We made it, everyone! Congrats and welcome to 2024 🎉

So much has changed. So much is going to change.

I’ve been away from the blog for a long time, and for that I apologize. I’ve been going through some life changes, culminating in a split from my wife.

I’m also been in therapy for several months now, for the first time. It’s both cause and consequence of everything I’m going through. Therapy for me is like going to the gym, but for my emotions. It’s hard, and I’m always sore afterward, but I’m stronger and glad I went. Would recommend.

Some things haven’t changed, though. I’m still living in Victoria, BC, and still feel incredibly lucky to be here. This city has welcomed me in so many unexpected ways. I’m grateful, and I can only hope I can pay it back someday.

I’m also still working my day-job as a programmer, and toiling away at my novels and short stories on the side. Still living without a car. Still trying to get the right amount of seasoning on my roasted vegetables. Still buying way too many books (I know, “too many books” is a category error. There are never enough books).

I want to start this year off with gratitude. Both of what I’ve accomplished over the last year, and for what’s to come. So, as 2024 rises and stretches, like a cat waking from a nap in the sun, let me list the things I’m grateful for:

• My writing group, with whose help I’ve finished editing a novel for the first time. And not just finished, but synopsis written and everything ready to submit to agents, starting this week.
• The organizers of the Surrey International Writers’ Conference, who put on such a welcoming and stimulating conference. And because of whom I was able to meet an agent that gave me the injection of confidence I needed to finish up that novel synopsis.
• My co-workers at Cisco, who every day demonstrate to me how a non-toxic technical culture can work.
• The folks at IRCC and BC’s Provincial Nominee Program, who gave this middle-aged guy a shot at permanent residence in Canada.
• My D&D group, who opened their gaming table and their arms to this immigrant.
• Dan, David, Baamonde, Alex, and Haywood, friends who have stuck with me over many years, through many ups and downs.
• My family, particularly my mom and older sister, who have never held my lack of phone calls or texts against me.
• The Victoria Creative Writing Group, without whom I would not have met my writing circle.
• The Victoria Bowmen Club, who taught me what’s it like to really wield a bow (after years of me writing about it).
• The folks on social.linux.pizza, mstdn.ca, and tenforward.social, who helped me find my footing (and friends) in the fediverse.

So many gifts, from so many people. Thank you, all, for everything you’ve given me, everything you’ve taught me.

May your new year be a bright one.

“Our party needs to be entirely about what our members want, what our constituency associations want, and that comes up to the provincial board and that makes the policy and the decisions and the direction gets set,”

This is a chilling quote, to me. Political parties are run by the membership, sure, but in a competitive democracy, they’re supposed to be about what’s good for society. All of it, not just those who happen to be party members.

Not to be too alarmist, but a “party run only for the good of its members” is how we describe communist and fascist governments.

www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/al…

Socialist: “Tailors are more vital to a community than bankers.”

Capitalist: “Nonsense. The community is the economy, and there’s no economy without banking. And without banks, how will anyone save for their retirement? Or start a business? Lest they get the money from their parents, of course. Are you suggesting we go back to relying on inherited wealth? I thought you were against that sort of thing.”

Socialist: “Not at all! Though your confusion of the economy of money for the entire community of people is typical.”

Capitalist: scoffs

Socialist: “What I’m saying is that if all the banks were to close tomorrow, your tailor could extend you some credit, and mend your clothes. But if all the tailors shut down, there’s no banker in the world that’ll darn your socks.”

Happy Friday! And thank goodness for the first weekend of summer 😎

As you can see from the title, I’ve decided to swap out Keeping Score for Writing Circle for these updates. I think the latter is closer to what I want these to be, for several reasons:

• It implies a circle of trust, which is what we build when we write; we invite the reader into our circle of trust, because when we write we’re vulnerable, in ways we can’t always see at the time.
• The writing process itself is a circle: idea, draft, edit, new idea, new draft, new edits. There’s no real beginning or end, only calling time on a current project.
• As we travel on a circle (working on a project), the idea of “winning” or racing doesn’t really make sense. There’s no where to go, really, other than forward, no destination to arrive at where we can compare ourselves (favourably or unfavourably) to others.
• A circle is bounded, which (hopefully) will keep us from wandering too far astray.

With the last point in mind, I think I want to start exploring a different aspect of writing each week. Share something I’ve learned from other writers, in the hopes that it’s helpful to someone else. Small tricks of the trade, if you will. I’ve got ideas for the first few (starting next week), but if there’s something you’d like to discuss, let me know!

