There's a new Mango in town! Beware the Patronizing Mango 157, Smell Phone! Go enjoy it and send it to all your friends! https://www.patreon.com/posts/75806935
Showing posts with label Beware the Hairy Mango. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Beware the Hairy Mango. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 27, 2022
New Mango! Smell Phone!
Monday, August 01, 2022
BTPM 152
UPDATE: The Patreon player is acting up at the moment. If you can't play it in the player, you can always download it and give it a listen.
Here's a link to the latest episode of Beware the Patronizing Mango, number 152. Enjoy!
https://www.patreon.com/posts/patronizing-152-68890838
Sunday, January 09, 2022
Friday, December 31, 2021
A Brief Rundown Of My 2021
I wrote about 115,000 words in 2021, around a third of my goal. I finished six stories and made thirty-six submissions. I sold two stories and a reprint, and had three stories published.
Of those 115,000 words, approximately 89,000 were for my Patreon patrons, whether it was for the forty-eight Mango episodes I wrote, the twenty-four flash fiction pieces, or the fifty or so Sunday Updates. My Patreon words added up to the equivalent of a shortish novel.
I’m very happy that my kids and I remained Covid-free in 2021. Precaution and luck. I accumulated nine more college credits. I got a little promotion at the library and was able to quit my part-time job in October, which brought to an end a misery-filled 33-year retail career. That was the best thing I did in 2021.
I’m disappointed overall. I always fall short of my big plans. Falling short doesn’t happen in a year, it happens moment to moment with every decision, and readers of my Sunday Updates can see my spotty productivity over the weeks. But the things I did do were all positive and I continued to move forward. Tomorrow, I’ll post my brief but unreasonable goals for 2022.
I hope we all have a great 2022. Onward and upward.
Tuesday, April 24, 2018
Forty-Nine
Well, gang, we're down to the wire. I'm forty-nine years old today, and that means there's only one year left to achieve this blog's original goal: write one thousand stories meant for publication by the time I'm fifty years old.
Let's look at the tally, shall we? Right. So all I have to do is write eight-hundred and thirty-five more stories in the next year. Okay, so much for that goal.
But if you've been following this blog for a while, you know I gave up on that goal a couple of years ago, if not longer. My goal is still to write a thousand stories,time limit or no. At the pace I'm currently going, death will come before I hit three hundred stories.
My life is super busy right now. I've got two jobs and I'm taking classes to get a better job in the library system and say goodbye to retail forever. If everything goes well, I may have a lot more time in about twenty months. In the meantime let's enjoy what we can.
My story, Stars so Sharp They Break the Skin (number 164 of The One-Thousand), comes out next week in the May issue of Apex. I'll post a link when it's up. The issue will also feature an interview with me by Andrea Johnson.
Over at https://www.patreon.com/matthewsanbornsmith the mangoes are still coming out, slowly but steadily, as well as new stories, video and audio extras, and some terrible, terrible art by yours truly.
No matter what happens, I'm always moving forward. Even when I'm moving backward. Because I turn around.
Let's look at the tally, shall we? Right. So all I have to do is write eight-hundred and thirty-five more stories in the next year. Okay, so much for that goal.
But if you've been following this blog for a while, you know I gave up on that goal a couple of years ago, if not longer. My goal is still to write a thousand stories,time limit or no. At the pace I'm currently going, death will come before I hit three hundred stories.
My life is super busy right now. I've got two jobs and I'm taking classes to get a better job in the library system and say goodbye to retail forever. If everything goes well, I may have a lot more time in about twenty months. In the meantime let's enjoy what we can.
My story, Stars so Sharp They Break the Skin (number 164 of The One-Thousand), comes out next week in the May issue of Apex. I'll post a link when it's up. The issue will also feature an interview with me by Andrea Johnson.
Over at https://www.patreon.com/matthewsanbornsmith the mangoes are still coming out, slowly but steadily, as well as new stories, video and audio extras, and some terrible, terrible art by yours truly.
No matter what happens, I'm always moving forward. Even when I'm moving backward. Because I turn around.
Monday, January 01, 2018
2017/2018
Happy New Year!
2017 wasn't great, but a couple of things happened that were good enough to give me some hope for the future. One major thing was getting a part-time job at the library which pointed the way out from a death at the hands of retail.
I had a goal of writing twelve new short stories in 2017. I only completed six, but I thought five of those six were great. Two of them were the longest pieces I've written in years, technically novelettes. I'm excited about the story I'm currently working on, but that will be one for 2018.
I had only one story published this year, but some people really dug it. It's called The Wardrobe and you can read it here: http://www.metaphysicalcircus.com/the-wardrobe-fiction-by-matthew-sanborn-smith/
After peeling out of a terribly stressful job, I started a Patreon in June that helped me reconnect with some awesome fans, raise Beware the Hairy Mango from the dead, and cover some bills during a very lean summer. It also got me to blow the dust off my failed Kickstarter project, Hive Five.
2018 is the year of biting off more than I can chew. On top of my two part-time jobs, I'm going back to school to get an Associate's degree in English, and then an even better library job. But the degree and job are for late 2019. Classes, or at least eight of them, are for 2018.
On top of that, I've packed more (mundane, but important to me) goals into the year than I could possibly have time to achieve, but so what? Among those goals are another stab at twelve stories and finishing Hive Five, though that will likely be a novella, rather than a novel. There's also creating content for the Patreon, probably moving, and consuming a lot of stories, books, comics, and movies.
I'd better get moving.
2017 wasn't great, but a couple of things happened that were good enough to give me some hope for the future. One major thing was getting a part-time job at the library which pointed the way out from a death at the hands of retail.
I had a goal of writing twelve new short stories in 2017. I only completed six, but I thought five of those six were great. Two of them were the longest pieces I've written in years, technically novelettes. I'm excited about the story I'm currently working on, but that will be one for 2018.
