2025-W37 EOW Report
Anti-Goal Cycling
- So I totally put off that last read of prj:SAVED until Friday. I made some final changes, and moved it over to the Shunn format in Word. I shared it with GFP as well since we had a Saturday check in (in which there were weird vibes all around as our first call since the retreat back in early August). On one of the afternoons this past week, I went through the list of literary journals that I bought from Sub Club. Surprisingly a lot of magazines have an open period right now. So… shoot my shot?
- So what did I do during that procrastination period? I reviewed the Hugo/Nebula winning short stories again, but this time from the framework that the ARCs and PROGs don’t actually correlate. It’s on one level procrastination, but on another, I keep going back to these same nine or ten stories and keep discovering new ways to thinking about them and breaking them down… all in the hope of developing the neural pathways to build stories faster and more efficiently. A systematic way to story dev that first draft that’s good enough so I can iterate on it.
Four Thousand Weeks
| Wks Lft | HP |
|---|---|
| 1677/4000 | 41.925% |
- Getting back into the element with a new routine. The eldest’s MWF university schedule gives me an extra day of writing fiction while shifting gym days to TRSa. That said, Saturday morning gym days do take some getting used to. Aside from this, a lot more walks the past few weeks. Want to maintain 5000 steps per day while the sun is out. Some days of reading while walking to kill two birds. Overall, routine.
- Went down a bit of a rabbit hole and looked at early modern instruments… like the tabor pipe, the hurdy gurdy, and the lute and I was tempted to get one… even finding an actual fucking luthier in VANCOUVER named Travis Carey… except $7000 sounds like way too expensive to start another hobby. OFC, there was also a cheap $1300 starter set as well. Regardless, this is a rabbit hole. Stop.
Story Introspection
- Started Call Me By Your Name (2007) by André Aciman. About a third through. The first part (63 pages) was a very well written (as in prose-wise) obsessive teenage crush. Not very much plot. It isn’t until part two that he confesses his love to Oliver and I’m like… let’s keep it moving, yeah? I’m impatient. But it is very good.
- Finished Darwyn Cookie’s DC: The New Frontier. It’s… interesting. It has a good MECH and it delivers on said MECH, but at the end of the day, it felt more like a history than a compelling, emotional story. The scenes were all brief and short, just enough to deliver a moment. But because of that format, there’s not enough time to let things breathe, to develop anyone organically, to let the glacier movement of emotional ARCs grow. So ultimately, this didn’t really work out for me. Stories like these can be read with interest, but not exactly investment.
- The second season of Peacemaker doesn’t seem to have as much of the rapid-fire comedic dialogue as the first season. Loved the Tim Meadows one where he talks about how you always bring a gift when you visit someone, but then always forget it. And then one where Nhut Le correcting Michael Rooker’s hilariously written character as being Vietnamese and not Chinese was also good. But we’re four episodes in and we just don’t have as much as the really silly, stupid dialogue that made me crack up. Which is fine. This season seems a lot more focused on a solid ARC and PROG.
Archive of all EOW reports here