Okay.
Okaaaay. It’s been a while since I’ve updated the blog. In my defense, I’ve launched an online lit mag/small press in the time its taken the Expendables to launch a sequel. Things are happening, stars are aligning, all that jazz. I’m writing this from a cool little apartment in Krakow, Poland. I didn’t come here to write, not exactly, but getting out of the country and seeing the world is doing wonders for the work-in-progress.
A visit to Warsaw, a city that’s got one foot in the future, and another foot still healing from being stepped on by Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. The people here are stoic, quiet, proud – on the surface. Get them talking and they’re friendly, gregarious, they love to laugh.
Silver and Gold living statues in the Krakow town square spent more time talking to each other than they did performing. A musical revue began with a sexy lady in a huge fur hat, short shorts and thigh-high boots standing on top of a tractor that wheeled onto the stage powered by two acrobats pedaling while a third rode inside of the tire. All this prior to a man snorkeling through the air while serenaded by an old 50s love song, which was followed by a crazy man firing blanks from a real AK47 over the crowd. A man who looked like Jerry Garcia brought his horse to the town square so people could pay to pet it. That was the whole act.
There’s graffiti everywhere and on every building young and old. There’s no way I can complain about tagging in LA, not after what I’ve seen here. But there’s a pulse, a vibrancy to everything, a sense of place and purpose and history.
There’s a church in the town square where a herald has played the trumpet every hour, on the hour, every day…for the last 600 years. Think about that for a minute. Every hour on the hour for almost three times as long as America’s been a country.
Krakow amazes me at every turn, and there’s more to see and more to do, and all of these things are slowly worming their way into my work-in-progress, a dirty, two-fisted Sci-Fi tale about genetic augmentation, sociopolitical strife, and government machinations in a near-future Los Angeles. It’s ambitious, sprawling, and fun as hell to write.
Now, I’m off to explore more of Krakow, but pictures will follow here, rambles, updates, what-have-yous. Things are in the works, and if all goes well, more of my words should be in print by this time next year.
In the meantime, go entertain yourselves at ThunderDomeMag.com. Read about our upcoming print and web collections, and submit!
FINALLY!