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!
Reading Old Sci-fi
I love old sci-fi. I mean, I was raised on it… Dune, Foundation, Starship Troopers, Red Shirts… I can’t claim that I’ve read a tonne of classic sci-fi, but I’ve read my fair share. The first sci-fi I ever read was a Ben Bova collection called “Future Crime,” and the hooks have been sunk deep into me ever since. It’s my comfort reading… I love fantasy, romance, modern alternate history, basically speculative fiction of any colour and stripe, but sci-fi is what I always go back to.
Along that track, I’ve been reading a lot of older Battletech novels, since my new podcast is all about Battletech stories that I’ve written and performed. And there is a certain… je ne sais quoi about old sci-fi that, as much as I love it, tends to permeate works of the 70s and 80s. They can be quite casually sexist, for one thing (although I doubt it was intentional, just below the threshold of the time for what constituted inappropriate male gaze) and often casually racist in the same vein (skin colours of characters are either “dark chocolate” or “normal,” that kinda thing), but there’s more to it than that.
Things like… the scope of what the future would hold is often missed. Look at the exceptional “Neuromancer,” in which William Gibson does his damnedest to dream up the most bleak, terrifying, oppressive future imaginable… and it’s still less depressing than modern life in many, many ways. Society’s casual disregard for personal privacy, our acceptance of police and government surveillance, our surrender to the megacorps and monopolies in almost all regards… Gibson thought people would fight for these rights, but instead we have lineups around the block for the newest pocket panopticon from Zeibatsu 071.
Anyway, it’s just something you notice when you read old sci-fi. People using terms like “Megabytes” or “gigabits” with reverence, unaware that we’d explode past such paltry data usage within years of them writing how insurmountable a threshold such numbers seemed.
With all that stated, I have an old book I want to start and finish today, if at all possible, so I’d better get back at it!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Creatives, and the Hazard of Being One
I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before, but I like board games. I play a fair number of them, I have a very large collection, and for about a decade I worked in a Friendly Local Game Store.
For the most part, good times. The holidays were a little hard, no surprise, and working during COVID was a challenge, but for the most part I really enjoyed my time there. Good people on both sides of the counter.
Recently, a video board game reviewer (technically a pair of them, a husband and wife team) put out a video asking for more subscriptions in order to get a raise, basically. I have cut almost all of my Patreon outwards-support, but I figured I could throw a few dollars at these two because:
1. They do really, really good work. Great editing, solid writing, insightful reviews.
2. They’re creatives who are struggling to make ends meet. Their ambition outstrips my ambition (they want to get studio space, and I couldn’t ever DREAM of having studio space for my own projects!), but at the core, it’s two talented people who want to make a living doing something they are both good at and passionate about.
Of course, I don’t have enough money to support myself, but part of the reason I chose to support them (at the lowest tier possible because, yes, I am mostly broke) is because I have to believe that talented creatives are allowed to make a living. I need to believe that, because if that’s not true then what am I even doing?
So I now support two board game review channels: Shut Up and Sit Down (who I have supported for 14 years now? For as long as they’ve accepted any form of donation, significantly earlier than Patreon has existed) and No Pun Included. My two outwards Patreons are slightly less than the amount I currently receive from Patreon, so I guess at this stage I’m just sharing the love a little. I hope it helps.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Busy Summer
I think it’s the nicer weather that is why I am always busy in the summer. I can take more car trips (driving to see friends a few hours away in the summer is arduous, but in the winter it can be impossible or exceptionally dangerous), I can do more chores around the house, and I can write in more places (either in the home or nearby).
Busy!
I didn’t manage to get any writing on the novel done this weekend (boo), but that’s okay. I still have a stockpile of good ideas, and it’s really a question of sitting down and putting them on paper. Which I will do. Today, maybe.
And of course any time I think about writing the novel, that reminds me I also have a stack of short stories I need to finish (a few of them are almost finished), and the audio stuff for the podcast (which is getting more critical as I run out of pre-recorded episodes… 3 more weeks of content, which sounds like a lot, but it’s taken me 5 weeks to record 2 more episodes… gotta speed that up!).
Anyway, all this to say that I am busy! And busy doing things I love, which is good, but busy nonetheless.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
And then Suddenly, July!
The summer has hit Southern Ontario with a vengeance. It is WARM outside… and as somebody who almost never notices the heat, that’s a statement of some weight.
I like the warm. It makes it a lot easier for me to do work in my basement (where I write) when it’s not freezing, I like running and the air not hurting my lungs, and I’m quite insensitive to humidity. So summer is kind of my favourite time of year in many ways.
Except for bugs. I hate bugs. But other than that, summer is great!
