I just played a round of a lovely little board game called Chronicles of Crime: 2400, which is a cyberpunk game about solving mysteries. I had a great time! I love a good cyberpunk story, and a cyberpunk mystery is even more delicious!
It’s been a long time since I’ve read any really good cyberpunk… well, that’s not quite true, I re-read Neuromancer, one of the first cyberpunk novels ever, and a great one at that, for class a few months ago, but that was a re-read, rather than a read!
Actually, now that I’ve written that down, even that isn’t true… I’ve read both of Scalzi’s cyberpunk crime novels (Locked In and Head On, both great). So I take back what I said. I’ve read a fair amount of great cyberpunk recently, which might be why I am so excited to write my own! Mine is a little more optimistic and upbeat than the norm, granted… no faceless multinationals ruling with an iron fist before powerless governments. But I have space elevators (crucial, if you ask me), I have a great heist, and I have a plausible hacker in there just for kicks.
Anyway. The thing is that cyberpunk is great, and getting to play a cyberpunk private investigator was a lot of fun. If any of you out there are fans of board games, it’s not expensive, it uses a neat app that does some really cool stuff… it’s worth a look! And hey, maybe it will help fuel your hunger for a good cyberpunk heist book in a few months…
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
December! Already!? Argh!
Something magical happens every year as the weather gets colder and the nights get longer…
Time speeds up.
I can’t explain it! But by the time we hit October it feels like I blink and then we’re midway through November and a yawn later it’s December! It’s super weird.
That stated, this year has been harder than most for a variety of reasons unworthy of going into detail about. But suffice it to say that I’ll be happier-than-average to put the last few months of 2021 in the rear view mirror and move on with my life. And my writing! The novel I’m working on right now is a tonne of fun, but is taking months longer than I originally expected it would. Maybe having the month pass by more quickly will result in the novel being finished more quickly as well? Wouldn’t that be nice!
Anyway, I should get back to writing said novel, now that most of my major school work is done for the semester (sure, I have a final exam to prep for, but I can’t say I’m stressed about that… I usually love exams).
I hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Sunday Shifts
The game store I work at to pay my writing bills is now open on Sundays (they do this every holiday season as a way to increase sales). It cuts my day basically in half, as the shift is from noon until 4pm. It always surprises me how much of my time that absorbs… you’d think it would mean a loss of 4-5 hours, all told, but in reality it can often obliterate about half the day, and more than that when I try to relax a little after work.
It’s hard to go from Customer Service(tm) straight to creative writing. Not impossible, but difficult. But some days, like today, I just don’t have time to decompress… it’s really one, straight to the other. In this case I need to write an essay for my English course, and as much as I enjoy the subject matter and the poems I’m working with, it’s still hard.
Ah well. Many things are hard these days, and I guess the goal is to not become too frustrated about it.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Cultural Studies
Man, I miss libraries.
I miss having time to go to libraries, sure, but even if I had the time to do so, I can’t right now. Which is too bad! I am trying to write an essay on Cultural Studies (based on early works by Edward Said'), and in order to do so I have to find two “oriental” (Middle and Far East) poems written by Western writer(s).
This would be almost trivial at a library. But sorting through offerings through The Internet is… hard. Not impossible, thankfully, but it is taking me four times as long to do everything, and time is already short, honestly.
Oh well. What can ya do? I still have a week until the essay is due, so I have some time after work and before work to get it done, but I also need to finish “Ethics and Infinity” by Emmanuel Levinas in that time… and a bunch of other (shorter) course readings… and set up my exercise bike for the long, cold winter months…
Never enough time, ya know? Never enough time.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
The Probability of Truth
The universe, we now know, is not deterministic. It is often deterministic for macro-level analysis (if I drop a ball 1,000 times, it will fall at exactly the precise value given by Newton’s formulation of gravity), but it doesn’t hold at micro or galactic-level scales. Everything is determined by probabilities, and it just so happens that those probabilities are sometimes pretty close to deterministic.
