I’m not a big fan of the cold. I was born and raised in Canada, a notably cold environment, and yet I hate being cold.
I couldn’t specifically tell you why, or when the switch in my brain went from “Pretty snow and fun activities in the winter!” to “Blankets, sweaters, heater, and a roaring fire please,” but it did.
I used to love snowboarding. Skiing I was okay with, but I loved snowboarding. Now? You couldn’t get me on a slope without paying me. There’s just something about willingly going into the cold that sets my teeth on edge.
Maybe it’s because I didn’t have a choice when I was younger? Winter camping trips, family vacations on the slopes… all of it was mandatory, and I have a sneaking suspicion that I would’ve much preferred to just curl up with a book somewhere warm, but since I didn’t have that choice, I tolerated the cold better. Now I have the option (not always, of course, but more often than not!), it feels much worse than it used to?
Anyway. This isn’t really important in many senses, although my work has slowed down recently because my basement (where I work and write) is really cold, and it’s hard to motivate myself to spend the time I need to spend down here.
Ah well. Supposed to warm up soon. Finger’s crossed!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
The Threads that Connect Us
Last night I played a game called “Ito,” which means “thread” or “string.” The idea of the game is pretty simple: you have to play numbers face-down in ascending order, and you do that by using a subjective scale.
So, for example, the second round we played last night was “Popular Candy,” with 1 being very unpopular and 100 being the most popular candy ever. I played my card and said “Twix,” letting everyone know that I was playing a card I thought was a high number. The next player put down their card, higher in the line than mine, and said “Peanut butter cups,” which are a very, very popular choice, and then the next put their card below mine and said “Black liquorice,” implying a less popular choice.
And so on. The core of the game is trying to decide what other people feel about a topic, and how they would rate whatever they said. The threads that link which cards are played and where create a really interesting glimpse into how other people view very subjective things.
For example, one of the rounds was “Hard things to endure.” A one on that scale would be the easiest thing to do ever (“Sex with an attractive person” for example) and 100 would be the most difficult thing you could think of (“Dentistry with rusty tools, no anesthetic, and an untrained dentist”). Almost all the clues given that round were about work… long meetings, correcting your boss, having to work on a Friday, and so on. It turns out that everyone had pretty low numbers (the “Work on a Friday” was a 30), but there was a lot of uncertainty because some of my friends really hate their jobs, and some of us really love our work.
I mean my writing work, of course. My current day-job is fine. Good boss, great coworkers, but stressful a lot of the time and retail is draining at the best of times. But writing is a dream.
Anyway. I just found it interesting that we could all agree about so many things (like what candy is better, or who is the strongest person in movies), but when it came to work we were all over the board… the lineup wasn’t even close to correct.
The game was a lot of fun, and I highly recommend it to anyone familiar with “The Mind” or “Wavelength” since I think it’s as strong as those, and pretty dang cheap.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Finally Healthy!
Well, it took a couple weeks, but I have finally shaken off the last remnants of the flu (or whatever) I had. I’m back at as close to 100% as I ever get these days!
Of course, this means I’m a week or so behind most of my projects, but that’s okay! Five more weeks at the job I’m at now, and then… time. Glorious, glorious time. To write and paint and create and film… it’s gonna be amazing.
Not that I’m waiting for that, of course. I sold a short story (pro rates, but very short) yesterday. Feels good, no matter the size of the project (I think it’ll be about 2-3 pages, max, when it’s done). And I’m almost finished the second story that I’m submitting to Shrapnel, a sci-fi short story magazine. Fingers crossed for that one, but no matter how it does I’m going to start writing another immediately. Only way to get better is practice, and man, I love practicing!
It’s good to be running on all cylinders again. So much to do, and never enough time!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
The Common Flu
I honestly have no idea what I caught, only that it put me on my butt for the last few days. Last night, for example, I slept from about 9pm until about 2pm today… a solid 17 hours, I think? It was a lot.
