Well, the Stop Motion animation I was working on for class is finished… well, almost finished. I have a buddy doing music for it. But when he’s done, then it will be completely done. I’m really happy with how it turned out, and more importantly I learnt an awful lot from the process… like how much I like writing scripts and doing these sorts of silly things!
Future animated shorts will be… shorter… but I have to be more mindful of interstitials and transitions. This one had 4 or 5 that I had to do last-minute because I only realized I needed them after I had disassembled the set (which is also a useful thing to know. I set up everything so I could shoot everything on a set before changing it, but in the future I might just make multiple sets so I can go back and reshoot as needed).
Anyway, I’ll probably be posting the video to ye olde ‘Tube before too long, and I’ll put a link here when I do. It will make almost no sense to anyone who hasn’t read Motorcycles and Sweetgrass by Drew Hayden Taylor, but it might be interesting as a benchmark for my future work. Kinda like I still love the work I did with the Tintian series, but I would write them much differently (and better!) now.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Other Projects!
So I think I mentioned a while back that I’ve started to dabble in some side creative projects.
That’s actually unfair: I am always doing other creative projects in addition to writing novels. I write some short stories (admittedly, not recently), I paint, I play guitar, I draw occasionally (again, something I haven’t done in years, but I love doing it)…
But with the availability of solid Stop Motion software on phones (and the power of modern cameras), I’ve started to dabble in a little stop motion animation. The one I’m doing currently (my first!) is for school… but although it is only halfway finished, I’m really quite proud of it. Writing scripts for audio format is something I’ve done for years (I’ve written and performed several audio stories), and adding visuals to that… well, it’s just lovely.
So! I think I’ll post that video up in a bit. It’s a little rough… the lighting is the big issue. I only have 2-point lighting at this point, and I really want/need 3-point to make everything clearer, and there are a few moments that the camera is making the image brighter or darker, but hopefully not a big flicker issue. I guess we’ll see once I stitch everything together!
At least something to look forward to, yeah? Yeah!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Long Sentences
For one of my courses (“Caribbean Literature”) I have to read The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon.
It’s not the worst thing I’ve had to read this semester by a long shot, but I just finished a sentence that, without exaggeration, lasted ten pages. One sentence, lots of commas and hyphens, but no periods or full-stop punctuation. It was sorta stream of consciousness, but mostly it was annoying.
Granted, Selvon was writing decades ago, and his specific style was to bring a sort of Caribbean patois to English literature, and boy howdy did he succeed there. The book itself has been mostly enjoyable (aside from some blatant sexism, but again, the book is just shy of a century old at this point and while not acceptable it isn’t surprising either), but this one sentence annoyed me. A lot.
It’s hard to read! It’s specifically anti-readability. It always strikes me as the author sticking their nose in the air and saying with a snooty attitude “Well good readers will understand!” A sort of “No True Scotsman” argument for writing or reading… if you don’t like it, you’re not a “real” reader. Like… oh, I dunno, post-modernist crap that wanders around without ever actually telling a story and that’s supposed to be the story. Although not that bad.
Anyway. Makes me appreciate that my particular stylistic difficulties (parenthetical asides and ellipses) don’t really impact readability that much. A bit, no question, and I have to be careful with them, but yeah. Long sentences. Selvon couldn’t pull ‘em off, and I ain’t gonna try!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Better than Before!
One of the only upsides to losing the first chapter of the novel I’m working on is that I’m pretty sure that I’m writing it better. I have a better idea of how I want the chapter to go, at least.
The “problem” is now wanting to put all-the-things in that first chapter. Like an alien race… I almost never write aliens because I don’t have a mind that works well on the concept of “not human.” Like, most aliens you think of are usually just humans with some slight cosmetic changes. David Brin does some incredible things with properly-alien aliens in the Uplift series, but I have no illusions of being able to replicate that. Sometimes my humans are somewhat weird humans, though… atypical, at the very least. So maybe I’ll do that for this novel? Future humans meeting more primitive humans? That’s basically alien (or magic, depending on who you ask).
Anyway, I don’t think I’ll be putting aliens in this novel. But maybe. Might be a nice change of pace…
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Always Save Your Work
Whelp, that was a lot of lost work…
My computer froze up yesterday, and in the process of rebooting it I lost all my notes for the novel, plus about a chapter that I had written. The notes are the real blow… I’m too demoralized about this stupid mistake to rewrite them right now, but I’ll have to fill them in as I go along. Just stupid of me to not save my multi-day work at all.
