I mentioned that I had started running again. Today is the first day I can’t do my scheduled run because of weather.
Living in Southern Ontario means adapting to all sorts of wild weather swings. Usually it’s some variation on “cold and miserable,” sometimes “cold and wet,” and occasionally “freezing cold and snowing.” But cold is a pretty consistent contributor to the description of the weather.
But usually by late May, early June, the weather kind of hits a point of becoming less cold and becoming, I am told, “too warm.” I’m not sure I agree with that… I rarely, if ever, find it too warm for anything, but so I am told by those around me. The word “humid” also gets bandied about quite a bit, but again, that is a setting my personal body sensors just don’t have. I understand it theoretically, but in practice it just feels like nice “not cold.”
Lots of quotation marks in today’s post. Ah well!
The point is that right now it is raining and cold, and I can handle one of those things when I run (I’d rather deal with neither, but that’s just not the reality of where I live), but the two of them together means I’m not running today. Maybe if it stops raining and warms up a bit? But the forecast makes that out to be unlikely.
On the upside, this is fantastic weather to stay inside and edit! So that’s what I’m going to do!
Hope everyone is staying safe and healthy!
Dinner "Parties"
One of my favourite scenes from the Dune novel is the dinner scene. I’m sure I’ve talked about it before, but I love the way Herbert injects a real sense of danger into a casual eating event. No violence occurs, although a fair amount of it is suggested or implied, but there is a fair amount of “action” that occurs by Paul and his mother just observing the diners.
A couple times I have tried to do similar sorts of scenes in my novels. “The Hunt for the Wind’s Howling Rage” has a dinner scene between the protagonist, Cici, and her boyfriend’s evil father that I am very proud of, but it doesn’t have the same sense of tension that Dune manages. There’s a great dinner scene in “Starconvoy EH-76” that is one of the best parts of that book. The novel I’m working on right now has a better dinner scene, IMO, between the captains of various naval vessels heading out to battle, and like in Dune it occurs much earlier in the story, setting the stage and letting the readers know some of the gravity of what is going to happen down the line.
That stated, lots of different authors handle dinners very differently. Who could forget the Red Wedding? Great scene. Or the smaller, more intimate meals in “Legends and Lattes,” which is a great little light fantasy novel. Food is an integral part of many societies, and showcasing the way social norms and spaces interact with it gives great fodder (ha) for scenes!
Then again, maybe I’m just hungry, and so I’m putting more importance on it than usual! I should get back to editing my dinner!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Running Again
Last year I attempted a Couch to 5K that stopped abruptly in late May due to a knee injury.
I am trying it again this year.
LAST year I pushed myself too hard and tried to outpace the app that was helping me run. I’m an impatient guy, I don’t want to run 5K eventually, I want to be running it now.
Full disclosure: I have run a bunch of 5K runs in the past. I used to be quite good at long distance running… never fast, but steady, and I’ve run in lots of places back when I used to travel more extensively. But it has been a few years since I did a 5K, and much longer than that since I’ve run consistently, and at this point in my life it’s that consistency I’m looking for. I eat too many sweets to not be at least moderately active at all times… and since I hate the cold and going outside in the cold I have to squeeze every drop of activity I can out of the summer.
Today was my first day running for my new attempt. It went okay! Felt slow and awkward, but that’s par for the course. Much like editing the novel, I just gotta stick with it and it will get done!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Espresso
I mentioned last post how much I like coffee. It’s a lot.
But I’m not crazy about espresso. I mean, it’s fine, but the real joy of espresso, to me, is all the things you can do with it that you don’t do with regular coffee. Lattes, cappuccinos, even the humble Americano (which a few shops around here have started calling “Canadiano” as a result of the ongoing trade disputes with the USA) are all, to my tastes, a better application of espresso than just drinking the pure espresso.
When I visit my father and mother I let my dad make me espresso. He takes great pride in the simple process, and seeing him happy to serve me the coffee is worth way more to me than the coffee itself. In any other application, I skip the espresso and go straight for the tastier applications.
