So for once, I remembered to write this Sunday! I’m very proud of myself… I had a very busy day of reading homework and cooking (roast pork ribs, vegetables, potatoes, and a blueberry shortcake with whipped cream for dessert). Still have more reading to do in Gabor Mate’s “In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts,” but I’m making good headway into it and wanted to make something nice for dinner.
I don’t usually read “real world” stuff like this. In fact, I wouldn’t be reading it now if it weren’t a course requirement (full disclosure: I only have to read half of it for the course, but I’m a completionist… not going to do something halfway if I can avoid it). Too depressing, even with the occasional sprinkling of optimism and hope. I know that the Vancouver East End (“Hastings”) hasn’t gotten better in the years since the book was written and revised. My brother had a office in the area for a long time, and he is not sympathetic to the plight of the less fortunate but he is a reliable observer. The stories he tells are not encouraging.
But Mate (there should be an accent on the “e” there, but I don’t know how to find/put one on Squarespace quickly) is a very talented writer, and his admissions of his own addictions are really interesting. Still too depressing for me, but I’m glad I’m reading it.
Anyway, only a few more days before the end of the month, and I’d like to get a bit more work done before then, so I’m gonna get back to it!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
The Problem with Quantum Mechanics
I failed my third year Quantum Mechanics course the first time I took it. I passed on the second attempt, but I think more out of the professor’s pity than any firmer grasp of the material.
Which is slightly unfair. I more-or-less understood QM. The issue is that it’s fundamentally nigh-impossible to actually understand QM without the underlying mathematics, and I have never been any good with the mathematics.
Let’s take a simple example: the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. This is familiar to some non-scientists, but it is most often summarized as “The more accurately you know an object’s velocity, the less accurately you know that object’s position.” Keep in mind this only applies to quantum-level physics (hence the ridiculous joke where a police officer pulls over Heisenberg and says “Did you know that you were going 100 km/h?” and Heisenberg throws up his hands and says “Great, now I’m completely lost!”), but the concept sort of makes sense.
Except that’s not the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. The HUP is more along the lines of “Any pair of canonically conjugate variables are connected such that there is an upper limit to the accuracy of any measurement of those variables in relation to each other,” and that is defined by an equation. And it doesn’t matter if it makes sense… quantum mechanics, if you will excuse the oversimplification, doesn’t need to make sense: it just has to be true. So the age-old question of “Is Light a wave or particle” has the answer “Yes, and no, and both, but sometimes neither, depending on the circumstances.”
What are the circumstances? Just plug the variables into this equation…
Hopefully you understand what I’m getting at. Classical mechanics is all about grasping and understanding how objects interact: a cannonball has a parabolic trajectory, so how does that relate to gravity? The sun’s mass allows us to understand the Earth’s mass and the way that our moon orbits us is the same way, albeit simpler, than the way Titan or Io orbit their planets. But QM? Doesn’t care. It doesn’t need to make sense, but it has to be mathematically solid.
This long tirade brought to you by trying to explain the Uncertainty principle to somebody last night. It did not go well… but that’s in part because it’s a very difficult concept once you get into the weeds of it.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Single Sundays
I lament that with such limited “free” time (what is “free” time? Either all time is without price, or all time is priceless, and nary the twain shall meet!) I still am unable to tear myself away for an hour to write a blog post. I should’ve posted on Sunday, but it was such a whirlwind of friends and visits and cooking that I, quite plainly, completely forgot.
My apologies, dear reader/visitor. I shall endeavour to do better!
Progress on the novel is slow, but steady. Sadly, at this point it would require a nigh-miracle for me to have the time to finish it and have it edited in time to publish in December. Perhaps it’s for the best… perhaps releasing two novels in 2023 will be better than only 1 novel in 2022? Hard to say… I look forward to the day that I’m established enough that my audience knows the next book is coming without me having to maintain a constant pace of publishing! Perhaps one day.
For now, I apologize again for the lack of a Sunday post, and then head back to my studies! Big test in a few hours… the joys of university education.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
T.S. Eliot, And Why I Don't Like Him (or Faulkner!)
Honestly, I know almost nothing about T.S. Eliot as a human being aside from the following facts:
1. He was born in America but moved to England at some point, and
2. If you don’t use his middle initial in his name, it spells “toilet” backwards.
Not a lot to go on as a human, really, but I suspect I could learn more if I cared to. The fact is I don’t, because having read a few of his poems and one short story (As I Lay Dying) I have determined I don’t like his work.
