Now With More Buds

I haven't blogged in a week, almost exactly.  That's not conspicuous at all, is it?  Don't worry, I might start blogging more frequently again soon.  I start orientation next week.  The pressing concern for the moment is this:

I'm standing in a wedding on Sunday.  I'm excited, but it's in Ohio, and my wife has to work, so that means I'll be apart from my wife for the better part of three days, and as jazzed as I am I'm going to be exhausted, because I know like... three people who are gonna be in the wedding?  I don't know how many Houghtonites will be at the wedding, and that's really the only group of people I know of the bride's, and I know even fewer of the grooms.

Still I'm honored to stand and witness the marriage of two good friends whose distance from me is yet another prod making me yearn to invent teleporters.

Graduating from college seems to have been a subtle shift in anxieties.  Some would say the stakes are higher now than they were, though monetarily I would say no way in heck are they actually.  Except that the high stakes from college have rolled over in the form of student loans looming over my head, demanding to be paid.

But I feel less like there's a single pressing project I need to finish to determine the course of my future, and more like every choice I make throughout every day contributes to the life I'm leading.

It's terrifying, but in the same way as a dull ache is agonizing.

Subtle, and always there, applying pressure.

I'm slowly making my way through The Hunger Games, to the pleasure of my family members who think it is quite good.  I have personal taste qualms about the first person present storytelling, though I think Collins executes it fairly well.  I am most impressed by the wells that go unmentioned in the story, one of things so often overlooked in first person stories.  The narrator is not always a stand-in for the author, and his/her flaws are rarely explicit, since it's hard to be fully conscious of your own failings.  The first person narrator in an active story is never (if the story is well done and the character well-fleshed-out) the unequivocal voice of truth.

Honestly, my personal voice choices have edged towards the third person omniscient, with the narrator having verisimilitude with the author.  It's an old-fashioned preference, but there it is.

At the same time as I wade into the strange coincidental cousin of the film Battle Royale, my wife is finishing up with The Wise Man's Fear, which means I can nerd out with her over a lot of stuff and we equally anticipate the third installment of the Kingkiller Chronicle.  I had some small ambition to review The Name of the Wind myself after reading a particularly aggravating review written by a professional.  I have since procrastinated and haven't done much that could be considered creative in the last week or so.

But I have played Guild Wars 2 like its servers are shutting down.  That's what you do when an MMO releases, right?  Play it eight hours a day for the first week?  That's pretty much what I did.

Now I sit and scoff at my own buffoonery and resist the urge to play the game.  It's hard, okay?  I love that game.  It's a mild obsession, and I'm doing my best to be an adult about it.

It's not going anywhere.

Time marches forward and more cool stuff is on the horizon.  Homestuck continues to be fantastic, a new season of Doctor Who approacheth, The Hobbit comes out this winter, and people have finally stopped harping on the "end of the world" that's supposed to happen before the year's over.  I probably jinxed it by saying that out loud on a blog that gets broadcast to... ten people?  I don't even know who all reads this blog, though you're awesome if you do, whether you agree with most of it or not.

One thing I've noticed about my life now is I don't feel like I'm in an environment where I can say, "All right, now I have to work on this" and have that be accepted.  That's probably just my bogus feelings, but it's true.  I feel like, since I don't have a grade waiting for the work that I do where the value of that grade is a condition of my earning honors that can get me hired better, any work I do is just frivolous head-in-the-clouds creative stuff.  I'm not saying my family doesn't support my art, but...

I need an art space.  A place to sit down that is the place where the ideas and the words are blended in an alchemical concoction meant to be administered to as many individuals as possible.  Okay, that got away from me.

-shrugs-

That's it for now.  Bye guys.

Music and Silence

So my direction falters yet again as to what I want to say in this blog.  Sometimes time passes too slowly, and sometimes it passes too quickly, but it is always passing.  The stillness of time is only a poetic image to contemplate.

