The Mind of Bryan Lee Peterson

There was a time where I had a plan, a collaborative creative ensemble, making media and putting it out for public consumption. I think we were way ahead of our time. I did a “blog” in 1999, back before the software was available and the concept was even viable, did digital comics at about the same time, and even now they’re just coming into their own due to iPads. I had a team of artists, musicians, actors, comedians, writers, game designers, programmers.

Since the technology wasn’t there, and the doors we needed opened weren’t opening, we began to find other ways, ways that pulled us apart. One by one we made our way into separate ventures. Some of us found success in our pursuits, some found a way to live, but I don’t think any of us lost our creative edge.

I found a lot of distractions, a lot of challenges, lost my way quite a bit, but all of that is turning around now, and I’m finding a number of us are looking at the same kinds of projects again, fresh and with a new interest in making our own way. I’ve accumulated some new talents, and many of the old ones are still with me. What we wanted to do but couldn’t ten years ago is now easy. We may not be on the cutting edge of media or technology, but our products are still high quality, our skills are better, and our capabilities are greater than ever.

And the technology is finally here, the content delivery mechanisms to not have to go through a producer, a manufacturer, or a big company to be discovered.

So my next steps are pretty clear in my head. I’ll be meeting with a number of you in a couple of weeks. More of you are across the country, across the world, in the twitterverse or the facebook realm. We’ll find our ways to collaborate. But it starts now.

It’s time.

I’ve told some of you about how everything I write comes true. Sometimes it’s just coincidental, like when I wrote about a scientist who broke a liquid helium machine at Fermi to kill a demon in The Hidden, and a day or so later, a liquid helium machine had a problem at CERN. Ok, so that’s just a coincidance (sic, c.f. Robert Anton Wilson). So was when I wanted to create a backstory for a Rosetta Stone type of journal and remembered a Romantic poet who died in a fire trying to save his books, screaming “By the immortal gods I will not move!” who also happened in real life to be a translator.

But then there was, in the same story, a character I created who was a University of Chicago linguistics prof who transplanted a village of Guatemalen Abuelitas to Chicago to learn their nearly extinct Mayan dialect and then a month or so later found out about a University of Chicago linguistics prof who transplanted a village of Guatemalan abuelitas to Chicago to learn their nearly extinct Mayan dialect. Don’t worry, so far as I can tell, none of them have ben murdered by the professor in a ritualistic manner. Yet.

And that’s just the beginning of all of these synchronicities. When you start lining up the coincidences, and there are so many, you’re tempted to stop defining them as coincidence and start narrowing down the conspiracy, or begin to apply the hipcrime vocab definition of coincidence, “You weren’t paying attention to the other half of what was going on.”

So this has struck again. I’ve just finished my warm up to Inside, and I’ve edited Inside up to where I had written before, so now it’s time to strike out and put new words at the end of the manuscript. My next scenes? An attention seeking pastor at a conservative church burning Michael’s painting because he found it offensive, and both sides of the argument try to manipulate the media for gain. Well, substitute “Koran” for “Michael’s painting” and you’ve got today’s news cycle.

Either the world is reading my mind, or it is handing me research material again. Any way, this is going to get interesting.

This month I started over at work. I was promoted and had to start in a new location with new people, and new challenges. There is nothing better for me than new challenges, they bring out the best in me, everywhere I go and in everything I do.

In this case, it couldn’t have come at a more critical time. I was out of money, and out of my mind at my old location. It isn’t that I couldn’t take the people I worked with or any of that, I enjoyed working with them, and truly miss them, but I was in a rut and working below my level. It is hard when you’re capable of much more than what you’re doing, but don’t have the title to enforce it. My level of success has for the last few years been determined only by the ability of those above me, and until my last boss came, my level was above my manager’s. This is about as frustrating a situation as I can imagine for where I’ve worked. It hasn’t been good for my soul.

All this time, I was making, well, less per hour than my college summer job ten years ago, so it was even worse than it sounds in a lot of ways. Being a “management trainee” means you’re something of a wage slave. But I needed the more regular hours and lower stress of not being on the sales side of the team. The work I do is something I tend to do automatically, anyway, so I don’t have to think, in some ways, it just comes out right.

But the run-up to this point was not easy. I knew a position was being vacated and my old boss had a goal of getting me into it, at least as much as I had, and so I’ve been pushing even harder to get myself into this position than before, and as the time the position would come open drew closer, the tension increased, as we began to run short on money, and bills were getting more difficult to pay. I began to push myself even harder to make it, and my drive and focus is fairly unstoppable, I am a force of nature at times. This also took much longer than I thought it would. People weren’t leaving, and weren’t failing in their positions. The lack of vacancy kept me struggling for a long time. There was a point in time where my district manager wanted to install me in the store I am in now, and I had just made yet another desperation move to Berwyn. That was not a feasible drive.

