Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been mentioning how I was close to the completion of the fourth draft of my first novel, Wake the Drowned. Today I’m happy to share the news that the draft has been completed, bound and printed, and now sits on my desk as I begin work on the next draft. This particular undertaking took about nine months and found me sometimes breezing through 2-3 pages at a time, and then being stuck on a single paragraph for two days. This is definitely not the smooth reading experience I would expect from something that’s a final draft, not that I expected this to be the one.

Even with the first couple of pages, on which I’ve probably spent the most amount of time over the last few drafts, I knew that the sea of red wasn’t a particularly encouraging sign that I was anywhere near done. But I didn’t let that discourage me, liberally spilling red ink over the next 245 pages.

This draft is also a product of me taking research seriously. It’s not as if I was talking out of my ass before, but there’s always room to do better. I was pleasantly surprised how accurate some of my details were and also humbled by where I stood to inject some realism. I strongly encourage reading both non-fiction and fiction books on your subject to look both for inspiration and to bolster the credibility of your work. I’m certainly not done the research portion of this writing process and I expect the next couple of drafts to reflect this.

I also ran through all the graphs and metrics I use to improve the productivity of my editing process. This includes the plot graph, my word clouds, my “shit list”, and others. I’ll elaborate all on these in upcoming entries though you can read a bit about my word cloud process here. In any case, I saw improvement, some modest, some significant, on all of my metrics, which again pumps me with excitement for the following drafts.

But I think the most important aspect of draft 4 is that this is the draft that I have chosen to share with a small group of beta readers. I have previously talked about how my wife was subjected to a largely undigested first draft, but with three major rewrites since then, I felt I was ready to go into a slightly wider world.

This is where the excitement really begins and my stomach is aflutter with all sorts of butterflies. Sharing my writing with other people has always been an exhilarating and terrifying experience for me and I look forward to it every time. I can’t wait to see what they enjoy (hopefully something) and what I need to improve (hopefully not everything).

I’ve heard time and time again that writers should just write for themselves and not worry about what other people think. But I see the writer as primarily a storyteller, and for a story to be told, it needs to be heard. So while I want my beta readers to like my novel, I don’t want them to do so unequivocally. I want them honestly to tell me what they think about my story, because my story is not for me, it’s for the world.

After this, I estimate I have about three drafts left (two of them post-beta readers) until I might be in a spot where I think I’ve given the story all I can give, and at my current pace, this should take about a year and a half. After working on Wake the Drowned for more than a decade, this feels like almost no time at all, the proverbial light at the end of that tunnel. At this point, I’ve got an unquenchable craving to see it through, which is why I didn’t bother to take a break between drafts four and five and dove right into the next one while my beta readers go through my novel at a comfortable pace.
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I hope this novel is the one, but at the same time, I know it’s my first novel, and it should be treated as a learning experience. So wherever this journey ends up, I’ll just be content to bask in the excitement of a long and massive project slowly nearing its completion.

Any day now, I’ll finish draft 4 of Wake the Drowned, and when I do, I will inundate you with useless statistics and maybe some marginally helpful editing and novel planning tips along the way, but until that happens, I want to talk about inspiration.

For the writers in the audience, we all have an author or work that at one point has made us go “Wow, this is the thing I want to create. I want my writing to make someone feel like this makes me feel right now.” For me, one of those works, and probably the earliest one I can remember, is J. Michael Straczynski’s science-fiction series, Babylon 5, which I have previously mentioned on multiple occasions as a great inspiration.

Not sure how many of you folks will remember Babylon 5 but it ran in the 90s on the Prime Time Entertainment Network and then TNT for its final season and was the original (and superior) cousin of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. The show followed the crew of the space station Babylon 5, built by humans to be a hub of diplomacy and understanding between different species, as they struggled with their internal politics and threats from ancient races.

Very importantly, it was one of the shows that found both syndication and a fan following in 90s Russia, where I had grown up, and because off its airtime, served as a forbidden fruit. It was on after my bedtime, which was extended to cover the show only on Fridays, so the other four days of the week I had to piece the show together by sneaking out of bed and standing quietly in the doorway, bolting every time there was a commercial break knowing that that’s when I was apt to get caught. My parents later claimed they mostly knew about this but I still like to think I was pretty stealthy.

