I spent today nervous about MoD2, and finally discovered that the selections won't be made today, but over the course of next week. You know what? I'm more than all right with that. I will wait patiently like writers do. Not knowing exactly when I'll find out actually takes a lot of pressure off, somehow.
NaNoWriMo is tomorrow. Arthuriana ho!
Overheard:
Child's voice: That's a pineapple.
Adult's voice: That's awesome!
Yeah, they got candy.
Monday, October 31, 2011
Nerves
Tomorrow (for another 75 minutes it's tomorrow) is the day the Machine of Death 2 people will be announcing their selections, and I wish I wasn't nervous about it. That's how it is, though--I'm jittery about the probability of my first post-college writing rejection as if there were something I could do about it now. It's not much good to try to explain the odds to myself: positing for a moment that my story is in the top 10 percent of submissions, that makes it one of 200 stories. So, inasmuch as I am a logical being, I expect a rejection. But, inasmuch as I am a fantasist, I of course know that my story is destined for publication and glory. That part of me is setting itself up for disappointment and I don't know what to do about it.
I wish I were already used to this. I don't look forward to the process of getting used to it. So here I am talking to the internet.
I had hoped to finish a short story by tonight as a sort of ego armor, but I wasn't able to. (What a strange phrase, and really a lie. I know I was able to. I just didn't, and the fact is that now I can't have done it and I'm not able to do it by the time I should be in bed tonight, which is now.) I did make progress, though, and I should probably put more work into it Halloween night as a warmup for NaNoWriMo.
This year I have a lot of things I want to do in November, it being my last full month in Seattle. I want to keep going to jujutsu close to twice a week, and one or two evenings I want to stop by the Pathfinder Society at The Dreaming. This is something like my last semester of college, and I'm probably going to have too much on my plate. Of course the novel will take precedence.
I hope to keep posting here once a week as well, though I'm sure you'll forgive me if a few posts are very brief.
Do I want luck? I don't think I believe in it.
I wish I were already used to this. I don't look forward to the process of getting used to it. So here I am talking to the internet.
I had hoped to finish a short story by tonight as a sort of ego armor, but I wasn't able to. (What a strange phrase, and really a lie. I know I was able to. I just didn't, and the fact is that now I can't have done it and I'm not able to do it by the time I should be in bed tonight, which is now.) I did make progress, though, and I should probably put more work into it Halloween night as a warmup for NaNoWriMo.
This year I have a lot of things I want to do in November, it being my last full month in Seattle. I want to keep going to jujutsu close to twice a week, and one or two evenings I want to stop by the Pathfinder Society at The Dreaming. This is something like my last semester of college, and I'm probably going to have too much on my plate. Of course the novel will take precedence.
I hope to keep posting here once a week as well, though I'm sure you'll forgive me if a few posts are very brief.
Do I want luck? I don't think I believe in it.
Thursday, October 27, 2011
The Pineappolantern
Hey, I figured out how to put pictures on Blogger (like it was hard). This post is mostly about showing off this thing I have pictures of.
Halloween is a holiday I enjoy somewhat. I haven't enjoyed dressing up in many years, but I still approve of candy in small pieces (the real fun of "fun size" being the ability to eat a Snickers bar, a Reese's cup, a 3 Musketeers, and a bar of dark chocolate in one sitting without endangering one's digestive stability). I'm ambivalent about jack-o'-lanterns. Drawing has always been an amateur-level forte of mine, and it's not every day of the year you get carte blanche to draw on things with knives. Fire, also, is a medium I am seldom invited to work in. But at least since I've been in the Hedgehog House, there's been an expectation that I would handle the design and execution of the jacks. I think it started when I did this:
The problem is that I don't generally like pumpkins. I can enjoy a slice of pumpkin pie in a Thanksgiving setting, but I certainly could never approach the enthusiasm that some of my housemates evinced at the prospect of fresh squash innards. When I could, I got someone else to handle the scooping. I think whether or not you find something appetizing can have a lot to do with how you feel about plunging your hands into it.
This year I didn't feel inspired with any clever pumpkin designs, and as usual I wasn't really feeling the pumpkin thing. The people who would most expect me to perform have moved out now, so I could probably have punted.
But at the supermarket a week or so ago, I saw something that I hadn't thought was in season, and I got an idea.
An awful idea.
A wonderful, awful idea.
...
This probably isn't as big a reveal as it could have been, since it's right there in the post title, but check that out! I'm pretty pleased with it.
Abby was doing some work at the dining room table and I didn't actually explain what I was doing--I just sat down with a knife and a tropical fruit and went to work. She approved of the idea, and took the pictures when it was finished.