Let this be a lesson to everyone: save your work, and backup your computers!
Ah well. No point crying over spilled milk. I’ve started rewriting the lost chapter already and hey, who knows, maybe it’ll be even better this time!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Big Stompy Robots
I am an unapologetic fan of big stompy robots. From the early days of Kaiju (Godzilla-style) films with actors inside robot-suits, to anime and cartoons, to Battletech and WarHammer, and to modern video games and movies… I just love big stompy robots.
I don’t think they “make sense” in a traditional way. There are shockingly few situations where having a 20-100m tall robot makes any logical sense. But the same could be said of airships, which I love, and landships, which I think are hilarious but still love. It doesn’t have to make sense to be cool… heck, most FTL systems don’t make sense, but they’re still cool regardless.
But I don’t know if I could write a big stompy story. A lot of the joy in these stories are the visuals… which isn’t to say the Battletech books aren’t fun. They are! But they’re predicated on decades of people kinda knowing what those robots look like. As a random example, the Robotech/Macross series of books just weren’t as good… the comics were great, the anime/cartoons were great, but as words on a page, they just lacked the oomph of other stories. So the ability to translate giant mecha into narrative story, I think, relies on an understanding of what the mecha “are” (in universe at least), and then a hefty suspension of disbelief.
Maybe I’ll try one out in a few books (my next 2 at least don’t involve mecha). Always good to stretch your creative comfort zone!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Page 1!
Like any great expedition, the start of a new book is an exciting time. Everything is full of hope and opportunity! Who knows where this story will take us!?
Certainly not me.
I mean, I have a rough idea. I have the skeleton of an outline, the framework upon which the rest of the story will hang. I used to not even do this… I would just embark in a direction and see where I ended up. But I have learned that this is a “bad idea” when I write… I like my endings to be Sudden But Inevitable, and in order for those to land you kinda need to telegraph key moments. And in order to do that you need to do some planning.
Not a lot. I name characters and locations, but I’ll still discover elements of each of those as we go. I’ll redefine aspects of everyone, of the technology and the conflict and the universe, on the fly.
Which is why I’m always so excited as those first few words, which soon become the first few thousand words, flow out onto the page. There’s still so much potential! Can’t wait to see where this one will take us… I’m calling this story “The Trojan Stars” for now, despite that being a bad name for a myriad of reasons, it makes sense thematically. It’s all about… well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves just yet.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
The Importance of Being True
I love sci-fi. I don’t think I’ve made that a secret at any point in my life. It is one of my great, if not my greatest, ambitions to be a full-time sci-fi author.
Sure, I love fantasy and speculative fiction and a smattering of alternate-history stuff, but in my heart of hearts, what I love is sci-fi.
That’s why it feels so nice to come back to a space opera. Cyberpunk is still sci-fi, but at its core cyberpunk is really about rebellion and theft (not necessarily in that order!). They’re heist stories or resistance stories first, and sci-fi stories second. And that’s fine! I’m not saying they’re not sci-fi.
But space opera, to me, will always represent the beating heart of the genre. Starships, and planets, and wars and exploration and all the wonderful and horrible and fantastical wrapped up with a Faster-than-Light bow. They’re human stories, even the ones about aliens (especially the ones about aliens!), but… better.
I hope mine will be, at least! It has a strong start at least!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Removing Goals from Patreon
So Patreon announced today (or at least I saw it today) that they are dropping the “Goals” feature from the Patreon pages.
Now, I don’t think this will have a meaningful impact on my Patreon page (current or future). But it’s weird to me that removing the goal of my patrons… like… doesn’t matter? Weird.
But I suppose my goals haven’t really changed. I had milestones for my Patreon (which aren’t anywhere near reached), but my overall “goal” has always been the same: become a full-time writer. Patreon is just a step in that direction.
So I don’t suppose this will actually change much. Still writing, still working on the next novel while gazing wistfully at the eventual destination of being able to write when I want, the books I want (and hopefully other people want!), at the pace I want. That would be great.
One day.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
All Normal Again
Well, without any actual effort on my part the back-end of Squarespace looks appropriate again.
That sentence sounds particularly dirty for some reason. Ah well, you all know what I mean.
