Jay's still preening about the publication of his novel, The Naked Ghost, and his second novel is now imminent, mere days away from seeing the light of day. Before that happens, however, he's giving credit where credit is due.

Jay began The Naked Ghost on an actual typewriter. Those contraptions employ the impact of raised letters through inked ribbons for the torture of posterity. That was barely as many years ago as Jay generally likes to admit being old. After languishing for years, after revisions and re-revisions, and after being ported to a succession of computerized wordprocessors, Jay read the manuscript ten or so pages at a time at meetings of the Twisted Scribes writers group, whose members are hereby properly and thoroughly thanked, as well as being acknowledged in the book. So, what did Jay get from the Scribes?

Plenty. As you read The Naked Ghost, thank the Scribes for the activities near the beginning that the two main characters don't see - sure indications that something is "odd" while Whit and Casey explore the haunted mansion and its grounds for the first time. Good suggestion. Introduced the ghosts, and set up a mysterious conflict. Thank them also for suggesting other plot twists, but particularly for nodding off when Jay's readings from the book got a little tedious. Those somnolences helped greatly, because Jay wisely paid attention to the nods and snores and spiced up the novel accordingly.

Alas, the Twisted Scribes folded, but not before Jay was able to inflict his second novel, Company Time v1.0, on them and obtain their sage guidance. As a non-computer-geek audience, the Scribes' reactions were extremely valuable. Jay calls the book "a geeky novel," and it is. The non-geek Scribes had difficulty understanding some of it, so to help them out Jay interwove a cool discourse on the inner workings of computer software and the process of creating it. As the characters pursue their elusive goal of not being fired, sets of curly braces - it's a programmer thing - interrupt for explanations of things software. The geeks among us won't need those explanations, but Jay's made them cynical enough for even C++ experts to enjoy.

The Naked Ghost is available in paper and electronic versions at booksellers, Amazon.com, and Smashwords.com. Company Time v1.0 is coming soon - real soon now - in paper and electronic versions. Here's the cover and a synopsis. And Jay's working on yet another book, as we "speak."

For entertainment, here's a nice bunch of internet magic that features Jay's photos from

Much as Jay loves paper, he's a tree hugger at heart, saddened this time of year that so many beautiful trees are wasted.

Jay doesn't do that, for more reasons than his tree-huggerness. Yet, Jay loves paper. And wood things. Wood grain and cedar shakes. And pictures of all of the above.

Jay appreciates all things tree. Patterns in the bark, shuffling through leafy rainbows of muted color in the fall, the gaunt gnarls described by bare branches in winter, sprouts and buds that herald spring and especially the brazen few that flower first, risking frost to put on their colorful display early on. Jay greatly appreciates cooling shade, pine cones, and particularly nuts and berries. He loves looking at trees, too, admiring them through the lenses of his cameras as often as possible. And he has, on occasion, actually hugged a tree. Indeed, more than once, but no need for details. It's just a fact. Besides, he's seen many trees, great and small, that he'd like to have hugged, but didn't for one reason or other.

Jay respects trees and the many products made from them. The paper that he uses goes out with Jay's respect and with his heartfelt appreciation of a job well done, a purpose fulfilled, a tree's life not squandered. He

tries not to waste, and looks for "Recycled" icons on the products he uses. If he sends you a paper invoice - and you have to ask to get paper instead of electronic any more - it's on a (beautiful!) paper made from banana peels. Envelopes to match. Jay's proud of that. Jay'd rather we not have any more global warming than we've already got, and he's tried to keep his carbon footprint minimal. Not successfully. He drives around, instead of walking, though he wishes his wallet would accommodate an electric car.

Jay got interested in photography as art in the late Sixties (the nineteen sixties, thank you), and joined the actual fray as a photographic artist around 1970. That turned out to be a short-lived, ill fated venture, but he pleads youth and naïveté. Okay, youth and stupidity, but the multitudinous disasters had little to do with photographic or artistic considerations and a whole lot to do with crooked real estate agents, greedy banks, nincompoop insurance companies, and heavy handed Southern politics so crooked they call it "North Carolina" politics. Anyway, photography-as-art still beguiles, and Jay yields to the Muse's call whenever possible, reason and common sense and even old age notwithstanding. Jay's exhibited many of his photographs in the Midlands of South Carolina within smelling distance of the very seat of state government and within cannonball-shooting distance of the capitolith itself. The art shows provided opportunities to show off, even though Jay had to brave appearing in actual person at the openings. Now he maintains a continuous online art show, where sales of prints are enabled worldwide: RedBubble

Jay's not noted for conformity and doesn't fit well into any categories. "Mainly, I get bored easy." So, the body of his work cuts across a variety of styles, schools, techniques, subjects, and display media. Some are old and traditional, and some new and misunderstood. Some work, and some don't. The viewer decides which is which.