I had only one story published this year, but some people really dug it. It's called The Wardrobe and you can read it here: http://www.metaphysicalcircus.com/the-wardrobe-fiction-by-matthew-sanborn-smith/
After peeling out of a terribly stressful job, I started a Patreon in June that helped me reconnect with some awesome fans, raise Beware the Hairy Mango from the dead, and cover some bills during a very lean summer. It also got me to blow the dust off my failed Kickstarter project, Hive Five.
2018 is the year of biting off more than I can chew. On top of my two part-time jobs, I'm going back to school to get an Associate's degree in English, and then an even better library job. But the degree and job are for late 2019. Classes, or at least eight of them, are for 2018.
On top of that, I've packed more (mundane, but important to me) goals into the year than I could possibly have time to achieve, but so what? Among those goals are another stab at twelve stories and finishing Hive Five, though that will likely be a novella, rather than a novel. There's also creating content for the Patreon, probably moving, and consuming a lot of stories, books, comics, and movies.
I'd better get moving.
Wednesday, November 29, 2017
163 and 164
I've been my usual lax self here. Forgot to mention I finished a flash piece in July called Outvasion (that's 163) and a 5,000 word short story in October called Stars so Sharp They Pierce the Skin (that's 164).
I've had very little time for writing the last month, between two jobs and life outside of those. I've mostly been working on Mango scripts for the Patreon and a little bit on "Hive Five."
My netbook, which has been pretty good to me for the more than seven years I've had it, is now causing me enough problems that I went and ordered a refurbished desktop, just so I can write and podcast without wanting to kill things and smash objects. I should be getting the other machine in a couple of days. I really hope it works and doesn't crap out on me.
I've had very little time for writing the last month, between two jobs and life outside of those. I've mostly been working on Mango scripts for the Patreon and a little bit on "Hive Five."
My netbook, which has been pretty good to me for the more than seven years I've had it, is now causing me enough problems that I went and ordered a refurbished desktop, just so I can write and podcast without wanting to kill things and smash objects. I should be getting the other machine in a couple of days. I really hope it works and doesn't crap out on me.
Sunday, June 25, 2017
I'm On Patreon!
If you loved the defunct Beware the Hairy Mango podcast, you'll definitely want to get in on this, because, for just a dollar a month, you'll get to listen to it's latest iteration, Beware the Patronizing Mango. You also get weekly writing updates by me and the occasional sneak preview of things I've got coming out before the public gets them.
Kick in more and you'll get more goodies, like an episode a month of the old subscription show, Beware the Elitist Mango, flash fiction, and short stories. Take a look at the site and if this isn't the time for you to commit, do me a favor and tell your friends about it through social media, or old-fashioned human being talking. Thanks a bunch!
Wednesday, October 12, 2016
Your Limitations Are Your Strengths
This is aimed toward artists and their art—most specifically writers—but can be applied to all aspects of life.
A story:
There once was a blues band called Earth from Birmingham (the England one, not the Alabama one) who played a bunch of dives where people wouldn’t shut up. Many audiences don’t shut up. What I mean is that these drunks were loud. So Earth went with the solution that had worked for the Beatles back in their loud, drunken audience days in Hamburg: they got louder. As the volume went up, the sound changed. The guitar and bass sounded more distorted. The singer had to get a little more screamy. The drummer beat any subtlety right out of existence. Their bluesiness maybe sounded a little less bluesey.
One day, Earth left their practice space and looked across the street at the movie theater marquee, which advertised the horror movie currently playing. The story goes that the band watched some couples leaving the theater clutching one another tightly. The guitarist, probably looking for a bigger audience, said something like, “Hey, people like being scared. What if we played scary music?” The rest of the guys liked the idea so much, they not only agreed to it, they changed the band’s name to match that of the film that was playing, Black Sabbath.
For those of you unfamiliar with blues music, let me tell you, it’s usually not scary. The group’s sound got a bit farther from the blues and a bit closer to something else that didn’t necessarily have a category at the time.
With no airplay, but a hell of a lot of work, the band began to gain popularity. At one point they were making enough money that the guitarist, Tony Iommi, came home for lunch from his factory job and announced to his mother that he wasn’t going back to work. Perhaps not wanting him to burn any bridges, his mother convinced him to go back and at least finish out his shift. Back at the factory, Tony got himself caught in one of the machines and lost the tips of two fingers on his left hand. (Maybe it was an irony factory)
MUSIC TRIVIA MOMENT: Fingertips are largely regarded as important to guitarists.
Now, in many families, this would mark the beginning of a decades-long resentment and an early death by alcohol consumption, but Tony was a little better than that. He fashioned himself a couple of prosthetic fingertips from what I’ve heard were melted plastic bottle caps, though I don’t know if plastic bottle caps were a thing in the early seventies.
But here’s the part that’s more important for my purposes than the origin of the fingertip material: Even with his new fingertips, Tony found it painful to hold his tight strings down against the fretboard. He decided to wind the keys down a bit, slackening the strings three steps down from standard tuning. Geezer Butler, the band’s bass player tuned his instrument to match. This brought Black Sabbath two steps closer to their signature sound. They could go lower on the low end than most groups did and the slack strings gave the instruments a distinct rubber band sort of twang.
The point of all this is to look back at the title of this post.
When I was a lad in Moosup Elementary School, our art teacher was Mrs Hinchey. (My apologies if I spelled your name wrong, Mrs. Hinchey) I had no idea how smart she was at the time because I was a bit wrapped up in my own problems with pastels on black paper, but years later, she was my teacher again for a bit, maybe middle school, maybe junior high, and that’s when I realized it. In one class, she gave us our medium of the day and told us to have at it. Some kids jumped into the project without missing a beat. Many kids stared at the materials and at one another wondering what to make. That’s when Mrs. Hinchey fuckin’ unleashed it on us. Here’s what she said:
“If you’re having trouble figuring out what to make, it’s not because you don’t have any ideas. It’s because you have too many ideas."
