One of the perks of being a writer is that one really needs to read a lot in order to do the job well.
And I love reading sci-fi. I mean, I love reading a lot of stuff (having recently finished Jane Eyre and Murder on the Orient Express), but sci-fi is really my jam.
I picked up two relatively new novels recently, and I’ve already finished one and am working on the other. One is The Worst Ship in the Fleet, which I’ve finished, and I was surprised by how short it is. I mean, good little book, but it felt a lot like it ended right when it was just getting started (and there’s a late-story twist that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense… not a deal-breaker, but not foreshadowed nearly enough).
The second one I forget the name of, but involves somebody waking up inside the body of an agricultural robot and not knowing why. Almost immediately he’s attacked by hunter mechs, and from that moment on it’s a big chase/escape scene, one stacked on the other. Great pacing, interesting setup, and I am really curious to see how the book will end. I’ll have to remember to write down the title for next post and let y’all know it’s name.
And then after this one, I have a new book by James Bow, a local sci-fi author, to dive into! I really enjoyed the last one he wrote, and I’m excited to give this one a read… it releases in mid-November, but I was generously offered an early copy to read, and I very much intend to do just that!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Writing Sequels
So my next novel, after I finish up this one, is going to be a direct sequel to one of my earlier works; specifically, part 2 of the Caitlyn Morcos series.
This isn’t the first time I’ve written a direct sequel, but it will be the first time I do so from scratch. My Tintian series were homages and inspired by specific Tintin stories, so I kinda knew the rough layout of what was happening before I even started those books… Tintian and the Mysterious Meteor was directly inspired by Tintin and the Shooting Star, so I had the arc mapped before I sat down.
But not so with Caitlyn Morcos. Her first sequel is untouched territory. There are no shortage of problems in Delta Quadrant for her to tackle, so it’s really just a question of picking one and having her go at it… but the previous work was action mixed with murder-mystery, so I’m going to see if I can tap into that again. The stakes won’t be quite as personal as they were the first time, and I have to be careful of power-creep (that thing where the big bad for every novel becomes more and more of a threat by incremental steps… as much as I enjoy the Honor Harrington series, every threat she faced was one ship-class larger in neat, sequential order. Too predictable, and too… video game.
Anyway, today I’m finishing up a big painting project that I’ve been working on since April, so that will be very nice to have done, and then I’m going to spend a little time working on a rough plan for Morcos Book 2! Exciting!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Getting the Big C
Well, I think I finally caught COVID.
Not 100% sure, of course. All of the tests I have access to (without going to a hospital) have long expired, but I managed to catch some form of serious respiratory issue. Lots of sneezing and whole-body exhaustion which has since morphed into lots of coughing and muscle soreness.
I’m eating chicken soup by the kilolitre and have consumed my body weight in tea daily, but it’s still a slow process recovering. Today I felt better when I woke up, but since then I’ve basically been coughing non-stop, which, it turns out, is exhausting.
I got sick on Saturday evening, initially, and it’s now Wednesday, so hopefully it’s run its course. because this sucks.
Anyway. Another day of watching old anime and taking it as easy as I can.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
October! When Did That Happen!?
Holy snakes it’s, like, 80-something days until that gift-giving holiday hits. Where has the time gone!?
September passed in a bit of a blur, but it wasn’t an entirely unpleasant blur. It was a busy one, though… October should be a bit slower-paced before diving into the pure insanity of November and December.
There’s also been a fair amount of family-drama, although most of it is arm’s length so I don’t have to deal with too much of it directly. Still stressful, and still chews up time, but otherwise just more fuel on the general dumpster fire my life so frequently is… sure, things will burn a little brighter for a while, but it will all (probably) work out eventually.
Okay! That’s it for me today… with any luck I’ll actually get the novel finished for it’s final edit in the next couple weeks! How many times have I said that this year!?
Hope everyone is staying safe and healthy!
Rosmersholm
It has been years since I’ve been to a live theatre production… possibly a decade? Maybe not quite that long.
I used to love going to Shakespeare plays, or to musicals in downtown Toronto. They’re expensive now… they were expensive back then too, but I used to be able to afford it.
Yesterday I was able to attend an incredible performance of Rosmersholm at the Crow’s Theatre in Toronto because a good friend of mine is in the cast. It was… devastating. I can still feel the performance sitting on my chest.
It was one of those times that makes me feel both unbelievably proud to be an artist, and sad that I have never written or created anything as raw and powerful as that. Gosh is it good. Calling it “good” is actually a grave disservice.
Some day. Some day I will write something as good as that.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Conspiracy Theories Suck
I don’t talk about him much, but I have an older brother. Used to look up to him a lot… he left home when I was still very young (certainly too young to understand why he and my father argued all the time), and he has lived a very different life from mine. Certainly more adventurous.
About a decade ago he got really deep into some conspiracy theories. He’s still locked into a bunch of them, which is a shame. He is mostly a rational, intelligent guy… but there’s this massive blind spot when it comes to several well-established and easily countered conspiracies.
And before you say it: yes, I know that being able to disprove a conspiracy in no way stops people from believing them. There are lots of things that we can’t prove that people believe… it’s a fundamental cornerstone of many faiths. But it’s still frustrating!
Recently he’s been on a big “Aliens are real” kick, which as a scientist, is frustrating because it’s one of those “Yes, but” sorta conspiracies. Is there intelligent life elsewhere in the universe? Definitely. Are there aliens somewhere in the Milky Way galaxy right now? Mathematically it’s possible… are they here, on Earth, right now? Well, there’s no real evidence of that (or, alternatively, there is exactly as much evidence for that as there is for the Flying Spaghetti Monster).
Anyway, just a rant. Work on the book is still stalled for another week, but I’ll get back to it. I really miss writing.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Dreary Wet Fall
Okay, it’s not technically autumn yet. I don’t think so, at least… I’ll be honest, I barely keep track of time (as you may have noticed with the lag in my posts recently!). I’m going to get back to frequently updating the blog, even if I don’t have the most exciting things to say because I do think lines of communication are important.
Anyway, it’s been raining almost non-stop for the last few days. Just cold and cloudy… a pretty clear indication that summer is officially over and we’ve moved on to the dark months.
Which is okay! I love autumn and winter (as long as I don’t have to go outside in it!). Dreary days are perfect for staying at home and writing, which is basically all I want to do these days (and shoot videos, granted, but that involves a lot of writing, so I’m including it).
So here’s to the cold and dreary! Bring it on!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Thoughts on The Acolyte
There has been a lot of Star Wars content recently… new shows are popping up almost constantly, as well as additional seasons to slightly older shows. They’ve been of mixed quality for the most part… Andor was spectacular, Obi-Wan was generally weak but not bad, The Bad Batch was generally very good…
And then there was The Acolyte.
Generally great acting. Some spectacular fight scenes… like, really, really spectacular.
But the writing. My gods. The writing is awful. The last episode in particular is so bad as to make the series almost unwatchable in retrospect… kinda like the last few episodes of Game of Thrones or Battlestar Galactica. Not a fumble on the finish line so much as a full-body explosion.
On the plus side, I’m hopeful this means that people are starting to realize how important good writing really is!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
It's the Olympics!... Apparently!...
I’m not a sports guy. I’ve done sports. I’ve done a lot of sports… soccer and hockey when I was young, a smattering of several martial arts, and Japanese fencing up until I damaged my Achilles pretty severely. Plus running, biking, swimming… like I said, a lot of sports.
But I don’t really care about other people doing sports. Sure, fine, some people care a lot… the existence of “professional” sports is definitely proof of that. But I don’t really care for any team, nor do I find attachment to how my nation’s athletes perform against other athletes. I don’t have a personal interest other than to acknowledge that it’s something that a lot of people care very deeply about.
And hey, if it makes you happy, more power to ya. But I just don’t get it. Not my jam.
That stated, I hope everyone who does enjoy such events is enjoying this Olympic thingy. May your team do better than the other teams.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
It's August, Baby!
I don’t actually care that much about August. I mean, I hate cold weather and that’s something that almost never happens in August in Southern Ontario… hot, humid, lovely August. But other than that, it’s just a month like any other.
Another month in which I haven’t finished my novel.
Sigh
The process has stalled right at the precipice of being finished. It’s only a few pages of edits away! But sitting down and actually doing those edits has proven remarkably difficult. Don’t say “Writer’s Block,” I don’t believe in it. Say instead “exhaustion coupled to depression,” which is far more accurate.
Such is life sometimes. Thankfully the other projects I’m working on are nearing an end, so I should actually be able to get time and energy back to my writing soon. That’s the plan, at least. We’ll see how it goes.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Exhausted, But Still At it
I was almost hit by a car today while biking. I wish I could say it was rare that a car almost hits me, but Canadian drivers are not super aware of other things on the road… I suspect a side-effect of a large country divided by long, mostly-empty roads has resulted in generations of drivers that often forget there are other people out there.
Maybe that’s just me. Or maybe I’m just unlucky. Who knows? Either way, somebody turning left through a protected bike lane came within a meter of converting me into a past-tense version of myself.
I was a little shaken, but otherwise escaped unharmed. I suppose I am grateful for that.
But there is definitely a part of me that, upon realizing that I wouldn’t be hospitalized, was a little disappointed. It meant that I had to go to my day job.
It was around then I realized how tired I was, and it was only 9am. Not a great way to start the day.
Ah well. I’m home now, and I can have at least a few hours of doing art. I aim to make the most of it.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
CMOs and the Stupid Things They Say
It might be unwise to badmouth Squarespace on a Squarespace website, but here I am.
What the CMO said a few days back was insulting to say the least, and utterly idiotic at the worst. It was bad enough that I am seriously considering migrating to a new service… sadly, I am a bit of a luddite, so I’ll have to be slow and careful with that migration, but unless a very, very strongly worded apology backed up by some actual ramifications comes down the pipeline soon, I think I’ll move.
A damn shame.
Anyway, that’s all backend stuff, and if everything goes the way it’s supposed to, none of you reading this will even know that I changed websites. But that’s the newest level of “This Isn’t Writing But Is An Important Part of Writing” that I have to deal with currently. Huzzah.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Finally Recovering
There are few things I miss about my youth. I didn’t have a “hard” childhood by most measures… my parents weren’t the most affectionate, but they weren’t outright cruel either. I had to work, a lot, to keep them happy… lots of odd jobs, though, and not because we were on the verge of starvation or anything.
But one of the things I do miss about being young is the ability to bounce back after sickness or injury. Gosh, I have a few injuries that have hung around now for years, and the sickness I caught last week is just starting to let up.
So that’s a blessing, I suppose? A week of lost productivity and work in exchange for getting better seems like a fair trade.
And, hey, in the interim I managed to watch Shogun, the semi-historical retelling of the events leading up to the battle of Sekigahara, which led to the founding of the Tokugawa Shogunate, which would then (more-or-less) peacefully rule Japan for centuries.
Interesting show. There are choices that confuse me (like why not use the actual names from history), but still, I enjoyed it a lot.
Anyway! I am now officially “better” (although still not quite 100%), so I am getting back to making art!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Sick Day
On Saturday I came down with something. Sore throat, cough, headache… you know, the usual suspects for standard ‘being sick” in the modern era.
Was it COVID? I don’t know. Maybe? I haven’t gotten one of the vaccines in a few months, so it’s certainly not impossible.
Regardless, it meant I had to spend an entire day in bed, alternating between napping and wishing I was napping. Not a productive time, and one of my ears is basically a solid clog right now. Fun!
So no updates for a few days, and no meaningful work on any of my many, many projects. Which sucks!
But I guess it can’t really be avoided. And I’m already feeling a bit better, so a few more days of rest and I should be back on my feet.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Class Dismissed!
Well, I think I’ve done my final university course for the foreseeable future.
This last class (EN-489 “Foundations and Future of Cyberpunk”) was a lot of fun, and very educational, but I think it was also the final gasp I made towards getting an English degree. My grades are exemplary, but I am out of time and money, and still 6 courses shy of the degree.
Which means I’ve taken 14 English classes, some which were great, and some which were… not… but overall I had a really good time being back in school. I’ll miss it, but I just can’t afford it.
With some luck they might hold onto my progress for a few years, and maybe I’ll come back to it when I have time again, but for now all that time and money are getting poured into my writing career in an effort to stabilize it enough that I can switch to doing it full-time.
