There is an old video game by the folks over at Penny Arcade (a webcomic from a time before that was “a thing”) called On The Rain-slick Precipice of Darkness, and I always loved that title.
The game itself is pretty meh… not bad, by any extent, and they did some really neat world-building (and some very silly world-building as well), but that title… gosh, it’s just wonderfully evocative, isn’t it? And kinda silly at the same time, which is more-or-less what they were going for.
The general term for prose like that is “purple,” although I don’t recall why. I remember looking it up once, but have since forgotten… thankfully this is something I can look up again! One second please…
Ah yes, Horace and the Ars Poetica. Right, right. A silly reason, which is why I promptly forgot it. Anyway.
I tend to use a fair amount of purple in my work, as I’m sure you are aware (having read it both in my books and here, on this lovely blog-type-thing). But I like a bit… sure, too much and it’s distracting (although I would argue that Stephen King built his literary career on piles of prose so purple it’s positively grape-flavoured). But it is a special kind of fun to describe or read about something truly otherworldly, and that often involves these little flights of fancy that aren’t strictly needed.
I am currently reading The Diving Bell and the Butteryfly by Bauby, and it’s littered with purple prose (well… it was originally French, so I don’t know if that makes it violet or whatever). But under the circumstances, the entire book built one letter at a time by somebody with locked-in syndrome, it seems fitting. Reminds me why I love those little flowery patches sometimes strewn throughout a good sci-fi piece.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Speedy, Speedy Words
It’s nice to get into a writing groove.
There are lots of phrases for it these days. “The Groove” is an old one, but it still checks out. “The Zone” or “The Flow” are all equally good, in my humble opinion, and I’m sure there are dozens of newer, hipper, better terms for the same basic idea: when you sit down to do a thing, and you kinda forget about everything else because you are doing this one thing and gosh if you aren’t doing it well.
I’m in that mode right now with the novel. I had hit a pretty major stumbling block a few months back so I took a step back and then came running at it full steam. The progress since I decided to do that has been lovely… I’m a man of numbers, as I think I’ve mentioned in the past, and I like seeing those numbers go up.
Who knows how long it will last. I’m back in school in… a week? So that’s going to put a damper on it, probably. But that still gives me a bunch of time, and I should probably make the most of it.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Severance by Ling Ma
Right on the heels of finishing the Kaiju Preservation Society by Scalzi I managed to read Severance by Ling Ma.
I admit I was hoping it was tied into the show of the same name, but they have nothing to do with each other. Such is life… but Severance is really good! I was very impressed. One of the comments on the jacket describe it as a “Zombie apocalypse coming of age story” which is hilarious, and true.
If I had complaints… well, the ending was a little unsatisfying. Not awful, but I always like my stories wrapped up neatly, and this one wasn’t. There was an element of deus ex machina at work, and that always feels a little cheat-y, but again, that’s a pet peeve of mine and not a fault in the story.
Speaking of which, I have started reading The Fault in Our Stars, and it’s a lot funnier than I was expecting. So far at least. I suspect that it won’t stay “funny” for the whole piece.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
The Kaiju Preservation Society
Today I finished reading John Scalzi’s latest book, “The Kaiju Preservation Society.”
It was a lot of fun. Really enjoyed it, laughed out loud at least four or five times. There is a part… oh, spoilers, I shouldn’t. But let’s just say it’s cotton-candy reading at its finest. No deep or meaningful messages, but a great yarn told in a really interesting and engaging way.
I think I’ve waxed poetic about Scalzi at least a few times in the past, but it bares repeating: I don’t think he’s the greatest sci-fi author of our times. I don’t even think he’s a super-genious author in general, but he is very good at writing intelligent, funny, clever stories that fit together incredibly well. He’s a craftsman. If you want, I dunno, flowery literature that you can read while sipping champagne and eating caviar, he’s probably not a great fit, but gosh does he craft great stories. I’m a huge fan, and not least because his writing is exactly the kind of writing I aspire to.
Also, he seems really nice. Like, just sorta human in a really interesting way. Who knows if that’s true or not (he has a public persona, after all, so no idea how well crafted that is), but he seems really nice, and that’s nice.
Anyway, now that I’ve finished reading his story, I’m gonna get back to writing mine!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Writing is like BBQing Ribs
I love to BBQ. I don’t do it much for a variety of reasons (the main one being that I hate insects, and it’s very hard to be outside without there being insects around), but I try to power up the ol’ ‘cue at least a few times a month. Ribs has been a tricky thing… they’re best when finished on the grill, but not very good when they’re cooked all the way through on the grill.