Granted, it’s probably unfair to say since I haven’t read his magnum opus in The Wasteland, but I also feel no compulsion to do so. He’s just so… dreary. Turns a good phrase, crafts really evocative scenes, but gosh are they ever depressing.
I should point out that this isn’t to say I don’t think he’s good. His work is incredible. But it’s like appreciating a painting by Picasso or a building designed by Gaudi. I can admire the artistry without actually wanting to be anywhere near the work itself. They’re just not my style.
But it’s equally important to know that. Since I know what I don’t like in Eliot’s work, I can now avoid making the same creative decisions in my own work. And that’s worth something.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
EDIT: Ha! I forgot that As I Lay Dying is a Faulkner, not an Eliot! Gosh, that’s embarrassing. I don’t like either of them, though. ^_^
And Now Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Program
Well, it was almost a nice vacation while it lasted. My leg is still giving me a bit of trouble, but it could be much worse. My arm is definitely on the mend, but no workout for me this morning since I don’t want to push my luck just yet. Next week for sure.
Oh, and the weather has decided that it should be heckin’ cold all week, and rain/snow, so that’s also a joy.
But that’s okay! I finished all my assigned reading and started on the next wave of books I need finished for November. Nothing super fun, unfortunately, and the Faulkner I had to read was basically torture, but what can ya do?
You can write! Which I am. Right now. Yay!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
The Last Leg of Vacation
Well, I have two days left off from school and my other job before I am back in the metaphorical salt mines. It wasn’t the break I wanted due to my injury a week ago, but I can’t really complain. It could’ve been much, much worse, and this gave me an excuse to go on a few long walks (to figure out how my leg was healing. Turns out… pretty well!), play lots of Battletech the video game (still one of my all-time favourite games… this is probably my 8th time playing the mercenary campaign), and build a few LEGO buildings.
So, while not perfect… I’m not complaining. It’s worked out pretty dang well, all things considered.
However, since today is my 2nd last day off for who-knows-how-long, it is the day I have to wrap up all the things I need to wrap up before heading back. I fixed the brake lights on the car, I cleaned up and organized the basement a little, and I bought a new bike helmet to replace the noble one that saved my life. Oh, and washed all my 2nd layer masks (I wear an N95 as my primary mask, which is thrown out at the end of every day obviously, but the advisement to wear a 2nd mask if you are in frequent contact with the public, which I am, has resulted in me wearing my “nice” masks as a second layer).
Not a sentence I think I would have ever imagined writing 3 years ago. Ah well!
I am going to finish up a few more chores, and then… get back to writing! Woo!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
The Problem with Gravity
Normally, with a title like that, I would be waxing poetic about the difficulty of writing a story that includes realistic interpretations of gravity. It can be done (see the sublime The Expanse for it done extremely well), but in my case I normally just wave my hand and say “Grav-plating” or some-such technobabble and am done with it.
But in this specific case, what I mean is that I fell off my bike on Saturday and have been slowly, slowly recovering ever since. Hence no posts on Sunday or Tuesday this week. Sorry about that for anyone that was looking!
I’m feeling much better. My right leg has a bruise the size of a sheet of paper, my right arms has a bruise bigger than my hand, and my left shoulder is still sore, but I really can’t complain. Wear your helmets, folks, because I took that fall straight to the head and it might’ve killed me.
But, hey, it couldn’t happen at a better time, because I’m on vacation for a week! And let me tell you, getting an immobilizing injury the day before that started is exactly how I wanted to start my holiday.
Sigh
Ah well. Now that I’m okay with stairs again, I can at least get back to writing! And I can’t really do much else… So not all bad.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Icarus Down by James Bow
I just finished reading a neat YA-style sci-fi written by James Bow called Icarus Down. I won’t say it’s the best sci-fi I’ve ever read, but it was very good. Enjoyable, light, moved at a nice pace… the protagonist is a little too mature for the age he’s depicted, but under the circumstances it’s a justifiable choice. Like, it feels slightly surreal, but by the same token the situation he is thrust into is pretty surreal, so it works.
I love good YA fiction. I don’t read a tonne of it, but the stuff I have read is as satisfying as “adult” sci-fi. Actually, much of it is more so… trying to find that balance of approachability without patronizing, and still engaging? That’s a very tight balance to hit, and honestly I think Bow did a great job!