Which was always the goal. Is still the goal. We’ll get there.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
What Is Cyberpunk?
I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before, but I’m taking a course on Cyberpunk right now at a local university. The main focus of the course is about what defines Cyberpunk as a genre… a combination of the aesthetics, auditory, visual, and written media that are labelled as such, and how to determine whether a given work is Cyberpunk or not.
To some extent, this is purely academic. What makes a genre is that books are put in that genre, and people acknowledge the social contract in which the author(s) work. But it is kinda neat thinking about work that I wouldn’t instinctively consider Cyberpunk and try to figure out what it is about that piece that either does, or doesn’t, make it part of the genre. Altered Carbon, for example, is a perfect case of something I didn’t consider, but almost certainly is. One could make the same argument for the first book/season of The Expanse, a favourite of mine.
Anyway. My final term paper is due on Friday, and I’m writing this post here as a way of procrastination without actually procrastinating. I’m thinking about the paper, I’m writing about writing the paper… it’s kinda like actually doing the work, right?
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Books Read
All of my books are enrolled in a thing that allows me to get a little money from people who read my books without having to buy my books. It’s a neat system, and it works out pretty okay for me.
But so far in June, several people have read my books, but nobody has bought one of my books. In fact, since late May I haven’t sold a single copy.
Now, that might sometimes be a cause for concern. The only real downside at this point is that I was on track for a stellar year, and this is going to put a little hiccup in that year, back down to a merely good year. That’s okay, just steps on the path to being a full-time writer, but a little discouraging.
The real trick is not panicking and doing a bunch of stuff to try and get those numbers back. Three weeks isn’t long enough to draw good conclusions about anything in such a small and limited pool. I’m going to keep pushing ahead with my work, the way I always do, and hope that the release of my novel will help pump my number back up a bit. That would be great.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Step by Step
There are no shortcuts to success. Only hard work.
In Ontario when I was growing up, teachers had a book of phrases that were “approved” for use on report cards. Basically, the teacher would pick which phrase they thought best represented the student’s progress, and put that on the final report.
In Grade 4 (when I was… 12?) my teacher put that on my report card. I don’t agree with the statement (there are many, many shortcuts to success), but it is true that hard work does, usually, help lead to success. It’s not sufficient (hard work alone won’t make you successful), but in a vacuum it’s often your best odds outside of being born rich.
That’s the real secret. But if you weren’t born rich, might as well work hard. You might someday make it.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Ready Player Number
For the course I am taking on Cyberpunk, I had to both read and watch Ready Player One. It’s a tough read, and an even tougher watch… plot holes aside, there are a lot of issues with how women, minorities, and other sexual orientations are depicted (or not depicted, in some cases). Cline didn’t do a great job, and Spielberg somehow managed to make it worse? That’s unfair, I’m not sure it’s Spielberg’s “fault” insomuch as the movie somehow made a lot of the questionable decisions worse.
But as always, I am drawn back to my own art. Would my portrayals of other races, other genders, and other sexualities be equally bad? I try to be conscious of it, but I have a lot of baggage to work through and I am positive some of it falls through the cracks. I wrote an entire character who is basically a sexist jerk for one novel… I could’ve fixed it, but I didn’t. Maybe I should’ve? I dunno.
Anyway. It was good to revisit the world of RPO to remind myself that I don’t have to get things perfect… I just need to try and do better, and that’s a pretty low bar, sadly.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Pure Jealousy
I freely admit I get jealous at times. I try to not let it impact me too much… like many feelings, I acknowledge it, and then try to get on with my life.
The jealousy isn’t angry jealousy. I see people doing stuff that I wish I could be doing (and know I am capable of!), and I get this feeling in the pit of my stomach which I can only describe as crushing depression. This feeling of “I could be doing that, but I’m not, and I have nobody to blame but myself.”
It’s an oversimplification, of course. I don’t get jealous of people who are super rich, or people who are living lavish lifestyles (often the same people, granted). I get jealous of artists who get to create art. Art that I love, and that I am absolutely certain I could make similar work to, if I had a chance.
I am jealous of opportunity, I suppose? Of all the things I want to do but can’t.
Struggling with that right now. But still editing the book, so… at least there’s progress, I suppose.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!