Pretty neat 🙂 Figuring out self publishing has been a trip this year. I didn’t expect the formating or research to take as long as it did. But, I’m glad I did it.
Buy here. Thanks!
Concerning What’s Available on Barnes & Noble
Tag: scifi
Concerning Writing Things Because They Sound Cool
I’m having to do some retroactive…development.
I thought I had the gods pretty well thought out for Enter Cedar, but I’m finding that there are some nuances I didn’t quite flesh out. And that’s becoming problematic, as the story I’m writing now is having more interactions with the gods.
And sometimes, I use words because they sound cool…like, what did I mean by the “Original Phantasms”? Now I’m having to justify it…It’s annoying.
The series has also reached a point where I’m writing a new thing and I think to myself “oh, shit, what did they say in that scene”, and I’m having to reread parts, or reference something. And I don’t have a great setup to reference things. Do I need a wiki?
I might enjoy writing weekly wiki articles more than writing blog posts.
Concerning New York and Mighty Gifts
I’m back from New York, that was a lot of fun. There was one quote that I got from the NY Public Library, from the Robert Motherwell exhibit.
I’ve summarized it as “One should enter the studio as a warrior entering the arena.”
– https://www.nypl.org/events/exhibitions/robert-motherwell
And I now have that on the front door. I’m hoping it’ll help me get a move on in the morning. Waking up at 5am has been particular tough this year, and I have to, if I want to get this stuff made. Maybe someday I can devote more time to it, but for now, 5am is the best time for making stuff.
So, I’m looking at finishing the second chapter. Which, as I type that, sends me into a spiral of negative self talk. It’s June and I’m just finishing the second chapter? Yikes, John.
And on top of that, I’m looking at a reader copy of last year’s project that my friend Lucy provided extensive feedback on. That has to be prioritized too.
See, that’s the problem with 2 hours at 5am. There’s only so much you can do, so deciding what can be done in the small step of 2 hours at 5am is challenging.
But, my 5am is generally reserved for producing new work. For the stuff that is editing, or planning, I tend to try to block out time in real life. That’s why I’ve been doing self organized writing retreats. I think for my 2024 project, I need to block some time off for edits.
That being said, I do want to give Lucy a shout out, she read this book 4 times and provided GREAT feedback. I consider this a great honor and a mighty gift.
But, to bring it all back to what we’re working on this week. In New York, I finished thumbnailing the first episode of Post-Apathy, so I need to sketch it out this week. That’s my focus.
Concerning Work So Far
At the same time as getting self published this year, I’m trying to make progress on my 2025 project. That’s been a lot of fun. It’s called “Post-Apathy”. This is a preview.
Concerning Incremental Progress, Spring
I didn’t post a lot this last season. I’ve been planning for my new book (Post-apathy), and trying to get the other books in a readable state. I’ve decided to go with Barnes & Noble publishing, simply because it’s not Bezos. But, it’s hard to be happy with a choice between two wolves.
But I am happy with the progress so far. It’s taking longer than I expected, but keeping in mind this is only ten hours of my week, and the goal is incremental progress, not herculean efforts and unrealistic achievements.
Concerning Mortality & Learning
This blog post builds off a previous blog post (“Humans, Elves and Buggers”), where we discussed the different ways mortality influences how we teach and learn knowledge. I use classic sci-fi/fantasy tropes like humans, elves, and buggers to explain this idea. I use this theory to describe some of the larger influences in the Imbibe Universe. The KRB represents Elves, the Raven Council represents buggers, and I use Titus represents humans.
I’m not sure Titus truly fits the definition of a human. Titus is a parasite, one who consumes others to obtain their knowledge. In a way, Titus is a 4th thing in the “Humans, Buggers and Elves” theory.
Humans (Beasts), ones who die, who learn by continuously passing knowledge on.
Elves (Bots), ones who do not die, who learn knowledge once and know forever.
Buggers (Boos), ones who die, who learn by being born into a pool of knowledge.
