I’ve had a great time!

It’s not quite over. We still have this last day. A couple of meals, a farewell party, and then tomorrow we disembark and make our various ways home. Melissa, Mike, and I will get our rental car and drive back to Sacramento. Most other people will be flying back to their homes. And then we all have the weekend to recover.

I think I’ll pretend this post is a sort of Q&A.

What has the cruise been like for you this year?

It’s been really nice. I think this is the first year I’ve struck a really good balance between productivity and play time. Including notes and blog posts, I think I’ve written around 10k words this week. In the evenings, I’ve hung out with friends, played games, or just relaxed.

Melissa has expressed a sentiment that we didn’t spend as much time together as we have on other cruises. The main reason for that is that I’ve gone into a “writing cave” several times on the cruise. Neither one of us drink much, so we didn’t spend any time at the R Bar with the rest of the writers. We’ve had some time together, but we mostly went different directions this cruise. Since we were wanting to do different things all week, I think that’s okay.

What have you been working on?

I’m so glad you asked! I’ve continued to advance The Psychic on the Jury, adding around 8k words to this first draft. The really big thing I’ve done, though, is I completed the outline. I’m pretty sure I’ve talked about the outline for this story before. I banged my head on it for months, not really making much progress, until I eventually gave up on it altogether. I figured that a Mel Walker story is one that must be discovered more than planned.

After getting into it for a bit and finally meeting Holly on the page, I cracked the code to this story. I see the whole thing now, beginning, middle, and end. And I like it! I think this is going to be a really good story. I’m not sure how I feel about this first draft so far, but as I keep telling people, artistry happens during revision. The first draft just has to exist. And, thanks to this cruise, a lot more of it has come into existence.

There are some really fun characters in this story. There’s one or two I haven’t seen on the page yet, but I think I know what they’re going to be like. One psychic named Kyle is going to be particularly interesting to write, since he is such an asshole.

If you’re a writer and you have an opportunity to join Writing Excuses for one of their retreats, I highly recommend it. In the past, they’ve had a few smaller ones on land, like when we went to Bear Lake in Utah and got up close and personal with horses and falcons. The cruise has left out of LA for the last two years, and I have heard reliable rumors that next year, it will be leaving from somewhere else. Not Texas, and not Florida.

How have you been really?

Well, I have had internet access the entire time, so I’ve been able to peek out from beneath my security blanket and observe the stupid, stupid world.

We boarded a big cruise ship and isolated ourselves from the world, but I still carry my brain gremlins wherever I go. For the most part, I was able to stay distracted with writing and fun, but there were moments when I slowed down a little and felt some feelings, not all of which were nice.

I hit a couple of low points throughout the week, and I’m on the verge of one now. Why am I feeling low? Because of everything. The world is on fire and run by the stupidest people to ever seek office. The publishing world is whacky. Tech bros want to eliminate all of my favorite activities using spicy spellcheck. There are real, terrible things going on and at the same time, my brain likes to chew on things that aren’t real. Things like, “No one likes you” and “You’re not good enough” and “You deserve to be alone.”

Why do I do this to myself? I don’t know. Am I going to seek help for any of it? Probably not.

It’s all stacked on top of each other. One of the ways in which the world is broken is healthcare. People get sick, and they have to start a GoFundMe just to get basic levels of care. The economy is on the precipice, my current job and the job I wish I had are both in danger, and it seems like I’m one broken tooth or bout of depression away from managed healthcare hoovering up all our savings.

One night, I stood along the railings, watching the dark water churn beneath the ship, and I thought I saw a hint of our future. Not just mine, but yours, too. We’re all going to wind up under the water, desperately trying to get our heads above so we can breathe. Some will pull others down in their desperate efforts. Some will swim the wrong way. There is so much needless struggling in front of us. It could have all been avoided.

Well. That’s enough of that.

I really did have had a good time. Good people. Good writing.

I’ve missed pretty much all of the classes, but they’re getting recorded, and I think I’m making the right choice. During the time when the class is being recorded, I have the energy and opportunity to write. Later, when I’m at home and feeling like I’m drowning in work, I’ll be able to put on the videos of the class. Maybe that will inspire me to get back to writing.

I hope you’ve all had a good week. It’s sad to see this cruise coming to an end, but I’m also looking forward to getting home to my kids and my cats and familiar rooms.

I also have to get back home and finish the keyboard. Someone is going to win it tonight. I need to finish it and send it to them, because they’ve earned it.

It’s Sunday. I think. When you’re on a cruise, it is really easy to lose track of which day of the week it is. Fortunately, crew go into the elevators and rotate the “day plate” on the floor of the elevator. The last elevator I rode told me it was Sunday, and I believe it. So welcome to Sunday.

If I didn’t make it obvious before, or if it is unclear, I’m attending the 2025 Writing Excuses Retreat at sea. We’re just coming into Cabo, though I won’t be getting off the ship. Tomorrow is Mazatlan. The next day after that, Puerto Vallarta.

