How Is Your Confinement Going?
For me, aside from fewer visitors, it is life as normal. I'm home in my command chair, on the computer with PBS or YouTube in the background. Sometimes I'll watch a show on Netflix, but not often. The second season of Altered Carbon has been a slow building fireball. As I type I am watching Blood Sugar Rising on PBS - an excellent documentary on the rise of diabetes in this country (and the results).
But I continue working on the juggle. As I've said before, I use the juggle to keep from going into another multi-year "writer's block" and remain productive. It results in a sudden burst of releases as things ripen together. Kind of like an orchard, when the fruit comes ready for picking.
I'm thinking of sharing it to the patrons as I get to final drafts on each scene. They are not just a simple liner novel, but episodes in the life of the main character. We see him first as a boy living in an oasis of power and water in the debris of a destroyed city and follow him through his movement through a world of sophisticated scavengers under the control of a benign AI who has all the trappings of a religious figure but denies any divinity. It is a narrow, controlled society which is coming back from social and natural disasters. I don't think it is prophecy, but it is a solid story that offers viewpoints as it moves through.
Would you like to see chapters of the work as they emerge? I don't want to flood mailboxes so people ignore the communication. I'm trying to avoid, "Oh, it's just from Joe."
When the new book fights with me, I work on the new print editions of the existing book. Those are Climbing the Spiral Mountain with a cover based on an unsplash.com photo that seemed to be the right feel.
I've found a font that I really like to use on all of the new editions. It is called "Slenderella" and it has a modern and Art Deco feel, which I love. It has worked well on the covers of all five books.
The Taste of Fire will include the novella Niall's Dream, previously released as a separate volume. I feel uncomfortable with novellas as a short book in the market. Just on general principles. If you are buying a book, you should get a book. It will increase the page count on the anthology, but that is more comfortable than two books, one of which barely qualifies to be a standalone volume.
The collection of three of my plays, and I think they are the best three, will also have a new look with the Slenderella font. Plays do not need a graphic the same way the stage production needs to scream at an audience. The simple green cover works.
I had released a collection of ten radio scripts several years ago and it garnered not attention at all. It may have a place with the DIY Radio Drama project, on which I will say more in a few paragraphs.
The material that will be added to third edition include how to use the book for a class like the one I have run at our local drug and alcohol recovery center.
"Mazing Adventures," the comic strip format that follows what it is to be a Sponsor. There are twenty one of those. They will go in the Sponsor section. I have not really focused on creating any new strips, but I can stand by what I have. I would like to come up with a few more and come up with a comic book of just these views of sponsoring, including what it is to lose one.
I've always loved comic books, and it seemed like the right way to carry this message.
There are several articles from different authors I would like to include, but I'm trying to get permission on those - which takes time. It all takes time. But it is also all progress. The problems of eye and fingers make me work slower, but that seems to benefit the work.
Jorune has been a favored game world, but I also have a passion for the era between the wars that defined the Twentieth Century, the "pulp" era. I call it the age of the Tube Punks, to go along with the Cyberpunk and Steam Punk flavors of gaming. Mine is called Heroes for Hard Times and involves an element of supernatural power called "Weird." It has a style all its own, and a political awareness that could shape how people make and play their characters.
It isn't perfect, but it progresses...
I'm still doing the series for the OTRR Newsletter. Another installment just appeared this month and I'm running a few months ahead. The plan is for it be a series of articles for the newsletter, and then to be collected as a handbook in the house that some young talent will look at radio drama as an art form for new horizons of art and communication. I designed the "tombstone" radio for OTRR, who decided to grow with a rework of their original microphone design, which I did.
I like this radio design too much to let it vanish into history. The font is "Are You Jimmy Carl Black?" which is a great font name for a commemoration I felt was supposed to be done.
One difficult part is this raises the ghosts of the people who worked with me on the radio drama project and have passed. I've gotten so I am afraid to ask how people are doing when I encounter a mutual friend on Facebook or by other means.
David L. Krebs, one of the founders of American Radio Theater and modern sound effects wizard, has been gone for many years.
Gregg A. Roebuck, another found and my comedy partner for many years on radio, left us just a few years ago.
Edwin Duerr, author of Television and Radio Acting, who worked with us on developing the workshop process to train actors to the specific needs of radio performance, Gone.
Tom Boyle, one of our actors who could be called up on to do almost any role we could imagine. Gone.
I need to stop.
