2025-W25 EOW Report

Anti-Goal Cycling

• Super close to finishing the first draft of prj:WAITE. Just have a few more paragraphs left to wrap up the story. This week basically a lot of waffling on the final scene. I’m not in love with it, but I’m also at that point in a project where I’m constantly asking, “is it done yet?” A lot to myself and being annoyed with it. If I can get it done today, that would mean the first draft took 58 days. If I look at Early and assuming I tracked it “good enough”, it looks like 18h39 of drafting, 4h15m of prewriting, 20m of research. The last one is super-questionable. Hell, the last two are super-questionable. I didn’t track this very well at all. I’ll fix this for the next project. But regardless, 23 hours for about 5,000 words (which includes story-dev and drafting) is… I dunno. Is that good? Is that bad? It’s 217WPM. Considering I’m doing story-dev and research while I draft… I guess that’s good? Again, I probably shouldn’t be breaking down the numbers until I have at least five completed stories post-ARC-figured-out. But you know me. I like me my numbers and data. But I also recognize that we have a data integrity issue here, not unlike my life at Client A right now. Parallels!
• Ultimately tho, this is not a speed I’m happy with. I would like to draft 5-8k words per month if possible. I know my biggest constraint is time. I got that. But this past week, it was also health. Allergies knocked me out.
• Started Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (1978) by Peter Burke. One hundred pages in. It is mostly clarification of what can and cannot be done because it’s a proper academic history book. It’s foolish to think of “popular culture” as a homogeneous group, whereas, I guess, you could think of elite culture as somewhat homogenous, or at least “known”, since elite culture is literate and all written down and recorded. So you would think the church, the intellectuals, and the nobles share more similarities? As for the wrongness of bifurcating the people into “popular” and “elite”, the first essay covered how elite also participated in a lot of popular cultural activities, and a important distinction to make is that “elite” is just as stratified as the peasants… as in a small rural village, you still had the “peasant aristocracy”, as in the dude who owned the most land and ended up being the “richest” in the village. And while they may be more literate than the people renting land from them, they are still more “peasant” than “noble” in most people’s conception of the differences. Point, is the Venn diagrams of who did what overlaps A LOT. The next chapter went into how each profession also had their own subculture. Soldiers and beggars/thieves were basically two sides of the same coin until armies became nationalized, and their itinerant lives meant a unique… counter-culture for professional criminals. Shepherds and sailors don’t really stay in the same place either, and because they had their own clique and also had a lot of “hurrying up and waiting” kinds of life, they also craft stuff more? And then Burke goes into Jews, Muslims, Anabaptists, Quakers, and Huguenots… all of whom also lived amongst the elite/popular culture spectrum, but also apart from it with their own pocket of culture. Ultimately – it’s hard to pinpoint without getting into the weeds. Such is actual history and not a fantasy perception of it.

Four Thousand Weeks

• The BIG news this week was eldest’s prom and after grad party. Dropping him off downtown and then picking him up at four in the morning. Next week will be a lot of logistic juggling as well. Middle one is going camping for her year end and we need to be at her school by 515. Wednesday will be the graduation ceremony for eldest and both set of grandparents have decided to make an appearance and logistics with my side is always iffy. The Chungs are inherently unmanageable and late and won’t follow basic rules of order. And that has passed down to eldest, who spent the entire ride downtown fixing his tie and attempting a double-knotted Windsor with his phone between his legs as a mirror. Wife got mad at me for not helping prior to driving down.
• The MEDIUM news this week is how fucking hard allergies hit me. Like crash on the couch for an hour on Wednesday and Thursday beat up. Like I slept for ten hours Friday night tired. Like I couldn’t even on Thursday and that’s why prj:WAITE was not completed earlier. Did I crash on the couch BEFORE work on Thursday? Fuck. Yes I did. I don’t think I’ve felt this much fatigue since… June of 2023. A lot of things “wrapped up” that first part of the year. And I remember just sleeping a lot for almost a month. I don’t know if June 2025 has similar tones. I think there are some similarities. I feel better about my position at Client A where I have a better grasp on my purpose there compared to last year. I feel somewhat secure that Client B will be long-term… like, I mean, 18 months isn’t enough to make you feel secure? And the answer is no. I dunno. I guess a large part of me still has PTSD from the 2020-2024 period where post-TG to end of BH, then PP… It was a lot of chaos. Technically, logically, objectively, I am in a good place in terms of financial stability… but so much of me is still in survival mode, like I’m worse-case-scenario-ing everything, that it’s all going to come crashing down.
• The SMALL news this week is I’m starting to get sick of the amount of money I’m spending on comics. Did the math. June 27th, 2024 was X-Men #700, the first issue I bought. To date, $3,744.44. That’s $312/month. That’s a lot. Then I actually looked at what my Canadian LCS has been charging me with the exchange rate. A $3.99 USD comic is $6.16 CAD (cute, I know). $4.99 comes out to $7.70 with bag, board, and taxes. Of course, I still stand by the fact that this is a way better hobby for me than board games and TTRPGs ever was in terms of consumption. I’m sure the numbers on that hobby are even higher, but with so much of it that just sat on the shelf and was never played. That said… as per the last few weeks comments on my “curating prowess”… I believe I can cut down on all the titles that aren’t great. That said, even at 15 ongoing titles and 5 minis, I’m still looking at $160/month.