I’m not getting off the ship, but don’t feel bad for me. These were the same ports we enjoyed last year. Also last year, we did went on a sailboat excursion that led to some really bad sunburns on my feet. I was pathetic, and it was memorable enough that people are still making jokes about it this year. I’m staying out of the sun, and I’m taking advantage of the quiet times to get a bunch of writing done.

Continuing to compare and contrast last year to this year, I am getting a lot more writing on the page. Last year, I played a bunch of board games and hung out with my friends. It’s what I needed the most. This year, I still need that, but I also need to get the next Mel Walker story finished. I’m really hoping to get the first draft done before the end of the year. It would be neat to publish it at Baycon 2026, but that might not be in the cards. I don’t know yet. Have to finish the story first and see.

I’m writing this post as a way of priming the pump, as it were. I’m less than 500 words away from a scene I’ve been looking forward to for a long time. I’m really excited to get to it and the character that will be introduced. I would tell you more, but I don’t want to spoil anything. It’s going to be special.

It seems like every year, I hit an emotional low point on the cruise. Something happens, someone says or does something, and I have to go off and process for a little while. I’m going through that now.

The event this for this year took place at dinner last night. Dinners during the retreat are special. We’re assigned a different table each night of the cruise, forcing us to mingle with different people. Instructors are then able to spread their time and attention more evenly across all the attendees. It’s a well executed system. Fun for extroverts, a little bit of a social challenge for introverts. I like the system. I go into each meal with the aim of making each person at the table feel heard.

Last night, the chemistry at the table was a bit off. There was at least one really strong personality that kept crushing the conversations and bringing it back to them. This is something I’m terrified I’ll do myself, and I try really hard not to be that person.

At the end of the dinner, Melissa and I were sort of exhausted. We talked about it this morning, and Melissa said she was close to getting up and leaving the table last night. She really didn’t have a good time. That sucks, and it recontextualizes the whole evening for me.

Maybe there’s a lesson I can pull from the experience.

Across the hall from me at this moment, Mary Robinette is teaching a class on tension. I feel like I have a handle on that in my writing, so I opted to go in one of the other conference rooms and write. Is there something I can pull together from last night’s dinner debacle, and relate it to the idea of presenting tension in stories?

I believe the first tool the writer can reach for when building tension is empathy. The reader tends to feel what the character feels. Do something to the main character that makes them tense, and the reader will feel it, too.

If I were the viewpoint character in last night’s dinner debacle, there would be descriptions of me taking a drink in order to swallow my words. Moments of me stopping and quietly breathing, holding back sharp rebuttals that would do nothing but lower my social standing in the group. A time or two, I reached over and held Melissa’s hand beneath the table, offering reassurance through touch. I would describe everyone’s eyes on the person that usurped the socially dominate position at the table, allowing no other opinion to be expressed that did not match their own.

Without stakes, there can be no tension. The classic Hitchcock example is showing a time bomb under a table. The reader or viewer has the information, but the characters do not. A couple sits at the table and they talk. They can talk about anything, and the person experiencing the story is on the edge of their seat. They know that there is a bomb about to go off, and the anticipation is exquisite. The stakes are obvious in this example. It’s also an example where empathy is not used. The characters feel calm, chatting it up as if their lives aren’t in danger.

Perhaps tension is the product of conflict and stakes. In the Hitchcock example, the conflict is between what the audience knows and what the characters know. Characters can have all the information, but when their conflict is with each other or the environment or some part of the plot, the tension comes from the stakes involved.

Imagine a character that’s found themselves in a trap. There is a gun on a tripod pointed at their head. An elaborate series of strings and pulleys attaches the trigger of the gun to the victim’s arms. They can try to free themselves, but if they move their arms too much, the gun will go off. We can describe this and go through the actions of the character, and as long as we believe the gun is loaded and lethal, the tension is high. If it’s a water gun, on the other hand, the stakes drop, as does the tension.

That’s probably enough for now. I’m having a good time on the cruise. I’m getting lots of writing done, and I’m having fun with this community. If you get a chance to join one of these, I highly recommend it. Next year, we won’t be leaving out of LA. I’m not at liberty to say where the next one will be leaving from, but I can tell you that it’s one you’ll want to do.

The alternate title for this post would be: Writing Through My Feelings.

Melissa, Mike Baltar, and I have arrived in LA. We drove down in a rental car, dropped it off at LAX, and caught the hotel shuttle. Tonight, the Retreat will kick off with packets and a brief orientation for the new folk. Tomorrow morning, we’ll get up, have breakfast at the hotel, then bus to the port to board The Navigator of the Seas.

I’m a ball of emotions. Some of them are the standard sort you should feel when presented with the end of the world. We don’t need to talk about those right now. Maybe later.

The ones I need to talk about are more personal.

The most minor of them are the feelings I think I always get before the retreat. Do I belong here? Should I stop coming to make sure there’s room for others? Do the people in this community even like me?

I recognize the insecurity that gives birth to those questions and emotions, and I don’t take them all too seriously. The doubts are still present in my mind, but I don’t give them energy to chew on and sustain themselves. There are people in this community that like me very much. There is plenty of room for other people in the retreat and, in fact, I help make room for new voices by donating to the WXR scholarship fund. As to whether or not I belong here, that’s subjective. It doesn’t matter if I belong here or not. I’m here.