It grows into a long list of men and woman I don't want to resurrect. I don't like the grief it resurrects. A lot of my work for a project I don't talk about much on the blog, grief is a very personal process that requires as much time as it takes. And it can rise with the right smell, or the right taste, or the sound of a show we did together long ago which inspires my work on the news version of my radio drama life. But the memories bring both grief and the sweet memories of the time we had, making me want to share in the hope someone unknown to me will catch the fever and bring new productions to a new audience. That is the hope that keeps me going.
The articles will continue. Do you want me to post the completed articles as they are done. Again, I don't want to flood mailboxes with PDFs filled with things they do not want to read.
I have finally been able to start digitizing some of the old American Radio Theater Presents... episodes, cleaning them up with Audacity, an open source audio editor that has more power than some of the commercial programs available.
I think I will do a modified pair of podcasts. One will be the programs produced by the evil quartet - David, Gregg, engineer supreme William (Bill) Berkuta, and myself. Gregg and I did several years of once-a-week, sometimes twice a week, radio programs mixing music, comedy from albums, and original comedy (these were through Heavenly Miracle Air Experiment, The Sunday Gummies (sometimes the Monday Gummies), Adams and Roebuck, Pacified Radio, Hour 25, Music Black and White, and more). We weren't world breaking, but we occasional found some truffles (as blind pigs are wont to do). David did a dozen radio dramas (Dimension of Imagination and Dead Air) on the same station before we all teamed up with a couple hundred hours of radio programming under our combined belts.
Together we did the separate series of hands on workshops for actors, writers, directors, sound effects, and production projects. We developed as shared program training system with a core of people who served as producers, directors, writers, and fill-ins wherever needed, which gave us many hours of production experience in just a few months. Incredible talents from the early days of television and well established in radio came to help up - Peggy Webber, Sam Edwards, Marvin Milner, Joe Maross, Wes Lau, Ray Bradbury, Cliff Thorsness, Janet Waldo, June Foray, and others, gave their time as volunteer or, on the commercial programs, working for scale.
There were a dozen Dimension of Imaginations, eight episodes of Dead Air, the original Heyoka Radio Drama Workshop (the first effort to bring the old and new talents together), wenty six episodes of American Radio Theater Presents, aka A.R.T. Presents, sixteen episodes of Bertha And..., raised funding for a hoped-for commercial series called Midnight Theater (horror stories), MindScape (science fiction), and Hope Street (a continuation of Bertha And...).
On leaving ART, when our hearts were broken when our pilot programs were to premiere on a small network of 18 stations around the Pacific Northwest the same week that began with Mount St. Helens exploding. We couldn't get funding to rework the pilot events we had planned. I did my own intensely personal four hour drama, Chapel Perilous, which has also been aired of a small series of stations in half hour episodes. David went to work on Milford Haven and shows for Golden West Broadcasting. Gregg went off to appear in Oingo Boingo's Forbidden Zone (as Hitler in the school scene), the voice of Land of Lakes Cheese, and eventually Charlie in the last two seasons of Grace Under Fire.
We never worked together again.
I only have a handful of these shows left. About a dozen of the Adams & Roebuck, ten or twelve of the Bertha And..., a few episodes of A.R.T. Presents, and early, imperfect mixes of Chapel Perilous. I'm hoping some of the reel tapes I have have not erased themselves, which magnetic tape is known to do, so I can digitize them. I was able to get a Revox B77, which can handle the 10.5" reels on which some of the shows remain untouched. A member of the Sunday Gummies, David Arias-Rios, who just retired as the morning voice of KONO in San Antonio, supplied me with an edit block, leader tape, and editing tape to pull together reels whose edits have separated because of age and chemistry.
My modified podcast would be individual episodes of Adams and Roebuck Minus One, me producing from old material and without Gregg, and American Radio Heritage, which would serve as a primer for appreciating the American art form of radio theater. Maintaining podcast availability costs money and the Patreon roster is still around six people, one of whom has an expired credit card so their subscription is not in force. Working within those means I can do programs (I'm looking at 90 minutes per) to put up on a podcast server that only allows five hours up at a time, then shift them into more permanent storage on archive.org.
So you will be able to tune in up to three podcasts at any given time, and what goes beyond that will be available on archive.org.
This blog entry is running on too long, so I'll talk about this next time.
