Melissa and I just back from a trip to San Jose! This was a well spent Sunday.

Upcoming Events and Such

Boskone is coming up, and as long as I can find a place to record, we’ll be doing a Live From Boskone recording for the Small Publishing in a Big Universe Podcast. Additionally, I’ll have LOTS of copies of both The Repossessed Ghost and One for the Road available at the table.

Additionally, I’ll be attending the Sacramento Comic-Con on March 9th and 10th where I will also have books available. I’m sure I’ll talk more about that later.

The Topic: A Literal Stroll Down Memory Lane

Melissa and I went down to San Jose to meet up with Steven Radecki, managing editor of Paper Angel Press and its imprints, and his wife. I had the cash to hand over to him from some of the sales at Arisia, plus the signed release forms for the podcast we recorded. It was the first time I got to meet his wife, and she and Melissa had quite a bit in common. We had a really great time, and I’m sure we’ll meet more often.

After we parted, I drove us about 12 minutes away to the first neighborhood I can remember. It’s been over 40 years since I’ve seen those streets, and it was truly fascinating seeing that area as an adult.

We found the first house I can remember on Blake Street. It looks like an additional room has been built where once we had a closed off covered patio. As you might imagine, the place looked smaller than I remember, because my memories are from a 6 year old. The front yard is just the same, and I remember it feeling spacious when I played on it. As a 6ft tall adult, it looked more like a green postage stamp.

After staring at my old house for a bit, hopefully without making the current occupants nervous, we turned and walked half a block to what used to be Luther Elementary. The heavy wooden sign that once said Luther Elementary is still in front, but the campus is now split between a Montessori school and a French American Academy.

Gates were open, and we walked through the hall connecting the different buildings. It was all just as I remembered it, save for a change in paint and everything seeming about 20% smaller. I was able to point out the rooms where I attended 1st and 2nd grade, and a bit further down the walkway, the yard where I played during kindergarten. Past that, we were able to wander around the field attached to the school. One of the old fitness trail signs from the 70s is still there.

We walked around the field, then hung a right and made it to Kellogg Way and the other house I lived on once we moved from Blake Street. The house on Kellogg looked much, much different than I remember. The tree with the long boughs I was yelled at for swinging on wasn’t there anymore. The lemon tree where my father’s cat was buried is no longer in the enclosed patio. I had a hard time reconciling the house to what I remember from when I was 7 and 8. Again, it’s been more than 40 years. Things were bound to change.

The feel of the neighborhood was the same, though. It looked like a place that would still make a good home.

Next, Melissa and I will have to wander over to Susanville and see what that old haunt feels like.

It’s Saturday afternoon, and this is #27

Personal News

The cat has once again ceased her desperately horny yowling, and we enter another couple weeks of peace. I met up with my publisher and we debriefed for Arisia and talked about preparations for Boskone. I finished the work I needed to finish. Time to play, right?

The Topic: Echo and the MCU

I mentioned Echo yesterday. After finishing the post, Melissa and I watched the rest of the season. Did they stick the landing? I kind of think so!

What did I like about this show? It seemed more grounded and the stakes were personal. I liked that the answer the main character found for defeating the antagonist wasn’t just a fight. I liked the reconciliation of the family. It was nice, and I felt some emotions.

Is this my favorite thing in the whole wide world? Not really. I enjoyed it for what it was.

Apparently, I’m in the minority of actually liking Echo. It has the second lowest Rotten Tomatoes of any of the MCU series. I’m not sure why it was rated so poorly.

Hating on the MCU seems like the trendy thing to do. I’m not ready to jump on that bandwagon yet.

If the world wants me to give the MCU less of my attention, it needs to offer me something else to focus on. Something more interesting than just tickling my nostalgia.

Give me new SciFi. New genre fiction. Take a chance on new or recent stories and give me more to love.

Don’t expect me to hate, because something has to be really, really bad for me to hate it. Like Rise of Skywalker.

Happy Saturday, friends.

Today was a sleepy Friday, in that I woke up so exhausted, I wound up taking a nap at the back half of the day that went way longer than expected. If I’m going to hit #26 in a row, it’s now or never.

Personal News

Because the nap went longer than expected, I’m going to have to make up some lost Day Job time this weekend. It won’t be that bad. I got ahead of the game on Thursday night. The stuff I’m going to do is relatively straight forward and shouldn’t take too long. But it is another weekend where I’m going to be doing some work.