As for my own projects, I did manage to wrap up the second round of novel edits last weekend 🎉✍️

So now it’s on to the stickier bits. The relationships I didn’t properly flesh out before and the background characters that exist as little more than a name right now (if even that). For those, I’ve just been brainstorming this week: Opening my notebook to a fresh page, writing a question at the top, and then listing out all the different possible answers I can think of in fifteen minutes. Yes, I do set a timer, and yes I do make myself keep jotting down progressively silly ideas until the time is up 😊

This weekend I’ll make time to go back through all of those, pick out the ones I like best, and then start planning how to work them into the story. I’m hoping to make more targeted edits this time, adding these new parts of the story as extra scenes or flashbacks or dialog where appropriate, instead of having to read the whole thing through again.

That’s the plan, anyway. We’ll see if it works 🤞

Switching out the naming convention here. Keeping Score hasn’t really applied for some time now; I don’t track words written so much as chapters or scenes completed, and even then I’m aiming for time at the keyboard more than anything else.

And the old name is starting to feel a little too competitive, for me. A little too much like I’m trying to outpace myself or other writers, when really I just want to remind myself every once in a while of how far I’ve come, and maybe — if I’m lucky — give some comfort to my fellow writers, full-time or part-time, that are struggling.

That said, I haven’t settled on a new name/theme just yet. Going with Writing Update for now, which is very on the nose, but will do for a first draft. ✍️

Speaking of drafts, I’m almost done with the second-run edits of the sci-fi novel. Fingers crossed I might actually wrap those up this weekend!

Word count is holding steady at just over 87k, though I think next I’ll tackle the missing scenes, and fill in some plot holes, which’ll bump that up a bit. Ditto the fleshing out of some background characters I need to do. Hard for readers to get attached to folks that just pop in and out of the narrative.

And that’ll probably take me through the end of the month, if not longer. Still, once this second round is done, then the book-wide edits are basically finished. The rest will be more targeted changes, so I won’t have to keep going through the whole draft every time. At least, that’s what I hope 🤞

How about you? Where are you at, in your own projects?

In 2018, I’d filed near-identical FOI requests to each of Canada’s 14 federal, provincial and territorial prison agencies asking for data from their correctional databases. I figured there might be interesting stories hidden there, particularly in the relationships between peoples’ sentence lengths, age, sex and race…What ensued was a detailed discussion [between provincial ministries] about how to block me from getting what I wanted.

A damning indictment of the current Freedom of Information process in Canada.

The whole Secret Canada project is fine reporting, and well worth your time. I wanted to highlight the above story, though, because it’s so personal. Also the surprising fact that Alberta denied every FOI request The Globe and Mail made as part of the project, the only province to do so.

Apologies for the long gap between these. I swear I’ve been working on the novel (well, off and on), but with a new gig and a schedule shift my usual morning routine has been a bit disrupted 😅

In any case, the novel edits continue. I’m about two-thirds of the way through the second major round of edits. I know, slow pace, but a chapter or two a day (on good days) is about all I can handle right now. Still, I tell myself, if I have an edited novel by the end of the year, that’s fantastic. No deadlines.

And the book’s still growing, as I edit. It’s pushing 88,000 words atm, after starting out at around 79k. And I haven’t yet added the missing scenes that the critique group uncovered. So might still end up somewhere north of 90k, which is on the long end, I think, for a thriller of this type, but that’ll probably come down again if I sell it and it goes through the full editing process 🤞

Meanwhile, I needed something to submit to the critique group, so we’ve been working through my third novel, an urban fantasy where the main character is a lawyer working for a modern-day Titania and her Faerie Court. That one’s even shorter than the sci-fi book, so we’re already halfway through the first draft (!). It is a first draft, though, so there’s a lot of work to do on that one.

Reading that book again (with the group) has been…a bit of a trip. It was written long enough ago that the idea of using a camera (instead of your phone) to take pictures for evidence wasn’t strange, and it contains a character that I wanted to read as non-binary before I really knew any folks that identified as such (or had done any reading on their experiences). So I’m editing it as I post each section, re-working things on the fly to catch up to current events (and my current understanding).

Yet I realize I’m still in love with the book, and its characters, even after all this time. I’m glad the group’s been willing to dive into it with me (it being a very rough draft), because it’s given me hope that it, too, can be edited into a shape suitable for publication.

Who knows? With some luck (and a lot of elbow grease) I might finish the year with two novels ready to go. ✍️