But I’m awake now, and still dealing with the brain-fog that comes from being sick. Nothing serious, just everything taking longer and not being able to think very clearly. Suboptimal conditions to write, certainly, but good opportunities to watch movies and shows that I’ve missed. I’m currently 4 episodes into “Star Wars: Skeleton Crew,” and it’s better than I expected. Not great, sure, but solid.
Anyway, tomorrow I hope to feel better (I can’t keep having 17 hours of sleep a night!), and then I can get back to finishing up the short story I’m working on!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Read the Submission Guidelines!
So I finished a short story! I was going to submit it!
And then I read the submission guidelines again, because of course I check before I submit anything, and what I wrote almost fits, but doesn’t quite. It’s very close, but very close isn’t what I’m going for.
So I’m going to put that short story into the vault for now, and I’ve started a second one. And, to be honest… I really like the second one. I don’t know if I can say it’s better, but gosh it is good. I hope they like it!
I should be done by the end of the week, and then leave it alone for a day or two before I dive into the editing (you always need a small gap between finishing a work and editing it, or your brain will substitute in what it thinks you wrote, rather than reading what you actually wrote. Important distinction, that!). So with some luck I will submit my first short story for publication since… 2020? Maybe not quite that long, but it’s been a while.
Oh, no, I submitted a few over the ‘22 to ‘23. Well, this will be my first in at least a few years!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Time to Play
I think we all need time to play.
I mean, sure, I work(ed!) at a game store for 7 years, so maybe I’m biased. But we all make time for work, for family, for obligations and chores… I think we should all try to make time to play.
And I know with the pace of life and the just crushing… everything… it can feel hard to do that. Who has the energy? Who has the time for play when there are bills and tariffs and environmental collapse? But I remember reading somewhere that joy is an act of resistance, and I think that’s really true.
We have to find time to be happy. To bring joy to our lives, and ideally, to the lives of others. And hey… play absolutely does that!
So today, after I finish editing the next draft of the short story I’ve written, I’m going to sit down with some friends and play a game. Maybe two! And that, after that… who knows? We’ll just see where the day takes us!
Hope everyone is staying safe and healthy!
A Big Change
For the last seven years or so, I have worked a retail job in order to fund my writing efforts. Writing, as it stands, is an expensive occupation to get into: editing costs are high, art is expensive, and as far as time goes… well, let’s just say you will never have enough time.
Then there are submission costs occasionally (I usually avoid those unless they also include feedback, which is something I tend to find very useful), and back when I started writing, postage. Less of that these days.
Anyway, so I worked a retail job at a small game store to pay for my writing and living expenses. I have a Patreon account, but as much as it means to me (SO MUCH!), the actual dollars I make is small. About $30/month at time of writing… and while I live a frugal, low-cost lifestyle, even I can’t live on that.
Today I gave my notice at my job. I will be working retail no more… and I have very mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, the company treated me pretty well. On the other hand, they paid me quite poorly for the amount of time and effort I pumped into the business. And if you haven’t worked retail at a small business, ye gods you work your ass off most of the time.
My direct manager said that he knows people who make three to four times as much as he does, and do a fraction as much work. Like, actual work-work. Which isn’t to say that they’re not working… but it is to say retail takes a lot out of you. It took a lot out of me for seven years.
But, as of late March, no more. I’m moving on to a small office job, just being a gopher and data-entry guy, and I am looking forward to it so much. It’s terrifying, because change is terrifying and I have no idea if the new place will be a good culture (say what you will about my current job and the insane amount of work, the company culture is really solid… good people, every one of ‘em), but hopefully a positive step.
And more writing! Woo! That’s the biggest plus out of all of this. For the last couple years, the amount of energy that my job took out of me meant way less time and energy for creative work. And now I have way more time for that! Fingers crossed I can convert that into sales and results!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Consistency!
Once again I’m banging the drum of consistency… to me, it’s probably the most important element of the media I consume. I want to know how many episodes I can watch, or that there will be another book in the series and approximately when to expect it, or whatever.
The reason I gave up on reading “A Game of Thrones” was because nobody knew when the next book would be finished… except to say “not soon.”
And that’s fine. If your level of consistency is one book a decade, so be it! Just don’t pretend you’re going to suddenly start churning them out if that’s not your pace. Be true to yourself and all that.
