Coyotes of a Conundrum - Anheroic Fantasy Headgames I

Hestia Housekeeping

Last time up, in Summer 2003, the caption at the topmost row of the index page read: "PHANTACEA gets downsized". Which it was, though hopefully not much so as you'd notice what with all the colour I added to almost every constituent of pH-Webworld.

What I did, besides adding colour and removing a few long-serving webpages that still haven't made their return, was downsize most of the kilobyte-eating GIF's and JPEG's I'd been showing off out here in WWW-Dotland since it sometimes seems to me approaching forever.

Nothing quite so dramatic this time. At least not visually. I've added more colour, placed webpage indicises at the top of many of the synopsis pages and started gold-mining them for bits and bytes of information pertinent to the PHANTACEA Mythos that might otherwise escape your notice.

Still no FLASH opening, no FLASH anywhere. Still no Web Gallery either, though I've been experimenting with PHOTOSHOP in that regard and might have something to show for it next time around.

What new images there are can mostly be found in the topic section of this very edition of pHpubs. One of them pops up while, beyond the usual text mouse-over, a couple click to the Notes on Graphics section where I provide more details on the image itself.

Should tell you most are scans of photos I took in Eastern and Central Turkey during September 2003. The larger ones are accompanied by an extemporaneous coyote of a composition. Bingo, bango, boffo bilge for the most part but, hey, it's my website!

There are two new entries in the Serendipity section. Both have to do that fellow I kept forgetting to mention when I was doing synopses for the 'The Trigregos Gambit' and nowadays keep forgetting about when I do a dot-ditto for 'Helioddity'.

What does the VAM Entity have to do with the possible Mayan vampire cult I detected in Copan, Honduras, in January 2003 and wrote about in that Summer's Serendipity segment -- other than bats and the first three letters of vampire, that is? Answer is the word 'maya'.

As for that crack I made at the tailend of "Godly Caterwauling and other Rude Awakenings" regarding Cleopatra making an asp of herself, well, as much as it pains me to admit it its, um, 'Travels in my Pants' extrusion is displayed ass well.

Have to say there are barrages of verbal as opposed to visual dramatics to look forward to in the six new story installments I've uploaded. I also left up last time's featured story because, in my humble, "D-Brig 3 Go to Hell" really should not be missed.

While there remain two ongoing web-serials out here in Cyberia, they aren't quite the same two Web Wheaties they began as back when they began. Well, 'Helioddity' is and it isn't. That is to say I did some revision work on it recently.

Regarding 'The Damnation Brigade' sequences, they haven't been revised so much as re-envisioned. That's because I decided it was so long it had to be split in two. Its first 11 chapters now constitute Month One - After Limbo, which I've tentatively re-entitled 'The Weirdness of Cabalarkon' while Year One - After Limbo shall henceforth be known as 'Psychodrama'.

As for why it's called that, for one thing it's shorter than "What the hell happened to Saul Ryne's body after Marie Antoinette had her way with it?", which is its unifying subject matter. For another it sounds better than "Magnifico Drama".

Howsoever it goes by it's therein D-Brig 3 got sent to Hell. Whereupon, after fooling around there for a couple of chapters, all Heaven proceeds to break loose!

With respect to Oddity, after something like seven years of starts and stops it's finally stopping for good. That's because it's over, finished, kaput, done as a Thanksgiving turkey, American or Canadian variety. There's bound to be some leftovers, though, and we get going on them next time around.

Finally there are some new synopses to go with previous and current installments of the two web-serials. As always, -- good reading!

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Coyote #1: Huh? Run that by me again, will you?

Gladly. Always better to run by someone than run over them. As I've shown previously, predominantly and ever so appropriately on the Faeries webpage, sometimes faeries do get stuck in trees. Evidently they occasionally get stuck in cliffs as well, often in the form of heads. In PHANTACEA fact I realized this a long time ago. Sooth said part of the inspiration for this installment of 'Today's Topic' came from the background image found on this page.

Variations of it have been out here for a long time. This version is the same one I used for the Summer 2003 edition of 'pH-pubs'. It's a deliberate distortion of a photograph I took on a sloping, sandstone cliff on Saturna Island, off the southeast coast of Vancouver Island, circa 1994.

They're apparently natural land formations that I believe are called hoodoos. Although I could be wrong about the name, they're definitely shape-suggestive. In this case, and indeed in the case of most of the images on this webpage, they're shapes suggesting head-like objects.

