My opening moves today were to bake an angel food cake. I forgot how fiddly the process is, but the end result was pretty good… fresh strawberries and whipped cream forgive many sins.
It reminded me a little about writing, actually. Perhaps not a surprise… as I dive full-body into my exams I won’t be able to even think about occupational writing for at least the next few weeks, and so I am focusing on these moments of joy when and where I can. Anyway, writing is a little like baking: it’s less about rigorous precision, and more about knowing what will make a good finished product.
Sure, if I add any fat to the egg whites, they simply won’t whip up, which means they’re wasted. But other than that, everything is carefully variable… more sugar, less sugar. More salt, less vanilla, more lemon extract, swap lemon for orange, fold the flour or whisk… but critically, until you have baked a lot, you’ll never really know what you’re supposed to end up with, and therefore you won’t know exactly what to mess with.
Writing is the same sort of thing. There are expectations for any story when you, as a reader, pick up that book. You may expect the hero will survive, or that the hero has no hope of surviving, or that there is no hero. But all of that is determined very early, and often just by picking your genre. A horror novel that has the monster slain by a group of determined heroes may be a great story, but it’s probably not Horror, which has pretty specific rules. And yes, once you get very good with reader expectations you can start to subvert them… I think one of the many things that made Game of Thrones so appealing for a long time is how many of the genre expectations it subverted, just as a random example. But gosh you gotta bake a lot of cakes before you can expect to do that.
Just idle thoughts. And half-decent angel food cake.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Fame and Fortune
This time of year is always a little introspective for me… a look at the past year, perhaps the past few years, and a consideration of everything that has or hasn’t happened over that time.
Most of the time it’s pretty depressing. The last couple years in particular have been harder than most, and I think that holds for everyone, but even before this nonsense, my time is usually spent trying to figure out where, exactly, things went wrong.
Now I don’t want to come off as whiny. I have a lot of blessings in my life, and a fair dose of that is due to this work… I love writing. It’s hard, sure, but any day I can spend crafting words into sentences into stories is a good day. Any day that I can’t is a worse day for it.
But a part of me is looking at the successes of others and wondering what they’re doing differently than me. A lot of it is money, I know, because money just makes everything easier. Editing, art, time… all of them cost money, and often a lot of money, and so me scrambling around trying to do whatever I can with the scant resources I have is definitely making the climb more uphill. I get that.
But that can’t be it. And I want to stress that my definition of “success” is very, very modest. I don’t want or need huge buckets of cash, or the adoration of thousands. In order for me to make this writing-thing a success I need about 3-4 thousand people to buy each of my new releases. That’s not nothing, and I’m certainly closer to that number than ever before, but a fraction of what any New York Times Bestseller reaches. And that’s okay! A few hundred copies a week would be plenty.
But that’s still a long, long way off.
Ah well. I’m waxing poetic rather than doing the work, and that’s a big part of the problem… so instead, I’m going to try and finish my exams, so I can get back to writing.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Exams
There’s a funny thing about exams… well, there are many funny things about exams, honestly, but there’s one in particular about take-home exams, which the majority of my exams have been for the last two years.
There’s this weird sense of stretched-panic. Like, this is a big, heavy, massively important thing, but it’s not due right now. Heck, it’s not due for a week (sometimes two!). But gosh is it important! You really should do it now, don’t you think? But not right now. But probably now.
Both my courses have take-home exams this semester, and today I get the 2nd one (the other I’ve had for a week and isn’t due for another week). Honestly, I will probably start working on them on Wednesday, just to get them finished (and give me time to sit on them and think, rather than rushing through at the last moment). But I used to love exams… the stress was lovely, the pre-exam studying was hell but then, boom, it was done and you could move on with your life (or, more likely, on to studying for the next exam!). But these weird take-home things have all the stress, but almost none of the defined release…
Of course, last time I was doing “proper” exams was almost exactly 20 years ago, and I was a much different person back then. And studying the wrong thing.
Anyway, just a weird thought. Can’t wait to finish these so I can get back to writing the book!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
The Last Hundred Yards
Getting close to the end of my English degree… two 4th year courses (both seminars), and I’m done. At least theoretically… considering the way the bureaucracy of Laurier has been in the past, I wouldn’t be stunned if things get messed up one last time. We will see.
But for this semester, I am almost done. One term paper and a take-home exam, and then I’m done until September. It’s been… four years?… since I’ve had a summer without classes throughout the majority of it, and gosh am I looking forward to it.
