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Unlock with PatreonNovember is coming
If you’ve been here for a minute, you know that I have participated in NaNoWriMo for two decades. I have posters from past years on my walls, I have merch from past years. It’s a program that I’ve loved and supported for a long time.
I’m doing it this year. I have my reasons, some of which are probably pretty obvious. At the same time, some are practical — I have so many things that I’m working on that I should be giving attention to, not trying to start something new (not that I have a burning idea for something new this year anyway, but that’s neither here nor there).
This said, that doesn’t mean that I don’t intend to drill down on something and track it. I’d like to get the current draft of When All’s Said and Done knocked out (it’s over 55,000 words and there is a bunch more story to tell in some very good and fun ways), so that may well be my November project. That would kind of be a fun full-circle moment for me, since it was my original NaNo project all those years ago, eventually coming in at something like 80000+ words by the time it was done.
This one is going to be bigger, the story a bit different, but every bit of the same level of vibes that I had going back then.
So stay tuned for hopefully a fragment of something a day coming in November — and maybe beyond.
Also stay tuned for promised cat pictures coming later today.
23 Septembers later
Today I was thinking about how much the world has changed in 23 years, how different the world was on that beautiful Tuesday. Not just about how what happened on that day changed the world, but how it was a reality that would be all but unrecognizable to the generation that has been born and grown up since.
On that September Tuesday, cell phones were still relatively new. The smartest phone you were likely to have was a Blackberry. The internet was still young. I remember my university had only that year transitioned from Telnet to a more modern system for network access around campus.
Televisions were still usually hardwired into a wall to get broadcasts via cable, or had an antenna attached directly to the set. They were still big, boxy things and they weren’t nearly as ubiquitous in public spaces as they were even a few years later.
I remember calling on a land line to check and see if my first class of the day was going to be cancelled or not. The Classics department hadn’t heard—of course they hadn’t. Unless they had a radio on, or someone happened to check a news website (not a common occurrence in those days unless you were of a certain major, to be honest), they wouldn’t have known. There was no TV in the department office. Email was barely in use as a mode of communication between professors and students that day—it was still very new, something that people in academia were still getting used to using. Class cancellations were posted on classroom doors, not emailed out in advance—most of the time.
Classics Department—and my professor—found out what was happening from me.
After that class lasted all of five minutes, I remember going to the dining commons and some of the food service staff and other people who worked in the building had a TV rigged up in a side room, plugged into a jack and the wall so they could watch the footage. Everything was eerie and surreal.
It was a different world.
I didn’t have a cell phone yet, didn’t have my dad’s number memorized, didn’t have most of the family’s numbers memorized. I had a land line and a prepaid calling card. I wasn’t the only one. I spent most of the day on the floor of my friend’s dorm room, most of us uncomfortable with the idea of being alone.
There are some things you don’t forget, but it’s easy to forget how different the world was, how strange—why the video and pictures of the events are much more rare (and remarkable) than they’d be today. Why it took so long for word to spread.
Why the world slowly stopped in inches and measures as the skies empty out and there was nothing but the quiet and a cloudless blue sky on a September Tuesday 23 years ago today.
September start counts
Obviously these aren’t all the projects in the works, but these are the start counts I’m tracking this month. We’ll see what has the biggest add.
August it was When All’s Said and Done, the first big Lost Angels book (and direct sequel to What Angels Fear).
We’re in about the sixth or seventh draft of that monster and I think I finally have a feel for how it needs to be shaped.
It’s definitely going to lay groundwork for Pawns, which is a big crossover piece that’s going to stand as sequel to both WASAD and Lost and Found, really tying Lost Angels and UNSETIC Files together more tightly than anyone quite realizes yet.
I may not be fast but I do have a plan for some things. I promise.
Musings on current
I can always tell that I’m completely over summer and longing for autumn because I tend to end up consuming (via television/streaming, audiobooks, and podcasts) random paranormal and spooky stuff at higher levels than normal. It’s no secret that to a very great extent that the fall is really my favorite season, followed by winter. Spring and summer I appreciate for the storms and sometimes the blue sky sunshine and various other things but not so much the heat and humidity–I’m just not built for that.
Times are weird right now and feel as if they’re going to continue to get weirder. I’m not sure what’s triggering that feeling, but something is certainly driving it. Either I’ll figure it out or I wont, just like some character in a novel or a game or another media. Maybe it’s just not important to know, but to feel and acknowledge.
There is a restlessness right now coupled with an exhaustion and a readiness for whatever’s shifting to just well on and do it so we can brace ourselves for what’s coming next. Another thing I’m not sure about, one way or another, but there it is.
Creatively and intellectually, I’m considering what to do going forward. There’s a little bit of a desire to possibly put together some brief research essays for Patreon and this site and see what happens. Professionally, I’m starting to take a look at things like knowledge management and content management, above and beyond what I already do in my day to day (let’s just say even though Tech Writer is my title, I’m doing a lot that is not that). In some ways, I miss the research and the digging and the piecing of things together, so maybe that could be coming in the future. I doubt there will be a consistent theme to any of it because part of my academic problem has been that I am, in fact, interested in far too many things to focus on one thing forever. Specialization is a beast but I have a very bad (good?) habit of drilling down on whatever interests me in the moment, which has rendered me a bizarre kind of generalist in some ways.
It’s an interesting idea, anyway. Something I need to think about–something I need to give myself permission to think about, to possibly try, and to accept that I’ll either love it or hate it and either is fine. Failure is fine. Success is fine. The joy is what I make of it.
We’ll see.
Frederick’s Burrough Chronicle – Volume 1 – intro video
Something from the UNSETIC Files / Lost Angels universe that I’m playing around with.
Looking forward to some feedback.
More boards….
Decided I needed more board space for the UNSETIC/Lost Angels plots and notes, so I picked up another couple boards with a coupon. They came this morning and now they’re on the wall. Time to rearrange the note cards and figure out what level of the boards the cats will bother (or will bother the cats).