Fresh Prints (& Posters)!
I’m pleased to present the first advance art prints from Lullaby in Red, pairing my lyrics with Paige’s wonderful artwork. First is a 10” X 10” detail of the cutest bagpipe-playing cicadas. There’s also a 20” X 30” poster that will look familiar if you followed us on the Kickstarter last year. These are printed on demand on really good-quality paper to last a long time.
AND! For the first week both new prints are on sale for 20% off!
Find them in the Lullaby in Red Collection in the Jaycroft online shop.
La Peste
Do you remember, oh, roughly five years ago, all the memes floating around with the exhortation that now was the perfect time to write one’s magnum opus? Last fall the New Yorker somewhat prematurely took a gander at the literature actually produced during the “lockdown” period and declared that y’all are a bunch of slackers.
By way of refutation, here is my short list of recommended COVID-era works worth seeking out:
The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021, film) Joel Coen (Director)
Starring Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand
Visually stunning in black and white, Tragedy’s cinematography reflects the physical and emotional starkness that prevailed during COVID’s second wave, during which most of the production took place. Macbeth and Banquo stalk the moors as a vacant whiteness, from which the witches emerge like a Japanese ink painting, never appearing in the same frame as the actors who apprehend them. Interiors are undressed, the stone walls bare and echoing; the Macbeths preside over banquets where neither food nor plates arrive. (My first inkling that the pandemic was a thing to be taken seriously came when I arrived at my eye surgeon’s office to find it over the weekend stripped of magazines, brochures, coffee machine, any and all amenities that blunt the sharp corners of a clinical space and make it human.) In the film’s final shot, after Malcolm has been crowned and the succession restored, Ross gallops away in an explosion of crows with the boy Fleance, prophesied the founder of a new dynasty of kings. For all the talk of peace, Scotland’s future remains long years of bloody war.
Cavaet: the acting is very much of the Shouty Shakespeare school.
Glass Onion (2022, film) Rian Johnson (Director)
Starring Daniel Craig
While the rest of the world chafes at the strictures of social distancing and lockdown, a group of deliciously awful influencers gather on a billionaire’s private island for a murder mystery game that turns IRL deadly. Like Knives Out, the previous Benoit Blanc episode, Johnson uses traditional whodunnit tropes as a springboard to a more complicated story. There are flashbacks aplenty, POV shifts, and the editing itself becomes an unreliable narrator – or does it? If that sounds like ponderous going, it isn’t. The humor is brilliant, the dialog is fire, and the quantity of celebrity cameos gobsmacking. Johnson seizes the zeitgeist of the summer of our discontent and runs with it right up to the film’s satisfying catharsis. I saw this in the cinema and the atmosphere was electric with shocked laughter. No spoilers here, but – Hindenburg!
The Last Post (2020, podcast) Alice Fraser (Host)
From The Bugle podcast stable
A niche pod definitely worth seeking out. The premise was ambitious from the beginning: a satirical daily newscast from an alternate dimension similar to our own, but slowly and weirdly diverging over the course of a year. Enlivened by Alice Fraser’s signature wordplay, a rotating cast of co-hosts, and a faux advertising section featuring Half a Glass of Water and the latest literary offerings from self-published romance (with a supernatural twist!) author D’Ancey LaGuarde, the serial got off to a bang with news of the Atlantean continent of New New Zealand emerging from the waters east of Old New Zealand. Unfortunately the sinister octopus people bent on world domination found themselves upstaged in March when the pandemic hit simultaneously in both worlds. From that point on it was a scramble for Fraser and crew to keep the weirdness in the alternate dimension one step ahead of the weirdness running rampant in our own. By the end of the year the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and its running mate Wayne “The Rock” Johnson had won the U.S. presidential election, despite the former not being a citizen; Piers Morgan and Boris Johnson had jointly given birth to the Dragon of the Apocalypse, and the sole remnants of humanity were a handful of wealthy podcasters (yes, this universe seriously diverged from ours) ensconced in their bunkers or orbiting high above the Earth’s scorched surface. The Last Post ran daily throughout 2020, with a handful of episodes in 2021 forming a sort of post-apocalyptic coda.
Look also for spin-off “A Passion for Passion,” a delightful book collecting D’Ancey LaGuarde’s increasingly convoluted and unlikely cover blurbs.
Doctor Who: The Flux (2021, TV series) Chris Chibnail (Series writer/producer)
A destructive force of unknown origin sweeps across the Universe in waves. In its wake the bereft and sundered strive to reconnect, while Doctor Who’s baddie species – the Daleks, Sontarans, et al – take advantage of the devastation to expand their own empires. Meanwhile Earth cowers sunless behind a shield wall that eventually fails them. It’s wild that the Season 13 narrative arc was plotted in 2019, well before COVID-19 was a blip on anyone’s radar.
Filmed over 2020-2021, the fingerprints of the pandemic are all over this production. The UK’s strict social distancing rules meant that shooting was single-camera only. Crowds are non-existent, explained away by alien curfews and other plot devices. Actors double up on roles. Two conspirators meet – in the middle of a forest – and speak to each other exactly six feet apart. The sense of a melancholic, depopulated world couldn’t be starker.
