Writing to the end of 2024

#inktober drawing for the 17th thru 22nd

 

I’m ending this year by writing. 2024, it’s been quite a year so far. Today is November 4th. The election is tomorrow, over half of the Nation has already voted, and it’s so stressful, like the pressure and drool just before you throw up. The world is spinning, just enough to make balance feel off, and you are not happy-drunk to numb the pain. That’s how it feels at my house anyways. 

BFF’s job, the giant company that bought the small company he worked for, for over a decade, is laying off another wave of people. Good people, some of them, contractors who are in the Ukraine, their wives and children in asylum, far away in other countries. It’s heartbreaking, he knows it’s bad for them. One of the contractors is also taking care of his elderly Dad, who also is not allowed to leave the country with the women and children, who are now not there to take care of the elderly men. 

And here I am, sincerely grateful to be American. I’ve already voted and checked to make sure my ballot got to the counting machine. 

Last month, October, I distracted myself by doing #inktober an ink drawing per day in October. It was nice, but reminded me why I’m not a cartoonist. I did seriously consider becoming a cartoonist. Several times over the course of my life actually, not just last month. I love cartoons, not comic books really, cartoons, the silly scribbly ones with more jokes and less fighting. 

My plan for November was to do NaNoWriMo but something has happened with the company having to do with AI and a small but bad conspiracy about grooming children. I sure hope that is a lie. The Ai stuff? It’s there in print, and I don’t agree. I think people churning out Ai generated trained novels and articles in a sham, and I don’t like it. I think the Ai should be doing fact checking for lies in the news, and writing author and artist credits -- to stop humans intellectual property and creative work from being stolen, not doing the stealing, or this so called creative work of humans.  I can barely even stand autocorrect or the Ai that suggests crap when I’m trying to chat with my family. Grammar is to change over time. That is the nature of human language. Dictionaries are useful communication tools, but being able to choose your own words is a freedom of speech level issue, especially when talking with your loved ones. 

I do very sincerely appreciate spelling help. I do also need help with homophones, words that sound like other words but have another meaning, I stumble over these two issues a lot. But, if I have an ideal, it is an ideal and if I have an idea, then it’s an idea and the two are not the same even if idea is the more popular word. It’s very, very tiresome to believe you have the right to choose your own words and have to fight as you type to make some Ai stop changing what you are attempting to communicate, especially if you are writing poetry, or fiction dialogue, have a funny non common spelled name (you think it would learn how to spell the authors name, but no?) and never mind the spelling of terrible character’s names. Ai. There’s a line. Don’t cross it will me or I’m going to get a brainless text editor. Oh, and I know I need a human editor. There's never been any doubt about that. If they succeed in an Ai editor that can help me polish my writing, not break it up and destroy it? Then they may have an actual intelligent algorithm happening.

I need to write. I haven’t been writing. It’s time. I need to write for other people so I had planned to do a 100k word count NaNoWriMo goal this month, but then everyone says boycott the company. And so I found another counting site. And of course just like Twitter turning into X and social networking being splintered into many directions, in my case. 5? Let’s see, ummm.. Facebook, (that I can barely stand but is where the most people I know are), Instagram, now owned by Facebook, but I don’t always have photos to share, and then BlueSky, Mastodon and Threads that I rotate ignoring. Oh, and Reddit. It’s 6 apps now that I waste my procrastination time with. 

Anyways. I’ve been writing again. I started November 1st, with 3,422 words. Nov 2nd, I was up to 7,055 words, I moved to https://trackbear.app/ on November 3rd, added my NaNoWriMo word count there, and ended the evening yesterday 8,481 the last word count update to NaNoWriMo. And today, via Track Bear, my morning writing word count was 11,687. 

Onwards, peace and love, ☮ +💚, Uva Be 

P.s. the illustration for this blog post is a screenshot of 6 of my ink drawings as posted on my Instagram feed. 

P.s. #2 Nov. 5th, can't sleep. Word count as of 6:31 a.m. 13,402. 

change and stay the same

UBD's 1990's art

 

Some things stay the same ...

June 21st 2024

As I work away from this story, (Un-Un-Cat, the unfinished past replaced by the next project). Sanity slowly creeps in, in waves, like the tide. The mental conflict leveling over time like a heaping pile of compost turning slowly into rich soil. Yes, I implied it, it was shit, politics gobbled up all that it could and shat it out. 

But, plants and interesting critters remain waiting for me to feed them, some of them growing like weeds and feeding themselves, other habits gone wild and feral as a grumpy mood. It takes time to tame them. All things in their place in the chaotic garden that is a human mind.

