2025-W43 EOW Report

Anti-Goal Cycling

• Still on prj:LOOSE. I mostly wrote out the metafictional parts for one of the MECHs. I’m kinda happy with it. Next is figuring out the actual ARC and RLTS of the PROT. I think I’m leaning more and more towards a friendship breakup. It feels fitting, considering what happened two Saturdays ago – which btw… the offended party, while replied, still hasn’t taken the time to explain or clarify. Someone else in the party is now getting a little teed off and resentful. I mean, I know I’m guilty of causing said drama, or at least contributed to it, and I do feel bad, but at the same time… as horrible as it sounds, this is story gristle I’m taking.
• Still hopping between Burke’s Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre on notes. I’m done with note-taking for Darnton. Just going to re-read and finish it and then shelving it. Tempted to go down 17th C. Paris… but don’t do it, Jinn. Don’t. But there’s a potential story there! Don’t. Focus. Let’s get good at 16th C. First, OK? Let’s write at least four or five stories in that world first, OK? But what about 19th C. England? I want to do Victorian prose as well? STOP IT.
• I keep meaning to catalogue the irons in the fire and keep forgetting to. I made a catalogue of all the potential projects I could work on to try and hit the three stories before EOY. Most of them require further research and it was great to see what I could eliminate or not.
  • prj:MUNSC - got a book on it to “supply the incidents”. This needs to be deprioritized.
  • prj:MERCI - I’ve blown this one out of proportion because I want to write it in mountain speak. Could I divorce this story from an Appalachian voice? Maybe. But then it wouldn’t be as fun. So this is on the back-burner too.
  • prj:URSUS - This actually could be done at a smaller scope. I can use WGE as a structure. I can add a half-man. It doesn’t have to be a novel. I still very much love the PROT and the MECH of this story. This is a maybe.
  • prj:LIZZY - There are FIVE fucking thickass small print books I bought for this, and one of them is written in her EME English. I don’t think I want to invest so much for a short story. I think this is most likely a novella if not a full-blown novel. Another challenge is that this is mostly a MECH, a STCH, and a RLST with no clear ARC. It’s just a REALLY FUN IDEA. Action items: just keep reading and letting it brew.
  • prj:NIFTY - This is a concept. It’s got a strong MECH… period. There’s no ARC, no RLTS, no PROT, no STCH. HOWEVER – this could be done if I pushed on it I think.
  • prj:BECKY - whatever I worked on two years ago… I think I need to scrap. This is, like NIFTY, a MECH with no clear ARC. But just like NIFTY, I think it can be done with some pushing.
  • prj:WHEEL - I mean… I’ve had the whole structure of the piece plotted out for over two years now. The ARC and RLTS and PROT and LOVR are mostly there. It could be done.
  • prj:GAMES - Another concept of a plan. I basically have a metafictional idea here. It’s a cute one. But a metafictional concept a story does not make.

Four Thousand Weeks

• Was hyper distracted at work writing something that was neither work nor fiction related. Otherwise, week was steady. Got a lot done, probably need to put a bit of a rush on Client B stuff so they can review it on the plane.
• Met new people at a bookclub for Northanger Abbey. A translator, a researcher, an accountant, a content marketer, and someone with an undefined disability. I didn’t ask further when they brought it up, leaving it open for them to expand, but they didn’t. (My god, the they/them pronoun is so useful at obfuscating sex as well). Anyway, it was interesting meeting people who are not creative aspirants, but love creativity so much.
• See my Heavy Metal Magazine story below.

