"I didn't play all Tetris all those years for nothing." It's something I've said to my customers at my shop when they marvel at how I manage to completely fill their shopping bags and yet still keep them reasonably light. You'll notice that I'm looking at the items on the belt, scribbles of algebra floating around my head just like in the meme, working out what can go where before I even pick it up.

This is one of those albums where I went in not knowing a single track from it, and it ended up being one of my favorite albums of the year. I'd read the positive reviews in the British music papers, and had heard this would get a slightly abridged stateside release (a mix of tracks from the UK version plus the handful of popular songs from their previous record…

While I've been finishing up the current revision of The Persistence of Memories, I started looking at the list of what I call the Mendaihu Universe Legacy Soundtracks. Out of the thousands of albums I'd listened to over the years I wrote what would become the Bridgetown Trilogy, these are the titles I equate to my writing sessions, whether they were in the family basement, the Shoebox apartment in Back Bay, or the sweltering summer in Allston.

I was introduced to Global Communication in a very roundabout way. While I'm sure I saw the above record in the bins at the HMV I worked at, I never gave it a chance, at least not until late 1997 when I heard a deeply haunting track by Pulusha called "Isolation, Part 1", found on the not-quite-holiday album Invocation…

One of the downsides to my day job is when I end up monitoring the self checkout machines. That job on its own isn't that bad, because I'm totally fine with helping customers there. No, the issue is that it's right next to the shared sinks and hand dryers just outside the bathrooms, and every single time someone uses those dryers, everything I hear ends up getting covered up by a half-minute of…

I'll be honest, I really needed to rethink my book buying habits, so I did. Just not in the way you'd expect. I'd been a subscriber to the magazine Publishers Weekly for a good number of years, mainly because I got to read all the news and reviews about the writing field, and during those years I would make note of many of the books that got reviewed and add them to my shopping list.

I heard this morning that Duncan Sheik sadly passed away yesterday at the early age of 56 (one year older than me). He's been a mainstay in my writing soundtracks for years, ever since his 1996 self-titled debut album. You will most likely know him from the hit that gets played the most, "Barely Breathing". I loved hearing that song on the radio when I was commuting to and from work.

ALT: Your Name Sad

In honor of Beck's upcoming new record Ride Lonesome which comes out this Friday, I thought I'd do a quick revisit of my favorite album of his, 2002's Sea Change. It's aptly named; after the quirky Odelay, the meandering Mutations, and the funky Midnite Vultures, he goes through a bitter breakup, completely changes direction, and comes out with a deeply personal and contemplative record that defies anything he's done before.

I usually write these entries on Sunday afternoons after we get back from our morning jaunt around the neighborhood -- the farmers' market, a coffee run, lunch ordering, what have you -- and while doing errands around the house like the laundry. I like doing it this way because I have a lot more time to think about what to write without worrying about running out of time to work on my WIPs.

ALT: The Beatles' Yellow Submarine Walk

I was working at Yankee Candle that day, and I've already posted about what I did, what I felt, and so on. We all have at some point or another. One thing I rarely about, however, is how I got through all of it on a personal level. Those of you who know me already understand that I'm an obsessive music nerd.

Well, more of a mini-vacation, heh. We're both taking a few days off next week to just kick back and relax a bit, maybe do some walking around the neighborhood or drive somewhere for the afternoon. So this isn't exactly a fly-by, per se, because I've been thinking about such days for a while now. I mean, sure, I'm getting older (I'm in my mid-50s, for those of you playing along) and have already come to the realization that I really don't need to be constantly plugged into the neural network or Always Being On or whatever.

While I'm on the subjects of the HMV years, writing The Phoenix Effect and favorite albums from 1998, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention another album that even more play in the back room of the store and especially during my writing sessions. Most of you already know their popular hit "Counting Blue Cars" from 1995's Pet Your Friends…

I'd been a passing fan of this Belgian trio because of their excellent 1996 trip-hoppy single "2Wicky" (which would show up on multiple soundtracks like Stealing Beauty and I Know What You Did Last Summer), and their debut A New Stereophonic Sound Spectacular had done relatively well with the clubs and critics. I even listened to it once or twice while working in the back rooms of the record store.

Something I posted on Threads a short time ago… I’ll only say this once because I don’t have the patience to repeat myself: My writing has never used and never will use AI. The cl…

We have a few sidewalk plots outside our building that were originally set up by a group called Friends of the Urban Forest here in town, where they'll cut out a square and plant trees. Two were set up quite some time ago, and by the time we moved in last year, one was looking rather haggard and needed a desperate pruning, while the other one was...well, pretty dead.

Something I posted on Threads a short time ago... I'll only say this once because I don't have the patience to repeat myself: My writing has never used and never will use AI. The closest I will ever get is the grammar and spellcheck in MS Word, and even then I make the final decision on it. Your not believing that is not my problem.

This is a super short one, mainly because in my music library, the rest of the year is filled with singles, box sets, and best-of collections. I suppose in a way that's a reprieve from my ingesting far too many new releases over the last several months, and it also gave our store a much-needed boost in Q4 sales. I'd like to think we did pretty good that year, considering the music business was about to get hit with a major shake-up in 1998 when the two major distributors PolyGram and Universal decided to merge.

When I think about late 1997 into early 1998, I'm of course reminded that this was when I worked on the longhand rough draft of The Phoenix Effect, but I'm also reminded that this was right about when I started working more often at my writing nook in my parents' basement. I'd been transcribing off and on when I had a chance (or more to the point, when I felt like it), but by this point I knew that I had a pretty important novel project that kept me excited, and I'd started thinking about how I could up my game.

