Following Funds, Fitting in Friends, and Fantastic Feedback

The word of the week is obstinate.

Oct 16 – Beastly Ships?

Why not start out the week with something cool, like spaceships?

In fact, why not step things up, with ships from Star Wars... redrawn as monsters???

Perfect for Halloween coming up!

I just love this art: it plays with the familiar ships, giving a fun and fresh life to designs that I've liked since I was a kid. I'd certainly watch an animated short with these designs, though getting Disney's blessings for the endeavor might be a tad tricky. 

Still, there's always hope... which is the message of Star Wars, after all!

Oct 17 – Follow The Money: 45

Here's something you may not know about the current US Prez:

Who's funding him?

It's a convoluted trail to follow, strangely enough, that leads to one of the richest men on the planet... who got that way via huge investments in fossil fuels.

So it's no coincidence that 45 is really, really interested in repealing laws that restrict that sort of industry, because it puts money both in his and his benefactor's pockets. Follow the money, as they say.

A recent article from The New Yorker dives deep into the story of 45's rise to power through fossil funds, but if you don't want to read the full scoop, here's a primer on how the Orange One came to power riding on political back-actors:

I'm posting this today because it confirms just how dishonest and deadly Donald is for the USA, our nearest and best neighbour: he's solely interested in dollar signs, and will ride the US down in flames if it means he can jump off at the last minute with a golden parachute. 45's a psychopath, and he's there for another three years, it seems.

Horrifying.

Oct 18 – New Home Designs

I'm still working on the dream of getting a Tiny Home for my lady and I here in Victoria, sometime in the next five years.

I've gone over many types of plans for tiny homes, and I'll talk about my favorite design soon in an upcoming blog post. You can even order quite a few tiny homes on Amazon now, and there's quite a few of them available, though I'm not thrilled with any of the designs: they all seem like summer cabins, at best.

However, just this week I found several new companies in Canada who are selling 'container homes' for extremely reasonable prices, once that don't look at all like they've been slapped together at of steel and particle board.

One company in particular, HonoMobo, offers designs incorporating up to four containers that have up to three bedrooms inside, making for quite the spacious home for far less than the current Victoria market value of over $750,000 CAN for the same number of bedrooms inside the city limits - which is crazy. 

Best of all, these particular homes qualify 100% for a regular mortgage, according to HonoMobo! Have a look:

Having a second room for a workspace / office is a MUST!

Oct 19 – Homeless Escape

In my city, the homeless are everywhere, mainly because they can stay here year-round outside due to the weather, unlike most every other city in Canada.

Last year, I blogged a few times about the InTent City camp that sprang up on federal courthouse land and remained for over year until summer 2016 when it was finally dismantled. I walked past the twice a day to and from work, and I saw many things that made me think, but in the end the take away for me was that there's no 'one-size-fits-all' solution for the homeless here in Victoria. But solutions have to be found, as InTent City cost taxpayers $184,000 each month that it remained on the courthouse grounds, totaling several million dollars in all.

Understanding the many problems that homelessness brings with it is the first step, I think, and the CDC recently did a story on a project designed to bring awareness to the public of what those barriers are:

Oct 20 – FEEDBACK!!!

Sometimes, I just can't believe my good luck...

Earlier this year, a friend of a friend moved to Victoria from Ontario, and though we'd connected online through FBook, we'd not managed to meet up in person. However, he did ask about reading the latest draft of my novel to give his feedback, and promised to fill in my multi-page questionnaire diligently, so I was hopeful that I'd get a few solid tidbits from him to tweak my draft with.

HOO-BOY, did he deliver, and in SPADES!

Incredibly, he wrote up nearly 10,000 words of feedback on my recent draft, and almost every word of it is spot-on in terms of context and the reasoning behind the comments, as well as suggestions as to where to go with it - and ALL of it delivered in a positive, constructive way along with praise for the quality of my book.

I was stunned: it's by far the most concise-per-page feedback I've received to date, which I suspect is because my friend was unfamiliar with my book... but being a scifi fan, and a programmer, he dug in with gusto to comment chapter-by-chapter. My critique group has been wonderful in the last 5 years in their ability to deliver excellent feedback to date, and today my new friend did the same in the space of a few week's reading time... an AMAZING feat!

To be honest, I'm now looking at least doing a Draft 4.5, if not a full revision, given the scope and detail of his notes. I'll be discussing most of the major points with my critique group in a few days, to see if they agree as they're most familiar with my draft, but my head is reeling...

Wowsers.

Oct 21 – MORE FEEDBACK!!!

After another busy morning, it was time to meet my feedback friend again.

We went to Sookjai, on Fort Street, which at this time of day / week is almost always uncrowded... and it held true to form, so we were easily able to converse over some tasty Thai food.

Yesterday, we left off about halfway through the chapter-by-chapter feedback, having put to bed all the nitty-gritty questions and details asked for in my Questionnaire; that alone had a ton of back-and-forth that left me smiling all last night!

Going over the later chapters, much of what came up was plot-related, and also tied into the character's motivations, which my friend had zeroed in on with laser-accuracy: something that I've been too close to the work to do over the years. 

In total, we spent more than five hours yesterday and today discussing my novel, with my taking copious notes atop his already-detailed notes to ensure I didn't miss a thing as my mind raced with the possibilities - which we then worked over.

I'm going to be compiling his suggestions over the next few weeks, and then setting aside my initial re-work of my second book to dive back into the first - I can't let an opportunity like this slip away, when it's been handed to me on a silver platter!

It's even more work, but the end result will be a stunning book indeed in early 2018!

BONUS: I spent the VERY rainy evening with my lady and a couple of friends in Langford, playing boardgames! We played a few rounds each of Dragonwood and Seven Dragons, so it was a fire-breather of a night - fun!

Oct 22 – Denouement

Since it's been quite a week of weighty subjects, I thought I'd take a break.

How about a spot about books?

One issue with my wanting to live in a Tiny House is to find space for the nearly 2,000 books I own, a not-inconsiderable number in terms of the space they take up. In my first apartment here in Victoria, I had a total of 13 bookshelves of various sizes, 7 of which were completely devoted to my books... and the number's grown since then. Fitting all of that into a 20' x 10' space will be a challenge, I know, but I won't go through life with a pared-down library - I can't.

It seems quite a few authors feel the same way.

There's some pretty extreme examples of famous book hoarders out there, whose collections dwarf my own... but since they're famous AND rich, it's not an issue. Here's Neil Gaiman's basement library, and he's not even in the Top 10 Hoarders listed above( Hemingway is, and he only had 9,000 books in his collection ):

I'll admit, I'm not sure what I'm going to do at this point. Depending on the property we find, we might end up having a 'book shack' to keep most of them. It'd be a writing space separate from the main house, insulated and quiet, where my lady and I can retreat to read or write, away from the bustle of the world:

Sooo.... cozy....

That way, we can keep our books close, but not feel crowded by them; perfect!

Well, I'm flying high from those two days of feedback - wow! I should say that my core seems to have firmed up, as I'm sitting and moving around pretty much normally now, though I am using a heating pad a few times a day to ensure my abs and deeper core muscles stay relaxed. My right leg's still tweaking me a few times a week, depending on how long I've been sitting, so that's something to work on, but I went swimming again this week and was just fine, having stretched before and afterwards without overdoing things. Onwards into another fine week, with lots to do in a day again - hooray!