In the dark:
Halloween is a holiday I enjoy somewhat. I haven't enjoyed dressing up in many years, but I still approve of candy in small pieces (the real fun of "fun size" being the ability to eat a Snickers bar, a Reese's cup, a 3 Musketeers, and a bar of dark chocolate in one sitting without endangering one's digestive stability). I'm ambivalent about jack-o'-lanterns. Drawing has always been an amateur-level forte of mine, and it's not every day of the year you get carte blanche to draw on things with knives. Fire, also, is a medium I am seldom invited to work in. But at least since I've been in the Hedgehog House, there's been an expectation that I would handle the design and execution of the jacks. I think it started when I did this:
This year I didn't feel inspired with any clever pumpkin designs, and as usual I wasn't really feeling the pumpkin thing. The people who would most expect me to perform have moved out now, so I could probably have punted.
But at the supermarket a week or so ago, I saw something that I hadn't thought was in season, and I got an idea.
An awful idea.
A wonderful, awful idea.
...
Abby was doing some work at the dining room table and I didn't actually explain what I was doing--I just sat down with a knife and a tropical fruit and went to work. She approved of the idea, and took the pictures when it was finished.
In the dark:
That looks a lot better than I expected. I'm just sayin'. And you get this translucent effect all around the shell:
Here it is in its proper place, on the front stoop:
With a long exposure, the thing looks pretty demonic:
This is almost certainly my last Seattle jack-o'-lantern, and I think I went out on a good note. I just hope it holds together until Halloween proper.
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Steps forward
As frustrated as I can be with myself for repeatedly missing my self-imposed Saturday-night blog deadline, I’ve decided that moving the deadline proper to Sunday would be a mistake. As it is, you can probably count on posts happening at some point over the weekend.
I set some balls rolling this week. The first, almost certainly most important, is that I gave notice at my job. You may remember how I wrote a while back about how I would probably be moving to Washington DC to be with Girlfriend. I then promptly stopped referring to it against the outside chance that my bosses would find out I was planning to leave before I told them. But now I told them, and I can tell you too. My last day of work is tentatively set for November 30.
I’m willing to tell you that this has been a very scary thing. As America evolves into a despair-based economy, the prospect of giving up a good job, that pays all my bills, has moved from irksome to terrifying.
But what do I mean when I say I have a good job? Meaning no disrespect to my employer, to whom I am very grateful, I found no value in the work itself. Yes, I knew I was doing something that was of use to some people, maybe that was even important, and I could take a little pride in doing it well. But I didn’t enjoy it, or even engage it. Like every job I’ve had, actually, in the narrative of my life the time I’ve spent working has worked out to lost time, like sleeping.
It was money, and money is security, and I’m not so romantic as to imagine that I can get by without it. Over the past couple months, though, I’ve been realizing that the life I’ve been making secure is not the life I want. Not that I didn’t understand that before, but when Girlfriend was here there was something to be said for just living, and I imagined my steady job providing a safe platform for a cautious transition into an artistic livelihood. I don’t think I was wrong. But now I have roots here, and I want to be there.
What will I do in DC? I’ll definitely look for a steady job—I’ve read the advice of enough successful freelancers warning against jumping straight in to the artistic life without a net—but I’m starting a new phase of my life again, and it’s time to start working with a goal and a plan.
One step taken in the right direction: I signed up to the Cracked.com writer’s forum, which is the first step toward being able to pitch them article ideas and, hopefully, get published and paid. I'm not bragging about this. It’s not an award or anything; anyone can get in. But the fact remains that last week I had not done this, and now I have. When an article of mine is published, then you can be sure I will be bragging, right here.
I’m off to work now, despite it being Sunday. Seeing the end of my current job has suddenly made me care about money, which is something I haven’t done in a while. But I took four days of unpaid leave while my Grandma was dying, and while I’m not required to make that up, now it looks to me like an opportunity to squeeze four more days’ pay out of this job while I have it, if I can find the time.
November is coming. Are you ready?
Sunday, October 16, 2011
The future will be different from the past
I just finished watching Troll Hunter on Netflix, and that was fun. Bizarre, overblown, and understated in pretty decent proportions.
Recently I've had to do some Thinking about my Future, and while my Future as a Writer isn't the crux of my ruminations, I've had plenty on that subject to think about.