Story Introspection

• Finished the Superman: The Silver Age Omnibus Vol. 1. Quite tired of lugging it around from home to office, honestly, lol. And the worst part is, I never read it at the office. I only ever had intention to, but never do. I just get caught up in the whirlwind of Slack, Zoom, and Sheets… and I’ve been walking more. It’s fine. It’s done and I enjoyed so many of its issues. The ones I cruelly enjoyed the most were the ones where Superman is a complete dick to Supergirl. I just found it so fucking hilarious he’s so mean to her. First he sticks her in an orphanage instead of letting her move in with him. Why? Because he can’t think of a better way to maintain his secret identity, but also, to keep her as a secret weapon. I mean… genuinely what-in-the-actual-fuck asshole is he as a cousin? She flew all this way to save your ass, not knowing you grew up, and now you’re just a dick to teenage Kara. And then issue #260. HOLY JESUS FUCKING CHRIST ON A STICK! This issue was so unhinged, so bizarre, so absurd… that I loved it for exactly that insanity. Like, I really wonder what people in 1960 thought about this issue. Like, did they think this was OK, or did they also thought it was the most bizarre thing they’d ever read in their lives? I mean, I guess, marrying your cousin was “OK” back then? And then there was an issue where he BANISHES her to a distant asteroid just to test her? And here she is, sad lonely girl using her telescopic vision to spy on her old friends at the orphanage and missing them? I don’t know why I’m shaking uncontrollably with laughter and amusement. I am a broken and horrible person… but it was just so outwardly and unabashedly cruel that it’s… I dunno man. I just can’t stop laughing at the pointless cruelty. Someone please help me. And then in Superman #131, Lois Lane sits in some haunted rocking chair and she sees the future, and Superman has two kids and he’s spanking them, but they’re invulnerable like him, so they’re bored. Again. Just HILARITY. OK. One more. The last issue in the omnibus. First off, Hyperman’s story was poignant in all the ways I like… but then also in that issue is “Supergirl Reveals Herself”… and she finds an amazing couple to adopt her, and she finds a new home in Smallville, and she is GENUINELY HAPPY with a family… and guess what Clark Fucking Superman Kent does? He erases her memory so she can be put away in Midvale again so she can be his secret weapon when he needs her. There has GOT to be an equivalent to Gail Simone’s “fridging” for whatever the fuck Superman is doing her.
• The Greg Rucka Batwoman DC Compact came out this past week, collecting Detective Comics #854-863. I wasn’t going to get it originally, but DC Compact’s price point of $13.50 is just so hard to resist that even though I don’t care for street-level superheroes, my LCS slipped it into my box so I just said yes. (That sounded really rapey). Given it’s Greg Rucka though, it was grounded in a way I liked. Not that I know better, but it appears he knows his military terminology and lifestyle well. Hold on. I’m going to look up if he served. OK… so no service, but uh… “Before becoming a professional fiction writer he worked in a number of other occupations, including house painting, restaurant work, emergency medical technician, security guard, technical writer, and fight choreographer.” The last one is what gets me. Huh? Just a hobby then? Knows his martial arts and stuff? ANYWAY – I enjoyed the first two arcs a lot and didn’t care for the last one. The last one was a “case-of-the-week” type of deal… which is one of the MAJOR reasons why I can’t bother with street-level crimefighters. It’s just “case-of-the-week” like so many police procedurals, legal dramas, etc. There’s very little in terms of character development for those kinds of stories.
• Bought a copy of 2034: A Novel of the Next World War (2021) by Elliot Ackerman and James G. Stavridis. I haven’t finished a novel since last August. I still have Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti staring at my face unfinished. 100 pages to go. But I’m hoping I can break free with 2034. I know a lot of this is due to the deep deep rabbit hole that is DC comics. (BY THE WAY. Seriously BTW. DC Comics is basically like chai tea, shrimp scampi, naan bread, ATM Machine, RSVP please, rice pilaf, ahi tuna, LCD display, Sahara desert, and PIN number isn’t it? I can’t believe it took me this long to realize that.) Back to regular programming. Novels. I’ve committed to reducing my pulls to 15 monthlies and 5 minis. I’ve started tracking my monthly and weekly expenses. I hate it when my wife is right for some things, but she flat out asked me at the beginning of the year, where are you going to put all these comics at the beginning of this year, and I’m like, I’ll just get more short boxes and leave them at the office… and then I go the third short box and I’m like fuck. I don’t want more short boxes. Dammit wife. Dammit. And I then realized… I much prefer the Compacts, Finest, and Compendiums with the collected runs anyway. So dammit again. I think if I’m going to pull monthlies, they have to be GREAT. Like fucking GREAT. So yeah. Going to reduce monthlies and make room for more fiction again.

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