Often printing images in more than one way, Jay alters them as necessary to adjust to the medium. Other works are traditional photographs printed by technologically impressive means onto non-traditional (for photography) surfaces such as artists' canvas, watercolor paper, and metallic foil.

Jay especially likes images in plain ol' photographic gelatin-silver created in the dark. However, the allure of electronic output, with the color permanence of giglée prints, keeps his kitchen smelling more like food than fixer. Oh, and that's another thing. Jay's respiratory functions are extremely sensitive to photographic chemicals, owing to the years he spent in the color photo lab business.

People are usually Jay's favorite subjects, including nudes. He also likes the surreal, and creating abstractions that start as photographs of people, nude or otherwise, and metamorphize into something indistinct, but reminiscent of reality in some curious way.

Computer technologies have booted up an infinite palette of possibilities for manipulating the camera's imagery, and Jay delights in exploring those complexities with works that cut across both traditional and digital photographic technologies. Many of his favorite works are digital abstractions, which he greatly enjoys doing and looking at, ever since 'way back in the Seventies - the Nineteen Seventies.

As an artist and a photographer, Jay's completely self-taught. "Outsider," is the current term. He learns best by doing, anyway, and Jay's always felt that doing something - even doing it wrong - was a better way of figuring out how to do it than being told. Besides, there have always been plenty of books on the subjects, and Jay definitely relates to books. In fact, he'll miss them when they're replaced by electronic versions. But moving to his present apartment was complicated by the fact that his books filled up more than half of the rent-a-truck and consumed immense amounts of time to pack and unpack. A few dozen CD-Roms would have held them all.

Great news! Well, at least Jay thinks it's great. Jay's entries in the Professional Division of the Fine Art Competition at the 2010 South Carolina State Fair won a prize - both pieces. Here's Jay at the artists' reception, gawking at the camera in front of his Chorus Line piece, a 12x22 art-paper print from a manipulated digital image.

The photo is of a storefront window, and Jay has applied a number of electronic abstraction effects to achieve the grunge look.

And here's Jay doing likewise in front of his 20x30 canvas print of this image, the historic Gervais Street Bridge at dusk, taken from the River Walk that goes underneath it on the west bank. This one won a $350 Purchase Award.

Jay spotted the shot on an evening walk back in the summer and tried to snap it with his ever-present pocketable camera. Its lens wasn't up to the task as Jay saw it, so he returned the following evening with his wide-angle camera and a tripod. The exposure is delicately balanced between the available murky daylight and the light from the streetlights and the lamps on the bridge. The sky came out considerably bluer than it looked in person, perhaps because the reddish balance of the sodium vapor streetlights skewed the sky's grey toward blue. Or not.

Thanks to Jay's long-time friend Jay Reed for recording for posterity and this blog Jay's joyous participation in this momentous reception. His art is also on RedBubble.com

Nothing finer than cruising through the mountains expressing awe at the fabulous scenery, and that's just what Jay's been up to for the last couple of weeks. As he prepares to celebrate the 34th anniversary of his 29th birthday (you do the math), he rewarded himself with not one but two trips to the mountains. He even sprung for a new pocketable camera for the second trek, and except for eating batteries for lunch, it's a gem.

Verbiage, even the storied kiloword, does a poor job of expressing the visual, so here are some pictures, with links to larger versions on RedBubble.com.

More are in Jay's RedBubble presence now, with still more to come. There are more extensive captions there, too, but really, just look at the pictures and enjoy, and fill in with your imagination any details that might be lacking.

First up is The Light Center. It's on the scenic (to the max!) Highway 9 near Black Mountain, North Carolina. A geodesic dome (think 1964 New York World's Fair and the 1970 South Carolina Tricentennial celebration), the cool space has shaped windows that admit streams of light. The Center is located on a one of the many vortexes (vortices, whatever) in the area, and if you're not familiar with those tune in to some of the frequent Visitations from Distant Planet episodes on cable. Mystical or not the dome made for cool pictures, both inside and outside.

The nicest thing about Tennessee is getting there, 'cause from here you get to drive through the mountains of North Carolina and through some of the most beautiful parts of Tennessee, just over the North Carolina/Tennessee line. In the mountains, of course. Can you tell Jay likes mountains?

Anyway, the occasion was a wedding of friends and former neighbors of Jay's in Knoxville, and here's a cool shot of a small stream close to the outdoor ceremony. The weather was quite hot, with humidy far above the Richter scale, so Jay got overheated, but managed to survive. He snapped this picture and many others before retreating to the cool confines of the hotel for a rest.

