Hiatus

I'm taking a break, a hiatus. You know, I started reading the greatest writers of sci fi and horror when I was a kid. True sci fi is not just the subgenre of Star Wars. True sci fi reflects back to us who we are and who we can be. It gives us a glimpse into the future showing us our potential, the potential for good and bad, and our worst nightmares so if and when they happen? We c an be forewarned and forearmed.

What I've seen in today's America is not good. It is what I read in the dystopian sci fi of the past by people like Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Ray Bradbury, Philip K Dick, and others. So when you see it all around you, when you feel it and your skin crawls, you recognize it. When others support it and gaslight you that you are the problem, that you are just hateful, stupid, or divisive, it hurts, and it's wrong.

And so I am taking a hiatus here because America is quickly becoming "Amerika" under Donald Trump. A sad manufactured reality for the benefit of a few and powerful. American kleptocrats with the help of Russian Oligarchs like Putin and his intelligence and organized crime machine.

This isn't conjecture, it's not theatre or fantasy It's hardcore fact supp[orted by our own intelligence community Donald Trump disrespects and tries to subjugate to his ill will. While even that of intel from our friends worldwide try to warn us, to help us, and Trump dumps on them, distances himself from them and more closely associated with those who we know to be autocratic and criminally inspired and oriented. 

"Pres." Trump is making US into a closer example of Putin's Russia day by day. 

The world is happier and better without autocrats, oligarchs, and kleptocrats. These are bad guys and yet their supporters have been groomed not to see it. Trump supporters now see reality through the lens Donald Trump touts and projects, and whines about on Twitter and from his illiberal bully pulpit of the Oval Office. 

We are being abused. And lied to. So yeah, I'm taking a break. I've had enough for a while. I'm sickened by the road Trump and his Trump Popularist Party (once the GOP) has put us on and even THEY are sick of it as more and more Republicans speak out against Trump and join supporting the opposition party and Joe Biden. Myself, I'd have preferred Bernie Sanders, but I'll vote for Biden. Because we have to at this point. 

There is a mistaken belief that I, or many of the non-Trump, non-Trump Populist Party (the "TPP" as the "GOP" or old "Republican Party" are now defunct), or conservatives, are hated by us. I hate no one. But I also do not like criminal or criminal aligned people or party's in our government, especially our White House. 

Once back to reality and decency, I will again appreciate whatever party remains to rightfully and democratically oppose the Democratic Party. For those pointing out faults in the DNC, anything can be made better, but in comparison to the RNC, well, there is no comparison as that party has killed itself off since the early 90s and the efforts of Newt Gingrich to win at any or all costs to any or all others than themselves.

When we are wrong, we should lose and that is considered anathema to the conservatives of this country now. And that is a crime and treason. 

I'll be working on finalizing two new books of my previously published and unpublished horror and sci fi short stories and one novella ("The Unwritten"):

"Anthology of Evil II", and...

"Anthology of Evil II, The Unwritten a novella"

Coming soon. 

I just need to take a breath from this madness. I have high hopes for us still though. It's obvious the majority of America does not want this president or support the once "Republican Party", the once "Grand Old Party", the now-dead "GOP", which is now the Trump Populist Party...built on Putin's suggestions and model of abusing the country you are supposed to be leading.

Speaking of horror, here's my new cover. From photos taken in Bremerton, Washington by Gordon Hayes, format by myself with help from artist Marvin Hayes:

Cheers! All the best America! 

In Memory, Yet Crystal Clear, A New Audiobook

It is finally UP and Available to the public on Amazon, Audible and iTunes:

Original artwork by Marvin Hayes

In Memory, Yet Crystal Clear. The title, an homage to science fiction writer Isaac Asimov's 1979 first autobiography which I found so affective and orienting to me as a writer, In Memory Yet Green.

My story is a tale of how a dystopian society comes to be through the efforts on a single man who takes over much of America's thinking through his managing their daily feed of information.

Sound familiar? Seem a bit too real? A bit too much like today? It is. But this is a reality we can easily escape, simply by finishing listening to or reading the story.

From the Amazon description:

A short story about a world reminiscent of a Philip K.Dick story since the 2016 US Presidential election, or this story here where a world famous surgeon helps his missing son's best friend. Only to find that his actions lead to monumental changes in the United States and as well around the world. All in ways he would never have foreseen.

