Trying Again

Wow, it's been since January of this year that I've posted a blog post. I've still been writing, but mostly on my own. I have been focusing on my own fiction. I got tired of editing other people's dreams and decided to focus on my own.

To that end, I've been submitting my first novel to agent queries (my goal is to hit 100 rejections before I give up or think about self-publishing). I'm also currently revising my second novel, which is in the very ugly first draft stages. When I hit a block with the novel revising, I work on short stories. In fact, I had one of my short stories, "Spare the Demon, Spoil the Child," accepted by Inkd Publishing for their upcoming anthology, Cthulhu Awakens.

I'm not going to lie. I have been neglecting a lot of my writing, especially my own journaling. But writing is thinking, and when I don't write, I find that my thinking has also started to wither. So, here I am back at again. I'm just going to sit down and write about whatever I'm thinking about. Movie or book reviews. Thoughts about writing. Thoughts about my aging life.

I was getting stuck in thinking about story ideas, stuffing my brain full of reading and watching movies (and, oh God, so many true crime stories). I told myself that I was just feeding my writing compost. And someday, something beautiful was going to sprout from that rich soil. But, nothing can grow if it's just a shit pile that you fill up and then ignore.

I'm going to paste in a few of the small writing attempts I made in the past couple of days, just to get myself back into the swing of things.

10-26-2026

Finished Videodrome. Very dated in so many ways. Still, sexy and gruesome at the same time. You feel guilty for getting turned on by the sensual/violent scenes and then realize the message that the movie is trying to make. We become the violent images we see. When we give up our ability to think and lean into the sensual (reveling in our senses and not using our rational mind), we open ourselves up to violent propaganda. And God damn, James Woods is ugly. Hideous really. But I couldn’t stop looking away.

There are definitely a lot of parallels with AI now. Shadowy figures with their own agendas working behind the scenes and trying to violently shove their ideas directly into our bodies.

10-27-2026

Very much feeling the writer’s block right now. I’m just so dissatisfied with all of my writing at the moment. I’m revising my second novel and was trying to work on a short story, but I’m going to miss the deadline for the short story. Mostly because I can’t, for the life of me, figure out why the story ended up where it did. The characters feel so flat. I need to learn, like Woolf, how to dig tunnels behind my characters.