The Vase - Waiting for the Big Five

Since my book The Vase is in Limbo right now I have options. Go with my current publisher, Knox Robinson, (nope). Go with my other current publisher, Melange Books, (nope). Find another POD publisher, like its former publisher Penumbra, (nope). Self publish, (nope). Don't publish it, (nope), or once again try for the Big Five, (yes). But that takes an agent and agents are not interested in a nobody like me. Yes, but there are ways around that.

So I will examine publication via non-agent access to the Big Five publishers. It will be a last ditch effort on my part. At the same time, I will be undergoing a last ditch effort in my music. I'm at that age, I guess, where everything is a last ditch effort. My kids are in high school and college now, so even that part of my life is in its later stages.

Here's to hoping things work out.

Music Getting Closer to Being Posted

The last couple of weeks has seen a lull in my story writing. Back to school is in progress, of course, and I'm loving being back in the classroom. That never meant I didn't have time write, but with the recent completion of my latest book, John Dunn: Heart of a Zulu, I'm slow to proceed with my next.

I'm more inspired to get back to my music. It's like a cyclic thing for me. I go through phases I guess. It was all about drawing and painting for a long while. Then sculpture. Then music. Then writing books. Now back to music. It was during my music phase I had written quite a lot of songs about ten to twenty years ago. Some of those songs can be dismissed, sure, but some, I don't mind saying, were quite good. Especially my last two "albums."

I had not named my first eleven "albums", which were a collection of about ten songs each album. I considered ten songs to be about what would constitute an album from those years ago when albums used to be vinyl. Now albums are CDs, I think, or are those now obsolete too?

Whatever, I wrote songs in about groups of ten or so, and called it an "album." I only named them Volumes 1 though 11, until I wrote volume 12, and it contained an outer space type theme. Much like the individual songs Rocket Man  and Space Oddity, by Elton John and David Bowie respectively, which are just that, individual songs, albeit great ones, and worldwide hits. My Volume 12 is a collection of ten songs that has a space theme, too, so I call it Rockin' the Cosmos.

And the lyrics to Rockin' the Cosmos can be found right here on the blog. My next goal, at this point, is to see if I can post the entire collection of music onto the blog. Never mind that the vocals are horrible, which I readily admit. Singing is the one thing I readily admit I cannot do. But even so, I do it. Why? Because I have that much confidence, not in my singing, but in my music. I really believe the songs are good. So I will post them.

But therein lies the problem. I don't know how. But I know people. People who know how. And once those people have time, they will come and help me. I've already converted all my songs into mp3 formats, which was the first step. Well, the first step was actually recording the music. Which I did more than ten years ago. But that was on cassette tape. It was recently I did the second step. Converting the cassettes to CDs. Then the third step was transferring the music from the CDs onto my computer, and then the fourth step was converting the songs into mp3 formats.

Now, the fifth step will be posting the music right here onto the blog. Can't wait.

Aberrant Wave of Horrible Heat

I used that phrase, "aberrant wave of horrible heat" in my book, The Vase. It was published some years ago, but it's now unpublished due to the publisher going out of business. I'm hoping to find another publisher, this time one of the Big Five, even.

But speaking of aberrant waves of horrible heat, that's what I'm experiencing right now in the Bay Area. Heat in the triple digits in early September, I'm hearing is record setting heat, and I used that phrase often in The Vase too.

In the story in The Vase, the people in Nazareth, Israel were experiencing their own aberrant waves of horrible heat, and as I explain in the book it was due to unusual geomagnetic storms in the earth's atmosphere, which were caused by solar winds generated by solar flares erupting on the surface of the sun.

Yeah, that's a lot of solar activity for one day, but it's not just one day in which it occurs. It occurs over several months, even years, and it's an eleven year cycle called solar maximum. You learn that through research, and it's all in the book. You see, ultra concentrations of electromagnetic radiation also are spewed forth from the sun which makes its way into the earth's atmosphere, and seeing as how its this type of radiation that powers the audio/video recordings and playbacks of recent technologies, it's all fitting for the holograms that are projected from the ancient vases in a Palestinian potter's ceramic shop.

Throughout the story line the heat is atrocious, and I'm finding out for myself just what it feels like to live through that kind of heat. Friday, it was 107 degrees and Saturday it was 108. Let's see how hot it gets today. I think maybe I'll join the thousands at Santa Cruz. Just for some relief.

But it got me to thinking about The Vase. I'm still hoping an agent will pick it up, and shop it to the Big Five. Fingers crossed on that. We'll see.