Zen Master: Blog

The "Mike & Shirley" series are about a relationship I had when I was younger. Some of it is true, some of it is close, and some of it is completely made-up. The "Wedding Vows" short is exactly what the preface says, something we talked about and pretended but never did since we couldn't find an ordained minister who would go along with it.
The problem is, all of these were written long ago before I decided to publish them, and I used different names for me and my girlfriend. One of my best friends just pointed out that I didn't do a very good job of making sure that I used "Mike" for references to me in Vows; when I wrote that short I was using "Steve" as a pseudonym and that story flopped back and forth between 'Mike' and 'Steve' and is pretty confusing. So, I apologize for not having a good proofreader back in 2012 when I posted that story. I have one now, I have fixed that story so it makes sense, and I will upload it as a revision as soon as I figure out how.

-ZM

My Swarm Cycle novel "The First Command" has been turned over to the Swarm Authors' Mailing List to be ripped apart, uh, checked for canon problems, plot errors, and typos. As everyone knows, I don't make mistakes so I'm sure I'll get back several emails saying "That was great. Don't change a thing!"
We'll see what really happens.

-ZM

One of my readers asked what I was up to (hint, hint). Okay, I guess that's a fair question.
As I've mentioned before, I really enjoyed reading all the stories in The Thinking Horndog's "Swarm Cycle", but it bothered me that it was about an interstellar war and not one of the authors appeared to know anything about ships. The only veterans writing Swarm stories were all clearly ground-pounders. They knew far more than I do about war from the front lines, but they desperately needed someone to inject a little "here's how it would have to work" about the ships they ride around in.
That turned into "Independent Command". My intent was to simply show the other authors how ships would be run, how squadrons and task forces would be organized, how the REMFs (rear-echelon, uh, weenies) would support the fighting forces, etc, etc, etc.
Well, I kept asking questions about what had been previously been decided while I was writing IC, and when the smoke had cleared _I_ was one of the "experts" that the other authors came to, to make sure that their shiny new story fit in with the others. Sure.... I've got a lot of notes.
We still don't have all the answers, though. We needed at least two more stories that explain things. One will be about how the aliens first contacted us humans. I've suggested an outline but that's gonna be a comedy of errors and I don't think I write comedy well. I have suggested to TH over email and even over lunch once that he write that one so that it goes the way he wants, and he suggested that it would get written faster if I handed the monkeys at the Tampa Zoo several typewriters and all the crack they needed.
The other story is going to be how, once the world leaders get over their shock at not being the most important men in the universe, we actually got the Confederacy Navy and Marine Corps started. I can write that one. It's almost done, in fact.
I'm calling it "The First Command", usually written as "TFC" because I'm lazy. All that's left is to argue out a couple of "how do we want this to work" items in the author's group, then write it up however we decide. Some of the items I have strong opinions on, as in it's going my way unless TH emails me and uses his veto. Other items I frankly don't care, just make up your minds and tell me. If no one else on the author's group cares, I'll flip a coin. And rip their heads off and shit down their windpipes next year when they bitch about my high-handed decisions.....

I'm also working on a novel-length expansion of that scene I published named "Ending This Mess". That really wasn't on my to-do list, but it occasionally grows when no one is watching it. And, dammit, my last excuse for not writing the rest of that story went away this fall, when we hammered out how the 4th Battle of Earthat and the subsequent Battle for Earth would go. There were several authors who wanted to write about that, and they were all holding off until we had the big picture agreed to. Well, we came to a consensus, TH blessed it, and now we're supposed to be back writing again. Dammit.

Anyway, TFC should be done by the end of the year, and ETM should come out sometime in 2015. Sorry. I've tried to write short stories. They just don't work. Either it stays small and I kill it as worthless, or it grows enough to fight back, and it becomes a novel. Did I mention that I can't concentrate on one thing long enough to finish it? I have nine other (non-Swarm) stories in work, four of them well over 100 KB and none of them want to end.

-ZM

Back in November I wrote about a new author who had asked me to edit his first story, a "Zombie Apocalypse" tale set in Australia. Now, when we say 'edit' here on SoL we really mean what the outside world calls 'proofreading'. Out in the paid world, the editor is in charge. If he says that paragraph is wasted space it's going away. A proofreader, on the other hand, is just reading the draft to find all the speling and gramer issues. The proofreader is definately not in charge.
Back here in SoL-land, the author retains final authority for his story. All us 'editors' can do is point out that this word is mis-spelled, that sentence fragment needs a verb, and so on. We can point out that Raul's best friend is named Phyllis in Chapter 2, but it has somehow morphed into Phoebe by Chapter 4. And so on. It's the author's decision to make the changes he wants, or retain the original if he wants.
In this case, I think I overwhelmed AgroDavid with all the red ink in the manuscript I sent him, because he stopped emailing me after a month or two. So, any spelling or grammar issues in the first couple of chapters are my fault, but I won't take the blame for the later ones. :)
Still, I said at the time that it was a good fun read, and it made more sense than any other zombie story I'd ever read. It's finally up, titled "Life, Love, and All That." You can find it on his shiny new AgroDavid page or in the "updated serials" list. It's not perfect, but I'm not pointing any issues out here. Read it and find them yourselves. It's a great story and I really enjoyed getting to read it first. I know that, with this experience behind him, his next story will be even better.

So, okay, neither one is exactly short, but compared to most of my other work they are practically flashes. BOGO is about, well, a good BOGO deal I picked up. Shauna, on the other hand, is all about realizing that my neighbor wasn't exactly quite right, and I could benefit from that.
Neither story is what I'm spostabe working on, but I was out in the middle of nowhere for a couple of weeks (actually, working on the family farm described in "Johnny's Girls") with no TV, no cell coverage, and no Internet access, and those were the things my muse insisted on working on so I finished them just so I could get back to what I was spostabe doing....

-ZM