My weekend

I keep telling myself I'm making progress on my list of things to do, but it keeps growing so that I feel I'm constantly falling behind.

I worked in the yard this weekend. A lot. The unseasonably warm weather we've been having has tricked a lot of plants into thinking it is spring, and some of the trees I have are showing the first swell of budding out. Which isn't great with a big cold front coming in this week. It also isn't great if I want to trad bud wood for grafting. So, I got to work. I received a shipment of persimmon trees from Stark Brothers and planted them Saturday--a Prok American persimmon, plus Asian varieties Ichi-Ki-Kei-Jiro and Saijo. I also planted a Perdue pear and two Blanco crabapples. I painted the trunks of all my young trees with a water-diluted white latex paint to protect them from potential sun scald, pruned branches from those that needed it and did some grafting amongst the pear trees to hopefully ensure a diverse array of high quality fruit production. Once all the pruned wood was collected and trimmed for size, I ended up with the following for next month's scion exchange:

• Warren pear
• Ayers pear
• Moonglow pear
• Orient pear
• Fan-Stil pear (expired patent)
• Blanco crabapple
• Santa Rosa plum
• Elephant Heart plum
• Le Feliciana peach

I also went to Famick's in San Antonio hoping to find a pomegranate or fig to plant, but I wasn't blown away by their selection or prices this time. Instead, I picked up two low-chill peach trees--a Galaxy and Red Baron--I plan to put in the ground once this sloppy, wet cold snap passes. They came pre-pruned from the nursery with a handful of neatly trimmed side branches, so I took the opportunity to graft on a few La Feliciana scions I'd collected from the old house last week (I have to say, it is nice to have the people who bought your old house allow you to come back by and get cuttings!).

So, at this point I still have to get in the ground one Pindo palm tree, two pineapple guavas (Feijoa), two mandarins (satsumas), two peach trees, one Texas persimmon and a fig that's outgrown the large pot I've kept it in the past two years. And I still haven't gotten the avocados, paw paws, loquat and jujube trees I've planned for.

Oh, and when I wasn't in the yard, I was in the studio taping drywall. Last night I was in there until 11 p.m. because all the tape I put down started showing air bubbles, forcing me to peel it off and start again. Plus, there was one corner of a drywall panel that kept pushing out and would not go smooth. Arrgh. And I still have the ceiling to go. Joy.

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My genius time travel movie

So there's a new time travel movie out, Project Almanac, that The Wife and kids want to see. From what I understand, it's about a group of people who travel back in a time machine, change something in the past, and all hell breaks loose. Which is pretty much the plot of every time travel movie from Back to the Future to Hot Tub Time Machine. Yeah, there are some others that don't fit the mold, like Primer and 12 Monkeys and such, but when you want a go-to Hollywood time travel plot, changing up the past to screw up the present is a cinematic workhorse.

Naturally, my brain started turning this idea over, as my brain is wont to do. My first published short fiction was "Project Timespan," which showed why time travel could be discovered once and only once. I have an unpublished comic script titled "A Sound of Blunder" which is a shameless riff on the Bradbury story, in which hunters from the future travel back in time to hunt dinosaurs only to encounter a dragon instead. Hilarity ensues (not to mention massive destruction to the time line). So I can play around with time travel when the mood strikes me. And thinking of Project Almanac, the mood struck me.

What is the one constant in time-alteration plot movies? That the characters responsible for the changes to the timeline are aware of said changes when they happen. Think of Marty McFly with his fading photo, or his confusion when he returns to the future that is unfamiliar to him. Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. This is usually explained in a hand-waving way, that since he arrived from the unaltered future, his memories from that time are preserved. Or that reality has been split into an alternative timeline. Whatever. All of this is a conceit to keep a consistent viewpoint character to anchor the audience.

But what if one was to discard these shackles of convention? What if one was to write a movie where cause and effect were fully unleashed, that any changes to a single timeline reverberated through said timeline to impact the characters who traveled back in the first place? Any change they affected would not appear to them as a change at all, since it would be instantly incorporated into their remembered history. This has been done some in literature, but it's not terribly easy to pull off since the baseline is erased--none of the characters in the story remember what's happened if the author is playing by the rules.