It turns out that my pace is “as fast as I can possible finish a piece,” and most of the time that’s pretty dang fast. Last year was the first calendar year since 2016 that I didn’t finish a novel… and I almost finished a novel. It will be out this year, along with, I hope, many other new pieces.
But that includes this here ol’ blog. Just me, mumbling mostly to myself, about my writing… and trying to do it a couple times a week. Gotta get better at keeping my output more predictable.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Deceptively High Numbers
I have been having a bumper month when it comes to book sales. I have sold more books in January than I did in November and December combined.
Now, granted, half of those book sales were to me. So, kinda cooking the numbers in an unintentional way. I bought the books so I can sell physical copies at a convention that a friend in publishing is going to be attending, so they will count as sales eventually, but for now it looks like January is just a very good month.
Of course, physical book sales have a much lower margin, and since I had to pay for these, even if I manage to sell all of them, they’re not going to make back all of what I spent… if I’m very lucky, I might break even… assuming that I sell most of them.
Ah well. The goal is just to get books in people’s hands, and hopefully they like them and buy more eventually… and that they buy those directly from me, which means I make money on the sales rather than lose. That’s the goal at least.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
The Slow Decline of Everything
Look, things are hard out there for many, many people. And I suspect heavily they are going to get much worse for almost everyone before it shows any signs whatsoever of it becoming better for anyone.
There are still bright points. Good books, good movies, great music… there is a lot that we, as a society and as a people, produce that we can be proud of. A lot of awful stuff, and AI is making sure that there is more and more awful stuff constantly, but a fair amount of really good stuff too.
I was speaking with an editor friend of mine, who was lamenting how the big publishing house she works for has this monumental decline in quality because everyone is overworked and underpaid (despite how massive the industry is). And I get it. There’s more and more crap out there, and everyone thinks they can write.
But it’s exhausting to try… to really try and make fun stories that people will enjoy, and to put the time and effort into polishing and refining them, and knowing that I’m getting a fraction of a fraction of what I need to live on.
Ah well. Whine whine whine. Stuff is hard, and all we can do is our best.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Building LEGO for Fun and Profit
I love LEGO. I own a fair amount, and I spent a few weeks last year organizing most of it into bins and trays and various tackle boxes and such so that I have a pretty straightforward system in place to know what I have and where.
Partially because I legit just love LEGO. Many of my happiest memories as a child were spent playing with, assembling, disassembling, and rebuilding countless LEGO kits… the classic yellow castle, the galaxy explorer, the moon base… I would build stories and adventures around them for countless hours, mostly alone but occasionally with a friend.
But of course, partially it’s for work. I love making animated shorts with my LEGO… I’ve only done one so far, but golly gee do I have plans for a whole mess of others. I just need the time to sit down and do it, which is so frequently my problem. So many ideas, so little time.
Ah well. When I finish this latest kit (“Medieval Town”), I think I am actually going to put time and energy into building and shooting this next story. I’ve had it written for almost a year now, and I made a storyboard to make sure I can shoot everything in the right order. Shouldn’t take very long… just got to get the time to do it!
Hope everyone is staying safe and healthy!
Happy New Year!
Just a quick post to wish everyone a very happy 2025! Here’s hoping it will be better than I expect!
More information soon, but for now, just gratitude to y’all for reading my little corner of the internet, and best wishes!
Weird Technology
Today I had to reactivate an email account for the English degree I was working on.
It was working as of September: I haven’t had a chance to confirm that for a few weeks.
I doubt I lost anything of real importance (although… who know!?), but it was a pain in the butt to get around to reactivating. I’ve submitted the appropriate forms, and now… we have to wait.
The funny thing is that the email the IT people sent to me said that my account had been deactivated because it hadn’t been used in two years. That’s… impossible… but on top of that, they didn’t know who I was when they sent the form (the form requests my identification, so NOW they know who I am). Just silly.
Anyway, hopefully that will all be sorted out shortly. I don’t need the school email often, but it’s nice to have in case one of my profs wants to get a hold of me (and they have a few times in the past year or so).
