I’ve had a few days to rest and recover recently. Not doing anything exciting… sleeping a lot and class readings and some video games and then sleeping more. If the weather was nicer I might exercise or go for a walk or something but honestly I’m just run down and taking things easy is… well, easy.
I still have one more day tomorrow before I go back to my other job. The paying one. I have no idea how I’m going to spend it, but hopefully productively. Or at least reasonably productively.
Video games and sleep are sometimes very productive.
I hope everyone is staying safe and healthy!
Midterms
So today I have my only midterm test of this semester. I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before, but I love midterms… I mean, I love tests in the grand scheme of things. Opportunities to prove I know what the heck I’m talking about.
This is a big change for me from the person I was the last time I attended university. I used to hate tests, but mostly because they were testing me on stuff I legit didn’t know. Or, at least, stuff I knew but couldn’t prove I knew. Mathematics, so binary, but also so methodical (which I am not) and patient (ditto) and slow (I think you can sense a trend here).
But these days? English Studies are all about justifications… basically instead of either knowing a thing or not, you have to be able to justify that you know a thing. And gosh am I ever full of justifications… or the ability to produce them, I suppose.
So tests these days don’t scare me any more. Which isn’t to say that I’m going to do super well on today’s. I could still be caught flatfooted and get everything wrong. It has happened. But it’s not something I worry about any more.
I have plenty of other stuff to worry about instead.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Pitches
Today I’m submitting a pitch for a novel (in the Infinity universe, no less!). I’m excited about it, but part of the process involved writing a detailed outline (no problem) and to pick examples of my previous work.
Ah, that’s tricky. Not that I don’t have a substantial oeuvre to choose from, but the actual choosing is tricky. How do I pick a favourite child? How to decide if this short story or that passage from a novel will convince the editor that my work will be up to snuff?
I picked two Infinity short stories (“The Ten Commandments of War on Varuna” and “Clockwork Blues”) and a chapter from Caitlyn Morcos, which I hope will give enough evidence that I can string words together. But who knows? Maybe they’re looking for a different tone for their work.
All I can do is apply and keep my fingers crossed.
Speaking of which, time to send off that application and then get a little reading done!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Nope, Still Weird
The title of this post is a direct reference to the fact that my website’s backend still looks weird (same, website, same), but could easily be a reference to me in general.
Hey Marc, are you less weird?
Nope. Still weird.
I’ve got to finish Wide Sargasso Sea for school this weekend, so I’m going to be diving into that in a few moments (right after hitting “Save & Publish” at the bottom of this page, in fact!). After that I have some secondary source reading AND a pitch for a novel I’m submitting (WOO!). That’s going to be fun! I’ve never done a formal submission for a novel before. We’ll see how that goes!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Weird Tech Issues
Squarespace has been doin’ some weird stuff the last few days. As far as I can tell everything on the front-end still works as advertised, but my back-end is looking strange.
Hopefully not an issue any of you have when visiting? Because at this stage I’m very much in the “gosh I hope it goes away on its own because I do not have the energy to deal with another problem” stage of my life.
So, hopefully just a localized glitch? I’ve visited the blog from other sources and everything seems above-board, but hey, if it does look weird to you: I’m sorry! Hopefully it will be fixed soon!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
What I Think About
Yesterday somebody asked me if I was still planning on doing the stop-motion video that I started back in September.
“Yes,” I thought, “Just as soon as I have a free moment!”
And that’s kind of the truth of the matter. I have about fifteen different projects in the air simultaneously… short stories, books, audio stories, and this stop-motion thingy… but no time to work on basically anything aside from school work these days.
That’s not completely fair: I also do a fair amount of reading as a matter of course. Can’t be a good writer if you don’t do a lot of reading. I’m hopeful that I can crush through about a dozen books before the summer hits… I have seven on my “To Read” pile right now.
But I’m always thinking about my stories. Always. Always thinking about a way to get a plot point across more clearly, or a clever bit of dialogue, or if I should cut a scene or add another somewhere. Dialogue takes up a lot of my brainspace. I’m always thinking about how somebody sounds when I write them. Can I hear their voice? Would I recognize it in a crowd?
Ah well. Maybe I’ll have time to finish up another chapter on the cyberpunk story this week, and then I can spend some time on my stop-motion stuff in a week or two. We’ll see!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Presentation Whoas
Yes, yes, I know it’s “woes,” but that wouldn’t be funny!
I had a big presentation in class today. A full half of my grade is now done, and I basically just have a final exam to write for this course. That’s kind of a nice feeling.
