Get Your "Soul Cakes" Here!

If you've been around here for any length of time, you'll know that it's that soul cake time of year. If you haven't been around here, you're probably asking yourself, "What the hell is a soul cake?" Which is a very appropriate question since a soul cake is like a get-out-of-jail-free card but for Hell. Yes, a Get-Out-of-Hell-Free cake.

If you'd like to know more and see what they look like, you can go here and, for an actual recipe, here. They're pretty tasty treats.

Unfortunately, we didn't make any this year. It's just been that kind of year. Of course, we didn't make any last year, either, but that's because Sonoma county was on fire last year, and we just didn't do it. Of course, I am writing this ahead of Halloween, so I suppose we could still make some, but I don't think it's happening this year. If it turns out I'm wrong, I'll make pictures about it.

Anyway! Even though we didn't make any this year, you can still get yours by buying my story of the same title and which features soul cakes prominently. Come on, it's a Halloween story, and who doesn't need a Halloween story? NO ONE! That's who! So pick up your copy of What Time Is the Tea Kettle?... Oh, right! You get stories for the price of one! Because it's "What Time Is the Tea Kettle?" and "Soul Cakes"! What a bargain!

Come on, help a guy out. It's even got a flying cat! And, no, he wasn't launched from a catapult. He does the flying, of sorts, all on his own.

Look, I don't ask (tell) you guys to buy stuff from me very often, so pick up your copy today and READ it. It's fun!

Oh, and, hey! There's another story featuring the man and his cat coming soon!
Just soon, okay!
As soon as it's finished!

Tinged (pictures I like)

The Rest of the Year

the rest of the year...
It's going to be a BIT MEssY
somewhat
LIKE
this
post

Things are just...
>>>>>>>>>>busy<<<<<<<<<<
And I'm behind
on most things
BUT
specifically
the Blog
Because I keep it several weeks ahead most of the TIME
But tIime
caught up to me during all the stuff with the fires, and I've failed to get back ahead of things

SO
even though I don't have a specific
SCHEDULE
I do have a pattern
most of the time
but NOT through the end of the year

Also...
I'm working on beginning to sell off my comic book collection
right NOW
and that's taking a lot of tiMe
but
you know
if you want to buy some comic books
let me know

Power (part 4)

Theoretically, my wife was supposed to go to work. Theoretically, she was supposed to have been at work on Monday, too. She had almost gone on Monday, a half hour commute north, but had made the decision to work from home, something that hadn’t much happened due to the power loss and poor internet reception. It had been a good thing, though, because they had shut down the freeway north of us about half an hour after she would have arrived at work. The freeway was still shut down on Tuesday morning, so she would have been stuck there overnight with no way to communicate with us. That would have been a nightmare.


You can find the rest of this piece here:

Silent Night (part 3)

That said, Monday was a waiting game, like being stuck in traffic behind a terrible accident. But a terrible accident involving a bus full of people you know. All you can do is sit and wait to hear if there are casualties, but you know that emergency services are having difficulty getting there because of all the backed-up traffic.

All of our information was coming through the radio and my wife’s phone...


You can find the rest of this piece here:

The Red Glow in the Sky (part 2)

I left her to do the research on what was actually going on while I took the dog out. The dog, too, was up early and wanting to go out hours before she usually wants to do that. Agitated, I guess.

We, the dog and I, went out the door into the pre-dawn darkness and made our way to the end of the driveway and turned north to go up the sidewalk…

…and the sky glowed red against the black of night.

You can find the rest of this piece here:

A Piece of a Life (pictures)

The Smell of Smoke (part 1)

The smell of smoke was in the air. Strong, like sitting around a campfire, but the smoke haze in the air had no obvious source. I thought back to the plume of smoke we’d seen from the highway on the way home from the south Bay earlier in the day. Not that we’d agreed that it was smoke, but I’d thought it was smoke.

Still, as far as I could tell, there was nothing to see...



You can find the rest of this piece here:

It's so hot here... (pictures I like)

 ...the water's on fire!

Dream a Little Dream... Or a Big One

Do you have a "dream"?
Do you even know what that is or what it means?
Is it a dream or a fantasy?
Yeah, I want to make a difference between those things.

But first:

I've been doing this a while, now, the whole author thing and, with it, the blog thing. I've changed the way I blog since way back in the beginning when I used a lot of my time to go and search out other blogs and be very interactive in the whole blogging process. It's time consuming, and I got to a point where I had to ask the question about what my dream was: Was it to write or was it to blog? But that's beside the point, though worth noting. The short of that was that I changed the way I blog, and I no longer go out searching for new blogs by other authors to get involved with.

The point of me telling you that is that I want to note how few blogs show up in my blog feed each day, now. Back when I was being heavily involved in blogging, there would be dozens of blog posts in my feed each day. It was seriously difficult to keep up with. When I changed the way I blogged, I didn't stop following people (even if I did stop visiting all of them), so all of those posts still showed up in my feed each day. Now, though, today, there were only two new posts in my feed. Monday, the heaviest day of the week, there were only eight, and there were none from Saturday and Sunday. [All of these numbers are as I write this on Tuesday, August 16.] Days without posts used to never happen. Never.

