2025-W30 EOW Report

Anti-Goal Cycling

• Didn’t do much iterative work this week. Touched prj:SAVED briefly. Saw places where I could inject more character arc elements, but then didn’t actually finish or act on it. What really sucked me in this week was prj:MINOS. As the GFP retreat is coming up, I want to have as much research ready. So I dove back into my earlier drafts, the original dev notes, and re-familiarizing myself with my CDA, including reading the source material that inspired this story.
• Attended the VGW Tri-Cities meetup that Alex is still running and carrying the torch for after I started it back in November of 2023 and then promptly abandoned it. I’m so glad he’s doing that. With that said, as per end of 2023 when I realized that these meetups weren’t for me and didn’t really help me move the ball forward on writing fiction, I felt that way again after attending. I guess I was using this as a “test subject” to see if I wanted to attend SIWC again, because MRK said I really should go again and make writer friends. I don’t know. I really don’t. I don’t know if I want or need writer friends. AND/OR maybe I don’t want a variety of writer friends at varying stages of being in the craft. I think historically, I much prefer hanging out with others who are a lot better than me. Talking about craft in generalized ways in a meandering conversation (as social meetups go), doesn’t really help me improve, especially when you’re talking to a wide array of writers from fresh beginners dipping their toes, to people who’ve been working on their novel for years. I also don’t find it entirely useful if the genres are so broad and distinct. I’ll probably not go to SIWC. It is, also, another $1000 I don’t want to spend.
• Started Ruth Goodman’s How to Be a Tudor (2016). Read the first few chapters when I forget got it at The Globe in London back in 2023, but didn’t finish. Now committed to finishing it. This is pretty basic compared to the heavier, more academic history stuff I’ve been reading. Also, started Geoffrey Parker’s Emperor (2019) on audiobook.

Four Thousand Weeks

• So Saturday was an interesting marathon from early afternoon to 2AM. Connected with someone who is a professional artist. Sometime while at IKEA, I realized I don’t know how to articulate what I actually want to see from sequential art even though I’ve been reading nothing but comics the last twelve months. So I went home, and I spent hours compiling and making notes on what I liked and disliked about my favorite artists along with a few random pulls of Marvel comics that I knew I probably wouldn’t like. I learned A LOT with this exercise. By compressing and observing with intensity in a short period of time, I think I have a good sense of what I do or don’t like in sequential art now. I send my thoughts over to said connection, and for two hours, I am being torn apart for coming off as a disrespecful “entitled Reddit nerd”. There are hints of the January Incident here. What I’m noticing is that people, especially “creative types”, really really really dislike it when you make authoritative, declarative statements with value judgments as if it’s “The Truth”. I do that. I recognize this now. This makes me come off as an asshole. And this morning, I saw that someone else in relation to a separate conversation, saw that I was “declarative” on a negative opinion regarding a restaurant chain in Canada, and he defended it with a “depends on what you’re in the mood for”. This, to me, is… I don’t know. Should I always hem and haw with my negative opinions, and add context, and be like “I feel like”, or “to me”, or “I prefer”, or “this isn’t for me”? Why is stating an opinion so strongly (as objective fact, I guess) so offensive? (I know why it is, I get it from a “hey, that person has strong opinions and isn’t afraid to voice it, and those kinds of people annoy me” perspective… but wow, oh wow, it really triggers certain types of people).

Story Introspection

• Didn’t really read a ton of stuff this past week. My pulls are down to 26 titles, and I’m working on continuing to cut them. With that said, I keep shopping for DC Finest and Compendiums on Amazon when it’s severely discounted, so now I have a huge backlog of trades to read. Maybe I’ll just keep cutting until it’s under 20 titles. A lot of stuff is ending in October. I don’t care of the X-Men event. I don’t care for the Cosmos event either. I have all the Absolute lines I enjoy and some other DC stuff. TMNT is switching creative teams and while I loved it and I’m curious about Gene Luen Yang… I also can live without it. Mostly, I’m just going to keep cutting until I have room for novels again. That’s the goal.

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