Ugh you know this website is held up with my meager income. I do not make the money to afford this place, BUT it also gets me work. So I guess in a round about way it’s monetized, but only for other work I get. Not for these rambling posts. I wish I could say it was me being principled, but really the only other way I figured out how to monetize it was installing google ads, but I sometimes post drawings of T Dick here so it’s probably forbidden from getting money. BUT also because of that you get to read my unvarnished rambles.

Anyway whatever. I had to pay $150 for some webhost services this week which is what reminded me of it. But I pay over $1000 a year for this damn site. I didn’t want to leave it on a free WordPress site. And back when this existed on Blogger, Blogger was going to bring in rules that would censor this place so I had to export it and bring it here. So here is my own place on the internet that I pay for so I can say whatever I want.

Life is going ok. I was reminded of this book project I’ve been wanting/trying to work on for the last year. I got the idea on a train from Amsterdam to Osnabrück last year, but I had a LOT of questions that needed answers before I could write it. I wrote a 27 page short story out of it but left the ending off. Then I wrote down the timeline for it. And I kept getting more and more ideas and would just add them to the two documents I had running about the book. So after coming back from Amsterdam this last week I decided to start. So far I have written 12,957 words. One and a half pages were already written though, I just need to go over them again when I start writing again tomorrow. I was dedicating a couple of hours to it every weekday. And some days I increased my writing just because I had a lot to say. One day I wrote over 4000 words but I generally try to get in 1500 a day. I’m aiming for 50,000 words by the middle of the summer, or maybe sooner, it depends how fast I write. In paperback pages I’m at 52 pages I think, and ideally I want 200 pages. Not a super long book. But also! This is me just barfing out the story, I imagine adding a lot more description in the second draft. Plus it’s got a lot of grief in it so I need to linger on some emotional points and right now I’m just kind of zooming through it all. There’s still a lot that has to happen, but I think I might be giving away the answers too soon in this draft. Which is fine since it’s a first draft I guess, but I need to hold back more.

I’m extremely protective of this project though, to the point that I don’t want to apply for grants because I don’t want the idea to get stolen. It feels like a winning lottery ticket and I need to hang on to it while it’s in it’s little ugly baby bird phase. And coax it into being and I just don’t want what has happened to my film career to also happen to something I can write in my own free time. I don’t want to be constantly waiting for permission to tell a story. It’s really frustrated me to need to ask for money for my whole film career and always get just a little bit but never enough for the epic stuff I want to make. And then people are like why is your work so low budget? UGH because that is the budget I keep getting okay?

Anyway, in a book you don’t need a big budget to talk about massive epic things, which is why this particular project is a book and not a film.

The dogs are fine, in other news. Nothing super exciting about them, they’re adorable and fine and Todd is getting less aggressive to Posey and that’s always a good thing because we all have to co-exist in this house.

I’m going back to the gym, I went yesterday for the first time in a long time. I’m thinking about quitting smoking weed again too. I was doing pretty good when I wasn’t smoking it, I was doing ok. And then I guess I just wanted to have shorter periods of being high, because edibles get you high for way too long. But with smoking it’s usually back to normal for me after an hour. But the reason I want to quit is because I know I need to be better to my body. Especially if I want to outlive the fascists to the point when people will give me money to make films again. I just need to live long enough to make stuff! I’m having trouble with my diet though, I just can’t feed myself in a healthier way. I don’t know, I guess I should get more vegetables in my diet or something. I love pastries too and that’s not supposed to be good for me either. But a life deprived of pastries feels like no life at all.

I may as well include here a message that I have started consuming alcohol again. It’s been a couple of months, I have been very careful. My goal was to see if I could hit a limit and not keep going. Because that’s what got me into trouble when I used to drink, I would go way over the limit and puke all the time and not know how to stop. BUT I am happy to say I can stop now. I have not once gotten pukey. And it doesn’t feel as compulsive as when I used to drink. At the same time I know alcohol is a carcinogen so I might end up wanting to quit again for other reasons. But moderation is going alright. I am keeping myself a lightweight too, so that’s kind of good. I don’t ever want to be drinking like, six drinks at a time again. That was not great for my body at all.

What else? I’ve been doing a lot of reading. I read almost all of Parable of the Talents on the plane coming back from Amsterdam. Then I read most of Kindred in one day. Octavia Butler is amazing. I’m reading Fledgling now which is her Vampire novel. I love the way she writes. And I think the way she approaches trauma is really interesting. She will give you this raw information about a traumatic event, but somehow the way she writes it feels respectful, even if it’s horribly violent and unsettling. I noticed that a lot of the Parable of the Sower, with all the violence against children in it. I appreciated that she didn’t just omit the violence and try to act like humanity would be better behaved in that circumstance, which is maybe what other writers would do.

It’s difficult writing trauma. I wish there was a workshop on writers working with trauma because I noticed it a lot in writing one of my features that it didn’t feel good writing these terrible things and I didn’t know what it meant for my brain that I was even thinking of these things. But then if you follow the news there are even more terrifying and evil things happening in real life. So we do have to deal with this in art and writing and film etc.
Anyway besides all that. I am glad I started reading again last summer. I didn’t read as much when I was teaching this last semester. But getting back into it makes me feel good. Especially deciding not to read on my iPad, I think having a physical book in my hand feels a lot better to me. Reading words on a page is a very specific act compared to reading on a screen. Also doing music has taken a large space in my life that I think opened up creative forces that I wasn’t tapped into before.

This weekend Cris Derksen died and while we didn’t spend much time together I would see her out and about. I think the last time I saw her she was performing with Tanya Tagaq here in Toronto. She was three years younger than I am. So definitely in my age group. While it’s been sad to see someone so talented and with such a bright soul pass, it has been nice to see how many people were touched by her work while she was here. At the same time while I know sometimes people say there’s a reason or whatever, I think really sometimes life is just unfair and things happen that shouldn’t have happened. I hope her wife recovers from her injuries. It’s really brought out how fragile life is here. And we don’t know when people will leave.