It’s kind of opposite to many people, I suppose. I am way more productive in the summer than I am in the winter. You’d think the traditional time of “Staying Inside and Reading” (Winter) would be better for me as a writer, but for whatever reason, it tends to be the summer. Weird.
Anyway, I have a laundry list of work to get done (not least of which is the novel, which I am hoping to get to 20K words by this weekend!), so I should enjoy the warm weather as best I can: by staying inside and writing!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Scope Growth
One of the reasons I love writing is that I can do anything. I can create massive starships, or entire alien civilizations, or brand new languages… anything I can think of, I can write about.
Sure, it takes effort and a lot of editing to make it good, but I can do it.
The problem is that this same ability to do anything doesn’t translate super well into other forms of media. For example, the audio stories I’m currently publishing once a week… the most recent one I am recording requires a total of 6 voices that are different and distinct. I wrote them, no problem… but now I have to record them, and that’s a lot trickier. I know 6 people willing to do it… but now I need to have everything setup so that when they’re available, I am ready to go. And then there are sound effects, and foley work that needs to get done.
But I want to tell interesting stories! And in audio, that means a bit of scope-creep. Or growth, at least… but remembering that I actually have to manifest the results of this writing… that’s tricky.
Anyway, I’ve recorded most of it (4 of the 6 necessary voices), and now am doing the editing work. That will probably take me the rest of the day (aside from a brief hour-and-a-half trip to a park for some exercise). And with some luck I can get everything ready so that I can get those last two voices in quick.
Next episode? Next episode I am reining in a bit, so I can create a few episodes relatively quickly. Less sprawl, more focus. That’s the plan, at least…
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Reading Fast!
I am a relatively fast reader. I can consume most regular books in a day, sometimes two if I’m interrupted or have significant plans.
That stated, I don’t usually start reading a book unless I have a full day to devote to it. I don’t like having to pick up and put down a book, in general. I used to spend days reading at home… basically every evening after school. My parents had a couple very comfortable chairs in the living room, and I would curl up in one with a copy of “The Hobbit” or “Dragons of Autumn Twilight” and chew through them.
These days my reading is a bit more pointed… I read to keep up with the Joneses, so to speak. I want to know what other writers are producing in the space, and so I have to read what they’re writing to both learn what people are reading, and how people are writing it. It’s fun, don’t get me wrong, but it’s lost some of the lazy allure it once had. These days, I read on a mission.
Today I have to chew through 300 pages (approximately) of dense technical writing. It’s RPG stuff (Starfinder 2E, specifically), but I’m kinda looking forward to it? I enjoy these sorts of breakneck “absorb everything you can!” reading sessions. Reminds me of university.
Anyway, I should get back to it… I’ve only finished a few chapters today, and I have a lot to do in the next 8 hours!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
"Short" Stories!
I’ve mentioned before how short stories aren’t my forte.
I can write them… I have written them, and a few of them have been sold professionally. So I can do it.
But it’s not a natural place for me to write. It’s more effortful than me writing long-form stuff like novels and novellas. Those feel more natural… I can’t tell you why that’s the case, but I have been doing this writing thing for long enough that I know it’s true.
The reason I mention it is because right now I’m working on the novel (12K words and counting!) as well as two short stories. Technically three if you include the one that’s off with my editor. But regardless, the short stories involve a lot more editing, a lot more second-guessing, and a lot more work to get that final product on a per-word basis.
That’s not a bad thing, I think. People seem to really like my short stories, so the extra time and work seems to pay off. And that’s good! But it does mean that days like today, where the emphasis is on the short story side of my work, feel more like I’m working harder to do less work. It’s a weird feeling… even when the end result is extremely satisfying.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Musical Pondering
I like listening to music when I write. I usually have to pick either purely instrumental, or stuff that’s in a foreign (or fictional) language. Otherwise it tends to creep into the writing itself. But I have a stable of music I like… stuff like the entire “Mass Effecct” soundtrack, or the Sardaukar throat singing from the new “Dune” movies.
The reason I bring it up is that I’ve been incorporating some music into my audio story podcast. All instrumental at this point because it’s what the budget I had to work with (minimal, and the music is definitely worth way more than what I paid for it), but the idea for a few more songs have been rattling around between my ears for a few days now. Just ideas, just thoughts… but the thing about being an artist is often about converting those random thoughts into actionable creative outlets.
And I’m working on it.
I did play a tiny bit of guitar (quite badly) for one of the fictional in-universe commercials I recorded. That was kinda fun. Oh, and today I’m working half on the novel, and half on the podcast. Progress on both has been deeply satisfying!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!