I think the nap that took me today was part of the inevitable crash I mentioned a few days ago. So since I’m working some this weekend, it seems the cycle will continue.

Upcoming Events and Such

Last night, I made hotel arrangements for Norwescon, reserved the hotel for Baycon, bought the plane tickets to Seattle for Norwescon, and confirmed that we’re all set for the rest. Boskone is going to be upon us before we’re ready. It’s going to be a busy year.

This weekend, I’m heading to San Jose area to meet up with Steven Radecki and his wife.

The Topic: Some Good and Some Bad Entertainment

Today, my work’s book club was supposed to meet, but because Teams was pretty much down for everyone, we rescheduled the meeting to another time. The book we were going to talk about is The Sisterhood by Liza Mundy, and this will represent the “bad” entertainment.

It’s not a bad book, per se, but it is definitely not for me. The main thrust of this book is that there existed women patriots that served the CIA, and they faced misogyny. None of this information is particularly new or interesting to me. There were a few stand out individuals described in the book, but the overall structure is wrapped in generalization, which just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Maybe if my gender were different, I’d enjoy this more, but that seems shitty, too. The world is flooded with media that is all about my gender, but I don’t take comfort in it.

This might sound strange, but I don’t typically identify with most straight white CIS characters just because they’re straight, CIS, and/or white. I am a straight white dude, but the life experiences and personality on the page and on screen does misses me more often that it hits. Do you want to know which MCU character I most identify with? Sam Wilson. That might be a topic for a different post, though.

I started this with some criticism. Let’s move on to some praise.

Melissa and I just started watching Echo on Disney+ and I think it’s really, really good. I’m hoping all of the Choctaw content is good representation, but I don’t know. I like the main character. I’m very much into the family drama portion. It’s good! I’m not sure Disney/Marvel promoted this as much as the other stuff, and I’m guess that’s for two reasons.

1. The perception of superhero fatigue and oversaturation of Marvel media on both the big and small screens
2. This is following a deaf, Native American with a prosthetic leg, and the anti-representation, anti-“woke” crowd has been particularly noisy lately.

With regards to the first point… I love the superhero stuff, probably more than the next person, but I get it. Less is more sometimes, so backing off and leaving people wanting and anticipating is probably a good play.

As to the second point… I really hope I’m wrong about it. It’s important not to let ignorant people steer the ship. If Disney/Marvel is really concerned about being perceived as having a representation agenda, either lean into it or ignore it, because if it’s a good story, it will stand on its own.

That’s it! Pizza is on its way. Melissa and I will finish Echo tonight, and maybe I’ll mention tomorrow if I think they stuck the landing.

Today felt like it should have been Friday most of the day, and I’m already exhausted thinking about getting up early tomorrow and finishing my work week. But, the show must go on! And so shall we.

Personal News

After the day I had yesterday, today was sublime. Sure, a cramp in my right calf woke me up, painful enough to make me wonder if I slipped a tendon and resulting in leg pain all day, but at least I wasn’t denied salty tacos from a fast food restaurant!

My card appears to be working and I was able to donate to the Writing Excuses Retreat scholarship program. If you’re a writer and you’re interested in going for free, you still have time to apply.

Upcoming Events and Such

We leave for Boskone exactly 2 weeks from today. I took care of the hotel for Baycon, so that’s all settled for July. I still need to take care of everything for Norwescon, which is in Seattle at the end of March. I put in my vacation requests for all these times. Progress has been made.

Also, I committed Melissa and I to going to the Writing Excuses Cruise later in the year. My wallet will hopefully stop sizzling sometime this weekend.

The Topic: What Even Is Thursday?

Today feels like a non-day, so I’ll go into some of the least favorite topics here at Brian C. E. Buhl dot com. That is, I have some thoughts about the blog itself and this full year challenge.

We’re 25 days into it, and I have no doubt that I can complete this challenge. Not all of the posts will be stellar, and I think that’s okay. Some days, it’s going to be challenging finding something to talk about. That’s also okay.

What I’m thinking about now is what the effect will be of me actually writing something every day this year. Maybe that’s… bad?

