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.

I’m going to break from the format tonight, because I’m coming at this very late, and I think this one will be on the shorter side.

Earlier today, I was trying to pair program with one of my guys and I found myself constantly angry. It wasn’t anything that he was doing. The code we were working on is frustrating, but not unusually so. I was trying to get through an annoying problem and my temper was at full boil.

I believe this was another case where I needed passion in order to get through the task, but I didn’t have any that was particularly useful. The thing that we were working on is not going to be useful for a long time. In fact, it may never be useful. We’re writing this complicated thing not because we need it, but because we need to go through the exercise of writing it, so that we’ll have what we need for other projects. It’s a little bit complicated, and I don’t really want to do it.

But we’re doing it, and I need something to drive me. Today, my means to an end was anger.

Anger is just another sort of passion, really. I’ve done a fair share of hate-programming, and it works fine. It doesn’t feel good in the moment, but there is a great deal of relief when reaching the other side, and the fire inside fades.

I’m not sure I’m explaining it very well. I don’t know if this is a common thing. When I need to get something done, I have to summon some kind of energy to remain motivated, and anger works for me.

Music also works. Joy can work, if I can find it. It’s joy that fuels my writing, more often than not. It used to be the same way with programming, but I’m not finding much joy in it these days.

There could be joy in it, but probably not while things are the way they are at my company.

I guess what I’m saying is that I need you all to buy about 100,000 copies of my book so I can switch careers and find joy in my work again.

Tomorrow is Friday, and I’ll be getting back to the regular format. Soon, I’ll update the banner and link to point at One for the Road.

It’s Wednesday evening, and I’m on headset in Discord, getting ready to play video games with some friends, like we do every Wednesday. Mike Baltar said, “Where’s the blog post?” and so I have him to thank for keeping me on track. More on that in the main topic.

Personal News

Bryanna’s hard drive appears to have died. She’s the first of us to get an M.2 drive. I think the only thing I can do is replace it, which is a bummer.

I’ve got some work to do on my gaming system, as well. Maybe when I get her a drive, I’ll look at putting one in mine.

Upcoming Events and Such

Boskone is still the next event. As an alumni, I can now register and pay for the Writing Excuses Retreat happening in September. I’ll talk with Melissa about it. I think we still want to do this, though there must be some point in time where it doesn’t make sense to attend.

The Topic: Juggling

I learned to juggle my Junior year of High School, when the band was between uniforms and we dressed as clowns for one of the half-time shows. I can’t do more than 3, but I have the basics down. And, that’s not the kind of juggling I mean to talk about tonight.

For my Day Job, I have a number of responsibilities and high priority tasks in front of me. Today, I needed to focus on several of them at once. Then one of the high-availability services we maintain started making itself unavailable, and I needed to focus on that, too.

As I was finishing putting out that fire, Bryanna came over with her broken PC. I wrapped up the work day, hooked her system up in place of mine, and started troubleshooting. It goes straight to BIOS, and while it looks like it can see the drive, any tests we run on the drive locks the BIOS up completely.

Then there’s all the rest of the things an adult must do to maintain their home and health. I tend to neglect those, a bit.

That’s why I almost broke my streak tonight. I have too many balls in the air, and if not for the reminder of a friend, I would have dropped this one. Blog writing, by the way, is one of the ways in which I’m maintaining my mental health.

There’s too much to do, and pairing this with my thoughts from yesterday, most of the tasks don’t make me happy.

On that note, I think I’ll take a break from responsibility and get back to gaming with my friends.

Keeping the streak alive! We’re a little bit past my original list of planned subjects, so if there is anything you’d like me to include as a main topic over the next couple of weeks, please leave me a comment and let me know.

Also, if you have thoughts or feelings on the format I’ve been using, let me know that, too.

Personal News

I’m going to save most of the personal news for the main topic. I’m feeling pretty good, and I’m glad to be home.

Upcoming Events and Such

With Arisia behind us, Boskone is next. We’ll fly out on February 8th and return on the 11th. We’re using United instead of American, too, and all the reservations and whatnot are in place.

I believe some One for the Road books should come to our house in the next couple of weeks, so we will be able to sign some and send them out for those asking for such.

Also, soon, I’ll change the branding on this site and social media to point at One for the Road, so don’t be too surprised when it looks a little different around here.

Topic: Back Home and Back to the Grind

A few days ago I talked about how the time shift from travel kept messing with me. We arrived last night at 10PM local time, which is 1AM Boston time, and we were home and in bed a little after midnight. We didn’t give ourselves a day to recover, so we were up at 7AM and back at it. Or, as back at it as we could muster.

From what I could tell, Melissa did great. She was on calls, in her spreadsheets, and generally kicking ass as she usually does. I think we both slept better than we have in a while.

I zombied through the day. I attended a couple of meetings and I answered some questions, but I wasn’t as productive as I needed to be. Around 3PM, I took a nap. Tonight, after I’ve finished this post, I’ll make up the time and try to finish catching up.

The Grind. Getting back to “normal.” The Day Job.

We get one life, and we spend it actively doing things that make us miserable. The older I get, the more acutely I look at this. The more I look around, the more I see how we have huge potential, but we’re generating misery instead of joy.

When I enjoy my day job, it’s when I feel like I’m making something. Software that will make it easier to manage renewable energy. Software that will make it cheaper to set up solar and battery sites. I feel best when I’m doing something that is making the world a better place. My bio does not lie where it says “Brian Buhl is trying to save the world.”

