I’m not a fan of Halloween. When I was a kid, I hated getting dressed up to go out and beg for candy… I loved the candy, obviously, but the whole production beforehand was just not my scene. And then my parents would take half the candy anyway to try and keep me from getting fatter (which didn’t work, of course, but that’s beside the point).
The problem was that I wanted to dress up, but I wanted to do it properly. Like, full kit, the whole nine yards, the sort of costume that would make modern cosplayers take notice. But I didn’t have the time or money to do that, so I was left with the option of either doing a costume badly, or paying for a bad costume. Neither appealed.
This has trickled down to many other aspects of my life. If I’m going to do something, I’m going to try and do it right, or not at all.
Anyway, this Halloween I’m not dressing up, but that’s okay. I will still try to give out candy to the few kids we get that come around every year, and then enjoy whatever leftovers we happen to have at the end of it. So I suppose it’s not all bad.
Switching Between Projects
I’m not very good at multitasking.
I’ll go so far as to say that I’m extremely bad at multitasking. In my defence, I think everyone is bad at it, and those people who say they’re good at it are lying, either to themselves (more likely) or everyone else. Humans don’t multitask. We handle one thing at a time, and either we switch between that one thing (and everything slows down) or we focus on that one thing and things get done faster.
I remember when I was a manager at the small R&D company I worked at doing an exercise to prove how bad everyone was at multitasking: basically people were given a series of simple tasks and told either to do one to completion, or to split their attention between several to try and get them done faster. No question, the splitting of attention always, always-always resulted in much slower output.
Anyway, in my case the problem is having too many stories on the go at the same time. Right now I have the novel, the podcast, and a few short stories, all of which I’m trying to work on at the same time. And that’s a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, if I ever find myself lagging on one story, I can just switch to something else, keeping every writing day fresh and interesting! But on the other hand, it feels like the progress I’m making on each story is glacial.
This occurred to me today because I realized that it’s been a few months since I worked on my most recent short story. I think it may have been August? Something like that. Time really creeps up on you when you’re not looking!
With some luck, I’ll get some progress on it today. I guess we’ll see!
Long Walks
Yesterday I went on a 15km hike that took over 4 hours. It was a hilly part of the province, but beautiful fall colours, cool air, and not too many bugs.
Some bugs, of course, but not too many.
I’m not generally a fan of hiking. I don’t mind my morning runs too much (I don’t like my morning runs, but I don’t hate them), and a good walk occasionally is fine. I used to walk all over the place, and during the pandemic I would go on frequent walks to just get out of the house. But hikes… hikes are a slightly different beast.
There is something calming and lovely about being in nature, especially on a good trail without too many mosquitos. But at the same time, I don’t love hiking because it takes so long, and if I stick to my comfortable pace then I never get anywhere. So I have to push myself a bit faster than I want, and I feel like I spend the entire time looking at my feet trying not to trip over things… and then tripping over things anyway.
Yesterday’s hike was okay. I’m sore today (I didn’t go on a morning run as a result), but otherwise it was a nice time. If it weren’t for the fact that it consumed the entire day (left around 9am, returned home around 8pm), I would’ve probably really liked it. But now I have a full day of work I need to catch up on… somehow! Gah!
Inspiration versus Perspiration
I was talking to a friend over the weekend about being a writer, and he commented that he found it really hard to work when “inspiration struck him.” He was talking about painting, which I also do, but the idea is the same… the movements of inspiration are capricious and fluid. Sometimes I will be inspired and get half a novel done in a week (that hasn’t happened in a while, but it HAS happened to me!). Sometimes inspiration will vanish like mist on a sunny day. Just… poof. Gone.
But writing… well, creative work in general, I think… is about showing up regardless of inspiration. You think I am inspired to work seven days a week? No. I am driven and motivated to work, but I don’t wait for fickle inspiration most of the time. I am grateful for when it shows up, but I am writing, editing, recording, painting… I am working every chance I can.
I know I’ve talked about it before, of course. I’m not inventing anything people don’t know about. But I still think it’s important to talk about, especially these days when the threat of gen-AI looms over all creative work and people suddenly think it’s easy, and that anyone can do it.
Regardless, today is a low inspiration day, but I still need to get at least one episode of the podcast edited, so I’m gonna get back at it!
Getting Sloppy!
