Tag Archives: Oh the Places You’ll Go

March 13, 2026 · 5:21 am

Do you remember Morris, the finicky cat?

Morris was the star of a long-running series of commercials for 9 Lives catfood, emphasizing he was finicky about his food — but he loved 9 Lives! Which I was thinking of this week because Plushie seems to be in a “Morris — hold my beer!” mood.

We have to give both dogs lots of drugs for their various ailments. Trixie will eat hers on soft food; Plushie’s finicky and unpredictable. Depending on the day he may eat gabapentin on either soft food, chicken-broth concentrate or Delectable cat treats. I have no way to know which the chosen substrate will be. This adds several minutes to the process and sometimes waste the drugs. It’s frustrating. Sometimes he’ll turn the gunk down on the plate but eat it off my hand. Currently we’re randomly switching day to day — that seems to help but he still sometimes gets picky. And no, we can’t force it into his mouth the way we do Trixie when we have to. Plush Dudley’s more likely to bite and too stubborn to force easily.

So far we’ve managed to keep him doped enough for his own wellbeing. Hopefully we can keep it up.

(Plushie rolling in snow, from earlier this year)

On the plus side, no dog health disasters this week, so that’s a win. And we took care of one house problem, some foundation work that needed doing. Nothing urgent but it’s good to have it taken care of.

Now, as to writing, this was a good week. I was disorganized after spending last weekend at Ret-Con. Even so I was productive. I completed my March writing goals on Let No Man Put Asunder and on Savage Adventures, covering Doc’s adventures up through The Red Skull. I also rewrote, and I think finished my short story “Mage’s Masquerade.” I realized a while back that some of the key supporting characters weren’t developed enough for readers to tell them apart (a complaint made about a much earlier draft). I think I’ve got it fixed. I also much improved “Oh, the Places You’ll Go” by chopping about 1300 words off the end. I’ll look at both stories the last week of the month and see if I still think they’re done (the first story, maybe, the second almost certainly not).

There’s still no Local Reporter work — hopefully we’ll be back next week. However over at Atomic Junk Shop I blogged about the comic-books of Earth-One. The cover above suggests they looked exactly like the ones in our world; as I detail at the link, probably not. I also post about Doctor Doom’s short-lived run as a co-star with Ka-Zar in Astonishing Tales.

Doom’s racism in that scene does not work for me.

Things will get crazier next week when I have some IRL tasks to take care of. Still, I budgeted the time for that, so hopefully it’ll still be another good week.

Art by James Bama (t), Carmine Infantino and Gene Colan (b).

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January 30, 2026 · 4:02 pm

On the plus side, we didn’t lose power.

Which was something we worried about during last weekend’s freeze. The predictions were for heavy ice — literally enough weight to snap power lines — along with snow so we charged up our generator and our small chargers, kept the heat up high so it would take longer to freeze inside if the power died.

It didn’t die, like I said. There was some ice but mostly snow.

That big square near the steps is a tarp TYG laid down so the dogs would have an ice-free spot to walk on. It worked, though Plushie insisted on walking on slippery places as much as possible. With four legs he and Trixie did fine; we had to be a little more cautious.

While the storm itself wasn’t a catastrophe, a week of sub-zero temperatures means the ice still hasn’t thawed. It was off the roads by Wednesday so I was able to get to a dental appointment yesterday and physical rehab today, but we still have to exercise caution when going outside, going to the mailbox, etc. And this weekend we’re anticipating another storm — all snow, probably, so we hopefully won’t lose power. But that means no going anywhere this weekend (I got my shopping done today), nor for the first couple of days after. Frustrating.

As we wrap up the first month of 2026, I feel pleased. I didn’t accomplish all the writing goals I wanted — I didn’t have time this week to finish Oh the Places You’ll Go —but I got most of them. I caught up on saving my Local Reporter stories to my computer and saving my blog posts (I see no reason my blog should suddenly vanish but just in case…). I made slightly over my word count for Impossible Takes a Little Longer and Let No Man Put Asunder. I’m 2/3 through with this draft of Savage Adventures. Because of my one colleague at the Local Reporter leaving, I earned slightly more money this month than usual.

