D. Lee Jackson

Words and Music

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One PUNY Little Thing

Posted on 2019-11-13 Written by D. Lee Jackson Leave a Comment

As this is a blog of all things musical and literary, I must include the goings-on as of late that involve a mailing group of which I am a part—in fact, of which I am the group owner.

Some background, first. As stated in my Wikipedia entry, I’m a three-time world champion punster, as determined at the annual O. Henry Pun-Off World Championships in Austin, Texas. I’m also a charter member of an organizing committee called Punsters United Nearly Yearly, or PUNY, formed in 1990 to rescue the P-OWC from near dissolution. In fact, the photo accompanying this post is from that era, I believe. As a member of PUNY who had some computer smarts, I set up an e-mail list on the old Prodigy service back in the late 1990s. That group migrated to eGroups, which was bought out by Yahoo! several years later.

Within the past few weeks, a rather ominous announcement came down from Yahoo! Groups. To wit, they would be shutting down their message archives, picture archives, databases, and pretty much everything else, to concentrate on simply transferring e-mails back and forth. This was unacceptable. The search was on for a replacement, which was located rather quickly in the form of Groups.io. They advertised that they would handle transfers from Yahoo! Groups to their own service for a fee. Members of the PUNY group quickly stepped up with donations, and within hours after the decision to transfer had been made, I had begun the transfer process. It took several days for the transfer to go through, but it was successful, and now the PUNY group is up and running on Groups.io.

If you are at all interested in puns and wordplay, I invite you to join the PUNY group. Click on the word “join” in the previous sentence, and you should be taken to our group’s main page, where you will find a form where you can join. In addition to puns, limericks and haiku are served by a separate subgroup of the PUNY list which you can also join. You would be warmly welcomed in both groups.

I hope to see you there!

Filed Under: personal, words Tagged With: personal, words

Words and Music – Update 2019-08-02

Posted on 2019-08-02 Written by D. Lee Jackson Leave a Comment

Sheet Music 2Now that we’re in August, it’s time for a quick update on how things are going.

Words:

  • Sergeant Marcos’s Rescue has been through a couple of rounds of revisions, thanks to a critique on Scribophile. It’s a better short story now than before.
  • I’ve added an extra chapter to Tapper. That brings the chapter count to 35 and the total word count to just over 97,000. It’s a desperately needed chapter in a crucial spot, even if it is less than 100 words in length. Still, it was worth going to the trouble of renumbering all of the other chapters beyond it.

Music:

  • It’s been a bit more difficult to work on the Music section than it has been on the Words section. You see, I spent a good deal of time traveling from Dallas, Texas to Des Moines, Iowa with my wife in order to see an IndyCar race, and while I can bring my Words with me, I can’t very well bring my keyboards and my music composition computer. I’ve also had downtime due another lumbar rhizotomy procedure (a.k.a., radiofrequency ablation of the nerves of my lower back), but that only explains more recent absences from the workstation.
  • Still, I have managed to complete the first phrase of a new song for the second album. It’s in fact a tribute song—more I can’t go into yet—and it involves two pianos playing off against each other in an andante 3/4-3/4-4/4-4/4 pattern. I have yet to program the tempo changes to make it sound as human as possible (yes, I mouse everything into the computer), but once I do, I think I’ll have quite a nice piece.

Thank you for reading, and watch this space for further updates!

Filed Under: album, composing, health, music, novel, personal, racing, sports, words Tagged With: album, composing, health, IndyCar, music, novel, racing, Scribophile, short story, writing

Words and Music – The Site Motto At Work

Posted on 2019-07-14 Written by D. Lee Jackson Leave a Comment

Choral BookRevision Ten of my novel, Tapper, has been completed and has been uploaded to Scribophile. This is the version that I hope will be the last major rewrite. Of course, there will be tweaks made to the new material, but I don’t anticipate wholesale changes. They won’t be critiqued for at least the next six weeks, due to the way The Ubergroup on Scribophile works, so I finally have some free time.

My first revisited project has been my second album. I’ve put it off for a long time now, and it’s high time that I gave it some attention. I’ve only got four tracks complete to date. Track number five is now under way.

I had some delays due to some hardware in my sound setup going on the fritz (an old Mackie 1202VLZ mixer feeding two channels into a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2). I wound up replacing both the Mackie and the Focusrite with a Steinberg UR44 six channel USB 2.0 interface. It was a bear to set up, but once I got it going, it sounded great. It also allowed my son, Nathan, to rip out about half of the cables from my patch bay. My mixer rack is a much cleaner area now. I was also able to recalibrate my monitors (i.e., pro-level speakers) to a state that they’ve never been since I bought them.