And I like making presentations. I like being in front of people and talking, I like making them chuckle or groan, and I like being considered an expert in something, even if it’s something irrelevant. In this particular case, I was considered an expert in the use of Nature in Cambridge by Caryl Phillips. It was a nice little talk, and afterwards there were no questions.
There almost never are. I try to ask questions for my classmates because I think it makes you look better if you have an engaged audience, but maybe I actually am terrible at giving presentations so there are never questions because everyone hated it? Not impossible.
But it’s nice to be done the presentation. And to have more time to write! Which I am going to go do right now!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Board Games
I think I’ve mentioned before (surely I must’ve by this point!) that I love board games. It’s been a long road of slowly evolving tastes, but from humble beginnings with Chess, Risk, and Monopoly, to my current favourites of Twilight Imperium IV, Galaxy Trucker, and Battletech (and countless other miniature combat games… that’s a whole thing on its own).
Today I got to spend a few hours with friends (remotely) playing board games, and that was really nice. We tackled a mid-weight game called “Lost Ruins of Arnak,” a delightful Euro-style game with a little bit of a lot of different elements, and it was a very pleasant day (even if I lost by a fair margin! Thankfully winning has no impact on whether I enjoy a game or not!). It made me think a little about how I could include my love of games in my writing, something along a Player of Games by Iain M. Banks (which, if you haven’t read, absolutely do so!). I’ll have to think about it further, of course, but nothing has really “spoken” to me yet about a good way to mix the two together.
One of these days I’ll figure out something. Until then, it will just be another passion of mine that I don’t get to spend enough time with!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Progress!
Finished up one of my three assignments due in the immediate future, and you know what that means… I wrote more in the novel!
I’d say it’s rapidly approaching half-done? I think that’s a safe thing to say. It feels about half finished. And that’s a nice feeling, honestly. And I think I’ve finally saved up enough to pay for the editing (cover art… well, not yet, but hopefully soon!). So as soon as I finish the 2nd draft I can send it off to my editor (at least as soon as she has time!), and then get it out to all of you good people!
Yay!
I’m getting ahead of myself here, though. Still have the other half to finish, and it took me a year to get to this point! Granted, 50% of that work has been in the last 3 weeks, so I think I’m on the right track.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Indigenous Literature
I think anyone who has stumbled across my website or my books probably knows I’m a Canadian. I was born in Hamilton, Ontario, to two immigrant parents fleeing political unrest in Argentina (where their parents had fled in the aftermath of WW2).
I can’t say I’m proud to be Canadian, but I certainly don’t mind it too much. There are much worse countries, and overall it’s a nation with a lot of good going for it.
The way we treat our Indigenous populations is not one of the good things going for it. Canada’s treatment of the various nations we rule has been… well, genocidal at times, and utterly contemptible the rest. It’s not a good look, and most Canadians, including many immigrants like my parents, either don’t care or are actively opposed to the government doing anything resembling reconciliation.
And, hey, I get it. Accepting that you are part of a nation that commits atrocities is hard. The idea that we have to pay, in a literal sense, for decisions that we had no part in is difficult. But I don’t think that absolves us of responsibility.
In a tiny, minuscule act of acceptance, I’m taking a course on Indigenous literature this semester. It’s been a lot of hard reading… I think I mentioned that I read Motorcycles & Sweetgrass a few weeks ago, and that was really a great read. A lot of fun, and tinged with sadness and weight, but not as soul-crushing as a lot of my reading has been. I’m now working on… less light-hearted fare, and it’s difficult to get through. But this is minimum-level work. Everyone should at the very least know about what their nation has done. You can’t make amends if you don’t at least acknowledge that anything wrong has happened.
Anyway, I have a big paper due next week, and a bunch of smaller assignments before that point. But, hey, at least I’m learning, right?
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Baby Steps
New years are always a weird mix of anticipation and fear. I mean, this was true even before the modern pandemic era, back when politics was bad but not the pure poison it seems to be these days.
Simpler times. Not better, I wouldn’t ever say that the past was better, but certainly simpler.
And as I embark on my 7th year of attempting to transition into full-time writing, I am again faced with the challenge of taking stock of everything I’ve done. Of my accomplishments, and my failings, and my struggles. The journey is far from over, and it feels most days like I’m making so little headway as to be considered stationary, but I am trying as hard as I can. I can’t do better than that.
Added to all this is the stress of January-ness, the post-holiday expenses, the new semester of classes and assignments… all in all, the month is just a mess. A stressful, depressing, worrisome mess.
