The Speed God reigns Eternal

When he moves between a gust and pause of lighting, carve a maze between a pattern of rain ten miles high. You can see him here or there when the redline clips past bleeding and the jetwash burns terminal and he holds you careful in his hands. This is his sky and his speed and he examines you, will he praise you, will he beg you to remember his name when gravity loses its anchor around you. 

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Hidden Monsters

There they are, just hidden behind the clearness of the breeze 

 

Encounters with a Bold Jumping Spider

Found this guy on my porch. Used a Macro Lens to see what he was up to for about a half hour. He (maybe I'm presumptive about gender, I don't know the morphology of Phidippus audax) was less than 0.5 inches long even when extending while moving. No bold jumps, despite the name. 

Blue Alchemy

Off the top of my head, here are some of the various chemical compounds I reference in the Book of Blue Daggers

 

  • Capsicum
  • Shilajit
  • Acetic Acid
  • Adderal
  • Xanax
  • Cocaine
  • Tetrodotoxin
  • Hydrocodone
  • bromo-DragonFLY
  • Haldol
  • Ryogardase
  • Estradiol
  • Magnesium
  • Cinnabar
  • Mercury
  • Aqua Fortis
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Vietnam Aesthetics

Ken Burns "The Vietnam War" is fantastic, if exceptionally bleak, but I was thinking about how good the visuals, aesthetics, and literal landscape background of Vietnam are as a narrative driver towards any story or document about the Vietnam war. The intensity, and texture of the landscape allows for an abundance of narrative depths and visual immediacy to any story in, around, or about the Vietnam war. 

 

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The country itself is an beautiful. Jungled mountains, tropical agricultural lowlands, and forrested highlands cut by rivers and streams, with a continually warm and rainy temperature that lends a constant, wet green. 

Narratively, the aesthetics of the country itself have made Vietnam a hyper-tactile, and very visually apparent conflict. I'm talking solely in the sense of the visual shorthand of what wars/conflicts "look" like, and, how much of it you would need to see to understand a narrative around it. World War 2 has maybe too much, it's too spread out, it was in black and white, and the camera technology wasn't good or fast enough to differentiate. 

But in these photos, you know exactly where this is, don't you? You can pinpoint exactly where it is, and what is going on, right? 

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Relationship between Money and Happiness

Fantastic infographic here, although this source is a pro-investment and heavily marketing trend. 

  • United States is large, has lots of money, and is slightly unhappy
  • Costa Rica is unusually unhappy, small, has less money, fascinating outlier
  • Finland, as usual in these sorts of satisfaction-of-life charts, is doing just fine, hanging out in the above-average group
  • Luxemborg is having a terrible time for some reason
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Revisions

I've been working on revisions to The Book of Blue Daggers. Getting to the editing part of a novel is always thrilling, but daunting in that everything you make feels like an improvement, but it is obvious that there is no end point. Unlike a first draft where you're just trying to get done, finished, completed, the 2+ drafts can take an endless amount of time. 

There's a point where the story is completed, but how do you know that it cannot be told in no more efficient or exciting way?

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Book Moods

Just some moods I have for my novel, The Book of Blue Daggers. Images, feelings, ideas, concepts, textures. 

Shades of Blue

Ink and Water