I checked back in on the Machine of Death people today. It looks like I will know the fate of "Burned at the Stake" at the end of the month. I'm bracing myself for a rejection, there being 1,958 submitted stories, and their declared intention being to reject between 1,923 and 1,928 of them. But they did come out with this neat word cloud poster of all the submitted titles, and I'll admit it's kind of exciting to see my title in the cloud, bottom center, the size of everything else that only one person tried.
Reading Kristine Kathryn Rusch's blog has churned my expectations for publishing rather thoroughly. Even if everything she's said about the publishing industry turns out to be wrong (and that seems unlikely to me), it's still probably for the best. Until perhaps a month ago I was still basing all my assumptions on advice published 15 years ago, not really considering that 15 years ago... you know what? Computers. I was going to list quaint things that were true in 1996 but you can do that yourself. A ridiculous amount has changed.
The upshot of what I'm hearing is that self-publishing has become something you can start a career on. There's also indy publishing, which is something I will have to look into.
What will I do with my writing? I don't know, exactly. But I've begun thinking in terms of what I can do for myself, and what I have to hire other people to do for me. I've spent the past three years proofreading and working with text formatting software--I begin to suspect that I have the skill set to format a book. I minored in visual art in college, and I think I can handle the cartography that should go in the front of Hengist & Undine. I have had the support of smart and talented friends throughout the writing process.
What can't I do? I can't produce cover-quality artwork--at least not the quality I would like. And I don't know anything about marketing. Managing marketing will be tricky, to say the least.
On the one hand I'm excited by the possibilities offered by self-publishing, but on the other hand, after a few conversations about the venue with certain friends and family, I realized that it doesn't lower the identity hurdle by that much. Even after my book was available online, I would still feel the need to explain, "The industry has changed. You can be a serious writer and self-publish now." If I bagged a traditional publishing contract, I wouldn't need to defend my status as a serious writer to friends and family, even if I didn't sell. Without a publishing contract, the only argument will be success, if I can have any. But, whether I can sell an editor on my work or not, I'll need to sell books to prove to myself that I'm a writer.
Recently I've had to do some Thinking about my Future, and while my Future as a Writer isn't the crux of my ruminations, I've had plenty on that subject to think about.
I checked back in on the Machine of Death people today. It looks like I will know the fate of "Burned at the Stake" at the end of the month. I'm bracing myself for a rejection, there being 1,958 submitted stories, and their declared intention being to reject between 1,923 and 1,928 of them. But they did come out with this neat word cloud poster of all the submitted titles, and I'll admit it's kind of exciting to see my title in the cloud, bottom center, the size of everything else that only one person tried.
Reading Kristine Kathryn Rusch's blog has churned my expectations for publishing rather thoroughly. Even if everything she's said about the publishing industry turns out to be wrong (and that seems unlikely to me), it's still probably for the best. Until perhaps a month ago I was still basing all my assumptions on advice published 15 years ago, not really considering that 15 years ago... you know what? Computers. I was going to list quaint things that were true in 1996 but you can do that yourself. A ridiculous amount has changed.
The upshot of what I'm hearing is that self-publishing has become something you can start a career on. There's also indy publishing, which is something I will have to look into.
What will I do with my writing? I don't know, exactly. But I've begun thinking in terms of what I can do for myself, and what I have to hire other people to do for me. I've spent the past three years proofreading and working with text formatting software--I begin to suspect that I have the skill set to format a book. I minored in visual art in college, and I think I can handle the cartography that should go in the front of Hengist & Undine. I have had the support of smart and talented friends throughout the writing process.
What can't I do? I can't produce cover-quality artwork--at least not the quality I would like. And I don't know anything about marketing. Managing marketing will be tricky, to say the least.
On the one hand I'm excited by the possibilities offered by self-publishing, but on the other hand, after a few conversations about the venue with certain friends and family, I realized that it doesn't lower the identity hurdle by that much. Even after my book was available online, I would still feel the need to explain, "The industry has changed. You can be a serious writer and self-publish now." If I bagged a traditional publishing contract, I wouldn't need to defend my status as a serious writer to friends and family, even if I didn't sell. Without a publishing contract, the only argument will be success, if I can have any. But, whether I can sell an editor on my work or not, I'll need to sell books to prove to myself that I'm a writer.
Sunday, October 9, 2011
Step 1: Hygiene
Sorry to miss a week plus. That's something I was hoping not to do. There was traveling, and then there was traveling again, and a funeral. As these things go, I suppose it went pretty well.
I called Girlfriend the other day and said "apparently I'm depressed." I wanted her to know that this was the sort of boyfriend she has: one who doesn't say, "Honey, I'm depressed," but says "apparently I'm depressed." I cited evidence, most particularly the 12 hours I had slept the night before. I didn't feel like I felt depressed. Today, I have just felt like I was depressed.