What struck me about B5, aside from the cool aliens which would tickle the imagination of any young boy who was into Star Wars, was that it was my first exposure to long-form storytelling. Babylon 5 remains fairly unique in its approach to its story – it started off with a pre-planned five-season story arc, and it was given a chance to conclude its full five-season arc, albeit with some shuffling in the final two seasons due to a threat of cancellation. My little child mind was absolutely boggled by this as stories and themes were interwoven, secrets had satisfying resolutions, and actions had consequences reaching into seasons ahead.

​It was the first work of fiction that taught me that characters can come in shades of gray, that as one enemy redeems himself the other can face a cruel downfall, their fates seeming both inevitable and completely avoidable. It showed me that humour can cohabitate with tragedy, and strength with vulnerability, and that somewhere deep within me my own stories were itching to get out.

The reason B5 was on my mind as I set to write this post is twofold. Firstly, I have been diligently working on Chapters 2 and 3 of Drops of the Black Sun (despite what the general lack of updates would otherwise suggest), my own long-form mostly pre-planned sci-fi series that I’m sharing here on this blog. As I’m putting together these early chapters and planning for the future of the series, I can’t help but seek inspiration from B5 and I have spotted some unintentional minor similarities that make me question whether I have an original bone in my body.

The other reason this has been on my mind is because on Tuesday, through the magic of the internet, I had a chance to have a brief interaction with the creator of B5 himself. J. Michael Straczynski did an AMA on the /r/books subreddit and I was lucky enough to catch the beginning and fire off my comment. I told him the little tidbit about watching it past my bedtime and what an influence he was.

The ever-humble Straczynski advised me to never let “some other show” influence me as a writer. In general, I take his meaning. Those previously mentioned similarities notwithstanding, I want my work to be original, but what are we without the giants whose shoulders we stand on? Straczynski is one of the giants for me. While I want Drops to have a unique voice, to breathe life into a story and into characters that are entirely my own, I can’t help but see my work through the lens of works that have inspired me. I want to at least come close to bringing to the world the same complexity, the character development and engaging story that Straczynski brought me when I was a kid.
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So with that said, I hope you all get a chance to experience the brilliance that is Babylon 5. I know I’m already looking to my next rewatch, and to bringing you even a smidgen of the same powerful storytelling.

In today’s post, I wanted to continue the theme of last week’s entry, and talk a bit about another aspect of self-care: boredom. Firstly, I want to recognize that I’m not breaking any new ground here. Though our aversion to boredom may have something to do with being unable to block out the unpleasant thoughts and feelings that attempt to constantly bombard us, it’s well-accepted that that same lack of distractions can also spur creativity. What I did want to talk about though was my own personal recent experience with the relationship between boredom and creativity.

I’m generally fairly inseparable from my phone. Not to the point where I might be constantly texting all day, but at the height of Pokemon Go I did fall down the stairs once, and the less said about that, the better. Waiting rooms, walks to and from the bus stop, and washroom breaks have historically been accompanied by either my Reddit feed, or whatever flavor-of-the-month mobile game I’m playing at the time. Too many hours have been spent playing Disney Emoji Blitz, as my Disney obsession is well-documented.

I am very well aware of the fact that the hours spent on my phone are, by and large, “wasted time”, in the sense that while they’re entertaining (and I think time spent enjoying yourself is not technically wasted time) there are no long-term benefits derived from it whatsoever. It’s similar to eating cookies – it’s not “wasted” food but a lot of the time you should probably eat something other than a cookie. Same with mobile games; I acknowledge that I can be doing something more useful but boredom is unpleasant and games are just so darn fun. There, I said it. I know some of you are probably more disciplined than me, but for many, this should sound familiar.

Over the last couple of weeks I found myself in a lull between games – nothing spoke to me enough that it made micromanaging inventories and daily tasks worth it. Of course, there were no shortage of Reddit updates to get into as that front page is theoretically infinite, so I will give myself some credit for consciously choosing not to pull out my phone and actually enjoy the scenery of the beautiful campus I work on.

This will sound stupid in both how obvious and cheesy it is, but boy does it feel good to lift your head and just walk for a change. It helps that it’s summer and therefore not raining here every day to the point where you’d sooner drown yourself in the nearest puddle. What I found though, is that even if we only took the walking part of my commute, which is about ten minutes each way from the bus loop to my office, I had twenty extra minutes in my day to allow my mind to wander. And, being the kind of mind that I have, it invariably wandered to my writing.