This fourth volume is my favorite of the original four volumes from the 90s, and the one that got the most play, even more than the first volume. It was made almost a full year after the third volume, when I was already coming close to finishing the first draft of The Phoenix Effect. By early 1998 I'd finally solidified the process I'd been aiming for: writing a few longhand pages before work started, and transcribing it into the computer when I got home, revising it as I go.

Songs from the Eden Cycle Volume 3 was created in November of 1997, when I was somewhere around Chapter 7 in The Phoenix Effect. By that time I was getting a little bit better at keeping up; it looks like I was writing maybe two or three times a week of maybe a page or two every now and again. I'd also started a new poetry comp book called…

Looking back on it, I think that road trip to Ohio was a key moment in my wanting to go out on my own a lot more. By this time I was still heading up to Toadstool Books in Keene on the weekends, but instead of heading back home afterwards I would sometimes expand on it by driving down to Leominster and stopping at the Barnes & Noble afterwards.

After that long-distance road trip out to Ohio, I came back refreshed (and very sunburnt on my left arm due to my then habit of resting my arm on the open window) and ready to start working on The Phoenix Effect again. While it took me a little bit longer to get into the intended 'write every day' goal, the story was resonating with me even more as the days went on.

This volume was made not long after I came back from the long distance road trip to visit my friend. The first one came out so well, and I was really getting into writing Phoenix at the time, that I wanted to make another volume. This volume was also made mostly in the back room of the record store, grabbing songs both from my own collection and from the CDs we were selling.

Recently I've been visiting the early days of the Mendaihu Universe project, specifically when I'd started writing it mid-March of 1997. I've talked about the background of this story quite often here, but I've sometimes commented about its influences only in a passive way. When I started The Phoenix Effect, it was going to be more dark and intense than its previous incarnation as…

It had been ages since I actually had a paid vacation and given that I'd be here at HMV for the long term, I was able to accrue enough hours to finally get one! And so it happened that my inaugural vacation would be a roadtrip....to Ohio! My high school friend was living in Columbus with his wife at the time and as we hadn't seen each other in quite a long time, it was planned that I'd spend the week there.

This one's a little longer than usual because May's releases were kind of quiet. That said, by this point I was doing pretty well with writing The Phoenix Effect. I wasn't even close to working daily, let alone getting a significant number of words, but that wasn't my aim at that point. Some days I'd work on my poems and lyrics instead; other days I'd just sit and listen to cassettes on my Walkman.

While I haven't decided on a specific release date for the Remastered Edition for The Persistence of Memories, I can say that I'm still on schedule. I'm about halfway through, which is where I expected to be at this point. Not bad for a month and a half's worth of work! It does help that I had an easy time of this one to begin with, so there aren't too many issues to focus on.

YouTube video by William Orbit

There's something to be said about finally finding your groove. So much stress and anxiety finally recedes into the background where you don't need to constantly worry that it'll come back to bite you in the ass when you're not paying attention. HMV was the first job in ages where I wasn't jumping ship, getting axed or finding it's a terrible fit after six months, which meant that I could…

The mind is elastic, as they say. Sometimes you end up misremembering things, or you're absolutely certain something happened in this order when it actually happened differently. If you look at the timestamp I wrote on the very first page of The Phoenix Effect, it says 3/7/97, 10:30pm. I almost always timestamped my longhand work, something I've done since the early days of the Infamous War Novel back in 1984, so it's not as if I was making it up.

Today marks the last of five days in a row of my oddball day job schedule as the person whose job I was covering has come back from their three-week vacation. It's taken a lot out of me and I'm sore and exhausted most of the time, but I survived intact. The trick was to purposely not run myself ragged at top speed every single moment.

It's another few days ahead of waking up at stupid:early AM for the 4am shift start. I can certainly still do it at my age, even if I don't get enough sleep the night before, though I pay for it later that day once I'm off the clock. But I keep telling myself: if I can make it through the first couple of hours when I'm solo and prepping the front end for doors open, then I'm all set for the rest of the shift when the rest of my team comes in.

I spent most of the next month or so taking my time thinking about how to approach the futuristic sci-fi story idea I'd had in my head for the last couple of years. While True Faith was a step in the right direction, there were two things wrong with it. One, it felt like a swing and a miss; it had its moments but it felt too derivative and weak, like I wasn't allowing myself to expand on the ideas and push boundaries.

As mentioned previously, I'm continuing with 1997 as it's the first full year of my stay at HMV. Even though I'd technically started in late September 1996, I kind of consider those first couple of months a trial run, getting myself used to the job while at the same time dealing with a lot of personal change. Once that disconnect from the recent past was made permanent, I had a clean slate to work with, and I wasn't going to squander it.

As I get older I find myself seeking clarity more and more. The problem with doing that when I was younger was that I was still stuck looking at that in terms of extreme opposites: I'm either Totally Locked In or I'm Completely Disconnected. I either have All The Feels or I'm Cynical and Don't Give a Shit. I knew that wasn't want I wanted, bur nor did I want to keep pretending that I could find a happy medium where I could be all at the same time.

Okay, I feel much better now. I managed to survive six early starts in a row by way of keeping my energy levels to a minimum. No going above and beyond unless absolutely necessary. Knowing when to say no or not having the ability to take on yet another Thing To Do and letting them know about it. And not pushing myself at home, either, other than sitting down and working on the…