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!

Purple Prose and Thee

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!