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.
Figured Out DaVinci! Sorta!
Yesterday I started working with DaVinci Fairlight for my audio stories.
Strictly speaking, I’ve been trying to learn DaVinci Fairlight for a few weeks now. The tutorials are… hmm. I can’t fault the writer or the company, because they are extensive. The problem is that I think I’m not the target audience for their work. They really want “professional” audio and video editors, people who have already received training and, perhaps more importantly, are somewhat familiar with the tools. At least are familiar with the terminology.
I am not a professional in that sense. I’m a professional writer, sure, but audio editing is something I do as a… there’s a term for this. Somebody who does it passionately and consistently but isn’t paid for it… an amateur? Something like that, the word will occur to me later.
Anyway, moral of the story is that at some point I had to stop learning how to use the tool, and just… dive in. I’ve already learned a few interesting things! And my process is kinda getting a bit faster already, which is a very good sign… editing the Arena Combat episodes is time intensive, to say the least. I’ve tried to set up my tools and workspace to minimize the time it takes, but it’s still long.
Thankfully the other episodes are much faster to record. But, ironically, much longer to write and edit. So it kinda balances out?
Anyway! I’ve started using DaVinci Fairlight, and so far, so good! We’ll see if I can finish the episode today and get started on the next (which will take me into September for the release schedule, which is good! I’d really like to be into October at this point, but those few weeks to learn Fairlight slowed me down!).
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Unsocial Media
I love social media. I mean, I think to some extent, we all do… it’s designed very specifically to be loved by us. Some of the smartest people alive are spending millions of work-hours to make you love social media.
… instead of solving world hunger or war or disease or doing anything useful. Which tells you a lot about the reason the world is the way it is.
But I’m kinda done with it, sadly. As much as I love the personalities I see and engage with casually (and I have my favourites, mostly internet cooks and socialist thinkers, often both at the same time), I’ve found at least a few days where I meant to spend a minute distracting myself, and instead spent hours upon hours sinking into short clip after short clip.
So I’ve decided to step away. That’s tricky as a creator in this, the year 2026 of the current era, but I’m going to do as little as I can do let people know that I’m still alive, still writing, still making weird stuff, and hopefully people will find me through that.
I still have a Patreon (last month’s support was enough to pay for a few dozen physical copies of my books that I’m now selling at a local retailer!), I technically still have Instagram and Facebook (although I haven’t posted in quite some time), and obviously I still have this tiny little corner of the internet. But I think that’ll be it for the near future… I can’t keep spending time telling people about what I’m doing instead of doing the things that I want people to read and enjoy!
On that note, I have at least a couple episodes of my audio short story podcast to record… I’m going to go do that!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Noise, of Various Types
As a scientist, we had some pretty unusual definitions of the word “noise.”
For most people, they mean auditory issues. Loud sounds, constant background humming, a co-worker that chews too loudly.
I had one of those for a few years. Loud slurper. Drove me nuts. Anyway.
From a science standpoint, though, “noise” is sorta everything that isn’t “signal.” Signal is that which you are trying to detect or do. Noise, therefore, gets in the way of Signal, and Signal-to-Noise ratios are very important for most measurement applications.
Right now, I’m dealing with both auditory noise, and distraction noise. There is heavy construction outside my house (new fiber-optic lines, if the non-stop door-to-door salespeople are to be believed), and it’s very distracting. Especially because I’m trying to work on some audio engineering (editing, really), and that’s proving very difficult under the circumstances.
Ah well. They said they would only be about an hour… although that was about 2 hours ago… so I guess we’ll see!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Almost August
I know I complain a lot about the passage of time. As a youth, it seemed to crawl by most days… there was always time to do things. To read, certainly, but also to play with friends, or go on trips, or do the endless list of chores my parents foisted on me.
So many chores.
These days? There isn’t enough time to do anything. I’m trying to learn a tool to help with my audio stories, and it’s taking forever, and I don’t have forever to learn this tool. I have books to write! I have stories to record! I have movies to shoot! I have so many things I need to do and I have time for exactly none of them.
Sigh.
