2025-W41 EOW Report

Anti-Goal Cycling

• OK, so I spent a lot of Saturday night until 2AM putting together an application for a literary fellowship. It asked for a resume and a “personal statement”. The resume… was interesting, since I haven’t had to use one in over fifteen years. It was good to reflect on my professional life over the last 16, 17 years. The personal statement was a great exercise in and of itself for me to help myself clarify what I want to say as an author. What themes I want to touch on and how I want to convey it. It’s not a framework I’ve thought about since I was asked two years ago by Garage Fiction. I’ve been so deep into story craft. It feels like a cycle has passed and it’s time to go down another cycle now. The application also asked for a writing sample, and they got my only fully complete story: prj:SAVED.
• prj:LOOSE is going off the rails. Like totally off the original idea to the point that I probably need to rename the project code to something else. I’ll give it one more week of development, but the MECH in LOOSE is barely fitting in with the two new MECHs I’m adding to the story.
• Started doing something at the end of the day in the office: taking notes from the history books to ensure I get my daily twenty minutes in. That way, I can read fiction during my daily stretches.

Four Thousand Weeks

• Chaos and upheaval continues at work. Someone I trust, like, and rely on gave their notice. The reason is something that’s been a thorn in my side for almost two years now. On the business side, partner is sharply fluctuating between ambitious drive and the lowest lows. And on the client side, mostly layout. Dinner with AJM to catch up. Wait. Stop. I keep writing about work here when I said I wouldn’t. Let’s move on.
• Energy wise, it was good. As per above, I got a lot done. Mostly development. But a lot done.
• Kinda splurged on books even though I shouldn’t have. Two are potentially foundations for future short stories. I forget when but I recently put together a list of novels I’d get really mad at myself if I didn’t read them before I died. It’s an evolution from a decade ago when I compiled and conflated all the top 100 lists available back in 2015. It’s… surprisingly not a huge list. 43. I could potentially get this done in one year, if not two given my pace these days. I really need to stop shopping for books to be honest.

Story Introspection

• Read Magic for Beginners (2005) twice. Broke it down. Studied it. Dissected it. Still driving forward on Northanger Abbey (1818), got less than 100 pages left. Slogging through The Pedersen Kid (1961) by William H. Gass still. I mean, it’s only 80 pages and I get what it’s doing, but it moves at a glacier pace (joke totally intended in reference to the prominent Midwest cold featured in this story). Put a pause on Kate Elliott’s King’s Dragon (1997) as Kelly Link took up that slot. No major introspection to share publicly.

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