BOOM!
Go look at the title of this post again.
Which of these writing prompts is easier to get going on?
1) A story about anything you want.
2) A story about a guy who is trying to coax his dying car across Soviet Russia.
To go back to music again for a moment, as a kid, Ringo Starr was ill and couldn’t go to school for many months. Somebody set a drum kit in front of him and he learned how to play, because what else was he going to do?
His drum kit was set up for a right-handed drummer even though he was left-handed. Some of his most creative drum fills when he was with the Beatles came about because his orientation was the opposite of what it should have been and because he had to move his arms a little differently in order to avoid knocking into cymbal stands with his arms.
Your limitations are your strengths. I didn’t even make you scroll back up for that one.
Ryan Holiday wrote a book called The Obstacle is the Path, full of sweet-ass examples of what I’m talking about. It’s based on an aspect of the philosophy of stoicism which, in a nutshell, goes something like this: “Welp, here I am. Now what am I going to do about it?" A hardcore stoic takes her setbacks and turns them into advantages.
Let’s look at me.
I write. I’ve been diagnosed with the depression, with the ADD. I work well in short bursts, so that’s how I write. Sometimes I can’t bring myself to hit a key, so I don’t, and I’ve been through the cycle enough that I know it will pass. Come back tomorrow or the next day. It’ll be okay. But this means that every time I attack the keyboard, I’m in an extreme state of mind. I’m hot to write and I’m stuffing everything I’ve got that day into a page or two.
I like ideas to the exclusion of some other important things. I like heavy stylists. This combination along with my very brief writing interludes can make my work seem dense and devoid of nuance. I own that shit. I make it my voice. Yes, you should always work to improve your weak areas, but I believe if all your areas are in balance, you may be washing out the eccentricities that make your work truly great. Embrace your strengths until they burst. If people want balance, they’re in luck. There are hundreds of other writers for them to read. If they want a ride, they’ll read you.
My podcast, Beware the Hairy Mango, wasn’t popular, but it was unique. As an artist, that was more important to me. It was five minutes long because every word of it was scripted to keep me from “umm”s and “uhh”s. It was funny, because that’s a strength of mine. (You disagree. Humor is subjective, I know. Go with me.) It was absurdist because that idea thing again. It was delivered at top speed, with pauses edited out, because there were things that I thought weren’t that funny, but if they were presented as if they were, and you didn’t have time to think about them, you’d assume they were funny, and maybe even laugh. There was no other podcast out there like it because no one else brought my specific set of limitations to a show.
Let’s look at you.
You don’t have time to write. Those individual sentences you get to scribble down on the office printer paper during your smoke break pack an entire day’s worth of punch.
Your family is driving you crazy. Unleashing on them in prose is the most raw and passionate work you’ve ever allowed yourself.
You have physical limitations. You’re forced to approach your art through a medium or a method most people wouldn’t consider and your results don’t quite resemble anything else you’ve ever seen.
You have psychological limitations. Your art may be exquisitely controlled. It may be told in a voice so different that it shocks your audience.
The “J” key is broken on your keyboard. You’ll have to get creative with words and your characters have now developed an interesting new dialect.
Or maybe you take those things in a different direction .
The point is there’s no limit on problems. You can let them eat you alive. You can also use them to shape your work into your fingerprint (or plastic bottle cap print, depending on your situation.) If you’re making art, your voice is the only thing you’ve got. Your voice is what happens when your vision gets squeezed through the birth canal of everyday circumstance.
Stop using your problems to avoid making your art. Take your problems to your art and pile them all on top of the accelerator.
Go.
UPDATE 1-16-17: If you like stories about limitations steering art, the latest episode of the Cracked podcast is full of them. "Mistakes That Created the Best Art of the Last 100 Years" http://www.cracked.com/podcast/accidents-that-created-best-art-20th-century/
A story:
There once was a blues band called Earth from Birmingham (the England one, not the Alabama one) who played a bunch of dives where people wouldn’t shut up. Many audiences don’t shut up. What I mean is that these drunks were loud. So Earth went with the solution that had worked for the Beatles back in their loud, drunken audience days in Hamburg: they got louder. As the volume went up, the sound changed. The guitar and bass sounded more distorted. The singer had to get a little more screamy. The drummer beat any subtlety right out of existence. Their bluesiness maybe sounded a little less bluesey.
One day, Earth left their practice space and looked across the street at the movie theater marquee, which advertised the horror movie currently playing. The story goes that the band watched some couples leaving the theater clutching one another tightly. The guitarist, probably looking for a bigger audience, said something like, “Hey, people like being scared. What if we played scary music?” The rest of the guys liked the idea so much, they not only agreed to it, they changed the band’s name to match that of the film that was playing, Black Sabbath.
For those of you unfamiliar with blues music, let me tell you, it’s usually not scary. The group’s sound got a bit farther from the blues and a bit closer to something else that didn’t necessarily have a category at the time.
With no airplay, but a hell of a lot of work, the band began to gain popularity. At one point they were making enough money that the guitarist, Tony Iommi, came home for lunch from his factory job and announced to his mother that he wasn’t going back to work. Perhaps not wanting him to burn any bridges, his mother convinced him to go back and at least finish out his shift. Back at the factory, Tony got himself caught in one of the machines and lost the tips of two fingers on his left hand. (Maybe it was an irony factory)
MUSIC TRIVIA MOMENT: Fingertips are largely regarded as important to guitarists.