Ah well. July wasn’t an awful month, I got a fair amount accomplished, and the podcast has now had over 500 downloads. Not great, not terrible, but it’s out there, being listened to by at least a few people, and hopefully those people like it and share it with others who will also like it. Didn’t sell any books in July, but three books were read through the Kindle Unlimited thingy, so even with no sales, my work is still circulating a little. So that’s nice.
Now to push my face into the cheese grater that is DaVinci Fairlight again. Gotta get the audio editing suite working for me!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
New Tools
I have spent the last couple days learning DaVinci Fairlight, a subsection of DaVinci Resolve.
Resolve is a video editing suite that I have some very limited experience with. I dabbled with it early this year in an attempt to learn better stop motion animation. It’s a very powerful suite of tools… honestly, too powerful for my limited brain at this stage. I tried, but the layers you have to dig through before you can do something remotely useful… it’s a lot. A lot a lot.
But Fairlight is part of the suite, specifically for audio editing. I asked a very successful (and talented) podcaster for advice for polishing up and improving my own work, and he immediately suggested switching from Audacity to Fairlight. I can see why… Audacity is free and reasonably powerful, but it’s really designed to be idiot-proof to a large extent, and so it does some things suboptimally because they’re more beginner-friendly. Fairlight… is not beginner friendly.
But I’ve been recording audio (and podcasts) for over a decade at this point. I know Audacity. I don’t know Fairlight, but even then, I can tell it’s powerful and it does a lot of things in a really clever way.
Just to take an example: when I’m editing in Audacity, I actually have 3 files open at the same time: the file I am editing, a second file for all the music, and a third for all the sound effects. I copy and paste music or explosions from their files into the file I’m editing. It works, but it crashes periodically because I’m doing all this on my tiny, old Mac.
Fairlight has a “Media Pool” built into the program. All my effects and music are already in the program, just two clicks away. You can drag and drop files over where you want them to go, and make them translucent so you can overlap them perfectly, and then fade the old audio out so only the new audio is heard. I’m pretty sure I can do that in Audacity, but it’s not trivial, and inserting a piece of audio into an existing track… lots of cutting, moving, and pasting. Which is fine! But it’s time to upgrade my tools.
So that’s what I’m doing for the rest of the day. Watching tutorials and trying to stay focused. Wish me luck!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Flow States
I know I’ve written before about how much I love the situation when I get “in the flow” while I’m writing. I think it’s common among creatives, that inclination to do work such that time just sort of disappears and work just kind of gets finished, almost magically.
The moments where it doesn’t feel like “work.” Where it feels like art.
Of course, you can’t really control those moments, and so I cheat. I create whenever and wherever I can. I spend a large part of my waking life writing (or thinking about writing, or preparing for writing). That makes it a bit more likely that this will be the time that lightning strikes, the moments where I get a tonne of work done and everything feels… if not “easy,” then at least easier.
These last few days have been like that for me. While many people were wrapped up in the World Cup over the weekend, I was writing, recording, and editing a bunch of content for my podcast. And when I finished all that, I churned out a few thousand words on the novel.
It’s been a good couple days. Now if I could just get a hold of my editor and cover artist…
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Auspicious Days
As I write today, my cat is curled in a little ball of fur between my arms. She’s seated on a blanket (placed specifically for her, of course) on the table where I do most of my writing, and right now she is gazing at the computer screen.
My cat’s name is Koko, she’s 13 years old, and she’s very sick. We’ve known for over a year, she has difficulty breathing and is on a battery of medications that don’t heal, just help. She doesn’t seem to be in pain, she sleeps peacefully and is still playful and eats and drinks joyfully, but she won’t be with us for much longer.
One year ago today, her sister, Donut, decided to leave us for the giant tuna fields in the sky. Donut was almost 20 years old, an ancient and wise creature who was loved and loving in equal measure. She is still missed… occasionally I will see a shadow down the hallway or a flicker of movement by a door and still think “Oh, there’s Donut!”
Today is a good day, though. I’m going to sell a few books to a friend, which is nice, I’m finishing up a novel I’m reading, and going to put a few thousand words into short stories and my own novel. It’s a sad day, but also a happy day. Auspicious, one might say.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!