I’m sure there are people who will disagree. And, hey, you can technically smoke ribs in a good BBQ for sure, but honestly? Wet cooking tends to do them better most of the time, and then a nice glaze to finish them off on the BBQ. In my experience, at least.
What does that have to do with writing? Well, nothing directly… I am a man of many talents, and I enjoy a lot of very diverse interests. Japanese Fencing, working out, running, biking, cooking, baking, painting… I’m all over the place, really.
But in a different way, it is kinda like writing. A good story isn’t finished in the same way that it’s cooked… er… written. Heck, even starting a story is a radically different process (for me) that writing it, and the editing process is again a totally different thing. It’s like… having to know how to bake so you can make a good crust, but then knowing how to cook so that you can make a really tasty meat filling to put in the crust, and then knowing how to decorate the finished meat pie?
It’s a stretch, but I think you get the idea. I’m going to go upstairs in a few minutes to turn on the oven, assemble a spice-rub, and then toss in a couple of racks of ribs for a few hours. While they cook I am going to finish another chapter or two on the novel. Then I’m going to turn on the BBQ to medium, brush on some sauce on those ribs, and toss them in for a couple minutes per side while I think about how to make sure the “sudden but inevitable” twist happens in my story exactly when I want it to, and not before that.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Exhaustion
I slept in today.
I didn’t go to bed particularly late last night… say, around 11pm, which is pretty normal for me.
And then I didn’t wake up until twelve hours later. And, to be completely honest… I could’ve stayed in bed. I almost did. The thing that dragged me out of my warm, comfortable bed was the knowledge that I would get to write today and I didn’t want to have to start doing that after dinner.
It’s a hard feeling to quantify. Like, I’m not tired right now, but I could totally go back to sleep given the opportunity. Everything is sort of… baseline sore and tired? Just always tired.
Maybe in a past life I was a cat. They seem to be very happy always sleeping, and maybe I would be too, given the opportunity? But no, a few hundred million years ago some fish crawled out of the ocean and so now I have a mortgage to pay.
Life is weird, folks.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
A Little Voice
I find it interesting how authors have “voices.” Not their actual real-world voice, of course, but a kind of stylistic fingerprint that usually demarcates their work.
Like, pick a random page from a well-known author (or at least one you know well) and chances are pretty good you could pick them out. Or, perhaps for a more fair test, pick an author, and then read four paragraphs, where only one was written by the author… I think most readers would be able to pick it out, even if it was a paragraph from a book they never read.
It makes me think a little about my voice. My “style” is definitely laser-swords-and-explosions, but I suspect there are elements of my work that I’m not conscious of that work their way in. The way my characters talk, or how often they talk, or what they talk about… how often discussions of coffee come up in my works (I can think of at least three distinct coffee-related conversations in the Tintian series… I don’t think it was one per book, but it may have been!), or how often I shy away from depicting violence directly… a lot of casual comic-book-style references to the aftermath of violence (ships exploding or the like), but seldom that zoomed-in view that some authors wield so skillfully.
I suppose a big part of authorial style is specifically that you aren’t aware of it. You don’t think in a voice, you just write and your own style develops out of that. Or, in my case, I absorb as many other styles and voices as I can, and then I try my best to synergize them into something new and interesting. “How to Train Your Dragon, in Space” or “Tintin adventure stories, in Space” or whatever.
Anyways, just some idle thoughts for today. Back to the novel!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Summer Reading
Well, like it or not, the summer is starting to draw to a close. The weather is calming down a bit (it was hot as Hades for a few weeks there), the days are getting noticeably shorter, and my last two semesters of school are approaching like a freight train.
Part of going back to school for these last few courses includes a list of “summer reading,” which I have been happily diving into, along with a few leisure books I picked up at the same time. The first is Severance my Ling Ma (no relation to the show of the same name), and it’s been a joy to read thus far. I forgot how much I love reading during my lunch breaks… just a few chapters at a time. I get the impression that the ending (which I am still half a book away from) is going to be super bleak, but hey, you can’t always have everything.
I also picked up John Scalzi’s Kaiju Preservation Society, which I am super excited to dive into. I love Scalzi’s work, almost without exception (I didn’t love all of the sequels to Old Man’s War, but I at least liked them), and I have heard very good things about this one.
