First day of class and new 365 attempt

SO, I started the new semester today as a student at Texas State. I'm also maintaining my full 40-hour work week at the university as well. I had my basic drawing class this morning at 8 a.m., followed by my digital photography class at 2 p.m., with what little time I have sandwiched between them (and after hours, depending on work load) to keep up with everything that comes across my desk. Truly, Mondays and Wednesdays are not going to be kind to me for the next four months.

Despite that, or maybe because of it, I've decided to launch another 365 photo project. I ended my previous foray into the year-long photo shoot adventure following Day 40 for various reasons I'll not go into here, but it was a conscious choice I made, knowing I'd revisit the format before too long. Now, with two photography courses staring me in the face, I figure now is as good a time as any since I've got to shoot, shoot, shoot regardless. My rules are going to be pretty loose--basically, nothing I shoot commercially can be used to satisfy my daily photo. I'll try to post daily, but not going to give myself an ulcer over it. Again, pretty loose. My goal is to have 365 new photos up by this time next year, and the route by which I attain that is flexible.

So, here's today's entry, a shot which I took yesterday at Bug's Cub Scout pinewood derby race. Yeah, I dusted off my old photojournalism skills for this. His car is the menacing one in front with a shark fin. "The Shark of Mars" is what he called it, and while it didn't reach the finals, it put up a good showing over six heats, with three first place finishes against one second and two thirds.

Camera: Canon 7D
Lens: Tamron 28-75mm 2.8

Lisa On Location Photography

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R.I.P. Steven Utley, 1948-2013

Damn it all to hell. I was just winding down for the night when I saw the awful, wretched news that Steven Utley had passed away. Words can't express how angry this makes me. Hell, I didn't even know Steven was sick. I saw him at Armadillcon (that's a photo from a previous Armadillocon to the right--Chris Roberson's on the left, Steven is on the right) this past summer and he looked healthy and in good spirits. We passed in the hall several times on the way to different events, but promised to catch up with each other later on and chat. Of course, we never did. Now I'm kicking myself. Lawrence Person's posts sum it up:

I just received word from Jessica Reisman:

Molly let me know that Steve passed last night at about 10:40 pm, eastern. His family was with him.

I’ll miss him.

As will we all.

Utley announced to his friends that he had been diagnosed with Type 4 cancer in his intestines, liver, and lungs, and a lesion on his brain on December 27, 2012. On January 7, he sent out an email saying that he was losing his motor skills and designated Jessica as his literary executor (and hopefully she’ll be able to get some of his swell stories back in print). On the morning of January 12 he slipped into a coma and died that night.

Steven was one of the original members of the legendary Turkey City Writers Workshop. I became a fan of Steven's maybe 20 years ago at a Monkey House party in College Station, during some AggieCon or other. Perusing the bookshelves (they've got great bookshelves at the Monkey House) I came across a copy of Lone Star Universe, the anthology Steven co-edited with George W. Proctor. I was besmitten. I mean, that Texas-centric anthology spoke to me, and I vowed to put together another myself, come hell or high water. And I almost managed to pull it off a time or two, but Cross Plains Universe and now Rayguns Over Texas have pretty much taken the wind out of those sails for good. Still, I got Steven to sign my copy at Armadillocon 30 (as well as his collection Beasts of Love) so it's all good.

I first "met" Steven online, in the late 90s, on comic book message forums, believe it or not. I can't remember what we talked about, but we exchanged quite a few messages back and forth. Then I began tracking down his other fiction, having only read the magnificent "Ghost Seas" in Lone Star Universe previously. His story, "Custer's Last Jump," co-written with frequent collaborator Howard Waldrop, is as brilliant (and outrageous) an alternate history romp as ever I have read. But what is truly amazing is that during my tenure as fiction editor at RevolutionSF.com from 2002-2005, Steven became my most-frequent contributor, sending me both classic works for reprint and original pieces. This is particularly amazing, considering the fact that I paid him "all the prestige he could eat." But I made sure to assign the best illustrators to his stories, so that's something. I was fortunate enough to publish several installments of his classic Silurian cycle, including "Another Continuum Heard From!" which takes a skewed look at voting rights when they come into conflict with the technicalities of time travel. It makes for a poor memorial, but here is a comprehensive list of every Steven Utley story I published while at RevSF. It is the best that I can do:

