Thomas McAuley is a San Antonio fiction writer who broods over weird stories. Bizarro stories. Absurdist stories. Whatever label, they're strange stories about impossible things and written with normal, solid language.

I began this his blog back in January of 2008. The very first post was called My Writing Process and Environment. in which I spoke highly of Monroe Product's wonderful ambient slash meditative product called The "So" Chord. It's a two-track CD of ambient noise with their trademark Hemi-Sync sound underneath that is designed to "balance and focus the mind."

Whether or not the tracks balance and focus my mind is up for debate. I can only say that I've written pretty much non-stop for now nearly four years and The "So" Chord continues to be in my heavy writing time rotation. It effectively blocks out the surrounding spiking sounds of a busy coffee shop and a home life filled with barking dogs, the idiotic goings-on of two teenage boys and too-frequent reality TV.

But as man can not live on bread alone, or in this case, two ambient tracks, I've spend a good deal of my non-writing time finding other sources of ambient and atmospheric noise blocking...noise. I can now rely on a collection of 43.2 hours of audio tracks -- yes, I did the math -- two Internet radio stations and one usually terrific podcast (Ultima Thule) all of which help me create an ideal writing environment no matter where I choose to BIC (that's Butt In Chair).

That should seem like enough, right. Well I write most days and I write for hours at a time when I do. So again, relying on our friend, Math, we can easily figure out that since January of 2008, I have written somewhere between three and four thousand hours. That means I might have listened to every one of my ambient tracks somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 times in those years. Suddenly my vast audio collection seems rather...vlow (slow, for the vlow among us).

Well, I found another source. I finally got my iPhone at the end of November -- you can't imagine how much I hated my old phone, but that's a story for anther time. Since getting it, I have been poring through the immense catalog of available apps.

Recently I found a terrific app that called my name. It's called Relax Melodies. And I'm talking about the Premium version -- $1.99. It is a collection of "white noise ambiance for sleep, meditation & yoga," according to their own description. Its intended use is to give you something to meditate to or to relax to as you go to sleep, but it's turned out to be a wonderful tool for my writing.

Here's what it does. Primarily, you have a group of 82 smoothly looping ambient tracks that -- I estimate -- run about 5 minutes long, so you never really feel even a minor jolt at the start/end point. You can listen to any one of them by themselves. Fine. But the real power is in being able to not only play as many of the sounds as you like simultaneously, but in being able to mix the level of each sound you add. Then, on top of the 82 sounds, you get those extra spooky Hemi-Sync-esque underneath tracks: Concentration, Relaxation and Pre-Sleep. You can create the perfect bled of sounds from nature, hippie music and laboratory magic then save your audio cocktail into a sound library. Genius.

FYI...Right now I'm listening to a mix I named Concentration with Brown Birds. It's, perhaps obviously, the Concentration track mixed with very low "Birds" and something called "Brown Noise," a lower-toned, less staticky version of "White Noise" and a touch of "Light Rain." Ahhhh. 

Ambient? More like Damn-bient.

Buy Relax Melodies Premium in the app store for $1.99 and tell them Thomas McAuley sent you.

Recently I took another look at the blogging aspect of my writing career. I had a good run this year, blogging nearly 5 days a week for a number of months. I had built a pretty good habit and got a little of a following going; however, that all came to a screeching halt last month when I realized that blogging was factoring at all into whether and how much I would write on any given day. Blogging was fine when I had something to say, too, but around the same time I made the realization about it affecting my writing output and time, I also found that I was spending more time than I could accept -- namely ANY time -- hunting for interesting content to blog about.

Why was I doing it? Platform? Pride? Boredom? Was I writing as a result of writing fatigue? Yes to all, probably, though I wouldn't guess at proportions.

After reevaluating blogging and writing, I've decided to admit that I headed down a road that didn't gain me much in the way of following or building my writing. As I had said in a blog entry sometime this year, there are benefits to writing something -- anything -- every day and that blogging does bring one closer to one's real voice, but if that blogging interferes with the more important work of writing and honing fiction, then it's got to be reigned in.

Sigh of relief.

Now, after taking a couple weeks off from pushing myself to write three pages each day -- a wonderful habit that one of my perpetually unnamed writing buddies practices -- I am officially back in the saddle. Just today I finished up the second draft of my witch/tattoo story. I'll let it sit for a couple weeks before rereading it and making what I hope to be final edits. During that waiting period, I'll be writing a story that I quickly synopsized and outlined in the wee hours only two days ago. Needless to say, I'm excited to get into a new story, not only because it's not the same story I've been working on but because it's so new an idea to me that it's glowing with exciting energy.

(The new story is another witch story but one that looks at the type from a different angle than I've explored before. She's every bit as dark as other evil, magical women I've written about -- in fact, she's probably a good deal darker -- but there's some dim light about the application of her evil.)

As with any hiatus, I rediscovered my love for the craft. I have a tendency to do anything I do with maniacal energy, thus quickly burning myself out. Maybe this time around, I won't do the same. I believe in a gentle float downstream when it comes to my own artistic endeavors but I have a difficult time feeling good about it when others around me can produce such ridiculous word counts.

Grant me the discipline to keep gently paddling forward even as speedboats pass me by, threatening to upset my Zen.

I've got to say I'm impressed that I can post from my new iPhone. I would have expected the experience to have been more difficult, but no, typing -- once one gets used to it -- isn't so bad. And the tools show up well, if a tad too uncomfortably small.

But what does this have to do with writing? Nothing. So, to the writing.

Not having posted for most of November may have led some to think I hadn't written either. That was not the case. I have actually been fighting with the end of a story I had writes the first draft of earlier this year but had abandoned in lieu of Forever. I got back to it and realized that most of the negative critique it received was in fact warranted. It isn't a bad story, but the first draft was tedious, especially toward the end. This rewrite has been both enjoyable and, for the most part, successful.

thank goodness for Forever. Having stuck with that story turns out to have been worth the struggle. Though I haven't heard back from any of the places I submitted to, I can tell that, sale or no, I emerged from the long difficult experience not only a better writer in regards to skill but a better thinker and a better self-critiqued (in the good sense, not in the way that I can't write or otherwise function.)

still, as I said, I'm having trouble with the ending. Part of the problem is that the original impetus for writing the story was not well-documented. The other reason is that, because I ran into and learned how both recognize and solve logic problem and other literary shortcomings, I discovered a few not small problems with the story's structure and action.

this isn't a bad thing. I'd rather know what and where the problems are so that they can be fixed, but they do need to be fixed and that almost inevitably takes time. I think the biggest obstacle that I'm facing right now is that the original story suffered a bit from a non-ending and my lead -- as is commonly the case in my early drafts -- was too much of a passive observer. Both problems are fixable but require a but of head scratching.

Fun fun fun.

I'll keep you posted. I have a deadline of two days (three?) for this draft, so I'd best figure something out soon.