Those two should get me to about mid-next-week, at which point I will dive into the other two I picked up thus far (Icarus Down by Bow, I think, and… another school one… oh! The Fault in Our Stars by… I don’t know off-hand!).
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Little Projects
The life of a writer is weird. Everything I do, to some extent, involves writing. Every show or movie I watch, every book I read, every game I play, every conversation I am involved in or overhear… all of it goes into the ol’ skull sponge so I can pull it out later for a story.
I mean, obviously not everything I hear is going to end up in a story. But it is all little snippets, little pieces of information that get stored away for use. It’s wonderful and exhausting… you lose some of the innocence of watching a show “just for leisure,” since at its core everything is going to be involved in work. And hey, I’m not complaining. This is part of why I love being a writer… seeing the world through a weird and wonderful lens that I can then use to communicate to my readers in new and interesting ways.
Huh. I just realized that “skull sponge” was from Cyberpunk 2077. See what I mean? In it goes, out it comes.
Anyway. Just a weird thought I had. I’m working on a quasi-speculative-fiction-pirate story right now, and its making me realize that much of what I “know” about pirates isn’t actually factual, but based on other media I’ve consumed. Which, in this case, totally fine, since I’m not trying to have a factual, historical story… just something with sorta-pirate set-dressing. But even that involves knowing enough of the history to make sure I get those parts right. And, hey, if I happen to watch Pirates of the Caribbean a few times for research… so be it!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Failure and Success
I wanted to finish a short story to submit to a market by the end of July.
I didn’t manage it. I tried, I got several thousand words into several different drafts, but at the end of the day (yesterday, in fact) I didn’t have a finished story to submit, and that’s a failure.
I can cushion it with all sorts of softer language: it was a learning experience, I learned a lot, It wasn’t meant to be, it was an extremely stressful month, and so on, and so forth. But the simple truth is that I wanted to do a thing, and I wasn’t able to do it.
That’s okay. Failure is just part of the job. Not everything I write is going to light the world on fire… heck, if anything I write gets widespread acceptance or readership I will be very, very pleasantly surprised. I have humble wishes when it comes to my writing… a small community just big enough to support my work, really.
But it is equally important to know when I stumble, to learn from it, and to take steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Was there anything I could do to help me finish that story? Is there something I can do now to help me finish the next one?
And so forth.
The secret to success I’m told isn’t to never make a mistake. It’s to do your best to not make the same mistake twice.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Cyberpunk 2077
Well, I managed to finish Cyberpunk 2077. Not a perfect experience, but a joyful ride regardless.
There’s something to be said about good cyberpunk. As a genre, I think I’ve mentioned before, I don’t think it really exists any more… even this game isn’t technically cyberpunk in a modern sense. I think it acknowledges that with an alternate history that dates back to the 80s (when the original Cyberpunk RPG was written, I believe). So in a way it’s more alt-timeline sci-fi than cyberpunk… but whatever, I’m splitting hairs. It was fun!
There’s an interesting element to the story, though… and more varied endings than you can shake a really big stick at. A lot of them are “bad” endings (for a loose definition of the word), and I was okay with skipping most of those… but a few offer moral gray areas that are very interesting at the least. And I don’t think any of them are unmitigated “good” endings… something I usually want from my fiction, both what I consume and what I produce. Life is depressing enough without adding to that in fiction, in my humble opinion. But this one was… well, true in spirit, I suppose? Few real cyberpunk stories have “good” or “happy” endings, because the stories are almost never about “good” or “happiness.” They’re about survival, or anger, or fear… but happiness? Not so much.
So they nailed that part at least. And, hey, when I get a rig that can really run CP2077 I absolutely will reinstall and run it. My current machine, being as old as time itself, could barely handle it on Low specs, and while I still had a great time, Night City definitely loses something without the… taste, the scent, the grime you can almost feel. The “punk” part of the world, I suppose.
Anyway. Gave me heaps of inspiration for my own work, and at the end of the day, that’s really want I want from anything I read or watch. Just a few lessons, a couple ideas, maybe a snippet of dialog that stays and can be tweaked a bit.
Heck of a ride, though. Not perfect, and some really questionable editorial decisions, but honestly? I enjoyed it.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Carrot Cake
I like carrot cake. There, I’ve said it. I don’t think it’s my favourite cake by a long shot, and I certainly wouldn’t pick it over most other cake variants… chocolate, vanilla, strawberry shortcake, coffee, toffee, caramel, apple… but I do really like carrot cake.