Fine. But is there truth? If I drop a ball a billion times and it falls a billion times, is that enough to say that it is “true” that dropping a ball will result in it falling at a specific speed? There is a probability (infinitesimally small, natch) that the ball will not fall due to electron repulsion or weird gravitational effects or something-something-quantum.
Science. It’s a helluva drug.
Anyway. The point I’m asking is if truth, what actually happens, what is real, however we want to define truth, is deterministic or not in a universe in which everything else is based on probabilities? It’s a weird thought… are there circumstances of truth being quantum (“one unit of truth” being the smallest possible unit of truth possible), or is truth actually a binary (true or false), or is truth a continuum of fractions-of-truth? If there is nobody around to witness the universe does “truth” stop being significant? Does even the act of observing a truth change it? And, of course, is there even such a thing? Does truth just not exist?
There are definitely days where my brain works perpendicular to the direction I kinda need it to work, and today’s rapid descent into the structure of truth is one such day. Nothing meant by it, just idle thoughts, but these are the kinds of things that keep me up some nights.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Snow Gone
Ah, Southern Ontario weather. Snow covered ground yesterday, green grass today. Sub-zero temperatures yesterday, almost 12 degrees today.
Whatever! Whatever. The weather won’t stabilize into the frozen hellscape that we usually get from December-March for a few weeks yet. It will dip into it occasionally, but such is the life of the region. And, hey, compared to the horrific flooding in British Columbia these days, maybe it’s not so bad? I have considered moving out to BC (and may yet do so after my parents pass, since they are established enough here that they’re not going to move), but yeah, the footage these days coming from out West looks terrifying.
I guess being grateful for what we have is important, yeah? Yeah.
Not much else to add. Busy day today, lots of running around, getting my bike’s trainer wheel on and picking up cat food and all sorts of other little things like that, so I suppose to warmer weather is nice? I look forward to the weather stabilizing so we don’t get these crazy swings, but until then I suppose… grateful for what we have.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Snow
Well, it snowed today. It’s not the first snowfall of the season, that happened several weeks ago, but it is the first time the snow stuck around for more than a few hours. I think this officially means I am done biking to and from work for the foreseeable future, for better or for worse.
On the one hand, that means I have more time at home, since driving takes me about 1/3rd as long as biking does.
On the other hand, it means no more “free” exercise, exercise I don’t have to schedule or think about. Now if I want to exercise I have to set aside time and space to do exactly that, and that’s always tricky, even at the best of times…
But, on the griping hand, I don’t want to turn into a blob over the winter so I suspect I will find that time. Probably in the mornings, still, because I’ve never had the energy or drive to exercise after a long day of work.
I have a Nintendo Switch with a neat little exercise game, and I am looking forward to getting back into it, I suppose. At least it’s varied, and that’s nice, and the pacing of it tends to be pretty good, plus it includes a warmup and cooldown, which is usually something I skip when I’m not directed to do it.
Anyway, we’ll see what kind of shape I am in when spring rolls around, but fingers crossed I don’t slide too far back over the colder months!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Sad Today...
It’s been a rough day.
Nothing serious, and these days crop up from time to time. Nothing to do about it except soldier on and fortify as best one can.
A long week ahead of me, too… with some luck maybe I can squeeze in a little writing. Probably not, but gotta try, right?
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy.
Why I Bother
I have been asked more than a few times why I bother being a writer. It certainly isn’t the pay, and I suspect it will never be the pay (I am a good writer, but in order to make appreciable amounts of money you have to be a exceedingly prolific writer, or an exceptionally talented one, and I’m neither). It’s not that I feel I “should” be a writer, or because I have a message that needs to be shared with the world and this is the only way I can think to spread that message.
Honestly, it sometimes feels like I’m a writer because I have no choice. That no matter what else I am doing in my life, that part of me is always writing (or, at the very least, wanting to write). I can’t help it. The ability to do it full-time would just mean that it would stop spreading into all the cracks, into every waking moment, into all the gaps and pauses that should be filled with rest or sleep or leisure and are instead filled with scribbles, hastily scrawled notes, and any other way I can get words on a page.
