Tag: personal

Perhaps a *little* nervous…

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I’m sure we’re all on tenterhooks as we await the outcome of tomorrow’s election. I know I certainly am, for various and extremely obvious reasons. It continues to blow my goddamn mind that some people are still contemplating voting for The Fuckwit.

(Hey, it’s my blog, I get to wax politic every now and again. I don’t all that often, so stick with me here.)

As for me, I will most likely be heavily distracting myself instead of watching coverage for most of Tuesday because I know I won’t be able to emotionally handle it otherwise. I did this back in 2012 when I was worried Mitt would win by binge-reading the webcomic Endtown. (I highly recommend it, Aaron Neathery’s storytelling is equal parts strange, heartbreaking and humorous.) I believe in 2016 I binge-watched the Gall Force anime series which I hadn’t done in ages, and 2020 I think I just focused on writing and my music collection. Perhaps this time out we’ll watch silly holiday romcoms or something.

I mean, realistically I feel cautiously optimistic. Harris has consistently proven herself not only able to go above and beyond, but also to consistently think multiple steps ahead and and think outside the box when necessary. TFG and his team, on the other hand, has consistently proven himself utterly unable to do even the most basic homework without fucking up spectacularly, and hiding said fuck-ups with distraction. And several members of his own party have even gone public to say oh christ please I’ll even vote for this cheese danish instead of him. Completely ignoring the “polls” that have been popping up as of late, it sounds like Harris has an extremely good chance of winning.

Still, I’ve come to accept the fact that I do not have the stomach or the brain to be a political wonk. I’m just too mentally reactive with such things. So I’m just going to hope for the best. I’m certainly hoping we’ve dispensed with most if not all of the faithless electors who screwed up 2016. And I’m also hoping that TFG’s minions won’t pull another January 6, because we really don’t need a repeat of that now, do we?

Well. Either way, I’ll still be here. I’m definitely not going anywhere.

We are hope despite the times

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One, I had no idea REM had dropped this digital mix last month, but it’s a great eighteen-track compilation of what they did best in their earlier years: a strong and vocal political awareness, and a keen eye for community both local and national.

Two, and more importantly, I ask you to do the right thing. Even if you need to swallow that bitter pill because they’re not perfect. Even if they do one or two things you disagree with. Even if they can’t fix everything right away. One candidate has the intelligence and the strength to keep this country working and improving. The other is a bigot with a rap sheet, wants to outlaw several of my friends and coworkers, and wants to keep hate alive.

Do the right fucking thing and vote. You know who for.

In the end it’s just love

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I might not be doing nearly as much writing and revising as I should these last couple of weeks, but fear not, I am not avoiding it. Merely just waylaid by Day Jobbery and trying to sort through the plots of two major projects in my head at the same time. And I’m trying not to make it all complicated.

The ending of Theadia might feature several characters doing several different things all at the same time to achieve one singular goal, but the important thing for me to remember is to take it one step at a time. There’s a lot to juggle but if I already know where all the pieces fit into the larger pattern, all I need to do is carefully and patiently put them all together. I learned that with the Bridgetown Trilogy.

And speaking of which, I’m also prepping myself to start (restart?) MU4 which, like the trilogy, has a lot of moving parts and patterns. I’ve worked and reworked them in my head for probably far too long, so I think it’s time to just start writing it. Put pen to paper and move. And to remind myself that despite the darker moments of this particular new project, there must also be moments of incredible light. That’s always been the theme of the Mendaihu Universe: the yin-yang balances of the world around us.

Every now and again I still need to remind myself of that. Not just in my writing projects, but in life as well. The Day Job might be stressful lately, but it also remains a place I’m proud of working at (and that in itself is something I very rarely admit to).

Meanwhile, in Bridgetown…

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I’ve got two projects in my head related to the Mendaihu Universe that I’d like to work on once I finish up Theadia. The first one, of course, is MU4. The second one is a ‘remaster’ of the trilogy. I’ve been itching to work on them for a long time now, so as you can well imagine, it’s affecting my focus on Theadia just that little bit. Heh.

A remaster, you say? Well, Next September will be the tenth anniversary of the release of A Division of Souls, the first in the trilogy as well as my first self-published book. And while I think it still holds up really well, I feel like I could revisit it again as an author with a few years and many more books under my belt and make it even better. I don’t plan on any major changes or revisions, mind you. Perhaps a bit of tightening and cleaning up, a few rough patches that I could fix. And maybe some fun extras to add in at the end, like the official soundtracks, some annotations and explanations, that sort of stuff.

And then there’s MU4. That one is just as old, now that I think about it: I started writing some of it longhand while working on prepping ADoS for self-release. It has multiple outtakes and versions that are interesting yet remain unfinished due to focusing on other projects. The story itself is a continuation of the theme of spirituality found in the original trilogy, though this time it focuses on a slightly different angle: what happens when that spirituality is tainted or mishandled.

And that’s a story I think will need a lot more focus and dedication than I can give it while working on other lighter projects. Which means that I’d better get cracking on finishing and releasing Theadia, yeah?

It’s going to be quite the epic project, but I am definitely looking forward to it.

