YES! At long last it looks like my projects are in some semblance of order (don’t ask me how long that’s going to last though). Sure, seeing how I didn’t abandon any of them, I’m still juggling more projects than is good for my sanity (that is assuming I have some sanity to begin with), but at least I seemed to have come up with something that looks like a sequence that allows me to prioritize them so that things can start moving again. That’s a good thing because lately I had been feeling like there was a logjam in my mind, so much so that at times I had the feeling that I was so worried about what wasn’t getting done that I couldn’t even concentrate on whatever it was that I was actually trying to accomplish.
Category Archives: It’s my life
How do you explain that you actually love what you do?
Someone suggested that maybe I should take a break, go on vacation for a few days beyond the couple of weeks I go visit my family each year. A part of me found the idea appealing. To see new sights, to do new things, and taste new flavors (especially the latter). Then I tried to picture myself actually going. What would I want to see or do? Well, there are countless places I would love to visit, but in spite of that the image that came to my mind was mostly one of myself in a hotel room, typing away in my computer, far from home.
Granted, a couple of hours of being on vacation in some exotic location a day sounds great, and taking a break from what I charitably describe as ‘my own cooking’ would most definitely be a welcome relief, but until teleporting becomes an option going on vacation remains an all or nothing proposition. You are either there or you are home… and the truth is that for most of the time I’d rather be doing what I am actually doing.
Far away so close
I look at the world around me and, even when everything seems to be going nicely, I can’t help but to think of all the ways in which things can, and probably will, go wrong. No, I don’t consider myself to be a pessimist, but somehow we always seem to be living on the edge of something. Maybe it’s because change seems to be spinning out of control, because at times it feels like we can’t even catch our breaths before we find ourselves being shoved along in a direction that is no longer the one we thought we were going.
I know this doesn’t really make much sense. I’m not even sure what brought this about. I think it may have to do with that project that crept up on me a few days ago (it does feature a dystopian view of the future), but the thing is that all of a sudden I feel like we are in the middle of something, of a process that threatens to spin completely out of control.
Yes, I know the book I am planning, a book I may never even get to write, is a work of fiction, but at the same time, in order to be believable, it has to depict a world that I deem to be at least possible outcome of what I see around me. For it to work there has to be a path from here to there, and that is what makes bringing that world into being a slightly unsettling experience.
Yes, I know that doing that is part of the job description, and I won’t deny that there are some aspects of it that are a lot of fun, but the bottom line is that the world I am seeing is one in which I would most definitely not want to live… and yet at times it feels so near.
One more project to add to my to-do list
Remember how I mentioned a while ago that I was juggling more projects than are good for my sanity already? (and yes, I know, what sanity?) Well, it looks like a new one has moved in and added itself to the list. It was one of those instances in which you read something (in this case a news article) and a new story comes up to you, pretty much fully formed, smacks you over the head -hard- and starts jumping up and down screaming ‘do me, do me…me, me, me!’
The good news is that I’d rather deal with this than with writers’ block (just thinking about that one is enough to make me shudder), the bad news is that, no matter how I look at it, there are still just twenty-four hours a day… and to makes matters worse my body insists on sleeping at least some of them away, plus the truth is that there are only so many hours I can spend writing before my brain feels like it is about to start dripping out of my ears. Still I am excited about this new plot (even if it is being a bit of a brat), that means that I am going to have to try to accommodate it somehow. It’s not like I’ve never done something like that before… in fact that is kind of the problem.
I’m already working on four projects simultaneously (including one that began as a brat), so I guess adding one more to the list won’t make too much of a difference (though, to be honest, two of those are taking turns and near completion anyway). Who knows? Maybe, if the project insists on being a brat I’ll just turn it into a bribe (something along the lines of ‘listen brain, I’ll make a deal with you: you do your share when it comes to all the other projects, and then, if there is still time, at the end of the day you can spend an hour working on this one, deal?’)
The List
About three years ago I made a list of books I really wanted to read. It was a long list, featuring literally hundreds of titles. At the time the task ahead of me seemed daunting… there were so many books! Some were books I had never read, others were books I felt had crossed off my list a little too early (think of all those books you were forced to read in high school because they figured that, if they didn’t cram them down your throat then, chances were that you’d never pick them up on your own)… a few were books I remembered fondly. As you can imagine, I wound up loving some books and being sorely disappointed by others (rereading old favorites can be wonderful, but at the same time there’s no denying that revisiting childhood friends may wind up shattering some of your fondest memories).
I am done with that list now, at least with that initial version. The good news is that there are still plenty of books out there that I’m itching to read, that the list kept expanding itself (I added other books by an author I fell in love here, a friend recommended a new title there), but at the same time as I made my way through it I became increasingly aware that my list was, almost by definition, one that was limited by my own knowledge, by the connections I have been able to make up to this point… and I wondered about those books that should have been in there, but weren’t, about the books I’ll never read and that I might have loved if only I’d known about them.
Of course, in addition to those books I long for but am unaware of, I also wound up taking a few chances, adding books that I knew of, but wasn’t sure I was going to like. Some of these chances paid off, others didn’t. In a couple of instances I was tempted to break my self-imposed ‘no desertions past the first chapter’ rule. I also tackled a few best-sellers that were not really up my alley in an attempt to see what all the fuss was about. That didn’t turn out too good.
The one thing I wound up getting out of the whole experience was a better understanding of who I am and what I like as a reader. Oh, in a way I have always known, but it was an instinctive knowledge, now it seems to be more narrow, more defined.
As for where my reading will take me in the future, I’m back out in the wilderness now. I don’t have a grand plan any more, I only know what my next four or five books are likely to be… plus there are a few books I’m still trying to hunt down and a few classics that should probably have made the list but didn’t. There is one in particular that I haven’t quite dared to tackle, one I still find a little too daunting but that keeps calling me. The problem is that, as was the case back in high school, I don’t think I’m ready for it… in fact I’m not sure I’ll ever be ready. That book? It’s The Mahabharata.
I wonder what THEY think
I was reading a story about a woman who found herself on the receiving end of a visit by the spook brigade because she was looking for a way to cook some lentils… okay so maybe it was a little more complicated than that, and there are some questions about the details, but basically what happened was that a series of innocent searches by different members of a household led someone to put two and two together and come up with twenty-two. That got me thinking: in a world in which our every search is logged, monitored and aggregated to create a ‘profile’, what would my search pattern say about me? The answer is that I suspect that my profile is likely to come up as puzzling to say the least. Why?
Well, as you know I am a writer. I may not be a great writer, or a successful one, but I am a writer. That means that some of my search terms are bound to be on the unsavory end of the spectrum. I can’t help it. If I want to write a less than pleasant character, and I want that character to come across as believable, then I have to try to understand that character’s world… and that is precisely where my research comes in. After all, the characters I have something in common with are easy, it’s the characters that are totally alien to me that require me to look things up to try to figure out just where it is that they are coming from, and at times that research can be pretty extensive. Oh, it’s not just the unsavory characters that lead me to Google’s door (the professional ones too tend to require their fair share of research), but those are the ones that are most likely to raise some eyebrows.
The thing is that doing that research can be an eyeopening experience. It can also be a puzzling one, or it can leave me feeling almost sick, but at the end of the day what I have is a situation in which what I search for says very little about who I am, what I think, or what I care about.
Free to write whatever I want
Is it odd that I find the fact that my books aren’t selling oddly liberating? That was a thought that hit me as I worked on the third book of the Citlalli series, and I found myself confronted with the need to make some hard choices when it came to a few critical aspects of the plot. It is a choice I have known I was going to have to face at some point pretty much from day one, and that was one of the main reasons I switched from Virtual Bookworm to CreateSpace in the first place, but still I know that, if the book had been selling, I would have found myself wondering which plotline would play better with my readers… I would have found myself trying to play it safe. That is human nature, but as things stand I am free to make my choice with no external influences. In fact if the books had been released by a traditional publisher I might well have found myself deprived of the right to make that choice at all. More often than not, that freedom is one of the first things authors working on a series have to give up when they sign on that dotted line.
Oh, that doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t like it if my books were a source of income. Like everyone else I have to eat, but the bottom line is that at the end of the day I have a roof over my head, I am reasonably happy, I can publish what I want, when I want, and my dogs are fed, so I have no reason to complain. It is a matter of perspective, of keeping my priorities straight, and figuring out what matters to me… and of feeling grateful for the fact that I am in a position to follow my dreams, to write and publish my books on my terms, and to live my life more or less like I want to.
Training the dog is easy…
As I mentioned a while ago, I recently adopted a new dog. We are still working out the kinks in our relationship, but so far things seem to be coming along nicely… as long as it’s just the two of us. The problem is that while training the dog is not that hard, that training has to take place within the context of the real world, and that real world is not always as accommodating as I’d like it to be. I mean, I love my dog, but let’s face it: the world does not revolve around him, and that in turn means that I can’t rearrange everyone’s life around his training. If I have someone over, I have to be able to interact with that someone. I can’t exactly afford to spend most of my time instructing my guests on how to act around the dog -that’s not what they are here for- but at the same time I am all too aware that one well intended guest that doesn’t understand that feeding the dog at the table is most definitely not allowed can do away with weeks, if not months, of training. In fact that was pretty much what happened with my first dog (though to be fair I’m not sure if that one was the guests’ fault). She was a former stray, and as such she was used to begging. It was a skill she had relied on for her life, so breaking her out of that particular habit wasn’t easy. Eventually I managed to do it… or so I thought until I had some people over and I realized that what she had learned was that while I wasn’t going to give her anything, everyone else was fair game (what can I say, she wasn’t dumb).
Anyway, back to my current situation. When it comes to my new dog my main headache has been the whole door etiquette thing. I mean, if someone knocks on the door I can’t exactly leave them standing there for five minutes while I try to ensure that the little rascal doesn’t get a chance to dash out the door, and don’t even get me started on what happens when I come back carrying some packages. That situation is compounded by the fact that the dog is still a little shaky when it comes to recognizing his new name (especially when he gets excited), that he is still in the process of getting settled, and that he still doesn’t quite recognize my house like ‘his home’. Yes, I know, he will get the hang of all of those things eventually, but eventually isn’t now, and the bottom line is that for the time being I can’t even open the door without breaking into a cold sweat.
Trying to address this issue I did what most of us do these days: I turned to the web for help. Unfortunately that research wasn’t particularly successful. The problem is that while there are plenty of articles on how to keep a dog from dashing out the door, finding one that deals with the specific challenges posed by a rescue dog in a realistic way has turned out to be all but impossible (in fact you can probably scratch that ‘all but’ from that statement because I’m still looking). Simply put, the situation most of those articles seem to describe is not the one I am dealing with, nowhere near it. They seem to treat door etiquette as something that should be addressed after basic obedience is in place, they assume that the dog has already mastered other basic commands, that he knows his name, and so on. This is often not the case with a rescue dog, where door etiquette is one of the first things that must be tackled for the dog’s own safety, and where the dog in question is used to being able to roam the streets on his own.
That in itself is a pretty major problem, but in addition to that there is also the fact that most of the articles I have come across seem to have beer written by dog trainers. That is understandable given the subject matter, but unfortunately it also means that, while they are great for training, they don’t seem to take into account such trifles as real life. Oh, it would be great if I could simply park my dog in an isolated pocket out of the time/space continuum until the whole training thing is conveniently out of the way and he can be let out safely, but that’s not the way the world works. Regardless of my dog’s training status I still have to be able to interact with other people, open the door, go to the grocery store and so on… unfortunately according to most of the articles I have come across whenever I do that I am undermining my own efforts because ensuring that the dog behaves as he should is not my only (in fact it’s not even my primary) concern.
Yeah, right, welcome to the real world.