It’s no coincidence that it was last week that I finally finished the first draft of Chapter 2 of Drops of the Black Sun, which had been slow going since spring. The first sketches of Chapter 3 are already populating my Moleskine notebook, along with notes for the current draft of Wake the Drowned, and bits of dialogue for the bedtime story I’ve been telling my kids since January. In fact, that same notebook that I’ve had since December and was only half-full a month ago is now almost complete. I don’t remember the last time I had such a burst of creativity on multiple projects. I’ve even managed to take this week to design a flag for the Human Interstellar Dominion in Drops of the Black Sun, just because my brain happened to have had some extra capacity to work on it.

I have gone at length about all the different ways you can deal with writer’s block and one of the obvious solutions was staring right in the face the whole time … literally. That said, I’m not going to pretend that I will reduce all my phone use to a minimum, or that I won’t at some point, for however long, slip into another game that gets me with its dopamine microdosing. Nor do I want to make the argument that writers that do shun technology to that extent necessarily make better writers. Quite the contrary, I think a writer impoverishes themselves by deliberately shunning anything that is enjoyed by a large number of people. I don’t believe in the artist as a creature unto themselves and I strive to see how people tick.
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What I do want to acknowledge is the benefit of boredom. Even for a few minutes a day. Make an effort to spend time away from your desk, to let your brain breathe without being subjected to the myriad of stimulations tossed at it like slop to hogs. Take a moment to listen to what your brain has to say, and you may be pleasantly surprised.

Recently I’d tweeted something about the fact that one of my most satisfying moments in editing are deletions. This has stuck with me since then, and I’ve been taking a more critical approach to phrases, sentences and passages that I’m editing and I feel like I’m onto something here, so I thought I would expand on this.

I’ve previously talked about writer’s block and the various ways I deal what that stubborn bit of writing that just won’t let me be. But what if making it perfect isn’t the answer? What if making it disappear is what makes your writing stronger?

At first, this sounds like a quitting attitude, and I do agree that a deletion decision needs to be critically assessed. It’s tempting to interrogate yourself and ask whether you’re just giving up on something and whether a better writer would be able to write their way out of this one. But good writers delete, and you should too.

Secondly, I acknowledge that deleting your own writing hurts. This is your baby, come from within the depths of your creative process, and now you’re expected to unceremoniously sever it and discard it? As traumatic as the experience might be for you, there’s a reason why “kill your darlings” is a bit of writing advice that’s been driven into the ground. Sometimes, no matter how attached you are to the smaller piece, its removal might be an overall benefit to the whole. And if you really do think it’s a good line that just happens to be in the wrong place in the wrong time, save it somewhere else. I have a whole file with deleted sentences and paragraphs to use to inspire myself later. It may find a home a yet.

So let’s look at this in the context of the actual deletion I made last week. This was in Wake the Drowned, the novel I’m currently editing, and the protagonist, Charlie, is struggling about whether or not to enter a room and help another character, but then this character says something completely inappropriate, and the protagonist leaves instead. The immediate next sentence after the protagonist makes his decision and is described as leaving the room is as follows: “There was no need for Charlie there.” While there is nothing wrong with that sentence by itself, something didn’t feel quite right.

My first suspicion was that it didn’t show my character’s motivation or decision making enough. After all, the preceding sentence never explicitly states that Charlie couldn’t or wouldn’t help this other character or why. So I fiddled with the following alternatives: “There was nothing Charlie could do then” or “Charlie realized there was nothing he could have done” or “There was nothing Charlie could do for [character] now.” While about as short and punchy as the original sentences, all of these options didn’t sound right. So I went with a more complicated structure to the tune of the following: “Despite what twisted Charlie on the inside, if he’d cross the room then, he would soon discover that [character] had now sunken out of reach of his help.” This seemed to somehow make things much worse.

So I stared it for a few minutes, wondering why this little sentence, with its expression of hopelessness in a hopeless situation, was bothering me so much. And then I just put a fat red line through it, and read the paragraph again.

Now the scene ended with Charlie leaving the room, without any epilogue-type commentary. That’s it. Here he is contemplating helping, the character saying something inappropriate, then Charlie leaving. Sure, I can add extra details about what Charlie felt at the moment, but what would that accomplish? He left. The reader understands what the decision implies, and if Charlie’s exact train of thought isn’t set out, what’s the big deal? So I figured out what was wrong with the sentence. The sentence couldn’t be editing or improved, because the problem was that it should never have been there in the first place.