On top of that I’ve finished up the background/universe building for the next novel, and I’m going to spend a few hours today outlining the major plot points. If I’m really ambitious I might even get a start on the work! For now I’m call it the Trojan Stars due to the major plot of the arc, but as always the name is mostly a placeholder until I get around to writing another.
Still, it’s nice to have things going more-or-less as expected. It’s hard to focus on the good sometimes, and there is good.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Universe Building For Beginners
I mean, I’m not really an expert in universe building. I’ve done it… 5 times so far? Each universe has elements in common with the others, but I try to make them distinct (otherwise I wouldn’t be able to keep them straight!).
In this case I started with very broad brushstrokes: how big is the “galaxy”? In this case, the galaxy just includes the subset of stars of interest (the good guy government has about a dozen stars, the bad guys about three times that number, and the “Old Roman-esque Empire” that came before had about fifty times that number.
Yes, I’m doing the fallen empire thing. I’m considering how to give it a post-colonial spin… something that differentiates it from your stock-standard Everything Was Better Before Empire that so often is the staple of sci-fi. Although I might not? I don’t know at this point. Like I said, big brushstrokes.
I’ve also named the captain of the starship that will be the focus of the adventure, and the starship itself. Tentatively in both cases… I’m not married to the names at this point, but I think it does give me an interesting starting point.
And I’ve started naming the significant crew on the ship. It’s an exploration vessel in a post-scarcity government (although their enemies are not post-scarcity), but it is attempting to explore, forge new diplomatic ties, and layout the groundwork for new trade as well… so it needs a crew of significant scientists, diplomats, traders, and military staff, plus enough conflict to keep things interesting while also having them work together.
I’ve done a half-dozen already. I think I’ll name a few other “secondary” characters just to make sure everything feels fleshed out, and then I’ll start mapping out the novel itself. Might even get to starting that tonight! Dare I dream!?
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
The Start of a New Novel
The first week or two of starting a new novel is a very exciting time (by the standards of writers I suppose). Laying the groundwork for a new universe is really neat! New governments, new economies, new technologies… revisiting a setting that I’ve already established is like getting into a comfy pair of pajamas, but inventing new worlds is going shopping with an unlimited budget!
This one is going to be a relatively tech-forward universe. There are a couple key technologies that are critical to the story: specifically “shields” and “lances.” Basically, the good guy ships have defensive technology called “shields” (super original name, I know, but it fits perfectly with the purpose of the defensive tech and it means everyone reading about it already kinda knows what it does) and offensive technology called “lances” that are both powered by a super-secret secondary power source called a Cylinder Engine.
There was a brief temptation to call it a “C-Drive” as a nod to us old timers who had to deal with things like lettered drives in the times before Windows, but I think I’ll leave that be.
The Cylinder Engine is going to be a critical plot point, since the Good Guys(tm) are desperate to protect it from the Bad Guys. It’s their sole advantage in a war they’re already losing.
But other than that, it will be an exploration story, of reaching new and exciting worlds, meeting new and exciting people, and trying not to die in new and exciting ways! I’m excited!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
A Little Sick
After not getting sick, at all, since 2019, it’s finally happened.
Not “The Big One,” and not much to speak of whatsoever… if this was still 2019 I would probably still go to work and school. It’s a bit of a sore throat, an occasional cough, and that’s it.
But it’s not 2019 any more, and I take my (and everyone’s) health a bit more seriously these days. So I stayed home from the retail job for a couple days to recover and recuperate, and I feel significantly better today.
I think I’ve also decided to temporarily set this story aside. The novel that I’m working on, that is. I love the setting and the characters and the core idea of the story, but it’s stuck again and I don’t have time to be stuck again. I’ll come back to it after I finish a different novel… something a bit more space opera, I think. Lone ship exploring the galaxy, looking for friends and allies among the harsh, unforgiving stars. I think I’m going to build off of an old story thread I wrote back in 2010 or so… not the same story, but built along similar foundations.
I’m excited! I love writing space operas!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Trading Winter
The amount of snow we got yesterday during my drive home was… impressive. Depressing, and it resulted in an extremely slow drive (it usually takes me 15 minutes, it took me almost an hour), but I got home safely.
It did make me think again about living someplace that doesn’t have snow. Would I miss it? A lot of my reading this semester has been focused on areas of the world that never see snow… heck, sometimes they don’t see seasons at all, at least in the way we expect seasons to exist.