But it’s not all bad. Right now it is snowing gently outside, I have three pizzas that I hand-made in the fridge (I love making pizza dough… it took me years, but I finally found a recipe I really like that gives rock-solid results), and I am caught up with all my school work for today. I’m going to spend a few hours trying to get a head of my work, since I have a bunch of assignments due on Thursday, but it’s a nice feeling to know I’m not behind in anything.
… except life. But hey, can’t win ‘em all just yet, I suppose.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
One More Scene
I think I’ve mentioned it before, but I don’t really suffer “writer’s block.” I mean, I understand it on an intuitive level, but I don’t really “get” it in the traditional sense.
But right now, gosh oh gee, but I’m gettin’ close.
The scene I’m working on is a pivotal moment in the heist. I know that, the audience knows that, heck, my characters know that. And it’s just not coming.
I’m going to do my standard thing of writing the words GOAT CHEESE in big brackets and come back to the scene later, because it’s been four days now and I can’t not keep writing like this. Hopefully by the time I finish the rest of the novel I can come back and replace that with a scene that makes sense.
Because this writer’s block stuff? No time for that nonsense.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Sad Reading
One of the downsides to reading Indigenous and Caribbean literature (two different courses, for the record) is that a lot of the reading is super depressing.
And don’t get me wrong. I understand the need for honest, no-holds-barred writing about this stuff. Too many people still wallow in the belief that ye olde tymes were somehow “better” for everyone and that intergenerational trauma is a recent thing.
I don’t even know where to start with that one, but some people seem to think it.
Anyway, the result is that the 4 readings I had this week are soul-crushingly sad. And as one of my classmates pointed out today, very few people seem to enjoy sad works.
I definitely do not. As stated, I get the necessity, but I don’t enjoy them. They are necessary but not fun! And I like fun writing.
Ah well. I guess a little rain has to fall into every life.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Caribbean Literature
One of my courses this semester is on Caribbean Literature (it’s technically my 4th Year Seminar course, of which I am allowed to only take 2 in my entire undergraduate degree… my previous one was on Healing through Reading). It’s interesting to lump together so many diverse cultures and diaspora into a single umbrella term… “Caribbean.”
I’ve never been, of course. I mean, I would’ve loved to have gone when I was younger, but my parents were not big on “fun” or “travel” and so I didn’t. And now I know too much… the tourism industry in the Caribbean is a brutality in so many ways that I can’t bring myself to make a trip, even if I could afford it.
Which, of course, I can’t.
But at least I can read some of their works! I read A Small Place last week, as I think I mentioned, and I’m going to start Caryl Phillips’ Cambridge later today. I’m looking forward to it! The poetry we’ve had to read thus far hasn’t really been “my thing,” but no fault of the poetry. I just don’t really like or “get” poetry as a matter of course.
So I’ll let y’all know how this story works out in a few days when I finish it up! Our professor has spent a lot of time discussing how the geography and geopolitical landscape of the Antilles works its way into the works we will be reading… I wonder if Canada does that with my own writing?
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Small Angry Books
I just finished reading A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid, a little book about Antigua (a tiny island in the West Indies). The book itself is a joy to read, but also fueled entirely by rage.
It’s great. Somebody wrote that it’s “Swiftian” in its wit, which I think is a little unfair, but not entirely inaccurate. Definitely worth a read.
The next book I’m working on is about the Canadian Residential School system, and as somebody born and raised in Canada, it’s a tough read. But an important one, I think… sadly, more important for the people who won’t read it than it is for the people who will read it. But still. I’m glad it exists… I' don’t have it immediately at hand, otherwise I would quote the title, but I suspect I’ll finish it later today so I’ll put the title here on Tuesday.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
One More Time, With Feeling!
Well, the year has officially started. I mean, it had officially started on Tuesday when I last posted, sure, but now I have started working again. The cycle has continued.
I finished reading Motorcycles & Sweetgrass, which was nice. Not great, but good, and very clever at points. A few actual laugh-out-loud moments, which is always a pleasure to encounter in a book. I’m about a third of the way through The Golden Compass, which is proving to be as good as I expected it to be, and I’ll be diving into some Caribbean literature later today (I have some chores and tasks to accomplish first, but right after those). A friend on the internet read 164 books last year, a jaw-dropping number until I realized that I probably read close to 100 without really trying. Work related and schoolwork, almost exclusively, but a few that I really wanted to read tossed in there as well. And a stack of at least 50 more than I will absolutely read the moment I have time. My current course list is only 10 books long for this semester, but I still have 2 more semesters to go this calendar year (one over the summer, and another in the fall of 2023).
