Is ordinary 21st century technology with retro flourishes "Electropunk"? "Digipunk"?

One of my favorite things about living in the far-flung futuristic world of 2014 (seriously, people who are kids today have no idea how weird that is to someone who grew up in the 20th century) is knowing that we used to envision people using their watches as phones, and seeing people pull out their phones to check the time.

So I'm more than a little amused that the cover I got for my new phone (the LG G2, free with contract) trips a quick window function when it's closed that makes a widget designed like a high-end watch face appear in a little cut-out.

I could change the widget's appearance to be a digital clock, but I'm too amused by the idea of a 21st century digital pocket watch with sundry computational and telephonic properties.

Thursday, July 10th

The Daily Report

I spent a lot of yesterday in a thoughtful mode. I've been practicing random writing and particularly doing it with my phone, and one of the things that came of that was the audio track that I linked to, which is very much a part of a bigger story.

I have 5 of what will probably be between 12 and 20 similarly-sized installments of the finished story, which I plan on writing in full before doing any larger scale recordings. Like the first few "episodes" of Harper's Folly, I've conceived of this as both a self-contained story and part of a potential ongoing longer one.

With Harper's Folly, I did that in order to keep the project manageable and not end up committing to another endlessly open ended ongoing serial. I like that kind of thing. As I've said before, the middle part of a story--be it video game, TV show, movie, or book--is generally my favorite part. Which might be why I like comic books as a serial medium, because they spend decades in the middle. It's just very demanding, creatively, to write a thing forever. TV shows don't have one writer and they do a season and then take a break, and comics achieve their longevity by being generational.

Anyway... taking a break between each episode of HF and only going on with the next one when I was sure I knew what I was doing for the next one and had something I really felt like I needed to do with the project was the original idea. And I mostly held to that. But each time I ended an episode, the concern from the audience that there would be a next one became stronger. Which is a good thing! Demand is good. Interest is good. I thrive on interest.

It just made me more reluctant to actually take a hiatus and take the time to reflect and plan, and though there was the longest break between episode 3 and the currently interrupted episode 4, I think I really started episode 4 before I was ready, because fans were clamoring for the next one and because not everybody follows this blog or reads everything on it and so not everyone knew that the break was intentional and finite.

Regarding Harper's Folly in particular, I think I might just break the paper thin charade on the blog and put up announcements when it's on break because I don't see any other way around that in the future.

But more generally, I think I need to take a "seasonal" approach to my writing. There's a line of thought regarding writer's block and burnout that says it comes from not respecting the rhythms of nature, fertile to fallow. I can't at the moment find the quote by whoever put it like that to attribute them, which is a shame, but it's something that's been on my mind since I read it. I'd have so many things I'd like to be writing, and more particularly, so many things I'd like to write forever. I can't write all of them at the same time, though, and I can't write any of them without a break.

I don't have a destination for this train of thought yet, but it's definitely heading somewhere.

The State of the Me

I've been slow getting up in the mornings the past few days, though it just hit me why: I got used to waking up to an alarm, and the alarm was on my phone. My old phone. Whoops! Will correct that for tomorrow.

Plans For Today

Got a chapter to finish today. The extended family is holding a yard sale on our front lawn; it should have minimal impact on my work day, but being in my first year here, this is one of many "first times" I'm experiencing.

Omnibus IV will definitely be out next week.

I transcribed the third book of it today, after having done the second book yesterday. I still have to collect all the Other Tales, which takes a bit more reflection and thought since there are questions of placement and presentation to be answered, but it's still something that can probably be done in a day. And if it can't... there's next week.

The fact that I have super hit my stride on this and that I'm not likely to be traveling anywhere any time between now and December means we can expect the volume 1 omnibus to be done in the fairly near future and the Omnibus being more or less caught up to the current story by the end of the year. I still plan on spacing them out each month for a couple of reasons, but I think I can count on them actually coming out each month now that I've got production down to basically a week.

The Omnibi are both my steadiest sellers and the highest priced items in both my Kindle and independent multi-format bookstores (though still phenomenally value-priced in terms of cost per word), so this bodes very well for future earnings.