This is my main way of putting news and information out in the world. Posting my random daily thoughts does not support those efforts, in that unless I’m willing to repeat myself a lot, some of the things I want to talk about will get lost in the minutia. That’s not great. This is probably one of those cases where less is more.

I am subscribed to a couple of newsletters and when they get too chatty, I skim instead of read. I’m sure that will happen with my daily deluge, if it isn’t happening already. So again, I’m putting more out into the world, and less of it will be seen.

Who cares, though? I’m not making money on this site, and I’m not hurting anyone. This challenge is to keep me sane and keep me productive. If it’s for me, what does it matter if people are reading it or not? In fact, if I’m so concerned about it, why don’t I just make the bulk of these posts private?

The problem is that when it’s private, I lose interest in writing it. I lose the accountability of having this be a public exercise. This feels like something I should be doing out in the open.

I’ll keep going, anyway, as long as I can. I’ll go with my guts and not let the doubts cause me to stumble.

Also, I’m really looking forward to publicly writing a story. I think I want to start it after Boskone, when there’s a little bit of a gap in my schedule. I don’t know what the story will be yet. I’m just excited to get into it. Maybe it’ll help someone. Maybe it’ll help me.

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for sticking around. And, with great intention, I look forward to talking to you tomorrow.

It’s 7:30PM on a Wednesday. I’m about to play some video games with my friends. Can’t slouch on my daily duty, though.

I’ll forgo the “Personal News” and just jump into this, because this whole topic is personal news. Today was rough. Let me tell you about it.

As I mentioned recently, Pancakes is in heat again, so sleep is once again strained. It doesn’t seem quite as bad as before, but I still struggled to get up on time to make the drive to work.

Traffic this morning wasn’t as bad as it had been yesterday, but it still took a full hour to get to the office. As has been told to me by a tech writer I admire, “California drivers are powdered crazy. Just add water.” The drizzle of rain this morning was sufficient.

Thus far, things aren’t really that bad. I’m tired, cranky, irritated from the drive, but I’m healthy enough and I made it to work on time. My upset stomach put me in the bathroom earlier than I like, and of course the first stall I went into somehow had shit smeared on the back of the seat, but this isn’t that bad so far, I swear.

I get through some meetings, some of which were intense. One of the meetings goes long, bleeding into my lunch hour, but we accomplished some stuff. It’s fine. Everything is fine. I figure I’ll just go to Chipotle because I lack self-respect and figure that if I already have some stomach issues, how much worse can they be? I’ll get my greasy tacos, take them to my desk, and stuff my face while I catch up on some more work.

They make my tacos and I go to pay and… my card is declined.

“Do you want to use a different card?”

I don’t have a different card. I don’t carry cash anymore. I have plenty of money in the bank. My card should not be declined.

They put my bag of food behind the counter and let me step to the side and call my bank. The call is not quick. I’m on hold for over 20 minutes, with dueling robots interrupting each other to use too-loud voices to tell me things I do not want or need to hear. I heard it all before, the last time an overly sensitive fraud alert stranded me without money.

At least the last time this happened, I wasn’t alone or embarrassed in front of a Chipotle full of people. My stomach twists in knots, and I wait it out.

They’re able to help me. It wasn’t easy. There is some 24-hour pin that I was never actually told, and the account numbers changed, so I don’t have that to give. My social security number is enough to identify me, and the rest of the identification process of verifying personal information and giving numbers from a text message verify my identity.

It takes them 3 tries to unlock my card. Each time, they keep me on the line and I have to weave in through the paying customers to try my card. My face is hot. I’m tired of pressing my cell phone against the side of my head. Just let me get my unhealthy lunch and get back to work.

I get through it and return to my desk, and I have about 10 minutes to down my lunch before the big end-of-scrum meeting, in which I’m supposed to be one of the presenters. I haven’t had a chance to prepare.

That’s okay. My presentation is fine, and the meeting continues. But there’s still that one task I need to complete, so I start working on it during the meeting. It involves updating a row in the production database, in order to change the replication settings for one of our internal environments. No big deal. I’ve done this thousands of times.

Lack of sleep. Upset stomach. Flustered from the lunch experience. Oh, and I left my glasses at my desk, and I’m working on my tiny laptop screen.

I’m not sure which factor played the biggest part, but I screwed up. Instead of changing the replication settings for one of our environments, I changed it for all of the environments.

