Save Realms of Fantasy

I don't read a lot of short fiction. I never subscribed to Asimov's or Analog or any of those magazines, but years ago I was in a Borders and found this magazine called "Realms of Fantasy." It was glossy, had amazing art and short stories that I liked.

I still have a few copies of it in my room. I know right where they are: in my main desk drawer in what, as a kid, I'd decided was a place of honor.

Realms of Fantasy is folding, and I hope it doesn't. So I'm blogging to save it, as the group "Save Realms of Fantasy" requests. If you've ever read it and liked it, I hope you'll join me.

The Facebook page for the group is here: Save Realms of Fantasy Magazine.

The LiveJournal group is here: Save Realms of Fantasy.

Good luck guys. And I haven't been doing my part: if you guys succeed, I promise to get a subscription to Realms of Fantasy.

The VPXI Blog

Jeff Soesbe wrote a really exhaustive set of entries covering Viable Paradise XI, which can be found here.

I just discovered another massively comprehensive set of entries from Julia Dvorin at her blog here and Jean Huets blog is here.

I've put together a flickr set of my pictures here.

If I ever manage to get my videos uploaded to YouTube, I'll put a link to those as well.

Update: I don't know why I didn't think of this earlier, but Pam set up a fantastic website on Viable Paradise here. It should answer lots of questions about VP and VPXI.

Advertising

I don’t get it. Listening to rain on your roof is beautiful and musical at night, but when it’s just dripping on something and you’re trying to sleep it’s annoying.

I regret entitling that other post "Looking For Work," now, and really this episode ("Three Weeks of Pennies") should have been shortened down and maybe combined with that other episode, but in the end it didn’t feel right unless I explained that Alex isn’t a slacker. He’s not exactly competent either, but he’s not a slacker. And right now I want to provide context for the real story, which is imminent.

I missed a counseling session today, which sucks because I’ve been really down recently. Just depression kicking in, but it’s awful that neither of us thought about it.

I’ve been thinking recently about something one of my favorite teachers in high school once said. He said that he thought that I was special because I didn’t care what other people thought about me.

I wonder what he would say if he saw me today, going out of my head trying to provoke reactions from people?

I’m not a good troll. I mean, I can put a slew of effort into creating the persona of some 27 year old Christian Single Mother who got pregnant, found Jesus, and now believes that most organized Christian religions are secretly plotting to fund the anti-Christ so that they can bring about the end of the world. Oh, right, and she’s injured and the state is threatening to take Abby, her daughter away because she can’t take care of her.

When it comes time to go out and spread the Word though, I couldn’t get much out. And when I did, about how my brother was preaching that Christians were going to hell for violating Jesus’ command, I was so vague that no one responded.

And here I am, this is the real me, and I’m fairly explicit here, and I still can’t get a reaction even with a magnesium flare.

Maybe it’s just that I don’t advertise myself well. But I don’t have a decent camera, and I know better than post naked shots of myself online. Especially grainy ones.

It’s odd, people used to tell me that I was pretty, and by “people” I mean girls. I go to the club though, and people treat me like a lemur. An ugly lemur. Granted, the music deafened me, the smoke and the heat made me sick, and I don’t drink, but I would dance, but clubs are supposed to be about easy sex. Where the hell was the easy sex at the clubs in ABQ? All of the cute guys were with other cute guys, and the moderately cute guys were about “waiting” for something special. What was that? There is definitely something wrong with gay culture if we’ve already passed the no-strings sex mentality completely behind. Because I seem to have missed it.

And I’m easy.

That’s not a particularly flattering thing to say about myself, but it’s certainly very true. I threw myself at Gabriel not because I thought he was that good looking but because he seemed interested in him. It didn’t work out because I wasn’t interested in him, but that certainly didn’t seem to matter to me at first because he showed some interest in me.

So how do I advertise better? Pictures of me with my head photoshopped onto Mason Wyler’s body would be a good place to start, except that I don’t really look anything like him and I don’t necessarily like to lie about myself.

I can’t draw (real things, anyway) so I can’t become the next Penny-Arcade, Something*Positive, or PvP.

And I haven’t figured out how to advertise a blog. Back in the day Mike and Jeff both highly recommended “forksplit” to me. It’s the blog of a NYC half-Muslim arab/half-WASP advertising exec, and it’s brilliant. Some of the best writing on the internet. How did they find it? I can’t imagine. I can’t even get them to read my blog regularly, and here is this woman from New York City talking about how she likes to go clubbing with gay boys that they read whenever it’s updated.

Let’s talk about another friend: Alex (the real one, not one of my fictional ones) validated my existence the other day. By Buddha’s man tits, it was nice to get out of the house with someone other than my mother. Someone who volunteered to spend two hours on the road to prove that the person living in my room isn’t some zombie corpse raised by my mother.

