Danab Cycle editing

Last week I finished up editing Danab Cycle, a short story collection of Space Corps material. This is a result of the IWSG exit at the start of the year. I’ve amassed a good number of stories over the years from the saga, and this collection represents the material that hasn’t yet been published elsewhere. I’ll link and feature the cover later (as well as a formal announcement for last year’s Nazi Crimes, another collection), but I figured it was worth mentioning here ahead of time.

Editing the collection was interesting, as always, finding ways to improve as necessary, and really just revisiting, in some cases, work I hadn’t had a look at in years. Tonally there’s a good range. There’s one new story unseen anywhere else, based on what I used to consider a potential comic book (and even commissioned artwork for), which I expanded further in the editing process.

I’m all the more proud, as I have been anytime I’ve worked on a writing project recently, for making the time to do it. I don’t know, it seems in recent years my attitude has changed about what it looks like to spend time writing. I used to be fine taking long breaks between projects, but that was when I was tackling long projects routinely. When that period ended, I didn’t realize how far I drifted from it until I realized I wasn’t even tackling long projects anymore.

This ended up on my mind, naturally, since my next project is of course a long project, the second Danab Cycle/Space Corps book-length manuscript, Collider, the outline for which I am finally 100% satisfied has reached workable condition. So I will certainly keep you posted on how that develops. And hopefully I start writing it soon, too...

Comments Currently Disabled

I apologize for the inconvenience, but for the foreseeable future, comments will be disabled on this and my other blogs, as a longtime internet acquaintance is currently experiencing a digital stroke, and hopefully this will help convince him once and for all that he can move on. It’s only been nearly a decade of pointless dithering. And only a few weeks of the stroke. So I anticipate bringing comments back...next millennium? Does that sound good to you? Most of the people visiting me I visit anyway, so I will try to keep up correspondence better that way. 

Thank you for your time.

A Journal of the Pandemic #23

Well, I don’t know about you, but at this point it’s no longer a question: There are people who talk about COVID-19 numbers being purposely inflated, but at my workplace there has been a consistent, concerted effort to downplay infections.

Is this common? For everything that’s been said about the pandemic, I personally have seen very little chatter about what it’s like to actually experience it. There has certainly been plenty of talk about the effects on the job market, schooling, sports, but not much on what people have experienced in their everyday lives. Maybe glimpses into isolation, but, well, I don’t know. That’s a large part of why I’ve been writing this series. I wanted to document my thoughts along the way. This is as significant a moment in history as I have yet lived through, something that has extended to very close to a year at this point, and of course whatever the effects of vaccine rollout, will linger for probably much of 2021 at least.

The stimulus money, for me, has been a bonus. The second installment I decided to use in part to read comics, DC’s Future State slate, which is a repurposing of what was originally intended to be another line-wide revamp, akin to the Silver Age, a new generation of heroes inhabiting familiar roles. So far I’ve really enjoyed it. One month down, one to go. I’ve been ordering them from Midtown. I panicked this past week because I ran into a roadblock for a release for the first time. I thought speculators had spoiled the second issue of a Teen Titans story featuring the in-continuity debut of Red X, a character previously featured in the cartoons. But then it became available soon enough, and I made Midtown even happier by ordering even more...

I joined the first decade of the new millennium a few weeks back by actually getting a Blu-ray player.  By the end of this decade I might even have a Netflix account! 

My sister just retired from the Air Force after twenty years. The pandemic prevented me from even considering attending the ceremony (which I had been looking forward to ever since my brother-in-law’s). Well. She’s a full-time mom now, about six months into the life of her son (the Burrito’s baby brother). I sent her a card in which I tried to express how proud I am of everything she accomplished in her career.

The Super Bowl is in town! I’m not attending, and won’t really explore the attractions, but obviously this is not a normal Super Bowl and as such the economic and visitor rush is not going to happen, and really, the small sampling of neighborhoods I took this morning does not reveal an abundance of excitement (maybe elsewhere in town the Gasparilla faithful decked themselves out for this, too). At work there were a lot of jerseys. I made a deal with a coworker I can’t possibly lose concerning the outcome (because win or lose Tom Brady already makes further history just by being in the game). 

But it’s been nice to hear about all the healthcare workers getting tickets. Actual tickets were priced to highly discourage attendance, although there will be some of that, and another coworker will be moonlighting, so I will know someone there. As they say round here, “Raise the flag.”

I actually have been writing recently. This year will be a little interesting in at least one regard: I’ve got a project where I will write a new chapter once a month. Thankfully, before last month was over I even figured out how to write the thing. And of course Danab Cycle business, in a variety of ways, including a short story collection. I did a lot of small projects last year. This year the goal is larger scope. One being the first full-length manuscript in about seven years. My work schedule is (probably) changing in a few weeks. It might mean less reading. But if so, then more writing. Or maybe balancing both. 

We’ll see!

Danab Cycle

Recently I have been having one breakthrough after another with Collider, which is part of what here I’ve been calling the Space Corps books, but perhaps will be known as the Danab Cycle, so I’m transitioning that label with this post.

This is a story, Collider specifically and Danab Cycle in general, that I have been working on for a quarter century. I was a kid spitballing a version of Star Trek when it began, but over the years the idea has grown in sophistication and nowhere was it more necessary than in fleshing out what exactly Collider itself is supposed to be. There was no coherent story originally, but funny enough there was a broad arc that needed to be supported, and as I saw that more and more clearly, I better understood what the book itself should look like.