Oh no.

I didn’t panic. I did what I could to minimize the damage. But I screwed up, and there’s no easy undo to fix this.

I wound up having to stay late, waiting for a restore of a major database so that I can put the settings back. Then I wound my way through crappy traffic to come home, and the restore still isn’t done.

Anyway, how was your day?

It’s midafternoon and I’m between tasks at work. Now’s as good a time to at least start the post, even if I have to wait until I get home to finish it.

[Future Brian here… I wound up having to put it away and finish it in the evening. It wound up being a really long work day.]

Personal News

Remember a couple weeks ago when I couldn’t stop talking about how the cat in our house was in heat and none of us could get any sleep? Ha ha! Good times, good times.

Why am I bringing this up? No reason.

On a completely unrelated topic, do they make Midol for cats?

The Topic: Ethically Working as a Writer

I came in to the office today, and I’ll be coming in tomorrow as well. Coming to the office means I get to go to lunch with my coworkers. At least, the ones that also come in to the office. We went to lunch, and we introduced ourselves to our newest member. That gave me the opportunity to tell him that I’m a writer.

The conversation during lunch went through various topics, at one point landing on what it takes to make it big as an author. I maintained that the quality of the writing is secondary to the luck factor, as there are scads of writers out there producing good work that will never be seen. We touched on gatekeeping and publishers and whatnot, and while talking about one independently published author that made it big, I said, “He got lucky, but there were some allegations that he created sock puppet accounts in order to boost his reviews.”

The person across the table from me said, “Everybody does that.”

The person to my right said, “I think it’s generally expected that to make it, you must inflate your own numbers.”

A third person said, “They’re just trying to reduce the amount of luck involved in making it.”

One of the first two people said, “It’s just like people buying views or followers on Instagram and YouTube.”

I shook my head and tried to tell them it was unethical, but the conversation moved on by then.

I will never buy reviews, trade reviews, or do anything unethical with my writing career. I’ll put in the hours. I’ll go to events. I’ll do whatever I can to be a successful author, except compromise my integrity. Even if it means I die in obscurity.

Am I being naive? I don’t care. Everyone should know what lines they will and will not cross.

Some days it is challenging for me to think of something to talk about. I didn’t have that problem tonight. As soon as I saw the discourse, I knew what I was going to say.

Personal News

There’s this project I’ve been working on at work that is complicated and difficult to test. Worse, it’s something I don’t see us ever actually using, and the main reason I pushed forward on this thing was to give one of my fellows some training. Was this project successful in helping my guy? It’s difficult to say at this point. We’ll see.

In any event, it passes all the unit tests and it’s checked in. We’ll see what my contemporaries have to say about it.

Upcoming Events and Such

Nothing new to report over what I stated yesterday. Boskone is coming up quick. Norwescon is after that, and I still haven’t made all the arrangements. I still need to make decisions about a number of other events this year.

The Topic: More Thoughts on The Hugos

This last year, WorldCon took place in China. WorldCon is where The Hugos are given out each year, and I didn’t have a lot of exposure to any of it. I didn’t follow it. I didn’t vote. I was a bad fan.

In recent years, there has been a lot of drama around The Hugos. The Sad Puppies. The Rabid Puppies. George R. R. Martin completely bombing parts of the presentation. Drama.

Some rules were adjusted to deal with voting blocks and some of the shenanigans that went during the feral puppy era. The other sorts of drama that cropped up seemed minor in comparison, and ultimately forgettable. But this last year, we have a fresh new hell to contend with.

Stories that should have been eligible were ruled as ineligible. It looks like the head volunteer responsible for administrating the awards may have futzed with eligibility rules himself. Or maybe the Chinese government was involved. I haven’t looked that closely into the situation, and I sort of don’t want to. Yesterday, when I talked about getting away from Doomscrolling, this is what I meant. This is the sort of thing I’m trying to avoid.

I don’t know much about what went down, but it doesn’t pass the smell test. At least one of the stories ruled ineligible won the Nebula and Locus awards.

No one has stated this explicitly on any of my feeds, but it sounds like the stories ruled ineligible may have contained LGBTQ+ content. If this is the reason why they were left off the ballot, then this sucks all around.

A number of people more informed and more eloquent than me have talked about this online. I’ll leave it to them to go into the finer details. I do have one potentially different take, which I will share.

I really don’t see much difference between books containing LGBTQ+ content and books containing polyamory. I hope that statement isn’t going to get me in trouble. The reason I’m making it is because my guy, Robert Heinlein, winner of many Hugo awards, saturated many of his stories with polyamorous relationships. Stranger in a Strange Land, winner of the 1962 Hugo award, contained polyamorous content. If we could handle polyamory in 1962, we should be able to handle LGBTQ+ content in 2023 and beyond.

I feel like I’m being clumsy while trying to make the point that The Hugos historically have been capable of being progressive and challenging societal norms, and censoring these stories from the ballots today should not be tolerated.

In my heart, I still want to earn a Hugo. I want to have that connection to Robert Heinlein. In Stranger in a Strange Land, Heinlein told a story about the audacity and power of love, a theme that creeps into most of my own stories.

I guess that’s all I have to say about that.

It’s a rainy Sunday evening, and time for number 21. It’s going to get a little bit harder to know which number it is once we leave January.

Personal News

I put in a full work day yesterday, and I only managed to work a couple of hours today. I felt my brain getting smooth, and I needed to take a break. I’m still pretty far behind. I’m not sure how this week is going to be.

Upcoming Events and Such

Boskone in a couple of weeks, Norwescon a little bit after that, Baycon in July… there are still a couple of other trips I’d like to add, but it’ll be a struggle getting the time to go.

There is never enough time.

The Topic: Stopping Activities and Simplifying

There are chores we pick up at an early age, and tasks we acquire that give us no joy. A few years ago, I figured out I could make some of those tasks go away, and it was like a weight lifted off my chest.

I may have talked about this before. I hate folding laundry, and it seemed like I was going to have to fold laundry for the rest of my life, until I realized that I can just put everything on hangars. Putting shirts and pants on hangars doesn’t bother me as much as performing origami on them and cramming them into drawers. Socks? Just make sure they’re all the same and they can just go in the drawer as they are. Shorts and underwear don’t go on hangars, but that’s okay. Almost all laundry folding is gone from my life, and it is amazing.

I don’t like the buzz the car makes to remind you to put your seatbelt on. It turns out, as long as I fasten my seatbelt before putting the key in the ignition, I’ll never need to hear that buzz again. One less annoyance in my life.

It’s not so easy to put away the annoyances at work. The toolset for managing tasks and user stories bothers me more than it should, yet I have to interact with it every day. Now that I think about it, there are tons of tiny annoyances at work. It’s death by a thousand papercuts. I’m not sure how I’m going to simplify.

I’ve made some progress in eliminating Doomscrolling from my life. Killing Twitter was the major step. I spend less time on the other sites. I still check to see how my friends are doing, but I don’t obsess over it like I had been. If you’re trying to lighten your social media burden as I have, the first step is to remove the social media apps from your phone. Do this, and I guarantee an improved quality of life.

Simplifying is almost always the right choice. This is a pretty rich sentiment coming from me, as I overthink and overcomplicate so many things.

Twenty in a row makes me think this isn’t a typical New Year’s resolution. I never thought of it like that, but since I did start this blog-a-day at the start of the year, it could be considered a resolution. Most of the time, though, those fall off within the first couple of weeks. I’m still going strong, though I don’t always have much to say that’s new or interesting.

I woke up this morning a little after 7:00AM and I went right to work on some of the Day Job tasks I had stacked up. Melissa, Chris, and I went to brunch just before noon, and when we got back, I jumped back onto the work laptop and wrapped everything up around 4:30PM. A full work day on the weekend. And I still have more to do, but I’m taking a break to… you know, be a human.

Many times before, I have compared my processes as both a programmer and as a writer. There is some interesting overlap, and there are stark contrasts.

As a programmer, especially today, I needed to go deep into some analysis to figure out why something wasn’t working. It was very close, but something was off, and the only way to fix it was to take it apart and put it back together. This isn’t too different from some of the work I do on my stories. When I nearly lost Synthetic Dreams, I summarized all of the chapters, put the summaries on 3×5 cards, and laid out the whole story on the table so I could see it and figure out how to finish it and have it be satisfying.