Don’t get me wrong, I love writing. I love writing. But it is definitely something that doesn’t make my life any easier. Quite the opposite. My life is harder and busier and more stressful by many orders of magnitude because of my writing.
Oh well. I love it anyway.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
It Begins...
Well, we are officially in the holiday season for the game store. Longer hours, 7 days a week, going from now until the end of the year.
”Whee,” as one might say.
It’s a hard time of year, no question, and the stress for everyone (customers and coworkers alike) is definitely ramped up. But hey, what can ya do? Everyone’s gotta eat. I just have to remember to tone down the funny/smart-ass and try to help people as quickly and effortlessly as possible. Answer the question they think they’re asking, rather than the one they’re actually asking.
No other updates for today. No time for them!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Lacan. Not a fan.
For those of you who are lucky enough to not know who Jacques Lacan was, he was a post-Freudian psychoanalyst who… I dislike a great deal. A lot of his writing (if not all of it) is designed specifically to be difficult. Obtuse. Vague.
The defence given by those who like Lacan’s work is that the topic he is attempting to cover is very nebulous and slippery. By using specific terms, by writing clearly, and by formulating coherent arguments, he would be doing a disservice to how complicated the field he was attempting to explain is.
Gosh, that was a bad sentence right there, but it’s positively poetry compared to Lacan. Anyway. I had to read one of his works for class yesterday, and the professor spent today trying to… “explain” is the closest I can come… why Lacan is significant to modern literary analysis.
I disagree a great deal, but I guess it’s important that I read it so that I know I disagree with it. That’s something.
Anyway, nothing else for today. It’s been a rough week, but hopefully things will be looking up in the next few days. Oh, and I forgot that I have to write a Patreon post to thank all those wonderful people for their insane yet unwavering support of my work. Thanks folks!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Good Kitties
One of my cats is sick.
Technically, two of my cats are sick, but one of them we’ve known about for a while and she’s being treated for it. The other just fell ill a few days ago and it’s been non-stop vet appointments since then. Medication, IVs, overnight observation, the whole nine yards.
I’m bringing her home tonight (after 3 days, the vets have done everything they can do at this point), and I’m going to spend as much time petting and comforting her as I can, hopefully without annoying her. But it’s been hard… and it will probably get harder in the near future unless something very unexpected happens. Owning a pet is license to many years of happiness, and one totally miserable day of sadness.
But that may not be yet. Who knows, maybe Bean will bounce back and surprise us. That would be nice… it’s been a very hard year, and a little good news would be a nice change of pace. But I won’t expect it because it’s not looking good. And even if Bean doesn’t feel better and we have to say goodbye to our beloved and lovely little furball, she was a joy for many, many years.
No writing news this week for the above reasons. I hope she gets better… I’m not ready to say goodbye to her, but that’s up to her at this point.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy.
A Good Essay
A lot of the reading we are doing for my course in Literary Theory & Criticism is based on essays written hundreds (if not thousands) of years ago… some from books, some from manifestos, others from lectures, but almost all of them are, at their beating hearts, just essays.
I shudder to think that somebody will unearth one of my many academic essays and publish it at any point. I don’t think they’re bad, for the record, but they’re certainly unworthy of celebration or study. I don’t have a lot of original academic thoughts, honestly… although I did quite well with my last essay for this class (discussing Barthes’ “Death of the Author” and using it to analyze Shakespeare).
As an aside: I apparently struggle to differentiate “because” and “as” in essays. “This theory does this thing, as we have studied this other thing…” Gotta watch that in the future!
Anyway, I’ve never read an essay that really “spoke” to me, although I have enjoyed a few of the readings we’re doing. I just finished Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”, and while I wouldn’t say I enjoyed it, I did find it interesting. Tragic that he wasn’t able to produce more analysis (Benjamin, that is… I also have to be a bit more careful about ambiguous pronouns in the sense that they don’t tie to a specific noun). I’m glad I read it… unlike that awful essay by Althusser that only made me angry. Very, very angry.