What makes The Flux a quintessential pandemic work for me, though, is at the meta level. Chibnail has an unfortunate knack for introducing plots too complex for their runtime and trying to wrap them up in the last two minutes. Originally planned for eight episodes, pandemic funding cut this down to six, further compressing the denouement. When the big red reset button is pushed – as it inevitably is at the end of any Doctor Who doomsday story – it’s not clear what save point we’ve reset to. Has all the damage done by the Flux, the worlds erased, the lives taken, been reversed? Or has the destruction merely stopped, leaving the Doctor and companions to wander a now half-empty universe? Season 14 never answers that question. Dissatisfied, the fans argue amongst themselves what the hell, if anything, just happened. And isn’t that the most COVID thing of all.
New release on Smashwords
New short story on Smashwords!
I had some fun with this one. An historical fantasy - or rather a pre-historical fantasy. What might our earliest ancestors, applying their curiosity and intelligence to the world around them, have made of their dreams, illogical and insubstantial? Would it be foolish to act on them, or would that, in their world, make perfect sense?
There’s something about Doggerland - Europe’s prehistoric “Atlantis”, slowly drowned by sea level rise as the last Ice Age ended - that intrigues and fascinates. I’ve been enjoying the collection of essays in Doggerland: Lost World Under the North Sea edited by Luc Amkreutz & Asaja van der Vaart-Vershoof. Specialists, citizen scientists, and North Sea industrial concerns, working together, reveal new findings every day about the peoples who thrived here in the Mesolithic era. My story is set during a brief warming period the late Paleolithic, from which much less in the form of artifacts survives. But that’s the fun of speculative fiction - it’s speculative, and it’s fiction.
I made a thing!
Forging a hook at Desert Metal Craft
Just spent a rainy Friday evening at the forge at Desert Metal Craft in the heart of Tucson. Instructor Sean took us through the basics of blacksmithing, from square steel to fancy decorative hook in four hours. It’s a lot harder than it looks, and not because of any superhuman strength required. It’s skill and experience that makes the metal go in the direction the smith wants it, and makes it look pliable as putty to the gormless onlooker.
So anyway, I made a thing, and learned some things, including do not touch the hot thing! Can’t wait for my next class!
This is all part of research for the fantasy novel I’m working on. It’s a High Fantasy adventure seen through the eyes of the Commoners, with a splash of Hydropunk, plenty of family drama, dragons (of course) and maybe a capybara or two!
Working title? [smiles mysteriously] The Blacksmith.
Lullaby in Progress: an Update
Strawberry tart, Rhubarb scone, Apples on the hillside grown….
Last week Paige Ozma Ashmore took her beautiful artwork to be photographed at Davin Lavikka’s studio in Mesa - one more step, and a big one, on our road to bringing Lullaby in Red into reality as a book! My current plan is to do a limited print run around September of this year, and also offer it long-term as print-on-demand.
In the meantime, we are looking into making some of Paige’s illustrations available as posters for children’s playrooms, libraries, maybe your bedroom or living room? Watch this space to find out!
For those who have joined us recently, here’s a little promo video we put together last year. Unmute to hear the music!
Introducing NanCoin
Dear readers (and others), I am tickled pink to announce the next step beyond crypto: NanCoin, the imaginary currency! Forget cumbersome wallets and costly blockchain computations - NanCoin is 100% carbon neutral, because it’s powered entirely by your imagination! Forget your password? Misplace your retinas? Accidentally drop your hard drive in acid? No worries! You can’t ever lose your NanCoin, because it doesn’t exist – it’s imaginary!
FAQ
Q: Sounds great! How do I get in on the ground floor?
A: Easy peasy! You earned your first NanCoin just now, by reading this blog post.
Q: Can I earn additional NanCoins by reading your other posts?
A: Sure can! In fact, here’s another two NanCoins. Take as many as you like. It costs you nothing, and it certainly doesn’t cost me anything, because it’s imaginary!
Q: How much is a NanCoin worth?
A: It’s worth whatever goods or services someone will give you in exchange for imaginary money.
Q: How do I pay someone in NanCoin?
A: Easy – simply mime giving them coins and let your imagination do the rest!
Q: What if I tell someone I was paying them NanCoins, but imagine that I am keeping them instead?
A: That would be dishonest, but sure.
Q: Without a wallet, how do I keep track of how many NanCoins I have?
A: That’s your problem, not mine. Use your imagination.
Q: Is NanCoin legal tender?
A: lol no
Q: Is NanCoin tied to any real world currency?
A: I think you’re missing the point that this is imaginary.
Q: Is NanCoin FDIC insured?
A: I – M – A – G – I – N – A – R - Y
As I was saying…
Stellar’s Jay perched on a branch with red fruits.
Well, and here we all are, my friends. After the typewriters and photocopiers, after the VHS tapes, after the self-published CDs, the coffeehouse venues, the urban park music festivals. After the road trips and the late night runs to Denny’s and sneaking into the cemetery at night over the chain link fence when the gates were wide open. After dial-up bulletin boards, Usenet, GEnie, AOL, blogs, YouTube, and the glorious promise and ignoble dumpster fire of social media. After the adventures, the horseback riding, the SCUBA, the marathons, after I crashed out of a 27-year career of arguing with people about computers with a chronic back injury (mine, not the computers’).
After the loss of family and too many friends over the years.
This is my Act III. The creation of a new work of art, something that sparks joy, provokes thought, or provides release is a worthwhile endeavor in these times, even if it touches only one other person; that is what I now believe. Jaycroft will be the rallying point for all my creative endeavors from here on out. Please be patient with me as my back pain, which comes and goes, limits my screen time.
“In this world of hate and anger, when it’s easy to destroy,
Every act of creation is an act of joy!”