… which is kind of like my writing, really. Hey, did you know I’m an author and I write things? Ha, yeah, but here’s the point. Pure science fiction exists, and it can be excellent. The core concepts of “What If” and “How About” can be explored without needing silly laser swords and exploding spaceships. But I like silly laser swords and exploding spaceships, and so I write silly sci-fi. Is it “better”? Well, it’s less pure, and for some people that just means it’s worse, and I respect that. People are allowed to have that opinion, even if I don’t share it. My partner really likes pure espresso, and that’s fine! But for me, give me the creamy, sugary stuff instead.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Coffee
I really love coffee.
It’s weird. Most of the stuff I love I actively pursue, whereas coffee I only drink because it’s available. I think if I had to give it up tomorrow I wouldn’t actually miss it all that much, but the cup of coffee beside me right now is almost finished and I might go upstairs and get another when this is done.
How do I explain that? If I enjoy it so much, why do I not care if I don’t have it for a week or a month or whatever? But when I do have it I really like it, and if I’m out somewhere often I will go for a coffee just because it’s a thing I can do.
I love that it’s not super expensive. There is a particular brand of whiskey that I am quite fond of, but it’s so expensive that I will absolutely never buy it. I got a bottle as a gift a few years ago and I just finished it a few months back, but I will likely never replace it. But not so with coffee… the pot of it I brew every morning costs less than a dollar including beans, water, and power. Super cheap. And if I go out for a coffee, yeah it’ll cost me $5 or so, but that’s not bad! Cheaper than almost anything else you can buy.
I love that it gets me space to sit and write, either at home or out at a shop. I can plant myself at a table, rented by the cost of the coffee they sell, and write for a few hours without guilt (if I’m going to be there more than a few hours then I have to buy at least another coffee… I’m not a monster).
Coffee fuels a significant part of my writing work, both directly and indirectly. Great stuff. I used to drink a lot of tea, but that’s fallen by the wayside in recent years, whereas my coffee consumption has been a slowly climbing curve since about 2006. Twenty years of coffee!
Anyway, nothing super deep to say today. Just some appreciation for that which lets me do this.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Writing Is Also Part of the Job!
I think I mentioned a week or two ago that I had been listening to the Brandon Sanderson lectures. I’ve heard them before (probably… 2018 or so?), but he posted the 2025 lectures and I happily reconsumed them. Most of the material was stuff he spoke about previously, updated somewhat, but there were a few genuinely interesting tidbits tucked away.
Which isn’t to say the lectures weren’t good: they most definitely were good. If you are at all interested in the business of writing and hope to become a traditionally published author, I highly recommend them. And hey, they’re free!
It made me think a lot about the business that I’m in. Not just as an art that I practice joyfully, but as something that earns money (theoretically at least… I mean, I do “earn” money, but I certainly spend more than I bring in!). And how it is something I have to approach as both work and as something more than work… if I approach writing as a purely financial decision, the unquestionable conclusion would be to stop immediately and do anything else. Very few occupations require so much and give so little in return.
But I love writing. And I think that if I didn’t write I would be more miserable than I could possibly be struggling to make a living through writing? I think?
There are days that it’s really hard. Yesterday I looked at my income and expenses for the month of April and I was down $200. Which isn’t a lot, granted, but April was an unusually high month for my income… but on the flipside, it was also more expensive than average. But the outflow of money being more than the inflow is concerning, and there’s not much I can do about it except to keep trying!
And on that note, I’m going to go back to editing the novel! Only about 20 chapters to go!
Hope everyone is staying safe and healthy!
Reading is Part of the Job
I love reading. One of the reasons I became a writer is because of how much I love to read.
The stuff I usually read is, predictably, science fiction. I read a lot of Fantasy when I was younger and, given the time and opportunity, I’ll read it now… the last book I finished was high fantasy that was shockingly good. But my usual fare is sci-fi, which I read widely and joyously.