Now, in many families, this would mark the beginning of a decades-long resentment and an early death by alcohol consumption, but Tony was a little better than that. He fashioned himself a couple of prosthetic fingertips from what I’ve heard were melted plastic bottle caps, though I don’t know if plastic bottle caps were a thing in the early seventies.
But here’s the part that’s more important for my purposes than the origin of the fingertip material: Even with his new fingertips, Tony found it painful to hold his tight strings down against the fretboard. He decided to wind the keys down a bit, slackening the strings three steps down from standard tuning. Geezer Butler, the band’s bass player tuned his instrument to match. This brought Black Sabbath two steps closer to their signature sound. They could go lower on the low end than most groups did and the slack strings gave the instruments a distinct rubber band sort of twang.
The point of all this is to look back at the title of this post.
*
When I was a lad in Moosup Elementary School, our art teacher was Mrs Hinchey. (My apologies if I spelled your name wrong, Mrs. Hinchey) I had no idea how smart she was at the time because I was a bit wrapped up in my own problems with pastels on black paper, but years later, she was my teacher again for a bit, maybe middle school, maybe junior high, and that’s when I realized it. In one class, she gave us our medium of the day and told us to have at it. Some kids jumped into the project without missing a beat. Many kids stared at the materials and at one another wondering what to make. That’s when Mrs. Hinchey fuckin’ unleashed it on us. Here’s what she said:
“If you’re having trouble figuring out what to make, it’s not because you don’t have any ideas. It’s because you have too many ideas."
BOOM!
Go look at the title of this post again.
*
Which of these writing prompts is easier to get going on?
1) A story about anything you want.
2) A story about a guy who is trying to coax his dying car across Soviet Russia.
*
To go back to music again for a moment, as a kid, Ringo Starr was ill and couldn’t go to school for many months. Somebody set a drum kit in front of him and he learned how to play, because what else was he going to do?
His drum kit was set up for a right-handed drummer even though he was left-handed. Some of his most creative drum fills when he was with the Beatles came about because his orientation was the opposite of what it should have been and because he had to move his arms a little differently in order to avoid knocking into cymbal stands with his arms.
Your limitations are your strengths. I didn’t even make you scroll back up for that one.
*
Ryan Holiday wrote a book called The Obstacle is the Path, full of sweet-ass examples of what I’m talking about. It’s based on an aspect of the philosophy of stoicism which, in a nutshell, goes something like this: “Welp, here I am. Now what am I going to do about it?" A hardcore stoic takes her setbacks and turns them into advantages.
*
Let’s look at me.
I write. I’ve been diagnosed with the depression, with the ADD. I work well in short bursts, so that’s how I write. Sometimes I can’t bring myself to hit a key, so I don’t, and I’ve been through the cycle enough that I know it will pass. Come back tomorrow or the next day. It’ll be okay. But this means that every time I attack the keyboard, I’m in an extreme state of mind. I’m hot to write and I’m stuffing everything I’ve got that day into a page or two.
I like ideas to the exclusion of some other important things. I like heavy stylists. This combination along with my very brief writing interludes can make my work seem dense and devoid of nuance. I own that shit. I make it my voice. Yes, you should always work to improve your weak areas, but I believe if all your areas are in balance, you may be washing out the eccentricities that make your work truly great. Embrace your strengths until they burst. If people want balance, they’re in luck. There are hundreds of other writers for them to read. If they want a ride, they’ll read you.
My podcast, Beware the Hairy Mango, wasn’t popular, but it was unique. As an artist, that was more important to me. It was five minutes long because every word of it was scripted to keep me from “umm”s and “uhh”s. It was funny, because that’s a strength of mine. (You disagree. Humor is subjective, I know. Go with me.) It was absurdist because that idea thing again. It was delivered at top speed, with pauses edited out, because there were things that I thought weren’t that funny, but if they were presented as if they were, and you didn’t have time to think about them, you’d assume they were funny, and maybe even laugh. There was no other podcast out there like it because no one else brought my specific set of limitations to a show.
*
Let’s look at you.
You don’t have time to write. Those individual sentences you get to scribble down on the office printer paper during your smoke break pack an entire day’s worth of punch.
Your family is driving you crazy. Unleashing on them in prose is the most raw and passionate work you’ve ever allowed yourself.
You have physical limitations. You’re forced to approach your art through a medium or a method most people wouldn’t consider and your results don’t quite resemble anything else you’ve ever seen.
You have psychological limitations. Your art may be exquisitely controlled. It may be told in a voice so different that it shocks your audience.
The “J” key is broken on your keyboard. You’ll have to get creative with words and your characters have now developed an interesting new dialect.
Or maybe you take those things in a different direction .
*
The point is there’s no limit on problems. You can let them eat you alive. You can also use them to shape your work into your fingerprint (or plastic bottle cap print, depending on your situation.) If you’re making art, your voice is the only thing you’ve got. Your voice is what happens when your vision gets squeezed through the birth canal of everyday circumstance.
Stop using your problems to avoid making your art. Take your problems to your art and pile them all on top of the accelerator.
Go.
UPDATE 1-16-17: If you like stories about limitations steering art, the latest episode of the Cracked podcast is full of them. "Mistakes That Created the Best Art of the Last 100 Years" http://www.cracked.com/podcast/accidents-that-created-best-art-20th-century/
Sunday, July 17, 2016
What's Goin' On
Although I've done a bit of an update over at the Mango, I haven't done it in a while over here. Many of you know that I work seven days a week, with my time divvied up amongst two corporations. So the work I want to do happens at about the pace of digging a prison escape tunnel with a wooden spoon that I stole from the Italian ice guy. (It was nice of him to visit the prison.)