I usually write here twice a week… Mondays and Thursdays, most of the time. This week I forgot because Monday was a National Holiday (happy Thanksgiving to all my fellow Canucks), and the week before that I forgot because… I just forgot. It happens.
But it’s weird for me to forget twice in so short a span. I think I may be doing too much these days… being pulled in multiple directions in my writing career, for one thing, and dealing with a backlog of creative work in my painting and podcast. Just so much to do, and never enough time to do all… or even most of it. It’s a little off-putting.
I mean, I intend to stick with it. Obviously. I love doing this stuff. But it is concerning that I’m not doing this blog as often… ah well. Missing one or two a year isn’t a big deal, even if they have happened pretty close together!
Reading!
In the last two weeks, I have read 5 full-length novels, and started number 6.
Three of those were Michael Stackpole’s “Blood of Kerensky” trilogy of Battletech books. In some ways I can justify that as research for writing purposes… I write a lot of Battletech short stories these days, and having more general knowledge that I lacked is useful.
Two of those were the Murderbot Diaries novels, which were fantastic. Martha Wells knows how to write sharp, clever characters. It was a lot of fun, but also really smart. Big, big fan.
The novel I’m starting on now is going to take me a little longer to finish (“The Way of Kings” by Brandon Sanderson), but I’m looking forward to it regardless. It will be nice to have a change of pace from fast, snippy stories to Sanderson’s more measured pace of writing. I’m a fan of his work, no question, but he’s not… fast. He takes his time in his work, and I respect that.
Anyway, lots of reading! It’s been good! The only downside is that I haven’t been writing nearly as much, but today I get to start working on the novel again! So that’s good!
Have a great weekend, everyone!
Sometimes, Number Go Down
As I’m sure you’re all aware, I record a weekly podcast. It’s a silly little sci-fi short story thing. I do it because I enjoy the format and the opportunity to learn new tricks (like audio editing! So much to learn!), but I also hope that it will, one day, help me be financially independent.
Or at least close to financially independent. At this point in my life I’d settle for “less of a burden” most days. But I digress.
Since the podcast started in June, it’s seen pretty consistent and steady growth. Not constant, there are weeks that are better and weeks that are worse, but it’s definitely trended in the correct direction.
Until last week. Last week was the first big drop in numbers since the podcast started. It was averaging about 150 listeners a week, and last week it barely got 70. No reason that I can tell for why (there may be an issue with it being too quiet, but that shouldn’t stop people from downloading it because they wouldn’t know it was too quiet until after they downloaded it?). And this week looks like it will be weak again.
There’s nothing I can do about that. I don’t advertise the podcast (I barely have the budget to afford hosting it), so it’s not like there’s a knob I can turn that will get more people to hear about it. So I just have to accept that sometimes the numbers go down, and they’re probably out of my control.
That stated, I’m recording another episode (or two… hopefully three!) today, which is all I can do. I can only focus on the things that I can control: making a good story. And then maybe, if I do it long enough and well enough, people will find me.
I think I’m going to retire my standard sign-off… although obviously I still hope people out there are staying safe and healthy!
So Many Books!
As we round out the end of September (what is time, really?), I realize I suddenly have many, many books to read.
”The Way of Kings” by Sanderson, Murderbot Diaries 6 by Martha Wells, I still need to finish “The Man in the High Castle” by PKD, and I’m working on the Legacy of Blood by Michael Stackpole (which is a trilogy… so I gotta get cracking on that!). It sounds like a lot, but that’s only because it’s a lot. The Sanderson alone would usually take me a week assuming no major disruptions and me enjoying the story.
I enjoy almost everything I’ve read of Sanderson’s… not everything, granted, but most of it is very good. That should come as a surprise to nobody. He’s a very gifted writer.
Anyway, the moral of the story is that I have a stack of books I need to read in relatively short order. I also have one more… “Empire of Silence” by Chistopher Ruocchio, not sure where I heard about it but somebody recommended it to me so I’ve added it to the list.
And, of course, all my other work doesn’t just wait for me… I’ve got stories to write, podcasts to record, models to paint… time, it would seem, is suddenly not on my side. But I’ll get it done! Part of the job, after all!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Always Know the Way
A few weeks ago I got my first, actual, real-world fan letter. Somebody who bought one of my books from a local shop decided that they wanted to take time out of their day to write me and say how much they like the story.