☮+💚 @Uva Be

dealing with social media

...or not. Where to start?

1. It's all about "me", or the shared bits of all of us.

Thinking about "looking" at screens.

Writers of memoirs and painters of self-portraits have known this feeling for centuries. A window to our soul and an apple a day...whatever.

This grain of sand (now in 2020, 1 in over 7 billion). Light plus silver halide particles on a film negative, capturing a thin layer of shadow and exposure framed in a box for a flicker of a moment.

Now multiplied by millions (those who share) and billions (everyone who has access to the interwebs) if even only by wireless phone.

That brings me to phones. While I ❤ art + fiction. And enjoy autobiographies ( esp. unplanned ones) and don't care much for biographies (esp. unauthorized ones). Phones?

The problem with phones is like screens; it's not about the device. It is all about the disembodied voices. It is the torture of the damn things "beeping" all hours of the day and night.

A sincere heartfelt thank you to the team who developed the 'Do Not Disturb' algorithm. Thanks for helping to reduce a lot of suffering.

(to be continued) 

In the next post, later with the ...or not dealing parts.

(1/13 to 1/17/2020 or 4 days later)

Uploaded this background to FaceBook in December 2019.

More than a few times over the years I've written long wordy complaints about how there has to be something better. I've quit FB, even deleted photos there, etc...

Today? I'm feeling like enough words.

(1/29/2020, 12 days since I added words here)

Twitter algorithms hunt up data from "web-crawlers" my searches, emails and whatever else my digital life lets "them" list and sell. The loudest crap buries tweets from my meek busy friends.

Facebook bought Instagram, it keeps attempting to remind me to log in. But, I have never done the FB on my phone.

This Blogger blog, Google purchased, now uses ad space attempting to sell add clicks to me. It knows I visit my own blog here while editing more than anyone else reads it. That $84 and change in my Adsense account went from $79 to $84 dollars in the last 8 or 9 years. It will never reach the $100 dollar threshold. So Google will never pay me. 

Medium paid me a nickel. They actually sent a deposit for that five cents! But, people stopped clapping when I got past the five episodes they could read for free. So, I listed all the episodes as FREE to read. It's against the rules to ask for claps. I haven't but, the cynical side of my sense of humor assumes they are blocking me since it's free to read my story posts there.

My own blog, www.uvabe.com always shows up as Not secure. Hmm...? I see this same warning in the paid-for URL on a lot of other artists' and writers' blogs.

The mean person who I fight with sometimes says, You will never be young and sexy, you will NEVER be an influencer. Why do you even waste your time? 

I say What else is there? It's what I've got, a little time to waste. Then I write this post as a writing warm-up for more important things.

2020 around the corner

In 2010 I posted an art-thought per day 365. Ten years later 2020 I'm thinking about doing this again.

https://twitter.com/Uva_Be/status/1201927260946612224

to escape from reality

A strange child (who was me) drew these.

Then, I wrote a lot to escape from a world zooming in too fast, like the car crash that is transitioning from being a child, to being an adult. Not that the actual being an adult happens suddenly, just that life/reality happens and starts taking bites from you, as anyone with any "life experiences" knows.

Lately, I've been trying to retreat again. 55% voted? 45% didn't or were not able to vote. Less than 26% of total possible voters, voted for the racist misogynistic egotistical son of a millionaire and still, months later, I can't, I don't believe those numbers are real. 53% of women?! I can not rationalize that brainwashing is non-reversible. I can not stomach the complete failure of our entire election system. There should have only been suitable candidates on the ballot. Someone who betrays almost everything America stands for should never have been vetted by the Republican party. On and on, in waves of alternating nausea and anger, that just, will, not, stop. 

I need to escape now, more than ever. To state that I'm struggling to let go of "reality" ... blerg. I haven't posted anything since July 5th, 2016. I needed to post something, just to post something, so I am, doing that. This is a buffer. A bit of padding written by someone who recently got many cases of old manuscripts, journals, drawings and other things I had forgotten about years ago, out of storage and just dumped most of it onto piles on the floor. I could take a photo, but it's embarrassing mid sort, feels very naked. Anyhow, if anyone wondered. I hope you all are okay out there in your world. Things are happening one pile at a time around here. Also, I am working on stuff. 

To be continued... 

closet full of unedited drafts

lost tale direction 

story a mirage of words 

 too far to return 

 

 

Um.... why did I write that, ... haiku?  Back in February, this year of 2016? The simple reason is, 'I was lost'. 

