Me as a writer: I must pick each word carefully to best represent what I want to communicate so that readers will understand me and what I intend
Me as a music creator: this part of the lyrics annoys me, but it’s in a similar way to how the Beach Boys sometimes annoy me, so eh
Dog with large nose
Hannah supposes her nose’s span is grand and plans erroneously to land her owner under hypnosis as only her nose can.
Daffodil growing out of a concrete wall
Daffodils aren’t usually the yellow flowers you find growing out of the cracks between concrete.
Universe: here are tools that let you illustrate your fiction, copy edit easily, turn it into music, & design toys based on your main characters
Writing communities: anyone who uses these tools is evil & must be shunned
Serious writers: busy making the best things of their life
Also, Daniel has an idea for giving her feathered forearms like her uniform is short-sleeved which would match the book cover I’ve made. But we’ll have to see what’s actually possible.
Anthro blue hawk action figure
Getting closer on Ensign Ko Marin! Though, I think her head still needs to be bigger, and ideally, her feathers should fan out a little more.
And so you find other places to say those words. And then eventually you find other words to think and say. And you keep moving, keep creating, keep rebuilding.
But it’s a long, slow process with a lot of lonely words rattling around inside for a long while in there.
That feeling when there was someone in your life who you talked to every day about everything, and so for ages after they’re gone, you just keep thinking of things you want to say to them…
Except, like, for a whole community.
It’s weird figuring out the balance between how much I’m making music…
—for myself as a listener
—for myself as a creator
—as a creator for other listeners
It’s mostly the first. But it does bleed over into the others in some ways, and they can kind of fight with each other.
When I sell at events, I get so many compliments on my covers, and sure, some of the covers are still old copies from before my publisher dumped me, so they have art that was done by artists before the advent of AI…
But those aren’t the ones people are looking at when they give the compliments.
When I sell at events, I get so many compliments on my covers, and sure, some of the covers are still old copies from before my publisher dumped me, so they have art that was done by artists before the advent of AI…
But those aren’t the ones people are looking at when they give the compliments.
It’s so weird watching writers shoot themselves in their own feet. We’ve been able to self-publish for a while, but suddenly, we can make our own beautiful covers and do thorough, high quality copy edits on our own.
AI has so much more to give writers than it’s ever taken away.
It's a fun little game the US health system plays every few months where the machinery behind one or another of my prescriptions (doctors, pharmacies, etc.) conspires to make sure I spend a couple of days checking that, yes, yes I really do need all of my meds.
Claude thinking: "Weighing alien authenticity against decision fatigue."
Claude's thought processes are the best.
I will say that given the timing of the two — West Side Story (1961) and Star Trek (1966) — it’s extremely possible that the one really was actually direct inspiration for the other. And that’s definitely what I’m gonna believe from now on.
Seriously, I could go on and on about all the connections between West Side Story (1961) and Star Trek that just snapped into place in my mind… but it’s really late… and maybe I’ll write an essay later…
Star Trek was an answer to West Side Story (1961).
The Jets & Sharks became the Enterprise crew. Russ Tamblyn’s Riff was the prototype Kirk. And the entire series exists to answer the question, “What if they could just get along?”
And the answer is they’d reach the stars.
Action figure with spiky blue bird head
Very, very preliminary draft of a head for Ensign Ko Marin.
“I had to act without attachment to what was going on. Otherwise, I would get too worn out riding my feelings up and down.”
— Legacy of Luna: The Story of a Tree, a Woman, and the Struggle to Save the Redwoods by Julia Butterfly Hill
My spouse is working on designing a 3D-printable avian Tri-Galactic Union officer to go with the next book that I'm writing, and it leads to us saying "bird" back and forth to each other like Bambi and Thumper over and over again.
It's so cute when the 3D-printer sings about what it's doing while I'm generating songs in Suno, and the robots are singing together.
I’m starting to question whether Twin Peaks has aged out of being properly weird. Like it’s a little weird, I guess? But I’ve seen Centaur World and lived through 2016-26. So… it’s only registering at like a fraction of a degree of weird. But I guess I’m only on the 7th episode.
I know Twin Peaks is supposed to be weird, but not weird like this…
I’ve been staring right at Tony and Riff from West Side Story (which I watched on loop when I was ten) and totally missed it.
They’ve started searching the files for pet birds in Twin Peaks and that triggered a very deep memory I’d totally forgotten…
Monsterpiece Theater: Twin Beaks
…now I know why it was so eerily familiar when Agent Cooper kept recording messages to Diane and raving about pie.
It’s hard to take “Twin Peaks” seriously as just the name of some normal small town while finally watching Twin Peaks because it’s been synonymous with “some weird trippy surreal TV show” for as long as I can remember.
To be fair, I also kind of find breathing confusing... you know, as someone with a CPAP and various asthma meds. Like seriously, I genuinely totally forget how breathing works if I'm told to "just breathe" as if that's some kind of calming piece of advice.
I've now made six albums without short story collections to use as outlines (or pre-written stashes of poetry), and I'm still trying to figure out how to make this process definitively both enjoyable & repeatable.
Making music is very confusing. But also kind of like breathing.
I needed a few days off after finish my last book before really diving into the next one, but I got the next one started tonight, and it already feels good to be back in that universe.
ZOOSCAPE UPDATE:
All responses have been sent out for this year's reading period. We'll be opening to submissions again for February 1-28, 2027.
We have exciting news though! Starting next month, we'll begin publishing every other month. So, twice as many issues per year!