I think I’m going to frame the letter. Eventually. I have it now, tucked on my bookshelf, but when I have time and mental space, I’m probably going to frame it.
As a way to say thanks for writing, I sent them back a free copy of one of my other books. I doubt they’ll like it as much as the first, which they picked up specifically because it had pirates in it… my other books, as much as I enjoy them, don’t feature pirates quite as prominently as “The Hunt for the Wind’s Howling Rage” which, at its core, is all about pirates.
The one I’m writing right now has pirates. But I’m not done it yet, so I couldn’t send that.
Anyway. I signed the book, and then in a moment of insanity, I decided to personalize it a little. I just put the fan’s name (Zoe), and then something like “May you never lose your way.”
Knowing your way is something I struggle with constantly. I don’t know what I’m doing, or why, or even for who. Just… I like to tell stories. I like trying to make other people feel better. I hate feeling useless and alone, and I spend the majority of my life feeling either one or both of those things. And so if I can make other people feel… less useless, less lost, less alone… then to me, that’s a useful way to spend my time.
Is it? Is it really? I dunno. But since I don’t know, I figure it’s as good a thing to do as anything.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Murderbot
I love the Murderbot series.
Martha Wells is fantastic at writing quippy, clever sci-fi that’s dense but not unapproachable. It’s exactly the kind of sci-fi I aim for, although her stories tend to have more characters and subplots than I usually write. But it’s not usually too overwhelming (and in the cases that it is, the protagonist is also usually overwhelmed, which feels right).
I just finished reading “Network Effect,” which I suppose is the 5th book in the series? And I learned recently that they are up to book 7, which means I have two more I can read, and that’s fantastic news. I almost finished it the same day I picked it up from the library, but I ended up needing one extra day.
I love good sci-fi. It makes the world seem a bit better, even when the topics in the books are rather bleak. The “Corporate Rim” described by Wells is pretty bleak and dystopian, but the books are great, shining beacons of hope. Although Murderbot would probably disagree with you there.
Anyway. It was great. And I can’t wait to read the next one, but I have to get some of my own writing done before then!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Encounters with Famous People
I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone really famous. I’ve been to expos that had big name actors and I’ve shaken hands and complimented and taken pictures with some very big names, but I wouldn’t call that “meeting.” Like, we didn’t chat.
I’ve met a few local politicians, a handful of very successful people, and one or two exceptionally talented people who haven’t made it “big” yet, but my encounters with really successful, really famous people? Maybe two or three?
However, I have messaged and received responses from a few artists that I consider among the best in their business. When I was hunting for a cover artist for my last novel (before I found the exceptional Jackarais) I messaged Kwanchai Moriya, who is possibly one of the best board game artists, living or dead, and he was super polite when he messaged me.
Anyway, I just fired off an email to a musician who’s work I think is… perfect. It’s really perfect. He’s not a huge name, but the work he does is absolutely flawless for the application that they’re applied to. He creates for video games, ya see, and yeah, music I still listen to, despite not playing the game(s) any more. They’re that good.
Will he be able to do anything with me? I doubt it. But I emailed to ask, and who knows? In my limited experience, truly talented people tend to be super cool.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Helping Other Creatives
I don’t have a big network of creatives I know. I have my editor, my cover artist, and a voice actor that has been surprisingly difficult to get a hold of (but I know she’s going through a lot so I’m happy to be patient). I know one successful writer who has become a full-time editor (the extremely talented Stephen Kotowych), and I used to run a writers group that had one successful writer who then moved to Colombia to teach English. But that’s kinda it…
Oh, I also know a few other podcasters. Most of have since stopped podcasting, tragically, but I know a few that were quite good.
Anyway, the whole reason I bring this up is because I firmly believe in doing whatever I can to help other creatives. That usually means paying them for their work and avoiding any use of LLMs for anything remotely creative, as a bare minimum, but it also means things like talking about other podcasts when I record my own (usually as a “Hey, I’ve been listening to X-Y-Z, you might enjoy it!”). It means sharing table space at a convention to help other authors get some visibility. And it means promoting my friend’s stores when I have the opportunity (like the wonderful friendly local gaming store Valhalla Games in Kitchener!).
This past weekend, I had the chance to help out a guy do a Battletech-related thing. He needed me to hop onto a Mechwarrior 5 server, and stand around in a Mech so he could get shots of it for a project he’s doing. And since I happened to have a free day, I figured… why not!