I still, still, still have fifteen regular episodes of Beware the Hairy Mango to go and two episodes of Beware the Donated Mango before I'm done with that forever. I've got decent chunks of every script written, and will put the shows out as I finish them.
I've pulled out a story I've been puttering around in for years with a working title of Red and Roxanne. It's weird, interpersonal, artsy science fiction story that still has to have some cliches extracted, and it may be another year before it's finished. For a couple three days in my meager amount of spare time I'm trying to fix some horrendous formatting issues. Last year Scrivener was on sale, so I gave it a try, using Red and Roxanne as the guinea pig. I got the scenes laid out and worked on it to a degree, when my little netbook choked on it and couldn't move. So that was the end of that.
I reopened the file yesterday and I'm slowly cutting and pasting its several thousand words section by section back into a Word document. Slowly, because the formatting is so fucked up there are different issues with each scene. I'm talking margins, tab settings, fonts, spacing, numbered lists where there should be none, all sorts of shit. And neither Word nor AbiWord will let me select the entire document and fix the formatting across the whole. What a waste of precious life.
Once that bullshit is done I'll have had a few days to recharge my Mango batteries and can get to work on putting more episodes out. What I'm shooting for is to wrap up the podcast so I can get more fiction done. I've got at least five short stories in various stages and a novel rewrite I'm looking forward to getting back to.
I'm going to try to do one draft of all of them before starting on the next set of drafts. I'm hoping that taking that much time between drafts on any one story will give it time to develop in my head, and give me some distance so I can make it better. My name is Matt and I suffer from what Bud Sparhawk calls Premature Submission Syndrome. I get so eager! But I must control myself.
mustmustmustmustmustmustmustmustmust . . .
I still, still, still have fifteen regular episodes of Beware the Hairy Mango to go and two episodes of Beware the Donated Mango before I'm done with that forever. I've got decent chunks of every script written, and will put the shows out as I finish them.
I've pulled out a story I've been puttering around in for years with a working title of Red and Roxanne. It's weird, interpersonal, artsy science fiction story that still has to have some cliches extracted, and it may be another year before it's finished. For a couple three days in my meager amount of spare time I'm trying to fix some horrendous formatting issues. Last year Scrivener was on sale, so I gave it a try, using Red and Roxanne as the guinea pig. I got the scenes laid out and worked on it to a degree, when my little netbook choked on it and couldn't move. So that was the end of that.
I reopened the file yesterday and I'm slowly cutting and pasting its several thousand words section by section back into a Word document. Slowly, because the formatting is so fucked up there are different issues with each scene. I'm talking margins, tab settings, fonts, spacing, numbered lists where there should be none, all sorts of shit. And neither Word nor AbiWord will let me select the entire document and fix the formatting across the whole. What a waste of precious life.
Once that bullshit is done I'll have had a few days to recharge my Mango batteries and can get to work on putting more episodes out. What I'm shooting for is to wrap up the podcast so I can get more fiction done. I've got at least five short stories in various stages and a novel rewrite I'm looking forward to getting back to.
I'm going to try to do one draft of all of them before starting on the next set of drafts. I'm hoping that taking that much time between drafts on any one story will give it time to develop in my head, and give me some distance so I can make it better. My name is Matt and I suffer from what Bud Sparhawk calls Premature Submission Syndrome. I get so eager! But I must control myself.
mustmustmustmustmustmustmustmustmust . . .
Wednesday, February 17, 2016
Here Are The Things
Here are the completed things that I mentioned I was working on in the last post:
Beware the Donated Mango episode 1 - Carl's Wurst: http://bewarethehairymango.com/donated-episode-1-carls-wurst/
Fiction Crawler 16: http://www.starshipsofa.com/blog/2016/02/10/starshipsofa-no-422-brian-k-lowe-and-professor-christopher-riley-talks-about-apollo-14-astronaut-edgar-mitchell/
That Fiction Crawler was one I enjoyed doing, which is unusual for me. They often feel like a chore. But I chose stories the styles of which made me want to swim around in them. Enjoy!
Still working on many more Mangoes!
Beware the Donated Mango episode 1 - Carl's Wurst: http://bewarethehairymango.com/donated-episode-1-carls-wurst/
Fiction Crawler 16: http://www.starshipsofa.com/blog/2016/02/10/starshipsofa-no-422-brian-k-lowe-and-professor-christopher-riley-talks-about-apollo-14-astronaut-edgar-mitchell/
That Fiction Crawler was one I enjoyed doing, which is unusual for me. They often feel like a chore. But I chose stories the styles of which made me want to swim around in them. Enjoy!
Still working on many more Mangoes!
Friday, January 15, 2016
Outta Site
I took a little break from Beware the Hairy Mango for about a week and a half to get a couple of other things done. One is my new home site http://www.matthewsanbornsmith.com/ which ties together everything else I do online, including this site and the Mango. Go take a look if you want easy access to the other stuff I do.
I resumed work on the first episode of Beware the Donated Mango, the shows I owe to folks who donated seventy five dollars or more to the Mango fundraiser last spring.
Once that first show is done, I'll be producing the next Fiction Crawler spot for StarShipSofa.
Then lots more Mangoes. I really need more time off from my jobs.
I resumed work on the first episode of Beware the Donated Mango, the shows I owe to folks who donated seventy five dollars or more to the Mango fundraiser last spring.
Once that first show is done, I'll be producing the next Fiction Crawler spot for StarShipSofa.
Then lots more Mangoes. I really need more time off from my jobs.
Thursday, December 31, 2015
2015
2015 was a tough year, though not as bad as 2009. My Kickstarter failed. I changed jobs, moved twice, and put in way too many hours working for other people for not enough money. Things have started to pick up, though.
My creative work was consumed by the podcast. Outside of that, I did a couple of major rewrites on short stories and that was it. I did sell my first pro story in years and sold a couple of reprints. I did my first reading, sat on my first panel, did my first Drabblecast narration, and wrote my first introduction.
