Category: Uncategorized

I’ve been revisiting comics from my youth, again. This time, it’s a significant chunk of writer John Smith’s 2000 AD work, which I eagerly and impatiently followed through the late 1980s and early 1990s; he wrote a number of different things for the anthology during that time, both of his own creation — Tyranny Rex, Indigo Prime, Revere, Firekind, Devlin Waugh — and picking up part-time work on other people’s characters and strips. He did some Judge Dredd, a little bit of Rogue Trooper, and even a Robo Hunter at some point, if I remember correctly.

I’m telling you this not to be a fanboy — I think I’ve already established those bona fides simply by being able to list all those strips without having to reference anything in advance, let’s be honest — but to point out that Smith was someone who made a point to keep busy on a number of different projects during this time, with a number of different attitudes on display in each of them. There wasn’t just one “John Smith” flavor, if that makes sense.

And yet, I always knew when Smith was writing something, even as a teen who wasn’t the most adept at understanding the nuances of author’s tics or how to identify recurring themes and obsessions to identify a creator. Revisiting his work en masse as I have been, I realize what clued me in was, of all things, Smith’s language, and the ways in which he’d write things in such a way to be… emotionally centered, rather than practically so, if that makes sense…?

Looking at it today, I can recognize that Smith was using techniques he’d lifted from contemporary poets and literary prose in how he approached language; there would be blocks of purple prose, or sentences in fragments to establish a mood or a feeling, all of which felt brand new and exciting to the me I was back then. I feel as if, in his way, Smith opened up a space in my brain for an appreciation of non-linear writing, and more experimental writing, just by being in that Judge Dredd comic when I was at the right age to learn. I’m forever grateful for that.

Despite the weather shitshow that Portland has seemed intent on delivering lately — it’s April, why are we having to deal with snow showers and the temperature dropping below freezing seemingly every night? — it is, nonetheless, still edging towards summer, and my body is clearly preparing for this eventuality by refusing to keep me asleep past 5:45am.

This isn’t the worst thing in the world, I know; at the very least, I’ve been able to see some genuinely beautiful sunrises, as the sky shifts through colors in order to find the right setting for the day, all soundtracked by insistent and excited birdsong. There’s something about that being the start to your day that feels refreshing and invigorating, as if the world is waking up with you and you’re connected with something larger than yourself. I’m not complaining about that part of it.

I’m also not complaining about the opportunity waking up early has afforded me to both catch up on reading and, in a couple of cases, catch up on or get ahead of writing deadlines. There’s been a lot going on in the last few weeks, and even just that extra hour or so has proven to be a welcome godsend of quiet and brain space that’s been impossibly useful.

No, what I’m complaining about is the price my early wake-ups have taken from me. Now, no matter what, I am entirely done with the day by 10 o’clock at night; 10:30 at the latest. I don’t just mean that I’m sleepy, although I am; I mean that my body just basically makes the choice for me that the day is over, and I realize that I have maybe half an hour to get into bed before I’m out like a light.

It’s not as if I’ve ever really been a night owl, but this feels like next level tiredness, and a reminder that I’m that little bit closer to 50 every single day. Only old people are this tired at night, I think to myself as I start wrapping things up at 9:30 in the evening, and that’s just what I am, now.

Every single year without exception, tax time stresses me out. It’s something I struggle through from the moment I start thinking about taxes — usually somewhere in mid-December, because the year’s ending and oh boy I should start putting together that expenses list again — to the moment everything is filed and I’ve put the checks in the mail. (Yes, I pay the majority of things online; for some reason, though, I always pay Portland’s Arts Tax with a check. It’s the one thing I use my checks for, still. That’s not a joke; literally the last time I used my checkbook was this time last year, to write a check for Arts Tax.)

The stress surrounding taxes comes in waves, in different flavors. Gathering together all the information I need in the first place, and stressing simultaneously about how little money I made in any year and how much of it I spent on things that are literally unavoidable, like rent and groceries. (Honestly, my discretionary spending is shockingly low; I just can’t afford it.) Wondering if I’ve missed some expense, some information that would change all the math. Checking where all my 10-99 forms have gone. (One year, I’ll remember to store them all in one place as they arrive, I promise.)

And then there’s the anxious wait for my CPA to tell me how bad things are, and the feeling of, welp, I guess I didn’t want to save any money after all when I actually get the information back. I didn’t use an accountant for many years, and then the first year that I did, he told me that I’d been missing out on a lot of possible benefits I could have claimed, but also that I’d been failing to pay a freelance tax for years; after that, having a tax guy became a must.

I’ve mailed everything off for the year as I write. But even now, the stress isn’t entirely over: what if this is the year I get audited? What if there’s a mistake in there I didn’t catch? Surely there’s some way I could do this better? Maybe a month from now, I’ll be able to think of something else again.

In our search for appropriately mindless, entertaining post-work, post-getting kid in bed nighttime viewing, we’ve arrived at binging seasons of the dearly-departed America’s Next Top Model, and, man. Let me tell you.