On the downside I let the side down (as the phrase goes) on the dog’s daily exercises. Not completely but with Plushie on longer confined by his cage it’s a lot harder to keep him in one place for particular workouts. Yesterday I was using treats to tempt him into an obstacle course; he decided he’d get up on the couch and sleep instead. As the time for caring for them continually increases, I’ve no idea how I’ll work it out once the snow’s gone and Trixie’s back to full morning walks.

I also blew my GOTV effort for the second month in a row, getting half of the 40 cards I’d agreed to write out. I have to get better next month. I did do a good job with the various household/contractor/vet appointment tasks I dealt with.

As for the week itself, in addition to fiction I got in three Local Reporter stories, one on Chapel Hill changing its land-use ordinance, one on a local volunteer rescue service (not up yet) and a companion story about the technical rescue team (they handle water and missing person rescues). At Atomic Junk Shop I pondered whether too many comics are out of continuity, and Earth-Two comics in the post-WW II years.

And yes, the exercises the PT pro recommended did indeed help with my bursitis. Hope for continued improvement next month. And my dentist said my teeth look great, actually improved over last visit. A pleasant surprise, given that I had to delay this appointment two months (no time during the Watching Jekyll and Hyde finishing marathon) — usually that long without getting my teeth and gums cleaned causes (small and fixable) problems. Yay teeth1

Now, another cold weekend. Still, snow is pretty.

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July 4, 2025 · 4:32 pm

A good start to July

Politically, this week sucked. The Big Ugly Bill is bad in so many awful ways. Writing, however, went great, partly because I had no appointments to go to, no errands to run. And the holiday — this is one of the ones I take off — was on a Friday so it cut into blogging time rather than other writing.

I rewatched the John Barrymore 1920 adaptation of Jekyll and Hyde, the Spencer Tracy 1941 version and the Fredric March 1932 take — well, technically I sat and watched while I listened to the two commentary tracks. I will have thoughts in a later post. I also watched a 2008 version with Dougray Scott (ditto).

For The Local Reporter, I wrote an article about the Chapel Hill Historical Society’s online resources and one about Carrboro winning an All American Cities award. At Atomic Junk Shop I looked at some stories and images from late 1970, such as this cool Neal Adams cover —

— and the great challenge of research being the things you don’t know you don’t know.

And I wrote some fiction for the first time in a couple of months. I took a look at my short story Oh the Places You’ll Go and discovered it’s in better shape than I thought. I trimmed a lot of the exposition but found the ending still needs more tinkering with. It’s close to what I want, but not quite there.

So yeah, a fun week. I hope y’all are having an excellent holiday — I’m doing stuff I wouldn’t normally do on a Friday such as watching a movie and putting in a solid block of exercise (usually during the work week I have to break it into chuks).

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December 22, 2023 · 4:30 pm

It wasn’t just Macbeth who murdered sleep this week

I’m honestly not sure what did rob me of my sleep. Okay, some of it was IT emergencies forcing TYG to get out of bed (I’m a light sleeper) and once it was Plushie deciding to lie next to my legs and fidget. But even eliminating those factors I still had nights of bad sleep. It may be partly that my evenings had little chance to relax. The past year or so Plushie’s been pretty quiet at the end of the day but the new meds he’s on seem to have rejuvenated him by several years. Which is great, but he’s back to demanding Play, Play, Play in the evenings and with TYG working late that was on me.Snowdrop has been coming in for longer stretches in the evening. It turns out he’s quite happy to snuggle on the couch as long as the door is open, sometimes as much as 30 or 45 minutes. To ensure he’s not troubled, that means putting Wisp upstairs (she’s gotten out twice through that door) and me taking the dogs into the kitchen while TYG pets him (she loves that cat). That cuts into my relaxing time too. I can’t say I object — I pet him plenty too —— but I think it leaves me more stressed than I had slightly more time to myself.

Despite that, I did get a fair amount done. I sat down with Oh the Places You’ll Go and once again tinkered and adjusted, shifting the sequence of events at the end. Every time I’ve done that I say “At last! Now it’s where it needs to be!” so I’m not going to predict that this time. It’s definitely better than it was, but it’s still frustrating to be working on a story I was sure I’d finished with six months back.

