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.
Old Cats
So I have two cats: Donut and Koko. They’re both torties, and sweethearts, but they are also starting to get a little up there in age. Donut is a little older at around 15 years, and Koko is rapidly approaching 12.
They move a little slower these days, although they still get the zoomies sometimes. They eat a little less and drink a little more water, but otherwise they are still the same sweet, loving little furballs they’ve always been.
Donut has been to the vet a few times this year already due to some health issues that I hope aren’t serious. It’s been more expensive than I would like, but she’s a distinguished old lady and is worth a bit of difficulty.
We lost Bean, their middle sister, in October of last year. That was a hard time, no question. But things have calmed down since then, and I’m just doing my best to appreciate all the time we have together before we have to say goodbye to another one (hopefully in many, many years).
If any of you reading this have little furbabies of your own, give them a big hug from me tonight.
Hope everyone is staying safe and healthy!
Other Mediums
Longtime followers of me and my work (hi mom!) will know that I have frequently dabbled in other mediums for my creative work. I paint, I draw, I play guitar (badly, but still)… I have written audio performances, and I have created and edited podcasts and even written a picture book over a decade ago.
Don’t get me wrong: I am a novelist first and foremost. I enjoy dipping my toes in other fields, sure, but at my core I am a long-form writer.
That stated, I have been thinking about trying out a few different things in the next little while just as… joyous experiments, I think. I wrote a whole stack of short stories back in 2016 (six years ago! Gosh), and I might try my hand at a few more in the coming months. When autumn comes I am going to be buried in school work again, so this summer is going to be my only opportunity for the near future, at least until I graduate.
This shouldn’t impact my writing schedule, but I did want to share it now to see if anything comes of it in the future… you can all say that you heard about it before it happened!
For now I’m just going to leave it as a teaser, though. No details, just… other things in the works.
Hope everyone is staying safe and healthy!
It's the Humidity
I am told that Southern Ontario is often very humid. I am told this in such a manner, and with such authority, that I am inclined to believe it, despite being entirely immune to the words.
I have a sort of vague understanding of how it works. Higher humidity means that it is more difficult for sweat to cool down your body, since the act of sweat evaporating from your skin is the actual main method of heat regulation in that process. Sure, a breeze works as well, but your body can’t control or generate a breeze, while it most certainly can generate sweat.
But for whatever reason, I live a life that is primarily immune to the ravages of heat. Like, I feel heat, and it’s not my favourite feeling, but I’ve had days where my friends and family have insisted they are melting, and they all look very unhappy about this… and then I go turn on the oven to bake bread. Like, I get it, but it just doesn’t sink in? Like “hot” is a weather that exists in a sort of abstract.
I’ve been to a Chinese desert city once (Xi’an, on the sand-duned shores of the mighty Gobi desert), and I have traveled to a few tropical locations a few times in my life (mostly in South America and Mexico), so again, I “get” that these places are hot. But it’s just a word… unlike “cold,” which I loathe. Being cold is the worst… but being “too” hot is just something I sort of vaguely understand on a conceptual, not physical, level.
Anyway. Apparently it’s hot right now? Who knew.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Storytelling in RPGs
When I was younger I played a lot of D&D.
That’s not strictly true. I only played a little D&D… probably about seven or eight games when I was in Grade 4, and again a few more when I was in high school after the whole “D&D is a pathway to Satan” nonsense had passed. I played a lot of other roleplaying games, though… basically once or twice a week, every week, for the entire time I was in middle and high school. Years of campaigns, stories, and game systems.
After I went to university I basically completely stopped. RPGs are a way to tell stories with friends, and although I had a few friends in university I never really gelled with any of them enough to want to play a true RPG again. That lasted until just recently, when my partner decided they wanted to start playing D&D.
The last time I played D&D it was “first” edition (technically “D&D Basic”, since my friends never played enough to get to “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons” where there were way more charts). It is currently on its 5th edition, and probably going to release a 6th edition in the next year or two (probably).
The reason I bring it up is because RPGs are basically guided storytelling, and it was that element of the game that I was always drawn to. I like telling stories, in case you didn’t know, and at their core, good RPGs are all about that collective storytelling experience. It’s kinda like being a writer, in some ways, although being a storyteller in a D&D game is less about “telling” and more about “learning”… although to be honest, that’s quite true to my specific writing style already. While I usually have some idea of what I want to happen in a given narrative, most of the time the characters or the story surprise me at least a few times before they’re done!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Feels like Work
Your average adult in the Western world spends more than a third of our total waking hours at work. A lot of my identity and happiness is tied to my performance of my work, and a lot of the joy I have experienced in the last six years has been connected directly to my writing.