This job represented so much more than just a liveable paycheck. I would finally have extra money to fund my business, to not be worried about rent at the end of every month. I would actually be able to eat more and healthier. So the tunnel vision formed, and I pushed, and I got the job, and things are stabilizing. I’m breathing, for once.
What has happened though, is the tunnel vision has made it difficult to keep up with people. I know some of you understand, and some of you don’t. If you haven’t been very active in my life, you probably don’t know what we’ve been going through. If you’re new in my life, you don’t know what we’ve gone through. There are things that I’ve sworn I would never have to do, and some of those have become everyday circumstances of life. I don’t really show how this has all affected me inside, I choose not to, but I am weary from it, truly run down, though I keep pushing through. I know the way out is through. I fought to get here, and now the fighter needs time to recover.

I am diving into the new position with the same tunnel vision. The new location has a few things I want to take care of immediately, and the new position has a few things I have to learn while on the job. The first couple weeks have required I put in some extra hours, but that shouldn’t last for long as I get up to speed, and bring the standards of the store to acceptable levels. There are a lot of you out there I need to catch up with. A lot of little things have been slipping past me. So I’ll be trying harder now to keep up with the people in my life. I probably can’t make you understand without some major explanations, so please have patience.

That being said, understand the most precious resource I have right now is time, and there are a number of projects that are going to require that time.  Gearsecure has been neglected as much as people, and it is important I get that up and running, if only for Michael’s sake. We need something he can transition immediately to. I am still gearing up for the agent search. I have a couple people interested in wholesaling goggles and glasses from me, and in order to accomplish that, I may need to organize a work force.

There was a point in time where I looked at my life, and then looked across a vast gulf to the right path, the one I had set out on, the one I wanted to be on, and I set my sights on getting back. There were a number of points I had to reach in order to accomplish this goal. So far I’ve made my way through about half of them. I got the job in the place I wanted it to go. I got my writing heading in the right direction, including getting a fledgling writing group together. Physically, I’m about where I was several years ago. I’ll be trying to refresh on Japanese soon. I’ll start thinking about a martial art soon, and I’m planning some music stuff soon. There’s a few more points until I feel I’m truly on the right path, and I’ll let you know as I hit them.
So here’s the deal. I’m going to be able to be more social, and work on those relationships again soon, in a week or so after I’ve settled into the job a bit more. There are a lot of you, Willo, Karen, Doug, Chuck, Robert, Bobert, and on and on…but it’ll take time.
As far as projects go, I’m very excited about the direction “Inside” is heading in. I’m keeping the short version back, as that will be the book, what I put on-line is the greatly expanded, layered like ancient sediment, unabridged version. I’ll be releasing The Hidden faster. I want to get it out and done and on to the next storyline. I just got more lenses for goggles, enough to sell several. Plus I have more lenses for sunglasses. I have a new novel in development, something steampunk and fun.

Just happened to wind up next door to a Borders, and since I’m still pretty new in this town, I figured I’d stop by. I know Borders is hurting, but it’s very strange what I saw, very odd and disappointing. First of all, I think this was a tertiary Borders, not a huge store, not a lot of stock. First strange thing was where they had put the general fiction category. It was in the back, I mean, practically in the warehouse and there were only a few shelves, a very small section, and it was separated from most of the books. I don’t know for what reason, but we talk about science fiction being in the ghetto of the book store, this was practically the shanty town of it.

Sci-fi and the genre books were a bit of a different story, near the front of the store. That market is going pretty strong right now, but I’m not sure its placement would signify they are moving it to the forefront.

On the other hand, I’m fairly disappointed by the genre’s representation. I was interested in glancing through the Hugo nominations, and I didn’t have the list handy, but of the two I specifically remembered, they only had one, Boneshaker. The one I was more interested in, China Mieville’s The City and The City wasn’t there at all. You’d think they’d make a plan-o-gram for the nominees, but not really.

Second, there were a total of something on the order of two anthologies. Two. Anthologies were once a lifeblood of the industry. I’d really like to see what is getting selected to magazines as I start submitting stories around a bit, but this really isn’t affording me the ability to.

Finally, the sheer amount of urban fantasy, vampire killer chicks in corsets is overwhelming and horrifying. It felt like half of one side was dedicated to the badass chick genre, and really, how much material is there for us readers? I’ve been thinking about the badass characters of late, and realizing the more badass the character, the less depth we seem to get.

I wasn’t really interested in picking up any books, I can’t really afford much and my reading list is pretty backed up at the moment, but the one book I would have picked up wasn’t there. I was interested in John Everson’s the 13th. I know John from playing in a band with him, and we reconnected recently. In the interim he’s won a Bram Stoker Award, and he’s been touring bookstores for a couple months now. He’s an author who lives fairly close to the area, and they didn’t have a single copy of his books to be found. Plenty of vampire hunters, but when it gets to award winners, well, I guess that doesn’t carry the same caveat anymore, now does it?