I'm happy that I took more chances than usual this year and expanded my too-close horizons a bit. I learned a lot of new things, met some awesome people, and scored a win with last spring's Mango fundraiser.
Because of that fundraiser, I still have five months of Mangoes with which to contend. After that, I look forward to getting back to short stories and novels. 2016 will probably be a year of regrouping, but I'll keep my eye out for new opportunities.
My creative work was consumed by the podcast. Outside of that, I did a couple of major rewrites on short stories and that was it. I did sell my first pro story in years and sold a couple of reprints. I did my first reading, sat on my first panel, did my first Drabblecast narration, and wrote my first introduction.
I'm happy that I took more chances than usual this year and expanded my too-close horizons a bit. I learned a lot of new things, met some awesome people, and scored a win with last spring's Mango fundraiser.
Because of that fundraiser, I still have five months of Mangoes with which to contend. After that, I look forward to getting back to short stories and novels. 2016 will probably be a year of regrouping, but I'll keep my eye out for new opportunities.
Sunday, November 01, 2015
MangoWriMo
I haven't done NaNoWriMo in years. Haven't even paid much attention to it in a while, but I decided today to give it a shot, in my own matty way. The average Mango script runs about 1,250 words. 50,000 words means about forty Mango scripts. I only have about 45 left to write in total to finish this year, do the promised personalized episodes for super-donors, and do 2016's MuchoMangoMayo.
The thought of all those shows has been dogging me, especially because I've only been able to get one Mango done a week lately. I'm going to push myself now. If I can do MangoWriMo and it doesn't destroy me, it will make life much better after November.
Here we go!
The thought of all those shows has been dogging me, especially because I've only been able to get one Mango done a week lately. I'm going to push myself now. If I can do MangoWriMo and it doesn't destroy me, it will make life much better after November.
Here we go!
Sunday, June 14, 2015
"Oh Right," He Remembered. "I Have A Blog."
Oops.
The Mango Coast Guard came out in partial force over the last two and a half weeks and gave me a pile of money so that I might cause MuchoMangoMayo 2016 to happen. So that's something.
I haven't even finished this year's MuchoMangoMayo and it's the middle of June. Well, as this neglected blog will affirm, I've been busy. the last three and a half months have been crazy, with life warping in unpleasant bends. Whatever. Go listen to some of the Mangoes I shot up there in the last month or so and enjoy yourself for a few minutes. >>>> http://bewarethehairymango.com/
The Mango Coast Guard came out in partial force over the last two and a half weeks and gave me a pile of money so that I might cause MuchoMangoMayo 2016 to happen. So that's something.
I haven't even finished this year's MuchoMangoMayo and it's the middle of June. Well, as this neglected blog will affirm, I've been busy. the last three and a half months have been crazy, with life warping in unpleasant bends. Whatever. Go listen to some of the Mangoes I shot up there in the last month or so and enjoy yourself for a few minutes. >>>> http://bewarethehairymango.com/
Tuesday, February 24, 2015
155
Just finished and shipped off story 155 of The One-Thousand! If I had any hair, I'd be able to feel the wind in it! This one was a shortie that I conceived of yesterday and finished today. It's a story that would be perfectly at home at Beware the Hairy Mango (though it's twice as long as most of those) and I'm sending it to a very non-Mango magazine. Actually, every magazine is a very non-Mango magazine.
In the last five days, I've written or finished three stories and submitted seven. Golly!
In the last five days, I've written or finished three stories and submitted seven. Golly!
Sunday, December 14, 2014
Some Changes
I'm figuring out where I want to be in ten years, and I decided I want to have written a lot more fiction by that time. I looked at some of the bigger time-sucks in my life over which I have control. Yesterday, I dropped off of Facebook, Twitter, and Google +. My accounts are still there, I'm just not looking at them. I hope to spend more time reading and writing, because of that. Also, I'm bringing the Beware the Hairy Mango podcast to an end. Because I just had people subscribe to the Elitist show for a year, I figured I'd give it one more year. So my last show there is going to be December 30th, 2015.
As I sharpen my focus on what I want for 2025, there will be other changes as well. Who knows what they might be?
As I sharpen my focus on what I want for 2025, there will be other changes as well. Who knows what they might be?
Sunday, May 18, 2014
The Lessons Of Compressed Mango
Here's the lesson that MuchoMangoMayo tries to teach me every single year: Get the goddamned shows done before May!
Not only have I refused to learn that lesson, but this year I was less prepared than ever! There was the additional work brought about by the new subscription feed, Beware the Elitist Mango; there was my burst of short story frenzy at the beginning of the year; and there was my move across town in March.
MuchoMangoMayo is thirty-one shows in thirty-one days and each five minute show is fully scripted. It can take three and a half hours to write, record, edit, upload,and schedule one show. The farthest ahead of the conveyor belt I've been this year is maybe three episodes. Many days I'm doing the episode hours or minutes before it goes up.
This happens every year, but this time it's been happening since almost the beginning of the month, even though I took a week off from the day job and worked on Mangoes five hours a day. I was nine minutes late with one show early on, but I otherwise have ridden the wave, and continue to ride it. My goal for today, after some sleep, is to finish four scripts and produce one show. We'll see how that goes.
But all that is just set-up for the point of this post: the lessons this year's MuchoMangoMayo has taught me.
1) I can work harder than I thought I could. Working five hours or more a day on my days off and two to three hours a day around my day job has taught me that I can work harder than I thought I could. One of the reasons I've been writing for decades with relatively poor results is that I've been slow, inconsistent, and have had to wrestle with my ADD self always to get any work done at all. The past three weeks have been my most intense creative period ever, and that includes NaNoWriMo, which I finished the first time I did it some years ago.