Which is a bit weird, because at its core, carrot cake is ‘emergency cake,’ or wartime cake, or cake made when absolutely everything else has gone to the soldiers and you’re left with hungry children and root vegetables.
Sure, cream cheese icing helps. And yes, modern versions definitely include more sugar… and I like raisins, don’t mind nuts, and have had some very satisfying carrot cakes with pineapple in it (don’t knock it ‘till you’ve tried it!). But it got me thinking, via a remarkably indirect way, about the shortcuts I make in order to write my books. The substitutions I make because all the sugar and most of the flour has gone away somewhere else, to deal with other stresses in my life. And even thought that’s true, that I’m working with the totality of what I have remaining… it can still come out with a pretty good cake.
Maybe the real treasure was the carrot cakes we made along the way? I dunno, just a weird thought I had today while enjoying a small slice of carrot cake.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
I Have Too Many Books
As a writer, this perhaps shouldn’t be a surprise, but I have a lot of books. I own them, and four full-sized, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves upon which about half of my collection lives. The other half lives in boxes (mostly waterproof moving crates, basically), but the moral of this story is that I have a lot of books.
Sci-fi, fantasy, English, Physics, Japanese, Chinese, a few religious works, translations of religious works, roleplaying game manuals, source books, rule books, books on editing, writing, drawing, and just about everything else under the sun. A few dictionaries, a thesaurus or two, an atlas… I don’t think I have an generic encyclopedia, but honestly I might.
And that’s to say nothing about the dozens of books I own in digital-only format, whether PDFs of novels or other books on my computer, or ebooks on one of my two Kindles.
And so, what, is this a humble-brag? Have I come on here just to let all of you good readers of my fabulous wealth (ha!) buried in my personal book-horde? No. Honestly, I have too many books. I know I need to get about a dozen more for my few remaining courses (ah, university… so expensive, and yet still so questionably useful), but I’m getting to the point where at least a few of them are going to have to go. And that is going to be a few painful days of decisions, I tell you what… but perhaps I can donate them somewhere and they can bring motivation and/or happiness to others.
We will see!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Weird Social Situations
We had a staff party at the small game store I work at last weekend. It was… uncomfortable… to be out in public around so many people, and since it was at a restaurant I was unmasked for the majority of it (I wore my mask into and out of the restaurant, and the space we had was a patio so it was open air, but yeah, I’m a nervous guy).
It was also weird to be around… just… like… a crowd? Crowds are weird, and I don’t handle them super-well. I like talking in front of crowds, and I like attending seminars and classes, but those are different creatures entirely. There is a flow and a tempo, there are expectations and rules. But in social situations with lots of people and no clear “purpose"… yeah, I get nervous. I want to listen to everyone, I want everyone to be able to talk, I want nobody to feel left out or ignored. But I also can’t pay attention to that many people all at once.
It’s nerve-wracking. I had fun, or at least as much fun as I think is currently possible, but yeah, my nerves were shot after a two hour dinner. I even skipped dessert, which is not a sentence I say lightly.
Oh well. Baby steps back towards normalcy, I suppose. Baby steps.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Multiple Starts
Writing this short story is proving surprisingly difficult! I wrote a few thousand words, and then restarted the whole thing, and then deleted that, and then restarted again, and now I’m on the third “first draft” of this story. It’s… discouraging, I suppose? Like, I don’t mind, but it can be frustrating to know that it isn’t quite right, but not finding what is actually right.
It’s a process, of course, and I love the process. But it can be difficult as you are in the middle of it. That’s kinda just what writing is like… difficult while you are doing it, but a very satisfying conclusion when you do the difficult part well.
My initial thought for the short story was about a test to help young adults decide what they wanted to do with their lives, but a futuristic take on it. The difficulty I’m having is finding the right level of stakes: I don’t want the story to be grim and dark, but also there has to be something at risk for it to be interesting.
I’m going to try again today, see what I come up with. Who knows, maybe this time will be the final ‘first’ draft!
Hope everyone is staying safe and healthy!
Fun with the Internet!
While I suspect that the events of the last few days will rapidly fade into the collective unconsciousness faster than average, it has been something of a hellish week as a result of the Great Internet Crash of ‘22.
For those unaware, Canada has very few telecom companies, and one of them went down a few days back. Not the whole company, but the internet infrastructure went down, with massive ripples affecting banking, government, business, and entertainment. Plus, it was really hard to browse for anything.