Story Introspection

• Just finished Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014). Breathlessly burned through the last one hundred pages on this lazy Sunday where eldest it out with friends for bubble tea, middle on his upstairs on a school project, and wife and youngest are out finishing up her Halloween costume. It was beautiful and everything I would want from a novel. Comments here.
• Was so very exhausted yesterday on Saturday. Woke up tired. Laid on the couch in the family room not wanting to go to the gym. Thought maybe I could nap after sleeping to restore myself. Ended up not napping after lying there for an hour and begrudgingly going to the gym at 745, where it was packed with strange men, of which I only recognized one as a regular I know. Stayed until 930 – go through mobility, weights, stretches. All of it. Came home thinking I could nap after a shower – I know I’m supposed to be talking about story introspection here, I’m getting to it, I promise – I didn’t nap. Instead. I did laundry, got my family breakfast from Tim Horton’s, drove back, ate, then picked myself up to hit Costco. Gas and groceries, listening to Nightbirde’s “I’m OK” on repeat, then Behemoth. My Spotify algorithm is a complete wreck of K-Pop, AGT Golden Buzzers, Occult Rock, Doom and Sludge Metal, and… 16th C. English Madrigals and Bream/North playing Dowland lute music. Back home with groceries. Then out to Toyota for the Highlander checkup, needs new tires. Still tired. Still pushing. Drove back to Port Coquitlam, have to hit up Save On still. Need to go to the washroom, can’t remember the code, go back to ask again, then screw up the code again, then the door stops working, until the teenager working the returns area walks with me to punch in the code. All this to pee. Then I’m like, shit there are only 3 pumpkins left and they all suck, ask the manager if there’s any left, says there are some in the back, so I need to go out, but I can’t just walk out anymore because they put in these stupid one way gates that swing only one way which has annoyed me to no end since they installed it a few months ago, so then I walk the long way out through self-service, get a cart, push it to the back and the manager is a fucking lying liar. There are no pumpkins. I wheel the cart around (I hate using a cart at Save On because I get so little from there and I haven’t used a cart in years and now I have a wobbly broken cart I have to push around and I’m still tired)… so finally, I push it to the magazine section which I rarely if never do… and I’m like I deserve a fucking treat for this long ass day. So I pick up issue #2 of Heavy Metal Magazine – I’m still pissed off at my LCS for fucking up and not getting me issue #1 and they were so blasé and “oh oops” about it, which has been the pattern with them this entire year, just constant complaints about the industry and it’s distribution woes and tariffs – and I get it… they NOT WRONG, distribution in their industry is so fucked up and it’s like working with teenagers who’ve never ran a business before_… but I’m torn, y’know? I’m like you’re this small dinky brick and mortar and I want to support you. I want you to exist. I want to help you out by paying MORE MONEY for the stuff I want just so you can survive and exist, and I guess putting up with these inconveniences is part of supporting a local economy. I’ve done so much the past five years to reduce my Amazon spend to almost nothing. But ferchissakes – could you… I dunno. I don’t know what kind of attitude towards the fucked up nature of comics distribution would make me happy, but I know shrugging your shoulders and throwing your hands up in the air is not it. Why can’t you guys FIGHT BETTER? Why can’t the lot of you reach out to each other and fucking ORGANIZE. Like all the LCS just band together or something buy up Universal or Lunar or whatever. I don’t know. That was a tangent inside a tangent when all I wanted to say was, I bought a copy of Heavy Metal Magazine. My first ever despite being curious about it on the peripheral since my early twenties. I read through it all that night and loved it. These 6-8 page stories. So much economy for a comic. I’m going to keep picking this up at the grocery store as long as it keeps showing up there. (I looked into a subscription and it was $114 for four issues and I’m like, why the fuck would I do that? Why would I pay $29 per issue when I can get it for $17 at the grocery store? So fucking weird.) SIDE NOTE: It delights me to no end to see comics back at the grocery store. DC did it this summer with Superman. So fucking smart. LET’S GET KIDS BACK INTO COMICS AGAIN. This whole direct market is just dumb and bad for the industry. You can’t grow an industry if it’s just a bunch of LCSs with 80% terrible customer support and elitist gatekeeping. I don’t know why they ever let this happened. Let people buy comics and not be harassed or judged or feel uncomfortable doing it.
• Wrapped up Peacekeeper last Sunday. Landed all the emotional arcs. MG was like don’t watch it last Saturday, it’s bad. I’m like what?! After I watched it. What do you want? We got the EGPs and it opens it up for the next few DCEU stuff. I don’t know what you’re looking for man. My original quibble stands though. I wish there was more of that silly dialogue from S1. James Gunn is just so good at those stupid arguments about nothing that we have in our daily lives.

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