As a writer, I like to have an outline with enough details to give me the shape of the story, while still leaving plenty of room for me to discover and improvise along the way. As a programmer, I plan what I’m working on in advance, then write tests before the actual code so that when the code is finished, I have a way of exercising it to know if it works. I don’t have comparable tests for when I write, but the planning it takes to write the tests is similar to the kind of planning I do when I write an outline.

Editing and refactoring are very similar. In both cases, I cut the things that don’t need to be there, and sometimes I reorganize things so that they make more sense and reduce the length of the work. In both cases, and this is something I’ve been trying so hard to teach one of my engineers: it’s important not to refactor before the code is written. Similarly, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to do a bunch of editing on a story before the draft is finished.

As far as contrasts are concerned, I’ve talked more than once about how I can program to music, but I don’t write very well when there are lyrics entering my ears. Today, I jammed out to metal and rock while working on code. As I write this, it is dead silent in my room.

The emotions I feel are different between writing and programming. Sometimes it’s a matter of the story dictating the emotion de jour. Sometimes I need anger to push through programming, as I described a couple of days ago. While writing, I rarely feel frustrated. While programming, if I’m not consumed with frustration, it’s just an arm’s length away.

I think programming is exercising a different part of my brain from writing. Both involve a lot of typing and choosing specific language in order to achieve goals, but one feels like singing, the other feels like yelling.

Tomorrow looks like it will be a lot like today. We will see soon enough.

This is #19, and the topic is thanks to a comment from Mike Baltar. A comment, I will admit, I didn’t see until recently because my website didn’t email me and my comment widget doesn’t appear to be working properly.

If there are any topics you’d like me to tackle, feel free to comment, and help me justify the energy I’ll be spending on manually looking at comments until I get my technical issues resolved.

Personal News

This was a rough week at work, even though it was only 4 days long. There’s so much to do and not enough time or energy in the day. Plus, there are some complications with work that have me in an awkward position. I’m going to have to work quite a bit this weekend to get caught up. Given how I’ve had to be “on” for several weeks in a row now, without a real break, I think I’m setting myself up for a sudden and inevitable crash.

Upcoming Events and Such

Boskone is still the next conference. Checking my email, it seems I’ve already paid for Norwescon, too, which I believe is in March. I’m sure I haven’t purchased plane tickets yet, and I doubt I have a reservation for the hotel. I’ll need to take care of those things soon.

The Topic: Why Write?

I’m one of those people that must write. The depression is real when I go long periods without creative writing. This blog challenge helps to stabilize me and make more productive at work. I need to do more, but I don’t have the time.

If I didn’t fall into depression without it, would I still write? Absolutely. It’s more than a hobby for me, and not quite a career. It’s part of my identity. Also, and this is important: I just really like doing it.

As a kid, I was a voracious reader from an early age. When I was around 12, I tried writing, and it felt like I was reading a story into existence. It delighted me then, and it delights me now.

Writing doesn’t have to be expensive. If your wrist is up for it, you can grab a pen and start filling a cheap notebook with your words. It’s what I used to do, but all of those early stories are lost and gone. I like my writing to be a bit more durable these days, so I save it digitally and back it up all over the place.

At Arisia, I met and spoke with people that were just beginning to write, or had a desire to write but had not yet taken the plunge. I offered encouragement to all of these people. If you have even a whiff of desire to write, you should do it!

Why, though? Why do I encourage people to do this thing that I do?

Writing is magical. A writer draws upon their imagination, channels it through the language center of their brain, into their hands, and onto the page. Then a reader comes along, consumes the words with their eyes or ears, and the transfer is complete. From one person’s imagination into another’s, crossing a potentially vast gap in time and space.

Writing is creation. Writing is love. Writing is perhaps the most uniquely human thing in the known universe.

Like most art, when you sit down to write, you’re committing some part of yourself into a medium that can potentially outlast you. It can be a form of immortality, as long as there are those around that are willing to read your words.

I’m not sure what else I can say about it. Writing is good. I prefer to write fiction, because stories are fun and endearing, but I’ve perused old letters which transported back in time. I have read instructions that saved me headaches. I have read articles and obituaries and synopses and blogs and all sort of things that have sparked an emotion or made me think.

Without writers, readers would have nothing to read.

If you want to write but you’re afraid, or you don’t know how to begin, let me know and I will help you. For free! I just think writing is neat.