Still haven't started writing again, but that's okay.

A few weeks back I finally spent time with the Burrito (my niece) again, and the whole experience was wonderful.  I ended up with material for the next Christmas chapbook, just not as I wildly imagined it (actively collaborating with the Burrito, who recently won an award for a poem she wrote, by the way).  The Burrito has a younger brother and sister these days.  Liz & Pepe, as I'm currently imagining the title (and see no reason to consider changing it), is named after my youngest niece (and goddaughter!) and her grandfather, my dad (Pepe is French for grandfather).  

I also cooked up another potential novel-length concept, Whitman.  Haven't yet started writing again, but I keep reminding myself that only a few months ago I finished In the Leviathan, and until the Vella era I typically took much longer breaks between long projects.  I also have Don't Throw Baby Out with the Bathwater, technically a professional development project, that I'll be writing, hoping to publish it via Kindle for a particularly professional result (these tend to end up being three-ring binders when they're done by others).  

I kept telling myself, before the trip, wait on the trip to begin working on Children's Crusade.  And here we are weeks later and I still haven't.  Yesterday was the start of a four-day weekend for Memorial Day, so I certainly have plenty of time to work on writing (which I count these trips to the library, when I do the bulk of my blogging efforts these days, as part of, hoping next, as in right after this, to tackle a sequel to Dead Butlers, the scripting exercise that led to Nine Panel Grid).  (As I write this, I'm seriously considering making it a prose effort and not another script.)  (Anyway, just a relatively minor writing effort, keeping the juices flowing.)

All this and gamely plugging Event Fatigue on Twitter occasionally, hoping some schmo will help spark interest in it.  When I think about how far I am from even a figment of someone's imagination of the traditional publishing life, I sometimes regret that.  But getting to write exactly what I want ain't so bad, either.  It led to Leviathan, which could conceivably change all this.  Who knows?  Stranger things have happened.

EDIT: Wrote the "Man in the Box" thing, in comic book script format.  You can read it here.  

Not-the-Tonys 2022

Ha! So obviously this isn't quite yet an annual tradition (the first and only previous edition was in 2020), but I figured it was worth revisiting, since everyone loves an end of the year wrap-up.

Favorite Writing Project:

Obviously this would be Event Fatigue, which I've chronicled here as extensively as anything else on the blog in the past decade (and hey! 2022 was also the decade anniversary of the blog!), tackled over at Kindle Vella throughout the year and eventually my final self-published book of the year (there were many!).  Basically it was my only project in the past year, but it was quite an interesting one, and as I've stated, the longest work I've written in about the same timespan as this blog's existence.

Favorite Family Memory:

This one actually has a few options.  My niece, the Burrito, although our conversations via FaceTime have dwindled in the past year (she's just so busy!!!), we had some good ones, including at the start of the year (the inspiration for key elements in Uncle Toby), and on her birthday (in which she confessed a vulnerability).  But I made a trip to Alabama to attend my oldest nephew's high school graduation, and that was not only my first trip since the start of the pandemic, but also a rare trip to that particular leg of the family.  Lots of good food was had, and a lot more interesting things happened than I am going to get into here (but not in any of the ways you're probably currently imagining!), so with apologies to the Burrito, it has to take the spot here.

Favorite Work Memory:

I finally got to switch room assignments (not really going to get into that, either), which led to a whole odyssey of my second real miracle at this job, the second time I have definitely helped a child in my care.  Nothing can possibly top that!  Also notable was the time off due to Hurricane Ian, and then the day off due to Hurricane Nicole!  Sometimes work memories don't necessarily involve work.  Everything worked out both times, at least in my neck of the woods, thankfully.

Favorite Book (New):

The Ink Black Heart, the latest Robert Galbraith mystery featuring Strike & Ellacott.  I know the author has become controversial, but any rational person wouldn't possibly let that get in the way of a great book.

Favorite Book (Old):

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, which I finally got around to reading, and thank goodness, because I obviously loved it.  Kya is the American Lisbeth Salander.  The movie adaptation is great, one of the best movies of the year, too.

Favorite Book (Comic):

Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow by Tom King & Bilquis Evely, a combination of King explaining as no creator before him has what makes Supergirl great (and distinct from her cousin), and an original story that he weaves around her, the first time he's told an almost wholly original story since his debut novel, The Once Crowded Sky.