Turns out he didn’t realize he needed a heap of mods, and I needed those same mods, and so several GBs of downloads later, and he had run out of time.
It was a little frustrating, but only because if I were going to request somebody help with one of my projects (and I do! I frequently ask friends to lend me their voices for recording), I try to have everything ready for them, to make it as seamless as possible. Here’s your script and a highlighter if you want! Here are drinks, that’s your mic, do you have any questions, etc… etc…
This guy was just… sorta… “Hey, I need help. I guess we’ll figure out how it will work later!”
Felt weird. I hope I can still help him later (although a free weekend night is exceptionally rare!), but it got me thinking about how I try to help others and what I expect from others when they offer to help me…
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Reading Source Material
I love being a student.
I’m not currently a student. I had to stop a couple years ago because the money just got super tight. Which is a dang shame, because I was pretty close to graduating with an honours degree in English.
I’m good at English, it turns out. But I digress. The reason I bring it up is because I love being a student. I love studying, I love being tested, I love engaging with other students. But, perhaps most importantly, I love researching.
This is a dangerous love for a writer. The inclination is always to research rather than to write, and that’s not what a writer does. A writer, one must assume, writes.
But these days in order to maintain my pace of story writing (about 10K words a week), I have to sneak in my studying when I can. Things like… speed of light calculations, or mass-ratios, or, in this case, the fictional thousand-year history of a sphere of stars surrounding Earth.
You know. As you do.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Numbers Go Up
As you all know, I am sure, I record and produce a podcast. I’ve done them before, years ago, but this newest one started in June and it’s been a lot of fun.
But at the same time, it’s always nice to have an audience, especially because all this stuff costs money. Everything costs money, unsurprisingly perhaps, and so hosting a podcast, as a subset of “everything,” costs money. And if I can get a dedicated audience, maybe I can get people who have a few dollars they can throw at me to help offset the costs of… everything.
So while I am happy to make it just for the love of the setting and to let myself explore another avenue of writing, I would also like it to be received by people who also enjoy it. And for the last few months, every week, there have been more and more people enjoying it.
This week that just passed was the first time that fewer people downloaded than the week before. And, hey, that’s gonna happen. Numbers can’t just go up. But I surprised myself by how much I was sad when I realized that it wasn’t going to be another growth week.
And what does it really matter? At this point there are about 100 people who have listened to the podcast and downloaded a couple episodes. That’s not bad for a few months. I hit 1,000 downloads a few weeks back, so that’s good too… all indicators are that things are going pretty well. Maybe not great, but good! And I should be happy with that!
So I’m going to try and take the one week of lower downloads in stride, and just keep working on putting out the best podcast I can. Hopefully more people download it and enjoy it soon! Hopefully!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Big Rain
Yesterday, Southern Ontario was hammered by some rather remarkable weather. Lots of tornado warnings, lots of severe thunderstorm and wind warnings, and this morning’s jog around the block required occasionally reroutes around fallen trees and branches.
It’s always amazing to me how fragile life really is. How much of it is out of our control. The storm yesterday felt like a reminder of that.
Today, the sun is shining, the birds are singing, and the city has sent out teams to deal with the debris and wreckage. Everything is slowly getting back to normal, and life is resuming its usual pace.
Feels kinda surreal. But I am grateful that I got to witness the storm, and happy that I’m on the other side of it now.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Silly Stuff
My stories aren’t super serious.
They often cover dark, dangerous, and unpleasant topics, and often the characters are VERY serious about whatever they’re attempting to accomplish. But I’m not out here trying to write the next Neuromancer or whatever. My work isn’t trying to be groundbreaking or anything like that. I just like telling fun stories that people enjoy.
As a result, I sometimes put rather silly things in my work. For example, I’m writing a series of fictional advertisements for fictional companies… hmmm. I suppose the advertisements are real, just the products they’re trying to get you to buy don’t exist. Trips to exotic worlds, components for giant mecha, that sorta thing.
But because they’re not real, I get to be a little more creative in my ads. For example, I did one for a planet called “Misery” and the tag line was “Come to Misery: We love company!”
I have to write up a few more today so I have them ready next time I record an audio story that needs one. Time to be creatively silly!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
The Business End
It’s been a rough week for news. Since I live in Canada (Southern Ontario, to be a bit more specific), the elephant down south is causing a lot of transfer-stress, in both work and social circles. Times are going to get harder for almost everyone I know, and that’s rarely a good sign.
