Author Archives: Jeff Xilon

Flash Fiction: The Invisible Encyclopedia

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Hey folks! It’s been awhile since I did one of these but over at Terribleminds awesome author Chuck Wendig has launched his first flash fiction challenge of the new year. In this case we were offered two lists of 20 items each. Roll a die or use a random number generator to pick a word off each list and voila – you have your flash fiction title. Oh, and you can add “The” as needed.

So I rolled and ended up with “The Invisible Encyclopedia”. Read, enjoy.

The Invisible Encyclopedia

You might call it, and some have of course, Monopsychism, Unus Mundus, the Collective Unconscious, or the World Soul, but we call it The Invisible Encyclopedia and it’s in danger. Someone out there has gone into business for themselves. We don’t know who they are; we call them The Editor. My name is Ha Sung Hwa and along with my friends Lila Molesky and Basel Rizk we’re hunting The Editor.

We’re trying to anyway, but it has NOT been going well.

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The Music I Can’t Stop Listening Too Lately

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So I’m becoming more and more of a music omnivore. There are very few genres of music I don’t like, and in fact my music collection probably has at least one representative of most any well known genre. They only major exception I can think of off the top of my head are Boy/Girl Group Pop Genres where how pretty the singer(s) are and how well they dance are often as or more important than the actual music. No. Sorry – this is not, has never been, and probably will never be my thing.

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The 2013 Reading Challenge I Totally Failed Was…

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The Women of Genre Fiction Reading Challenge held by Worlds Without End, which is a great website for readers of genre fiction to check out.

The Challenge was pretty simple – within the 12 months of 2013 read 12 books written by women authors whose work you’d never read before and post a review. I failed pretty spectacularly at this, for several reasons. Chief amongst those was that I didn’t do much writing of any kind for most of last year, especially blogging or writing reviews. Secondary problems included starting the challenge fairly late and having way, way too many things on my ‘to be read’ pile.

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The Twilight Zone is Back…In Comic Form

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DIG014343_1I just finished reading the newest rebirth of the THE TWILIGHT ZONE, and I have to say I’m looking forward to more. I’m a fan of The Twilight Zone and, despite this being on ongoing series, Issue #1 “The Way Out” really feels like it belongs in the Zone. If you can read the narration on the first two pages without Rod Serling’s voice in your head then I’m pretty sure you’ve never seen an original Twilight Zone episode. I mean check this out:

…The opposition offers into evidence an otherwise nondescript neighborhood on the west side of Manhattan. A crossroads of secrets, dreams and desires whose longitude and latitude can only be found–in THE TWILIGHT ZONE.

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Goodbye 2013 (Thankfully), Hello 2014

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So 2013 is dead and gone. As I write this 2014 is about 11.5 hours old here in Korea, and I’m pretty glad for that. The last year wasn’t all bad; there were many laughs, and plenty of fun. That said, I can tell you that 2013 was, with out a doubt, the worst year of my life.

Trust me on this. I’m not going to go into it, and I’m sure many people had worse 2013s than I did. Millions and millions of them I’d guess. Still, for me this was a really, really bad year. So yeah, good-bye 2013, don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

Now, I like to think I’m no fool. I don’t expect life to suddenly be better just because I need a new calendar to hang on the wall. But I do plan to do what I can to set the ship back on course in 2014. I expect that there will be a lot of bumps on the way, but come December 31st I hope to be looking back on 2014 as a year of change (for the better) and new beginnings. The only resolution I’m making this year is to grab life with both hands, take some risks and start down the path of a life that’s more in line with how I want to live than recent years have been. It’s time to jump off some cliffs and build wings on the way down.

How about you? How was your 2013? Where are you going in 2014?

Jazz Collection Update

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I’ve written previously about my growing interest in and enjoyment of jazz here and here. Since then I’ve added quite a bit to the collection picking up some new albums for musicians I already had, like Art Blakey and Charles Mingus and adding many new jazz artists and groups to the collection. Some of these have become favorites of mine. Charles Mingus’ The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady is nothing short of incredible, a true work of genius. Clifford Brown is great and his work with Art Blakey (possibly my favorite jazz musician) on A Night At Birdland Vol. 1 & 2 is really enjoyable. Pharoah Sanders’ Elevation gets a lot of plays as does Bobby Hutcherson’s Dialogue.

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