I wrote this story in the 1980s and eventually saw it sold to an east coast horror quarterly magazine. It became my first published short sci fi horror fiction in 1990. Then in 2012 it became the first story in my first book Anthology of Evil (to which I'm currently shopping to publishers its sequel, Anthology of Evil II). That first book of mine is a collection of my original older short sci fi and horror, including its ending novella (Andrew) that evolved through one other short short story (Perception) into my second book, DEATH OF HEAVEN.

In 2013 I had produced and narrated three audiobooks on my own. The Conqueror Worm (first and standalone short horror which opens my DEATH OF HEAVEN book), The Mea Culpa Document of London (also in Anthology of Evil), and Expedition of the Arcturus (the title an homage to the 1920 book,  Voyage to Arcturus, by Scottish author David Lindsay) and was first published in the hard sci fi free online magazine PerihelionSF.com (thanks there to publisher Sam Bellotto).

I am now putting out audiobooks with friend and professional voice actor Tom Remick in a collaboration we are both finding rewarding and just fun to do. Here is a short video intro to Tom's work. We have since changed our equipment and recording setup for the current audiobook, In Memory, Yet Crystal Clear.

Next up... first, I am narrating my most popular piece, a science fact article I've renamed, On Psychology. It details the history of psychology, proposes new research on synesthesia and schizophrenia and offers some perspective on today\s related political environment.

We already have audio tracks for the next story recorded for Mr. Pakool's Spice, a short story about a single father trying to get his two young kids to safety through the back winter woods of Oregon during a zombie apocalypse. With no food, barely surviving, and with of all people an international terrorist hot on their tail. It's a well drawn and heart wrenching tale.

Included with that story in the ebook and now audiobook is the short short story, The Regent's Daughter, a medieval tale which won Best Tension, in a short short story contest among a group of writers.

After that we will be recording the engrossing and tense sci fi horror story, EarVu about a new and frightening technology. It seems like a fun technology... at first. Then the several scientists who developed it find strange things happening around their top secret lab.

Tom and I are having a great time. Producing audiobooks is not easy and takes a lot of work which we hope genre fans and others, will appreciate. It's especially rewarding for me as some of these stories I wrote a very long ago. My older ones even going back to my university days in the early 1980s.

Having read and re read them so many times during the crafting process, over the years and then to hear a talented voice actor read them, to bring them alive, brings another level entirely to these stories. Some of which I have now updated to be more relevant to today's sensibilities. And in some cases as with this current audiobook, our present reality has only enhanced the intensity of the story.

So many authors have said their stories are in a way, like children to them. This experience has been like my stories have gone from high school to college and who knows, perhaps one day they will achieve professional status to become produced on film. Part of the reason I retired in 2016, buying film production equipment and restarting up my LGN Productions (AKA Last good Nerve Productions, started in 1993) company was to produce my stories in new formats.

But until that happens these stories are available as print, ebook and now audiobooks as we produce more and more of my stories. Please take a look and a listen. I think you'll be very pleased with the result we have culled out of them in bringing new life to them as audiobooks. If you do like what you hear and read in my stories, please do share with friends and feel free to post your reviews. I look forward to seeing what you think.

All the best and do... keep reading and listening!

From the ever beautiful American Pacific Northwest... JZ Murdock.

Slainte!


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On Creating Great Story Titles

Properly titling a story is extremely important to me. In thinking about creating titles for stories, I thought I would share what my process can be. For at least one type of story title, anyway.

I believe that a good title can contain half of a story's meaning, in theory. It's something to shoot for anyway. By changing a title it can alter the entire meaning of the story. It can twist a story's meaning in unforeseen and  interesting ways.

Sometimes I write a story, from a short story to a novel, based upon a title I came up with first as inspiration. Sometimes that title lasts all the way through to publish. At times once I finish the story, another title becomes apparent.

Sometimes the title comes last once I discover what the story is through discovery as I write it. When that happens, I try really hard to come up with the right title. I try to find the title in the story. I'm not always successful to the degree I want, but it's usually worth the effort.

A good title can make a world of difference in reader perception as well as story meaning. One of my best titles came out of this story:

Nikolas Hayes as "Simon" on the cover of one of my free ebooks
Simon's Beautiful Thought

Having a story where the title pulls things all together at the end, can be very pleasurable. It's good to be careful however about taking a string of words from within a story as the title, as it can come off as cliche or in the worst case, simply annoying.

For our purposes here, I'll just use a story of someone I know, Nikolas Hayes. This is from his first published short-short story on Wattpad.  It's a cool little horror sci fi tale, a dystopic that worked on his first draft. It's a good title. Not quite the kind that alters a story outside of its obvious meaning or intent, but a good title nonetheless.