Things are just now returning to normal (hence why there was no update yesterday… literally couldn’t!), but I’m hopeful this will shake things up a little, maybe result in some positive changes for Canadian telecom and internet handling. We can hope, at least. And I’m going to spend most of today trying to do the things that I should’ve been able to do over the weekend but definitely could not!
Either way, hope that none of you were too negatively affected!
Hope everyone is safe and healthy!
Military Sci-fi
I like many military sci-fi stories. In fact, almost all of my favourite sci-fi authors have written military sci-fi stories of one stripe or another… The Forever War by Haldeman, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Heinlein, Old Man’s War by Scalzi… the list is extensive. Even some of my newer favourites (Chamber’s Long Way to a Small Angry Planet and Leckie’s Ancillary Justice) have an element of military sci-fi in them.
But at the same time, I don’t like military fiction as a general rule. The new Top Gun movie is going to be a pass for me because I see it as transparent military recruiting jingoism. I’ve read a few of Clancy’s books, and they’re fine, but they lose something by being… realistic? If that makes any sense?
It’s a weird line to walk. My current work has a protagonist that’s a starfighter pilot (and her partner, a starfighter mechanic), but it’s so divorced from the concept of the military being an absolute of any type that I don’t have issues with that. The military isn’t absolutely good, but it’s also not absolutely evil. It’s an arm of the government, and that means it’s complicated.
But I could be rightly called out for the hypocrisy of this position because, honestly, it’s subjective rather than objective. I like reading about starships exploding and laser swords and waves of droids fighting hordes of clones. I can identify the problematic elements of it, but I still enjoy it. And I don’t think there is anything intrinsically wrong with that… we should always be critical of the media we love.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Happy (Insert National Identity Here) Day!
On Friday I had a day off from my other job (the one that pays for this one, the one I want to do) as an opportunity for national pride. American readers are probably getting today off for a similar reason.
National pride is a weird thing to me. Don’t get me wrong, I love my country and I am very, very grateful that I was born and raised here instead of many other countries with more regressive or oppressive governments. But part of pride in one’s country is the understanding of what sucks about it, and I gotta be honest… there’s a lot that sucks about Canada. We have a long and ignoble tradition of genocide, colonialism, and a military budget that way, way outstrips our theoretically pacifistic identity… and, like many places around the world right now, we have a serious problem with certain political factions within our nation that are stretching for every iota of power they can grab. Dangerous, at the very least.
Which isn’t to say there isn’t a lot to be proud about. There absolutely is. But part of that pride should be funneled into trying to make the country great, rather than just assuming it is already as good as it could possibly ever be. It involves looking at other nations and figuring out how they got to be better at the aspects they are better at, and how they are worse in the areas they are weaker. It’s a moment for reflection and understanding, rather than jingoistic screaming about our ‘superiority’ without any consideration for what those kinds of messages say about us, as people, and our nation as a whole.
But, hey, don’t let me get in the way of whatever plans you may have for today. I hope it’s a great day, no matter where you live or how you show your appreciation for the flag you were born under.
Hope everyone out there stays safe and healthy!
Dating
Dating is weird, folks.
Like, don’t get me wrong. This isn’t revolutionary or unexpected or whatever… and I think dating has been weird since it was invented sometime in the 1500s or whatever. But modern dating? Weird.
I am in a very happy long-term relationship. This has insulated me from having to deal with the ravages of the dating world, a fact for which I am very grateful. I’m not saying it was better back in my day, because that sure as heckfire isn’t true, but it was a field that I was familiar with at least.
For those of you curious, I applied for a job today that is for a company that works very specifically in the dating world. I doubt anything will come of it (honestly, most of my job applications work out to be nothing), but it was an interesting application for my writing. And if something does come of it, it might be really interesting.
Anyway, we will see, we will see. But it at least gave me a tiny little taste of what dating is like these days!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Superstore
There is something really magical about well-written comedy. Superstore isn’t the greatest show I have ever seen, but for a six season show, they did a really good job of giving interesting characters an opportunity to grow and shine in interesting ways. I’m glad I watched it, I’m glad they got to finish it so strong.
While I think Kim’s Convenience is overall a funnier show, it didn’t really end… it was cancelled before the writers had a chance to wrap it up, and as a result I will always be a little unsatisfied by it. But they’re both really great shows in their own ways, and I recommend either of them without hesitation to people who want funny shows that still manage to be intelligent.
Still, it’s nice to have the story wrapped up, and it’s nice that the romantic arc resolved itself in a really smart way. So, I guess, thank you to the writers for being emotionally intelligent as well as clever! Great job, folks!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy.