Like any great expedition, the start of a new book is an exciting time. Everything is full of hope and opportunity! Who knows where this story will take us!?
Certainly not me.
I mean, I have a rough idea. I have the skeleton of an outline, the framework upon which the rest of the story will hang. I used to not even do this… I would just embark in a direction and see where I ended up. But I have learned that this is a “bad idea” when I write… I like my endings to be Sudden But Inevitable, and in order for those to land you kinda need to telegraph key moments. And in order to do that you need to do some planning.
Not a lot. I name characters and locations, but I’ll still discover elements of each of those as we go. I’ll redefine aspects of everyone, of the technology and the conflict and the universe, on the fly.
Which is why I’m always so excited as those first few words, which soon become the first few thousand words, flow out onto the page. There’s still so much potential! Can’t wait to see where this one will take us… I’m calling this story “The Trojan Stars” for now, despite that being a bad name for a myriad of reasons, it makes sense thematically. It’s all about… well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves just yet.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
The Importance of Being True
I love sci-fi. I don’t think I’ve made that a secret at any point in my life. It is one of my great, if not my greatest, ambitions to be a full-time sci-fi author.
Sure, I love fantasy and speculative fiction and a smattering of alternate-history stuff, but in my heart of hearts, what I love is sci-fi.
That’s why it feels so nice to come back to a space opera. Cyberpunk is still sci-fi, but at its core cyberpunk is really about rebellion and theft (not necessarily in that order!). They’re heist stories or resistance stories first, and sci-fi stories second. And that’s fine! I’m not saying they’re not sci-fi.
But space opera, to me, will always represent the beating heart of the genre. Starships, and planets, and wars and exploration and all the wonderful and horrible and fantastical wrapped up with a Faster-than-Light bow. They’re human stories, even the ones about aliens (especially the ones about aliens!), but… better.
I hope mine will be, at least! It has a strong start at least!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Removing Goals from Patreon
So Patreon announced today (or at least I saw it today) that they are dropping the “Goals” feature from the Patreon pages.
Now, I don’t think this will have a meaningful impact on my Patreon page (current or future). But it’s weird to me that removing the goal of my patrons… like… doesn’t matter? Weird.
But I suppose my goals haven’t really changed. I had milestones for my Patreon (which aren’t anywhere near reached), but my overall “goal” has always been the same: become a full-time writer. Patreon is just a step in that direction.
So I don’t suppose this will actually change much. Still writing, still working on the next novel while gazing wistfully at the eventual destination of being able to write when I want, the books I want (and hopefully other people want!), at the pace I want. That would be great.
One day.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
All Normal Again
Well, without any actual effort on my part the back-end of Squarespace looks appropriate again.
That sentence sounds particularly dirty for some reason. Ah well, you all know what I mean.
On top of that I’ve finished up the background/universe building for the next novel, and I’m going to spend a few hours today outlining the major plot points. If I’m really ambitious I might even get a start on the work! For now I’m call it the Trojan Stars due to the major plot of the arc, but as always the name is mostly a placeholder until I get around to writing another.
Still, it’s nice to have things going more-or-less as expected. It’s hard to focus on the good sometimes, and there is good.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Universe Building For Beginners
I mean, I’m not really an expert in universe building. I’ve done it… 5 times so far? Each universe has elements in common with the others, but I try to make them distinct (otherwise I wouldn’t be able to keep them straight!).
In this case I started with very broad brushstrokes: how big is the “galaxy”? In this case, the galaxy just includes the subset of stars of interest (the good guy government has about a dozen stars, the bad guys about three times that number, and the “Old Roman-esque Empire” that came before had about fifty times that number.
Yes, I’m doing the fallen empire thing. I’m considering how to give it a post-colonial spin… something that differentiates it from your stock-standard Everything Was Better Before Empire that so often is the staple of sci-fi. Although I might not? I don’t know at this point. Like I said, big brushstrokes.
I’ve also named the captain of the starship that will be the focus of the adventure, and the starship itself. Tentatively in both cases… I’m not married to the names at this point, but I think it does give me an interesting starting point.