But this isn't what I came here to talk about, and it's not what you came here to read either, and anyway it's getting better. I re-learned today that there are some things I just shouldn't do: sleep until noon, wait until the afternoon to shower, go more than three days without shaving, or let myself run out of clean clothes. That's a solid recipe for feeling pathetic, and having remedied the latter three of those issues, things are looking up.
Yesterday I did something I had been meaning to do for some time--maybe years; I don't remember. I went back to DeadJournal and looked up my college-era blog. I had really expected the site to have disappeared, taking three years of my maudlin navel-gazing off the internet forever. But no! The site is still there, and my blog is still there, not even as if encased in amber, but still waiting for me to post to it again.
Not trusting to the internet to preserve that indefinitely, I saved the pages to my computer. I don't know if there's anything I want to do with them, but I didn't want that volume of my writing to disappear if I could help it. Looking back cursorially over it my first impression is that I was more depressive in college than I remember. Perhaps that isn't true of all the posts. The most recent post is from the end of 2006, and that wasn't a good year for anyone I know.
If I find anything worth sharing, or mocking, I may put it up here.
On another note, if I had posted last week I would have made mention of the Kickstarter campaign for season 2 of JourneyQuest. Heck, I still will; it's still going on. If you haven't already, take an opportunity contribute money towards people I like being funny and awesome. A seven-episode season is guaranteed, but with another $40k they can make ten episodes, and with $200k they can make two seasons at once!
At any rate, as an aspiring artist, I support the payment of other artists, and the development of new ways to fund art. It's exciting to me when fans of something enthusiastically fund it, just like it scares me when I see people taking art for granted.
Then again, JourneyQuest episodes on YouTube all have upwards of 30,000 views, and the Kickstarter campaign has 501 backers as I write this. I don't want to imply that 29,500 people aren't pulling their weight, but I do wonder if we're moving back into a patronage model of the arts, and what that would mean. Off the top of my head I imagine it would lead to the tastes of a smaller portion of the population being catered to, which may not be a demonstrable evil, but which I think is far from an objective good.
I called Girlfriend the other day and said "apparently I'm depressed." I wanted her to know that this was the sort of boyfriend she has: one who doesn't say, "Honey, I'm depressed," but says "apparently I'm depressed." I cited evidence, most particularly the 12 hours I had slept the night before. I didn't feel like I felt depressed. Today, I have just felt like I was depressed.
But this isn't what I came here to talk about, and it's not what you came here to read either, and anyway it's getting better. I re-learned today that there are some things I just shouldn't do: sleep until noon, wait until the afternoon to shower, go more than three days without shaving, or let myself run out of clean clothes. That's a solid recipe for feeling pathetic, and having remedied the latter three of those issues, things are looking up.
Yesterday I did something I had been meaning to do for some time--maybe years; I don't remember. I went back to DeadJournal and looked up my college-era blog. I had really expected the site to have disappeared, taking three years of my maudlin navel-gazing off the internet forever. But no! The site is still there, and my blog is still there, not even as if encased in amber, but still waiting for me to post to it again.
Not trusting to the internet to preserve that indefinitely, I saved the pages to my computer. I don't know if there's anything I want to do with them, but I didn't want that volume of my writing to disappear if I could help it. Looking back cursorially over it my first impression is that I was more depressive in college than I remember. Perhaps that isn't true of all the posts. The most recent post is from the end of 2006, and that wasn't a good year for anyone I know.
If I find anything worth sharing, or mocking, I may put it up here.
On another note, if I had posted last week I would have made mention of the Kickstarter campaign for season 2 of JourneyQuest. Heck, I still will; it's still going on. If you haven't already, take an opportunity contribute money towards people I like being funny and awesome. A seven-episode season is guaranteed, but with another $40k they can make ten episodes, and with $200k they can make two seasons at once!
At any rate, as an aspiring artist, I support the payment of other artists, and the development of new ways to fund art. It's exciting to me when fans of something enthusiastically fund it, just like it scares me when I see people taking art for granted.
Then again, JourneyQuest episodes on YouTube all have upwards of 30,000 views, and the Kickstarter campaign has 501 backers as I write this. I don't want to imply that 29,500 people aren't pulling their weight, but I do wonder if we're moving back into a patronage model of the arts, and what that would mean. Off the top of my head I imagine it would lead to the tastes of a smaller portion of the population being catered to, which may not be a demonstrable evil, but which I think is far from an objective good.
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