I’ve always struggled with the mother of all writing advice: “show, don’t tell”. I don’t pretend that I truly know what it means but I caught a glimpse of it at that moment. “There was no need for Charlie there” was doing precisely that – telling us what Charlie felt, instead of showing us that he left.

There is, of course, the lingering possibility that I made the wrong choice. Perhaps some beta readers will feel like something is missing from this paragraph. And if that happens, I would need to rethink my choices. At this point, I found the red strikethrough to be liberating. I liked the sentence and how it sounded and how it capped off a previous much longer sentence. But ultimately I decided that it detracted from the work, and out it went. I’ll move past whatever pain that causes, because the next sentence calls.

​Pretty much the same day that I posted my last entry, it had become out of date. For those that don’t want to reread it, the lightning fast summary is that I explained that the reason I was so slow writing Chapter 2 of Drops of the Black Sun is because I was afraid of losing track of the lore and needed to find a user-friendly way of cataloguing it. So at the end of the entry I concluded that Excel was the way to go, and since I had been populating my spreadsheet for a couple of weeks by that point, I thought I had settled on a strategy.
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This all came crashing down later that afternoon, where I hit a particularly lore-heavy part of my story and realized that the spreadsheet was becoming a disaster. Just look at the below, and consider that this is about four pages into an idea that’s hundreds, if not thousands, pages long:

I’m not entirely sure I why I failed to realize this amount of information will completely overwhelm a table, but I’m not shy about admitting when I was a doofus.

So this doofus needed an alternative, and so I went back to my original concept of a wiki-type file. This time I got off my lazy ass and Googled whether and how you can create internal hyperlinks in Word. You can, and it’s especially easy when you use headings. So now instead of saving time and moving on with my writing, I’ve been busy transferring all the data I already put in Excel, and then organizing into something that I can actually work with.

So far, it’s working much better. Sure, it’s already 17 pages long and 500 words even though I still haven’t quite gotten through half of Chapter 1 yet. And sure, deep down in my gut there is this feeling that once the document grows too big, it will implode on me. But this is the best I can do with the resources I have available. And I know “Word” is a bit of a taboo world in writing circles, but I figured I’d give you a tour anyway.
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So here you can see where the wiki inspirations shines through. I’ve got category pages that list all entities in the category, and then links coming off that list to the actual entries.

​And here you see a sample entry with the information table at the top – some of the columns are placeholders in case I come up with other characteristics by which I want to distinguish planets from each other. The yellow highlight is a reminder to myself that this fact hasn’t actually made it into the work yet. So there you go, a sneak peak at a minor detail. As you can see, I also want to track where the entity has been mentioned in case I want to read up on what was actually said, rather than what made its way into this encyclopedia entry.

And here we see a sample of an entry that’s more “filled-out”, with the table above and the subheadings a bit more populated. “(BI, C1)” is a shorthand for “Book I, Chapter 1” and operates as an internal “cite your sources” function. Again, so I can check back and figure out what the hell I was actually talking about.
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So there you go, my adventures in worldbuilding continue, and hopefully I won’t have to change course any time soon. Meanwhile, going to go wish on a star that I can actually start writing this again soon.

Lately I’ve been feeling a bit like George R. R. Martin, if Martin had wrote the first chapter of A Game of Thrones and then promptly fucked off the face of the Earth. Success seems to be a favourite prey of ambition. One of my major follies is building up myself a lofty goal and then getting buried by the inevitable avalanche that follows. The only solution is then to burn the ruins to the ashes and move onto the next overwhelming task.

About three months ago, I ambitiously started my science fiction project, Drops of the Black Sun, which I planned to release as a web novel on this blog. Usually I’m a non-genre writer, but I’ve always had a soft spot for science fiction, so I figured I could write it off the side of my desk and share it with the rest of the world in an unhurried fashion. In mid-March, I finished posting Chapter 1. Almost three months later, Chapter 2 is a work in progress, and like George Martin, I am filled with wholehearted promises to get my audience the next installment.

In the meantime, instead of being content with tweets of lamentation, I figured I’d share in a bit more detail what I’ve been going through the last couple of months in terms of the creative process, and hopefully the other writers out there can glean something useful out of my experience.