Not to say stillness is nonexistent.  It is.  There is silence and stillness.  In my most chronologically recent novel (the one I wrote this last semester of college), there is a silence so tangible it permeates throughout the entire book almost as a character itself.

I guess there is something to say of that in world-building.  Pacing.  The passing of time.  It's one I have to admit I struggle with.  How many words should I spend to pass the time of the narrative?  Should I spring you forward with a word or fill the space of a moment with half a dozen chapters?  Well, the first is a totally legitimate thing if nothing happens in that time that is important to the telling of the story, but if you're going to stretch time so thin as to make a breath last several chapters, you should probably be writing poetry, or a novel just about that breath.

I can see it being done fantastically, to be honest, but it would take a brilliance you shouldn't just assume you have.

Silence is a motif I find myself writing into a lot of my writing.  One way I could look at this is by noting that my wife has at times compared me to a sea, which sometimes roils and sometimes rocks with waves, and sometimes it is very still, down to the core.

Since writing is among many things a reflection of the writer, I think it honest that I often write the silences into my work.  And who knows, maybe it's leftovers from my musical training.  Sure, you don't play on the rests, but their presence in a piece is as essential as the placement of the notes.

Music is something I don't often address in my writing.  It can be a daunting task to approach the sundry world of music, especially in today's age when so many people have vastly different opinions as to what constitutes music, let alone good music.  But it's also a very strange thing that I don't often broach music, because it's such an integral part of my life.

In Hearthstead (yes, I will keep coming back to this world) the primary people group of the story have little to no music.  Other groups, ancient groups before the dragonwaste, have music ingrained deeply into their culture, but the stubborn survivors in the blasted lands don't sing or play music.

However, there's a character who might introduce these back into their lives.

My wife would love for me to get started on a sequel to Ashes of Silver as soon as possible, but as I said a while ago I've got Talas Ke to be concerned with.  Maybe once that's done (whenever that is) I'll get back to prosaic forms of Hearthstead.  For now, though, I'm going to continue to encourage people to get and read my book, and tell their friends.  Also, job searching.

And I managed to get myself standing in another wedding.  I like weddings.  Especially friends' weddings.  So I'm excited.

All right, I don't have anything else to say.  Good night!

For Whom the Bell Tolls

So my last two blog posts were a little longer.  This one won't be.

Today, I stood and watched my cousin (one of my best friends) get married, and almost cried because I'm maybe a little happy for them I guess?  And it was an awesome ceremony, a great reception, and a wonderful time.

Now those kids are off somewhere having an adventure, and I'm home after about three hours or more of riding in a car.  It's super late, and I'm tired, but not tired enough to just let a face-punch penance happen.

Though I might have, if my wife hadn't reminded me.

Tomorrow starts a new week with the foreseeable future dedicated to figuring this life out.  A little over a week till I get my proof to verify, and less than that till a GW2 BETA WEEKEND WOO!!!!  In the mean time, more writing projects to agonize over, more job applications (and similar activities) to fill out/send, and some exercise to work into my (hopefully not too) busy routine.

I leave you with this:  Nate and Christine Hunter, I know you might not read this right away (you'll be busy, I know how honeymoons are), but God bless you and your marriage.  I pray it be as much a blessing to you as the last ten months have been for me.  All my best wishes.  I love you.  Seriously.

Bed time.

Book in the Works

I have just one thing to talk about today—I think.  Today I took great strides to get a novel ready for publication.  I signed up, set it up, formatted it, and finally submitted it for review.  Now I'm waiting for that review to come back so I can order a proof.

I'm super excited, and looking forward to what this means for the future.  There is another thing I'm excited for.  There's a wedding on Sunday.  I'm quite happy for the bride and groom.

Unfortunately, I don't have much else to say.  I'll reserve more of the information about the novel for when there's something you can do about it.  Just know that it's in the works and I'm ecstatic.