Sure, some of the missing people moved onto other platforms (InstaTwitter or whatever), but many of them just gave up on writing. Probably most of them. Okay, actually very certainly most of them. If I go down my list of people who no longer blog, most of them no longer do anything. They just quit.

And that is because of the difference between a dream and a fantasy.

For our purposes, we're going to call a "dream" something you yourself can accomplish.
We're going to call a "fantasy" something that happens to you.

So you can have a dream of buying lottery tickets, but any thoughts of winning the lottery are fantasies. Winning the lottery is not something you can achieve; it can only happen to you. Likewise, you can have a dream of being a writer (because you can sit down and do that), but you can only have a fantasy about being a rich and famous writer. You can be the best writer in the world and never become rich and famous because, as with the lottery, that is mostly luck. Maybe completely.

The problem is that it's easy to subvert your dream with the fantasy. Those things can be easy to confuse. When you believe your dream is the fantasy, you can become disillusioned. I know of several writers who quit, just gave up on it, because, after publishing a couple of things, they didn't become household names. It was crushing to them, and they just quit writing. They had a fantasy of becoming rich and famous and allowed it to take the place  of their dream. That's a dangerous thing, allowing your fantasy to squash your dreams.

How do you deal with that kind of thing?

Well, the first way is to identify your dream and recognize the fantasy for what it is.

However, it is perfectly reasonable to have a dream of being "rich," but you need to identify that as your dream. Your actual dream. If that is your dream, you need to choose a path that enables you to work toward that as a dream and, let me just say, writing is a poor path to riches. Pun totally intended. You could even choose fame as a dream, I suppose, although fame is a very elusive thing, and you need to find avenues that lead to that more readily than writing. I would suggest giving Will Smith a call. Evidently, he followed a very specific plan to get to where he was in the 90s.

Now, I want to take all of this back a step farther: What is your real dream? I mean, writing is my dream, but there is a deeper dream, Let's call the dream the "deep magic," but there is a "deeper magic," the thing that supports the dream. That dream for me is the dream of leaving something behind. Something lasting. Something for my kids but also something that goes beyond just them and, in one way or another, everything I have done in my life has worked toward that.

Let me put it another way:

My grandfather was a great man. I'm going to go into why that is because 1. it would take too long and 2. it's unnecessary to what I'm going to say. He was a great man but, once I and the rest of his grandchildren are dead, there will be nothing left of him. Nothing beyond a notation in a genealogy file somewhere. And a birth certificate. Nothing that anyone will ever take note of in the future. Even the farm he poured his sweat into and the house he helped build are all gone now, burned to nothing in the wild fires that swept through East Texas a few years ago.

I don't know what kinds of dreams my grandfather had; he was more than a little laconic. But it makes me sad that he will be forgotten one day. I want to leave something behind, and my writing serves that dream.

It's not that I have a dream of being the Shakespeare of the age. Or, even, the Tolkien. Or, even, the Lewis. But I would be more than happy with being a MacDonald. See, you people don't even know who that is, do you? Here, I'll help: George MacDonald. See, it doesn't matter how unheard of he is for the most part, because his books are still out there and he still influences people. Probably in more ways than we can even imagine.

So, yeah, I choose the dream of writing to fulfill the dream of leaving something behind that lasts. And, well, if fame and riches follow, well, that's a nice fantasy, but it has nothing to do with my dream.

So what is your dream? Is it small or is it big? And can you separate it from fantasy?




"'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains.

Controlled Burn (pictures I like)

The Sky Is Still on Fire (pictures I like)

More Fire in the Sky (pictures I like)

Abandoned Places: Loudoun Castle Theme Park

Once billed as "Scotland's Best Family Theme Park," Loudoun Theme Park has been silent for nearly half a decade, many of its attractions sold or removed. The theme park was built behind Loudoun Castle, the interior of which was destroyed by fire in 1941. The chair-o-plane ride, The Plough,

was one of the largest in the world. In 2007, one of the ride operators of The Rat, a roller coaster, went onto the tracks to give the cars a boost. When it started going, rather than let go, he held onto the rear car all the way up to the top of the hill where he finally let go, plunging 80 feet to his death. The park itself became a casualty of the economy in 2010.

All images used Creative Commons License Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 2.0 Generic. All images by Charles Graham [Clyde_REV / Flickr].

As an added bonus, here are some pictures of another jail: Lorton Reformatory.
Located in Lorton, VA, the prison was built due to an investigation into the horrible conditions of prisons in Washington D.C. It closed in 2001 and is now part of the D.C. Workhouse and Reformatory Historic District. [All photos used by permission from Opacity.