And this one, a simple slatted wooden chair. Jay likes pictures of chairs, always has, and harbors many of them in his collection of Photos that Few People Appreciate.

More chairs.

Now back to Black Mountain for a pleasant stroll around Lake Tomahawk in the middle of town. It's more of a pond than a lake, and a small one at that, especially by Lake Murray standards, but don't let on, as the locals treasure it. It's home to a fine bunch of feathered friends, too, some of whom posed for portraits as Jay and his friends made the half-mile trek around the lake to take in all the sights.

Cut to: Fine feathered friend on the fly, or almost so.

The park's management has taken pains to installed a Watercraft Launching Point. Looks like the ducks are observing the rules and launching without bringing in any vehicles.

It'll be hard to tell from such a small print, but this is a butterfly, posing momentarily in the middle of the path. Normally, Jay would enlarge to the max and zoom in on the little creature, but in this case he likes the shadow of the setting sun, and the textures of the path and the lawn's edges. So this is what you get. Small butterfly in a large space. Live with it.

Back to downtown Black Mountain, where a store named Chocolate Gems makes these masks out of, well, chocolate. This one's inside a plastic wrapper inside a glass showcase.

Jay pronounced the place a suburb of Heaven.

Pictures of Jay's late father are way scarce.  For one thing, he was always the shutterbug, the one who yells "say cheese" and unleashes the Flashbulb Dots Vision Syndrome. The few exceptions have largely been consumed by the dysfunctional family's long-lasting dis-functions.

Nonetheless, this is William Gross himself, photographed in glorious black and white by Jay, himself, with his Hasselblad 500c while the Old Man photographed Jay with the Kodak Instamatic that he's holding.

Says Jay, "We clicked each other at dusk on the lawn in front of my photo lab. The Old Man spent most of the latter part of his life in Rochester, New York, annually revisiting the South to pursue the elusive fish of central Florida. Some summers he took the car train, but when he drove the whole route he stopped off in town for a chat and a night's rest. Born in Rochester, he didn't mind the winters there. I was born in South Carolina and didn't mind the summers here. So... Well, you know."

Here's another one, courtesy of Jay's Cousin Chuck Jermyn of Rochester.

It's a cool old 1940s portrait that suffered greatly from cropping, perhaps to fit into somebody's too-small frame, but Jay managed to Photoshop a scan of it into usefulness.

Then there are these shots, also courtesy of Chuck.

Bill and Joephine (Bill's girlfriend in Rochester), and...

Bill and his sister Irma, in the 1960s in front of the family's home in Aiken.

Jay's not an enthusiastic headline writer, so you take the good with the bad here. Headlines sometimes pop into the brain and literally write themselves. Good ones, even. Bad ones, alas, can take much agonizing time to concoct while the Muse laughs and cackles. There are people who have a natural talent with headlines, and Jay's met lots of them, but doesn't count himself among their number. When it comes to headlines, he works for everything he gets, and often gets little for his work.

The same is true of poetry. Jay's Muse came for a stay a few decades ago and dropped pithy lines all over the place, trusting Jay to gather and record them. He did that, troubling the Muse on occasion for a completion to something well begun, but never achieved the stardom as a poet that some people enjoy without even working up a sweat. It's all there, the vocabulary, the imagery, the finely honed appreciation of the nuances of language. But it doesn't come without the Muse's inspiration, and Jay can't even force it to work, as he usually can with prose. His entire poetic output is but a thin sheaf of lines that he hasn't incremented or polished, or even looked through in years. Indeed, the few people he permitted to look at his work were all in agreement that it was, on the whole, worthless. Exit Muse, stage left.

But this week, again, deadlines loom, so have to do with a picture to tide over till another time. A little abstraction this time. Jay particularly likes abstract images that are something to begin with - abstracted ways of looking at reality, perhaps odd angles, extreme closeups, or lit in some unusual way. This picture starts off as a simple picture of a green plastic float, floating in the swimming pool here at the apartment complex during the annual pool party last week. The apartment management puts on the party to celebrate summer with hot dogs, burgers, and humidity. A good time was had by all. To bring out the plastic floatness of the plastic float, Jay added some Photoshop filters. It's a shot taken with his pointy shooty aim-and-mash-button pocketable camera, and the odd natural light gave it the alien look you see here. It didn't need much color correction. He applied a tonemapping filter that enhanced the midtone contrast, plus an Orton effect that emphasized the pillowy look of the float's folds. To the small version for this blog he added several whacks of unsharp masking to accentuate the texture. If none of this technospeak means anything to you, you're fortunate. Just enjoy the picture. Click it for a bigger view on RedBubble.com.