As I said above, I know this is just a minor bump in the road. I know we will overcome this, that my dog will get the hang of it eventually, and I will be able to go back to opening the door without giving it a second thought, but for the time being things are a little complicated, and I’d love to be able to find some help that is actually helpful. Unfortunately most of the information I have been able to find so far seems to be built around one very basic premise: training the dog is easy… all you have to do is get rid of the rest of the world.
Skype
Today I called my dad on Skype. It’s something I do often, but this time around it got me thinking… and trying to imagine what my life would have been like if such a service had been an option back when I was growing up. You see, I grew up basically half a world away from most of my family. In those days even an international phone call was a luxury, and I remember that almost as soon as I was old enough to write, writing a letter to my grandparents became an integral part of my Sunday routine. I would write a letter, have one of my parents proof it to make sure I wasn’t mentioning anything I wasn’t supposed to, and then I would write the envelope (the hope was that the fact that it was a child’s scrawl would get the letter past the post office unopened… let’s just say that there was a reason I was living half a world away from my grandparents, and leave it at that). In time phone calls became less expensive and the letter-writing fell by the wayside, but the thing is that in a way my grandparents, to say nothing of some of my aunts, uncles and cousins, remained virtual strangers (a phone call to my grandparents was a luxury, a phone call to my cousins was unthinkable).
My grandparents are gone now, and none of them ever got to use a computer at all. As for the rest of my family, we have made some efforts to reconnect over the years, but the truth is that (at least as far as I was concerned) by the time computers came along, too long had passed. Most of them were (and some of them still are) names without faces, so I wonder what Skype would have meant for my family back then. I don’t know, I can only imagine.
A nameless kitten’s story
Back in March, a couple of blocks from home, I saw a kitten sitting outside of a vacant lot. It was about six weeks old and absolutely adorable. I tried to approach it but it scrambled under the fence and there was no way I could follow. A couple of days later I saw it again, and I asked a shopkeeper whether or not that kitten had a human. The man told me that, as far as he knew, it had been abandoned. A few more days went by and I saw it again. This time I tried to catch it, but again it managed to slip away from me. I was about to go away for a couple of weeks, and I didn’t have anyone lines up to look after such a kitten, plus I knew that bringing it home would make my dog jealous and I knew she was going to have enough trouble dealing with the fact that I was going to be gone for two weeks anyway, so I reluctantly walked away.
Anyway, I figured that the kitten was so adorable that someone was bound to adopt it in my absence, but I was determined that, if the kitten was still there by the time I came back, I was going to adopt it myself. Sure enough, when I came back two weeks later the kitten was still there… dead just inside that fence. That day I learned a pretty harsh lesson about taking action and doing the right thing when the opportunity presents itself and not when it suits my schedule. I guess that was one of the reasons why, when a dog that was either lost or abandoned followed me home a few weeks ago, I didn’t hesitate to take him in. In the two blocks he had followed me it had become painfully obvious that that dog didn’t have a clue of how to cross a street and after what had happened with that kitten I dreaded the idea that the next time I walked out the door I would find that he had been run over by a car or something like that. So here he is, in part because of that nameless kitten, a kitten I failed to help, but one that taught me a lesson I hope never to forget.
Too much time in my hands
I realize that this blog has gone a little off-topic in the last month or so. As I’ve mentioned a number of times, I’ve been kind of sick (no, I’m still not back at 100% yet), and I’m afraid that that has left me with nothing better to do than to follow the news…though fortunately I seem to have picked an interesting month to do that.
I would love to say that ‘and now back to our regular programming’, but I’m afraid I can’t, not yet…
How to put an end to a stubborn cough
As you may remember, I’ve been pretty sick these past couple of weeks, and even though I’m doing better, I’m still not at a 100%. Anyway, a few days ago I had a coughing fit that had me basically puking all over myself (someone was burning leaves, and seeing how there’s no escaping the air you breathe, well, let’s just say that it got pretty scary). Needless to say that that was not an experience I wanted to repeat. In fact it was so bad that it had me googling the subject to see if a) I had to get myself to a doctor ASAP, and b) what I could do to avoid a repeat performance… especially the latter.