The worst emotion I’m enduring right now is disappointment. I didn’t finish the keyboard on time. I came close, but I could not get it to close.

I’ve been making keyboards as a WXR giveaway for the last several years, and I wanted it to be special this year. It hurts so much to come up empty handed. I knew it was a possibility going into it, and I stated it up front. I hoped I’d overcome, and I did not.

Going into the creation of the new keyboard, I wasn’t ready. There were some skills I lacked. In the last week or two, I’ve developed them, and I know that the next time I try to make a keyboard like this, it will be a success. It feels great that I’ve grown and learned, but it still sucks that I didn’t achieve my goal.

It’s a hard way to kick off the retreat. There will still be someone winning the keyboard. I’m still going to finish it. I’ll just ship it to them once the keyboard is ready.

I didn’t complete the keyboard on time, but it’s not the end of the world. No one else is disappointed in me. It’s entirely me, in my head and heart, wanting to have this special thing done.

There is one other emotion I should address, and that’s fear. I have a manuscript to finish. Last year on the cruise, I didn’t write much at all. I needed the break, and I played games with cool people. I had a good time, but it wasn’t as productive as I wanted it to be.

What I’m afraid of is that I’ll get on the ship with this community, and I’ll get distracted again and once again, not get any writing done. That will mean more disappointment on top of disappointment. Not something I’m excited to bear.

The story is good. I just need to get into it and let inspiration take me where it will. And I’m right before a scene I’ve been looking forward to writing for a very long time. Maybe once I get into that scene, writing will come easy and I’ll just keep going.

We’ll see!

Hey guys. Brian here.

It’s been a few weeks and I still haven’t written final thoughts on WorldCon. To be honest, it was mostly great! There was one tiny fly in the soup, which I don’t need to talk about here. The people were great. I sold a bunch of books. I had great food and great company. I’m looking forward to doing it again in LA next year.

One of the reasons I haven’t written a post in a little while is that I’ve been furiously trying to build a new keyboard for the upcoming Writing Excuses Retreat. For the last several years at the retreat, I’ve given away keyboards, and they’ve all been beautiful and special in their own way. This year, I want it to be unique and even more functional. I want it to be bluetooth and wireless. To accomplish this, I need to change up my game.

Without going too much into the technical weeds, I switched from the Teensy Arduino to the ESP32, which has built-in bluetooth and wifi, as well as a few other features that should make for a great keyboard.

Unfortunately, I’m stuck. I can detect keypresses on every key, but I can only say which row has been pressed. I need both the row and the column in order to determine the key. I have some resistors on order which might be the game changer I need on this front. Otherwise, I’m not going to get this keyboard finished on time, and that hurts.

Okay. Let’s talk about the shootings a little bit, but mostly the media’s coverage.

Charlie Kirk, a racist troll that didn’t give a shit about gun deaths to the point he said, “It’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God given rights,” has died.

He was shot and killed, so I suppose he would say that was worth it.

On the same day, a Colorado student shot two others and then himself. If you didn’t hear about that one, it’s not your fault. The media was too busy projecting the theory that the person that shot and killed Charlie Kirk was probably trans. Right-wing pundits and politicians were drumming up hate, threatening retribution and violence on trans people.

And then, it was revealed that the murderer was a young white man from a Republican household. He himself is registered Republican. He posted pictures of himself last year in a Trump costume for Halloween.

As soon as it became inconvenient to pin the murder on a minority, the media storm dried up. They couldn’t change course fast enough, from fomenting violent retribution to praying for the killer.

None of this is surprising. None of this is right. It’s all lies and performance and hatred, and if you spend as much time as I have trying to make it make sense, you’re just going to walk away with a broken heart and wounded faith in humanity.

I’ve seen stuff online suggesting some kind of conspiracy. Charlie Kirk had been one of the few right-wing pundits loudly calling for a release of the Epstein Files, and in the midst of the media storm around that, he died. There’s less talk about the Epstein stuff, for the moment. Isn’t that convenient for Trump?

As I said in another forum: I think the kid was just a lonely idiot that could have used better influences in his life. We are all struggling. The world is fucked up for everyone. And he dealt with it the only way he knew how. I don’t think Trump hired him. I don’t think there’s a conspiracy. Occam’s Razor works pretty well in this case.

I’m really, really looking forward to the day the coup falls apart. They’re too stupid and hateful to work together for much longer. Trump will die, MAGA will explode into a thousand different racist tribes, and maybe we’ll come together to put things back together. Perhaps start with unfucking the Supreme Court and rolling back their pro-King rulings.

There’s one more topic in my subject, and that’s dreaming. I’ve been napping a lot lately, and while I don’t fully remember my dreams, I know that it feels like I’m going somewhere else. A different life, but it’s my life. Different struggles, but they’re my struggles.

I wonder if that’s what the afterlife will be. Slipping from this life into the next, as easily as falling asleep. That sounds nice, to me.

Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, I hope you’re doing it well, and that you’re happy. Times are hard. Times are unimaginably stupid. Hopefully, we’ll get through them together.