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Tired Bones
This time of year is always exhausting.
Even if I didn’t work at a game store to pay for my writing, the “holidays” have always been somewhat fraught. My family has rough tensions that have strained our relationships for years, my partner’s family has heaps of its own problems, and generally all I want is to be left alone so I can write.
That’s it. Just peace, quiet, and enough coffee to keep me going through a day of writing. You’d think that wouldn’t be so hard. And yet.
I shouldn’t complain. I say that a lot, because I complain a lot, but I shouldn’t. Things could be much, much worse. With the political situation that’s unraveling to the south, it very well might be much, much worse soon. But until then the days grind on in their daily pace, and all our yesterdays light fools the way to dusty death.
Little bit of misquoted Shakespeare for ya. That’s the kinda mood I’m in.
Anyway. I’m tired in the very fiber of my being. Another… 8 days to go, and then I’ll get a few days off to recover, and hopefully things hold together until then. We’ll see. It’s going to be… “fun.”
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Review of "Tales from the Silence" by James Bow et al
A few months back, James Bow, a local sci-fi author who I have enjoyed in the past, asked me to read and review two of his upcoming releases: “The Sun Runners,” which I reviewed a few weeks ago, and “Tales from the Silence,” a collection of short stories that I didn’t have a chance to finish until yesterday! Not for lack of trying, I assure you… November and December are just hideously busy.
The book is a wonderful reminder that the science fiction is at its best in short stories. A collection of authors all writing in the same universe/timeline as "The Sun Runners," this work was a lovely revisit to the setting as seen through the eyes of some truly talented and gifted writers.
Bow himself adds a few short works to the piece, but most of them are written by other contemporary writers, and even the worst of the lot was very good (just a little deus-ex-machina for my tastes). But the best of the bunch are extremely well done... my favourite is probably "The Guards at Chelela Pass" for its simple, unassuming humanity, but "Right to Repair" by Fiona J. Moore was clean, well-paced, and fundamentally very human.
This collection reminds us what great sci-fi is about: Using a setting or situation as a lens which we can all examine ourselves, and "Tales from the Silence" provides enough width and depth that I was always drawn along to the next story, the next batch of characters, the next moment.
Exceptional work by all involved, and I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys good short-form sci-fi!
A Calling, As It Were
I love being a writer. I think, to some extent, being a writer is all I’ve ever really wanted to be.
When I was young I knew I wanted to tell stories. The idea of a wandering knight seemed too far fetched in the 1980s, but the idea of somebody who traveled around and, rather than actually slaying monsters, got to tell stories about slaying monsters? Hells yes.
But reality is a cruel thing sometimes, and I didn’t pursue becoming a writer until many, many years later. And now I am in the position of somebody who desperately wants to be a writer but can’t currently survive on my writing.
Not enviable.
So I have been looking for work. I have a job already, one that pays some of the bills, but it doesn’t leave me much time or energy for anything else. So the hope is to find gainful enough employment that I can do it on the side while I pursue my writing. Because all I really want to do is write.
The hunt continues. There are no easy answers, and with the economy being what it is (and has been for almost 20 years now), the few answers that existed are often disappearing. Almost impossible to be a tutor any more. Good luck writing part-time or freelance for some publication. And so on, and so forth… all of the standard options available in the years before I tried to become a writer are mostly gone, or incredibly difficult to get into. Can you believe they used to just hire teachers without having to go through two years of university to then become a member of a college to then maybe find work somewhere!? Blows my mind.
Ah well. What can I do but to keep hunting, and hoping. Maybe someday my luck will change.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Podcast Out of the Bag
I mentioned it over on ye olde Patreon, but I’m considering running another podcast.
I used to host one with a buddy about a decade ago. It was a silly little thing… I mean, I took it seriously, but we were never really “big” even in the microcosm of podcasting we found ourselves in. But I did get pretty good at it. I contributed to a few other podcasts for a few years, but nothing serious or long-term.
