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Posts published in “Writing”

The Black Laser Reads: Episode 5 – In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway

One of the struggles with The Black Laser Reads is to find material that feels modern. It’s really easy to find old-fashioned texts with too many semicolons, but the nature of copyright law means that recent materials are pretty rare. Just the nature of time, I suppose.

To my surprise, the original 1924 version of Ernest Hemingway’s first “novel” In Our Time came into the public domain a few years ago. It’s not really a novel, more of a collection of vignettes. I wouldn’t even call them short stories. They’re at most a couple pages long. But here is a piece of writing with a distinctly modern feel and which presents a new challenge for my narration skills.

I think I gave it a different feel, too. It was nice to read something where I didn’t have to worry about running out of breath mid-sentence. I hope you enjoy listening.

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The text for this episode came from Project Gutenberg. If you are interested in reading In Our Time yourself, you can download a public domain e-book here.

Next time on The Black Laser Reads: something distinctly unmodern.

Some creative thinking for the dawn of 2024

Happy New Year, everyone! I was fumbling around the internet recently and came across a post on Fstoppers that provides a framework about how to process your creative output from last year and your creative goals for this year. I thought it would be fun and interesting to go through this list here to share with you all.

Note that I am going to change some of the photography-specific language in the questions to be broad. I’m a photographer, sure, but I’m also a bunch of other things all lumped together.

Ok? Ok! Cool! Let’s get going.

  1. On a scale of 1 to 10 how do you feel about your year as a creator?

    Pretty iffy, overall. I posted 18 times here for the entirety of 2023: 8 were photos of my kids, 4 were TBLR posts, leaving just 6 that were actual writing. Not so great? But I did restart my TBLR project and am pretty happy with how that’s going. There’s been a bit of a lull through the holidays and all that business, but I have one in process that will go up soon. So that’s fun. I also have six more Failure States planned for when I feel like wallowing a bit.

  2. What is one big lesson you learned as an artist this year?

    I wish I could say I learned something, but I am not sure what that would be? I haven’t pushed myself too hard this year. Granted we had a baby which took up a whole lot of time between January and the summer, but that’s not a good excuse. The honest truth is that I just didn’t make much time to be creative this year. Anxiety, depression, shit even just distraction. I’ve been not so good for myself this year as with many other years.

  3. Glance through your calendar for this year, are you happy with how you invested your time? Why or why not?

    Not really. I spent a lot of time in 2023 dicking around and not getting too much done. Not that my value is determined by my output, but there was quite a lot of time that I spent messing around that I could have used better. I log all the time I do professional creative work in a notebook that sits on my desk. For a good part of the year I also logged the time I did personal creative work, but that sort of dropped off. I suppose that I subconsciously felt ashamed or something about how little time I was logging for it. Kind of silly. I should probably start logging it again this year.

  4. What piece or series was the best one you produced this year, and why was it the best?

    I guess we can call this the resurrected The Black Laser Reads. I’ve been thinking about this for years but never felt like I had the technical skill to execute in a way I would have felt good about. But over the last two years or so I’ve been recording a lot of voice over auditions and learning a lot about processing audio for that purpose. Suddenly, this year, I realized I actually do have the skill to execute TBLR v2 in a manner up to my standards. That is pretty satisfying. I have so many books in line. I could fill my entire year just reading for TBLR and do nothing else. A bit of a trap there, actually.

  5. Evaluate your [output]. Are your pieces where you want them to be artistically? Technically?

    Nah, they never are. My work can always be better. I think, for me, that artistic and technical quality go hand-in-hand. If one isn’t in place, then the whole work is a bit of a failure. I always try to accomplish both and consider both in the evaluation of the work after releasing it to the world. And I am not writing nearly enough. Not nearly enough.

  6. What do you like about your [work]? What do you dislike about [it]?

    I like the creation of it. I like the feeling of focusing on a project and doing my best to make sure it comes out well. But I wish it were more varied. I love my kids, but I’d like to take photos of something that’s not just them. I love reading audiobooks, but I also need to be writing for myself. And I have some video work planned that I can’t get off the ground for schedule, childcare, and financial reasons. A lot of things I’d like to have done, but did not do for a lot of reasons that just feel like silly excuses no matter how real they are.