Added bonus: James Bow is (or at least was at the time of writing Icarus Down) a local! He apparently lives in Kitchener, Ontario, which is where I am! The thought that I may have randomly run into him at some point makes me smile. He’s a bit older than me (I think 7 years or so?), but that’s still pretty close. I wonder what he’s up to these days… I hope still writing good sci-fi! I should check out the rest of his oeuvre… in fact, I’m going to do that right after I leave him a 5-star review on Goodreads!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Busy Busy Busy
There is an old fable that my father was very fond of telling me about a lazy grasshopper and an industrious ant. Depending on the mood dad was in, the lazy grasshopper either died from starvation, froze to death, or was permanently indebted to the ant. Basically your stock-standard story about the importance of working hard at all times without exception.
Several years ago, somebody told me “Hard work isn’t rewarded: it is exploited” and that’s kinda stuck in my head. Which isn’t to say I don’t work hard: I work very hard. But the rewards from that work have been… fleeting? And that’s okay… hard work without good luck is useless. I get that. But days like today, as I witness the state of my bank account and my bills… it can be hard to keep a positive outlook.
But what choice do I have? I can’t not work hard. It’s just not the way I’m wired. The new push for “Quiet Quitting” is really good for other people (honestly! Work to what your contract stipulates you are paid for and not more unless they pay you more!), but it’s not possible for me. I try, but I always end up rising to meet new challenges, to write more words, to be a better employee at the job I work in order to pay for my writing. I say I don’t care about my grades and then bend over backwards to make sure I maintain my straight-A average.
Ah well. Hopefully at some point the work I put in will be rewarded enough that I don’t have to constantly work at the razor edge of breakdown. That’d be nice.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Organization
I am, by my nature, a man who enjoys organization. There is a “way” that things should be done, a place that things should be placed, a location where a thing can be located.
My current working environment is not a reflection of that internal belief at the moment.
Right now I am surrounded in a situation that, were I Skurge, I would proclaim “Behold! My stuff.” I am slowly and steadily chipping away at the mess, organizing and reorganizing, deciding what stays and what goes.
For example, I currently have two full shelves of photo albums. I don’t think I’ve looked at them in the last decade. Should I keep them? I could really use that shelf space, as my book collection continues to grow but my ability to put things in it does not (no “shelf extenders,” as retail workers might say).
But even along with stuff that I have emotional attachments to, there is a lot that just takes up space because of the sunk-cost fallacy. I haven’t thrown out that glowing scoreboard that I wanted to use for board game sessions in the BeforeTimes… maybe I will use it when I feel comfortable having people over again, but maybe not? I really don’t know. But I’ve held onto it for 2 years, and it feels like I shouldn’t throw it out now because then why did I hold onto it for two years?
Ah, stuff is weird. I’m probably going to have to do a really good clean and toss a lot of stuff in a week or two. That will be a hard day, but afterwards I will feel much, much better.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Music That Matters
I got into music relatively late in life. My parents didn’t want me to “waste my time” on frivolous stuff like the arts, and so it wasn’t until high school that I actually got introduced to the concept of performing music.
Just as a brief moment of context, my high school had three different art streams: Drama, Music, and Visual Arts, and every student had to pick one. There was a really cute girl I liked in the Drama stream, but there were two in Music, and so I picked music. No regrets there, although I do sometimes wonder what my life would be like if I had pursued one of the other streams… just curiosity more than anything.
Anyway, my parents also didn’t like music aside from opera and the occasional Christmas carol. My brother used to listen to rock and/or roll, and when he moved out in protest of my father’s utterly draconian parenting my parents decided that music (and roleplaying games) were the cause. So no pop music for me.
I mention this only because I love music. Not all music, and definitely not at all volumes, but I have wide ranging and diverse tastes. A lot of it not in English or without vocals at all, because those help me write.
I can’t listen to English songs when I write because the lyrics work themselves into my writing. A lesson I learned in university the first time around.
So I listen to Japanese and Korean pop music (J-Pop and K-Pop respectively), Mongolian rock, Chinese ballads. I listen to instrumental bard songs and French love songs. I listen to Swedish punk and German alternative. Just about anything as long as it’s catchy and got a solid hook. I’m a simple man, I like simple music.
The music I’ve listened to most over the last decade is almost certainly the Skyrim soundtrack… the decade before that it would’ve been the music from the Final Fantasy series or Katamari Damacy’s soundtrack. Good tunes, folks. Good tunes.
I hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Side-Effects May Include
I love writing. I love it so much that it makes doing anything that isn’t writing far more difficult. As a result, I don’t often come here to talk about things unrelated to my writing experience directly, but I figured, hey, why not try once?