But I am toying with starting up a new one. I’ll link it here but it would be hosted on its own (humble, inexpensive) website. And it hopefully won’t directly impact my writing except to give me another creative venture to work on and towards. That’s the idea, at least.
I’ve written up rough scripts for the first 7 episodes or so, and I recorded one just to see if I still remember how to do all the technical stuff (spoilers: I do!). But it won’t actually become “a thing” until 2025 at the absolute earliest… no time to dig into the technical elements of hosting and RSS feeds and all that until then.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Let Slip the Dogs of Winter!
Gosh time flies during November and December, and I apologize for that.
My normal job that I work to pay for my writing (which, tragically, still can’t support my modest and humble lifestyle) ramps up a huge amount in the final months of the year, so I’m basically scrambling from day to day.
And that’s fine, I suppose. It’s not as if I have a lot of choice in the matter, so I just try and make the most of it. But it does mean that a lot of the stuff that I do just because I enjoy it… well, I don’t get to do it because I don’t have the time or opportunity. Like sitting down for 10 minutes to write a blog post. Ah well.
Not a lot of other news that’s exciting. Reading John Scalzi’s most recent and enjoying the heck outta it, but that’s not a surprise. Scalzi is a craftsman, and each of his books has been either good or great. This one is turning out to be pretty great so far. A lot of fun! I just wish I could read it straight through, rather than in 20-30 minute chunks over my lunch! Ah well.
And then after that I’m going to finish the James Bow “Tales from the Silence” collection of short stories. I’ve finished over half of them, and they’ve been pretty consistently strong. A nice reminder that great sci-fi really has its roots in short stories, a format I’ve always struggled with personally. It’s nice to read other authors who are good at it!
Anyway, that’s it for today! Finally got some snow where I live, so if you’re dealing with some winter weather wherever you are, be careful out there!
Hope everyone is staying safe and healthy!
Writing Begets More Writing!
I’ve been writing up a series of scripts for a podcast I’m toying around with (I’m still not 100% sure I want to commit to it, because the most important part of podcasting is consistency, and I’m not currently sure I have enough time to make consistent content).
As a result I’ve written… oh, at least 20,000 words this week. Maybe more? Each episode is hanging around 3K, and that’s after the edits, and I’ve written 6 episodes so far. So yeah, about 20,000 words. Which is pretty good!
But as a result of that, I’ve also written a few short stories that I’m thinking about submitting to a magazine… and as a result of that, I’m writing another blog post!
So many words!
I love when I get into these grooves when everything just kinda flows from one word to the next. Even when the majority of those words will be cut (and they will!), it’s nice to have the flow-state that encourages me to sit down and actually get stuff done. And that’s where I am right now… riding the flow for as long as I can to get as many projects as I can kinda-finished-ish. Or at least mostly finished.
If I do end up doing the podcast, I’m going to have to look into Podcatchers, and a website, and an RSS feed… I was doing all that like, a decade ago with an old podcast I ran for over 300 episodes, but it’s been a minute since then (our last episode was in 2017, I think), so I’m going to have to do a lot of re-learning.
But at least I can still edit audio pretty darn quick.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
The Psychic Problem
As a general rule, I don’t like “Chosen One” stories. Although the original Star Wars and most of its sequels are all about The Chosen One (quite literally, as both Anakin and Luke are referred to as the Chosen One by the Jedi), and there is a long and noble tradition of Chosen One stories in both sci-fi and fantasy (and history, sadly)… I just don’t like them.
I don’t like the idea that the hero has to be special to be a hero. I much prefer the idea that anyone, with hard work and training and enormous effort, can be the hero. Most of my stories are about people that are very talented, but aren’t “special” in any particular way.
The novel I am working on right now has a Chosen One as a hero. Somebody through a twist of genetic fate has psychic powers… very weak powers, granted, but powers nonetheless. And I don’t like it.
The reason that the novel is taking so long to finish is that I’ve decided to write those out. They never sat well with me, so it’s time they go. But that involves some pretty hefty rewrites, and I’ve been stalling at getting that part done.
My own fault, really. Shouldn’t have used psychic powers as a Deus Ex Machina in the first place! Live and learn!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!