Updates, Changes, and New Writing Projects

Reading Time

So I am officially moved in to my new place for the next couple years. Well, at least for the next year. There is a good possibility I will be spending some considerable time in New Zealand next year, but we’ll see.

Things are still a bit hectic. Some things are not yet unpacked, and things are a little misplaced and misshapen. I’m in a smaller room than I was before. You can see somewhat how things are progressing in some of the images at the end of this post. It’s not perfect, but it will certainly do, and at least I have DSL, a roof, TV, my beautiful animals, and my schooling to look forward to!
So given that, it’s been a rather stressful couple of weeks.

Now for an update on, well, stuff. I’m reading Leven Thumps and the Whispered Secret for SQT’s blog. It’s a wonderful book and if anyone hasn’t read the first you should. I also got a laptop, which I’ll get a picture of eventually. I need it of course, because I’ll be on campus quite a lot during the week.

Now, for the darker news. My blog has been getting a few comments from people from TeenageWriters, a website I was a part of. Well, I am no longer a part of the website due to issues that I don’t think need to be repeated in full detail, but I will give the gist of why this happened. I was the debate mod at TW. Recent happenings were causing the upper mods to begin breaking apart and I got dragged into the fray. Certain members proved to be incapable of trying to find a compromise, some members were trying to understand what was going on, and others were trying to explain it. Ultimately what happened was that all the upper mods were split right down the middle because of immaturity and selfishness. Everyone was bickering, everyone was arguing, and when someone tried to bring the argument to a close and resume finding solutions, the same people would continue bickering. So, nothing got done. Then a few members came back who had left before, some things were said behind my back, and I realized pretty quick with the beginning of ‘mod elections’ that things were going from bad to extremely horrible at TW. So, I made the decision to leave so as not to have to deal with the worsening condition of the site and the idiocy of holding ‘mod elections’, which proved actually to bring things even further down. I have left, several other members have left, and people who were very important to the site are now considering leaving permanently. So, that’s that. The Anthology for the website is basically dead. I’ve pulled all my material off the blog and intend to place it elsewhere, and it’s just a very bad experience. There will be more about this later, but for now, that’s that.

Now for some changes. I have a new email. If you click the “Contact Me” link on the left there it will have you send to the new email. For now it is a yahoo.com account. That may change again, but because my sbcglobal.net account will be going away I have to switch up. I have to start forwarding about 300 emails too.

I also recently had a short story reviewed by Zen Pen and at some point soon I’ll have to put a summary of what was said. The short version is that it was good stuff, but with some things that really got me thinking.

Now for my writing. I’ve got a few projects in the works now.

  1. I’m still working on my short stories. I am hoping to get several stories in final working order so I can start sending them out to magazines. I think I’ll end up with about 4 or 5 good stories all going out at once.
  2. The Spellweaver of Dern is still in the plotting stage. I’m a bit stuck on it, but at some point I’ll have to sit down and work out the entire plotline.
  3. I’ve taken an old unfinished story and have started turning it into a novel. It’s a cross genre piece taking a lot of elements from both science fiction and horror, and there are little bits of fantasy in there, in some ways. I’m not sure how it will work but I have two storylines working right now and I am really enjoying writing it

That pretty much completes that. Now for pictures! All the ones of the bay and nature and what not are actually from the UC Santa Cruz campus. Hope you enjoy them. All the pictures of a room are ones of my new room. Those are the early unpacking photos. Things are a bit different now of course. Enjoy!









Email
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Digg
Reddit
LinkedIn

3 Responses

  1. Hey, i’m sorry the whole TW thng didn’t work out, it sounded quite promising. Maybe in the future it’ll start back up or something, hopefully with more concrete positions.

    I’d be interested to here what magazines you send your stuf to (or even get in!), even if purely to hear of magazines i will never see! (not in america lol)

    I hope you can unblock spellweaver, though some of those photos are remarkably good…so maybe a career down that path eh?

    I’ll be sure to note down your email, thanks for that.

    Your room looks nice actually, though i am a fan f ‘cozy’ living!

    I hope you can get everything sorted out, and all goes well with those magazines!

  2. Awww, your room’s quite a lot smaller than the last one. And no books!!!!!!! :O Need any tips on how to cram stuff into as small a space as possible, just ask me. :p

Leave a Reply

Follow Me

Newsletter

Support Me

Recent Posts

A Reading List of Dystopian Fiction and Relevant Texts (Apropos of Nothing in Particular)

Why would someone make a list of important and interesting works of dystopian fiction? Or a suggested reading list of works that are relevant to those dystopian works? There is absolutely no reason other than raw interest. There’s nothing going on to compel this. There is nothing in particular one making such a list would hope you’d learn. The lists below are not an exhaustive list. There are bound to be texts I have forgotten or texts you think folks should read that are not listed. Feel free to make your own list and tell me about it OR leave a comment. I’ll add things I’ve missed! Anywhoodles. Here goes:

Read More »

Duke’s Best EDM Tracks of 2024

And so it came to pass that I finished up my annual Best of EDM [Insert Year Here] lists. I used to do these on Spotify before switching to Tidal, and I continued doing them on Tidal because I listen to an absurd amount of EDM and like keeping track of the tunes I love the most. Below, you will find a Tidal playlist that should be public. You can listen to the first 50 tracks right here, but the full playlist is available on Tidal proper (which has a free version just like Spotify does). For whatever reason, the embedded playlist breaks the page, and so I’ve opted to link to it here and at the bottom of this post. Embeds are weird. Or you can pull songs into your preferred listening app. It’s up to you. Some caveats before we begin:

Read More »

2025: The Year of Something

We’re nine days into 2025, and it’s already full of exhausting levels of controversy before we’ve even had a turnover in power in my home country of the United States. We’ve seen resignations of world leaders, wars continuing and getting worse and worse (you know where), the owner of Twitter continuing his tirade of lunacy and demonstrating why the billionaire class is not to be revered, California ablaze with a horrendous and large wildfire, right wing thinktanks developing plans to out and attack Wikipedia editors as any fascist-friendly organization would do, Meta rolling out and rolling back GenAI profiles on its platforms, and, just yesterday, the same Meta announcing sweeping changes to its moderation policies that, in a charitable reading, encourage hate-based harassment and abuse of vulnerable populations, promotion and support for disinformation, and other problems, all of which are so profound that people are talking about a mass exodus from the platform to…somewhere. It’s that last thing that brings me back to the blog today. Since the takeover at Twitter, social networks have been in a state of chaos. Platforms have risen and fallen — or only risen so much — and nothing I would call stability has formed. Years ago, I (and many others far more popular than me) remarked that we’ve ceded the territory of self-owned or small-scale third party spaces for massive third party platforms where we have minimal to no control or say and which can be stripped away in a tech-scale heartbeat. By putting all our ducks into a bin of unstable chaos, we’re also expending our time and energy on something that won’t last, requiring us to expend more time and energy finding alternatives, rebuilding communities, and then repeating the process again. In the present environment, that’s impossible to ignore.1 This is all rather reductive, but this post is not the place to talk about all the ways that social networks have impacted control over our own spaces and narratives. Another time, perhaps. I similarly don’t have space to talk about the fact that some of the platforms we currently have, however functional they may be, have placed many of us in a moral quagmire, as in the case of Meta’s recent moderation changes. Another time… ↩

Read More »