Except now I’m worried that I offended him by disagreeing with him. I knew that we wouldn’t agree on everything, but I guess I was just bored and I posted a long thing on one of his blog entries (which I read religiously) that basically called his writing tripe. Which it isn’t, I just don’t agree with him, which is a completely different issue.

And now I’m talking about it in a blog instead of confronting him. That’s so passive aggressive and passé. But I’m doing it anyway because sometimes I guess I’m passive aggressive and passé. I need to change that.

Dude, you’re important to me. Yes, I have a crush on you, but dammit, it’s because you’re brilliant and a good friend. And besides, you’re straight. My crush proves that. Any disagreement with you is automatically null and void because of that. You could probably slap me around a little and I couldn’t really dislike you. (I apologize, abjectly and profusely, for any and all wrongs I have done you Alex, and I post it here in some sort of punishment for myself. If you ever need to remind me of that, you have it in writing.)

I don’t have a gimmick, I guess. I’m an aspiring writer, but who online isn’t an aspiring writer? Geez, even the waiters and bouncers with blogs have books that they’re trying to sell. I’m gay, but not in a porn-star or even a “Super! Thanks for asking!” way so I can’t play that up.

Even the writing is questionable, although I have to hold out hope for that. If I can’t write, there isn’t much chance of writing for a living, eh? I am taking Ashley’s advice, though, and part of that seems to be working, although I have no idea why Live Journal is so popular.

But in a certain sense, I need the validation of response and interaction. This is certainly not the first time I’ve said it, but it’s certainly a reversal on my personal sense of “You don’t need anyone, dude.”

It feels awfully materialistic, to know that I want to make people respond, and I know that’s the right word, but I feel sort of like I’m treading into the area where Paris Hilton rules: being famous is having people want to respond to you. Do I want to be famous? Yeah, of course I do, but I think that I would settle for “acknowledged.”

Last thing, from out of nowhere: I haven’t heard from my little brother in more than a fortnight. That is very, very bad. My mom and I had the “talk” about what to do if two Marines in dress blues show up at the door. They’d probably come during the day when I’m home, and even if she was here, they would knock at my door first.

So, if it happens, I cry first, wait until I can talk without freaking out, and then tell her. I will try to remain calm while I am speaking to her, because she does not need me to be a wreck while she needs me.

And then I’d institute suicide watch procedures for her, which, of course, I haven’t told her about. Little to no alone time. Clean medicine bottles out of the cabinets and remove sharp objects from where she can find them.

He could be boycotting writing us because we haven’t paid enough attention (I haven’t written him yet), but probably not. The military might have blacked out communication because they do that sometimes, but probably not for this long.

It’s really starting to scare me.

Wreeling and Writhing

So, Ashley read the short story that I posted, Colony, and liked it so much she felt compelled to tell me, which is awesome. It's unreal when you realize that some has read and really liked something that you've written. In Ashley's honor, I'm going to do some work rewriting Colony and posting the second draft when I get a chance.

She also recommended that I join a couple of Live Journal communities, and I agreed, so instead of updating two blogs, I'm going to update three of them, the Myspace blog, the Live Journal blog and the main Worlds & Time blog on blogger. I've actually been thinking about this for a couple of days, so to me it isn't totally unexpected.

Ashley is also the person that originally came up with Lia. She had a record of the old original Lex blog, and she sent me a link. If you're interested in that sort of thing, you can see it here:

http://alexmercer.greatestjournal.com/

It's a lot shorter than I remember it, but I'm sure someday I'll look back at what I'm posting today and say to myself "Wow that's short." Especially if I continue trying to read Notes on a Geek Show.

Right, since I figured that no one really reads this blog anyway other than me, I suppose I forgot to mention this, but I put a little history into the links on MySpace and LiveJournal about Lex and Lia. Here's a little more.

Originally Lex and Lia were supposed to be part of a larger game of people, about twenty five or so, that wanted to do a sort of communal neo-vampire novel online. The community was based around the fictional city of San Maceideo, a sort of Gotham City in Southern New Mexico. Since we were new, we were the young, inexperienced characters while most of the characters were old and powerful.

However, nothing really happened in San Meceideo. The community was new, but it was so new that no one really could figure out their own stories. So between me and Lia, we only had a half dozen posts.

Still, I liked the character of Lex. His PB (this was my first encounter with this acronym, it means "played by" and it indicates the actor that your character looks like) was Kerr Smith, who is gorgeous, and he reminded me of Jonathan. Celia, incidentally, was Alexa Vega back when she was Spy Kids age. If you ever want to know what the characters look like, that's it.

He was also tormented, and he fit into his niche.

I knew I wanted to do a weekly serial, and Lex and Lia fit the bill. I did remove them from the fictional San Maceideo and put them into Las Vegas. I don't remember any of the other characters from the original universe, so I don't have worry much about stealing other people's characters.

That's where Lex and Lia come from.