Currently I’m reading a bunch of Battletech novels. These are classic cotton-candy sci-fi. Predictable to a large extent, with big stompy robots beating up other robots, but the good ones are focused on the characters rather than the tech. And, honestly, some of them are really good… Michael Stakepole in particular is a great example of Battletech author (he’s also written for Star Wars and a dozen other IPs), but the book I’m working on right now is a Bryan Young, and it’s been a lot of fun. Fox Patrol is a neat little book following a protagonist that might be too young to be a mercenary commander, but by jove she’s going to try. It’s been really good! And encouraging, because unlike somebody like N.K. Jemisin who is an absolute genius, Young’s writing is very approachable. He feels like just a really good writer, and not somebody who is a super genius that I will never be able to write like.
I mean that as a compliment. It’s the difference between… oh, James Shaw and Jimi Hendrix. Hendrix was a genius, but Shaw is just out there making incredible music that… honestly? I like better… anyway. Ramble ramble.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Steady Progress Again
I forget specifically who said it, but one of the best pieces of advice I ever received about writing was to consistently do something every day. Keep it reasonable, but every day, without fail, do something.
A few hundred words, fifteen minutes… it doesn’t matter, as long as you are consistent. It’s great advice… that I don’t often follow.
I try! I used to aim for 2K words a day, but that is difficult to achieve and maintain. It’s certainly possible, if I’m not doing much else, but even when I was averaging 2K a day it was more like 6 days of 1K and one day of 8K. And that’s difficult to maintain.
But these days I’m editing, and that’s pretty easy to manage a consistent amount of work. I edit two or three chapters, and then I do something else. If I’m lucky, I can repeat that a few times in a day, but even if I don’t, that’s still consistent work every day, pushing me closer to having this novel finished.
And as always, that’s the goal. Finish the novel. Write more novels! But finishing the novels is the most important part.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Three Chapters Done!
I actually did it. That thing I said I was going to do? I did actually resume working on my novel.
Better late than never? I think? And at my current pace I might actually finish these edits before the end of the month! There’s a heady thought.
With that note, I think I will actually get back to doing said edits. I hate editing, but since I love writing I can at least view this as a necessary step to let me do more writing!
Hope everyone is staying safe and healthy!
Still Cold
It is frequently still quite cold in Southern Ontario late into April, or early into May. Occasionally we get massive heat waves as well, but most of the time it’s this grey, cold drizzle.
Now honestly, I don’t mind the grey, but what I mind is the cold. I hate the cold, and the fact that winter clings on to the province like fur to a new suit bothers me. I just want to be able to work in a warm room without having to wear four layers and a blanket.
Maybe that’s asking too much. So here we are. Still raining, still cold.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and warm!
Working on the Novel Again
So the last time I modified the document with novel 8 in it was… September. That’s too long ago.
It’s not a huge surprise (to me, at least) because working at a game store, as I did, resulted in very little time or energy between October and January. But then in January I gave notice to my boss that I would be leaving in March, and so there was a lot of time and energy spent prepping for me stepping away, and then suddenly it was April and it’s been almost 6 months since I’ve actually edited or written anything in this book.
That changes today! Today I opened the file and started editing over from Chapter 1. There’s a big of foreshadowing I do early in the novel that my editor thinks muddies the end of the book, and I think she’s right. So I’m going to be chopping out parts and cleaning up the rest so that the story is as smooth and clean as possible. Then one more editorial pass (hopefully next week, we will see), and then boom, finished Novel 8!
That’s the plan. I love a good plan! And with the short story I submitted done and… well, submitted, it’s nice to get to work on the next major project!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Short Story Submitted!
For the last couple months I’ve been writing a pair of short stories, and today I finally submitted one of them. It’s a single-market submission (if the place I submitted it doesn’t want it, then nobody else will), but that’s okay. It still feels good to have something out in the ether again.
The submission software said that it will be about 11 weeks for them to get back to me (which is pretty quickly, tragically, compared to what I’m used to), but that’s plenty of time for me to switch tracks to the novel and the short movie I want to shoot. Gosh, so much to do!