These days, I don’t feel like that’s what I’m doing. My job is more about managing the products and the team, so that we can show an investor that our company is worth investing in. If the people I’m working for are more interested in making money than saving the world, then what good am I really doing?

I can make the world a better place with my stories, but no one will read the stories if I just give them away. And as much as I hate money, I’m realistic enough to know that I have to live in this world, and I need money in order to do what I did this last weekend.

I’m not sure what point I’m making tonight. Maybe I’m just tired. Maybe I’m just whining. I feel in my heart that humanity has greater potential than what we demonstrate daily. Maybe we would do better if we weren’t all wrapped in green-colored weeds, drowning in debt that does not need to exist, because the root of all our problems is also the root of all evil.

That’s enough for tonight. Time to make the doughnuts.

Melissa and I have the table set up for the final day. It’ll be short. In a few hours, we need to take the final inventory, pack everything up, haul everything to Steven D. Brewer’s car, then Uber to the airport to make our 4:15PM flight, assuming it isn’t delayed or canceled for mysterious reasons. As far as I can tell, the weather here is fine and shouldn’t be a factor, but we already received a warning email from American last night, so who knows what will happen.

Because of that, I’m writing this now, in case I don’t have another opportunity to write my post today. This is #15 of potentially 366. Gotta keep the streak going.

Most of my time at Arisia has been spent in the dealer’s room, selling books at the Water Dragon and Small Publishing in a Big Universe tables. It sounds like I’ve missed out on the conference but in reality, I’m doing exactly what I like to do at these things: I’ve been meeting people and geeking out over writing and books.

The panels don’t hold much draw for me anymore. The after party scene was not robust here — I checked last night before going to bed. Conferences like this have always been about meeting people and networking, and that’s exactly what I did, from the dealer’s room.

I also sold books, but I wasn’t a monster about it. I did best when I went to the other side of the table and just talked with people. I talked about other people’s books first, generally, and then gave my rehearsed elevator pitch for The Repossessed Ghost. I didn’t pressure, but I expressed enthusiasm, and enthusiasm is contagious. Several copies of The Repossessed Ghost sold simply because people enjoyed talking with me.

I might have even sold a copy to our Uber driver last night. They found out I was a writer and looked me up on Amazon before I got out of the car. I wasn’t trying to sell him anything. I was just engaged, enthusiastic, and authentic.

It’s something I’ve seen with Steven D. Brewer and the sales of his books. He pushes his stuff a little more than I push mine, but he’s authentic and friendly, and he has a good hook when people are passing by: “Do you want to be an airship pirate?”

I think this has been a good weekend. Does it make financial sense for me to come all the way out here and sell 7 of my books and bunch of other people’s stuff? Absolutely not. Like I said in a previous post, I’m planting seeds. I’m meeting people. I’m doing what professional authors do, and I’m doing what I was doing before I finally managed to get one of my books out in the world. Nothing has changed in that regard, and the goal is still the same.

The dealer’s room just opened. Time to get back to work.

Once I finished my post last night, I put my head on my pillow to take a nap, with the intention of getting up a little after 10PM so I could go and mingle at the after parties. I need to engage with this conference in more ways than just attending the table down in the dealer’s room. After parties should be good for that.

My body had different ideas. I woke up, but only long enough to take off my clothes and climb properly into bed, then sleep until the morning. I must have slept close to 11 hours, and I was still tired when we got up. I’m adjusting to the time zone by treating all hours of the day as suitable for sleeping.

Most of today looked a lot like Saturday. We got the table set up, registered our inventory as we rearranged the layout, then prepared to greet hungry book buyers. I didn’t expect to sell any more copies of The Repossessed Ghost today since all we had left were hard covers, but we sold 2. We sold a lot of books I didn’t expect us to sell. According to our records, we have outperformed Arisia 2023 says significantly.

The highlights of the day for me has to be the interviews for the Small Publishing in a Big Universe podcast. I helped record some interviews at Baycon in 2023, and I interviewed some new authors for the December issue. Over the last couple of days, I’ve been recording Live from Arisia content, and it’s been a lot of fun.

The interviews today went very well. I didn’t overthink it. I kept my canned questions simple, and I allowed the flow of conversation to influence my questions as we went. I’m sure the people I interviewed had a good time, too. We all left the recording room with smiles.

If you’re curious what the recording setup was like, I used my Blue Snowball microphone, now with a broken stand, plugged into my Surface Pro 6. I recorded using Audacity, and we took advantage of a quiet room near the pool in which masks were optional. If we’d left our masks on, we might have come across sounding like the adults from a Charlie Brown cartoon.

When I get home, L. A. Jacob will receive all of the audio files and edit them into something presentable. Hopefully, there will be enough material to make a good episode. I did record a comedy bit with Steven D. Brewer, which may or may not be useful. It was definitely funny.

Tomorrow is our last day of the convention. It’s nearly 10PM local time, and I still have some hope of going and mingling with people outside of the dealer’s room. I’ll pack up first, just in case. We’ll likely take our bags down to the dealer’s room with us tomorrow and stow them under a table. Our timing for hitting our next flight might be a little tight.

I haven’t seen much of Arisia, but I’ve had a good time, just the same. I wonder how Boskone will compare.