And I’ve started naming the significant crew on the ship. It’s an exploration vessel in a post-scarcity government (although their enemies are not post-scarcity), but it is attempting to explore, forge new diplomatic ties, and layout the groundwork for new trade as well… so it needs a crew of significant scientists, diplomats, traders, and military staff, plus enough conflict to keep things interesting while also having them work together.
I’ve done a half-dozen already. I think I’ll name a few other “secondary” characters just to make sure everything feels fleshed out, and then I’ll start mapping out the novel itself. Might even get to starting that tonight! Dare I dream!?
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
The Start of a New Novel
The first week or two of starting a new novel is a very exciting time (by the standards of writers I suppose). Laying the groundwork for a new universe is really neat! New governments, new economies, new technologies… revisiting a setting that I’ve already established is like getting into a comfy pair of pajamas, but inventing new worlds is going shopping with an unlimited budget!
This one is going to be a relatively tech-forward universe. There are a couple key technologies that are critical to the story: specifically “shields” and “lances.” Basically, the good guy ships have defensive technology called “shields” (super original name, I know, but it fits perfectly with the purpose of the defensive tech and it means everyone reading about it already kinda knows what it does) and offensive technology called “lances” that are both powered by a super-secret secondary power source called a Cylinder Engine.
There was a brief temptation to call it a “C-Drive” as a nod to us old timers who had to deal with things like lettered drives in the times before Windows, but I think I’ll leave that be.
The Cylinder Engine is going to be a critical plot point, since the Good Guys(tm) are desperate to protect it from the Bad Guys. It’s their sole advantage in a war they’re already losing.
But other than that, it will be an exploration story, of reaching new and exciting worlds, meeting new and exciting people, and trying not to die in new and exciting ways! I’m excited!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
A Little Sick
After not getting sick, at all, since 2019, it’s finally happened.
Not “The Big One,” and not much to speak of whatsoever… if this was still 2019 I would probably still go to work and school. It’s a bit of a sore throat, an occasional cough, and that’s it.
But it’s not 2019 any more, and I take my (and everyone’s) health a bit more seriously these days. So I stayed home from the retail job for a couple days to recover and recuperate, and I feel significantly better today.
I think I’ve also decided to temporarily set this story aside. The novel that I’m working on, that is. I love the setting and the characters and the core idea of the story, but it’s stuck again and I don’t have time to be stuck again. I’ll come back to it after I finish a different novel… something a bit more space opera, I think. Lone ship exploring the galaxy, looking for friends and allies among the harsh, unforgiving stars. I think I’m going to build off of an old story thread I wrote back in 2010 or so… not the same story, but built along similar foundations.
I’m excited! I love writing space operas!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Trading Winter
The amount of snow we got yesterday during my drive home was… impressive. Depressing, and it resulted in an extremely slow drive (it usually takes me 15 minutes, it took me almost an hour), but I got home safely.
It did make me think again about living someplace that doesn’t have snow. Would I miss it? A lot of my reading this semester has been focused on areas of the world that never see snow… heck, sometimes they don’t see seasons at all, at least in the way we expect seasons to exist.
It’s an appealing thought. Sure, it means insects larger than my head, but is that a fair trade for never having to shovel a driveway again? Or drive down a road covered in a foot of snow which makes it more akin to skiing than driving? I don’t know… ah, actually, I do know. If it weren’t for the spiders, I would consider it, but I hate spiders, and the ones we have in Canada are tiny compared to most, especially in temperate climates. The spiders in Japan freaked me out, and they were relatively small (amount hand-sized) compared to some of the monsters out there. I couldn’t do it.
Which is too bad. Maybe there is someplace on earth that is warm and nice and doesn’t have huge freakin’ spiders…
Looks whistfully towards New Zealand
I hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Time Off Over
Well, that was a nice Reading Week. I played a lot of “Assassin’s Creed Valhalla,” (which is a perfectly fine game) read a lot of Cereus Blooms at Night, which is staggeringly depressing, and played a bunch of board games.
All in all, a pretty solid week. But now it’s back to the grind. Back to the writing, back to school, back to assignments and all the fun stuff I do to pay the bills. The transitions are always hard… a week of doing what I want to do always grinds against what I have to do. When I was younger it didn’t bother me as much, but these days… yeah, it bothers me.
Oh well. At least I can get back to writing! Always enjoy that!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Some Time Off
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!