2024-W43 EOW Report

Highlights This Week

• Just busy. A lot more busy than I anticipated, and/or becuase I’m pushing harder again, I’m filled to the brim and any little inconvenience becomes the most stressful thing. Like Wednesday night, picked up the mail, stepped on dog poop, had to deal with that, and while that was happening, the control panel on the oven breaks. And financially, it’s nothing we can’t handle, but because I’m working nine, ten hours, with very little breaks, and I want to write fiction on top, and I’m fitting in everything I can with barely any room to breathe… almost anything that doens’t have to do with my focus becomes more painful. Is this sustainable is the question I keep getting asked by my wife, by friends. I dunno. That’s the cost of wanting it all? I dunno. So anyway, went shopping for a range this weekend. We’re transitioning from gas to induction.
• I have truly actually discovered Superman and get it because of Grant Morrison’s All Star Superman (2005)!
• Saw AJM this Friday after not seeing her since April.

Project Status Dashboard

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

Fooled around with THBs with Open House on Haunted Hill (2006) by John Wiswell. Came up with six different iterations, two or three of which may be viable. The THB is not as tight as I’d like it to be. No substantial progress.

Four Thousand Weeks

Aside from what I wrote in the highlights, I don’t think I have much else to add here.

Book Reading

• STILL NO NOVEL READING - It took so much prodding to get the StoryGraph Buddy Reads for Too Like the Lightning (2016). My god. A lot more energy than I thought it would. I mean, actual effort was minimal. But mental bandwidth is just… almost why do I bother. No wonder I don’t do this anymore. I did force myself to read a short story from my Paris Review collection. Joy Williams’ Dimmer (1969). Yes, the prose is beautiful, and the interiority of the PROT is rich, but the PROG. My god. Yes, significant things happen. But it’s like, I dunno. He impregnates the wife of a veteran, saves a drowning woman, flies to America (with zero plan or program or sponsorship thing), lives in the airport, and then gets picked up by a woman. I’m sure there’s a THEME here that’s deep (maybe how poor orphans are the dross of life, the driftwood that floats through the ocean chaos of the world, ignored, shunted off, a curiousity blah blah blah)… but where’s the entertainment value here? That you can voyeuristically look into a miserable life? That you can feel sorry for the poor, the oppressed, the ignored, the flotsam, the jetsam for thirty minutes of your elite upper middle class life, feel bad for a moment seeing how the other side lives, and then go back to your life? WAIT. Is that it? Hm.
• Only 20ish comics this week?! Been super busy. Mostly because of trying to fit in short stories again, but I also really need to lock up LCG, Discord, and Reddit properly again. But anyway, I finally read Grant Morrison’s All Star Superman (2005). I’ve never read Superman in my life, never saw the Christopher Reeves movies, could barely stay awake for the Amy Adams/Henry Cavill one, never saw Smallville (2001-2011) despite it being filmed at my high school, just never cared for Superman, and whatever knowledge I’ve had of him was cursory commentary, that one monologue in Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004), that other monologue in that Kevin Smith movie. POINT IS – I HAD NO FUCKING IDEA THIS WAS BASICALLY GOOD SCIENCE FICTION AND HAD VERY LITTLE TO DO WITH BORING SUPERHERO SHIT. I seriously just didn’t know. Here’s an insight from this morning: WARNER BROS. IS THE ANTI-MARKETING OF DC COMICS. Like had they leaned into the weird, the sci-fi, the interesting… and not just make another action flick, or just another dark, broody, superhero thing… would I have been exposed to the more interesting elements of Superman? MAYBE. But no, they had to make it a boring action movie.

Comic Book Issues Tracking

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