Once Upon a Time in Pennsylvania

Transparency

The View From My Hideout

I haven't had a lot to say lately and that's because I'm still busy being an author. I'm still tinkering with my seventh science fiction thriller, which has a working title, but it's a great big secret. But I'm mostly busy because Jonco Bugos, my literary alter ego, is busy working on his new novella, The Truth is a Lone Assassin.

And then I'm busy because of all the book marketing videos and promotional deals I recently "signed off on" and so on and so forth. But that only takes up part of my days. Most of my time is spent keeping out of sight and out of mind. Whose mind? Yours. Theirs. Everybody's.

Inspector Harry Callahan once told Captain Briggs in the movie Magnum Force that, "A man's got to know his limitations." and that's basically been my motto as I gaze down that long, dark tunnel into my seventh decade on Earth.

But, every now and then, I jab a stick out of my hiding hole and poke around. So, I may know my limitations as an aging indie author, but I can still poke a stick with the best of them. Or, at least I like to think so, and that's good enough for any ol' dawg who'd rather sleep than romp.

My latest L.A. Times comment

And, no, I don't like blogging anymore. In fact, I don't like it at all. I do it to keep from fading away before my time is up, like General MacArthur.

Man on the Lam

A Portrait of the Author as an Old Man

Back East

What I See In My Crystal Ball Now

Never Take Yourself Too Seriously

Junk TV Website

Junk TV Celebrity Showcase Photo Album

The Dreamer Never Sleeps

This is a promotional video for Michael Casher's fourth science fiction novel.

Eye Spy

Click on Pic for My Spy Report

Zero to Sixty in Nothing Flat

I never thought I'd make it (and, believe me, I wasn't in a hurry) but I did. Yep, I turned sixty this year. Sixty years old. The only reason I don't mind being sixty is that I feel like I'm eighty. So, sixty's nothing.

The big trick is being able to handle being eighty when you feel like you're a hundred. I guess it's time to throttle back a little. But I never liked life in the slow lane. And why slow down now, anyway? If I do add a couple years to my life, they'll no doubt be "scooter years". That's the slow lane again. And, once you've tried the fast lane, there's just no going back.

Seeing the Forest

Can't see the forest for the trees? Don't feel bad. Most people live their whole lives without seeing it. But I see it. Not always. But most of the time. And that's because I work at it. I pay attention to life as I live it. I put what I see in books that I sell and in blogs that I write for free.

I also shared what I saw every month for five years, in a free online monthly newsletter that I called The Pluto Observer. The Pluto Observer used to be the official newsletter of Science Fiction for Thinkers.com, my official website. Now it's just a memory, but one I still share.


When you've got nothing better to do, take a look at what I saw when I took a moment from thinking about myself and dared to see the real world around us. This is what I saw between September 2005 and October 2010. Too bad no one gave a hoot about what I saw and wrote. When I take a look at the real world now I just blog about it or else work on another book about it. Or just keep it to myself.

Blind Fool Running

Video Updated 3-26-13

A Knife In The Heart

I heard the chain saw this morning, cutting and cutting, sawing and sawing. I thought it was one of the neighbors cutting firewood. I was wrong. Then I heard the loud snap and the horrendous, terrible crash.

Downstairs, I could tell that my mother had something important to tell me. Something awful. Then I heard the words.

At the house where I did my growing up between age 7 and 20 — a house we can still see from our kitchen and living room windows — they cut down the tall tree that my father had planted 50 years ago. It was a magnificent, towering hybrid of an ash and some other kind of tree that I can no longer remember.

That's right. It's their property, not ours anymore. It was their tree and they had a right to cut it down. Still, that was the last living memory my mother had of my father, except for our 17-year-old cat that Dad found in an abandoned cardboard box back in 1994. I hope that cat lives forever.

And the tree is gone now. And, yes, it was the tallest tree in town and the tallest and the most magnificent tree this town has ever seen or is likely to ever see again.

This is what it's like to be doomed to living out the rest of your life in a town that should have been in your rear-view mirror a long time ago. What we have instead is a living nightmare that should have been a pleasant dream, departing from us on good terms ages ago, instead of reminding us that we somehow failed to evolve and that stealing what's left of our hearts and trampling that to death is the penance we somehow deserve for trying to come back "home" a dozen years ago.

