Roy M. Griffis

Roy M. Griffis

Storyteller

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Tech, New and Old

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Tech, Old and New

Here’s a writing confession:  I really like to write to music.  Have ever since I started working on my first short stories in the last century.  My wife, as a singer, has more sensitivity to sound than I do, so she finds doing creative work with music in the background maddening.

Me, I think it creates a kind of aural wall inside of which I huddle with the waking dreams.  When I’m on a roll, I rarely hear the music, but sometimes, when I lift my head from the keyboard, it’s kind of a refreshing surprise to remember how much I like that soundtrack (can’t go wrong with “Last of the Mohicians”) or that  old

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ON BEING A PECULIAR SORT OF PERSON

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On being a peculiar sort of person

My son’s mother, my second wife…yes, I’ve been married three times.  I’m either terrible husband material or a serial optimist.  Don’t judge.

Not the author, exactly

As I was saying, my second wife found fault with some of my reading choices.  For a while, I was reading a great deal about UFOs and folks who believed they had interactions with aliens.  The contacts ranged from variations of “turn your head and cough” type exams, to very distressing reproductive procedures (including “and here’s your hybrid offspring, say hello to mummy, darling”), along with occasional tours of other worlds or galaxies, often polished off with warnings about the impeding global disaster.  Note that none of …

How the research goes with me…

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How the research tends to go with me

When writing a novel, there is a place where you brain is going “Only 20 pages? Are you nuts? You have to write 40 times that to finish the book!”

I also run into that when researching the places and times for the next novel.  Pick up a source you think will be great, read 80 or 90 pages before you realize the author is only interested in relaying nominally interesting anecdotes about high-level goings on, with none of the detail of daily life I’m looking for.  So I’ll put that aside, grumbling about the lost time, and pick up another.

This is a very small sample, with all of the random
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Life Happens Pretty Fast

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LIFE HAPPENS PRETTY FAST

This past Sunday, I finished the first draft of the second Cthulhu, Inc.  book, The Auditors of Doom.  That clocked in at 340 pages, over 78,000 words.  I’m taking a week off to clear my head before diving into the revisions/rewrites.

In the meantime, waiting anxiously for the revised cover of Book One The Thing from HR.   Aiming to have that ready and released right around Memorial Day:  nothing says “beach reading” like the misadventures of a Shoggoth down among the Hairless Apes.

This may or may not be how our "hero" will look

And, since life has a way of happening even while I’m living among the characters in my head, I’ve been rehearsing

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Random coolness

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Random Coolness

 

So while I was home recovering from some sinus surgery (yeah, that happened)…

…I was in my office trying to read when out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of something flying low past our fence, toward the back acreage. 

It turned out to be this fine fellow, a great blue heron, probably checking out how well stocked we keep our little pond.  

I like seeing stuff like this. A bald eagle apparently nests about 8 miles from here.  Some day, I’ll get a photo of him, too.

Oh, and the surgery tuned out great.  Only downside to me not snoring is that my wife kept thinking I’d died in my sleep.  Fortunately, that hasn’t

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There is so much crap out there…

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pimp the good stuff, my people!

Mission Statement:  

There is way too much soul-debasing garbage out there.   Let’s tell the world when we find creative work that is good, original, even uplifting.

 

 

(Ed.  Originally written in March, which gave me the idea for these posts)

My wife is likely fighting the Wuhan Virus.  So we have spent time inside this weekend.  And we watched a delightful, accomplished, and exceedingly fine film called Emma.  Released in 2020, it’s a sumptuous, funny, sweet, and ultimately very moving adaptation of a Jane Austen novel.

Not an Austen purist myself, I’ve never read the source material.  I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the film and as soon as it is available on

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Random cool moment

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We arrived in Texas in February of 2018.  Besides everything else that was part of the move, like starting a new job, throwing bunches of stuff in storage, new Driver’s Licenses, etc, we started work on renovating a historic home in our new hometown (population 652).  How historic, we didn’t know.  The tax records show it as being built in the late 1930s.

Our down-to-the-studs work on the home became more like archeology.  It turns out the back 2/3s of the house was built in 1937, while the front 1/3 is a tacked on old Baptist church from between 1860 – 1880, based on the construction materials and techniques used (rusty iron nails shaped more like splinters, barn-wood, and even …

Update on my spirit

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My mood (“spirits” as they are sometimes called) is a bit subdued.  If you saw the previous post about Mother’s Day, pretty sure it seems reasonable.  But add to that the lingering bedamned cold and the fact I have a gall-bladder removal scheduled (after about ten years of mysterious double-me-over pain striking at random intervals), then yeah, I could be excused for feeling less gleeful than usual.

On the other hand, my lovely wife has been planning a new office for me at the historic home we are renovating, and it was finally revealed in all of its Coast Guard-themed glory this week.

 

Above, I’m standing beside a “Quilt of Valor” made by a dear friend in California.  In …

The Paper of Record Just Recorded They’re All Right with Racism. Really.

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Or: “The black people were surprisingly good last night…”

 

One of my personal failings (well, the only one I feel like admitting) is I have a strong fairness impulse. It was the whole Martin Luther King thing, judge people by the content of the character not the color of the skin. My father, who had grown up in the deep South surrounded by virulent racism, introduced me to the concept, mostly by the way he lived his life, treating everyone he met with the same courtesy, fairness, and respect.  It was what made me a nascent liberal as a young man.

That belief in fairness was the same thing that drove me away from Liberals. Growing up, my experiences with

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