I also want to point out that the submission word count maximum was 5,000 words, and I hit 4,995. I am very pleased with myself over that! The original draft was over 6,000 words, so it was a lot of painful cutting, but I think the final story is really quite good.
But it’s done and submitted now, so time to work on the next thing!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
The Sanderson Lectures
A few years ago I stumbled across a series of lectures that massively-successful sci-fi-fantasy author Brandon Sanderson gave at BYU about writing. They were interesting in an academic sense, but the thing that really stuck with me was the fact that writers who really wanted to be writers were more successful at it than most people believed. A lot of people think that your odds are worse than one in a million… it’s akin to winning the lottery. And while I think that’s true for really successful writers (your Stephen Kings or your John Scalzis), what Sanderson says is that your chances of making a living from your writing is closer to 1 in 20. Which, honestly? Pretty dang good.
The catch of course is that it takes about a decade. But that’s okay! I really want to be a writer, I don’t really want to do anything else with my time, so I’m okay with taking the long, slow grind to making a living from my art.
As an aside, can you imagine another career telling you that you wouldn’t be capable of making a living wage for at least a decade, and even then odds of you succeeding was about 5%? Like, if bankers were told that they’d make no money for a decade… yeah, anyway. Such is the life of an artist.
The whole reason I bring it up is that there are a brand new series of lectures that Sanderson produced (for this year, no less!), and I’ve been listening and watching them as I work on my painting. There’s some interesting stuff, no question, and it’s neat listening to somebody who has obviously spent a lot of time working on “the craft” say things about our shared work. I agree with a lot of what he says! I’ve learned a few things about how to write compelling characters (which I think I do pretty well already, but it never hurts to be better, or to be provided with tools that you may or may not need).
Anyway, I’m only 6 lectures in so far (so about halfway, I think?), but it’s been really interesting. We’ll see if I use any of the information in the future! But whether I do or not, I’m glad that Sanderson is making these so I can watch ‘em!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Short Story Rewrites
So I’m on the 3rd major revision of a short story. And that’s at least 2 more major revisions than I have historically done for short stories.
Minor revisions, absolutely. Editing for clarity or to hit word counts or whatever, yes, all my short stories have those. But major changes? This one is getting way more than usual.
But it feels… right. It feels like there is a really great story here, and I just have to nudge it a few more times to make it come out of its shell. But this revision is going to be it… if it doesn’t “work” after this, I am shelving it and working on the next project. Too many things to do, and still not enough time for all of them! Gotta get stuff done!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Meeting Stakepole
Michael Stakepole is a sci-fi author that I discovered sometime in the mid-to-late 80s. He wrote some truly foundational work in the Battletech universe (specifically the “Warrior Trilogy” but also countless others), and honestly, he is one of the main reasons I got into writing sci-fi myself.
He’s a craftsman. His books are clever, clean, and approachable without feeling childish. His stories had many strong female characters, and despite the setting being equal parts cliche and silly, he still managed to make really compelling, interesting plots.
And last week at Adepticon I got to meet him! Only for a moment, and he caught me very flat-footed (I wish I had known he was going to be there!), but it was an honour to meet him and get him to sign a copy of one of his books I bought on the spot. I’m looking forward to tackling it before too long… I have a backlog of books to read (when has THAT not been true!?), but his has moved to the top after I finish the current book I am working on… which is a compilation of short stories, several of which were written by Stackpole!).
It was a truly nice moment, and honestly the highlight of the convention for me. I hope one day I can have a fraction of the impact on the industry that he has had. Great guy, 10/10, no edits.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Back from the USA!
Phew! That was a heckuva trip, and I’m glad to be home.
Milwaukee, it turns out, is quite nice, but a 10-hour drive is just a touch too long. We were all a little frazzled getting there, and we were all equally wiped out when we got back. I’m going to take a couple days to just… mentally unpack, I suppose, would be the way to describe it. Just… let my brain go dapdfajsdphgadsa for a while.
It was a fun convention, although I did quite poorly in the one tournament I attended. It was still really nice to be utterly surrounded… nay, immersed… in “my people.”
That sounds dirtier than I meant it. I just mean it was nice to around so many nerds. We all nerded out. It was great!
Next year I might fly… I dunno, I need to think about it a lot. I’d also need to be in a much better financial situation, because stuff be expensive, yo.
But for now? Glad to be home, glad to be in front of my computer again.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Off to the USA
So I’m heading to America for a few days… 6 days actually, arriving Wednesday and returning Monday. It’s for a big gaming convention that used to be held in Chicago and has since moved to Milwaukee called “Adepticon.” I went back in 2018 and 2019, it was fantastic, but this will be my first time back since then.
I’m not… crazy… about going to the USA right now since there’s a lot of tension between them and my fellow Canadians, but the tickets were expensive enough that I have fully committed to the Sunk Cost Fallacy at this point. But that’s fine, I’ll probably have a really good time, and more importantly… get a lot of work done! Honestly, one of my legit favourite things about being a writer is my ability to bring my work with me wherever I go. It makes it very hard to have actual, honest-to-goodness “time off” but that’s compensated by being able to write in beautiful places and whenever I want to. In the balance it still works out in my favour, I think.
I have a stack of models I need to have painted up for the convention tournaments, so I’m going to get back to that, but I’ll try to post at least once (maybe, gasp, twice!) while I’m over there. Nine and a half hours of driving to get to the convention… I am actually kinda looking forward to that too!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Spring!
I suspect there are still a few snowy days in my future, but for now the weather is warm-ish, the sun is shining, and the temperatures have pulled out of the negatives, so we’re calling all of that a win.
Of course, I’m not a big outdoors guy. I was in my youth… days and weeks spent under the stars, being slowly eaten alive by mosquitos and black flies, drinking boiled lake water and generally having a miserable time.
It’s a wonder I don’t enjoy the great outdoors.
But the nicer weather still gives me more time and energy to do stuff. I generally turn into a potato after the sun sets, so a few more hours of sunlight generally means a few more hours of gettin’ things done!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Time!
You know that thing where you look at the calendar and you’re look “Huh, I think I wrote a blog post a few days ago, but I’d better go check” and then it turns out it was over a week ago and you have no concept of time or space?
Just me? Probably just me.
Anyway, I was shocked to see that' it’s been 9 days since I wrote a post! I could’ve sworn I did one on, like, Wednesday (3 days ago), but no.
In those nine days I’ve finished the first draft of a short story and started working on the second draft. The thing about short stories is that you can’t do my usual trick of writing the novel and then deleting the first three chapters… because there just aren’t three chapters to delete! But I’m kind of doing that now with this story… I’m removing the opening scene completely because, just like the first few chapters of my novel, I wrote it more so I could learn who the characters are, rather than it being important for the story. And in a short story you just don’t have the real-estate or space to waste. It’s a neat challenge, for sure.
Hopefully I’ll get the second draft finished today, and the story submitted to it’s (hopefully!) forever home tomorrow!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Everything is Political
I think I’ve mentioned here before the concept that you can’t escape politics. Wanting to escape politics is fundamentally a political act.
I don’t think I have ever hidden my particular biases when it comes to politics. It doesn’t take a very close read of any of my books to realize that the capitalists are usually the baddies… some variation, of course, because there are worse and better capitalists, but there is usually a pretty clean line between moral and immoral people in my works. I’m not aiming for nuance, just fun and light.
But on days like today, where the province I live in has decided the government for the foreseeable future, the issue of politics looms closer than ever. I don’t like that I have to live in fear of what these election results really mean, but the provincial government decides funding for almost all of the services I rely on: health, education, and the arts. All under the control of a man I wouldn’t trust with my car, much less one of the most powerful positions in the country.
Ah well. Soon this will fade into the background radiation of what my life has been for decades now… just one struggle on the heels of the next. Eventually maybe things will get better.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!