Abaddon
The Age of Mud and Slime
Another Continuum Heard From!
Chaos and the Gods
Getting Away
Little Whalers
My Evil Twin
Pan-Galactic Swingers

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Friday Night Videos

I suppose the only surprise about the Buggle's goofy, new wave, technopop hit "Video Killed the Radio Star" is that I haven't featured it on Friday Night Videos before now. Hard to fathom, I know, but here it is in all its 1979 glory:

Previously on Friday Night Videos... Charles Durning.

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Back to school with the Elan 7ne

So next week I pull a Rodney Dangerfield and go back to school. I've done this before--the fall of 2008 specifically--so I know what to expect, more or less. I'll be that old geezer in the class all the 19-year-old undergrads wonder about. "What's his story? He's not fooling anyone--he's got one foot in the grave already!" I pulled a 4.0 last time around, however, probably the only time I've done so in my college career. I hadn't intended to take such a long layoff, but work intervened and I couldn't get the highers-up to sign off on additional coursework until now.

This semester, I'm taking 9 hours (all that is realistically manageable while maintaining a 40 hour work week) and I've got more than my share of late nights and juggling family obligations to look forward to. Actually dodged a huge scheduling bullet earlier this morning through dumb luck more than wise planning. In 2008, I took 2D Design (a prerequisite course), Photojournalism I (which I should've taken at A&M, but my asshole father made me drop it) and Traditional Photography I (a film/darkroom class). This time around, I'm taking Drawing I (another prerequisite course), Digital Photography I and finally Traditional Photography II. Obviously, having assisted The Wife as second shooter on countless weddings, I'm pretty well-equipped on the DSLR front (have I mentioned how much I enjoy my Canon 7D? Well, I do!). For Traditional Photography II, I'm afraid I was lacking, however. For the 2008 film course I used Lisa's old Rebel, which is an OK camera, but very, very basic. The expanded capabilities of digital bodies have me spoiled, so I dropped some big hints that I wanted a more advanced film camera. And look what The Wife gifted me with for Christmas:

For those of you who aren't camera gear heads, that's a Canon EOS Elan 7ne. Elan was Canon's prosumer line of camera bodies, a big step up from the introductory Rebel line and roughly equivalent to Canon's current 40D/50D/60D line. The Elan is fully capable of using modern camera strobes and ETTL-II (Evaluative-Through The Lens flash metering system). It's got a number of the whistles and bells common on current DSLRs. It's light, well-build and simply looks attractive for a camera. But you know what? It's got a very cool feature that no DSLR has--Canon's "Eye-Control Focus!" It is exactly what it sounds like: Looking through the viewfinder, sensors track the shooter's eye and various focus points light up indicating where the camera will focus. It is very, very cool. Here's an article I accidentally stumbled across last week in an old issue of American Photo from 1993 that discusses one of the very first SLRs that incorporated this technology:

Alas, it seems that ECF was a technology ahead of its time. Remember, the autofocus and computer processing capabilities of these cameras are primitive compared to what we are used to with modern DSLRs. AF points were also limited (the Elan 7ne has a mere seven, total, while my 7D seeming has 19!). For some people, ECF never did work the way it was supposed to. For others, it operated perfectly. There's lots of speculation on why ECF proved so problematical for some, but I suspect it's calibration issues. The ECF must be specifically calibrated for each individual using the camera (it can store up to five separate user profiles). But what's more, calibration improves with more data. Calibrating once will get you going, but accuracy improves with repetition. After I went through the initial calibration process, ECF worked well for me with the exception of the far left AF point--either in landscape or portrait orientation. The next AF point over would light up instead. Maybe my eye is simply weak when looking to the left? I don't know. But I ran through the calibration process again, and the number of false focuses dropped by at least 50 percent. Running the calibration under different lighting conditions also improves accuracy.