  7. Are you producing great work, mediocre work, expected work, innovative work, or poor work and why?

    Somewhere between good and average. Above average, perhaps?

  8. What did you accomplish this year that you are most proud of?

    I kept my kids alive and they are nice people. That’s it.

  9. What are you most disappointed about from this past year as a creator?

    It’s been a bit of a creative wash. A lot of attempts, a lot of struggle, a lot of effort and thought and learning and support work, but not a lot of results. Frustrating.

  10. What is one thing you want to stop doing (1), start doing (2), and continue doing (3) in 2024?

    First, I’d like to stop sabotaging myself and cutting myself so much slack. Do I need to drink a couple glasses of wine or beers at the end of the night? No, not at all. Do those things affect me? Sure! They definitely allow me to convince myself with excuses and they affect my sleep which makes the early mornings pretty useless. This isn’t even really about alcohol dependence or some feeling that I am an addict. I don’t feel that way. But I do think I could be better about saving that sort of thing for times where it makes sense and not rely on it as a way to blow off steam at the end of the night. Even if I knock out 30 minutes of work that I wouldn’t have done otherwise, that is a positive outcome. This was one of my major takeaways from our most recent Whole30.

    Second, I’d like to start writing fiction again. When we were living in my mother in law’s basement before Sarah gave birth to the triplets, I started a story that I quite liked. I worked on it until Penny and Bea came home from the NICU, but really lost the emotional steam for it when Olive’s health took a downward turn. In fact, that story has opened automatically every time I’ve opened Scrivener since then. That’s like 3 years now. That’s a lot of auto-openings. I need to get back to it. There’s no craft that I enjoy as much as writing stories, but there’s also no craft I feel quite so unsure, so unconfident, so weird about. That feeds into a lot of fear and guilt and other stupid, self-defeating nonsense. I just need to rip off that bandaid and build some momentum.

    I think the best way to do this is to set a real schedule for myself. For the last few weeks I have been deliberately waking up earlier. Trying to retrain my sleep schedule. Once in my younger adulthood, the middle of the night was a fertile creative time. Now, however, in my early forties with three children that just isn’t true anymore. It took me a while to realize this. No, that’s not quite right. It took me a while to admit this to myself. Hence the deliberate schedule shift. My goal is to get to the point where I can wake up early, spend an hour writing, and then engage with my day as a stay at home dad. Because that’s my life. I need to make it work. I want to make it work. The time for it is now.

    I’d also like to take photos of stuff again. I feel like I’ve fallen into glorified snapshot mode, which is fine, but is not creatively rewarding. I am still going to take too many photos of my kids, of course, but I would like to also take photos of stuff that’s not my kids. You get it.

    Third, I’d like to continue with TBLR and Failure State. Those are fun projects that I can work on when I am not fresh. That is, late at night, after a long day of small children screaming for my attention. I can absolutely zone out and edit mouth noises out of my performance of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” while exhausted. No problem at all. What I can’t do in that state is form compelling thoughts and ideas and then translate them into words. Best to use that time of the day for projects that don’t require 100% of my processing power.

So that’s about it. Some optimization for this coming year. Some places I’d like to put more juice. You know what would also be great? Getting a job. Or jobs. I’ve been seriously underemployed since Verdant collapsed and that is driving me nuts. But I’ll save that for Failure State: Verdant Construction whenever I get around to writing that.

A Great Discworld ReRead & Read

I love Discworld. A lot.

I was first introduced to Terry Pratchett through Good Omens in the late 90s. I’d been a big fan of Hitchhiker’s Guide so the humor spoke to teenage me. Good Omens is great. One of very few books I’ve read more than once. But I didn’t really know anything about the Discworld series. Not that there was a good way to learn about things like that besides word of mouth, stumbling on them in a bookstore or library, or maybe some cruddy Geocities website.