2) It feels fantastic. Working at this level is what I've always wanted to do and I feel more creatively satisfied than I ever have in my life. I'm more tired (and that's saying a lot, because I'm always tired), but less cranky. I'm a little less anxious and way less stressed. For thirty years, I've been wanting to make creative work my life and although I've always done the work, I've never done enough of it to feel like I'm at the level I want. But now I feel like I'm living the dream. I'm squeezing more than ever out of myself and I'm getting good work done consistently. I've arrived at the life I've always wanted.
Don't get me wrong, the ultimate teenage dream involved much more money and fans and no day job, but the day to day work and satisfaction is all there.
3) I need to ship on time. In the world of manufacturing, shipping a new product on time means getting the thing designed, mass-produced and out the door on the day you say you're going to do it. I've known for many years that I work better with deadlines than without, so I started setting deadlines. I almost always missed them, but I worked harder knowing they were there.
I've known for less years than that that I'll work harder for someone else than I will for myself. For a couple of years I told other people my deadlines—my dear friends Emily and Diane—so I'd feel obligated to get the stuff done on time and not disappoint them. I'd still blow deadlines, but not as many.
With MuchoMangoMayo I've promised people I don't even know that I will ship on time. Every day in May, they will get a show, delivered at midnight. That is my promise. People donate more money to the show in May than in any other month because I'm delivering something special. I sure as hell don't want to disappoint them and so far I haven't.
So there's my lesson for future projects: tell people what you're doing and when it's going to ship and make sure that happens. There's creative power in time limits and I heard Ian Boothby talk about this just hours ago in the latest episode of the Sneaky Dragon podcast. When you've got to hustle to get something done for someone else, you'll deliver something that's less than perfect. The beauty is you won't have time to fret over imperfection because you'll have already moved onto the next thing. You'll never make one perfect thing, no matter how long you work and how much you stress. Say that to yourself a few thousand times while you're making many, many imperfect things and chilling.
4) The fountain's got to sit down. When you're kicking off into a creative life, you have a tendency to think that it's possible to run out of ideas. After a while you realize that's not true, but you don't really feel it in your gut yet. A few years ago, I began to feel it in my gut. I never worry about the ideas anymore. They always come even though I burn through a shitload of them with every project. But even though ideas flow from a never-ending fountain, that fountain needs occasional maintenance, some chlorine, a cleaning out of the spigots or whatever it is fountains have. Sometimes the fountain has to go sit down over there for a while.
I'd put in about nine or ten days straight when one day I had stuff to do. I did that stuff and then problems happened. I dealt with the problems and it was getting late in the day and I wasn't getting to work. This is normally the point where I wrestle myself into a foam of paralysis, guilt, and despair. This time I said to myself, "I think I accidentally gave myself the day off." I didn't freak. I relaxed and read and screwed around online. The next day I was back at it.
Normally when I take a vacation, I dread going back to work. I'm sure many of you do too. This time I didn't. As each day passed, I was working and I knew when I went back to the day job I'd still be working. Come Sunday I was a little bent out of shape that I wasn't going to have enough time to work on the show, but my destructive emotions just weren't hitting the highs that they normally do.
The alien thing was that when I went back to work, I was almost relieved. I was going to have an excuse not to think creatively for hours! I just slid in and did my job without a bit of frustration. That was weird. Normally I'm bubbling with ideas at work and I'm writing the best ones down, but it took me about four days before that started kicking in again. I'd worked my making-things-up muscle hard for a week and it needed to rest up a bit. Once it was rested, it started flexing again. This doesn't mean I stopped creating for a few days. It means I had many waking hours when I wasn't creating, couldn't create, and didn't have to create.
I had finally, for the first time in my life, sated this appetite within myself. It felt great. My bubbling demons were at peace for a while.
If you can do it, work your mind hard. Run a long distance race with it. It's wonderful.
Not only have I refused to learn that lesson, but this year I was less prepared than ever! There was the additional work brought about by the new subscription feed, Beware the Elitist Mango; there was my burst of short story frenzy at the beginning of the year; and there was my move across town in March.
MuchoMangoMayo is thirty-one shows in thirty-one days and each five minute show is fully scripted. It can take three and a half hours to write, record, edit, upload,and schedule one show. The farthest ahead of the conveyor belt I've been this year is maybe three episodes. Many days I'm doing the episode hours or minutes before it goes up.
This happens every year, but this time it's been happening since almost the beginning of the month, even though I took a week off from the day job and worked on Mangoes five hours a day. I was nine minutes late with one show early on, but I otherwise have ridden the wave, and continue to ride it. My goal for today, after some sleep, is to finish four scripts and produce one show. We'll see how that goes.
But all that is just set-up for the point of this post: the lessons this year's MuchoMangoMayo has taught me.
1) I can work harder than I thought I could. Working five hours or more a day on my days off and two to three hours a day around my day job has taught me that I can work harder than I thought I could. One of the reasons I've been writing for decades with relatively poor results is that I've been slow, inconsistent, and have had to wrestle with my ADD self always to get any work done at all. The past three weeks have been my most intense creative period ever, and that includes NaNoWriMo, which I finished the first time I did it some years ago.
2) It feels fantastic. Working at this level is what I've always wanted to do and I feel more creatively satisfied than I ever have in my life. I'm more tired (and that's saying a lot, because I'm always tired), but less cranky. I'm a little less anxious and way less stressed. For thirty years, I've been wanting to make creative work my life and although I've always done the work, I've never done enough of it to feel like I'm at the level I want. But now I feel like I'm living the dream. I'm squeezing more than ever out of myself and I'm getting good work done consistently. I've arrived at the life I've always wanted.