My idea--which will never be made, mind you, because that's the way these things go--involves a group of time travelers whose every action impacts the time stream and is instantly incorporated into their history. From the instant they arrive in the past, things begin to change, starting with subtle alterations to their uniforms. And the characters are completely unaware, because for them, there are no changes being made. This is their established history. For the audience, however, the changes come faster and more furious as the story progresses. In essence, there are dozens of simultaneous divergent narratives of which only a few scenes of each appear on screen before being supplanted by another. Characters change gender, disappear entirely, relationships twist and flip, the mission goals change, the history of the world morphs over the progression of the film to something very, very different from where it started. No single actor would appear for more than half the total running time (let's peg it at 90 minutes for argument's sake) and probably less. A couple dozen actors and actresses would play the evolving lead roles. It would be a strange, frenetic film, essentially the antithesis of Richard Linklater's Boyhood.

The nice thing is that it could be made for a modest budget. It's not an effects-driven film, but rather a character piece, albeit with characters changing out with regularity (The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus comes to mind as an example of multiple actors portraying the evolution of a single character). I do not see how I could convey this vision in prose--it is a visual conceit, and needs a visual medium. I'll not likely write it any time soon, but I'll file my notes away for safe keeping. Any ambitious indy filmmakers with access to a large cast and interested in the time travel genre should feel free to give me a shout.

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Friday Night Videos: Chicken Ranch publishing edition

Depending on how closely you may or may not follow my Facebook or Twitter feeds, you know that for the past couple of months I've been in serious communication with a publisher that has shown significant interest in my book on the comprehensive history of the Chicken Ranch. They requested some changes--additions and deletions--which, although I wasn't crazy about, I could see their reasoning. So I made those because I like to think I'm not a prima donna artiste. Things got serious a week ago when they offered me a publishing contract. The contract wasn't terribly favorable toward me, the author (which I pretty much expected) so I counter-offered.

All of my requests were rejected.

Now, I never expected them to agree to everything. Their business model is conservative and restrictive overall, built to ensure the publisher at worse breaks even on the books they publish. What took me aback was their taking offense at my attempts to negotiate. The editor did not tell me to take it or leave it, but that's the impression I got.

If that's the case, I cannot take it. There are three clauses that could burn me badly in the future regarding liability, subsidiary rights and reversion should the book go out of print. I'm told I should trust them. I say trust has nothing to do with it, that their interpretation of these clauses could be very, very different from mine without modification and clarification.

I started work on Texas Had A Whorehouse In It! Truth, lies and legacy of the legendary Chicken Ranch back in 2009. I've been actively soliciting agents and publishers since 2012. The manuscript has received raves from pretty much everyone who has taken the time to read it before they ultimately pass on it. To say that I'm ready for it to see print is a vast understatement. But I'm not in it just to see my name in print. I'm not an academic desperate for publication credit to maintain my tenure track trajectory. I am a professional writer, and I have to look out for my interests as well as the best deal to ensure the book gets widespread distribution. I have to be willing to walk away from a bad deal, and without modifications, this is a bad deal.

I've been going through the stages of grief since I realized my counter- counter-offer would likely be rejected as well. Which will mean that I'm back to shopping for publishers. Ever since that became clear, Kenny Rogers' "The Gambler" has been my relentless earworm. This is no bluff. It's time for me to fold 'em and walk away.

Previously on Friday Night Videos... David Lee Roth.

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Friday Night Videos

Remember when David Lee Roth was a thing? This video for "A Lil Ain't Enough" will show you why he quit being a thing quite abruptly. The song is pretty much the embodiment of 80s hair band cliches, lyrically as well as musically (the album, which I have, isn't bad. This song, not so much). The video, though... wow. Not only does it bring Diamond Dave's antics and womanizing and 80s cliches in to the 1990s in a way that doesn't translate and feels painfully dated, but it throws a bunch of bizarreness onto the screen that simply baffles. This entire video is a four-minute representation of a career imploding. It's one of those things that makes you rub your eyes in disbelief.