I also tackled the last two chapters of Savage Adventures, dealing with Doc Savage from 1945 through 1949, including the lost adventure In Hell, Madonna, which came out in 1978 as The Red Spider.I reread Will Murray’s Writings in Bronze and added more information to some of my own entries. I’m on schedule for publication sometime next summer so yay me!

I completed an article for The Local Reporter to run next week and had one published this week on Chapel Hill’s efforts to become more ADA-accessible.

And now Christmas weekend is here. Whether you celebrate it or not, it’s a holiday so I hope you enjoy yourself the next three days.

#SFWApro. Cover by Bob Larkin, all rights to image remain with current holder.

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November 17, 2023 · 3:30 pm

Feeling run down but at least I ran somewhere

Very, very tired today.

I haven’t slept badly this week, just a little bit short every night. Apparently it’s adding up. Today my brain feels like sludge. It didn’t help that my efforts to nap this morning were thwarted by one pet or another. Still, the week as a whole went well.

I published an article for The Local Reporter on a proposed Chapel Hill development.I finished the section of Savage Adventures I wanted done for this month, including double-checking details I wasn’t clear about in The Pharaoh’s Ghost.

I got a little bit further on Let No Man Put Asunder. It’s going slow now that Paul and Mandy are no longer running and have to fight back against the Community of All. This requires more than just flinging threats at them; as Doc Savage author Lester Dent put it, the action has to do more than merely move them across the setting. I’ll get there but it’s frustratingly slow.

On the plus side, I think I had a breakthrough on Oh the Places You’ll Go. I’ve been stymied because my redrafts have raised questions I had to leave hanging. This week I saw I can resolve them relatively easily and by shifting around who does what at the finish everything went smoother. I finally feel like I’ve got my finished draft.

I did not get much exercising or stretching done, alas. Cleaners and contractors to deal with on top of the usual pet distractions. Yesterday after the cleaners came, Wisp was sufficiently unnerved she insisted on spending all afternoon in my lap. I didn’t have the heart to get up and leave her.

I do appear in a Con-Tinual panel about Magnus, Robot Fighter (whom I’ve reviewed here). Over at Atomic Junk Shop I review the first issues of the current Wonder Woman and Power Girl series, plus a look back at Golden Age Black Canary. Did you know she has the magic power to summon flocks of black canaries to do her bidding?#SFWApro. Art by Modest Stein and Carmine Infantino, all rights remain with current holders.

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November 3, 2023 · 4:07 pm

We ducked an icy bullet!

Wednesday, I noticed that while the thermostat was set to 72, the temperature on the house, as shown on the thermostat, was 67. Given the temperature outside was going into the high 20s that night, this seemed like a bad thing.

Air Innovations, our HVAC contractor, came out and confirmed that yep, it was a bad thing: the motor had broken down. As it’s an older unit — we were planning t0 replace it early next year — we anticipated going a week or more while they scrounged up a motor. To our relief, they found one locally and installed it before bedtime that evening. It was pricey, but given it would have taken almost two weeks to get it replaced, better than spending two weeks bundled up and freezing. And fortunately we could afford it.

Other than that, this was a good week. I wrote an article about Chapel Hill city hall’s urban designer, though it took longer than usual. I’d hoped to get ahead on my article for next week, but no.

I got 3,000 words done on Let No Man Put Asunder; it would have been more but I had the HVAC dude and a locksmith to deal with (the outside closet containing our fusebox had a jammed lock). A lot of it feels like stuff I may cut later; I’m frozen on advancing the plot so it’s mostly character bits and chasing around. As Doc Savage creator Lester Dent once put it, action should do more than just move people across the scenery and I’m not sure the last couple of chapters manage that. Then again, maybe it’s the kind of pause-and-reflect moments my writing group keeps saying they want. We’ll see.

I read over another 20,000 words of Southern Discomfort and made some edits. Not a lot, which makes me wary; was my finished draft really that good or am I being an easy grader? Still I am making changes even if they’re not major ones, so perhaps major revisions are not needed at this point. We’ll see — I still have a final round of editing next year.

I went over my Savage Adventures manuscript from 1941-1944 and that looks pretty good, though there are several points where I’ll have to go back and reread the books to see if my comments are correct.