Furthermore, in addition to a hook, I'm sure you'd agree a topic should have a title. Hence 'Coyote Headgames' (for short). In cahoots with rambles on a pack of personal coyotes, what I'll be doing this time and next time in 'pH-pubs' is provide a pretty picture per coyote and indicate what to do with the picture in order to take you to the head or heads I see in it. Then you can click to it and see for yourself if you agree.

* Top of Page * Top of Topic * Cliff Heads * Note on Graphic *

Coyote #3: Okay, I get the cliff heads. Y-Coyotes?

Because they're tricksters, tricksters play headgames, PHANTACEA's full of tricksters and, as I'll be discussing in Coyotes 4 & 5, publishing's a tricky business. Not web-publishing, which for me isn't much of a business. Rather, it's an opportunity to get some of my weekend writings out there for anyone with access to the Internet to read, should they be so inclined, as well as to practice designing some decent-looking webpages. (Isn't overly tricky spotting heads where there shouldn't be heads either. I do that ordinarily.)

By way of illumination, what follows is a titularly topical BLOCKQUOTE from 'The Moloch Manoeuvres', both versions of it.

In mythological terms one-eyed Odin, the Hanging God of Aesgard, could have been the first Wanderer in the Weird. There were others, however; had been since Ragnarok and likely long before. One such appeared before the young buck he raised as his son virtually since his birth nine months after the Summoning. This teenager was cleaning his pistol. He looked up, unsurprised to see the insubstantial grey visitor from beyond the void."What is it, Shaman?"

"Perhaps nothing. I see you are already doing what I came to tell you to do. Although I was there and didn't hear him, before the Battle of Little Big Horn Crazy Horse reportedly said: 'It is a good day to die.' No one quite knew if he meant himself or Yellow Hair, General George Armstrong Custer. I say the same thing to you today. And with the same ambiguity."

"You always did speak too much. What you mean is it's better to kill than be killed."

"You know me so well."

"Would that I knew myself. My gun's been fired. And I have no idea who by!"

"Now that is a coyote of a conundrum."

Thus far in PHANTACEA on the Web I've presented two full-blown novels set in 1938, a mini-novella set in 1955, the start of a story sequence set in 1960 that I never got around to finishing, and I'm now in the midst of a series of novels set in the early 1980s. There's three more novels set in 1938 in the can. (Can still be ordered on floppy disk or CD as well. So can the four novels making up 'The Launching of the Cosmic Express' Tetralogy, of which more momentarily.)

Sitting in my archives are plenty of notes for more story sequences set in the 80s. Initially intended for PHANTACEA comic books and graphic novels, they're now waiting for me to get around to reworking them in prose. That's a good deal of material not contributing very much in the way of materially to any additional 'Travels in my Pants', let me tell you. (And I guess I just did.)

What to do about it, that's only the start of my coyotes of a conundrum. Expounding on my options, at least for the next couple of coyotes, that's my excuse for this time up's Web Publisher's Commentary.

* Top of Page * Top of Topic * Cliff Heads * Additional Note on Cliff *

Coyote #4: To self-publish or not to self-publish?

In terms of PHANTACEA on or off the Web this is the biggest and potentially ugliest coyote of a conundrum currently glaring at me. With the advent and increasing competency of On Demand Publishing ("ODP") companies both in Canada and the States it's positively slavering with temptation. It's also fraught with the proverbial perils. Coyotes, I'm reliably informed, will eat anything, -- including your savings account.

True, ODP does eliminate most of the need for storage, other than in a computer, and it does diminish the risk of either over-printing or under-printing. I've also heard the argument outside publishers like to see novelists whose novels aren't available in standard, take-to-bed print format biting the bullet and taking a shot, as it were, at getting their work out there for all to see. And, more importantly, for anyone to buy and read.

It works maybe they'll pick up the rights for the next print run and publish it themselves. Or be more receptive to any follow-up novel you send them. It doesn't, at least so ODP proponents will tell you, you're only out a few thousand dollars. Except of course it'll inevitably be a lot more than that. For one thing the cost of hiring a professional editor, one with a proven track record, can be quite daunting. For another you almost have to be better at marketing than you are at writing. Otherwise how are you going to make any money from it?

As for the storage issue, say you find a distributor, say that distributor orders a few hundred books, only then, a year or so later, instead of that cheque you've been expecting for so long you get all these returns. Where are going to put them? Not back in the computer that's for sure.

* Top of Page * Top of Topic * Cliff Heads * Additional Note on Cliff * Comments *