 Today, June 19th, summer of this same year, I've decided to be found for a while. I'm tired of being lost. It's not that I've figured out where I'm going to. It's just, I'm here now, so I'm going to try being where I'm at, where ever "here" happens to be. 

..

 By the way for those of you who wonder about #haiku, it's fun. 

 Here are the rules as I understand them.

Write a poem with three lines. The first line is 5 syllables. The second line with 7 syllables and the third line with 5 syllables, again. The goal of a haiku is to express an idea or a feeling in this short sound shape of words. 

Be careful to not write one line, or one sentence and divide it at 5/7/5. It may look like a haiku, but it isn't a poem unless each line of words can stand on it's own as a sound phrase. I only mention this because I see a lot of haiku on twitter written like a broken sentence, not that I am correct and an authority on this, but if you read them too, you'll know what I mean.  

 

 

Second day in May - story of the snack defender

 

The story of the snack defender

The snack defender is just one of my favorite’s in the defender series. The defender art works are totems of our immune system. Not literal realistic macro-giant sculptures of white blood cells, platelets, macrophages etc... but cartoon symbols about the war they fight for our survival.  

Why the focus of my art is on these invisible to the naked eye, bits of us, is a long story. It begins with an important memory. The small child that was me toddled into the kitchen. The floor a tangle of scampering clicking 8 legged creatures bigger than I was. Father had proudly brought home a pile of live giant king crabs. Mother is screaming, honestly freaked out about how to approach these creatures and get them into a pot.

Later, still before I could read I studied the illustrations in my parents medical text books. I flipped past the people, but what interested me most were the layers of diagrams about how the systems in our insides worked. But, strangely even then I took to drawing dots. While doing so, drawing dots for hours, my thoughts were not about ink or drawing something realistic with the dots, instead I was absorbed by how the world is made up of so many tiny pieces, like sand, seeds, ants etc...

Decades later, grown up and married, I dreamt of an army of strange crabs my subconscious had taken from that important childhood memory. They were fighting a battle across complicated rolling canyons with columns, and vein patterns. Wave after wave cleaning away disorderly grey pink fungus-like growths and tiny dark chaotic dust. At that time, I thought, it was what the army did. I thought at first a literal interpretation, cancer being the Greek word for crab. But, that concept felt false, they were a defending army, and then proven false a year later at 24, I had a biopsy of a benign fibrous growth. Two years after that, and many more complicated dreams I had a malignant tumor removed. While I was waiting for them to cut it out I felt helpless, that all I could do was pray and meditate on that army of white blood cells, my immune system. All this in retrospect, I think about how the tumor was cut off from it’s food supply, it was partly necrotic, killed by the army even before it was surgically cut out of me and the cancer did not spread.

Both prayer and science had an answer. Another decade of my life went by, science had studied many families with the same genetic deletion as the one I’d inherited from my Grandparents in the cancer cluster farming valley. According to a European study of many people with our specific exact deletion 3819del5 had no symptoms at all and those who grew cancer, even if they grew it repeatedly and bilaterally, didn’t die of cancer because it didn’t spread. Is it my fate as one living organism in a polluted world, that I was given this particular deletion instead of another defenseless more deadly mutation? Or is it mercy and an answer to prayer?

The defenders are about the post industrial world. From the beginning of modern food cultivation everyone in farming valleys is being exposed to pesticides and chemical fertilizers. Then almost everything we eat is wrapped in plastic, leaching more chemicals and sometimes even served in P6 styrofoam. The defender series are giant macro-cartoon totems, a symbolic reminder of the microscopic army of our immune system, warriors defending our survival all the days we are alive.

This story was originally drafted for the Story a day in May writing challenge. Find out more at StoryAday.org or via @StoryADayMay on twitter.

don't believe in writer's block

“ How best to shift out of this practical state of mind ? ” asked the scribbler staring at the blank page. There was a notebook beside her right elbow, and a box with a couple hundred thousand words of a draft on the table directly in front of her, but she felt uneasy, knowing when she started she’d to be swept away by the swift current that is writing fiction. They say, it’s only words, but she’d been there before, swam out from shore, nearly drowned, alone, in the mindless depths of the ocean of thoughts and ideas that is a story.

100 word story, also called a drabble. 

Story 1. for a story a day in May.

This blog / post left intentionally blank.

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(to be continued) 

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.... don't know what yet. But, something. Later. 

P.s. See: Note about 2011 link on left hand side of page

or other fiction blogs if you are looking for something to read.

thanks,

UBD 01-2013