Remain calm

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I’ve been posting here only once a week these days, for varying reasons. The main one is that I’ve been acclimating to the new shop I transferred to (new location, new bosses, new coworkers, new responsibilities, more hours, the really early start on my bookkeeping days), but at this point I think I’m comfortable enough not to worry much about that now.

As it stands, I feel like I’m finally acting my age. I mean, considering that I’m in my mid-fifties now, I see no need to be racing hither and yon every waking moment. [This transfer is indirectly involved in that, in which I no longer feel I need to be on top of everything out of necessity; I have a team that picks up what I can’t and I don’t need to twist anyone’s arm to make that happen.] I can slow down a bit and go at a leisurely pace. I don’t have to be so damned active every waking moment if I don’t want to. And it’s been so much healthier that way.

I think I finally get the real meaning behind John Lennon’s “No longer riding on the merry-go-round, I just had to let it go” lyric.

Not that I’m resigning myself to sitting around doing nothing, far from it. Just going at my own pace. I’m still looking forward to my other creative outlets once Theadia is done. Will I share it here on the blog? Most likely, yes, in part or at least with some decent amount of watermarking involved to avoid those pesky stealing LLMs. [Not that I expect my output to be works of brilliance, but you can’t be too paranoid about robotkind, heh.]

But yeah, life is better these days now that I’ve chosen to go at my own pace.

Currently reading…

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I’ll admit that I have become obsessed with reading comics on the K Manga app on my e-reader. It’s run by Kodansha, one of the big manga publishers these days, and I’ve picked up on a handful of series that I’m really enjoying. It’s where I discovered the wonderfully written teen romance The Fragrant Flower Blooms with Dignity, whose main characters Rintaro and Kaoruko have been showing up as pictures and gifs here over the last few months. [I’ve been enjoying that series so much I’ve been tempted to do a mini-series here about it.] Every night when I get into bed, I’ll turn on the app and catch up on a few titles.

The other night, I was thinking: y’know, I have this physical pile of books next to my bed that haven’t been picked up lately, I should probably do something about that as well instead of reading comics every night. But maybe this is part and parcel of my wanting to change up my creative outlets? Over the past several years I’d become super-picky about the novels I was picking up, and even then some of them haven’t been resonating with me as much as they used to. It’s not that they’re bad or that the latest trends aren’t speaking to me, it’s merely that I’m not feeling the spark of excitement like I used to. I’m not as voracious a reader as I was, at least not right now anyway.

So why not see this burst of interest in comics as a plus and not a minus? After all, that’s how I started reading more in the late 90s, isn’t it? During the HMV years when I suddenly decided that I would take those Wednesday drives to the comic book store every week, that sparked off a new love of reading that I hadn’t really had before. What started as a focus on just a few titles bloomed into several, which then expanded into different styles, different genres. And those, in turn, inspired my writing style and ideas.

And somewhere along the lines, I suddenly found myself interested in reading books again. It all felt fresh once more.

So perhaps it’s fine that I embrace this medium again for the time being. Reading comics like Fragrant Flower have reminded me that both inspiration and influence lie in interesting places, and it’s up to me to search for them when I need them. Perhaps now it’s time for me to learn not just the art of visual storytelling, but to learn how to see and understand things in new ways.

Good weather

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It’s been surprisingly warm and clear here in the Bay Area the last few weeks, so we’ve been taking advantage of that by ensuring that we get out for some walking when we can. I mean, given that we now live a block from Golden Gate Park, there’s really no excuse for us not to take a stroll along its greenery unless we’ve had an utterly exhausting work day.

To be honest, I’ve been thinking a lot about getting outside a lot more these days. It’s part of what I’ve posted about earlier — taking a little time off from writing to focus more on other creative outlets — and what better way to take an alternate look at things than to look at my surroundings? Take a few more pictures, appreciate the art and sound of nature, that sort of thing.

Rethink how I think, in other words.