Abandoned Places: Darul Aman Palace

The "Abode of Peace" was built in the 1920s by King Amanullah Khan to help bring Afghanistan into the modern age. Intended as the seat of parliament, it was part of a plan to build a new capital city. However, religious conservatives forced Amanullah out of power and halted his plans. The building sat used. In 1969, the palace caught on fire, but it was restored as the operating seat of the Defense Ministry... until it was set fire to again in 1978 during the communist coup. However, it was once again restored and used until the early 90s when it was heavily shelled by the Mujahideen during the Soviet invasion. It now sits as a gutted ruin, the modern future it was erected to usher in has never been seen.

Here's an added bonus:
The abandoned Dixie Brewery in New Orleans, Louisiana.

[The final four pictures are by Cody Allison and used under the Creative Commons License.]

And one more: the Devil's Slide, California bunker from World War II.

One more bonus!
FREE! today: indie writers monthly Vol. 1, Iss. 2

Go pick it up! Did I mention it's FREE!?

Redneck Fun Part One (a Fair post)

The County Fair came through here recently. We try to go to the Fair every year although I'm not always sure why. It's way friggin' more expensive than it's worth, and the kids do their best to make it as unenjoyable as possible most of the time. But, still, every year, we forget about the pain of the previous year and drag ourselves out to it. We went twice this year: once to look at stuff and once for rides. I do have to say that the first trip, the trip to look at stuff, was quite a lot of fun.

Let me sidestep a moment. I grew up in the 70s. The 70s birthed a lot of weird things: disco, bell bottom jeans (really?), and cars smashing into each other. When I was a kid, we called the car thing "crash 'em up derbies." I never got to go to one. I did, however, own a couple of zip racer cars (one red, one blue) that blew up when they crashed into things. The hood and doors and stuff would fly off, and you could put them on so that they cars looked new or crashed. I loved those cars. Then we moved and the cars disappeared, so I think my mom probably trashed them, but, anyway...

There was a demolition derby at the Fair this year. Maybe there's always one; I have no idea. Somehow, though, the topic of the demolition derby came up between my kids and their grandparents which spilled over to us and my declaration of, "I've never been to one of those." I don't quite understand why these statements of mine generate the kind of "What? You've never..." reactions that they do, but that is what it is I guess. So, much like last year's "I've never been to Disneyland" generated a trip to Disneyland, this year's statement of "I've never been to a demolition derby" generated a family trip to see cars smash each other to pieces.

It was way more fun than I expected. And full of the kind of people I grew up with, which are not the kind of people you really associate with Sonoma County, but there they were. A whole stadium full of people chugging beer and... well, I don't know. It just felt like watching the people in the "beer garden" at Shreveport Captains games when I was in high school (because watching the people in the beer garden was usually more entertaining than watching the games). I have to say, though, that by the end, the big finale of the event, my wife and I were rooting just as loudly as anyone. Because, see, we'd bet each other which car was going to win.

Before I go on, how about some pictures of the event (because, yes, I took my camera (who's surprised?))?

The cars coming out for the first round elimination event.

Round 1 gets started.

Things start to heat up.

And I do mean heat up. That's smoke, not dust.

That's 300 about to plow into the burning 69. (That sounds dirty, doesn't it?)

The shark car lost a tire...

...but kept driving anyway, which is fairly impressive, especially considering that he did pretty well.

But he didn't win. Some of the losers being towed from the field, which is a pretty good indication that you didn't win.

However, there was one guy that, after being declared winner, had his car give out on him, which had to be towed from the field. That was the end of round two, I think. Then, in round three, pretty much any cars that were able to make it back to the field were allowed to compete.

What's amazing to me is how quickly these guys were able to repair their cars and get them back out to compete. They were literally (and I don't mean in that in the sense of the new google definition, either) pounding their cars back into shape with sledgehammers in order to make repairs on the engines and stuff.

Exciting bits:

• The shark car (42) lost a tire and kept competing.
• Another car (I don't remember the #, but maybe I will find it when I go through the rest of the pics for the next post) broke the front axle but continued to drive around on it for a while. When it got towed away, though, the whole thing flopped down and dragged on the ground.
• Cars caught on fire. Occasionally, this meant they had to wave the red flag to start the derby so that fire extinguishers could be brought in. Let me just say: it's hard to get the drivers' attentions during something like that.
• Which brings me to the guy that got trapped in his burning car and couldn't get out because they were being unable to get the drivers to notice the red flag. Finally, they blared some big horn, the guy jumped out of his car, and they put it out.
• Sometimes, after they put a car out, the driver would start it back up and get back into it. Crazy!
• If a bumper fell off of a car, they would stop what was going on long enough to go out and retrieve it, which they didn't do for other parts of the cars. However, bumpers, depending upon how they were run over, could come up through the bottoms of the cars and seriously injure (or KILL) the driver.

Next time I'll tell you all about the finale and show you some more pictures.

Okay, wait. Here's that car being towed off the field in the middle of round two. This was the only car they stopped the derby to tow out, I guess, because it was blocking too much of what was going on. Notice the front, passenger tire dragging the ground.