Favorite TV Show (New):

For a Star Trek fan, it's kind of impossible to go with any other answer than Strange New Worlds, which reimagines Pike's Enterprise, and in the brilliant season finale revisit the classic "Balance of Terror" (while simultaneously introducing the third-ever actor to play Kirk).

Favorite TV Show (Old): 

I'm enjoying Ghosts (the American version) more than ever as it plunges into its second season.  It's such a little miracle of a show, an ensemble with a rich cast it rotates through but is at its best when playing everyone off each other (as all the best shows do).  I've been trying to watch the original British version, too, and recently realized one of my favorite episodes was from it (there's only so much actual overlap between them).

Favorite Music:

I finally, finally got a copy of Brian Wilson's Smile, an album he originally set out to make with the Beach Boys, but a project that eventually led to his departure from the group and hibernation as a creator for some thirty years, until he completed and released it in 2004.  It's so good!  It's such a complete pop composition, the sessions "Good Vibrations" came from, so in the same creative vein, an extension of his vision for Pet Sounds (all of this pushing the Beatles to their own creative heights at the time).

Writing Projects 2023:

The big one, and what I intend to begin literally after wrapping this up, is tackling In the Leviathan, which I've been talking about here for a number of years at this point.  This will be purely literary fiction, an interpretation of my grandfather's life.  And should I succeed and in good time, I'll then finally tackle Collider, the second full-length Danab Cycle adventure.

Event Fatigue published

 

You see that?  I tried doing an actual cover again, using, as I had the last time I did, Canva, and I think it's a decent one, but I'm not particularly objective about it, now am I?

This is of course Event Fatigue, the third and most recent of my Kindle Vella projects, a superhero story, but more specifically about mutants.  Watching the X-Men movies over the years, especially the ones featuring the soft reboot starting First Class in which we follow the younger Professor X and Magneto as they start out being friends and watching the relationship evolve from that point (everyone says Apocalypse was a terrible failure, but I don't agree), and even feature far more cooperation between them than standard continuity suggests possible, I began to wonder what it would be like to totally reexamine all that, what it would be like to explore a mutant team and community where there develops a split in the ranks.  

I had come up with a list of mutants for an otherwise unrelated project, and the idea for this story seemed like a perfect opportunity to finally use them.  As usually happens when I develop an idea, the simplistic setup I started with didn't work out when I actually started writing it, and so that cover image, not quite the one I had for the Kindle Vella site but very close, becomes a joke you'll really just have to read the book to find out.  

Since it was already the longest story I've written in about a decade, it's also the longest book I've published in the smallest format (5" by 8") Kindle has, which I've used for all the material I've published since 2016 (and the same as what I used for all the Mouldwarp Press Presents anthologies, dating back to 2013).

You can buy Event Fatigue on Amazon at this link.

With the three other works of fiction I've announced previously, two volumes of poetry, and this year's Christmas collection, that's seven books I've published this year thanks to Kindle.  

Done writing Event Fatigue!

I finally finished Event Fatigue over at Kindle Vella!

I've been slogging away at this sucker since January, originally a slow and sporadic pace, much as I'd done with the two previous stories I wrote for the platform, but started to realize, a few months ago, at that pace it was probably going to take forever, so I just settled into some daily writing for the first time in a while, and am pleased to have reached the end.

It's not very long, but it's the longest story I've written in about a decade, although ironically it's only about as long as what I had successfully done on a number of occasions previously by completing NaNoWriMo, fifty thousand words written in the month of November.  

As with most of what I write, it didn't turn out as I imagined when I started in, but definitely as someone might expect who's ever read me before, although in a lot of respects, it's the most complete version of what I've done several times in the past, which is to track the perspectives of a large cast of characters, in this instance a group of mutant superheroes who experience a shocking death, and the story explains their reactions, how things got to that point, and how things turn out.  

The term "event fatigue" will be familiar to comic book fans, who in recent decades have generally gotten tired of "event books," massive crossovers that always promise "everything will be different!" until, well, the next massive crossover.  I use it to mean a number of things, including as a commentary on modern times, though never to exactly bludgeon the reader (there's plenty of that on social media, thank you very much).