First and foremost I want to say, I haven’t given up on the project, nor has it turned into a chore, which is one of the reasons why it’s been progressing so slowly. I didn’t want to be buried by the weight of my own ambition in this case. Instead, I carefully took a measured approach to keep my joy alive and to keep some kind of semi-regular release schedule. This turned out a bit harder than I thought, and the main culprit is quality control.

It is far easier to be mediocre than good. So while the plot outlines and character arcs existed as networks of interconnected neurons in my own mind, they were difficult to scrutinize. But now that they were made flesh by writing them down, they needed to meet a standard. I knew I wasn’t planning to make it as polished as my traditional stuff, but that was still no excuse to make it sloppy. There were standards I needed to meet before I could share my work with others.

So that was one of the issues I face – “writing as I go” isn’t as easy as I thought when an involved editing process was going to be a crucial part of it. The bit of pressure I feel to continue to share the work does take the edge off the editing trap – revising and revising until your figurative knuckles turn bloody – but any way you spin it, editing is still not my favourite part of the writing process and it grinds along.

The other major issue that has been bugging me is worldbuilding. Which is funny, because in my introduction to Drops I explain that incessant worldbuilding is the reason I threw up my hands in the first place and started to write instead of plot the story to death. In a way, this reason is related to the first – quality control. My world needs to be polished and consistent, and I can’t risk being blindsided by neglected details.

I thought setting out to write was all I had to do. Yet not even two chapters into the endeavour I discovered that whereas worldbuilding without writing would not satisfy me, writing without a careful eye to worldbuilding is just as unsatisfactory.

I don’t know how the great worldbuilders do it, but I doubt they have a catalogue of all their world’s minutiae stored in their head. It’s not a task that my mind is up for and I already caught myself either thinking that I introduced something when I didn’t, and introducing something I thought I didn’t share but actually established in the previous chapter. I realized that I couldn’t move ahead at a good pace because I was worried about messing this up.

Anytime I namedrop a species or a planet, I need to make sure I record this instance. Both for consistency, and to avoid repetition and unnecessary exposition every time something comes up. Every little fact and name needed to be cataloged. So where I thought that setting out all this detail in advance wouldn’t work for me, neither would I be successful if I didn’t set out this detail after had I introduced it through my writing.

So now that the problem had been identified, I needed to look for a solution. Something that could replicate the ease of navigation of a wiki but be stored on my computer. Now, there is probably an app out there that would do a better job, but I’m a simple man – I need to record stuff, I go to Excel.

So over the last little while, all those times where I otherwise I would have worked on chapter 2, I’ve been putting together this lore repository that I myself could consult. Everything is separated into tabs by characters, planets, species, objects, etc. And in each of those tabs I record everything said on the subject as well as the precise chapters where they were referenced. It’s a bit of a painstaking process to build up, but I’m hoping that once I have the base, it will go a little quicker and won’t slow down my writing too much. My main goal here is using consistency to bring the world to life and keep the reader immersed. Now let’s hope the story itself can do the same thing.

So there you have it, some of the misadventures behind this unfortunate delay. I admit it’s a bit of a learning process, but I’m still committed to the story. Hope to see you for the release of the next chapter, whenever that might be. 

The concept of a promise takes on a completely different character after you’ve had kids, especially kids with a sharp memory and a sense of justice. If you say they’ll get to watch “Moana” tomorrow, they better be signing along to “How Far I’ll Go” or you will be summoned in front of a tribunal to explain your actions. There are tiny persons now who believe in the inherent goodness of the world and the value of your word has a heightened sense of importance. It’s an interesting sensation to have a magnifying glass lifted up to your words, like little editors following you around ready to be somehow disappointed.

All of that to say that the one person to whom I make promises that I still happily break is myself. I promise to go to bed by ten o’clock today. Lies. I promise if I sleep-in an hour tomorrow I’ll have twice as many morning runs next week. Lies. I promise that when I go on vacation I will set aside some time to write and make a couple of blog updates. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, that was a lie as well, and one I tell myself every time I go away somewhere.

And here’s where the looming figure of imposter syndrome stands behind me and reads over my shoulder. If you were a real writer, would you really be able to stay away from writing, it asks. If it was truly your passion, wouldn’t you find the time, conjure it out of thin air as if your life depended it? Whatever my self-doubt has to say about being a writer, I know that being one primarily involves being a person. And as a person, sometimes I need to be kind to myself and do what I need to relax without feeling guilty about all the other things I might otherwise be doing.

And you know what? I highly recommend it. This was our first chance to take the kids on a getaway beach vacation. They’ve been to Disneyland twice now, but that in itself is a unique experience. Realistically, you can only spend a few days at Disneyland and you’re well-prepared that it’s all going to be a hectic blur. We’re fine with that, and we enjoyed those two trips immensely. Two weeks in Hawaii though is an entirely different experience.

Even though the carefree days of lounging with a book on the beach for hours, drifting in and out of naps, are long gone, and by the end of the day both me and my wife were left thoroughly exhausted, we still felt relaxed, rested and happy. It’s just one of the many paradoxes of parenting I suppose.

In a recent entry, I had talked a bit about how my day job is relatively high-demanding and often moves into my headspace when I’m not at work. Spending time with my family every day, heading to the pool or to the beach or simply eating meals together managed to clear a bit of that log jam. It’s unbelievable how much routine can clog up the pores of your mind and restrict its breathing.

But if the issue is work (or other parts of daily repetitions that you don’t necessarily enjoy, like the morning commute or chores), then why did my writing get swept away in the same stroke? Don’t I enjoy that? Now suddenly I have arrived at one of the questions many writers, and artists in general, ask: do I enjoy this? The answer is of course, a resounding “I do”, but do I enjoy every aspect of it? Do I enjoy writer’s block, against which I’ve rallied in multiple entries? Or perhaps the rigors of editing? Not so much. So maybe it’s a good idea to step away from those as well, to let the enjoyment of my art rise to the top?

Perhaps I’m making it sound like this was a result of conscious decisions. Far from it. Truth be told it just never entered my mind that I should interrupt my “doing nothing”. That said, those of you that have been reading this blog know that I’m an advocate of the proposition that writing words down is but the tip of the iceberg of the act of “writing”. Similarly in this case, while I may not have written new words I have lived, I have experienced, I reflected and recharged and came out of it a better writer. Being away gave me what I sorely needed at the time.

That is not to say that a part of me isn’t glad to be back. A vacation that lasts forever just becomes “life” and how are you supposed to take a vacation from that? It’s going to take me a couple of weeks to blow all of the cobwebs off my writing but I’m happy to jump into all the projects I have on the go with renewed energy. Hopefully this means getting you that second chapter of Drops of the Black Sun, finishing editing the fourth draft of Wake the Drowned, and completing some half-finished short stories that have been sitting around for more than a year.

Now, I know not everyone has the option to go on the kind of getaway that I described. We consider ourselves very fortunate to have these opportunities and I don’t mean to imply that flying somewhere for five hours is the only legitimate way to take a break. Instead, my primary purpose was to come up with an elaborate excuse as to why I hadn’t done any writing in the last three weeks. But seriously, I do believe it’s important to remember to be kind to yourself, to not push yourself to a brink, to give yourself a break when you need it or just when you want it. You don’t cease being a writer if you don’t write. Take a vacation, whether literal or figurative, from anything that might be getting you down. The rest will come.

I want to start off by saying that I like my day job, and I’m not just writing that because someone might be watching. I may not love it as much as I would kicking back and writing all day so that I can sell coffee table editions of books of lore for my sci-fi epic and raking in money by the hundreds of thousands, but hey, I can still dream. I really do enjoy it. As much as one can enjoy being a lawyer without marrying the law itself and deriving pure unadulterated joy out of structuring complex securities transactions.

I’ve had a testy relationship with my career, but ever since I landed a gig at a post-secondary institution, gone are the days of wondering why I’m spending ten or twelve hours a day helping mining companies sell hopeless assets or aiding energy companies in potentially harming sensitive marine environments. Now I’m one of the greased wheels that helps an academic institution go round and round. Between the variety of work and being steeped in an environment of learning, this place is pretty great.

The nature of my work (and this is a reason why I appreciate a desk job in general) enables me to take a minute or two out of the day to write down an idea, or to a walk to a colleague’s office across campus and brainstorm, or to carve some time during lunch to eat at my desk and write. Overall, I find this job pretty conducive to my life as a writer. Despite keeping me consistently busy and for relatively long hours, I can make it work.