Previously on Friday Night Videos... Jill Sobule.

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Friday Night Videos

I've always liked Jill Sobule, but my appreciation for her has grown tremendously in recent years. She's a very strong songwriter with witty and insightful lyrics that never quite take the road less traveled. The sarcasm she laces her songs with could be caustic from anyone else, but her delivery always seems to have an element of joy that smooths the sharper edges. And I mean that in a good way. She's too quirky to have enjoyed more than fleeting mainstream success, but that doesn't diminish her talent. She's like a modern harry Nilsson. Here's her video for "Bitter," a song that manages to not be.

Previously on Friday Night Videos... The Kinks.

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Mourning the sandstorm

It's gone. I've lost it through a combination of carelessness and dumb luck. Pleading and bargaining with fate has failed. My efforts to do an end-around have failed. I have to force myself to accept the ugly truth: My beloved Monument Valley Sandstorm, Infrared, is no more.

Oh, I still have a gorgeous 36x24 gallery wrap on my office wall, and the web-sized version you see here persists. But the original RAW file is gone. The full-resolution tiff and Photoshop working files are gone. The finished-edit jpeg is gone. Which means I can never make another quality print of this image, which resonates with me at a level hard to explain.

The sad discovery of my loss came about because I had an offer to publish it in an upcoming photography book. I felt all the regular emotions--excitement, validation, yadda yadda--which quickly gave way to sorrow and denial when I could not find a single print-quality file. I'd had many multiples of this image on my home computer, my laptop, my work computer... all gone. My work computer ran out of hard drive space early this past spring, so I deleted all of my personal stuff to clear operating room. My laptop suffered a Windows implosion, so I did a clean install, wiping everything from it. All those duplicate files on my home computer? I deleted those duplicates, and apparently the master file as mixed in amongst those. Ah, but what about the official backup, the one kept by The Wife? Well, those turned out to be on an external hard drive I accidentally knocked off her desk and destroyed whilst attempting to install some new hardware. The awful part is that this drive continued to function for another dozen hours or so before going kaput, hours we foolishly did not use to transfer everything off it. We couldn't remember what was on it at the time, and didn't worry too much, because there were multiple copies of files kept elsewhere. Except those that weren't.

Other images are gone as well. All of my photos from the Very Large Array (with the sole exception of "Listening to Nightfall") and the Horseshoe and the Grand Canyon... Some of those were good photographs. None of them were great. All of them can be replicated, more or less, by me in the future if I ever return to those locales. But Monument Valley? In a sandstorm? Under these unique lighting conditions? Never gonna happen.

It's hard to let go, but it's time to move on.

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Chicken Ranch report no. 50: Tx Citizen comes a-callin'

Saturday was Edna Milton's birthday. She would've been 87. It's hard to believe that six years have passed since I first met her and started on this Quixotic quest to write the definitive history of the Chicken Ranch. When I look back over that time, all I can do is shake my head and say, "Wow."

Things are afoot in Chicken Ranch Book Land. Some I can share, some I can't. Rest assured I am not sitting on my laurels and am talking with publishers to get this book in print in the most widely-available, professional quality form possible. And people are noticing. I gave several lectures on the Chicken Ranch in 2014 and expect to give more in 2015. And the good folks (okay, the somewhat disreputable folks) over at the TxCitizen have taken notice and devoted an entire cover story (!) to yours truly. Very cool! And Lisa on Location scored that nifty cover shot as well.

Nick Rogers came over a couple weeks back and spent an afternoon talking with me about all things Chicken Ranch. He wrote up a pretty good piece, which can be read at this link or via the embed below. Here's a small sample:

The long history of the infamous "Chicken Ranch" of La Grange is, according to author Jayme Blaschke, "the story of Texas."

"It parallels the evolution of Texas as a culture and society," Blaschke said. "Every piece of history is reflected in the Chicken Ranch." The story of the Ranch and its demise is a reflection of power structures, clashing cultural mores, urban vs. rural conflicts and the power of television media. The story is also one of the people involved, strong personalities whose battle mirrored such growing chasms.

TX Citizen 1.1.15

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