Waking up early this week

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I don’t remember the last time I had to wake up before 4am, to be honest. Maybe that one time we were heading out of SFO on a 6am flight or something? I can do it if I have to, but no guarantees that I’ll be fully awake and coherent. Just letting you know ahead of time.

So why am I waking up at stupid:early AM this week? It’s because it’s my first week at the shop I’ve been transferred to, and right off the bat they’re going to train me on the newfangled bookkeeping software and hardware, and I have to be there at 4am. It’s a good thing I only live ten minutes away! And the other good thing is that after an eight-hour shift, this means I’m out by 12:30pm and have the rest of the day to do whatever. And you know how much I love days like that.

So this also means that I may not have the brainspace to get any blogging done this week, but we shall see.

Getting there

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I’ve still got a long way to go before Theadia is finished and let out into the wild, and right now the last thing on my mind is a deadline. I mean, I’d like to see it out at some point this year, but I’m not going to push it if it ain’t gonna move any faster. I’ve always pictured the writing process of this project as similar to the Bridgetown Trilogy, in that I’d keep up with it but I would never actually rush it at any point. It would get done when it got done.

There’s also the fact that I’m also purposely seeing this as…well, not a final project, but a last one before I put my writing aside for a little while. Which is kind of ironic, considering that I’d conceived it at one of the most stressful times of my life when I’d come to a crossroads and had no idea where I was going next, both personally and creatively. It began in desperation and ends in peace. In a way, that’s one of the themes of the book, which is why it’s taking so long: this is not a theme that’s easy to write, especially when one of the plot lines is the build-up to a possible galactic war. Everything has to unfold just right or it won’t work.

Does this come across as final? Maybe? I’m not really seeing it that way, to be honest. There’s definitely no finality in this decision of mine to step away from writing for a bit. If a story idea resonates with me enough, then sure, I’ll give it a go.

I merely want to see what other creative outlet resonates with me at this time in my life, is all.

Fly-by: brb, RL stuff

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Not to fear, it’s all good! Just some Real Life stuff that’s been a long time coming, finally coming to fruition. Very good news indeed, and I’m glad I’m finally seeing the end results. One less thing weighing down on me!

(Well, that, and it’s been a hectic week at the Day Job and I decided to take it easy and relax a bit.)

See you on Monday!

Expression

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Expanding on last week’s post about changing focus on my creative outlets, I’ve been thinking about why this decision has been resonating with me so much lately.

I could say that, like any other author, I feel like sometimes I don’t quite get my point across with my writing. I get close, but I don’t quite nail the landing, and it bothers me when it happens. It feels like I phoned it in just to get the damn thing finished. I know I’ve felt that way with pretty much all my stories to some extent. Still, that’s no reason for me to give up on writing, even temporarily. It’s got to be more than that.

Perhaps it’s that I’ve been using written words to express myself for so long, that I’m better at writing it out than I am trying to speak it sometimes. I trip over my words all the time, have linguistic brain-farts and forget what point I was trying to make, and get easily sidetracked if someone interrupts me. [This makes a lot of sense, as I always feel a sense of deep irritation when that last one happens.] Ask me to write something out for you, however? I’ll write you goddamn piece of art. Heh.

And all this got me thinking about how I used to express myself with music and art, especially in the early 90s during my college days. I was full of song ideas and comic drawings that spilled out into my notebooks, often as that ‘secondary focus’ while I was in class. It’s where I wrote some of my best lyrics for The Flying Bohemians and drew nearly all of my Murph strips and drawings. Both of those projects weren’t just doodles, either; I had some detailed plans for both the music and the comic, and the only reason I never followed through on either one was because I felt I’d started too late and didn’t stand a chance to catch up with most of my more creative classmates. To them I was just some idiot who wasn’t alternative enough and wanted to jump on the bandwagon. Or at least that’s how I felt they saw me, at any rate.

But here I am, years later and knowing a hell of a lot better. I’ve achieved my writing goals multiple times over the last ten years, and I’m pretty damn proud of that. And more importantly, that my age and the level I start at doesn’t mean jack shit. It’s that I do it at all.