I didn’t get anything done on Oh the Places You’ll Go but I guess I can’t win ’em all. Still a good week. Oh, and I have two posts at Atomic Junk Shop. One was about stories in otherwise good series that don’t do more than fill space. For example Tales of Suspense #92, in which the story has Iron Man in pointless battles with the Vietcong before this memorable finish:And the other about the debut of the Daily Bugle’s city editor, Robbie Robertson, a groundbreaking black character for the Silver Age.#SFWApro. Art by Carmine Infantino, Gene Colan and John Romita, top to bottom. All rights to images remain with current holders.

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September 15, 2023 · 4:05 pm

Did I fall short or set my sights too high?

I may have been premature in declaring Wisp a contented indoor cat. We got Snowdrop to come in a couple of times this week and it was adorable: they nuzzled, licked each other and she bopped him on the head like she used to. However, it also looked at times like she was ready to follow him back outside. We discouraged this: she’s still a little slow on one leg and it’s just better (for cats and for the wildlife outside) if she stays inside.

The downside is that she’s still restless when she’s on the bed with me, though not as bad as when her leg was in the cast and the cone of shame.And I no longer get mornings to myself because she loves me and follows me down when I get up. The loss of privacy gnaws at me more than you might think. If that’s what it takes to keep her indoors, though, so be it. This morning was an exception and it felt great — until I discovered she wasn’t sleeping on the bed, she’d followed me into another room and been trapped inside when I closed the door. Oops.

While adjusting my schedule to fit our new indoor cat — write in the early morning, exercise later in the day — still feels awkward, I’m getting used to it, and managing my time a little better. The lack of sleep, however, still lowers my creative ability some. I was supposed to work on Let No Man Put Asunder this morning and I just couldn’t. That said, I did get quite a bit done.

I finished a Local Reporter article on Chapel Hill’s participation in Vision Zero, a program for eliminating road fatalities and serious injuries. However there’s a major development on the Chapel Hill town council agenda for the week after next and I wound up scrambling to prepare an article for next week. That sucked up a lot of time away from my own work.

I got another 4,000 words done on Asunder and I finally see where the action’s going after this current section of talk. That’s a relief. I got less relief working on Oh the Places You’ll Go — I still can’t fix the ending. But I did sell The Adventure of the Red Leech to a new Durham specfic magazine, Dimension Zero. No pay, but I’m still pleased.

I got more work done on Savage Adventures (that was the work I did instead of the creative stuff) and finished my press kit for future Behold the Book releases. I also did some other publisher-type work, not worthy of note yet. And I had a couple of Atomic Junk Shop posts, one on writers who think they have clever insights and musing again about the end of Netflix DVDs.I also sold a copy of 19-Infinity and someone checked it out from a digital library service. Thanks, both of y’all, whoever you are.

And so the week ends. Have a good weekend everyone.

#SFWApro. Cover by Kemp Ward, all rights to image are mine.

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August 25, 2023 · 4:32 pm

A productive week for some definitions of “productive”

First the good news; Wisp’s bandage came off Wednesday. They applied some topical steroids to her foot so her cone had to wait another day. Here she is Wednesday afternoon, snoozing with me.Now she has the next  couple of weeks to strengthen her leg while staying indoors. If everything goes smoothly we don’t need to bring her back to the vet. And while she’s sleeping better, which means I sleep better, if I get up to pee, that’s her cue to get lively. So it’s about three to 3.5 hours a night; better than when this started, still not ideal.

Worse this week because I didn’t get my usual sleep on the weekend when TYG takes all the pets. Friday night TYG was out until late and I woke up when she came home (not her fault — I’m a light sleeper). Saturday night I took an Ambien and slept alone in the spare bedroom. Trixie, however, puked on the master bed and while TYG changed the bedclothes Plushie decided to come and paw at the spare bedroom door until I let him in. Without those two good nights of sleep I felt exhausted for much of the week. At Tuesday’s Zoom writer’s group, I fell asleep during the final reading.

So while I put in a full week of work, that’s partly because I counted a lot of stuff, like blogging, as writing hours, that I don’t normally do. That said, I got various household tasks (e.g. calling contractors) done; got a little more written on Let No Man Put Asunder; did some editing on a collaborative anthology I’m in; and got a little done on Savage Adventures. Plus taking cats to appointments and having tea with a friend (I budget part of my writing time for weekday socializing).