I’ve recently been prescribed an antidepressant. It has a long and complicated name that I haven’t bothered to learn yet, and part of that is because of one weird little side-effect: it makes my mouth taste really weird.
There are two things to that statement:
1. My mouth usually doesn’t “taste” like anything unless I am eating (at which point it predictably tastes like whatever I’m eating). So the fact that I can taste something at all is distracting.
2. The taste isn’t pleasant, and it changes the taste of other things I eat and drink. The closest I can come to describing it is: imagine the taste of licking an envelope or stamp. Like that, but like a dozen times that.
It’s a thing. It’s a weird thing, but if these meds make me feel better, I will absolutely muscle through having a weird tasting mouth (I imagine that if it is a constant I will eventually be able to ignore it).
Sadly, it hasn’t gone away over the last 3 days… but I’ll give it a little more time. I’m told it often takes a few weeks for antidepressants to start having an affect.
Still, could be much worse! And I remain optimistic that eventually we will find a combination of meds and therapy that helps out.
Oh, and don’t even get me started on how expensive therapy is going to be. Woof. That was an unpleasant shock. Not that I’m saying therapists don’t deserve it, but wow.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
The Hunchback of Some-place French
For class this week we were to read a small portion of the Hunchback of Notre Dame. The fact that la Esmeralda is so dense is painful. And, I’m sorry, but nobody is so ugly you can’t look at them. Like, nobody. They might smell so bad you can’t stand to be near them, but unless they are literally rotting away, you should still be able to look at somebody.
Man, old writers are weird sometimes.
But whatever. The goal of the reading is to point out older writing focused on disability and how it is portrayed. One of the stories I read was The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which is a true-life memoir of a man who got Locked In syndrome from a stroke and wrote the story while attempting to recover. I think I mentioned it before… I read it over the summer and the fact that the editors tell you right off the bat that he ends up dying kinda soured me to the work. But it was a good read.
It was also very interesting to see how Quasimodo reacts to life as a fictional character crafted by, I imagine, a human not as hideous as he is. A lot of extrapolation there, and while interesting… I wouldn’t say believable.
Ah well. It is certainly true that beautiful people have an easier life, on the whole. Maybe it shouldn’t be that way? Who am I to judge?
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
New Stories
Progress continues on the novel! I broke through 20,000 words (again), and that feels significant. The next big hurdle is to hit 50K without hitting the denouement… I don’t think that will be a problem here. I’m already thinking about things I want to seed earlier into the story, which is great! I love when I get these forward-backward sorta plot issues. It feels satisfying!
This is one of the joys about writing in a less structured style. It feels more organic, and I can “discover” where the story is going as I write. And that can be a lot of fun!
It can also be super frustrating when it doesn’t click (like the first draft of this story wasn’t clicking). Then it’s all about poking and prodding and nudging the story in approximately the direction you want it to go while swearing profusely. Lots of swearing.
Anyway! I’m glad that the novel is coming along, and I still really want to finish it this year if at all possible. That will mean saving up enough for editing costs very soon, and hoping that my editor has some room in her schedule… but hey, we can hope!
Oh, and I still need to come up with a name for it…
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Old Stories
I just finishing reading a novel written sometime around the late 1800s called The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. It was… well, it was awful, albeit well written. The story is about a rich, pampered idiot named Newland Archer who falls in love and is an idiot while all the rich people around him act like idiots.
Very frustrating, do not recommend.
But it made me think a little bit about how my writing will be viewed in a hundred or two hundred years. I mean, at this point it is beyond arrogant to think that anyone will care… there are literally millions of writers in the English language, and while I think I am better than most, I wouldn’t put myself in the top thousand yet. And who knows, maybe I never will be… but even if I am, even if I become somebody in the top hundred (ha), will my work really be worth looking at in that time? Will I be “indicative of writing of my time” or “an unusual specimen of writing that was ahead (or behind?) other samples”? Or will I just be forgotten like countless hundreds of other writers.
Which, to be perfectly clear, I am okay with. I make no illusions that my work will be transformative or stand the test of time or whatever. But I am curious, after reading this very well written disaster, how future readers would consider my humble offerings.
Ah well. For now I will have to content myself with how contemporary readers view my work!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Journaling for Beginners
One of my courses this year requires that I keep a weekly journal. At first I pushed back against it (I mean, I’m going to do it regardless, but I mentally groaned when it was announced) because it’s always seemed so self-indulgent.
