Category: General

Just the random, everyday stuff.

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Novembers past and November to come

It was very weird this week to be struck by the sudden realization that I hadn’t spent October thinking through and planning for another round of NaNoWriMo. Up until last year, I had spent almost every October for the last twenty years that way, deciding what I wanted to spend 30 days writing at least 50,000 words on.

My first NaNo was in 2003. My last was in 2023. I had a good run–“winning” more than I lost–and did Camp NaNo over the years here and there, too, in the spring and summer. After a while I didn’t participate in the online community as much, but I did manage to go to a few write-ins in graduate school and then while working through my second bachelor’s degree. It was wonderful and in some ways, I miss those quiet gatherings, the sprints, the coffee and snacks and laughter, the talking through sticky points together and sharing whatever insane yarn we’d come up with for that year.

I think the greatest gift that NaNo ever gave me was the permission to write fast, to write hard, to not worry about whether it was good just that it was down on paper–the permission to be wildly creative without worrying too much. When you have friends writing about sapphic werewolves and alien invasions, you learn those kinds of things.

NaNo was never about writing the great American novel, at least not for me and not for most of the folks I ever interacted with. It was about practicing a craft and telling the stories that were in us, about the actual work of writing and creativity. Even if you didn’t win, you learned something, you got some words toward the million words of practice toward mastery. In a lot of ways, it was magic.

Then the magic died.

It’s weird to think that it’s gone, now, but the writing was on the wall last year with everything that happened. Like for so many things, the stance on AI was the final nail in the coffin. It’s sad, but you also consider that most of the original staff was now gone, and the original magic that was bound up in the whole enterprise was fading.

But that won’t stop a lot of us from settling in this November, as the days grow short and the nights get cold (at least in the northern hemisphere) to work on something new, something old, to write hard and see where our creativity can take us.

I’m no exception. I’ve set myself a challenge and some of what I produce will land here and more will be on my Patreon. There won’t be winning, not this year, not the way there has been before. But there will still be something.

So here’s to the Novembers past and the November yet to come. May it be a creative, magical one.

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Thoughts on the promotional landscape

I found myself musing last week about how the advertising landscape—really, the landscape in general—has shifted for creatives over the last 15-20 years or so. For context, started releasing my first serial, Awakenings, in 2011 and probably in that first year and certainly by the second, I was doing some light paid advertising to get it in front of more eyeballs.

That was the heyday of things like serialized fiction (typically on self-hosted sites rather than aggregated spaces like Wattpad or AO3) and tilted more toward original work than fan fiction (not that I didn’t cut my teeth there for a very, very long time). It was also the era of the self-hosted webcomic (I read so many of those in college and grad school). In a lot of ways, the teenage and young adult years of the broadly accessible internet are something I’m sure I’m not the only millennial feels a bit of nostalgia for. Back in those days, there were different kinds of advertising options beyond the ubiquitous shameless self-promotion (which seems increasingly more what we’re expected to do beyond Facebook ads) and I tripped over one called Project Wonderful, which at the time fueled ads on several of the webcomics that I was following.

Now, I haven’t dug too deeply to see if it still exists, but back then, you basically load your advertising budget into a pool, load your different ads (images of different size, static or not) and then could do one of two things: let Project Wonderful pick what would be best for you based on information you put in, including what categories your ad fit into, what kinds of sites you thought your ads would do well on, and how much you wanted to spend per number of impressions, or bid directly on different spots (ie, on sites that you visited yourself). You could also do a combination of both, which is what I usually did.

And I’ll be damned if it didn’t work. At its height, I was getting thousands of hits a day on Awakenings and my other serial after I started advertising them. I wonder now, if I’d decided to advertise my books using Project Wonderful, if I’d have a bigger following now.