Wattpad, if you don't already know, is a site where you can find a lot of interesting and free writings. In some cases, authors are writing entire books online there that you can follow along with as they are written, chapter by chapter. You can comment on them, sometimes affecting how the book develops. Many of these stories are first drafts, written on Wattpad and published without a second draft attempt. Many find that interesting. 

I heard a well known writer once say that you CAN make a living as a short story writer, you just have to be able to write a first draft, send it off and have it bought by a publisher, every single day. Not a lot of people can produce a finished, polished purchasable story in one draft. 

Some people have even gotten book deals in publishing like this on Wattpad.

Here is one of my latest stories on my Wattpad, titled: "To End All War". It's about a scientist who misuses an experiment he and his coworker are working on, in order to affect the entire world to his agenda. He's finally had it and felt that he had to do something; something, to stop the madness. Hopefully in the end, it will work out for everyone for the better. 

Or perhaps, he's just sadly deluded as so many seem to be now a days. Yet, I wonder....

One last thing before I get to the point of today's blog....

Death of Heaven by JZ Murdock

A few years ago before I published my currently re-released epic book, Death of Heaven (you know, I don't use "epic" lightly either, the book IS epic in scope, there's simply no debating that...read it, you'll see what I mean), it still had no title as I approached the final edit prior to publishing.

Years before, Nik had produced a music CD of his original music on keyboards and there was one song titled, "The Death of Heaven" ( the link is to the video book trailer for the book using Nik's song so you can actually hear it). 

You can also see the web page for my book here, Death of Heaven.

In my search for a title for a book I scan a lot of art and music for ideas, to tweak to my own purposes. So at some point, I ended up looking over his song titles. I was starting to worry that I wouldn't find a title worthy of this book.

I loved that title when I saw it again. Perhaps I subconsciously directed myself to look at those songs again, songs I had previously listened to more than once. Although it wasn't quite how I was thinking of titling my book, over that next week, the more I thought about it, I just couldn't get it out of my head.

It started to make total sense to me. It fit the book the more I thought about it. So, I asked him and he allowed me to use that title. I dropped the leading "The" in the original title, as that isn't a great idea to use in book titles, but over all, the title was his.

In supplying Nik now with the title to his first short story published online, I've finally been able to pay him back in some small way for using one of his titles. I'm not saying that title doesn't exist elsewhere in the world, just that he came up with it independently on HIS own. 

Anyway, back to Nik's story and my method for devising a title, that would go something like this....

In his story there is mention of air, breathing, freshness and stars. These seem to be primary elements of the story, so good to focus on. 

Immediately I think:

star air

or 
air star

But that’s boring, right? 

It has the gist but not the cadence or pizzazz needed, especially in a short-short story. So I go and look things up in an online thesaurus. 

Maybe I’d keep "star", as it’s so immediate and recognizable. 

That leaves, "air".

So I enter into my browser URL field:

air syn

for 
air synonym

I pick a good site from the search results. This time it’s one on top:

thesaurus.com/browse/air

From there I get:

breath breeze wind blast draft heavens ozone puff sky stratosphere troposphere ventilation waft whiff zephyr

So 
zephyr 
seems cool to me. I like that word. 

Star Zephyr?

Except, now "star" seems boring and doesn't really match up well.

So maybe not "zephyr" after all.

Maybe:

star breeze?

Waft and whiff are both wrong; more silly than useful and this is in no way a comedy.

star wind?
That isn't too bad, but they don’t fit the story very well in my mind. 

So maybe "star" just won’t work.

star breath?

I like that, but it feels backward to me somehow. Maybe not "star" but "starlight"?

breathing starlight?

That just might work!

But not quite. It's too obvious, too straightforward, and I need something less obvious, with a twist somehow, something minor.

So if not breathing? Another sense? Feeling? Smelling? Tasting? Or maybe, drinking?

Drinking Starlight!

Drinking indicates thirst and that is a strong feeling. So is breathing but drinking twists things on its head and that's usually good.

So that’s it then. 

And that is pretty much how I go about creating my titles. Usually, anyway. 

I mean, that and other ways.

So check out Nik's cool little dystopian sci fi tale, Drinking Starlight, published just last week on Wattpad. I hope to see many more from him over the years as he has a unique vision on our world, our human condition and for that matter, our universe.

Drinking Starlight by Nikolas Hayes on Wattpad

Enjoy the free stories and as always... 

Cheers!