Long story short, I really like this feature. Sadly, the Elan 7ne is the last camera body Canon produced with ECF. No real explanation why has ever come out, but most seem to agree that the technical capability hadn't evolved enough to make it foolproof, and therefore Canon received a steady stream of complaints from those who couldn't get it to work. I suspect a large percentage of these complaints came from owners who 1) didn't calibrate the system more than once or B) didn't calibrate it at all and expected it to work perfect out of the box. Thinking about the computing power of modern DSLRs like my 7D, coupled with the vast number of AF points, and my heart starts to flutter. How is it that Canon has not reintroduced this cool feature? It would be magnificent for sports shooters and photographers who don't have the luxury of time for "focus and recompose." To me, it seems the long-rumored Canon 7D II would be a prime candidate for the return of a new, modernized ECF system (there were rumors a year ago that a version of ECF was included on prototype Canon 5D IIIs for evaluation). If so, I know I'd like to upgrade. With all of the smart phones and tablet computers surging into the market that include versions of eye tracking ability to follow what the user is looking at on the screen (SMARTPHONES FOR CRYING OUT LOUD!) then there is absolutely no reason why a super charged, refined ECF system shouldn't be a standard part of Canon DSLRs--after all, they make movies with these DSLRs now, so I could see ECF as being a real asset to filmmakers as well.

The Wife also got a film camera for Christmas. My brother, Uncle Shaggy, found a prime condition Graflex Crown Graphic for her. This is the successor to the famed Speed Graphic cameras used by every newspaper photographer in every Hollywood movie and TV show produced from 1940-1960. It's got a Kodak Ektar 127mm lens and the shutter works well, although it sticks on shutter speeds 1/5 of a second and slower. The rangefinder works. Pretty much everything works, but it has no back, no ground glass for focusing. This last bit is frustrating, but we're watching Ebay and elsewhere to get the few remaining pieces necessary to make this camera operational again. Sheet film holders are common and relatively inexpensive, and 120 roll film holders are pretty common as well. I've never shot medium or large format before, and neither has The Wife, so we're looking forward to exploring this new world of photography together.

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Lik what I found...

As I've learned more about photography and gradually improved my modest skills in the art form over the past few years, I've made no secret about my admiration for Australian photographer Peter Lik. Were I to become a full-time photographer (which I'm not) and given my choice (which I haven't), I'd most enjoy being a landscape photographer and traveling the world to fantastic and exotic places to ply my trade.

That's pretty much what Lik does, and he does a great job of it. He's as close to a superstar as any landscape photographer is these days. He does with color what Ansel Adams once did with black and white. Lik has a long way to go to attain a body of work comparable to Adams' but I believe he is capable of such lofty heights. Unfortunately, the only thing that might stop him from doing so is the marketing hype machine Lik has built up around himself. This whole smoke-and-mirrors bit about not using Photoshop on his images? Laughably bogus--especially since Lik himself raves about the greatness of Photoshop in interviews from just a few years back. Likewise, consider Lik's "Tree of Life." It's a pretty picture, I'll grant you. But that particular Japanese Maple is an extremely popular attraction in the Portland Japanese Garden, and thousands of comparable photographs of it exist. Why does the Lik version sell for such astronomical sums and the others don't? That Lik marketing machine. Maybe I'm a fuddy-duddy, but I'd rather the art speak for itself, rather than the brand name speaking for the art. (To be fair, limited edition prints of "Tree of Life" are available from Lik's website for $950 for this kind of work, but IIRC the initial release went for far more).

Still, grousing aside, I remain a fan. So imagine my delight this past week when perusing Half Price Books I discovered Lik's oversized coffee table collection, Australia: Images of a Timeless Land for a mere $12! I've been collecting Lik's smaller souvenir books for a while now, but haven't been able to afford any of his large format works. A quick check of Amazon shows that copies of Australia: Images of a Timeless Land are available starting at $180 for new (!) or $47 used. Considering the fact that my copy is in very good condition with only slight dust jacket wear, I'm very happy indeed. And the images inside are an inspiration--I want to travel to Australia more than ever, now.