Reading at night

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I was doing pretty good there for a while. I was going through a number of books on my TBR pile (or alternately catching up on my shopping list by reading library copies on Hoopla), but that seems to have fallen by the wayside again. I’m back to rereading my WIP again, and I think that’s doing more harm than good right now. I did this before with Queen Ophelia’s War…I was revision-reading so often that I kind of burnt myself out with the story for a little bit and had to distance myself for a while before picking it up again.

Mind you, I find revision-reading one of the best tools I have when it comes to writing novels and prepping them for self-publication, but I sometimes need to learn that overdoing it leads to hyperfocusing on the problems and rarely getting any further. There has to be a balance.

Not that I’m burnt out on Theadia yet, thankfully. Just that I need to put it aside for a time at night. I need to read things that aren’t my own work. How else would I happen to discover new things that might inspire newer ideas? And not even that, sometimes it’s fun just to sit down and do a bit of enjoyable reading at the end of a long day! It’s a perfect wind-down activity!

So maybe what I need to do is dust off those books in the TBR pile and start cracking them open!

Too Darn Hot

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It’s been uncomfortably hot here in San Francisco the last couple of weeks, seeing record temperatures and ridiculously clear skies. Thankfully I work in a place where temperature regulation is kind of important, so I’m spending most of the day inside where it hovers somewhere at a comfortable sixty degrees or so.

Unfortunately, Spare Oom has been a bit of a sauna at times, meaning I can’t always get a lot of work done until it cools off in the evening. Which means revision work on Theadia is falling a bit behind, but I’m not too worried about it. It’ll get there when it gets there.

It did remind me of my Boston days, especially when I lived in the Shoebox, which could get unbearably hot and stuffy during the summer even when the window wide open. The Allston apartment was a bit better, given that it was a north-facing apartment and thus never got direct sunlight, but without any AC it could still get uncomfortable. Those days I’d usually hang out elsewhere, like at a library or a record store until sunset, then stay up far too late enjoying the cool of the evening. And of course there were the summers in the Belfry…I’d often start my writing sessions after dinner when it was already cooling off.

Mind you, this is not normal weather for San Francisco. We’re more known for being firmly stuck in the upper fifties and low sixties on the good days, with the addition of consistent fog cover out here in the Richmond District. From what I hear, the weather will be dropping back down soon enough, then I’ll feel comfortable back here again.

It’s Inktober time!

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It’s been a few years since I’ve actively joined in the fun with this! I’ve got the time, my plate is relatively well organized (if not always clear), and I’m not in the middle of some sort of major project or personal crisis or whatever has kept me from it in the past.

That’s how I’m going to focus on it this year: have fun with it! I’m not out to prove anything, I really shouldn’t try to aim for perfection with every single prompt. Just draw whatever comes to mind. It could be the first image that pops up in my brain, or it could be a ridiculous pun or a music reference (I mean, #16 just begs to be full of flannel shirts). Don’t think to hard, just have fun.

And that’s something I need to remind myself of more often!

Passing the time

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So, how is my little experiment with passing the time at work going?

Well, it could be going better to be honest. I’m still finding too many excuses (and they are excuses) not to pull out my phone and screw around on Threads for the short amount of time I have for breaks. I mean, fine, it’s downtime and there’s nothing inherently wrong with using said time to mindlessly scroll social media…but like I said, I don’t want to do it anymore, and I’m trying my damnedest to get OUT of that habit.

I’m just not trying hard enough, really.

On the plus side, though…I have been doing a damn fine job of maintaining a level of Zen while at work. For a little while there I was letting myself get too frustrated and/or distracted and reactive to situations, just like I would do in the past, but that doesn’t happen nearly as much these days. Sure, I’ll get a bit snippy or grumble to myself in certain situations, but I’ll let it go very soon after and not continue to dwell on it.

And creativity-wise? I’ve scaled back the prep work, so to speak. For a while there I was carrying a small but bulky notebook in my jacket pocket, which did get its use, but I’m back to the old-school ways again, using my trusty back-pocket pad. Why? Because it provides lower expectations. I’m not writing anything big there, but I am starting to write down more lines of lyrics/poetry and the occasional WIP note. And that’s all I really need right now.

Walk in Silence: resurrecting the book again?

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Okay, so this long-simmering, often-backburnered project surfaced completely by chance and maybe because I was, er, cheating on my daily 750 Words.

A few days ago I found I’d run out of time to get my daily words done so as a fix and not miss a day, I figured a quick and easy cheat would be to copy and paste some older blog posts and add some commentary at the end of it. Cue the 2016 entries from my music blog as yet another attempt at a music-themed memoir.

I really liked this version, as I wasn’t really trying to prove anything with it. I wasn’t trying to shoehorn music history into it this time out, because this story was about me and not the college rock scene of the time. It was about my reaction to it, as well as what led up to it. And now that I’m reading it again for the first time many years later, I realize that perhaps this version has a lot more merit than the previous versions…?

The only reason I hadn’t focused on it then was because I was doing some heavy revision in preparation for the Bridgetown Trilogy. I knew that I’d get back to it eventually…I just didn’t expect eight years and several new novels to pass in the interim!

So. Do I pick this one up and run with it? Well, I’ll have to see how much work it actually needs. If it only needs expansion and minor revision, then I’m sure I could see it as a release for 2025. I can’t say for sure, because, well, Best Laid Plans and all that…but you never know.