I reread the redraft of Oh the Places You’ll Go that I finished last week and it looks much better than I thought. The ending still feels off, though. I want the ending to feel like a resolution: character arcs settled, plot issues resolved. As written it resolves them, then raises more questions, like it was Part One of a larger work. It’s not and I don’t see it becoming one. I can’t get rid of the questions but I need to write the ending so that even with questions it feels finished.

The largest chunk of time went to work for The Local Reporter. Figuring out how to manage the work and fit it in with my own projects has been challenging, partly because I’ve been bouncing from lead to lead trying to develop a steady stream of stories. But I got one done this week (not out yet), I have another ready except for a final proofing and a couple more in progress. If I can get it down to about six hours work a week in most cases, I’ll be satisfied. But that wasn’t this week.

Meanwhile, over at Atomic Junk Shop, my Silver Age reread looks at editor Jack Schiff’s retirement and the characters who vanished with him, from Animal Man and Immortal Man — — to the Green Glob and Automan in Tales of the Unexpected.

#SFWApro. Covers by Carmine Infantino (t) and Jay Scott Pike, all rights to images remain with current holders.

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June 9, 2023 · 4:30 pm

A productive week, though not in the ways I anticipated

Back pre-pandemic, Plushie liked spending most of the day in my lap while I wrote. This was suboptimal because he’s a big enough dog that to fit him comfortably I had to sit in a very awkward position for writing. Over time, focusing became harder. Once TYG started staying at home so he had two parents around, he did that a lot less, which was great.

This past week for some reason, he’s back to his old habits.Not usually with Trixie sharing the lap; typically she end up the other side of my left leg. Either way it’s very distracting when it comes to focusing on anything creative. However I can’t bring myself to keep him away — he’s thirteen and he won’t be with us forever.

So I spent very little of this week working on Let No Man Put Asunder, other than reading most of the first chapter to the in-person writing group (I’ll post about that next week). Instead I devoted my time to finishing final edits on 19-Infinity and settling on a cover (should be ready for reveal soon). Then I started drafting Story Behind the Story blog posts for the short stories I hadn’t written up here yet.

Today, though, for whatever reason, I found enough focus to work on redrafting Oh the Places You’ll Go. To my surprise it went really well: the rules for the magic in the story are simpler and clearer (I can’t believe I didn’t think of this solution before!), there’s more conflict and tension and less exposition. I’ll return to it next week.

I also have two posts at Atomic Junk Shop, one about the limits of reaction shots in both screen and print fiction and one looking at a few stories from the Silver Age.

#SFWApro.

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June 2, 2023 · 4:06 pm

May ends. June begins. Things occur. And there’s a cat photo in the middle of this post, so keep reading

One occurrence: I applied a month or so back to do some freelancing for The Local Reporter, a Chapel Hill nonprofit newspaper (Chapel Hill, like Raleigh, neighbors Durham). This week they contacted me, said a change in editor led to my response falling through the cracks, and they were interested. We talked on the phone; sounds like I’d be doing mostly business-related stories, and not a lot of them (the budget, at the moment, won’t stretch to a ton of articles). But it would be income, and the kind of gig I’m familiar with, so I’m down with it. I’ll let you know when something comes out.

Another occurrence: as I mentioned last week, I was blocked on Oh the Places You’ll Go because I hadn’t reconciled to doing more rewriting than my beta-readers had suggested. Monday, I got down to it; by Tuesday evening I’d gone through two rewrites and much improved things, including fixing the problems my beta-readers flagged. However I’ve introduced a couple more: a change in the time-travel rules required more exposition but what I wrote is neither clarifying nor enjoyable, just muddled and confusing. So more work ahead to smooth it out.

I sat down and rewrote the third chapter of Let No Man Put Asunder as I’ll be reading that to the writing group soon as I get on the schedule. I realized the fight scene needed a lot of work — too much banter instead of attacking — and I think I’ve fixed it. We’ll see what the group thinks.

That took up most of the week. Plus I had a post at Atomic Junkshop on Silver Age DC (possibly) knocking off Marvel’s storytelling style. Below, for instance, Gil Kane and John Broome inflict some atypical angst on Green Lantern. Plus I’m in Con-Tinual’s YouTube channel discussing mythological tropes in fantasy.

#SFWApro. All rights to images remain with current holders.

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