Jim Hodgson's Blog, page 8

4 – Jonathan French and the Cave Bugs

[image error] My buddy Jonathan French stops by the house to try his luck at an outline. Find his books here and his twitter here.

His work has caught a lot of traction recently. So much so that he has signed a deal with Crown Publishing, where his work will join such books as Ready Player One, The Martian, and such authors as Barack Obama. THANKS, OBAMA.

Jonathan is a great dude. He’s like me in that he has an awesome wife and family. And he’s lots of fun to hang out with on writing panels … but can he compose an outline on the spot? Listen and find out!

This week’s topic comes to us from my pals from Reddit’s Writerchat subreddit and attendant IRC channel. Yeah, people still IRC. Can you believe it?

https://jimhodgson.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/4-jonathan-french-and-the-cave-bugs_mixdown.mp3

Thanks for listening!

3 – A Chipmunk’s Journey with Meghann Hodgson

[image error]Your pleas have been heard, folks. Starting now, this podcast will cease to be just me sorting through submitted podcasts. I have some author pals scheduled. Should be a lot of fun. As a show of good faith, this week we have a special guest: my wife, Meghann Hodgson. Together we work through The Hero’s Journey.

Find out more about The Hero’s Journey here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey

Thank you to Tone Milazzo, who was very kind to submit to the podcast. Find him on his web site or on twitter. His outline was too long for us to do it justice here on the podcast, which is 100% my fault. I was not clear enough with regards to that for which I was asking. Can you imagine?

Shout out to my #writerchat crew on snoonet.org IRC. Come on in and talk writing with us if you are so inclined.

https://jimhodgson.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/3-a-chipmunks-journey_mixdown.mp3

2 – Love and Loss and Woodwinds with Ray_Thompson

[image error]If you’re near Atlanta, this month you can see me performing at Towne Cinema in Avondale May 25th. I will hosting Decaturish’s Folks To Give, a comedy show to support care.org. Find out more about that at folkstogive.com

This week we have a submission from Ray_Thompson. Find his work here:

http://Earth.retribution.fm
http://cyoesfp.retribution.fm
On twitter at @_Retributions

Ray’s idea/theme/message: A story of love and loss and woodwinds (A comedy)

Have a listen to hear Ray’s submitted outline plus one artisanally crafted on the spot by your host.

https://jimhodgson.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/2-love-and-loss-and-bassoons_mixdown.mp3

1 – Statement of Purpose

[image error]In this first-ever episode of The Outliners, I lay out what the podcast hopes to achieve as well as what it won’t be. I also take a swipe at GRRM. He’s rich. He can handle it.

Many thanks to Sean Connery Probably for the introductory section. That was much appreciated, sir.

Have a listen.

https://jimhodgson.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/1-statement-of-purpose-the-middle-game_mixdown.mp3

Hacked for the millionth time

Twice a year or so I get a message from my web host saying that WordPress has been hacked again. It happened yesterday. Again.

That’s what I’m dealing with right now. Thanks for looking at my site. Your humble author appreciates your support.

Sorry it’s a flaming shambles at present.

Book Report: An Unattractive Vampire by Jim McDoniel

Glittery vampires have had their day. Even Tom Cruise’s Lestat, with his frilly cuffs and meaningful glares, had his moment in the — forgive me — sun.

Mr. McDoniel’s main character, Yulric Bile, would happily crash something very heavy into the lot of them. For that, he must be our new favorite vampire.

The vampire Yulric has awakened after quite a long time under the earth to find that vampires are now sexy, preening TV stars with a code of conduct and no taste for proper violence. This irritates him, as it should.

This book is a hilarious (but not glittery) look at an ancient horror. It’s a great example of what a humorous book can be, not to mention a great example of what a vampire book can be.

If you’re into my brand of dark humor, weird fiction, things that go fart in the night, you’ll enjoy this one.

Get it. Read it. Tell the author you liked it.

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The Rain in Spain falls Every Single Day – Hodgsons in Spain Part 3

Spain is a beautiful country. I can’t wait to go back sometime and see it when it’s not raining every day.

The rain started on our way to Granada. Do you know the kind of rain where it’s not pouring, exactly, but you get the sense that the maximum amount of water is still coming down? This was that kind of rain. The kind where by the time you get your umbrella open, your shoes are already soaked through, and then your pant legs, and then you might as well forget the umbrella.

Here we are, leaving Toledo on the first day of rain.

After a lovely wait for an hour or so until the end of the car rental employees siesta at the Cordoba bus station, we picked up our rental car. We were looking for windmills at which to tilt, but didn’t see any. They have some peculiar structures around the landscape, but nothing like you see in Don Quixote drawings.

Maybe they’re antennas? Who knows?