A funny thing happened along the way, formatting-wise.  I started out writing directly on the platform, but when I got into daily writing, I wrote into the Word document I was compiling chapters into, and pasting that into the platform messed up formatting on the platform itself, and I am not savvy enough to correct such things.  As far as I can tell, no one is reading it there anyway, and the long-term goal is to get another paperback out of it (which, again, will be the longest I've released in a long time, and the longest in the format size I've been using for half a decade), which I plan to expend a little more marketing energy on than I usually do.

I've got other things to tackle.  I've got the next Christmas collection (Uncle Toby), a story I meant to be writing all year (Death Is Wearing Me Out), and of course, as always, recently, Collider.

But it feels really, really good to have finished this!

Nine Panel Grid, World Famous released, Event Fatigue

 I've added Event Fatigue to the list of my Kindle Vella projects on the right.  Apparently I skipped a month between chapters, but will be digging back in.  Two additional will be populating today, and, well, there are plenty more to come. 

Happily I can announce the release of a book from the second Kindle Vella project, Nine Panel Grid!

Keeping my present preferences, there is only a paperback release, which you can find here.  This is something of a metafiction, a story about a comic book that doesn't exist, detailing what happens in its final issue, including descriptions of art that does not exist, and a history that is equally fictional.  It involves characters I began working on nearly two decades ago, including one I created nearly three decades ago.  So it's got a lot of real history behind it, too, plus a bonus comic book script that's a version of Batman relevant to the story.  It's very much a project that's very interesting to me, and I will be peddling copies to a comic book shop that recently opened down the road from me, and I will keep you informed about that as things develope.

A few weeks before this one I also released World Famous, a story I worked on occasionally throughout 2021 (and finished earlier this year).

Likewise this is only a paperback release, which you can find here.  As the cover heavily implies, this one is about professional wrestling, and draws on stuff I've been dabbling with for the same general three decade period, so this has certainly been a good time to be writing stories on old material for me.  

Later I will be releasing my first Kindle Vella project, Aronnax, when I decide what (if anything) to add in order to bulk up the page count a little.  I have a timeline I put together for the abortive project that led to Aronnax, and I could certainly include the associated essay as well.  Who knows what else.  

Updates on Current Doings (or, 2022 Begins to Take Shape)

I sketched up the major projects I'll be tackling this year, Event Fatigue (the third Kindle Vella; previously reported as Ex-Ray: Event Fatigue) and Death Is Wearing Me Out (the once-monthly project succeeding World Famous; a ghost story, since it's apparently the thing that attracts me at the moment).  Both should be very, very interesting, and more accessible than their predecessors (World Famous, being about wrestling, and Nine Panel Grid, which is probably quite impenetrable).

But let's talk about those a little more, shall we?  Technically I should've finished World Famous by the end of last year.  Didn't really turn out that way.  I have two chapters yet to write, but they'll be easy enough to finish, and would've been done this morning if the very computer I'm using at the moment had cooperated (clever companies think they improve everything when they sometimes make them needlessly complicated).  In hindsight I'm all the happier I chose to do this a year ago, and that I plugged away at it dutifully (sometimes with a little catching up).  

Even Nine Panel Grid, since it handles a story I intended to write nearly two decades earlier (alas, a comics contest I probably hilariously fell far short of even coming close to winning).  I'm now six chapters away from finishing, about a month and a half, since it's mostly a once-a-week project, having started at the beginning of October.

Event Fatigue will be forty-four chapters, the longest by far (double the length of Nine Panel) I've tackled for Kindle Vella.  I still need to flesh out the story, but it's going to be pretty straight-forward, and also involve superheroes.  I picked out a cover image that hopefully at least stands out a little better than my last two.  It also picks up characters originally derived from an older project, which only occurred to me when I finally sat down to begin an outline.  This one should be fun.

I'm still writing up material for Substack, in the meantime.  I have no idea if I have a chance at developing an actual following there, but it's worth an effort.  I plan to devote one installment to Nine Panel Grid, perhaps write an actual story (you'd understand if you had a look at Nine Panel exactly what I'm talking about) and the journey to working on it.  I did write a story in the Space Corps saga, and probably will do more in the future.

I know I was just talking about Space Colony Bactria, and obviously Collider, and I really need to get on Montague, but as a writer doing it on the side, I have to decide the projects that can work around the schedule.  

As always, we'll see.