”But does it feel like work?” is a pretty frequent question, often phrased in different ways (“It must be nice to do something that doesn’t feel like work!” is relatively common, as is “Oh, it must feel weird to work in your PJs!” isn’t rate). And the answer is… yes. Yes it feels like work because it is work.
Back in 2019 I had my first trip to Japan, and it was glorious. Ten days, eight of which were spent in Tokyo and two of which I spent in Kyoto. And I wrote every single day. It was great!
Since 2016, I have taken most of my vacations as week-long trips to a small rented cottage on the lakeshore… in the middle of winter. Why? So I can write in peace without interruption. Sure, it’s nice to be in a place that has nice hiking trails, and to eat different food (my vacation breakfast-of-choice is crumpets… no idea why, but I really love crumpets and I only eat them on vacation!), but mostly I’m there to write.
Wake up, eat breakfast, write, eat lunch, write, go for a walk, eat dinner, write, go to bed. An ideal day.
So yes, writing “feels” like work. It feels like work I love doing and I am constantly trying to get better at, but it’s still work.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Soundtracks to our lives
Music is weird. It meant absolutely nothing to me until around when I hit high school, when suddenly music was a huge percentage of my time and life. I joined four or five different bands and a few choirs, performed and practiced constantly… but didn’t discover pop music until my first year of university, when there was a little program called “Napster” or something like that which allowed the masses to download as much music as they wanted.
Turns out that I wanted a lot of music. My collection sprawled into thousands of songs, tens of thousands, so much music that I rarely heard the same song more than once a month despite listening almost non-stop.
And then around the time I joined the workforce (reluctantly, granted) music kind of slipped from my regular life and exclusively into my social life. I had more rhythm games than you could shake a stick at… Dance Dance Revolution (“DDR”), Amplitude, Guitar Hero, Karaoke Revolution, and eventually Rocksmith (which came with a real guitar!)… and then into actual guitar lessons, which I’ve been taking for years now.
I’m still a mediocre guitarist… and I suspect I always will be, but I can play chords and easy riffs and stuff like that.
These days I almost exclusively listen to music when I’m writing, and I try to match the style of what I’m writing to the music itself. I listen to Skyrim’s soundtrack a lot, or the entire Star Wars audio anthology… stuff that doesn’t have lyrics is best. These days a lot of the music I listen to is cyberpunk (and some of it is from the video game “Cyberpunk 2077” which I haven’t played but does pop up constantly for searches of cyberpunk music).
Today… today I might go listen to a few DDR songs, just for old time’s sake.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Things You Know
Traditional advice for writers is to “write what you know,” which is well-intentioned but I feel inaccurate. I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before, but the concept should be “write what you want to read,” or possibly “write what you read.” If I spend all my time reading sci-fi, then I probably shouldn’t be writing romance, and if what I really want to read is cyberpunk then I probably shouldn’t be writing horror. Genre-mashing or mixing aside, I think it’s a pretty safe rule in general… although there are always exceptions to these kinds of rules!
In my case, I am firmly in sci-fi these days. Almost all the media I consume is sci-fi. I read sci-fi (the Broken Earth trilogy), I watch sci-fi (Altered Carbon), I’m even listening to sci-fi podcasts while I bike to work… it’s just kinda my wheelhouse. I like thinking about worlds that are… better than the one we live in. Not necessarily radically different, but just… smarter. Better.
But still with problems, of course. Just maybe not problems related to stupidity or ignorance so much as related to greed and arrogance. Small differences, I suppose, but meaningful to me.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Significant Milestones
I like numbers. I don’t like equations, per se, but only because your average equation requires you to be methodical and patient, neither of which are traits I possess in abundance. But I like numbers, I like data, and I like look at those numbers in order to better understand the data.
Like, I enjoy looking at my monthly sales numbers. I don’t like generating those numbers because that’s basically fell sorcery, but looking at the graphs of how my books are selling and which are selling is fascinating to me.
All this is a rambling way to say that I also like other people’s birthdays (although I loath my own for unrelated reasons), especially those of close friends, because it gives me a data point that I think is significant. Sure, one successful circumnavigation of the closest stellar object isn’t intrinsically significant, but we give these numbers meaning and, by that, it gives us meaning to examine them.