In Granada, people live in caves cut out of the hillside. We thought that sounded super cool, so we rented one via AirBNB as our Granada lodging. We were right, it was pretty neat, but the cave did smell a little weird. Maybe that was thanks to decades upon decades of smoking. People smoke a lot in Spain. Maybe it was the fact that it was a cave.

Still, it was pretty cool, even if walking down out of the hills to enjoy Granada in the rain was a treacherous death-dance. You might be worried that you’ll hurt yourself in a fall on the wet cobbles, but don’t worry, you’ll soon be put right out of any misery by a speeding cab.

Our main objective in Granada was to see the Alhambra, a palace/fortress built in 889 by the Moors, but even then, I understand, it was built on Roman ruins. Long story short it’s an old place. We love looking at old things, especially if the old thing in question has a combination café and beer hut in the courtyard.

The skies cleared in Granada, so we hopped back on the train and headed up north to Logroño, where rain was forecasted. It was also where we found the entrance to Fraggle Rock. Don’t believe me?

We toured a few wineries. I was delighted to find this cool Escort rally car parked outside one.

It belonged to the husband of the winemaker. She was an excellent tour guide. We learned a lot about the merits of different oaks for wine barrels and how different levels of toasting those oaks affect the wine. She didn’t have much to say about the car.

Every night for dinner: tapas. I can’t remember the exact name of this dish, but it was either the Nina, the Pinta, or the Santa Indigestion.

We loved Logroño. As we were leaving, it stopped raining, so we headed to Madrid where rain was forecasted as soon as it stopped snowing.

Madrid has some amazing tapas places too.

After two days in Madrid, we were due to end our stay. We’d had a great time, learned a lot, and eaten anything seved to us on a small dish. I even ate some hand soap in our hotel, mistaking it for tapas.

But at the airport on Saturday, we learned some things: there was only one flight home from Madrid, all flights from Europe to the US leave around the same time (so if you miss one, you miss them all for that day), and the German airline Lufthansa was on strike, so the busiest travel weekend of the year was even busier than it normally would be.

When you fly on a buddy pass, your status is that of a fart. If the plane is utterly empty and you happen to waft in just before they close the door, they aren’t gonna stop you. But if literally any other human being in the world wanders by the plane and wants to get on, that person has higher status than you do.

Another factor is that you might look at a list of flights for an airline and say, “wow, they have five flights outta here today. Surely one will be empty!” Except that four out of those five are probably what they call “codeshares,” which means that your airline can sell you a ticket, but they don’t operate the flight, which means that if you’re flying like we were, you cannot get on that flight.

We got to the airport extra early and hurried to each stop along the way. We asked everyone for help. Being on the standby list is one thing, but seeing yourself as numbers five and six on the list, then six and seven, then eleven and twelve, on down to the mid twenties as other people show up at the last minute, well, it’s not great.

Again, we asked to fly this way, so we don’t complain. We have flown on standby before. We expected some delays, maybe some rerouting. No big deal. We are flexible.

It was Saturday morning. We had a few options. I spoke to a lady from my airline. She said she might be able to squeeze us on a later flight on Wednesday morning, four days from now. Our only other option was to buy a ticket home, which would be between three and five thousand euros … each.

So, we were stuck in Spain. Admittedly, it’s not a terrible problem to have. There were still sights to see.

When Egypt built the Aswan Dam across the Nile, a lot of land that was previously land became lake. The Egyptians realized that this temple, The Temple of Debod, would be under-appreciated by fish, so they gave it to Spain, where people live. The Spanish disassembled it, moved it, and reconstructed it in Madrid.

Bedraggled, wet, and moving to our third lodging in Madrid, we stopped into a bar that appeared to have beer. Meghann ordered an Imperial IPA. I was attempting to find out, using a mixture of Spanish and French, how people said “IPA” there. The bartender was telling me with conviction that IPA came from the word “Imperial.”

“Non, c’est ‘India Pale Ale,'” I said.

“Je pense que c’est Imperial,” he said, pointing with his finger at the bottle. “See? Im, peri, al.”

“Do you guys need help with English?” a voice asked. It turned out to belong to some new friends from Wales. Abandoning the hopeless IPA conversation and hoping for common musical ground, I asked if they might be Elbow fans. They are. And so, we made some new friends.

The next day, we visited the palace in Madrid together, the four of us. They snapped a photo of us in the courtyard. It wasn’t even raining that day.

In the palace they have lots of fancy whatnots, including a dead guy in a coffee table. We were having fun, but we were also ready to be on our way home. Luckily, our new friends knew a few tricks for searching for flights, and we were able to find some for about half what we’d otherwise have had to spend.

So, we were headed home at last, tired, late, and having been kicked around all over Europe in the name of saving money that we didn’t end up saving anyway.

