2024-W48 EOW Report

Highlights This Week

• Xmas shopping is 99% done. Spent five hours at the mall. Muji, Chapters, Mind Games, Treehouse, Oomomo. Just need to pick up one more thing.
• American Thanksgiving meant they’re off and I’m free to do deep work. Got a chunk done without constant Zoom calls. Really wanted to get the new induction range delivered during these quiet hours too… but alas. No. Technicians were booked up. So Monday now. But, with the quiet-ish time, I watched a little telly during lunch hour again. Finished The Penguin S1 (2024). Yeah, I agree with the Internet. Give Colin Farrell and Cristin Milioti Emmys. Seriously. And who the fuck is Lauren LeFranc and where did she come from? OH MY GOD. Give her ALL THE AWARDS as well please. Also - MJL told me to watch The Remarkable Life of Ibelin (2024) two weeks ago. I totally forgot about it until she asked about it again. So fine, I put it on during lunch on Friday. I am balling my eyes out within minutes. Watch it. Don’t look it up. Go in blind.
• Libro.fm had a Black Friday sale and even though I haven’t really listened to a single audiobook in months and stopped my recurring membership, I still ended up picking up eight $7 audiobooks. Why.
• Because I have freedom.to set up across all three devices again, I am no longer “cycling” between meetings or whenever I have free time. And at first, I found distraction elsewhere, which was texting people. Lol. But it has mostly faded away and now I can hustle again. That said, a couple weeks ago, I tried to get my group of ex-colleagues from eBay together and my god, the amount of mental bandwidth and energy required just to get six 40-smths to one event was mind boggling. It took pushing up one boulder to get everyone RCS-compatible, and another boulder to get them to use doodle. And even after all that, we can’t schedule a damn thing until February. How? Adult lives.
• So what I dreaded last week has come true. We will be closing PHC, or at least our stake in it. There are potential exits that doesn’t mean carrying all the debt. But it’s up to my CEO to find those exits for us. I was just so defeated, sad, and angry on Monday. What’s the point of trying to help people when the entire system is rigged against you and don’t want you to help?

Project Status Dashboard

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

Did another zTHB. This one with Your Authentic Indian Experience (2017) by Rebecca Roanhorse. But also – something else that’s been bugging me a bit is how to create inherent tension in each and every scene I write, and I went down a minor rabbit hole of RELATIONSHIPS. Got some interesting insights into TRIANGLES. Not what I expected. Was really thinking more along the lines of pairings and the most common fights they could have, like MENTOR-STUDENT, AUTHORITARIAN-LIBERAL, PARENT-CHILD, LOVER-BELOVED, etc. But as I went through the key relationship dynamics in the zTHBs I’ve done so far, I realized there is nearly always a third, external force that drives the pairing. It can be on screen or off page, it doesn’t matter, as long as it exists.

Four Thousand Weeks

My eldest was freaking out while driving on Tuesday because he wanted to study for his Japanese test, but felt obligated to drive because he didn’t want to say no too many times. It stopped me cold. One, that heavy sense of obligation and responsibility. I’ve always known he had it and I’ve always known I had it, but it never occurred to me until that moment that he has that because of me. Whether genetic or environment, I’ve passed that on. Carrying the weight of the world on your own shoulders and feeling obligated to deliver and do the work. One on hand, I will and always have faith in him that he’ll be “fine” professionally because of this. But will he build up the same amount of resentment and regret if he goes down a path and later can’t get out – like how I’ve chosen mine? He’s doing too much (also me). It’s his graduating year and he has filled up his lunch hours and three of five weekday evenings with extracurricular activities. Both the eldest and middle one are like me in that regard. Let’s just jam as much life experience into every waking moment as possible. Let’s try ALL the hobbies. Let’s learn ALL the things. Let’s forgo sleep to DO more. I mean, it wasn’t until this year, at age 43, that I finally stopped all the things, and put every spare moment I could into writing fiction… and even then, even then, here I am, one year later, and I still haven’t completed a single story. I know it’s in me. I know I can. And I know this blind groping in the dark and building systems and tools, and heavy dissection of short stories and comics will get me there… but my god, what would it be like had I NOT stopped ALL THE THINGS. And even then, even then… this past year, I was tempted still. Tempted to try solo RPGS, tempted to not cancel the war games I have on preorder, tempted to start a blog about comics, start a newsletter, start this, start that. That wild chaotic “I can do ALL the things” energy. I would like to think I’ve snuffed it out this year. I hope so. I hope I walk into 2025 ready to produce on a good rhythm. Otherwise, why the fuck am I still journaling here every week?