One of my friends just bought a house: how old are they, and what was I doing at that age? Not as a competition, but just as an interesting data point. I am now the age my father was when I was born: how was he doing compared to how I am doing? And so on.
So I get to arrange and attend a birthday for my partner this weekend. I’m excited! There is going to be food, and sure, because of the whole pandemic-thing there will be only a quarter of the people we’d like to invite, but that’s still okay! It will be intimate and close, as opposed to chaotic and loud. Both fun, in very different ways.
On that note, I should go clean the BBQ… it’s going to get a lot of use this weekend!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Big Storms
There was a big thunderstorm yesterday. Short-lived, but it inflicted a lot of damage in the surrounding areas… lots of toppled trees, broken branches, and torn roofs. Our home escaped more-or-less unscathed, with some minor damage to a tree in our backyard and one section of a fence, but we also lost power for about 7 hours.
Losing power has never really been a big issue for me. It’s not ideal, sure, but there was a four day power outage back when I was in university (the early 2000s) and that was a lot worse. And even that wasn’t awful… I didn’t have a cell phone at the time (I have always been a bit of a Luddite) and the university cancelled classes so I just hung out with friends and played board games while BBQing everything I owned in the fridge and then freezer. It wasn’t ideal, sure, but it could’ve been much worse.
7 hours means we lost a fair amount of stuff from the fridge (about $60 to replace eggs, milk, cream, and a few open cheeses… that kind of stuff), but the freezers were both fine (never opened, lots of stuff in each, so the temperature barely budged). But there are people in the area that lost chunks of their roof, or had severe damage to their car, or lost windows… lots of really bad stuff, and we were basically just inconvenienced for a few hours when I got back from work.
We played a few board games to pass the time. It was nice!
I suppose I’m just grateful for the things in my life that are going right. Even when things really suck in many ways… there is stuff good stuff, or stuff that could be much, much worse but isn’t. And that’s worth remembering.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Altered Carbon
I’m a few years behind the curve here, but i just started watching Altered Carbon on Netflix. In a surprise to nobody, it’s pretty good!
Now, in my defense, I read the book years ago and enjoyed it a great deal. I was a little worried that the show wouldn’t be true to the source material, but for the most part that seems to be unfounded… I just hit a point of pretty major divergence, but for the most part I think they’ve been pretty true to the book.
And this is nice, because I’ve been struggling with my own cyberpunk novel, and so seeing a beautiful visual representation of a cyberpunk universe is pretty neat! Even noticing some of the visual and story changes from what I remember of the original is interesting, trying to decide if those choices were stylistic, or unintentional consequences of the shift in medium, or if it was required to increase the length of the show, and so on.
I’m a big fan of the AI in the show, for example, whereas I don’t really remember the hotel AI from the book having much of a personality at all. Correspondingly, Ortega is a bit short in the show for my expectations, but otherwise seems like a pretty flawless choice for the character.
It’s nice to find inspiration! I’m looking forward to finishing up the first season today!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Plodding Plots? Plan Lots!
Writing books is a weird activity, if I haven’t made that abundantly clear yet.
I mean, honestly, I don’t know how many people out there read these posts when I actually post them (hello everyone who does!) versus people who will be viewing these posts months or maybe even years later (hello all of you fine folks!). But if you’ve been reading the last few weeks of posts, you’ll notice that the novel I’m working on (“Starocean’s Eleven” is the working title, but it will definitely be called something else when I’m done) has been causing me a lot of trouble.
It’s not my usual style. I’ve done a few action novels (the Tintian novels are action-adventure with a little dash of mystery thrown in), a few military sci-fi (Spinward Expanse and Starconvoy EH-76), a YA action (Queen of the AIs), and one or two space westerns (Caitlyn Morcos and Wind’s Howling Rage)… but none of them require the level of planning and careful plot that a good cyberpunk thriller requires. I kinda need to know what my characters are going to do, at least broadly speaking, before they do it, and that’s not my usual style.
I really like exploring with my characters, learning about both them and the world at the same time. I have a loose plot for Starocean’s Eleven, but each time I sit down to write a chapter I have to expand on that loose plot because so many pieces need to fit together at the end to give a “sudden but inevitable” conclusion…
The moral of the story here is that the more I want to pick up the pace in my writing, the slower I end up having to go. This is a weird workflow for me as a result, but I hope the ends will justify the means!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!