Anyway. The revision course I took was nice, although not focused enough on the actual process of revision, but that might just be what I wanted out of it. I still really appreciated the course and the instructor did a great job! Oh, I think I mentioned that I would link it… the company is called Writespace, and I think this is a link to their course offerings. They’re based out of Houston, but I attended digitally from Ontario, so I imagine that’s not a big problem these days… but do be aware of timezone issues, since it was a bit of a surprise that the course I signed up for wasn’t listed in my local timezone. Big fan of the course I took!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
The Heist Itself!
Today I am writing the “everyone sits at a table and discusses the heist” part of my heist novel. I am excited about it!
This is the time when I get to throw the predictable problems in the way of the protagonists. The things that they think will go wrong, allowing me to later subvert expectations in interesting ways. This is half of the joy of a heist… deciding if things are going to go according to plan, totally not according to plan, or that glorious synergy where it simultaneously appears to go completely off the rails but, in fact, we learn that it has all gone exactly according to plan… but perhaps not the plan as initially planned.
Gosh, I love a good heist. Love ‘em!
Anyway, I’m a few hundred words into that already, and it’s been great! Nice to have some time to put words together… I had skipped this portion of the novel earlier (and basically wrote past it) in the hopes that I would get retroactive inspiration… which never really happened, but as part of the Revision course I’m taking on Sunday, I figured now was as good a time as any to get this pretty critical part of the novel done.
Right! It’s only been a few days since my last update, but I figure more is better than less… and we’ll see how much time I have to put another update here in a day or two. We’ll see!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Writing Revision Course
I signed up for a course to improve my revision process that had the first (of two) classes yesterday. It was nice! The editor who is running the class is specifically focused on speculative fiction (fantasy and sci-fi primarily), which is great, and has already sent me feedback on the first 20 pages of my novel that I’m working on.
All really insightful stuff, and the class is pretty interesting. So far it’s mostly focused on the writing process, and how to improve your writing output such that the revisions are easier, but the class on Sunday is going to focus on the “now you’ve finished your first draft, what do you do”, which is great! I’m looking forward to that, no question. Anything that helps getting both a faster first draft, and a better second draft such that it reduces the cost of editing for the third draft will be massively helpful!
Other than that, it has fostered several great ideas that I can bring to the story, which is good, and some homework that I want to get finished before Sunday’s class, which is also good! I’ll see if I can find a link to the organization that runs the seminars (they’re based out of Texas, I think) and toss it here when the course is done, assuming it holds up for the remaining class!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Half-Month Day!
It always shocks me how much faster time seems to go these days. Back in my youth, many, many years ago, days often seemed to last forever. I could happily spend an entire day playing with LEGO, building and tearing apart and building again. Come up with little stories for each ship and castle, inventing battles and heroics and villainous actions for hours at a time.
These days if I’m not careful when I sit down I might lose an entire evening.
Oh well. There are upsides to getting older as well, no question, but the pace of life is pretty ridiculous. And this weekend is going to be nuts… I signed up for a course about editing speculative fiction (like mine!) to see if I can get better at editing my first drafts into better second drafts to reduce editing costs.
My editor is great, for the record, and I’ve always been super pleased with her work, but at the same time editing is the number 1 cost for all my books. Reducing that cost would have a dramatic impact on making my self-publishing life easier.
So that’s something to look forward to! And who knows, maybe somewhere in there with the online course and my big paper that’s due on Monday and all my course readings I can actually find a few minutes to write. That’d be nice!
Hope everyone is staying safe and healthy!
Happy Turkey-Day!
Here in Canada, it is the Thanksgiving Day weekend. I think this is basically one of the few specifically-Canadian holidays, in the sense that Thanksgiving Day happens in other nations (not many, but some), but rarely on the same weekend as we hold it. Probably something to do with colder climates meaning an earlier end-of-season celebration back when farming framed most celebrations.