Don't get me wrong, the ultimate teenage dream involved much more money and fans and no day job, but the day to day work and satisfaction is all there.
3) I need to ship on time. In the world of manufacturing, shipping a new product on time means getting the thing designed, mass-produced and out the door on the day you say you're going to do it. I've known for many years that I work better with deadlines than without, so I started setting deadlines. I almost always missed them, but I worked harder knowing they were there.
I've known for less years than that that I'll work harder for someone else than I will for myself. For a couple of years I told other people my deadlines—my dear friends Emily and Diane—so I'd feel obligated to get the stuff done on time and not disappoint them. I'd still blow deadlines, but not as many.
With MuchoMangoMayo I've promised people I don't even know that I will ship on time. Every day in May, they will get a show, delivered at midnight. That is my promise. People donate more money to the show in May than in any other month because I'm delivering something special. I sure as hell don't want to disappoint them and so far I haven't.
So there's my lesson for future projects: tell people what you're doing and when it's going to ship and make sure that happens. There's creative power in time limits and I heard Ian Boothby talk about this just hours ago in the latest episode of the Sneaky Dragon podcast. When you've got to hustle to get something done for someone else, you'll deliver something that's less than perfect. The beauty is you won't have time to fret over imperfection because you'll have already moved onto the next thing. You'll never make one perfect thing, no matter how long you work and how much you stress. Say that to yourself a few thousand times while you're making many, many imperfect things and chilling.
4) The fountain's got to sit down. When you're kicking off into a creative life, you have a tendency to think that it's possible to run out of ideas. After a while you realize that's not true, but you don't really feel it in your gut yet. A few years ago, I began to feel it in my gut. I never worry about the ideas anymore. They always come even though I burn through a shitload of them with every project. But even though ideas flow from a never-ending fountain, that fountain needs occasional maintenance, some chlorine, a cleaning out of the spigots or whatever it is fountains have. Sometimes the fountain has to go sit down over there for a while.
I'd put in about nine or ten days straight when one day I had stuff to do. I did that stuff and then problems happened. I dealt with the problems and it was getting late in the day and I wasn't getting to work. This is normally the point where I wrestle myself into a foam of paralysis, guilt, and despair. This time I said to myself, "I think I accidentally gave myself the day off." I didn't freak. I relaxed and read and screwed around online. The next day I was back at it.
Normally when I take a vacation, I dread going back to work. I'm sure many of you do too. This time I didn't. As each day passed, I was working and I knew when I went back to the day job I'd still be working. Come Sunday I was a little bent out of shape that I wasn't going to have enough time to work on the show, but my destructive emotions just weren't hitting the highs that they normally do.
The alien thing was that when I went back to work, I was almost relieved. I was going to have an excuse not to think creatively for hours! I just slid in and did my job without a bit of frustration. That was weird. Normally I'm bubbling with ideas at work and I'm writing the best ones down, but it took me about four days before that started kicking in again. I'd worked my making-things-up muscle hard for a week and it needed to rest up a bit. Once it was rested, it started flexing again. This doesn't mean I stopped creating for a few days. It means I had many waking hours when I wasn't creating, couldn't create, and didn't have to create.
I had finally, for the first time in my life, sated this appetite within myself. It felt great. My bubbling demons were at peace for a while.
If you can do it, work your mind hard. Run a long distance race with it. It's wonderful.
Sunday, May 11, 2014
My Brand Of Failure
Happy Mother's Day to all you mommas! Here's a thing I wrote about my mother on Mother's Day 2009 in a nearly unreadable litany of terse sentences. http://theonethousand.blogspot.com/2009/05/mom.html
Well, last night fell apart so far as Mango plans went. After I finished my third script, I had to run to the store before it closed and mangoing never came back together. The Boy came home and I was sociable with people online and on the phone. It was a good night, don't get me wrong. If I've gotten some work done, I'll always want to connect with people rather than do more work.
I recorded those three shows a couple of hours ago and will start editing soon. I'll try to get to more script writing, but there are some chores I have to handle too.
Anyway, the title of the post is My Brand of Failure. As I was explaining to a close friend last night, I always set my goals higher than I think I can reach, and I nearly always fall short. Failure is always with me. It's been with me so long that I'm beginning to transcend failure. Any progress I make becomes victory. So my brand of failure, I think, is pretty good as failure goes.
Well, last night fell apart so far as Mango plans went. After I finished my third script, I had to run to the store before it closed and mangoing never came back together. The Boy came home and I was sociable with people online and on the phone. It was a good night, don't get me wrong. If I've gotten some work done, I'll always want to connect with people rather than do more work.
I recorded those three shows a couple of hours ago and will start editing soon. I'll try to get to more script writing, but there are some chores I have to handle too.
Anyway, the title of the post is My Brand of Failure. As I was explaining to a close friend last night, I always set my goals higher than I think I can reach, and I nearly always fall short. Failure is always with me. It's been with me so long that I'm beginning to transcend failure. Any progress I make becomes victory. So my brand of failure, I think, is pretty good as failure goes.
Saturday, May 10, 2014
The Challenge
As I said, I wanted to have seven more shows in the can this weekend. As I also said I took yesterday off. Ideally, I'd like to finish seven partial scripts today (some of those are extremely partial), record them tomorrow while The Boy's at work, and spend the rest of tomorrow editing and scheduling them.
I'm just sitting down to work now, after hanging with my daughter, going to the comic book shop, grocery shopping, and making and eating lunch. It's almost half-past four. I don't think there's any way I can make this happen, but what fun is there in not giving it a shot?
Off I go!
I'm just sitting down to work now, after hanging with my daughter, going to the comic book shop, grocery shopping, and making and eating lunch. It's almost half-past four. I don't think there's any way I can make this happen, but what fun is there in not giving it a shot?
Off I go!
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