2024-W34 EOW Report

Highlights This Week

• I am in Reykjavik and it is MenningarNótt, the 238th anniversary of when the city received its town charter. We did not plan this. Our AirBnb sits on the third floor above Laugavegur just a couple blocks from the festivities. There are live bands, DJs, street vendors selling popcorn, cotton candy, snacks. There are concrete Jersey barriers set up on several streets to block road traffic. Thousands of Icelanders are sitting on Arnarhóll, singing the choruses to pop songs whenever the DJ beckons them to.
• It’s been a long day today (written Saturday night, published Sunday). We started at 830AM to catch a day tour shuttle to the South Coast. We saw the receding Sólheimajökull glacier (yes, I know, that’s like saying chai tea or naan bread). Stood outside Vík í Mýrdal, the southernmost town in Iceland, nested beneath Katla, last erupted in 1918 and due to again, which could essentially wipe the entire town of 750 away. Wandered Reynisfjara, a beautiful black sand beach with basalt formations, with ample warnings of sneaker waves. Climbed 570 steps up to the top of Skogafoss, and hiked behind and through Seljalandsfoss, getting soaked.
• Knocked off Tjonin, the National Museum, the Punk Museum (in what was formerly a public washroom), and Harpa Friday.
• On Thursday, a sea of lavafields with yellow-green Iceland moss, a stark and achingly beautiful landscape ruined by mid-nineties to early 2000s pop/rap. Our tour guide that day was originally from Norwich and I felt like I was at my high school dance. We trekked down into the Kerið crater. Took a dip in the oldest pool in Iceland, Gamla Laugin. Witnessed the bursting of Strokkur. Saw Gullfoss. Ended with hiking around Þingvellir.
• NERD STUFF: I slowed down to… 42 issues this past week (gasp). Due to jet lag, I am waking up at odd hours and burning through five issue arcs. I read Erica Schultz’s X-23 miniseries. Timed myself for four issues: 2:40AM to 3:14AM GMT (UTC+0). So about 8½ minutes for a 20-page book. About one episode of Adventure Time or Steven Universe. With that said - I found the miniseries mediocre and I was rushing through the story. There were no gasp moments. No stand-up-and-cheer moments. No quiet moments of gravitas or profound melancholy. No delightful curiosity gaps. It was a straightforward action story. And thinking back on last week’s thoughts on what I like and don’t like… maybe this is it? I don’t like straightforward action stories? I enjoyed it as much as I enjoy Jed MacKay’s stuff, but it’s lacking those “moments” that make a story magical.

Project Status Dashboard

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

OK. I’m launching the new system. I probably need to reassess all the projects here when I get home to see where they’re at based on the four stages I’ve designed for each story’s kernel.

EOW Time Tracking

Mostly worked on wrapping up Story Kernel Redux. Then paused my streaks on Habitica when I flew out for Iceland on Tuesday night. Still writing three sentences daily.

Three Sentences First Thing Streak

• CURRENT STREAK: 56 Days
• BEST STREAK: 56 Days (August 24, 2024)

Thirty Minutes A Day Streak

• CURRENT STREAK: 0 Days
• LAST STREAK: 10 Days (August 17, 2024)
• BEST STREAK: 18 Days (May 10, 2024)

Four Thousand Weeks

I hate my body. Not in a teenage girl slash Mean Girls way. No, I hate my digestive system. It’s been betraying me for weeks now and I hate being the guy who has to vanish every time there’s a bathroom, 50% because “just in case”, and 50% because it is an emergency. I’ve been hyper-vigilant on my diets for years now, but come summer, the heat and bad sleep just ruins all that hard work. Put a new world on top of that, travel, jet lag, lack of routine, uncertainty and figuring things out, and all that… it creates a recipe of unpredictability.

I am also a bundle of anxiety and nerves on this trip. I don’t technically have the PTO for it and I’m borrowing against future ones. This is the reality of a full-time job and I haven’t had to gamify the system like this in fifteen years. And on top of that, I left on this trip to have TC cover me. Coverage. Also something I haven’t thought about or dealth with in 15 years. It’s the pro/con of working with a team. Pro that you have people to rely on and who rely on you. Con is people to rely on and who rely on you. So I wasn’t so keen to leave a team.

With all that said – this trip was/is important. These are the moments with C-Chord that are fleeting, the moments that needs to be enscapulated to be cherished later, moments where being fully present in new, interesting environments, new situations, new landscapes, new contexts… create moments.

Book Reading

• Finished Time of the Twins (1986) the day of right before I left for Iceland. Live commentary here. I bumped the rating from 3.00 to 3.25 on StoryGraph. 3.00 was my guess based on my 40-something recollection of what I would think of it today when I added every book I ever read to StoryGraph back in 2023. The novel gets a 0.25 bump because I could do .25 ranks more than anything else.
• Started Rich and Pretty (2016) at YVR. Was immediately besotted by Alam’s writing. By the time I got off the plane, I was 150 pages in. It’s a beautiful novel. Easy to digest prose, but deep in characterization.
• This week’s comic reading: still very much in love with Benjamin Percy and the way he turned X-Force and Wolverine into Mossad agents protecting a new nation state. Still amused by Gerry Duggan on all things Marauders and now Cable too. Young Cable is basically an Archie comic in the Marvel universe but with oversized rayguns. First issue of X-Factor was good. It’s X-Men CSI. Not a fan of the next arc in Mojoworld. The jokes are a little on-the-nose. Yes. Streaming. Monetization. Creator Economy. Got it. Wasn’t too impressed with Hellions either.
• So SIDE NOTE: Reading the Krakoan Age comics while in Iceland is an interesting parallel. Iceland got its independence June 17, 1944, a small, remote island nation with a population of 127,000 people.
• Art-wise: In love with Joshua Cassara.

Comic Book Issues Tracking

Archive of all EOW reports here