What I found when it came to the first one was that the cough sometimes sticks around for as long as eight weeks after the infection itself has cleared out, and that if the cough was the only problem I was dealing with, then going to the doctor was probably not the brightest of ideas (something about the fact that a doctor’s office is not a place you want to be in when your system is already somewhat compromised because it is a place where the bugs of all the different patients get to meet and greet). Okay, that made sense, and at least I knew that chances were that the problem wasn’t all that serious, that was definitely good news. Unfortunately when it came to the second one of my questions the answer was less than encouraging: the cough was likely to be a persistent one and it was unlikely to respond to treatment, thanks for playing. Needless to say that I was not what I wanted to hear. Still, I figured that maybe this was one instance in which maybe I could try a few home remedies combined with a bit of common sense. Continue reading How to put an end to a stubborn cough
My cooking is going to the dogs
Okay, so almost three weeks ago a lost/abandoned dog followed me home. So far attempts to locate his previous owners have been unsuccessful (and, having grown attached to him, I admit that I am grateful for that fact). Now it looks like the not so little fellow does not tolerate the kibble I feed my other dog. That means I’m back to cooking for my dogs, even if under normal circumstances I don’t even cook for myself. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love my dogs and effort-wise I have no problem doing this for them, I did it for over a year for my old dog when she got sick, and I would have loved to be able to do it for much longer, but at the same time I do have a problem with the notion that my dogs are eating better than some, if not most, children.
No, cooking for them like this isn’t really that much more expensive than feeding them processed food, but since I would never dream of feeding kibble to a child it was easier to look the other way, having to cook for them, on the other hand makes it impossible for me not to notice.
Well, they are my ‘kids’, and I do want what’s the best for them (and I also know that not feeding them like this wouldn’t make one lick of difference as far as those children are concerned, so the whole point is basically moot), but I wonder what that says about the world we live in.
Still sick
Okay, so it’s been almost two weeks and I’m just starting to feel a little better. Whatever this bug happens to be, it hit me pretty hard. I am trying to get back in the rhythm of things but that’s not easy, especially not when all I really want to do is curl into my bed (or in this particular case my hammock) and sleep for a week. The problem is not just that I feel miserable, but also that I am starting to panic because working thirteen/fourteen hours a day is just not happening right now and as a result I can’t help but to feel that I am falling behind… something that just adds to my sense of panic.
Oh well, hopefully things will get back to what passes for normal eventually, or something like it.
Sorry if this is not much of an update, it’s just that I’m at that annoying point of my recovery where I want to do more but I just can’t.
Do you have a favorite?
One question a few people have asked me is which one of my books is my favorite. That’s a tricky one , but my answer is mostly that while I try not to play favorites, that doesn’t mean I can’t give you a hint of where to start if you want to pick one of my books. To begin with let’s get Scales at a Glance out of the way. If you are interested in music theory then that’s the best bet. If, like most people, that is one subject you could hardly care less for, well, then you will probably want to avoid it.
Soulless was my first attempt at writing a full length novel, and I still think the concept is well worth it. At the same time there is no denying that it has a few of those kinks that are commonly associated with first novels(though I did fully revise it, so hopefully it’s not that bad any more).
Citlalli has its own set of issues. To begin with there is the fact that it is something of a work in progress, not to mention that it is long (something like 800 pages and counting, to be accurate), a fact that makes tackling it a prospect that may seem a little too daunting a starting point for those who don’t know me. It is a project I hold very dear, one I have been working on and off on for a very long time, but at the same time it is one I’m not sure anyone else is ever really going to care for. I would love for people to read it and enjoy it, but it may be too much of a commitment for someone approaching my books blind.
Finally there is Laira, I’m not sure I would describe it as my favorite, or my best, work but I do realize that it is by far the most accessible one of the lot. It is a straight-forward, science fiction novella that, if nothing else, can be read in a couple of hours.
So while I don’t really have a favorite, there is one book I can recommend as a starting point (unless you have a deep aversion to science fiction, that is)… make that two if you care for music theory.