/90s and always wanted to visit the island. The second night of the trip, I couldn’t sleep, so I got up, grabbed my photo gear and went looking for photos, trying to catch dawn on a lighthouse.

I’m not sure if I shared that one, but I’ll go check.

Anyway, I caught dawn and golden hour and started walking back to the B&B where we were staying. Six AM is an interesting time in a seaport town. A few late rising fishermen were getting their boats underway. Hardly anyone else was stirring outside, though. So I walked through a silent town, snagging photos here and there.

Why?

The colors and shadows playing across the metal cover grabbed me.

But, more importantly, it made me think about the infrastructure beneath everything. They set up water meters back in 1880.

What came before? How many individual wells did the island have before then? How did they portion out the water for the residents?

It’s the same with stories. I was watching a YT video from the other day where she interviewed Michael Morton from Cannon Press. In that video, he talked about developmental editing and the underlying structure that makes stories make sense and entertain.

It hit me. Does the writer “lay the pipes before putting down the foundation” or “dig up the foundation to lay the pipes”? Or a little of both?

Yes, I know I’m talking abstract again. 😁

Does the writer consider the structure before or during the drafting process? Or wait until edits when they might have to delete/edit/move the different scenes?

Readers questions: Heck, let me give all y’all some choices. Have you been to Nantucket or some other famous island? Did you enjoy it? Do you enjoy boating? Ever taken a long cruise? , I’m betting you have some awesome stories to share. 😁

Hope all y’all had a great week. Enjoy the weekend. 👋

As always, click the images for links to Amazon. And those links are clean without any gubbage stuck in their to track you.

Anyway, one book that sat for far too long on my teetering TBR pile was first up.

Wood, Iron & Blood by Peter Grant.

I love his Ames series about a man rebuilding his life after the War between the States, and this one rocked in a similar but very different way. Young Jeremy Ash has a chance to take the western trail to the California goldfields, facing a ton of challenges.

First off, Peter does a ton of research when he writes but still manages to avoid multi-page info dumps, something I hate with a passion.

“Why did you stop the story’s flow to describe Mycenaean palace economics? This is historical fantasy, not King Minos’s plumbing.” 🤬

I get like a skittish horse, spotting a snake in the road, when I spot an info dump, but no info dumps to be found in Peter’s books.

***

Cahena by Manly Wade Wellman

I started a Manly Wade Wellman historical fiction novel, “Cahena,” which he wrote in the 80s, but the pacing just couldn’t keep me hooked. I wanted to love it. I can lose myself in one of his John stories, but a lot of historical fiction and alt-history don’t have the punch of pulp.

Give me a story that starts with conflict—it doesn’t always have to be a gunfight—that hooks me into viewpoint character’s life, and I’m not going to put it down until that “ride is over.” The rest of Wellman’s stories have that punch, but the slower pace of “Cahena” made it harder for me to become engaged with it.

I’m not giving up. I will go back and try again later when I have the focus for it because the man is that good a writer, IMHO.

***

So, I needed a fun read after struggling with “Cahena.” And if you want fun, you go full Grayson.

Kelly Grayson. 😉

Random Synapses: Book 1 of Short Attention Span Theatre by Kelly Grayson

Side note: What is it with autocorrupt? You can’t type “theatre” without it trying to shove “theater” in your face?

Anyway, back on track, Matt.

I once ate breakfast with Kelly, in a Waffle House, of course 😉, and had to fight to keep from doing multiple spit-takes with my orange juice. Trust me, his books are as funny as, if not funnier than, Kelly is in person.

Side note: and , two awesome authors in their own right also ate with Kelly at that Waffle House, and they can vouch for my statement. 😁

Kelly has an awesome sense of humor, and a good portion of it is what my grandparents used to call “earthy.” 🙂

Seriously, sorcerers and orcs in Waffle House? Cecil, the Combat Wombat?

Awesomely earthy humor. In my echoing movie announcer voice

Be sure to check out his substack, , too. 😁

***

I’ve been reading Travis Bagwell’s Awaken series for several years now, so I snagged his latest, not letting it reach the TBR pile:

Awaken Online: Crucible by Travis Bagwell

Loved it. Every one of his protagonists rocks, especially Jason.

So many plot lines culminating in this book. 👏

A few things I didn’t see coming, too. 😮

And he did what every good writer does. Leave me wanting more at the end of the story. 🫡

I hope Travis can manage another installment soon what with all his other projects going.

***
Finally, I grabbed ’s most recent fiction.

Split Decision: A Novella of the Hidden Truth by Hans G. Schantz

I love me some multiple dimension stories. I was a big fan of DC Comics before they threw all the dimensions into a blender during the Crisis on Infinite Earths comic book series to “make things simpler.”

Who wants simple? Mix things up, throw challenges at the characters.

Anyway, there were no blenders involved in Hans’s story. 😁

I still loved it. The story took the whole multiple dimension family of tropes and pushed it to 11.

And played out very well.

***

These are the fiction books I pulled off the top of my teetering TBR pile in March. I’ll have my April list out the 1st of next month.

All y’all have a great day. 🫡

So, we’ll look at a song from inspired by a video game set during WW1.

And, of course, we’ll see what the AI dustbunnies do with the Swampdoodle and Feline-muse flying biplanes during the Great War. 😁

I must’ve hit “Generate” over a dozen times to get this. 🤦‍♂️ You can’t separate “bow tie” from “tuxedo cat” no matter what you do, apparently.

Maybe the AI is a fan of Ben Yalow? 🤷‍♂️🙂

Anyway, this is the least worst image, despite the weird airplane behind the collection of wings on whatever aircraft the AI was designing. 🥴

I think we may need to schedule the AI for a “golden flow” test soon. 🤔

But back on target, which is more appropriate, considering I’ve been researching the heck out of Great War air combat.

I found a cool YT channel from Over the Front, League of WW1 Aviation Historians, for those interested in the subject, but all y’all didn’t come here for that.

So, here’s a song, inspired by one of the Battlefield games focused on the Great War. The video game craphics are crazy. Check it out! 🫡

Have an awesome week, all y’all! 👋

As a title, I’m torn between “Mirror Mirror” and “Dancing With Myself.”

What?

At the local zoo, they have an enclosure with venomous snakes. In this enclosure, the snake was looking to get out, and I was able to see the snake’s reflection in the glass.

Had to take that photo.

Why?

Self-reflection is critical for any creative job.

If you believe that your fecal matter possesses no odor, you’re gonna miss all the glitches that slip through.

I’ve seen folks get “too big to edit” and some become so enamored with a process or technology that they forget that “garbage in/garbage out” used to be taught in computer programming classes the first week.

Everything I’ve ever written had errors; it’s human nature that we see the forest and not the trees unless taught to do so without emotional attachment to the “product.”

Suggestion: creators must see everything they publish as a “product” and not a “piece of art” if they hope to get paid for it.

Readers questions: Don’t worry about going deep on self-reflection, folks, if you’re not interested. I’m also curious what kinds of snakes you have in your areas. I can always use the research for future stories. 🫡

Thanks.

Hope all y’all had a great week. Enjoy the weekend. 👋