Writing is a bit like excavation, or even the old anecdote of Michelangelo freeing an existing statue from stone. It’s not always clear what the story is. Sometimes it comes to you in little thunderstrikes. You realize this is exactly what it is. Hopefully on the other end, to the reader, this is how it feels, that this was the best way to do it. (As a reader, too, this is how I approach it, and certainly, there will always be interpretations and opinions, although some are better than others, just as in the storytelling itself.)

So these are the kinds of ideas I’ve had recently; “Why didn’t I see that before???” Characters, sometimes minor ones, sometimes the most important ones, finally hitting their marks. 

And I think it’s getting closer to being ready to be written. 

IWSG: This time it’s kind of permanent...

I’ve been a part of the Insecure Writers Support Group off and on for years. I’ve taken breaks, I got dropped from the rolls, found my way back on. Well, this is where we say goodbye.

Last fall I experienced a dramatic turn in my writing career. I submitted a story to an IWSG contest, and that was literally the last thing I ever did on that computer. I made my peace with losing things, and then moved on.

It’s just, I guess I wasn’t quite done with that process.

I honestly don’t really get how the IWSG is supposed to work. I get that it’s a blogging community like any other I’ve encountered. You theoretically get what you give. And I stopped visiting a lot of blogs a number of years ago. I get that it blogs once a month every month, and the point is to give encouragement to other members. 

I guess I kind of reached the point where it no longer made sense. I am not the kind of reader who will read books because it will make an author feel better. I read books I think will give me a transcendent experience. I read a lot of books, and I don’t always prove my choices right. 

I did find out that books blogging friends write are not necessarily what I want to read. They have different goals. So I stopped pursuing that a number of years ago.

And as far as I can tell, that’s the opposite of what communities like this one are about. I can’t tell for certain, but a lot of the IWSG is people who will read and/or support anything so long as they know the author. I can’t do that. The material always comes first for me. Well, unless I have already read the author and loved, or at least enjoyed, the results.

I may be missing out big time. There may be writers in the IWSG that would absolutely be up my alley. If there are I honestly have no idea. And that’s part of the problem. When everyone gets a glowing endorsement for everything it’s hard to know where the quality really is.

So I don’t see a point to continue on with the group. I’m not really the kind of writer who needs general encouragement. If someone has something specific and useful to say about my writing, that’s something. But I have had no one in the group appear at all interested in my actual writing. 

That’s kind of what I want if I am going to have connections in a writing community, or someone who is willing to work with me, help me specifically find specific resources that would help me. Not have resources available. Someone who took an active interest. In me.

That’s what really makes me insecure as a writer, the crushing loneliness, the isolation I have always experienced, and that the IWSG never really changed.

The impetus for this decision is absolutely petty. I admit that. I lost a contest. Ten writers at least were deemed to be demonstrably better than me. In hindsight I don’t even know why a group about insecurity is actively giving its membership more reasons to be insecure. That’s bush league. Someone somewhere has time to at least give feedback, to at least acknowledge members that contributed, to give them encouragement. Not make them wait months until the file and the cover were already finalized. 

So I will continue my writing journey. Rejection is a part of the job. But it doesn’t need to come from the people who are supposed to be there to give you encouragement.

Goodbye, IWSG.

IWSG January 2021

Hey Insecure Writers Support Group,

It’s always going to be easy to feel insecure when your own group continuously rejects you.

Well, just lost at another of your contests. 

Feeling insecure. 

T-Shirt Guy

That’s a picture from a year and a half ago, or maybe a lifetime ago, I don’t know. Anyway, it’s also a picture of me, and it’s also a picture of my niece (the Burrito). 

It’s also a picture of one of the many t-shirts my sister (the Burrito’s mom) has gotten me for Christmas over the years.

I feel like an idiot for realizing that this has in fact been a tradition of hers, and having only just realized it a few minutes ago. Yesterday I got her somewhat belated Christmas present in the mail. It was of course another t-shirt (Chateau Picard!). And a few minutes ago I think I also finally realized why my sister has had this tradition:

I’m a t-shirt guy. I mean, it’s not unusual to wear t-shirts. It’s not even unusual to have t-shirts with pop culture references. 

It may be unusual to keep restocking the wardrobe with new ones, year after year, decade after decade. And to have a sizable, rotating collection worn daily. Again, I am not wholly unique in this regard. I get that. But I think in my family this is one of the many things I pursue differently than the rest of us.

And my sister noticed.

And so pretty much without fail, she’s been helping me add to the collection at Christmas. Hey, I added to it last year myself, quite happily, with a Buccaneers Tom Brady t-shirt. I sent a picture of it around to the family. We’re New England folk. Everyone else might think the past twenty years were a fluke stoked by cheating, but for us (okay, some of us are traitors) Tom Grady is unquestionably great, and yeah, I was pretty pleased that when he finally left the Patriots, he ended up here in Tampa.

So yeah, I’ve got a lot of t-shirts, celebrating various things. I’ve got one I just wore the other day, from a party I attended in 2007 the same day the last Harry Potter was released, the same day I got copies of my first book. I’ve got a t-shirt celebrating Moxie, which is an old timey soft drink my hometown adopted. I’ve got one featuring Gasparilla, the Tampa pirate festival. Some people wear the same treasured t-shirt memory endlessly. Me, I’ve got dozens of those.

Sometimes, sadly, the collar frays. I have to concede to stop wearing it. I keep those, too, of course, add them to my “archives.”

What can I say? I’m a t-shirt guy. And thank you, Burrito’s mom, for being a part of that.