And then I realized that I am already keeping a journal (hello!) and that this felt bad only because I was doing it for a purpose rather than because I enjoyed it.
My partner told me years ago about a study where a bunch of kids were playing hockey on the street and an old man enjoyed watching them play so much that he offered to pay them for it. And the kids immediately lost interest in playing because now it was something they had to do instead of something they chose to do.
I’ve always hated the story (mostly because of how deeply I disagree with the fundamental message of “Do what you love and don’t worry about the money” being a message of rich people telling their rich kids to ignore the plight of everyone else), but I suddenly understood it here. I like writing… I love writing! But now I was being told I had to write and I wasn’t excited about it!
So I decided then and there that I was going to approach it as another blog like this one, but with an audience of one. I am going to target my rambling, rather on the things that bring me joy, as I do here, on things that will bring my professor joy. What does she want to read? I’m going to do my best to write that.
We’ll see how it plays out. One of the reasons I went back to school in the first place was to figure out how to write to a market… and hey, this is a very specialized market. Who knows? Maybe I’ll learn a thing or two in the process.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Presentation Woes
Tomorrow I have a “big” presentation for one of my 4th year courses. I am cautiously excited about it, but in the pursuit of doing it well I have let a few other aspects of my course work for the semester slide.
I want to point out that this is the first week of class and I am already behind in a few things. Which is… ya know… amazing. So much fun.
OH WELL! I have nobody but myself to blame. I should’ve sacrificed my Sunday to do class work and make sure I’m up-to-date on everything, but instead I tried to complete my readings instead.
Even right now, I am posting here instead of finishing my presentation! Argh! I should be doing that!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Date Shifts
Just a quick word for this week: posts will now be heading out on Tuesdays, some Thursdays, and Sundays, unlike my old Sunday/Wednesday schedule.
My school days have shifted, and correspondingly so has my time to write/post on this here tiny little corner of the internet where I put up my feet.
I know there aren’t many of you who read these posts, and I doubt that I will ever have a huge following of any type, but those of you who do read these: you are appreciated, and I’m sorry I forgot to mention last week that there would be a shift in posting days.
Still, good news that maybe this will result in me doing more posts?
Today I’m writing a presentation for class, but immediately after that I am heading off for American Literature. If I am lucky the rain will stop and I can bike to work!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Back to School, Back to School
Before anyone says it, I haven’t seen the Adam Sandler movie that the “Back to school, back to school, to prove to daddy I’m not a fool” quote comes from. I haven’t seen a lot of Sandler films… I think the man is talented, but he’s not my kind of funny. No judgements, just not my cup of tea.
That stated, I am going back to school tomorrow. I have 2 courses this semester, a 2nd year course and a 4th year course, and then one course in January. I’m going to miss classes when I’m done… I really love being in the university environment, but gosh can I not afford it. Even taking the courses part-time is staggeringly expensive, and while I have no illusions that this degree will somehow make me more marketable (I’m pretty sure I’m 95% unemployable at this point), I have enjoyed several of the classes I’ve taken. Plus there’s something almost magical about being in university… you will never be surrounded by so many intelligent, driven, clever people again.
At least I haven’t been. I miss it from my first pass through the ivy-covered halls of academia, and it was really wonderful to return and find that part was mostly unchanged.
I think I’ve completed most of my required summer reading, if not all of it, but whatever I have to read next I imagine I can crush pretty quickly. I have a few larger textbooks, but only a few this semester. And this is good, because I still have a lot of writing to finish this novel. Which, speaking of, I should get back to!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Putting It All Together
Last night as I was preparing for bed I had an idea for my novel. Which is not in and of itself notable… I have ideas for my work constantly.
But it was notable for being between chapters that I have already written. This is a dangerous thing for me to do before I finish a work… I risk talking about things that I will mention again in a chapter or two because my brain won’t remember what I’ve written about here that I have or haven’t written about there. It will all be caught eventually on the 2nd or 3rd draft, but I like avoiding the pitfall whenever I can.
But I do think it will help inject a bit more action into a relatively slow part of the story. As it stands now the protagonist is riding an elevator (a space elevator, sure, but basically an elevator) for eight hours and the action happens “off-screen” (I talk about the aftermath of the action, rather than the action). I think I know how I’m going to fix that.
Added bonus: makes the story more exciting! And at the end of the day, isn’t that what we all want? A bit more excitement in our literature?
… okay, maybe not all of us want that, but I sure as heck-fire do!
Hope everyone is staying safe and healthy!