Mostly because I can get back to writing I care about, rather than writing that grades hinge on. Academic writing is a thing, and I’m pretty good at it, but there’s very little joy in it. It’s hard to be joyous about something you have to have three academic sources for, and that is edited to be as boring and with minimal individual input into it.
But that’s fine! It’s fine. I’m almost done, and hopefully I can leverage this degree into a different paying job until I can leverage that job into becoming a full-time writer. I’m gonna get there one way or the other, but it would be nice to shorten the road a lot. And maybe make it a touch less torturous to travel… that might be nice.
Anyway, almost done! Huzzah!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Painting
It may not come as a surprise, but like many artists I find a lot of different outlets for my artistic passions. I write, sure, and I love writing (so much so that it’s the only occupation I pursue!), but I also love to draw, and I love to paint.
I most paint miniatures (“war dollies,” if you will), and I have no shame in it. Sure, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but I really like having little armies of little soldiers that smash into other people’s little armies. I play a lot of varied games, but currently I’m not active in any of them, really.
Thanks COVID.
But joking aside, I enjoy painting because it’s a very different sort of brain activity than writing. Writing is like pushing your arm through a meat grinder sometimes. It’s painful and difficult and it seems to only get moreso as time goes on. But painting… you start off with something plain and boring, and slowly add layers and detail until you end up with something that’s quite pretty.
I’m not a great painter, by any extent, but I’m not awful and I can usually make the miniatures look pretty half-decent.
Anyway, the ones I’m working on right now are for a board game called “Descent Legends of the Dark,” which I am very excited to play at some point. The miniatures are incredibly detailed, and that helps, and there are a few good online tutorials to help with the colour selection (the area of painting I struggle with the most!). I think I’ve been working on the team of heroes for about a month now, and they’re almost done (may actually finish them by the end of March!), and then I’ll start painting all the baddies… there are way more of them, but they’re repeats so I should be able to crunch through them pretty quick.
Just a nice little distraction between writing!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Black Jelly Beans
As I sit here writing this post, there is a small bowl full of black jelly beans by my left hand.
I do not like black jelly beans. I don’t like them one bit. “So why,” you might ask, “do you have a bowl full of them right beside you?”
Ah, context. The short answer is that when I poured out the last of this bag of jelly beans for a snack (not a healthy snack, but I’m taking my journey towards being healthy one step at a time), I ate all the jelly beans aside from the black ones. Those were then returned to the bowl so that I can throw them into the compost upstairs… I don’t know if jelly beans actually compost (I suspect not, since that would explain their eternal existence despite being almost universally loathed), but I’m going to try.
But to a casual observer, it might very much look like I am planning to eat those hideous little black ‘candies’ at some later point, or perhaps have just shoveled a handful into my mouth and they will never know that I do not, in any way, care for black jelly beans.
Writing is often like that, I think (as I at last approach a point to this ramble). The parts that people see are often the disappointing or unpleasant parts that are sitting there until something happens to them. Because you see me editing my newest novel, you might very well think that all I do is edit my novels. Or because somebody glances at me on Wikipedia, they might think that I do all my research on Wikipedia. Of course that’s not the case, but it isn’t necessarily obvious.
And thus, there sits that bowl… I should probably clean that up.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
The Obelisk Gate
Part of being a good writer is being a good reader… or at very least a prolific reader. Ideally in my chosen genre, of course, but really anything I read helps me better understand what makes certain stories “work,” and what about them doesn’t work.
With this in mind, I do my best to read every John Scalzi that is released (I haven’t quite managed it… I think I’ve only read 2 of the “Old Man’s War” series, and they were great but I know there are a lot more of them out there), and I recently started reading N.K. Jemisin.
Gosh, she’s amazing. I just finished the second book in the “Broken Earth” trilogy, titled The Obelisk Gate, and wow. Just wow. What a writer! It won the Hugo in 2017 (on the heels of the first novel, The Fifth Season winning in 2016), and yeah. Such a brilliant writer!
It’s amazing to me that such writers exist. She is so talented that I don’t think I’ll ever write anything anywhere near as good. She’s like a Terry Pratchett… talented enough to be fundamentally otherworldly.
Can’t wait to finish the trilogy! I’ve been reading them at my day-job (and encouraged an enormous amount to read that Jemisin herself wrote while also balancing a day-job) over my lunch breaks… reading her novels in 25 minute chunks is challenging, but only because I never want to put the book down!
Anyway. If you have any interest whatsoever in touching, brilliant, and living speculative fiction, I can’t recommend the series highly enough. No idea if it finishes on as high a note as it started and continued on, but I’d be surprised if it isn’t at least good, and possibly sublime.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
The Drive to Produce
It’s a weird feeling, both needing to and loving to produce something. I am often reminded of that famous quotation “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people,” (Thomas Mann).
And it’s true. I love writing, but it is hard at the best of times (and, as we all know, these last few years have not been the best of times). It’s been a few weeks now since I dedicated any time specifically to working on the novel, and while I have jotted down a few words here or there, that’s simply not enough. My particular writing style needs a “flow”… an opportunity to really focus in on what I want to say and how I want to say it, and then to just let the torrent of words out (so they can be heavily, heavily edited later!).
Ah well. School is a more pressing, immediate priority at the moment. A couple really big term papers are looming in the next few weeks, and after that I think things should settle. And no summer school this year, so hopefully I’ll have a few relaxing months before I jump in for my last semester in September.
Okay, with that I really should get working on those term papers… one of them has a bibliography that’s due next week (to prove that we’re using appropriately academic sources for our papers) which I am… less than thrilled about… but whatever. Whatever! It’ll get done, and then it’ll be done and we can all move on with our lives.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Imperialism Sucks
As part of my English degree I have to study a lot of British Literature. Almost done now, but the last of these courses is “Later Victorian Literature”, and nothing says Later Victorian Literature quite as much as Imperialist propaganda.
We’ve talked about the almost-unbelievably racist Kipling already, and we are now tackling “She” by H. Rider Haggard, and gosh is it hard to read. Not that it’s intrinsically badly-written… it’s a very old-style of novel, but it’s a legitimately old novel, so it comes by that rightly. But wow is it ever racist and misogynistic. Just casually throwing around shade at everyone who isn’t white, descriptions of “cruel” features, discussions of the frailty of women and their stupidity…
Now, let it be said here that my novels aren’t perfect. There are definitely some questionable decisions I’ve made, and I have certainly written a few sexist characters. I don’t think I’ve ever been Imperialist in any of my novels, since I tend to believe very deeply that Imperialism (and monarchies as a more general rule) are always bad, but I may have had moments of colonialism that sneaked in when I wasn’t paying enough attention… Canada has some very troubling colonial roots, and as a child of this country it has bled into my perspective occasionally.
But I certainly hope nobody will ever look at my work the same way I’m looking at Haggard’s. Wow it’s bad.
Anyway. I have to finish the last half of this awful, brutal novel, and then I get to work on two massive term papers due in a week or so, and after all that… maybe I’ll get to do something remotely fun? Probably not, but a man can hope.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Put on a Happy Face
Well, things are certainly different than they were a few years ago. By this time in 2020, it was becoming apparent that the pandemic wasn’t just going to go away on its own, and the Canadian government was starting to take its first, hesitant steps towards mandates to protect the population.
By the following week I told my boss I would be self-isolating, since that was recommended. He took it pretty well, all things considered, and there followed the second most productive period of my writing career.
It looks like the provincial government is going to remove the mask mandates in the next couple weeks, and while this fills me with an impending sense of doom (4 of my coworkers have had COVID in the last 3 months, and that’s with the mandates still in place!), there isn’t a lot I can do about it. My editing costs still far outstrip my income from writing (by orders of magnitude, actually), and my university education is still almost entirely self-financed, which means I have to keep working if I want to do the things I love, like write and learn about how to write better.
So why worry? Might as well do my best to embrace this, and hope that we all come out the other side a little kinder and wiser. And who knows, a lot can still change in two weeks… maybe the downwards trend in cases will continue, and things will in fact get far better than things currently suggest they will get. It would be nice to stop worrying all the time (I worry all the time).
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Academic Papers
If the last four-and-something years have taught me anything, it’s that I’m really very good at writing academic papers.
I don’t enjoy it, I often don’t see the point of it, but apparently I am very, very good at it.
I am diving into another one this weekend. It’s for a course I have in writing narratives for video games, and I’m pretty excited about it. It is letting me approach a medium I love (games) from a position that I don’t normally care much about (academic analysis). Today is going to be devoted to picking a specific topic and thesis, and starting to lay out the groundwork for finding academic sources to back up whatever it is I’m going to say.
There is a temptation to continue on this track because then someday I might be considered an academic source… but I don’t think I’m wealthy enough or devoted enough to poverty to pursue the years and years of abuse the academic system heaps on people. Besides, all I’ve ever really wanted is a humble life where I can write books in peace… I don’t think the academic path allows that for decades, if ever.
Anyway. Those are my weekend plans.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Consistent Sales
It’s neat to see that most weeks I get a pretty consistent number of sales. That number is too small, sure, but it’s there, and that’s pretty amazing and comforting, honestly.
It also pushes me to write more, because if I get this number of sales with 7 novels, I can get twice as many sales if I had 14 novels! Hopefully the progression is better than linear, because I don’t know how long it would take me to write 70 novels (approximately 15 years), but it’s too long.
In other news, February was a total wash for writing. I think I got maybe 5k words done on the novel? I think March will be better, honestly, because things are kinda looking up, or at least a bit calmer. There is hope on the wind, right behind the terrifying “Will this result in the end of humanity” elements marching around Europe right now. It’s a scary time for everyone, but more so for a lot of people further east than me, and my heart goes out to them.
Anyway, that’s enough waxing poetic about the state of the world… hopefully we’ll all still be here in a few months to welcome a brighter, more optimistic summer? That would be nice.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Group Projects Suck
I’m sure I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, but I hate group projects. I never much cared for them at work, and I certainly have always hated them at school.
The problem, I have learned, is that people suck.
Joking aside, it’s mostly a question of work style: I want to get everything done as soon as humanly possible to both not have it on my mind, and to give me as much time as possible in case things go sideways… because things always go sideways. Most people would rather leave the work until the last possible moment, and if I’m being charitable, I can say it’s probably because they just have other priorities. I get that, it’s fine… but it often means that I end up doing everything anyways, and so it’s not a “group project” , it’s a solo project that’s bigger, longer, and other people get credit for.
But whatever. It’s fine! As long as it gets done, that’s all that matters. There’s a saying somewhere about “Imagine how much we could get accomplished if nobody cared who got credit and just did the work!”, and that holds kinda true. I don’t really care who gets credit, this is just a 3rd year course I’m probably never going to think about again, I just need to get the work done.
So, on that note, I’m going to go and do the last part of a project that 5 other students are supposed to be working on, but none of them will. Yay.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Correlation is not Causation
A few weeks back I had to reduce the advertising budget for my novels through Amazon (which, at this point, is 99.9% of my advertising budget). I reduced everything by more-or-less half… and my sales, likewise, have reduced by about the same percentage.
Now, that' doesn’t mean it’s a 1-to-1 correlation between ads and sales. It certainly suggests it to a certain amount, but there are plenty of reasons to expect a downturn in sales in February after some pretty consistent numbers in December. But still, nice to see that there is a connection at least.
Additional bonus: if I can figure out the price-sale ratio at some point, I may actually make some money off selling my books. Maybe! Nice to think that it’s possible.
But for now, today is my last day off for Reading Week before I have to go back to work, so I have actual readings to accomplish, and I’m gonna do that.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
A Few Days Off
“Days Off” is such a misnomer in my life. I never have days off… well, very, very rarely at least. Any time I’m not working one job, I’m working a different job, or studying. A day where I don’t have obligations and work hovering over my shoulder is a rare, rare thing.
But this weekend is a little longer than usual due to “Family Day” on Monday and me taking Tuesday off and Wednesday being part of reading week, so I theoretically have 4 contiguous days where I don’t have to do anything.
I will spend it doing the readings for my courses, starting some long-lead-time assignments, and writing… but that’s okay. All of those things are important, and I’m sure eventually I’ll actually have a day to do with what I want…
Right?
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Sonnets and Close Reading
My midterm for “Late Victorian Literature” (one of my 2 or 3 last classes before I graduate) involves reading a lot of Victorian sonnets and then doing close readings of them.
For those of you who are unaware, a “close reading” basically consists of reading a piece of work and then thinking every possible connection, every allusion and reference and possible interpretation the writer mentions or hints at, and then putting all that down on paper. Yes, the author said that the grass is green, but what did they mean by that statement? Is it a reference to Eden, or perhaps to the the grass always being greener elsewhere? Does it mean that it is springtime, or perhaps full summer? Has it rained recently… and so on, and so forth, ad infinitum.
It’s fine. I’ve never struggled with being able to put down a lot of thoughts about any particular topic, and while Late Victorian sonnets may not be my favourite literary genre, the ones we are reading are at least tangentially interesting.
Anyway, I should get back to writing that midterm… it’s due later today, and I only have a few hours to finish up before I head into school.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Oops!
Knew I forgot something… funny how time can slip by if you’re not paying attention to it, and in this case my Sunday-Monday post was the casualty.