One supported suggested I put the link on my posts to show what people can do to support this boil of projects. That I can do.
https://www.patreon.com/mdjoestuff
But I continue working on the juggle. As I've said before, I use the juggle to keep from going into another multi-year "writer's block" and remain productive. It results in a sudden burst of releases as things ripen together. Kind of like an orchard, when the fruit comes ready for picking.
 |
| Light, Slenderella cover |
LIGHT
This will be the most political novel I've written. More on the lines of my 1984. Like , it demands my time, dictates new scenes. To this point I have not given the lead character a name. It has been told from a personal, third person perspective. It is a difficult form because we are used to reading names, but in life we can go weeks without calling each other by name. I try to write in the demotic, which will become the academic in the next generation. I think it is a proper battle to tell the story.I'm thinking of sharing it to the patrons as I get to final drafts on each scene. They are not just a simple liner novel, but episodes in the life of the main character. We see him first as a boy living in an oasis of power and water in the debris of a destroyed city and follow him through his movement through a world of sophisticated scavengers under the control of a benign AI who has all the trappings of a religious figure but denies any divinity. It is a narrow, controlled society which is coming back from social and natural disasters. I don't think it is prophecy, but it is a solid story that offers viewpoints as it moves through.
Would you like to see chapters of the work as they emerge? I don't want to flood mailboxes so people ignore the communication. I'm trying to avoid, "Oh, it's just from Joe."
 |
| Slenderella cover |
I've found a font that I really like to use on all of the new editions. It is called "Slenderella" and it has a modern and Art Deco feel, which I love. It has worked well on the covers of all five books.
 |
| New edition cover. |
The collection of three of my plays, and I think they are the best three, will also have a new look with the Slenderella font. Plays do not need a graphic the same way the stage production needs to scream at an audience. The simple green cover works.
I had released a collection of ten radio scripts several years ago and it garnered not attention at all. It may have a place with the DIY Radio Drama project, on which I will say more in a few paragraphs.
 |
| 3rd Edition Cover Mock-up |
RECOVERY READER 3rd EDITION
LibreWriter is not completely without problems, but the Index feature seems solid.The material that will be added to third edition include how to use the book for a class like the one I have run at our local drug and alcohol recovery center.
 |
| Mazing Recovery - Bucket |
I've always loved comic books, and it seemed like the right way to carry this message.
There are several articles from different authors I would like to include, but I'm trying to get permission on those - which takes time. It all takes time. But it is also all progress. The problems of eye and fingers make me work slower, but that seems to benefit the work.
ROLE PLAYING GAME PROGRESS
The Skyrealms of Jorune version of ORFA (One Role Fits All RPG system) got some work this past few weeks, including expansion of the 1,500 word glossary, refinement of the base+points generation system (which incorporates the racial variant base values), and work on the PDF programmed character sheet added to the progress.Jorune has been a favored game world, but I also have a passion for the era between the wars that defined the Twentieth Century, the "pulp" era. I call it the age of the Tube Punks, to go along with the Cyberpunk and Steam Punk flavors of gaming. Mine is called Heroes for Hard Times and involves an element of supernatural power called "Weird." It has a style all its own, and a political awareness that could shape how people make and play their characters.
It isn't perfect, but it progresses...
DO-IT-YOURSELF RADIO
I'm still doing the series for the OTRR Newsletter. Another installment just appeared this month and I'm running a few months ahead. The plan is for it be a series of articles for the newsletter, and then to be collected as a handbook in the house that some young talent will look at radio drama as an art form for new horizons of art and communication. I designed the "tombstone" radio for OTRR, who decided to grow with a rework of their original microphone design, which I did.I like this radio design too much to let it vanish into history. The font is "Are You Jimmy Carl Black?" which is a great font name for a commemoration I felt was supposed to be done.
One difficult part is this raises the ghosts of the people who worked with me on the radio drama project and have passed. I've gotten so I am afraid to ask how people are doing when I encounter a mutual friend on Facebook or by other means.
 |
| Gregg A. Roebuck and me, promo for Adams & Roebuck, 1977 |
Gregg A. Roebuck, another found and my comedy partner for many years on radio, left us just a few years ago.
Edwin Duerr, author of Television and Radio Acting, who worked with us on developing the workshop process to train actors to the specific needs of radio performance, Gone.
Tom Boyle, one of our actors who could be called up on to do almost any role we could imagine. Gone.
I need to stop.
It grows into a long list of men and woman I don't want to resurrect. I don't like the grief it resurrects. A lot of my work for a project I don't talk about much on the blog, grief is a very personal process that requires as much time as it takes. And it can rise with the right smell, or the right taste, or the sound of a show we did together long ago which inspires my work on the news version of my radio drama life. But the memories bring both grief and the sweet memories of the time we had, making me want to share in the hope someone unknown to me will catch the fever and bring new productions to a new audience. That is the hope that keeps me going.