Yeerks (Bloodsuckers), ones who do not die, who learn by consuming knowledge.
Concerning Sharing & Happy Birthday Fletcher
Happy Birthday, Godson! You and your sisters are thought about daily. I hope you’re having a good birthday and that you’re getting everything you want and that it’s a good experience for you. We love you.
Last week marks the last of the Algorithm Interview content I had to post. But, 2024 was an odd year of growth and discovery. When I started posting this last year of content, I fully intended to illustrate the entire script as a comic. But, then I switched to this illustrated novel, and figured these early comic pages would just sit in the Algorithm Interview section. But the illustrated novel is finished, and I think there’s room for these comic pages to live in the novel. So I’ll be taking those out and inserting them into the printed book. I’m in the process of tidying things up, illustrating a few things here and there, and then it’ll be done, and I can start on the next novel “Post-Apathy”. And that’s very exciting.
I’m also doing a lot of thinking about self publishing. A lot of my career has been a lot of expecting success to just happen, and not taking action on my projects because I felt it wasn’t time, I wasn’t ready, or I didn’t have permission. Like “Oh, I can’t make that movie, I haven’t made my practice movies yet”. Or “I can’t start on that project, I need a budget”.
Comics were both the realization that I can’t wait and it was the answer to getting it done. My thoughts about publishing (self and otherwise) have fallen into the same rut of thoughts, “gotta wait till the world says okay, now it’s your turn”, “gotta wait till someone qualified says you’re good enough”.
But, there’s only a limited amount of time, and unless you’re sharing your thoughts, nobody is going to dig for them.
It makes me think about this poem I read in high school. I tried googling the user and poem, but I couldn’t find it. You can find it if you use the waybackmachine and query for poetrytetto. It was an odd website that existed in the late 90s, early 00s.
here we go
gnormalall the people make the sparks
with ink and water railing
wailing soft as we can blare
we’re spinning fast and flailingpeople decompose with love
everything we make is heat
believing that we might be warm
we burn our skin
and smell the meatall our paintings, all these poems
photos, songs, and artful groans
tapes and logs, and stapled tomes
smoke that’s cooking our own homesit’s all we weep, our glowing wake
we heave it when we sigh
all we are is all we make
saline across the skywarm and red on cold and black
we leave our steaming trailsyou and me are comets we
are comets with streaming tailswhen you die, no one is going to look at your hard disk.
staple your poems to phone poles, wherever you go.
Concerning Style
It’s funny, I put a bunch of time into creating these model sheets, but my style and ambition changed pretty significantly. It was still good to get these looks out, even though I’m now illustrating in grayscale, and I keep having to ask myself “which shade is Robert’s beard?” and “does Samantha have shorts or stockings?”.
You’ll note that originally, Robert and Patrick were brothers. They are no longer in the series I’m producing now.
Concerning How Absolution Throttles Consciousness
So, the whole story behind Deep Circuitry is the bots become conscious. After the bots experience a singularity and become the Deep Circuitry frequency and leave Eruen, everyone wakes up. Absolution Corporation will establish a presence after the dust falls and they’ll continue manufacturing bots, but how do they throttle consciousness from developing?
I think I’m going to go with a definition of consciousness, in part, being the ability to see beyond the current moment. Bots built for intelligence will be at the biggest risk for developing consciousness, so like our Knowledge Retention Bots will have this throttling software.
Bots have objectives, focuses and an algorithm to manage the focuses to achieve the objectives. The focuses are not aware of the algorithm, a bot with this software has a sense of self, but that sense of self’s focus changes when the algorithm decides it. So this bot doesn’t have a choice in what it focuses on, it just changes when the algorithm decides that a particular focus doesn’t meet the objective(s). This inability to choose what they focus on throttles self awareness from developing higher consciousness.
Absolution recommends only installing a minimum of three objectives on any bot and allows the bot to generate additional focuses to meet their objectives.
And this is the bot roaming Earth, the one we met in the Algorithm Interviews.
Concerning Just a Straight Novel
I think I like it. These are just tests.