I learned about the books from a TA at a summer film program I attended at the Maine Photographic Workshops and it sort of blew my mind. An entire series like the Hitchhiker’s Guide, but longer and about fantasy? Written by one of the guys who wrote Good Omens? Fantastic! Getting the books was a little tougher, though.

This was an era before easily accessible electronic copies of books and most of the older Discworld books were out of print in the US or hard to find. And I certainly wasn’t going to start somewhere in the middle of the series like some insane person with no respect for order. But then Harper Collins started reprinting mass market paperback versions in chronological order.

That meant the time was right. So I dug in! For years, from the reprinting of Color of Magic in 2000 , I’d pick up the next Discworld book as it was reprinted or printed in the US, careful to read them only in original publication order.

If you ask people, they’ll often recommend you start with some of the later books and then only return to the early ones if you find you’ve become a fan. Nonsense. I think the beginning is the best place to start. You really get to see Pratchett come into his own not only as a writer but also as the creator of a world that starts as a sort of send-up of sword and sorcery tropes but becomes a rich, living, satirical thing of its own that is unlike just about anything else in modern fiction.

Discworld is silly. Discworld is exciting. Discworld is profound.

Discworld is great. I love Discworld.

I’ve wanted to start at the beginning again, reread the ones I’ve read already, and finally read the ones I haven’t. About a year ago I had the idea to start collecting Kindle versions as they went on discount and would work my way through as they became available. By the beginning of 2024, I’d collected three books: The Color of Magic (Discworld 1), Hogfather (Discworld 20), and Raising Steam (Discworld 40). Ok. A start. It’s probably going to take me a long time.

And then yesterday I found that Humble Bundle is selling 39 of the 41 Discworld books for the price of a burger and a beer. It might be the universe’s biggest no-brainer. How could I possibly say no to this?

Sure, the books activate on the Kobo store (what?). Sure, it’s missing the graphic novel The Last Hero and Raising Steam (the latter of which I already have). Sure, Humble Bundle is kind of sketchy now. But almost all the books? In one place? For eighteen stupid dollars?

Done.

I spent about 2 hours converting the files with Calibre and then sending them off to my Kindle for the sheer convenience of having them all in one place with all my other ebooks. Time consuming, sure, but easy and didn’t require a ton of thought. A little metadata clean up here, find new cover artwork there, and boom! All done.

Now I can reread and read the whole series. So follow along with me as I work my way through forty Discworld books over the next few years. I’ll give each a write up here as a way to stay honest about my progress. Honestly, I am pretty excited about it. If you love Discworld, or are at all curious about it, I encourage you to read along with what is sure to be a wild ride. Should be fun!

The Black Laser Reads: Episode 4 – Dagon by HP Lovecraft

On this episode of The Black Laser Reads we feature the short story Dagon by everyone’s favorite problematic weirdo, HP Lovecraft.

Content warning: Suicide.

This is a classic Lovecraftian story where not very much happens but for some reason the narrator grapples with maintaining his sanity. Really. Dude wakes up on a muddy plane covered in rotting fish, finds a rock that’s carved with fish people, and sees a giant fish monster climbing around. He wakes up in San Francisco and decides to end it.

That’s it!

Light weight, overall, but important for introducing the fish people who would become so important in later Cthulhu mythos tales like Lovercraft’s later The Shadow Over Innsmouth. We’ll get to that one another day. Ultimately, like most of Lovecraft’s work, this story is about the vibe.

Please listen and enjoy, unless you value your sanity.

The text for this episode came from Standard Ebooks. If you are interested in reading “Dagon” or other Lovecraft short fiction yourself, you can download a public domain e-book here.

The Black Laser Reads: Episode 3 – The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

This time on The Black Laser Reads we are digging into Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s classic gothic horror tale of postpartum depression, internalized misogyny, and gaslighting from an era which predates all those terms.

I like this story a lot. I first encountered it in my creative writing class at Cabrillo College just before the pandemic. It’s clever and effective and efficient. There is not an extra word in the whole story. And, while it was originally published in 1892, it still feels quite modern. The language didn’t give me nearly the challenge that Bartleby did.