The articles will continue. Do you want me to post the completed articles as they are done. Again, I don't want to flood mailboxes with PDFs filled with things they do not want to read.
I have finally been able to start digitizing some of the old American Radio Theater Presents... episodes, cleaning them up with Audacity, an open source audio editor that has more power than some of the commercial programs available.
I think I will do a modified pair of podcasts. One will be the programs produced by the evil quartet - David, Gregg, engineer supreme William (Bill) Berkuta, and myself. Gregg and I did several years of once-a-week, sometimes twice a week, radio programs mixing music, comedy from albums, and original comedy (these were through Heavenly Miracle Air Experiment, The Sunday Gummies (sometimes the Monday Gummies), Adams and Roebuck, Pacified Radio, Hour 25, Music Black and White, and more). We weren't world breaking, but we occasional found some truffles (as blind pigs are wont to do). David did a dozen radio dramas (Dimension of Imagination and Dead Air) on the same station before we all teamed up with a couple hundred hours of radio programming under our combined belts.
Together we did the separate series of hands on workshops for actors, writers, directors, sound effects, and production projects. We developed as shared program training system with a core of people who served as producers, directors, writers, and fill-ins wherever needed, which gave us many hours of production experience in just a few months. Incredible talents from the early days of television and well established in radio came to help up - Peggy Webber, Sam Edwards, Marvin Milner, Joe Maross, Wes Lau, Ray Bradbury, Cliff Thorsness, Janet Waldo, June Foray, and others, gave their time as volunteer or, on the commercial programs, working for scale.
There were a dozen Dimension of Imaginations, eight episodes of Dead Air, the original Heyoka Radio Drama Workshop (the first effort to bring the old and new talents together), wenty six episodes of American Radio Theater Presents, aka A.R.T. Presents, sixteen episodes of Bertha And..., raised funding for a hoped-for commercial series called Midnight Theater (horror stories), MindScape (science fiction), and Hope Street (a continuation of Bertha And...).
On leaving ART, when our hearts were broken when our pilot programs were to premiere on a small network of 18 stations around the Pacific Northwest the same week that began with Mount St. Helens exploding. We couldn't get funding to rework the pilot events we had planned. I did my own intensely personal four hour drama, Chapel Perilous, which has also been aired of a small series of stations in half hour episodes. David went to work on Milford Haven and shows for Golden West Broadcasting. Gregg went off to appear in Oingo Boingo's Forbidden Zone (as Hitler in the school scene), the voice of Land of Lakes Cheese, and eventually Charlie in the last two seasons of Grace Under Fire.
We never worked together again.
I only have a handful of these shows left. About a dozen of the Adams & Roebuck, ten or twelve of the Bertha And..., a few episodes of A.R.T. Presents, and early, imperfect mixes of Chapel Perilous. I'm hoping some of the reel tapes I have have not erased themselves, which magnetic tape is known to do, so I can digitize them. I was able to get a Revox B77, which can handle the 10.5" reels on which some of the shows remain untouched. A member of the Sunday Gummies, David Arias-Rios, who just retired as the morning voice of KONO in San Antonio, supplied me with an edit block, leader tape, and editing tape to pull together reels whose edits have separated because of age and chemistry.
My modified podcast would be individual episodes of Adams and Roebuck Minus One, me producing from old material and without Gregg, and American Radio Heritage, which would serve as a primer for appreciating the American art form of radio theater. Maintaining podcast availability costs money and the Patreon roster is still around six people, one of whom has an expired credit card so their subscription is not in force. Working within those means I can do programs (I'm looking at 90 minutes per) to put up on a podcast server that only allows five hours up at a time, then shift them into more permanent storage on archive.org.
So you will be able to tune in up to three podcasts at any given time, and what goes beyond that will be available on archive.org.
THE VIDEO PROJECT
I have the working outline of the PTSD section of my Haunted Recovery classes. There are six videos in the first series and PTSD is just the opening salvo.This blog entry is running on too long, so I'll talk about this next time.
WHAT I AM NOT DOING
I am not doing what I need to do to keep you informed. I will work on that. I always put my energy into doing the work. When I have products in the stream, I will push the Patreon more.One supported suggested I put the link on my posts to show what people can do to support this boil of projects. That I can do.
https://www.patreon.com/mdjoestuff
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