I think I started realizing that some years ago when I bought myself an higher-end yet affordable digital camera and started experimenting, and realized it again when I started doing my own book covers. I’d taken a lot of pictures with my phones, sure, but there was something about playing with this visual medium that intrigued me. Even if it was taking simple pictures then processing them through things like PicMonkey and Affinity — always kinda-sorta knowing what I was doing, but leaning heavily on creative instinct — this outlet resonated with me. I’m only slightly annoyed that I let that one fall by the wayside for a while as well.

This is why I’ve been thinking — why not revisit these outlets? Pick up where I left off? See what comes of them?

Perhaps it’s time to discover a new way of expressing my creativity.

What if…?

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The other day while I was working on Theadia I got to thinking: what if I just…stopped writing for a while? I mean, not because I’m stressed out. or emotionally exhausted. or out of ideas. or held down by Real Life Issues or any other external reasons. It’s not as if I’m getting sick of it or feel I can’t hack it anymore.

Or to clarify the question: what if I choose to select a different creative output to be my primary focus at this point in my life?

You all know that I’ve always been drawn to the triad of writing, music and art. Three things I’ve always been interested in and loved in equal measure. But it was writing that took the driver’s seat, way back in the 80s. The bug hit me hard when I started writing the Infamous War Novel as a teenager and I just kept working at it for decades, and, well…here I am. Seven self-published books with an eighth one on the way.

And it seems that, somewhere in the back of my head, I’ve decided that I truly want to immerse myself in music again. I mean, I’m already far past immersion when it comes to listening, collecting and having my creative output inspired/influenced by it; it’s more of a clinical obsession at this point. But I’ve always kept the musical creative output at a distance these last two decades, leaving it as merely a hobby. I’ve learned enough to be Not That Bad (still with a lot of room for improvement), but in the last several years, there’s been that itch.

An itch that I want to know a bit more. To expand on my musical curiosities and see where it takes me. To finally learn how to home-record music without spending a fuckton of money doing it. I don’t even want to be a guitarists with multiple axes; I just want to try being some kind of quirky indie one-person project you find on Bandcamp. [Hell, I already have a name for it that A and I came up with ages ago: Drunken Owl.]

Mind you, this does not mean completely giving up the writing. I don’t think I’d be able to do that, anyway. It just wouldn’t be my everyday creative outlet like it is now. For a while.

Allowing those other creative avenues to open up wide and shine certainly sounds tempting to me these days.

Thinking about it

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The status of Theadia is still in ‘I’m getting there’, but right now I’m thinking about whether or not I want to self-publish it or try my hand at submission again. I haven’t decided either way just yet, but I feel like I should at least keep that possibility open for now.

So why now? Why not keep up with the DIY self-publishing? Well, why not is indeed the question here. I still feel like I could have had a chance with Diwa & Kaffi if I hadn’t sent it out a mere month before a world pandemic strongarmed its way into everyone’s lives. By the time things settled down, I’d wanted to try the DIY approach again. I always hoped that novel could have done so much better, as I still think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever written.

The problem with DIY is that I’m still not the best with getting my name and my wares out there. Honestly, it’s kind of hard to do so these days when self-publishing has gotten much easier to do. And of course there’s the completely unnecessary interruption of AI-generated slop out there clogging everything up. I’m sure I can rise above that, but the point remains that I’m not all that great at self-promotion. If I’m going to go this route, I’m going to need to seriously up my game.

[There is also the fact that I’m definitely going to need to commission an artist for Theadia‘s cover, because I don’t think the photo database sites are going to cut it this time. I can (hopefully) afford it, but I’m still nervous about getting it right.]

That’s not to say that this novel is going to be a make-or-break situation for me, far from it. I’m going to keep creating one way or another; it’s in my blood and I don’t plan on giving that up anytime soon. Just that I know I can do so much better than how I’ve been previously.