2025-W10 EOW Report

Anti-Goal Cycling

• I am sleeping through the night again after three weeks of not sleeping for more than three, four hours at a time, due to the adrenaline filled situation in Manila back in February. This past week, after the initial class with Cat Rambo in their Advanced Short Story Workshop, energy was reinvigorated, getting up at 4AM is happening again, progress is being made. Also this past week, I finally wrote up the “Ten Rules” on the poster board I bought from Michael’s months ago, and more importantly, I’m following them. The most important one being putting hard stops on the day job and socials. With the day job, that means not checking slack the moment I get in and devoting the first hour of Client B to 8-9AM, since Client B is writing work and doing it at the end of the day was just me being stupid until wife forced me to rethink this after more whingey complaining from me. It also means that after the initial flurry of meetings, I power through and get my script reviews done for Client A and not dawdle with a break that ends up being a nap, that ends up being frustrated I’m stuck at the office late reviewing scripts. And that has made a psychological different in how I manage my time. I have breathing room at the end of the day, I get home at a slightly more reasonable time, and I am also now, due to rule 10 being “Become a History Nerd”, reading the books assigned to me by Michael Tworek, at least 20m a day. On top of that, because I’m tracking my art consumption against all formats, I am also now seeing how I can ease off on the comic books, killing/dropping the mediocre titles, and increasing my short story and history reading. Can’t something-something what you can’t measure is the management/marketing platitude/proverb? I forget.
• Most important is where I’m at the last week or so with actual said story writing. I have converted my SimpleNote idea dump into individual index cards and added them to the zettelkasten. I have calcified the ten types of character arcs. I also re-reviewed MRK’s 10-step “Find a Plot” method and adapting it to my own method, which revealed to me that I should have a “go to” cast of character archetypes to launch from, so I’m working on a Myers-Briggs Tarot-Faces matrix. So about 16 archetypes to use as launch points to brainstorm a bunch of characters and narrow them during the MECH/CDA to ARC/STAKEs phase.
• Short note on Cat Rambo’s Advanced Short Story Workshop… not so much the class, the students, or Cat’s teaching even, but moreso, me and how I’m experiencing and reacting to it, given the January 2024 Incident during the MRK Short Story Cohort, I’ve found myself more muted and less “out there” in a much more positive and healthy way… a la rules 2-5. Oh. I just realized the rules I linked to above from “The Big Sort” has since changed significantly. Maybe I’ll post them somewhere else again in the future. Ultimately though, the point of the rules is to shave off all the excess, the flash, the distractions, the tangents, the rabbit holes, the excuses, the hobbies, the socials, the show-offiness, the being clever, the insecurity, the humor, so that the only thing, the only thing that matters is THE WORK. Show off IN the work. STFU and DO the work. Stop Broadcasting as one it starts fights, and two it detracts from the work. I/R/T the group itself, it’s a good group. They are all ahead of me and I can learn from them.

Four Thousand Weeks

• Just recalculated the math. 4000 - (52*44) = 1,712. So eight weeks out would make it 1,704. Don’t know how the math got off track last year. Anyway.
• This weekend. This weekend was busy as fuck. It was three events all pushed back a month because of Manila. My monthly mastermind with BJC and DBM. My RPG session with FYC, Glausers, and Ogrebeef. My Garage Fiction check-in. All three were cancelled the moment I got that text to get on a plane. And somehow, all three crammed into this one weekend… along with the additional Advanced Short Story Workshop class on Saturday morning. I’ll need a weekend after this weekend, hardy har har. Mastermind was at Ramen Bella, talk about AI and PH VAs, scaling, economic changes. Played Fabula Ultima Saturday night, dinner before at Solar Pho, same mall. Tried out Quest Central. Not 100% on it. The walls were thin, could hear the other group’s TTRPG. The music was loud. And it was unusually warm. Would recommend sound proofing, along with lights and sound with a board. It’s nice that these places exist though, I really want these third homes to be a thing again. And finally Garage Fiction – sounds like a lot of busy-ness causing problems for everyone except L.L. who’s trucking along.
• So the Monday I got back from Manila was Familiy Day and we went to the mall after my errands and while I was alert on the drive there, once we arrived, my head felt woozy. It wasn’t exhaustion or fatigue, it was just dizziness. Tried to walk it off to no avail. And now, there’s a ringing/buzzing in my ears at night.

Story Introspection

• Last week wasn’t exactly a standout for comic books. Nothing in particular leapt out at me. The X-Men event where Professor Xavier escapes Greymalkin was… OK. Ayodele’s Storm ended up being the strongest. I’m seriously considering dropping JSA and/or JLU at this point. It’s like a buffet. We have a million characters in each title, can only focus on three to four of them per scene or subplot, and because of the scale, all in under 22 pages, we can’t go deep on any one of them. As I said to my LCS, I’m sticking around JSA purely for Olortegui’s art and if he ever leaves, I dunno man. Every issue I pick up, I’m like, OK Lemire, when does this story actually start making sense? Sadly dropping Power Girl, Batgirl, and Poison Ivy as well. All for different reasons. Ultimately, want to drop my weekly pickup to six title at most. So about 20-24 ongoing titles or miniseries. On one hand to make more room for short stories, and ideally novels again. On another hand, to be brutally ruthless about this: I got what I wanted. One, I rekindled my love for a medium. Two, due to the rapid iterations of short 20 page stories, I have learned a TON from breaking down a LOT of comics in a SHORT amount of time. This is something I could never have done with prose short stories. Three, I now have a pretty strong context of what I like and don’t like and I can easily say that I will pull anything written by Kelly Thompson, Ram V., Eve L. Ewing, Gail Simone, and Jonathan Hickman.
• This past week’s short story stand out is John O’Hara’s Over the River and Through the Wood (1934). Gotta love a loser story. Especially losers who end up in a worse place than at the beginning. Modern and film equivalents are Uncut Gems (2019), Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), and Burn Before Reading (2008). They just keep losing and losing and we’re screaming at the TV to stop making such idiotic and bad decisions, and they inevitably make… the wrong decision. I guess a more accurate genre name would be the trainwreck story.
• So for the TTRPG session of Fabula Ultima, the “Press Start” tutorial module, I played Blair, the heiress of Dunova. I immediately fell into the role of a self-entitled blonde with vocal fry and uptalk. It just came so naturally to me. Everyone at the table hated me. It was lovely. And then, what made it even lovelier was how acting in such a privileged blonde white female royalty… I took proactive action and somehow ROLLED WELL EVERY SINGLE FUCKING TIME. It was like the TTRPG Gods wanted me to play Blair that way that night. Is there a story lesson here? I think so. Lean into your character’s sharp edges. It’s what makes them, them. And in doing that, your characters are just more memorable. Was Blair a trope? Sure. But it was a fun trope to play.

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