2024-W32 EOW Report

Highlights This Week

• NERD STUFF: Marvel Unlimited continues to bleed into every spare moment of my life. Played a session of Hunter the Reckoning. Got a copy of the Planetary Omnibus by Warren Ellis, and the first three panels with Elijah Snow in the diner and Jakita Wagner walking in to hire him instantly transported me back to the early 2000s when I was working at Chapters and dreamt about writing comics.
• Slow progress on writing fiction. More internalization of theory is happening. I made a table (of course a table) where I broke down the five character arcs as five columns, and the rows are the story beats: STS, 1SC, 2SC, BWO, MID, 2B->LOW, 3A->CMX.
• Lots of drama, significant events, and tribulations outside of and peripheral to my immediate circle. Someone passed away. Someone interviewed well. Someone broke down and wants to tear it all down. Someone needed to be checked and brought to order. Someone isn’t living up to the expectations I need them to be but they were brought in from somewhere else I didn’t agree with and now they’re more problem. Someone wants to be more, but it’s clear they’ve shown they don’t have the ability to handle the chaos that comes with more yet. Someone is dealing with an ailing parent. Someone is dealing with a parent who’s breaking down and delusional. Someone rose to the occassion and kept the ship afloat with their calmness in the face of tremendous chaos.

Project Status Dashboard

The following are ongoing fiction writing projects broken down to what stage they’re in. Legend in footnote¹.

EOW Time Tracking

I think floundering a bit in the daydreamscape last week helped me focus again this week. No, I don’t want to become a singer-songwriter. No, I don’t want to pour all my energy into TTRPGs, just a small portion. No, pursuing writing for comics is not the focus. Right now.

It’s like these energies need to be herded and brought into one steady focus, put them in tandem on one target. They get diffuse and scatter whenever the target (getting SFF short stories published) hits a wall. I get it. That’s life. And SBOs abound. And our brain makes beautiful logical justifications for the shift in direction. And then time passes and you’re nowhere further along. Nice people like to argue that dabbling is fine and you learned along the way. But that has never been the formula for any of my successes. Hyper-focus has been.

So as the summer draws to a close, as C-Chord gets back to school and the schedule becomes rigid again, let’s hyper-focus again.

Three Sentences First Thing Streak

• CURRENT STREAK: 42 Days
• BEST STREAK: 42 Days (August 11, 2024)

Thirty MInutes A Day Streak

• CURRENT STREAK: 0 Days
• LAST STREAK: 5 Days (June 14, 2024)
• BEST STREAK: 18 Days (May 10, 2024)

Four Thousand Weeks

As I wrote above, relatively calm on the homefront. There’s a sea of chaos outside this ship though.

I got a new chair for the home office. I went with the autonomous.ai. I have two at the coworking office and I trust it. I didn’t want to spend $600 on it, but at the end of the day, I also didn’t want to spend less than that on an unknown quantity. And I definitely didn’t want to spend more than that on an unknown quantity either. The Herman Miller at 1500 has got to be as bullshitty as Mont Blanc. Riding on brand.

Book Reading

• I read one chapter of Time of the Twins (1986). Really, half a chapter.
• But boy did I read a lot of comics. In addition to the single issues below, re-reading Planetary after two decades.
• HoX/PoX is way better this time around. I don’t think I was truly ready back in 2020?2021?

Comic Book Issues Tracking

Archive of all EOW reports here