The easiest thing in the world

On By griffinwordsIn BloggingLeave a comment

Launching a new blog is the easiest thing in the world.

When you first start up a new blog, nobody knows about it but you.  Then maybe a friend or two might see it, but nobody who doesn’t already know you.  No pressure, since there’s no real “audience” yet.   By the time anybody makes their way over here to read this thing, this first blog post will likely be buried under a number of more substantial and more recent posts.

I blogged for a while before, on Myspace, and what started off a fun and very personal blog space, ended up having hundreds of followers and dozens of people leaving comments. I was blogging about 10 times per week, writing about music and my social life and fortune cookies and restaurant reviews, all kinds of stuff.  I have no idea if this blog will attract many viewers, but that’s not the important thing.

I also spend a bit of time in an online community called the Hypnos Forum, related to the ambient/electronic record label I founded over a decade ago. There are lots of cool and intelligent people there, but most of the discussion is on music and technology, and subjects related to books and words and thoughts seem not to generate much attraction. I just wanted a place to write about some things that have become increasingly important to me, especially as I’ve become more serious and dedicated about writing fiction.

It’s my plan to post here about a variety of subjects, but mostly observations about writing my own words, and reading the words of others. I’ll probably kick things off with a series of quick mini-review posts about some of the things I’ve read lately, and then start explaining more about why I’m writing this blog and what I hope to achieve with it.

So then, I’d say “thanks for reading,” but nobody’s reading yet. Like I said…  easiest thing in the world!

Eye in the Sky, by Philip K. Dick

On By griffinwordsIn Words InLeave a comment

At any given time I’m usually reading (at least) one book, and listening to an audiobook during my commute.  Sometimes I work on similar books for “reading” and “listening” at the same time, but most often I try to go down different paths with the two books.

Right now, I’m listening to Philip K. Dick’s The Eye in the Sky.

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It’s one of Dick’s earlier novels, in fact arguably the earliest one that really had that provocative Phildick quality. It was first published in 1957, and the super-quickie plot summary is as follows: Following an industrial lab accident, an out-of-work engineer finds himself, along with his wife and a few others, catapulted into an alternate world of Old Testament religious fundamentalism, where prayer and miracles and plagues of locusts are part of daily life.

Philip K. Dick is one of those writers I find interesting enough to think about and talk about, but I don’t actually find myself reading his work very often. I think he’s more notable for his ideas, for pushing the envelope and questioning assumptions, than for his actual writing. Certainly he’s a beloved name in the realm of science fiction, but he’s one of those writers whose books are more interesting in summary than they actually read on the page.

Still, I’d say he has a lot of value even as just a provocateur. And Dick was certainly one of the more interesting personalities or “characters” in science fiction when I was growing up, along with Harlan Ellison.

Speaking of Philip K. Dick, there’s a Dick biography by Lawrence Sutin that is one of the more interesting author bios I’ve ever read. It’s focused quite a bit on Dick’s late-life religious/metaphysical/psychotic experiences, hence the title Divine Invasions.

I’m no more than 1/4 of the way through this audiobook so I’ll write more about it later. Just wanted to write a little something about it, as I’m having fun revisiting a writer I think about a lot, and regard highly, but don’t actually read often enough.