2025-W44 EOW Report

Anti-Goal Cycling

• Finally starting to actually break story on prj:LOOSE. It takes a lot from its inspiration and that’s a potentially good AND bad thing. It has the same theme of saying goodbyes in a liminal sort of way… but mine will be a little more heated and not as friendly. I think I want the two PROTs to have an unspoken and un-acted-out crush on each other… and I want the reaction to the going away to be a little more heated and toxic… and I want the final goodbye to a lot more sad. We’ll see.
• Dove into a book on working on the UN Security Council that will be the grist and gristle for another short story. Picked up a book on growing up as an Iranian teenager in America for something else. Found Lord of the Flies used too.
• Mostly burning through Alison Weir’s THe Children of Henry VIII (1996) on audiobook this past week. Just didn’t have energy at the end of the day to do more note taking on Burke. Although, I am also well into Grafton Forgers and Critics (1990) as well now.

Four Thousand Weeks

• Halloween on Friday night. Eldest had party here. Middle at a friends. Youngest went trick-or-treating. With Eldest and friends manning the front door, I had a lovely introvert evening by myself up in my bedroom reading comics and novels and watching an episode of Outlander. This month is finally over. I dreaded coming into this month and now it’s finally over. And the complaints are that of an introvert. There was just too much going out. I liked all the things I went out for by having almost ten of such things in a single month was too much. That said…
• This was a month of goodbyes and endings. AJM officially voiced her exit from the company. I found the last two weeks and the storming off as a good enough incident to exit my TTRPG group. And finally someone at Client A had had enough, put in a thirty-day notice and left on Halloween. And all of the above (including the first bullet) and that side project I’m working on is making me extremely contemplative again. I mean, I usually do at this time of the year, I tend to make my New Year resolutions around November and not late December, but I spent a good portion of Saturday night starting to hunker down, ponder, and let it stew. My beat-up Muji B5 journal entitled “2017-2017: The Next Decade”, which I started in 2015 only has four pages left. Some of it has come to fruition, and some are potentially within grasp. One, am arguably an ex-copywriter now. Have been since 2022. Two, did the publisher thing from 2021-2023, it was junk, and I can convert that to co-founder. Finally, novelist… still have two years to hit that. Not jinxing it though. I need to focus on the short stories first. I should have a revolver’s worth of bullets by next year to fire off. Fired off one shot already prj:SAVED and got my first rejection… so I’m in the game.
• So writing a lot with my Sailor 1911 on a Claire-Fontaine pad… and went on a rabbit hole this weekend looking at luxury stationary and discovered Smythson, rediscovered Midori (which both FYC gave me a bunch of last Xmas), and am tempted to get another fountain pen. And then I saw it. I saw the Pelikan M809. The teenage edgelord me is so desperately hungry for it. It’s $920 USD and probably a really bad idea financially… but… MATTE BLACK. I mean. C’mon. How fucking cool is that? I also saw that Sailor did a partnership with The Matrix and have an all black Trinity fountain pen? That’s fucking cool too. Oh dear.

Story Introspection

• Second half on S7 of Outlander (2014) finally made it on to Netflix. My attempt to sleep at 2200 on Halloween while eldest had a party downstairs failed, so I watched the first episode instead. Or eighth to be accurate. I mean, they can call it whatever they want, but the audience is basically getting another season even if it’s “shorter”. I don’t know why they don’t just call it another season. Are we running out of numbers here? It’s like comic books – but especially Marvel these days – resetting to #1 to get more sales even though it’s the same exact creative team. ANYWAY – it was a joy to return to 18th C. Scotland, America, all of it. This show is quickly becoming akin to Stranger Things (2016) in that almost, just almost I don’t really care if the plot is amaze-balls so much as spending time (almost parasocially) with a group of familiar faces. They all get an emotional arc for the season, you get to cry with them, you watch them be good to each other and support each other, and they separate/break-up and then reunite/reconcile and then band together to fight the big bad, and then you get the heartwarming message of how being together as a family will always win out over whatever evil you throw at it. It’s very nice and warm.
• Somewhat story introspection adjacent – looked at Mothership Month and this other Silver Ennie-winning sandbox, Wildenrem, and I was tempted to get them for their sandbox-y potentially usefulness for story construction and I even sat down to read A Pound of Flesh and I was tempted, so tempted to back these two projects but near the end of Sunday Afternoon I had to hit my clarity point. Why. Just why am I backing these things. I have three shelves of these things and I don’t play and I haven’t read them and the few times I’ve used a TTRPG to fuel a story development/breaking (Lancer, Warhammer, Mage, Kult)… it has NEVER turned out any useful at all. I should just stop. I mean, I just backed the Apex Magazine KS, pledging for four critiques. THAT’S USEFUL, JINN. Not TTRPG sandbox and rulebooks. I just need to keep being hyper-critical of the part of me that gets distracted and worn down and thinking these parallels, these adjacencies, these side quests could EVER be useful for the actual construction of stories. Also – did a late pledge on all ten issues of Old Moon.
• Finished the Kyle Rayner Compendium and I gotta say… uh… Aside from Green Lantern (1990) issues #48-52… a lot of his is kinda, well, mediocre, and I can see how Gail Simone’s “fridging” concept really nails it on the head. I mean, they really drag that out for a whole year. “I had a girlfriend that died and now I’ll do better” LITERALLY IN THE DIALOGUE OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN. And then he gets to sleep with Donna Troy/Darkstar… AND flirt with Supergirl? What in the actual fuck. So I’m slightly not as enamored with Kyle Rayner anymore (I still love him more than Hal Jordan)… which also, by the way, acts like a child stomping his feet during this entire period? Like at one point, you gotta go… dude. YOU KILLED ALL THE FUCKING LANTERNS. YOU TRIED TO CREATE A FAKE VERSION OF COAST CITY a la Solaris. You also caused the death of ALL THE GUARDIANS even though they were slimy motherfuckers. But most importantly… YOU FUCKING KILLED KILOWOG, you asshole. Shut up.
• Read a TON of short stories by the authors offering a critique in the Apex Kickstarter. Really excited to get feedback from them.
• Still plugging away at Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse. In love with the prose. Not in love with needing to find my bearing at the beginning of the chapter… and oftentimes in the middle of a scene where Woolf will use switch POV on you. Who am I now? But once I get into the correct headspace (literally), the interior monologue (some of it so unhinged and so surprisingly human and flawed interior monologue), I am really enjoying it all.

Archive of all EOW reports here