I will give credit to Lik regarding his self-promotion in one area: His books are very, very shrewd. They are self-published, but Lik has gone about the publishing process with a very business savvy approach. He owns Wilderness Press, which seems to have morphed into Lik Publishing in recent years. This is the way to go if a major publisher can't be attracted to the project. This point was driven home to me a few days ago when I picked up another photo art book, this one by a body paint artist I greatly admire. His work is magnificent, but sadly, he published his book through a vanity press--one that generally forces the "author" to pre-sell (read: purchase) a thousand copies ahead of publication. I can't help but think this other artist would've been better served by self-publishing via the Peter Lik model. If nothing else, he'd have saved the extra fees this vanity publisher charges and maintained more control over the final product.

And yes, this talk of self publishing and vanity presses is relevant to a project I have fermenting, but it's way too soon to go into any more detail. Suffice to say, I hope to have more news in the coming months.

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Happy Birthday, Miss Edna

Today would've been Edna Milton Chadwell's 85th birthday. Miss Edna passed away in February of last year, the last surviving madam of the infamous Chicken Ranch in La Grange, Texas, and inspiration for Miss Mona Stangley and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.

Not many people will realize today is her birthday. Far more will commemorate the birthday of famed fantasy author J.R.R. Tolkien today, and honestly, I'd never realized before now that they shared the same birthday. Somehow, I suspect Miss Edna never read The Lord of the Rings, although she did keep an extensive library at the Chicken Ranch for her working girls to read during off hours.

Out of curiosity, I went and checked my stats for 2012. My website, at JaymeBlaschke.com, had more than 15,000 unique visitors for the year, with a peak of more than 1,700 on March 1. That's right as the news of Miss Edna's passing broke into the general media buzz. Compare that with the modest spikes of a couple hundred visitors in December when Larry L. King and Charles Durning passed away, reviving a little more Chicken Ranch curiosity among the general public. This blog clocked nearly 20,000 unique visitors over the same span--double the traffic of 2011--although not everyone visiting the blog came looking for Chicken Ranch information. Even so, the busiest days were Feb. 27-March 1, when 3,000 people came here looking to find out what had happened to Miss Edna. Those aren't Boing Boing numbers, sure, but I'd like for publishers and agents to look at them and tell me with a straight face that there's no interest in the Chicken Ranch.

Happy birthday, Miss Edna. We'll get this book published, just be patient!

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2012 in the rear view mirror (Chicken Ranch edition)

So, 2012 has come and gone, and, two days into this strange new year called 2013, finally have a chance to pause, catch my breath and take stock of my world. If I'm being honest, 2012 truly proved a mixed bag for me. This was the first year since 1996 that I had nothing published. Nothing. Nada. Zip. No interviews, reviews, short fiction, anything. I'm not terribly happy about that. Considering how much of my writing energy the Chicken Ranch book consumed during the past three years, however, I suppose it's not too surprising. I also experience a number of other setbacks--I learned, belatedly, an anthology I was to co-edit changed into a single-editor work, with that single editor not being me. Ouch. Then my fiction submission to that same anthology earned a swift rejection. Double ouch. I experienced the singular honor of having a speaking engagement cancelled because I was too expensive. A speaking engagement, I might add, I'd agreed to do gratis. I also had extended experiences with two separate publishers who conducted themselves in not entirely professional manners in relation to my Chicken Ranch book.

Suffice to say, by the end of 2012 I wrestled with a bout of depression. I figure I was entitled.

By far the biggest news of 2012 was my completion of the Chicken Ranch book. What I'd expected to take about six months' effort to knock out ended up consuming more than three years of my life (and counting) and tipped the scales at more than 110,000 words. Traffic to my website and blog increases weekly, and the Chicken Ranch Facebook page I set up continues to gain fans at a steady rate. I regularly receive random emails from folks curious about the book or--just as often--people who were involved with the whole Chicken Ranch affair in some manner or other who are eager to chat with me about it. Case in point: Just before Christmas I made a day trip to La Grange to interview former Fayette County Attorney Dan Beck, who'd been in office less than a year when Marvin Zindler descended on La Grange intent on shutting down the brothel. None of these new interviews are altering the book in any major way, but they are giving me additional perspectives and quotes with which to fill out and give more perspective to certain events and instances.