But it is a day job; that second-most dreaded adversary of a writer after self-loathing. So it does come with its challenges, and the reason I’ve been prompted to write about it is because the last couple weeks have been particularly brutal. It was so busy at work that I had no time to think about anything else. I barely had enough time to remember how to breathe. Lunches were spent reading emails, the hours stretched somewhat, and the looming threat of an ever-growing to-do list clogged all my creative pores and drained me of that desire to write – the one that helps me pour out several hundred words in just a ten-minute stretch so that I could at least stay consistently productive. By the time I got home, my brain was so drained that I just had enough energy to put the kids to bed and watch Netflix with my wife over dinner.

It was one of the few times where I felt that my day job actually clashed with my craft. I don’t count the years spent at the law firm because that job just slowly saps your soul until you get irrationally angry at having to wake up in the morning. The last couple of weeks, where my job completely eclipsed my writing, gave me pangs for that fantasy world where I sit with a hot mug of lapsang souchong as the sun shines into our home office and I’m taking my time reading up on the East India Company as part of my research.

And you know what, for some people, that’s their life. They’ve chosen to make it work and they can make it work and I can respect that. I can also respect the shift worker that comes home at 7 in the morning, sleeps, hammers out a page or two in the evening while the world is settling for bed and then off they go to help the world turn while everyone else is sleeping.

The bottom line is, they’re all writers.

I’ve got a family and a demanding job and I continue to write in the same way as the Creative Writing major who spends more time writing than I do sleeping. Yet it’s not uncommon to see those “75 Habits of Successful Writers that Won’t Guarantee Success but if You Don’t Follow Them, You’re Basically a Fraud” articles treat having a day job as the antithesis of being a “real” writer.

You know what makes it really hard to write? Hunger. Not having a roof over your head. The stress of not knowing where your next paycheque comes from. Yes, a skillful writer can turn transform those things into inspiration and a burning fire to produce great writing, but it’s not a necessary ingredient to success. You don’t have to enslave yourself to a different master just to be a good writer; to prove yourselves to those anonymous people to whom you owe absolutely nothing.

A job is life experience. A job allows you to meet new interesting people or be alone with your thoughts for hours on end. I’ve advocated several times on this blog that the act of being a writer doesn’t start and end with the addition of words onto a page. It starts when you wake up and it ends when your go to sleep, and in between those two are dreams and nightmares that can be used for sparks of inspiration.

So don’t be tempted into being hard on yourself for how you choose to structure your life, there’s no one kiln out which a writer can be forged and there is no shame in choosing any kind of job, whether it be a long-term career or a part time means of making some cash, over fully dedicating yourself to the writing craft.

First off, I may feel shame about the reference in the title, but I will not apologize for it.

The last few weeks have certainly been fun and terrifying. For those of you who have not been following, I have released the first chapter of my science fiction web serial, Drops of the Black Sun in three weekly installments. I wish I could say the weekly schedule would continue but between life and a day job it just wouldn’t be possible. That said, I’m as eager to write the continuation of the story as much as I hope some of you are eager to read it.

The reason that it’s been fun is because Drops of the Black Sun has existed as a project for me for almost fifteen years. I have gone in detail about this in my introductory entry so there’s no need to reiterate it here, but I want to emphasize what a cool weird feeling it is to have something live in your head for so long and then have it out there in a sort of no-going-back-now format. Of course, that’s precisely what makes it so terrifying. Whereas before it existed in notes and outlines, now anything that goes out there is set in stone. I won’t say that I won’t cheat a bit and maybe retcon something here and there, but there’s a limit to what I can do and now I have to live with my choices.
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So far we’ve been introduced to Mikarik, one of the central characters of the saga, and the Thorians, the main political and military power in the region of our galaxy known as the Known Reaches. I don’t recall when the idea of the Thorian collective conscious first entered my vision for the species, but it has formed a central tenant of their civilization ever since. Imagine a species where its members actually benefited internally from acting for the collective good, but that also wasn’t an insect or Borg-like hive mind that erased all individuality in favour of collectivism. And then imagine being one of the few members of that species who don’t share that connection with the rest of their friends, family, and wider community. As the saga progresses, I hope to further explore this curious identity of the “netkarthi” or “severed”.