Not that it matters a whole lot. This blog is mostly for my own edification… a monument to my time and struggle attempting to be a full-time author, as all of you know. Will I keep it going after I succeed at that task? Yes, absolutely, but the focus of it will have to become more… well, focused. But that’s some time away yet, especially if I can’t finish this novel (which, honestly, is proving a struggle).
In an unrelated aside, I was considering moving… not leaving Canada, although that thought has occurred more and more frequently. I think I’m staying in the country for family… my parents both live in Southern Ontario, and as much as we’ve had a rough relationship, I owe it to them to be nearby in case they need help. But moving up further north (although still in Ontario) is on the table in a way I wouldn’t have dreamed of ten years ago. I just want a nice place to live where I can write and not be constantly stressed out by other work or school or whatever.
Anyway. School is going well, the presentation last week went very well, which was nice.
Argh, I just remembered I have a midterm due tomorrow… arrrrgggghhh… right, I should get that started.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Presentations
This Friday, February 11th, I will be giving a brief talk on ethics and Wordle.
Yes, you read that correctly. The basic thrust of the talk is going to be the interface of Emmanuel Levinas and his theory that all morality is the result of seeing a human face, and that Wordle’s staggering (albeit almost certainly temporary) popularity is because it visibly and easily quantizes suffering through those little green and yellow blocks as you play.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about… actually, I’m impressed. It has swept across the English-speaking world like wildfire, to the point that I’m seeing Wordle grids on Facebook, on Twitter… it’s basically everywhere. And recently sold for a lot of money (good on the designer), so there’s that too.
But I also think this is a very, very temporary sort of popularity. The… fidget-spinners of 2022, or the “What Does the Fox Say” or any other of countless thousands of brief sparks of something incredible that fade as quickly as they appear.
Anyway, I’ve procrastinated on writing that presentation, leaving it to the metaphorical “last minute.” Which is unlike me, but work has been hard and school has been hard, so finding time to do more school just hasn’t been a priority until now…
Although I will probably study for my midterm (later today) first. And then write the presentation… probably.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Reduced Advertising Budgets
Ah, business.
Don’t get me wrong: I get that part of being a writer is the business of being a writer. I get that it comes with the territory and you can’t really avoid it (although I suspect that the very successful ones do manage to avoid it to a large extent).
But I don’t have to like it. And I don’t.
Last week I was hit with an advertising charge for my work. That’s normally fine, but it was almost the same size as the charge I was hit with the week before that… and I just couldn’t afford it. On average, my book sales for a month cover about two weeks of running ads… and normally that’s a loss I can absorb because I’m still a new writer and I’m moving small-potatoes worth of units. But paying literally twice that amount…
Anyway. Moral of the story is that I’ve had to reduce my ad budget by a sharp margin, all the while Ye Olde Amazon is saying that I should be increasing it. I understand their justification, even if we step back from the “We want to make more money so you should pay us more money” position: the number of times my ads show up to people is definitely limited by their budget. But that will have to wait until I have more money I can spend on ads, which I currently do not.
Fun.
Oh well. Hopefully enough people are leaving 4-and-5 star reviews that a few more people will see my work, and at this point that’s basically all I can ask for. Maybe someday I will have a proper ad budget… but it is not this day!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Ocean's Eleven with Power Armour
I recently read an article over on John Scalzi’s blog. This is unusual for me… I really like Scalzi’s work, as I think everyone who knows me is aware, but I don’t often read any blogs by writers. I couldn’t say exactly why, but they aren’t entertaining to me (he said while writing just such a blog).
Writing here, for me, is part of the job. This comes with the territory, and since it’s writing I don’t mind that bit. And reading also comes with the territory, but I normally focus on reading that’s relevant specifically to my genre (hence me sitting down and crushing through all the Chamber’s “Wayfarer” series last month). Anyway, I digress.
I was reading Scalzi’s blog, which a guest author had written. And the guest author mentioned in a throw-away comment that their next work was, and I quote, “Ocean’s Eleven with Power Armour” (they probably spelled it “armor” because they’re American, but again, digression). And that made me instantly a little sad and took a lot of the wind out of my sails for this last week.
The story I’m working on right now is much more “Ocean’s Eleven with cyberpunk” than power armour, but it’s close. And I know that it’s not about having super unique ideas, but rather telling whatever ideas you have in the best way… great stories are retold countless times. It’s not the idea, but the execution that matters.
But I was still sad. And a little demoralized. I’ll get over it (I mean, the novel still needs to get written!), but maybe that’s why I don’t read other author’s blogs…
Anyway! Just a blip. I’ll be back at it later today after my classes!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!