You remember when things got easier as time went on? Yeah, me neither. I think it was a lie we were told when we were young and dumb.
Dumber. Anyway.
But, what can you do? I suppose I’m grateful that my little books and my art and the stuff I sell across the border is so low stakes that this has minimal direct impact on me. It has huge implications for my ability to ever make a living wage (or anything approaching it), but for now it’s mostly fragmentary stuff about groceries getting more expensive, fuel getting more expensive, and everyone starting to point fingers (usually at the wrong people).
But I can’t do anything about any of that. I’m just a writer, I just make silly stories about big stompy robots and space cowboys. And I’m going to keep doing that, with the hope that the people who read my stories maybe forget for a little while about the worst of the troubles in the world and live in a slightly better, brighter place for a few hours or days.
That’s the hope, at least. I should get back to it… the short story I’m working on right now is probably going to be almost 10K words when I’m done!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Into the Office
I think I’ve mentioned, once or twice, that I am not a full-time artist. I try, I aim, I strive for being an author that can just produce art all day, and have people out there who are like “Yeah, this writing is good, these audio stories are fun, we should give that artist guy a little money so he doesn’t starve to death and can keep doing this stuff.”
That’s the dream. That’s the goal. That’s what we’re doing here.
But until I get there, I gotta pay the bills. And the way I do that is by working a few days a week at a local accountant’s office. Nothing fancy, I do really basic stuff… basically data-entry, moving things from this piece of paper to that Excel document sorta stuff.
But today, the boss called me (on one of my days that I don’t work at the office) to see if I could come into the office. That felt really nice. I don’t think it will take me long (I hope!), but it’s nice to know that I am valued, even a bit, in my other life.
Would I prefer to not to go the office? Yes. I have lots of things to write and no time to do most of them, and this definitely isn’t helping with that. But I did miss a day of work last week because of saying goodbye to sweet little Koko, so the extra money will help, and it’s nice to be useful.
So I get to go to the office today. I’ve written a fair amount already today, so it won’t be a big disruption. Or shouldn’t be, I hope. We’ll see, I suppose!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
A Productive Weekend
Yesterday I wrote over 6,000 words. That’s a lot! It took me the majority of the day, but it was a nice reminder that sometimes I can just put my head down and write.
I’m editing it today, and while many of those words will end up on the cutting room floor, I feel like the majority it actually pretty good. For a short story it hits all the major beats, and I’m looking forward to recording it either tonight or later this week. And then editing that recording… the moral of the story is that I have a lot of editing coming my way in the near future!
But yeah, it was really nice to get so much work done over the weekend. I still miss my cat, but the ability to focus and get things done and not be pulled away every twenty minutes to check if she’s eating, drinking, napping… I feel a little guilty about being so relieved, but we were on hospice care with Koko for a long, long time, and it’s kind of a relief that I can put that energy back into my writing.
So on that note, I’m going to get back to editing!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
So Long, My Friend
Yesterday we had to say goodbye to our last cat, Koko.
Koko has been with us for almost a decade. We adopted her and her sister, Bean, as a bonded pair, and folded them into our family along with Donut, our previous old-lady cat. Since then, both of Koko’s siblings have passed on (Donut last year, Bean a couple years earlier), and she had some serious health issues starting early last year.
But she held on. For over a year she’s been our only cat, a constant companion and a source of limitless stress and love. Twice daily medications (which she was increasingly picky about consuming), difficulty moving and breathing, and a slow loss of energy led to Tuesday, when she lost the use of her rear legs. Wednesday we took her to the vet and sad our tearful goodbyes.
The house feels empty. I’ve spent a few hours putting away food bowls, watering stations, toys, comfy pillows in windows and on couches that were there for Koko to luxuriate on. I’m sure I’ll be finding Koko fur on my clothes and in my food for years to come. But all the same, the echoes of her tiny little paws are so loud in my head and my heart, that sometimes I can’t focus on anything else.
She’s not in pain any more. If there’s an afterlife, I like to think that it’s just for cats… Koko has been reunited with her family on a giant tuna that’s sailing through the stars.
She will be missed. My life is richer for having had her in it, and poorer for her absence, but I’ll get through this.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and health. And, hey, if you have pets, give them an extra snuggle or two from me.