One of my goals in writing Drops of the Black Sun has been to strike a balance in how I introduce worldbuilding. On the one hand, I don’t want it to be a terminology dump with no background or explanations, and on the other hand, I don’t want too many unnecessary tangents and expositions clogging up the story. Hopefully I got the right mix here and you’d be interested to know more about Thorians, Mraborans, the Last Gasp and Anthar Kai.

As a writer that prefers to outline everything from the beginning (one of the reasons why actually starting on this project has taken so long), it’s fascinating for me to see that now that the writing process has begun, it’s already having an influence on future timelines. Each element that I think I’m introducing in passing might end up living deeper into the story.

A bit of a heads up is that the Known Reaches is a big place. As you can see, it took Mikarik three months to journey from Vaparozh to Earth, and it takes about six months two cross the entirety of the Known Reaches on a ship that makes decent speed. There’s a lot going on between those two points, and the eyes of a single character would not be able to do the world justice. So be prepared to explore many points of view as you go through the story, though of course, like Mikarik, some characters will be more central than others.

So for those of you that are here since the beginning, thank you. Let your sci-fi nerd friends know that this web serial exists, and I hope to continue this journey with you for many years ahead.

I have something very exciting to share with you. Okay, I lied, I have something very exciting I’m about to share with you, and I wanted to introduce it. Those of you who have been following my blog will have acquired an awareness that I’m not primarily a genre author. Both the novel I’m currently editing and the one I’m currently writing can be best described as literary fiction. Not to say that I have any aversion to genre fiction. Most of my early short stories were science fiction (think really crappy Black Mirror episodes), and one project in particular has been growing in my head for a decade and a half now. And it’s this project that I want to talk to you about today.

Drops of the Black Sun has its roots all the way back in high school. Having grown up on Star Wars, Babylon 5 and to a certain extent everyone’s unfavourite Star Trek series, Voyager, I have always longed to create my science fiction or space fantasy universe. It was one of those ideas that I always believed in but knew for the longest time that I did not have the requisite ability to give it justice. It has suffered through many stages of the creative process since then.

I attempted to actually put it down on paper once, and never got past the first chapter. To give you a sense of how the project has evolved since then, not a spec from that original first chapter, except a couple of character names, has survived into the vision I currently have for it. I’ve bounced plot ideas off my friends for years, being met with everything from encouragement to “this particular thing makes no sense.” I took every piece of feedback I received and threw it into the cooking pot that Drops of the Black Sun has become.

For years I worked on additional plot lines, finding ways for them to intersect and grow in scope. I’ve worked out additional details of the universe going on for years in each direction to make the world seem more dynamic and “alive”. I rewatched Babylon 5, read and watched Game of Thrones, and the Kingkiller Chronicles and dabbled in the fine line between inspiration and plagiarism. I’ve noted similarities to other works and tweaked them into something different or else embraced them and made them my own.

It’s amazing how much goes into a piece of work that’s not necessarily “writing”, which again why I think one should not define their writing by soulless “words per day” goals. If you are truly a writer, then it doesn’t matter whether you have a pen in your hand. Your mind is always working through ideas and plot and dialogue. So much of a writer’s craft happens in their daily life, and I’ve extolled the virtues of this “off the page” writing on multiple occasions. However, every piece of advice can go too far.

Over the last few years, Drops of the Black Sun has been stuck in worldbuilding hell. I’ve convinced myself that I can only return to writing it once every meticulous detail is in place; only when every character has a name and complete biography, every alien race has a name and history and the all the star systems have been mapped and their political relationships defined. For some writers, this works, but in my case, the project was tied to an unrealistic goal.

And so as I was reflective on my last year in writing, on my successes and how to grow them, I decided that perhaps this would be a good time to stop procrastinating. I feel reasonably comfortable with the framework I have in place so that the story won’t get away from me, but at the same time, I need to start growing it organically.

So I’m excited to announce that starting next week, this blog will become the home to Drops of the Black Sun, which I will plan to release in somewhat irregular intervals over the course of the next whenever, since I will be posting it at the rate that I write it. I want to do this with a manageable schedule and in manageable chunks as I don’t want my other projects to be sidelined. But because this story is always itching to be written, I think this will be the perfect opportunity to allow myself an outlet, and finally share with the world something I have been working on for basically half my life.
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So here’s hoping that it catches your eye, and that you stick around through the adventure.