2012 proved a busy year on the Chicken Ranch front. The Wife and I traveled to Houston this summer to see the Theatre Under the Stars' production of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, which was magnificent. I'm telling you, folks, if you only know Whorehouse from the Burt Reynolds movie, do whatever you can to see it on the stage. Seriously. Burt's film, to quote Larry L. King, amounts to "Smokey and the Bandit Go to a Whorehouse." There's no comparison.

Speaking of which, Larry L. King, the legendary Texas journalist who penned the Playboy article "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas" and later co-developed it into the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical, died in December. I never did manage to interview King, although I read so much of his writing that I feel like I knew him personally. His health had been touch-and-go in recent years, so his passing came as no surprise. Still, I wish he'd have lived to see my book published.

Another great passed away shortly after King. The character actor Charles Durning had a wide and varied career, but as far as the Chicken Ranch goes, his memorable turn as the side-stepping Texas governor in the Whorehouse film remains a true highlight in a movie remarkably devoid of them.

By far the biggest loss, however, had to be the passing of Miss Edna herself in February. I've already written about her extensively at the previous link, but I have to repeat that I had no bigger supporter in this crazy book project than her. I made a serious effort to tell her story as honestly as possible, and to a certain extent the book is her biography--although it goes far beyond Miss Edna's life. It will always be my regret that I didn't finish the book in time for her to see it.

It was after Miss Edna's death that I realized I've probably become--without intending to--the world's foremost authority on the Chicken Ranch. What a claim to fame, eh? Spending two days non-stop on the phone with media outlets such as the Houston Chronicle and Washington Post tends to drive the point home. I just hope they remember me when the 40th anniversary of the Chicken Ranch closure comes up later this year.

Another highlight of the year was my first academic conference paper presentation. In September I traveled to Nacogdoches for the fall meeting of the East Texas Historical Association, where I presented "The Last Madam: The Unexpected Life of the Chicken Ranch's Edna Milton" to a standing-room-only crowd. I was extremely nervous, being a non-academic, but the number of people who went out of their way to introduce themselves and compliment me afterward was truly heartening.

There were lots of other accomplishments this past year as well. I learned to scuba dive (although I haven't made my qualifying open-water dives yet). My son joined Cub Scouts, and we recently completed his first pinewood derby race car (it looks like a shark). My eldest daughter beat up a boy who was making lewd, sexual comments at her, thus earning three days detention at school and the admiration of her classmates. My middle daughter has become a very impressive pianist--the arrangements she plays aren't terribly complex, but she's really turned a corner and has started seeking out music on her own to play for pleasure. The Wife's photography business took off in a big way in 2012, and I helped shoot a sizable percentage of the 45 weddings she booked last year. In fact, I'm assisting her so much that I've enrolled in 9 hours of photography classes this spring at Texas State, to bring my modest photographic skill set up to par. I'll keep everyone posted on how that works out. And hey, the Aggies finally fielded a decent football team, and featured a Heisman Trophy winner to boot!

So, where do we go from here? With regards to the Chicken Ranch book--which seems to be the primary concern of most readers here--I am now starting the process of querying agents. Most of the big East Coast publishing houses won't even consider unagented manuscripts, so this is a crucial step. I ended up wasting a lot of time in 2011 chasing after agents, but this time around I have a complete manuscript, so hopefully we'll be more successful in 2013. Some people have encouraged me to short-circuit the process and self-publish. Which would make the book available for them to read quickly, I suppose. But I've been published. That's not my goal for this book. I want to get it in bookstores, I want it seen. And yes, I'd like to make a little decent money off of my writing for once in my life, is that too much to ask? Self-publishing won't do any of that, unless I'm willing to make book promotion my full-time job, and frankly, I'm too old for that. I'm ready to move on to other projects, such as the young adult SF novel I've been promising my daughters I'd write before they're too old to enjoy YA literature anymore. I've got half a dozen partial short stories that fell by the wayside over the years, victims of the Chicken Ranch book demanding more and more of my time. And there's that online fantasy serial, Memory, that also fell victim to the Chicken Ranch.

I've got lots of other writing I want to get to. God willing, I'll get to it all in 2013. I don't ever want to have another year devoid of publications.

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