Dec 4, 2024
I’m still not feeling great. My side twinges and it’s difficult to get comfortable. Sleeping isn’t easy; I regularly wake up several times in the night and find it difficult to get back to sleep.
But I’m over the worst of it, I hope, and tomorrow I’m going back to work.
It has really thrown me. I didn’t know I could feel so much pain. Now I wonder when it will come back.
My dad suffered from kidney stones and there’s no reason to think this will be a one and done.
There are lifestyle changes I can make, and I intend to. I need to drink more water and eat less processed food. Citrus fruit is supposed to be good for parenting kidney stones.
The drugs I was prescribed were great for stopping the pain, but they didn’t leave me unscathed. I had weird palpitations in my abdomen. The antibiotics have wrecked my gut.
But it’s time to go back out into the world and try to hold onto these lessons. To take better care of myself.
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Latest release: Sisterhood
Currently Writing:
- The Storm: a cozy apocalypse short story. Today’s progress: 1,047 / 4,844
- The List: a dark fantasy novella. PLANNING
- The Last Outpost: a science-fiction short story about a human colony on a moon of Jupiter. EDITING
Apr 30, 2024
It’s been a while since I last posted here and a lot has changed. Well, maybe not that much, but it feels like a lot. Enough that it’s going to change the way I’m approaching blogging, and writing in general (but more on that another time).
I finished working at Verizon in June last year, after 14 years with the same company. Since then I’ve been writing and doing a few other things. As of tomorrow I am once again employed and that’s going to take some adjustment. It’s a part-time role which suits me because I can carry on taking Oscar to and from school, and still have time to write and publish.
Even working part time, I’m going to have less time to spend on writing and publishing though, so why am I back to blogging, you might ask. Well, the simple answer is that I like writing here, and that’s a good enough reason. But it’s also because, while not having traditional employment, my time became sprawling. Things that I used to be able to do in a couple of hours took whole days. Returning to blogging feels like a way of fighting against that tendency.
While I’ve been away from blogging I have also been thinking about my upcoming writing projects and there are going to be some changes there. All for the better, I think.
Anyway, just wanted to check in and let you know what’s going on. I’ll be posting more regularly going forward so you shouldn’t have to wait so long for my next post.
Feb 21, 2024
I have always enjoyed super hero stories. One of the first films I remember seeing at the cinema was Tim Burton’s Batman, and as you can probably tell if you’ve been reading this blog for a while, I am a big fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Although super heroes originated in comic books, I have never been a big reader of them. I have tried a few times in the past, but it has never really clicked. I’m not sure why. For me, the best place to enjoy these stories is at the cinema or on television.
Last night, Tamzin and I watched the first few episodes of Extraordinary. It’s a comedy series, but not in the way I have seen comedy heroes done in the past. Most of the time, the superpowers aren’t played for laughs, but are taken seriously. The comedy comes from the characters.
The closest thing I can think to compare it to is Discworld, a fantasy comedy that still takes the world it has created seriously. Being in such rarified company suggests this isn’t a straightforward thing to do, and it got me thinking about my writing and whether I could manage something like that.
It also got me thinking about another super hero film we watched recently: The Marvels.
The Marvels got a lot of hate online, but we both really enjoyed it. Same with Thor Love and Thunder, which I would put as one of my favorite films in the MCU. But many people didn’t like them and it makes me think some people take these films too seriously. They are, after all, about people wearing costumes fighting crime. There has to be an element of fun in that.
But I think a lot of it is down to setting people’s expectations. And I think that’s an important lesson to take away from them for my writing. A show like Extraordinary is no less silly than Captain Marvel visiting a planet where they communicate by singing, but it was established in the very first scene that Extraordinary was a comedy, whereas The Marvels and Thor have dozens of films set in the same continuity establishing a very serious tone.
That’s what I’m taking away from this: set the tone quickly and make sure it is maintained.
Jan 16, 2024
We follow the rules because we think they are going to keep us safe. Instead they turn us into good productive cogs in a machine which produces nothing of benefit to us.
There are rules beyond the law of the land. Social conventions put us in a similar position. We are expected to have social media accounts so we do it and our attention is taken away from us and sold to advertisers to the benefit of the companies that made the platform. We drive places because it is convenient and that makes us less fit and produces pollution that is destroying the world. There are many more.
Some things we can’t change, some things are genuinely a benefit that we wouldn’t want to change. But it doesn’t hurt to ask whether we are doing something because it helps, or if we are just following the rules.
Jan 15, 2024
I wasn’t born into this world of fast media and constant connection. The world I grew up in was one with four television channels and a home computer that could just about manage word processing. Now I have high speed internet in my pocket and instant access to millions of hours of television and films. It’s not a world that I am equipped to handle.
Few of us are.
Even people raised in such a world are about to have the rug pulled out from under them with the mainstreaming of virtual and augmented reality. We can barely handle the internet on our phones, which we at least have to take out of our pockets to look at. How are we going to manage when it’s right in front of our faces, all day.
The turnaround for cultural change is getting shorter and shorter. We had the internet at home when I was at college. Then I got a computer with internet access in my room a few years later. So I would guess there is about twenty years when things were similar. Now, the changes are coming quicker than ever, I would be surprised if there are five years.
The systems that I was taught were designed for a world where you weren’t constantly fighting to keep your attention on things. If I want to continue living in the culture of the modern world, then I need to find new ways of handling things. But that is a question, not a certainty. There is always the option of not trying to live in a modern media landscape.
Dec 14, 2023
I have a natural inclination towards orderliness. I like everything to have its place and to put things away where they belong when I have finished with them. On my computer everything is neatly filed away in the correct folder and the desk where I write is arranged so that it doesn’t get cluttered. It gives me a sense of peace to work in an orderly environment.
For years, I have tried to write in an orderly manner, but I am coming to the conclusion that the process is inherently messy. Ideally, I want a system that I can follow each time, which should generate minimal debris. The way I have set that up is to plan stories using Goodnotes on my iPad, then using the plan I come up with there to write the first draft in Scrivener, to then export as a PDF, so I can do the edits on my iPad again and then type them up and the whole thing should be neat and easily contained.
That’s not how it works, though. Every time I try, I find myself compelled to get out pads of paper to make notes there rather than on my iPad. I jump back and forth between paper, Goodnotes and Obsidian.
It used to frustrate me, but I am coming to the conclusion that doing that isn’t a failure in my process, it is the process. Switching from one medium to another (even between two that are pretty much the same) is where the story comes alive. There is no way to systemize this process and there is no point looking for a single tool I can do everything in.
Planning a story is a messy process, I guess, and I just have to make my peace with the piles of paper that litter my desk. They aren’t a sign of failure, but of a system that has evolved naturally over the years.
