Work Work Work

Graphic element for
SSC #12, exploring the
Colonials who left
Earth forother Worlds.

I am cleaning. Not my house - yet - but the material to go up for sale in April.

The final issue of the pre-sold subscriptions for my Jorune newsletter SEGMENT: SHO-CAUDAL #12 is being prepared, and I am cleaning up the HTML code for the attendant website. As much as I like the program, the Mozilla WYSIWYG editor, Sea Monkey, has been allowed to remain nonfunctional in the new web-authoring world. It no longer allows a search in the raw HTML mode. It also makes an automatic change in the HTML where the location of all graphics and download files are rewritten to seek my local folder names. That doesn't work — people on the web won't be able to read my local folder. So I have to use a raw text editor to seek and replace all the "file:///" replacements. I use CotEditor but miss my old BBEdit text editor for webpage work. Oh well.

While I am waiting for the editor in England to return the manuscript for SEGMENT: SHO-CAUDAL, I am attacking the new editions my little catalog.

Amazon sent an email detailing eleven corrections they needed to make the manuscript for CLIMBING THE SPIRAL MOUNTAIN compatible with Kindle. I am happy to meet that standard and, in the process, am cleaning a few other typographical errors - formatting errors from ghod-knows-what bad moment at some point in the past six years. This is the one work of which I remain most proud and I am re-reading it as I edit, and find myself satisfied with it as a piece that may define me after I'm gone

The source doesn't matter. The correction does.

Cover for the novella release
of NIALL'S DREAM.

At the same time, I am giving the same eye to clean releases of my short story anthology THE TASTE OF FIRE.  I made the decision to pull the separate edition of NIALL'S DREAM and fold that into the anthology as the last, and largest, story in the collection. TASTE OF FIRE grows fat as the Novella vanishes.

The same cleaning goes on with my collection of three stage plays, meaning THE MAMA LAW, FEVER, and LIVING IN THE HOUSE OF ANGELS will be available as both individual playbook editions and as a one-volume collection.

My fantasy novel SONG OF ORPHANS will be cleaned off in the same process with a visual update that keeps the excellent artwork by Fred Lang. I mentioned the unfortunate history of that book in an earlier post.

Cover for the single
play edition of
ASSASSINS

One play will not make the cut. I am dropping ASSASSINS. It works as a stage piece cut without the context of my personal life at the time of the first productions it does not stand on its own. SO I am pulling it from my release list. I'm not killing the existing Amazon print version, but the three play collection will not grow to this fourth title. It began as a one-act during my time as playwright-in-residence at the Deja Vu Coffeehouse Theater in Hollywood and enjoyed some additional productions (my favorite being the Houston Town & Country Black Box production under Kim Collins). As part of an exercise with Transformation Theater in Berkeley it was expanded into a two-act version, FEAR OF LIGHT with a couple of productions. But still, it was satisfying to me as a personal narrative, but not for the audiences. So that version has never been released beyond those productions and now the one-act will be something people can find if they look, but it will not have a new life with its siblings.

I have other plays that I wish could be included. THE PATRIOT was a powerful little one-act brought to life by monologist Thomas Boyle at the same time THE MAMA LAW was first staged. DRY RUN was an interesting satire of the return of a popular savior who is keeping a very low-profile - people didn't treat him well last time. PRAYER FLAG was an interesting holiday encounter between a lonely man and a runaway. But those scripts have been lost. I miss those.

Several other scripts have deservedly vanished. I did not save them and I really do not miss any of them. I was in a unique position to get productions for every script I wrote over a three-year period, meaning over twenty one-act plays. Not all of them deserved to survive. They were exercises where the production taught me lessons. Sometimes the lesson was what to never do again. But no one needs to see those lessons-in-process.

So April will be several releases. The completion of the SEGMENT: SHO-CAUDAL, the new Kindle push with fresh releases of CLIMBING THE SPIRAL MOUNTAIN, THE TASTE OF FIRE, THE SONG OF ORPHANS, and the three play collection.

I mix my day with cleaning the old prose for new releases, writing the new pieces (which I will detail in the future, and looking at my promised material for the role-playing gameworld SKYREALMS OF JORUNE.

No rest for the wicked.