It is the only paid advertising I ever did and I can’t say that it didn’t work. This said, I don’t know that it would work the same these days, in our worlds where the algorithms rule our browsing experiences and ad blockers are very much more the norm. Part of what was attractive about Project Wonderful was that you as a site host actually got to pick where you put the advertising boxes, too, which meant you got to figure out how to make it work for your site design. It feels less and less like that these days when you look at so many sites out there that are ad-supported. This said, I don’t know for sure – the last time I hosted any kind of ads, they were from Project Wonderful, and I had some control there.

It’s strange to think sometimes of how much the landscape has changed. Someday I may need to do those Facebook ads (I’m not sold on BookBub) or something similar. It’s going to be a lot of research before that day comes, though, and probably won’t happen until we hit release day for Lost and Found or a similar project.

But we’ll see.

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New stream layout

Not what I intended to be working on this evening, but it’s what ended up happening.

A little video of me testing out a new stream overlay and some stream deck settings (if you have never used a stream deck as a productivity hack, let me tell you, having it plugged into my desktop for pulling up files alone is amazing), preview of a tweaked layout, and a little teaser of something.

The something is a consequence of my looking over some really old work and starting to reconsider it. I guess we’ll see what shakes loose here.

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Submerged Rock (troll)

One of my favorite places in the whole damn world is Museum Campus on Chicago’s lakeshore, specifically the area around the Field Museum and the Shedd Aquarium.  On occasion, usually when the weather is good or I have time to kill or just feel the need, I’ll walk down along the walking and biking paths in the area, the ones that wrap down around the back of the aquarium, whose edges drop straight down into Lake Michigan.  Sometimes they’re closed off because of ice or because the waves on the lake are too high, making them dangerous to walk.  Sometimes even when they’re open, you’ll get sprayed by water from a freshwater sea that isn’t as the waves crash against the edge of these pathways.

It’s one of those places that I sometimes wonder if visitors ever think to wander along, or if it tends to be the provenance of locals, who bike along it in their lane, take their morning runs along the slanting walkways and the quiet that can come in those spaces, especially before the day really begins.  The view is really spectacular, even on misty days when the fog hangs heavy over the water and you can’t even see the park a few hundred yards away.  Of course, maybe I’m biased.  It is, after all, one of my favorite places, and I know that if I lived in the city I’d be there as often as I could be, convenience be damned.

Another point in favor of my eventually moving there, I guess.

Along one of those pathways are old warmings painted onto the pavement, telling passersby—and anyone who might consider jumping into the water—that there are submerged rocks in the area along the shore.  On the one hand, it seems silly that the warning would be needed.  It’s not a beach, not a swimming area, but there are certainly folks who fish along that pathway amongst the runners and the cyclists and wanderers.  The warning would be as much for them, who could lose a line in those rocks, or anyone who falls in or would-be rescuers.

Five years ago while walking the pathway, I snapped a picture of one of those warnings.  Someone with a sense of humor and a touch of whimsy decided to add a bit of extra flavor to one of those warnings.  I haven’t been back in the last year or so to see if it’s still there or if it’s been repainted, but it was still there a few years ago, the last time I was able to come down while the weather was good enough to wander down toward the water.

Spotted in the wild out on Museum Campus, behind the Shedd Aquarium

I’ve wondered since the first time I saw it—it’s been there for a lot longer than five years—about whoever painted the word “troll” onto that warning.  A college kid on a dare, a nerdy one out with friends?  High schoolers out for a laugh?  A creative with a penchant for a little bit of graffiti?

There’s a story behind it, one I know that I will never know.  Somehow, though, that makes it that much more interesting, that much more magical.  A touch of whimsy to the mundane, something that exists if you’re willing to find it.  That’s a little something we all need, now more than ever.  A little touch of magic to a gray, hard world.

So here’s to the magic makers and those who seek it—the ones that make joy and those who find pleasure in what’s been made.

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New-old posts dropping in

Since I finally figured out how to make Patreon and WordPress talk to each other, there’s about to be a lot of new-old stuff dropping in.

Some of it’s really old and outdated. Some of it’s not. Either way, have fun with it for what it is, what it was, and what may or may not end up being some kind of canon something someday.

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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.

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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.