Delighted to be on US soil at last, or nearly, we got into a customs line a mile long at JFK. It was moving pretty well until there was a concerted effort to re-route the line by people getting off another flight.

Rather than get in line at the end, the newcomers decided to just start a new line in the middle of our line. I guess they hoped no one would notice? Someone did. This led to wailing and gnashing of teeth, but no airport employees cared. They just let the passengers sort this kind of thing out amongst themselves “Lord of the Flies” style, I guess.

In Customs, we were honest about the fact that we’d brought a small quantity of ham home from Spain, so our government took it from us, not wanting us to wrench any form of enjoyment from the trip. But at least we were home, in the good old US of A.

We checked the forecast.

Rain for the week.

The Route of Don Quixote – Hodgsons in Spain Part 2

Ancient towns were built atop hills for many reasons. First, it makes your town look great. Second, if someone comes running along to stab you with something, you can just roll a rock down at them and squash them flat. And lastly, you can see a lot of the surrounding countryside, which gives you the opportunity to see enemies coming. This gives you precious time to ready the squashing rock.

[If you’ve missed Part 1 of this account, it is here. -Jim]



Such is the case with Toledo, situated atop a hill so picturesque that a blind earthworm could paint a masterpiece looking at it. We enjoyed a fantastic view of the town from our rooftop AirBNB terrace, once we managed to arrive a day late and many Euro short.

Here we see the tower at Parroquia de San Nicolás de Bari rising above the other rooftops, as we look northeast. Looking east, the highest point of the city is dominated by the Alcázar of Toledo, which is where you’d go in ancient times if you were looking for someone in military dress at whom to jab a sword.

You can always tell a fort built before high powered ranged weapons by the straight-up-and-down, right-angle walls. “Hey, wait, guys, if we built these walls perfectly straight, won’t they be an easy target for a cannon?” a third-century Roman might have asked.

“What’s a cannon?”

“Ah, carry on then.”

We enjoyed strolling around Toledo, then had a fantastic lunch. One of my favorite things about the places I’ve been in western Europe is that any random lunch will be better by far than what most fine dining establishments in Atlanta can do.

The Spanish eat a big lunch in early afternoon and then disappear until the evening, giving us time to relax, enjoy a glass of wine, and some Spanish language overdubbed American reality TV. This works well for me, because American television is incomprehensible. It might as well be overdubbed in a language I can only barely comprehend.

For example, we saw a lot of this show, called Treehouse Guys, in which a group of craftsmen help rich people hemorrhage money uselessly into a project to build a cottage in a tree.

Except in Spain it appears to be called “Tu Casa en un Árbol,” or “Your house in a tree.” But they don’t change the title graphics of the show, so you look at the screen and it says “Treehouse Guys,” in English, but in the guide it’s listed as “Tu Casa en un Árbol.” They’re not the same thing, but you can see how people who see two languages juxtaposed all the time are better at speaking multiple languages than people who only ever see English.

Also interesting about Spanish TV is that they have all the commercials between programs. Not peppered into the program. Most of their commercials are fever-dream mini-movies about cologne.

The American reality TV format looks even more stupidly repetitive than it is without the long minutes of advertisements interspersed. But then, Spanish-made television is weird too. Whenever a couple is pictured, the lady looks to be about 30 and the gentleman appears to be 58.

Passive Aggressive Belling

Toledo has a serious cathedral, the Catedral Primada Santa María de Toledo. It is considered by some to be the greatest example of okay-boys-this-time-we’re-gonna-build-a-REALLY-fancy-one architecture anywhere.

Like any good cathedral, it has a complement of bells atop that clang and bong around at significant moments in time. But elsewhere in the city, as we discovered while drinking wine and contemplating our view of the Alcázar, there is another bell tower that also clangs and bongs but appears to run a few minutes ahead of the cathedral.

I don’t know why that would be, but I assume it is a passive aggressive move on the part of the lesser beller, getting ahead of the cathedral by a minute or two so that your own bells aren’t completely drowned out. Also, the rogue bells appear to be slightly forward in time, which is always stylish.

Windmillin’

In our Toledo ramblings we were near the Ruta de Don Quixote, or the “Lightly thrown ham of Don Quixote.” We didn’t see any windmills that day, but the nature of the trip — particularly our plans for getting to and from Spain by buddy pass — already had a certain quixotic taint, which, it must be said, is one hell of a taint.

The Spanish are quite proud of Miguel de Cervantes. I snapped this photo of myself near this statue of him as we were leaving Toledo for the train station.

As we walked down to get the Renfe train to Cordoba, we were in good spirits, thinking our trials and tribulations of travel were certainly behind us now, and the rest of our trip would be sunny and without difficulty.