Anyway, this isn’t meant as a brag (humble or otherwise), but it made me really think about how much I read, and how much I enjoy reading. I’m so glad there are so many incredibly talented storytellers out there, and I hope that in some small way there are people out there who are glad that they read my humble offerings as well. And I look forward to being able to provide more to them!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Motorcycles and Magical Realism
The first novel I have to read for one of my English courses this semester is Motorcycles & Sweetgrass by Drew Hayden Taylor. It’s Canadian Magical Realism, heavy with Indigenous themes and content. Usually that means super-massively-depressing (not without justification!), but so far this one is… neat. Interesting. Not without elements of depression, certainly, but not just depressing.
But it’s got me thinking about Magical Realism as a genre. I’m curious to hear what my professor will say about it (eventually… classes don’t start for another week), since it’s a genre I’ve always found fascinating. Neil Gaiman wrote a bunch of it when I was younger, and the man is a genius, so they were a tonne of fun to read. Douglas Adams wrote the sublime and bizarre Dirk Gently Holistic Detective novels, and those were weird and fun in equal measure. But this one… I don’t know if “Fun” is going to be the correct descriptor. Just a hunch.
Anyway, I’m enjoying the reading, and am hopeful I can crush through at least 2 or 3 of my 8 course books. This one is very easy reading, and I’m enjoying it… not a requirement, of course, but it does tend to make the reading easier.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Happy Arbitrary Calendar Rotation Day!
Well, the planet has once again completed a full circumnavigation of our local star. I suppose it’s as good a reason to celebrate as any!
2022 was a weird year. Not releasing a book feels wrong, somehow… I’ve released at least one every year since I started this crazy adventure in 2016. Statistically I’m still okay: there are 7 novels out there with my name on it, and it’s been 6 years. But I want to average more than one novel a year, so this year I’m hoping to publish two.
The first one is the one I’ve been working on all year, and it is getting much closer to completion. I think another month, maybe two, and then it will be into my editor’s queue for a good coat of polish before heading out into the world.
The second one will be aiming for the fall, and that one I’m not positive about. I might do a sequel to Caitlyn Morcos… I really liked that universe. But I might try another new and different setting again, just to keep casting the net out as wide as possible. We will see, we will see…
Anyway, I’m off of vacation again, so you all can expect 2-3 posts a week from me. Mostly rambling, some updates, some advice… the usual mix of stuff that comes pouring out of my brain on any given day.
With that, I wish each and every one of you a very happy New Year, and all the best wishes for the days and months to come!
Hope everyone is staying safe and healthy!
Happy Whatever-You-Celebrate Day!
As an atheist, I’m not particularly attached to one holiday (literally “holy day,” after all) than another. They’re all equally silly in my generous estimation.
But, hey, I get a day off today and tomorrow, and I am very grateful for that. Exhaustion is never fun, and a few days to recover with no expectations and no insane work schedule is desperately needed.
So from all of me, to all of you: here’s hoping you too can have a few well-deserved days of rest and respite before diving into the new year.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Technically, Issues
I can’t speak for everyone (obviously), but there are days I almost forget how reliant I am on technology. Everything I do these days… well, almost everything… is touched by tech. I write my books on a computer, I upload my drafts to Dropbox, I post updates on my website, I enjoy recreational video games (ha, what a formal way of describing my current journey through Assassin’s Creed: Origins!)… even the music I listen to is entirely digital these days.
None of this is a complaint… except when it doesn’t work. And it happens… the router stops working, the internet hiccups and boots me off, one of the many services I need and use to write and advertise decides to just not work… and then I am suddenly faced with the web of interlaced tech that keeps my usual day-to-day… well, “usual.”
I order my books for my friendly local bookstore over the internet. I sell my own books through the behemoth that is Amazon. I used to use social media to talk about my work… these days I don’t do that any more (and, I’ll be honest, I kinda miss it).
Speaking of missing social media: I’m currently reading The Wrong Stars by Tim Pratt, and I’m really enjoying it! I like Pratt’s writing style, and I thoroughly enjoyed 2 out of 3 of his Twilight Imperium books (one was fine, but it was weaker and too Deus Ex Machina for my personal tastes). In this book the protagonists awaken a woman who has been in cryosleep for about 500 years, and she worries that she can’t hug people any more because “What if a plague or disease made hugging a faux pas?”
He wrote the book in 2017. What did he know that we didn’t…?
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!