Book Reading

• Dove right back into Green Lantern Corps (2006) this week because I hit a wall with Green Lantern (2005) - the Sinestro Corp War event starts at #22 and it alternates between the two books. So I figured I might as well read all the former series to get caught up. Glad I did because I got to hang out with Soranik Natu, Vath Sarn, and Isamot Kol again. The concept of Mogo, Ranx, and sentient cities/planets is great. Mogo creating virtual realities where you meet dead loved ones is obviously from Solaris (1972). Love Iolande the princess lantern. The R’amy Holl storyline was great. Also a fan of Mardin’s design, but she doesn’t seem to get a lot of lines, nor scenes of significance. Omigod, am I falling in love with my first C-list, or even D-list character?
• Also did my best to catch up on Joshua Williamson’s Superman (2023) run as my LCS accidentally gave me Dan Panosian’s variant cover of #20 thinking I had it on my pull list. I later fell in love with the cover and thought maybe collecting Dan Panosian variant covers could be my weird micro-niche thing. I mean… I drove two times into Vancouver to get the Absolute Wonder Woman cover, so there’s tons of self-signaling via expended energy, time, and resources already. So maybe that’s my “thing”.
• Friday, feeling guilty I’ve been ignoring the Marvel Multiverse, I read Jason Aaron’s Namor, and it was alright. Not enough to grab me, so I moved on to my next taste test, the Ryan North Fantastic Four (2022) run everyone’s raving about. And OK. Yeah. My jaw dropped a few times, I was tearing up by the end of #1 with the montage sequence, and was still reading them while I waited at the Indian restaurant to pick up dinner for my family.
• Woke up one-ish on Saturday morning, was tired, but couldn’t sleep. Craving some dumb caped hero, preferably an absurdly sexualized one… thought Power Girl ought to do it. So started on Leah William’s run, and instead I got an intelligent character, with depth, journalist at Daily Planet, trying to live up to the perfectionist standards of both Lois and Superman, struggling with depression, a great friendship with Lilith/Omen, and a Streaky issue that I want to buy now. Was not expecting that at all. So started that run as well. SIDE NOTE: I think Leah Williams and I might be similar in our tongue-in-cheek sense of humor. The “same bat channel” vibe of her final caption in issues one and two… I could just imagine that she sees caped comics as inherently silly/absurd, but also can be taken serious… while still sneaking in dumb jokes. I dunno. Something about that just called out to me. Now – I looked up reviews later and it appears William’s run is mostly hated online. I tried to get to the root of it, because, agin, aspiring writer here, want to know how reactions form and develop and why something gets a positive reaction or not. Apparently, the 2011 run had her as Karen Starr and the CEO of some tech company and a lot of influence with the JSA or something and fans are mad that Williams threw all that away to do her own take? I can see why they may be mad, but some of the comments just make them sound like cranky sexist fanboys. Personally, I had a few revelations, or reaffirmations. One, not every author is for everyone. I knew that, but when I love Williams’ humor and most of the Internet doesn’t, I can see how I’m very much in the minority. Two, I gotta stop listening to these reviews in the first place because who’s actually writing these? Mostly 20-smth males? Three, obviously, Williams’ Power Girl run is still going, which means one thing: it’s selling. And the Internet can gripe. But enough of the silent majority is BUYING it. It’s basically like how my LCS told me, the rage Tom King generates online means nothing. He sells. People buy it. I am going to assume people buy it to read it and like it and not just to spite the online critics.
• This week’s pulls: Besotted with Waid’s JLU. So related to the above comments on Williams’ run on Power Girl… apparently people are upset with the twist at the end. I feel like these upsets at what’s canon or not, what’s been done or not, are just not things I will ever care about much. I’m reading these runs as their own pocket universes. If a writer wants to mess with and choose bits and pieces of canon, why the fuck not? It’s all contradictory if you go back far enough anyway. Anyway – Absolute Wonder Woman #2 was the bomb. I was just so happy the entire time I read it. Thompson is just so confident in her writing, which translates to a confident Wonder Woman taking charge. Fanboys and fangirls seemed to be annoyed Steve Trevor is showing up again, and we have to have another romance between them. Well thank god I have zero baggage and could care less about whatever it is they’re so hung up on i/r/t Steve Trevor. May drop Mystique and Iron Man…

Comic Book Issues Tracking

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