My second revisited project has been Sergeant Marcos’s Rescue. Now that I’ve finished the Tapper revision, I can attack the rewrite of that short story at my leisure. I intend to work on it when I can’t work on Album #2 (e.g., when my wife is washing clothes or doing other noisy things around the house that I’m physically unable to help with, when I’ve got musical writer’s block, and so on). I got a lot of really good advice from my critiquers, and I intend to make the most of it, using as much time as I need to get the job done.

Words and Music. Working on both at the same time. That’s the idea behind this web site, and the idea behind how I spend my days when I’m able to function. Wish me luck.

Filed Under: album, composing, music, novel, words Tagged With: album, composing, music, Scribophile, short story, Ubergroup, writing

Revision Time For Tapper – Or Is It?

Posted on 2019-06-11 Written by D. Lee Jackson Leave a Comment

Writing WorkstationThe Demi-beta period has ended two weeks early, as the third author has decided to pull their book out of the critique line. That means I now have two precious, free weeks (three, if you count the mandatory vacation break between Ubergroup cycles) in which to take the critiques I received for Tapper and apply them to the novel before returning to the weekly grind of team critiques. An opportunity like this doesn’t come along that often, if ever, so I definitely planned to take advantage of it once I found out.

Of course, something has come along and thrown a bit of a monkey wrench into my plan. That something is called Sergeant Marcos’s Rescue.

You see, I rewrote a part of Tapper where my main character, Travis, gets rescued from what we’ll just call a “very nasty situation” for now. In my original version, he was rescued by a police officer. However, in my revision, he and the aforementioned police officer are rescued by one of the title characters: a Tapper. (Not to give too much away, but Tappers are people with the ability to manipulate the four fundamental forces of the universe—gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces—but they take great risks to gain this ability.) In order to flesh out this revision, I sort of “reverse engineered” it by writing a short story about it (approximately 3,500 words), called Sergeant Marcos’s Rescue. However, I didn’t write it from Travis’s point of view. Instead, I chose the point of view of the police officer who went in to rescue Travis, but who wound up getting rescued himself—Sergeant Richard Marcos.

Where did the monkey wrench come in? Well, it was spawned the day I posted the first draft of the short story to Scribophile and asked for critiques. It took several days, but I eventually got a critique from one of my dear friends from my early days on the site. She pointed out several issues with grammar and punctuation, along with a few story issues, all of which I fixed immediately. I reposted the revision and waited for more critiques to come in.

Now, keep in mind the timeline on this. I wrote Sergeant Marcos’s Rescue in a single day while Tapper was in its Demi-beta period. I got my first critique after I’d finished reading the second Demi-beta author’s work and completed critiques on it: in other words, I was in a holding pattern, waiting for the third Demi-beta author’s work to go live.

Yesterday, which would be Monday, June 10th, I got two pieces of news. First, I learned of the pull-out of the third Demi-beta author’s work. Second, I received an incredibly detailed and well-written critique from another close and trusted friend on Scribophile. His critique was almost a third as long as the story itself, and it needed every word. He pointed out numerous weaknesses that my version 1.1 draft had, story-wise. Almost everything he wrote was spot-on and would improve my short story if implemented immediately.

Herein lies my dilemma. Do I act on the critique for Sergeant Marcos’s Rescue first, or do I put it on the back burner and work on the more difficult task of implementing changes in Tapper? The answer is rather clear in this case. While fixing Sergeant Marcos’s Rescue would be a case of instant gratification, it would not help my long term goal, which is to get Tapper published. Tapper most definitely gets the front seat, and therefore my editing attention, during this break in the action. Sergeant Marcos will have to wait.

This does not mean I am done with Sergeant Marcos’s Rescue, not by a long shot. One of my favorite authors, Stephen R. Donaldson, published a chapter outtake from his series, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever, in his short story collection, Daughter of Regals, after the series was published. I would like to do something similar with Sergeant Marcos one day. Besides, who knows? There may be other short stories from the Tapper Universe forthcoming. It all depends on what I need in order to get the book published.

Filed Under: novel, words Tagged With: novel, Scribophile, short story, Ubergroup, writing

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Hello, and welcome! My name is Lee Jackson, and I'm the composer of "Grabbag," the theme to the video game Duke Nukem 3D, plus music for Rise of the Triad and Shadow Warrior (the original). I've got four albums out, with tracks on Spotify, Apple Music, Bandcamp, and SoundCloud! Read More…

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  • New Music Collaboration In The Works 2023-03-23
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  • “Lady Tygress’ Suite and Other Commissions” Album Released! 2022-11-04

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