Please listen and enjoy.

The text for this episode came from Project Gutenberg. If you are interested in reading “The Yellow Wallpaper” yourself, you can download a public domain e-book here.

The next couple episodes are probably going to be on the shorter side with the holidays coming up, but if I can find some time, I’ve got something special in my pocket. Come back and check it out!

The Black Laser Reads: Episode 2 – Bartleby The Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street by Herman Melville

This time on The Black Laser Reads we visit Herman Melville’s classic tale of capitalist woe “Bartleby the Scrivener”. You didn’t think we were the first generation to feel ground to death under the heel of our economic system, did you?

You might have read this story in high school English, as I did, and not realized how funny it was. A quick scan of the Goodreads reviews reveals a bunch of readers taking this story very seriously. But I think it’s actually quite humorous, especially in the contrast between the narrator’s uppity opinions of himself and his staff and the reality betrayed by their actions.

I tried to inject a little personality into the performance of this one. It’s easy to lose that in the old fashioned writing style, but there’s plenty of it in the text if you can coax it out a little (and deal with all the commas and semi-colons). It was certainly lost on me the first time I read the story as a 16 year old or whatever back in the 1900s. It was a pleasant discovery as I looked through texts for my next read.

Listen and enjoy.

I apologize to my British readers for Turkey’s accent. I did my best. I will work on it for the future.

The text for this episode came from Project Gutenberg. If you’d like to read “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street” yourself, you can find it here.

I’ve got a nice spooky one lined up for next time. If you’d like to be notified when it comes out, subscribe to e-mail notifications and you don’t even need to remember to check. It just shows up! Easy!

The Black Laser Reads: Episode 1 – The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe

Welcome to the inaugural post of the rebooted The Black Laser Reads, a series of audiobooks recorded by yours truly all sourced from the public domain. I attempted this project once before way back in 2011, but I was never happy with the recording quality or the performance. Fly forward 12 years with me and I’ve practiced a ton, figured out how to record myself in much higher quality, and gotten excited for the project all over again.

I even designed a sweet new logo for the series!

Nice, right?

We’re beginning with an old standby: Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”. This selection was partly inspired by Criterion Channel’s Roger Corman/Vincent Price/Poe retrospective they put up in September (excellent watching all of them) and my simmering hype for the new Mike Flanagan show premiering later this month. Poe seemed a natural start. Plus, Poe was the first one I read in the old version of The Black Laser Reads and who doesn’t love a callback?

Please listen and enjoy.

If you enjoyed it, leave a comment and tell me. If you hated it, leave a comment also! I have tons of texts lined up for this series, and not just short stories. And if you want me to read something from the public domain specifically, let me know.

A huge thanks to Standard Ebooks for providing the text I used in this performance. I mean, they didn’t directly do anything for me, but they do provide an incredible resource for anyone interested in classic ebooks. Really. Go check them out. Fantastic site.

And if you are interested in reading some more Poe yourself, this is the collection I read from.

Failure State – Confidence

We could also call this “Failure State – Believing in Myself” but it’s not quite as snappy, is it? “Failure State – The Ability to Think My Decisions Are Good Decisions and Not Bad Decisions”.

“Failure State – Feeling Good About The Creative Choices I Make”.

Nah. None of that is good. Let’s go with “Confidence”.

You know that feeling when you’ve been working on something creative and literally at no point at all through the entire process do you feel good about it? Not like the work itself is stupid, but more like you’re stupid? Like, somehow, you totally misunderstood the assignment and you’re spending all this time making something that completely misses the mark creatively, intellectually, and spiritually? You know how you feel that feeling all the time about everything you make?

Good. I’m glad it’s not just me. I feel this way about literally everything I’ve ever made, professionally and personally. My whole career. Everything. The entire time. And I’ve spent most of my adult life working in a creative field! Even when we were doing the greenhouses, I felt this way. I’ve never not felt this way about something. Can you relate?