Author-and-Pony Spotlight

My paperback publisher, Lulu.com, just told me that they'll be deleting my Science Fiction for Thinkers at Lulu storefront 30 days from now. They said they'll be replacing my old, customized, personalized storefront with a new "Author Spotlight" page.

I had the option to sit back and do nothing and just let Lulu.com move my published content 30 days from now or to do it myself before then and maybe add a few touches of my own. Being a self-published author, I naturally chose self-flagellation over being flogged by somebody else.

Being a veteran P.O.D. author, I also know when an author-and-pony show hoop is being held out for me so, naturally, I hopped right through this new author hoop without hesitation. The sad news is that my old storefront sure beat the pants off this newfangled "Author Spotlight" page and it had a lot more to offer, too. The new page looks generic while my old storefront had me written all over it (too bad you can only see the screenshot and not the whole storefront). R.I.P.

My new "spotlight" page doesn't allow me to add blog feeds or customized text content or HTML content, like the old storefront format. The new format allows me to add a few links, a logo and a single YouTube video on an impossibly small screen. You can click on it if you want to watch the real thing at YouTube. Since my professional videos are at Photobucket and not at YouTube, this new video option is about as useful to me as tits on a boar.

So, Science Fiction for Thinkers at Lulu is now as dead as a fish and Michael Casher's "Author Spotlight" Page is, unfortunately, alive and well on the Author-and-Pony Show circuit.

My new Author Spotlight page at Lulu.com

Click on the image above to buy my paperback books at Lulu.com or to just check out the latest hoop I happened to hop through on my way to that big Pearly Hoop in the sky.

My Old Lulu.com Storefront

Dead as a fish.

September 7, 2011 update: In August 2011 I created a YouTube account for SciFiForThinkers and uploaded the four professional videos I made so far to YouTube. I did this so I could have a video on my Author Spotlight page at Lulu since I can't have blog feeds or other custom content there. Plus, YouTube gives me an online backup for these videos. My Photobucket page is pretty classy so I finally customized my YouTube channel. Snazzy is as close as I could come to classy at YouTube so snazzy will have to do. There are now seven professional videos at both sites. And, no, these promotional videos have nothing to do with my Junk TV videos. A Junk TV video is a horse of a different color.

July 28, 2012 update: I removed all my videos and photos from Photobucket and deleted my Photobucket account earlier this year because of all the Flash ads people had to wade through in order to watch my videos. Photobucket is permanently in my rearview mirror.

No World for an Old Author

When Roger retired he started writing books that would sit in boxes on the floor and make no difference in the lives of others. That was not the plan. Was it his fault? You decide.

BLIND FOOL RUNNING

a novella by JONCO BUGOS

Some secrets are meant to be shared.


Buy this book at Amazon.com

Buy this book at Barnes & Noble.com

Buy this book at Lulu.com

My World

Click on the bottom edge of the image to display control buttons. Clicking on the green arrow will take you to the Picasa page for this album.

Jonco Bugos Himself

My alter ego is my literary pen name and a name under which I write two other blogs, here, at Blogger — Jonco Bugos and Think-A-Holic Lounge.

But there's a lot more to this alternate personality of me than meets the eye. I just found out that Jonco went indie on me and put up his own website. I should be mad as hell but I'm too old to argue.

Click on the screen shot or here, Jonco Bugos Himself, if you want to see what his own personal website is all about.

My Better Half

One of the things I find the most interesting about other people is that they're unpredictable sometimes. The predictable part of anyone is quite often nothing more than a label he or she has been forced to live up to in order to get by or to survive or to compete in life. But that's only half the story.

The other half of any person, the part that isn't labeled, is always up for discovery, if anyone's interested enough to do the work. That half is unlabeled because it's the part of any person where assumptions have no power. That's the part of people I like the best. The real part, not the part that fate or other people assigned to them in life. It's the part they choose for themselves. It's the part they'll defend with their lives. And it's always the best part.

I've got another half, too. The real part of me. That's the part of me that doesn't fit in a file folder or a box or a pigeonhole or under anyone's thumb. The part that can never be predicted because it's too dynamic. You can decide for yourself which is which because that's your job, not mine.

I already know which is the real me. It's the part of me I know and like the best. It's the part of me that still loves life and the part that still finds the universe worth exploring. But it's also the part of me that no one should ever mess with.

Once people discover that there's another half to everyone, they're on their way to realizing that the undiscovered half of a person is almost, without question, made up of many smaller parts. And they're the best parts of any person. They're the pieces you can't take apart.