My parents came to visit yesterday, and correspondingly I spent basically the entire day cooking. Made a pot roast, a chicken, mashed potatoes, vegetables… mom brought brussel sprouts (I’m weird, I like sprouts) and a tiramisu for dessert, and I made coffee.
It was nice. It was almost normal… almost. Our renovated kitchen is operational but not yet fully re-incorporated… we’re slowly moving stuff back into the kitchen or tossing it out over time, rather than doing it all at once. But even aside from that, it was nice to see my parents for a few hours without us arguing.
Well, we argued a little. But that’s kinda just what my family does. We get together, and we argue.
Anyway, that was an entire day including setup, cooking, and cleaning afterwards. And then today we continued the cleanup (did I mention I cooked a lot?), and now that I’m finally finished with that nonsense I can get back to writing. Huzzah!
If you happen to be seeing family this weekend, I hope your interactions with them is awesome… and if you aren’t so good with your family, just know that’s okay too, and you are loved and respected.
Stay safe and healthy, everyone.
A Weird Sort of Normal
Much about the last 19 months is weird, and very little of it is “normal” for many definitions of the word. But with that aside, a recent trend has become sort of normal…
It is now normal for me to sell one or two books a day. That’s usual. There are blips where I will sell 3-4, and occasionally a day that I don’t sell a single book, but those are exceptions. And this is nice, and weird, and now… normal.
A good month, like August was, will have me selling an average of 2-3 books a day. And that’s definitely nice, but due to advertising expenses it wasn’t sustainable at that level. And I’ve said it before but it bears repeating: this is pretty close to what I need somewhat consistently in order to write full-time… about 10x these numbers and I’d be set. Or, more likely, a few months of really good sales and then back down to these sorts of numbers the rest of the time would do me just fine.
But there is still that part of my brain that struggles with this concept. Right now, today, somebody who has no idea who I am as a person is going to buy one of my books. If my reviews are to be believed, chances are pretty good they’re going to like it. That’s really kinda neat.
Anyway, I have a week off class for “Fall Reading Week” (a nice addition to the university schedule), so I can focus on a major assignment in a few weeks and, also, so I can focus on my writing! That’s going to be nice. I really want to get this novel done… it’s a fun story, but it’s starting to wear me down a little.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Lazy Sundays
I can’t say I’ve had a really relaxing day in… years, probably. I’m always working.
I mean, it comes with the territory. I want to be a writer, therefore I write. And that means any day that I’m not at the game store earning enough money for food and editing costs, I’m writing. Or at school… learning to write better. The end result is never really having a day off.
Heck, when I was in Japan a little over a year ago, I was writing there too. Every day I had to get at least a few thousand words done, in the mornings or in the evenings, between trips to gorgeous castles or hikes up mountains or taking a bullet train across the country. Always writing, always thinking about writing, always editing.
It’s exhausting, as you can imagine. I look forward to the day that I can focus on the writing and not pump so much time and energy into the rest of the stuff I have to do to fuel my writing currently. Hopefully another year or so, because gosh am I tired.
Anyway, I shouldn’t complain. I have shelter, food, and two jobs, only one of which costs me money. Things could be much, much worse. And I’m making slow progress on the novel, so that’s nice as well… not as nice as if it were swift progress, but you can’t have everything it seems, so I’ll take slow progress.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Cold Coffee and The Meaning of Life
I can’t say there is a thread that really connects those two things… I just happen to be drinking cold coffee, as I often do, and am thinking about the meaning of life.
School is interesting, in an abstract sort of way, but it continues to drive home how desperately I want to write full-time. Which is good, in a way, since that is what I am working towards, but that old phrase “Obstacles are what you see when you take your eyes off the destination” feels very true many times.
I also have never liked that saying (not seeing a obstacle doesn’t stop you from hitting it!). But anyway.
I suppose I can’t really complain that much. There are a few significant stressors in my life, but everything else is going kinda close to how I want it. I just need way more time.
Maybe I’ll go pour myself a bit more cold coffee, and start on the novel again. My readings for this week were pretty short, so I should have some time.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!