Worse is that this feeling puts me on edge like crazy. I’m so worried that I am making a dumb mistake that my anxiety spikes and I work myself into a sulky mess. The anxiety also really slows down my progress while I spin out about whether or not I am metaphorically shitting the bed. What a colossal waste of energy.

For example, just yesterday I received a very nice compliment from someone to whom I sent an audition for a VO project. She didn’t need to say anything to me about it. It could have just gone out there into the void like 99% of auditions do to never be heard about again. But, instead, she took time to tell me something nice about the work I put into it. It was really nice! And I really appreciated it! And she absolutely did not need to do it! And what did I say back to her? Just look!

What the actual fuck, Joe. How about a “Thank you!” or a “That’s awesome! I am glad she liked it!”

No.

Instead I offered a self-deprecating joke and then totally hammered it home because I felt weird. Slick, dude. So slick. Then I spent the whole rest of the day thinking about—and feeling bad about—this exchange. So bad, in fact, that I am now writing this post.

I’m not worried about the person who sent me the text and this weird little exchange having some effect on our relationship. We’ve known each other for a long time. It’s totally fine. But, man, am I a doofus sometimes. Like, just be gracious and take the W, dude.

Maybe allow that there is a chance, however slim, that you are actually ok at some stuff and just have faith in yourself? Maybe just a little bit? A teeny tiny bit? A speck of faith?

With professional creative work, I grind and I spin and I torment myself until the deadline comes and it’s time to present the project. I am sure I’ve written about this here before. I make my presentation with this profound shrugging feeling inside my soul that screams “I have no idea if this is good or right or if I’ve completely misunderstood and fucked it up but here it is and oh god I’ll never work again”. And boy does that suck a whole lot. I experience this every time I start a project. And, if I am being honest with myself and with you, the feeling has led me to actually fuck up some projects because I was so far inside myself that I couldn’t put one foot in front of the other to get the thing done correctly. I couldn’t put the right amount of effort in with the time allotted. And those regrets haunt you. I always want to do a good job, but sometimes I get in my own damn way.

And with personal works? Forget about it. As soon as this rears it’s hideous, malignant head the project stops. If I could share with you all the sheer mountain of aborted projects littering my projects archive, you would go mad in the face of true hopelessness. A thousand thousand projects—good ideas all!—begun and abandoned because deep in my heart I truly believe that everything I make is trash and that no one will ever want to read/watch/listen to them.

For the projects that do meet completion, by the time they are finished I have spent so much time feeling weird and uncomfortable about them that I can never see them in a good light. Even when they are good, like the audition I wrote about above. And this feeling of… shame? embarrassment? uneasiness? none of those are right, but you get the idea. This lingering, haunting feeling impedes me standing behind my work or promoting myself with any real vigor. This has been a major professional failing that we will discuss in further depth another day.

I am always in awe of people who can really promote themselves and the effort they’ve put into a project. It’s impressive! I wish I had even a tiny ounce of that, but I don’t. I can feel the inside of my chest just crawling thinking about it. The most self-promotion I can stomach is the occasional post here on The Black Laser and that is insufficient.

Another recent example I can’t stop thinking about. Ever since Verdant folded, I’ve been picking up freelance video edit projects to try and pay for my kids and life and stuff. It has been pretty tough because I live in Delaware and everything is remote. The time gap between the last time I was active and now is quite long, so people have moved on and I am out of their minds. Normal stuff. I sent an email to someone I used to work with to let them know I am on the market and looking. I made a mention in the e-mail of how awkward I find that sort of inquiry e-mail. And while that is completely true, why the hell did I write that? Why self-deprecate at all? All it does is feed the void and that’s not helpful at all. Does this person now think I find them awkward? I don’t. I really just want to work. But I couldn’t help writing some dumb ass shit because I felt nervous about representing myself and, God forbid, asking for something. I wrote that e-mail in May. I never received a reply. I think about it every single day.

Yet things do get finished. Otherwise there would be nothing here for you to read and I’d have starved to death ages ago. Worry not for things will continue to get finished for as long as I am making things. I am more than three decades into feeling like this and I don’t see it letting up any time soon. Just have to live with it and work through it.

Download the audio for this post.