lost time incident 39
Still working this rainy weekend on my top secret writing project. The weather’s been a great help, enabling me to not even feel remotely guilty about not stepping outside. Instead I can stay in front of a computer every waking moment, listening to music and occasionally adding a few sentences or paragraphs to the work in progress.

I did, however, put some stuff on Twitter this week, so we’ve got that. The election was a big creative driver. Obviously.

 

stuff from Twitter

 

playlist
While I’m doing all this writing, I’ve been exploring soundtracks that work for me. I’ve been finding that my current project goes well with vaporwave and retrosynth. With vaporwave, I have hints of the familiar, with R&B structures washed out and pitched down, so my brain has some rhythms it knows. And when I need energy, the retrosynth propulsive sound sets a good pace.

VA-31 – “A Night On the Town” – With this album, I can listen to Michael Jackson’s PYT slowed down over 15 minutes, the vocals pitched down a soul singer’s romantic baritone.

In Love With a Ghost – “let’s go” – Last night, when I ran out of steam, I went digging through Bandcamp’s tagging system, looking for subgenre names that sounded interesting, or checking geo tags. This is how I found myself wondering what was going on musically in Slovakia. Turns out someone there is running a cassette-tape label where they put out bedroom pop artists, which is how I found this little EP of domestic sound-sampling.

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Anyway. That’s something. Gotta get back to that other waiting browser window that still needs more words in it.

—Michael Van Vleet

lost time incident 38
Not much going on this week on the lost time incident front. This is because I have another writing engagement that’s taking up my time and attention this week. Considering that I started this weekly writing project as a placeholder until I had a writing project, I must be on the right track.

Anyway, here’s a few things from Twitter, featuring my Halloween pseudonym:

twitter stuff

 

retro retro retro
Since I don’t have much for you this week, maybe you could be entertained by some of the retro-80s music corners I’ve been spending time in.

FORÊT DE VIN – “Another Dimension (feat. SAY)”
It’s so hard to believe that this track is from two Swedish guys, produced this year, because if you told me it was on the soundtrack to, say, Mannequin 2, I would have believed you. It’s a perfect recreation of the 80s synthpop sound. And not necessarily the cool stuff that everyone wants to pretend they were listening to in the 80s.

New Retro Wave
And here’s a label that’s doing its level best to bring back the synth musical landscapes that used to accompany movies about kids who find alien best friends, or rollerblade across the desert looking for water, or other films found in VHS clamshells.

Division – “Lost in Time”
The artist who records as Division was one I first knew under their Timecop1983 identity— and to date, that’s one of my favorite band names, as far as names-as-mission-statements go. They’re based in the Netherlands, so maybe northern Europe is where decades go to retire.

 

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Anyway, I’ll be back on here when I’m out from under my other writing project. Even though I’m not doing original fiction for here, do you guys still want a weekly check-in with Twitter nonsense and notes about books/music/films/etc.?

Otherwise, I’m happy to go quiet for a while. Let me know, or leave feedback in the Facebook page.

lost time incident 37
Halloween is just around the corner so this week we have a spooky story about responsible parenting. If you are pregnant, or prone to seizures, or are “spook-averse”, please consider coming back next week, unless you have consulted your doctor and asked your doctor to subscribe to this newsletter as well. (We don’t have much representation in the medical field in our subscriber base and this is the perfect chance to address it.)

For the rest of you: Are you ready? Braced?

Okay, let’s go!

 

100 children
Their parents were part of the quiverfull movement, which meant they made a full time job out of making babies, plus there were some adoptions, and honestly some of them might be kids from the neighborhood or from the hobo camp down by the river. But the last time anyone counted, there were about 100 of them.

And when the parents went missing, they had to go somewhere.

Rumors of where the parents went, ranked by popularity among the children:

• Got locked inside tanning beds, turned into human jerky, bodies hidden by the salon owners who are also now missing
• Now living somewhere in Europe, starting their second 100 child family in a country with a social safety net
• Car accident, probably
• Bringing 100 souls into the world (directly or indirectly) was a task set upon them by a malevolent spirit and now their curse is lifted and they’re in Heaven
• They’re still around, but they walk on their knees and wear kids clothes and have blended in with the 100 children, always standing in the back, keeping quiet
• Mexico

Luckily, they had a rich uncle they knew as Uncle Earwort. Unbeknownst to him, he was listed as next of kin and on October 1st, all 100 children dismounted county buses that had transported them and their worldly possessions to his clifftop mansion. Three of the children were lost somewhere in the garden maze on the way to the front door. Eight of them remembered, rather abruptly, that they were old enough to manage their own finances, and they left to find an apartment to rent on their own.

A social worker knocked on Earwort’s front door, on behalf of the remaining 89 children. After a clipboard exchange, some signing and initialling, the social worker re-entered the garden maze and probably made it home. Who can say.

The 89 children explored the mansion, claiming rooms and cupboards, corners and cabinets for their new sleeping space. Four of them found the secret second basement beneath the first basement, but unfortunately it was never completed and was without an exit.

After a family meeting and a speech about the importance of education, 23 children were told to pack up again as they were off to an exclusive boarding school in Bestonia (tourist slogan: The BEST of the -Onias!) where they would learn diplomacy, fencing, bird mastery, and forest-dwelling.

Soon, it was Halloween. 28 children didn’t come back from Trick-or-Treating. They may have eaten so much sugar that they’d gone feral, living in the town’s central park, their costumes patched up as they fell into disrepair with leaves, feathers and mud layered over rubber masks. That was Uncle Earwort’s theory, but as he never visited the central park, but this theory is not regarded as terribly likely by those investigating the absence.

“I find it more interesting that 34 made it back,” Earwort has been known to say. “Obviously, as that’s a majority, I must be doing something right.”

Two of them ran away from home. Two of them went to find the two that ran away from home. Eight were seduced by strangers in online chat rooms, but it worked out, and they’re all married now and living in Kansas.

“True love wins,” Uncle Earwort was quoted as saying. “How many of you are left?” he was often known to ask. “And do you all still have separate names?”

Thirteen of the remaining children got into politics, which lead to seven of them getting deported. (Turns out their original adoption lacked some important paperwork.) Of the remaining 15, 14 went on to endure lives of quiet desperation.

The last one … THE LAST ONE IS BEHIND YOU RIGHT NOW!

Oh man, Halloween season, am I right?

Seriously, though. Please take good care of this orphan.

 

twitter stuff

 

hand o’ glory courtesy of Amanda Summers

 

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Thanks for joining us again this week, or for failing to notice the unsubscribe button at the bottom of this email. Or reading it as part of the Facebook page I set up to provide a forum for feedback, or to share behind the scenes info.

Whatever got you here, thanks for being the reason I’ve stuck to giving up swathes of Sundays to knock this project out.

—Michael Van Vleet