felis_ultharus

Happy new year, and happy end to decade of evil and disaster. Somebody seems to have put the goddess Hera in charge of this decade: pointless Trojan-esque wars, suspicion and paranoia, scheming and bickering - but punctuated and relieved by some wonderful weddings, and the right to same-sex marriage.

(Let's hope Demeter or Artemis takes the reins of the next - we could use some progress on the ecological front. But I'd settle for Aphrodite. Making love, not war is certainly better than the alternative.)

I'm going to be ushering in this decade with Sean tonight, who I was with when this decade started. It's a nice bookend to the bad decade, and a good way of starting over the decade. Here's to getting a re-do on the last ten years.

Happy Christmas to those who celebrate it, and a belated Io, Saurnalia to those who don't. It's also my fourteenth year of being a Montrealer - I arrived on Christmas Day, 1995.

This is the first year that Yule has felt bigger than Christmas. I've been Pagan more than fourteen years now, too, but it takes a long time for a new set of traditions to become visceral, if that makes any sense. The last two years, I've held rits here when everyone is asleep. I don't know a single other Pagan in Victoria, though I know the community is huge, here.

I've been visiting Sean almost every day. He and his brother have a huge collection of games. One that's really captivating is Mirror's Edge, particularly if you like the Cyberpunk aesthetic - you play a courier running information for democratic dissidents over the rooftops of a shiny corporatist dystopia. I get a little vertigo watching that game, though.

So, yeah. I finished the novel about an hour ago. Not as in, pending another edit. Done done.

I'm reading up on general advice for submission. I'm going to keep studying up on it for another week or so. I've already selected a publisher for my first attempt, and gotten their submission guidelines.

That's the reason for my near-total radio silence this last little while on LJ, and the total deadness of my Facebook account. Well that, and all the overtime. I've worked six of the last seven days, and I've been bringing my laptop into work to keep up with the editing.

It's a little scary. But mostly I'm too busy to think much about it. I'll be full and more-than-full-time at work for the foreseeable future, I have a short story and poems to prepare for the CBC literary contest. Somewhere in there I'd like to sleep, too.

I hope everyone's doing well. I'm getting slowly caught up on friends' pages, I promise.

The second request for something outside-the-ordinary in my journal came from infinitecomplex:

"Blog about your plans for the future, and the steps you're taking to get yourself there..."

Actually, in a way I do that all the time. But in greater detail:

I've known what I wanted to do with my life since the age of six, when I wrote my first twelve-page fantasy novel. Problem is, it took me a very long time to admit that because I thought it was impractical.

At the age of 12 -- when all my classmates in the gifted program wanted to be world-class musicians, authors, painters, or rocket scientists, or find the cure for cancer -- I told people I was going to be a computer programmer, because it seemed like a nice, stable profession.

By the time I graduated, they all went into law and accounting, and I'd figured out I wanted to write fiction, and even made publishing a novel one of my goals. But I still insisted on trying to bend that gift to something safe commercially -- writing as a journalist, or analyzing fiction as an English professor. Finding out what goes on behind the scenes in the Canadian media killed the first goal, Postmodernism killed the second.

By the time I was thirty, and re-evaluating my life, I realized that there was only one thing I wanted to do and which felt engaging: writing fiction. By then I'd found a stable job at 20 hours a week that allowed me lots of leisure time, and being very frugal, it didn't really matter much that I wasn't above the poverty line.

I've cut back my hours on writing since I finished the last draft of that novel, down from 34 a week to about 20. I'll put it back up when I'm ready for the next re-write. Right now, I'm editing the current version while three long-suffering friends do the same, so I'll have four edited versions by the time it's ready and will be able to compare them. I guess that answers the "steps I'm taking..." part of the question.

That's pretty much it -- that one goal consumes so much focus and energy that there's little left for anything else.

The only other long-term goal I have is to find some guy and settle down, and toward that end I'm gradually getting myself used to interacting with people -- it's usually very painful for me -- and trying to be not so cut off emotionally when I am around others.

I have smaller goals, too -- learning all I can about x subject, learning a bit more of y language, and generally becoming more spiritual, and also more politically aware and engaged. I work on those consistently between work and editing.

Time Elapsed for all versions: Two years, three months
Number of pages in the current version: 213

For the third time in two year and three months, I got to lift my head from a finished product of a novel, and breathe again. I'll be printing it up this evening, after work.

It still flawed -- just how deeply flawed I'll leave to my three editors to determine. It is improving, however. For the first time I can actually imagine it as having a fan base for it beyond my circle of friends.

I picture them as very small in number, but quick to defend my work against the criticism of the majority who've read it.

I've also started comparing its flaws to flaws of the works of great writers I admire. This is progress. I doubt I'll ever see its best passages as on par with theirs, but if fails in the same ways that the works of the great fails, that's a step forward.

For my editors: I've tweaked the back-stories on several of my characters, so they won't be consistent with previous versions. Hopefully, they'll be consistent within this version.

So I'm back, and it's been a good 24 hours. I finally got official confirmation for graduation, so the ceremony will be in June.

And this morning, before work, I finished the massive re-write/re-structuring of my novel. Now I've got about two close edits and one quick edit. I'm taking a break from it for a week to work on short stories and do research.

Today is the fourteenth anniversary of my coming out as gay, at age 16, so I thought it deserved a post ^_^

It's been a quiet couple of weeks. Work has been non-stop lately, and we're mostly just trying to keep our head above water because the company is expanding so quickly. Everyone's a little frazzled. But I haven't been working as much lately, so it's taken less of a toll on me.

I'm almost two-thirds through my re-write. Some parts are being heavily re-written, others are mostly the same.

I finished Irving Layton. It's a little like reading poetry by the X-Men's Magneto, which makes me wonder who the Charles Xavier of Canadian poetry would be.

Otherwise, I've been quite immersed in Final Fantasy XII. It's a very long, very complex game. The story and character development are both good, but it seems that the main character gets the least development of all.

One aspect of the game that fascinates me is its use of archaic, rare, or very British words -- "sundries," "paling," "docent," "jape," "lambent," "grimoire," and "mummer" to name only a few. Only twice have I had to go running to a dictionary. They use "aceldama" as a general noun, and the word "togail" which seems to be Gaelic. Their use of "togail" seems incorrect. From what I can tell, the word means something like "building" or "construct," and the context seems to imply a part of a book.