It’s an appealing thought. Sure, it means insects larger than my head, but is that a fair trade for never having to shovel a driveway again? Or drive down a road covered in a foot of snow which makes it more akin to skiing than driving? I don’t know… ah, actually, I do know. If it weren’t for the spiders, I would consider it, but I hate spiders, and the ones we have in Canada are tiny compared to most, especially in temperate climates. The spiders in Japan freaked me out, and they were relatively small (amount hand-sized) compared to some of the monsters out there. I couldn’t do it.
Which is too bad. Maybe there is someplace on earth that is warm and nice and doesn’t have huge freakin’ spiders…
Looks whistfully towards New Zealand
I hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Time Off Over
Well, that was a nice Reading Week. I played a lot of “Assassin’s Creed Valhalla,” (which is a perfectly fine game) read a lot of Cereus Blooms at Night, which is staggeringly depressing, and played a bunch of board games.
All in all, a pretty solid week. But now it’s back to the grind. Back to the writing, back to school, back to assignments and all the fun stuff I do to pay the bills. The transitions are always hard… a week of doing what I want to do always grinds against what I have to do. When I was younger it didn’t bother me as much, but these days… yeah, it bothers me.
Oh well. At least I can get back to writing! Always enjoy that!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Some Time Off
I’ve had a few days to rest and recover recently. Not doing anything exciting… sleeping a lot and class readings and some video games and then sleeping more. If the weather was nicer I might exercise or go for a walk or something but honestly I’m just run down and taking things easy is… well, easy.
I still have one more day tomorrow before I go back to my other job. The paying one. I have no idea how I’m going to spend it, but hopefully productively. Or at least reasonably productively.
Video games and sleep are sometimes very productive.
I hope everyone is staying safe and healthy!
Midterms
So today I have my only midterm test of this semester. I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before, but I love midterms… I mean, I love tests in the grand scheme of things. Opportunities to prove I know what the heck I’m talking about.
This is a big change for me from the person I was the last time I attended university. I used to hate tests, but mostly because they were testing me on stuff I legit didn’t know. Or, at least, stuff I knew but couldn’t prove I knew. Mathematics, so binary, but also so methodical (which I am not) and patient (ditto) and slow (I think you can sense a trend here).
But these days? English Studies are all about justifications… basically instead of either knowing a thing or not, you have to be able to justify that you know a thing. And gosh am I ever full of justifications… or the ability to produce them, I suppose.
So tests these days don’t scare me any more. Which isn’t to say that I’m going to do super well on today’s. I could still be caught flatfooted and get everything wrong. It has happened. But it’s not something I worry about any more.
I have plenty of other stuff to worry about instead.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Pitches
Today I’m submitting a pitch for a novel (in the Infinity universe, no less!). I’m excited about it, but part of the process involved writing a detailed outline (no problem) and to pick examples of my previous work.
Ah, that’s tricky. Not that I don’t have a substantial oeuvre to choose from, but the actual choosing is tricky. How do I pick a favourite child? How to decide if this short story or that passage from a novel will convince the editor that my work will be up to snuff?
I picked two Infinity short stories (“The Ten Commandments of War on Varuna” and “Clockwork Blues”) and a chapter from Caitlyn Morcos, which I hope will give enough evidence that I can string words together. But who knows? Maybe they’re looking for a different tone for their work.
All I can do is apply and keep my fingers crossed.
Speaking of which, time to send off that application and then get a little reading done!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Nope, Still Weird
The title of this post is a direct reference to the fact that my website’s backend still looks weird (same, website, same), but could easily be a reference to me in general.
Hey Marc, are you less weird?
Nope. Still weird.
I’ve got to finish Wide Sargasso Sea for school this weekend, so I’m going to be diving into that in a few moments (right after hitting “Save & Publish” at the bottom of this page, in fact!). After that I have some secondary source reading AND a pitch for a novel I’m submitting (WOO!). That’s going to be fun! I’ve never done a formal submission for a novel before. We’ll see how that goes!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Weird Tech Issues
Squarespace has been doin’ some weird stuff the last few days. As far as I can tell everything on the front-end still works as advertised, but my back-end is looking strange.
Hopefully not an issue any of you have when visiting? Because at this stage I’m very much in the “gosh I hope it goes away on its own because I do not have the energy to deal with another problem” stage of my life.
So, hopefully just a localized glitch? I’ve visited the blog from other sources and everything seems above-board, but hey, if it does look weird to you: I’m sorry! Hopefully it will be fixed soon!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!