How we ended up here was, admittedly, somewhat skewed. A couple of weeks ago, there was an article somewhere on the internet — I saw it excerpted at length on Twitter, and unfortunately can’t remember where it actually came from; Insider, maybe? — that purported to be an expose of just how shittily the show had been run, how poorly it treated everyone involved aside from the show’s host and creator Tyra Banks, and just generally the way in which ANTM was, in fact, the worst of reality television. Chloe and I saw that and thought, as you do, we should watch old seasons.

(I’d say, don’t judge, but it’s fine; you probably should.)

Here’s the thing: I remember, vaguely, watching some of the show when it was airing — I love reality TV, after all — but I was never really a fan, for whatever reason. It seemed over the top, but fine if you liked that kind of thing, if that doesn’t seem too dismissive. Dear reader, I was so, so wrong. America’s Next Top Model is a whole special level of trash television.

It’s not that it’s tacky, although it is, nor that it’s geared towards generating the most amount of interpersonal drama possible between its contestants, even though that’s also the case. (There’s definitely a line to be drawn between the editing manipulation here and the far more successful evolution of the same ideas on something like Below Deck.) It’s not even the shocking ego on display from Tyra Banks, and the way in which everyone else on the show seeks to stroke that ego, shamelessly, for attention and approval, even though, wooooooooooo, that is shocking and hilarious at the same time.

More than anything for me, it’s how cheap the show feels, on every level. Even in the latter seasons when it’s been a hit for more than a decade and produced international spin-offs, Top Model has the air of a show being produced on a shoestring by people promising that, as soon as the check clears, everyone will get paid, really. The tension between the self-declared glamor of the show and the clearly limited budget and effort spent on bringing said show to the screen is, repeatedly, breathtaking and hilarious. It’s impossible to look away from.

I couldn’t not tell you why this happens to be the case, but in the last few days I’ve found myself wanting to write something entirely different from what I normally do; I don’t know if it’s simply needing to take a mental break, or wanting to stretch new muscles or some combination of the two, but it’s been a running theme in my head recently.

Specifically, I’ve wondered what it would be like to write guides to everyday tasks. You know the kinds of things: step-by-step methodologies to things that we all do every day without even really thinking about it, to help someone less skilled in whatever task get better at it. Every morning, as I make tea for myself and Chloe, I think to myself, I wonder what it would be like to write a guide to making a good cup of tea.

Of course, it’s the kind of idea doomed to failure; I couldn’t write something entirely dryly without breaking character, I’m pretty sure — nor, to be honest, something that I’d want to not break character at least once — but also, it’s something that I suspect I’d lose interest in quickly because there are inevitably going to be other things demanding my attention that, you know, pay my bills, and that’s something that tends to win out in the competition for my affections. (I’m so mercenary.)

And yet. And yet.

I want to write something like, if only there were more hours in the day, but the honest fact is, if there were more hours in the day, it would be great to use them on things that don’t involve me sitting in front of a computer or an iPad. What I really mean, I think, is that I occasionally (more than occasionally) wish there was more space in my brain to do things that remind me that writing was a hobby and one I loved, before writing became my job. Even if it means writing instructions for someone to make a cup of tea.

There is, I’m sure, a specific word to describe the feeling I had yesterday when standing outside in a t-shirt and pants — no sweater, no jacket, no hat — basking in the sun and actually, honestly, swear-to-god feeling the warmth of the sun on my head and shoulders and realizing that, maybe really honestly, the winter is coming to an end.

In younger days, I embraced the cold and the overcast; sometimes, I even appreciated the rain, although growing up in the west coast of Scotland, that wasn’t something I did that often. The summer and, more importantly, the idea of enjoying sunshine and warmth was something that I had definitively decided was Something That Other People Did. Not for me, the t-shirt weather of even San Francisco in the summer; I’d ride the bus downtown to work and grimace at the sun in the sky, squinting when it got in my eyes.

Portland, then, felt like a godsend when I arrived. The weather here was just like I’d grown up with, after all, with actual seasons after almost a decade of generic, unchanging Bay Area pleasantness. Within weeks of getting here, there was a snowstorm that I was in no way prepared for, and I was thrilled to freeze my backside off upon discovering that.

Maybe it’s just the increasing length of the winters that have changed that — I’m fairly sure that March marked the changeover from winter to spring when I first got here,  although that might be an entirely faulty memory at work — or simply the reality of getting older and less tolerant of atmospheric conditions that are, let’s be blunt, uncomfortable and not entirely enjoyable to anyone with a lick of sense. Nonetheless, just as seasons change, so has my response to said seasons. I may not be becoming a summer person just yet, but I’m at least making it to spring.

That said, it’s gone from high 70s and sunny yesterday to low 50s and blustery today, so perhaps the weather is trying to tell me not to get too comfortable just yet.

It’s one of those weeks where I feel as if I’m preparing for a lot of things, on the work front. I’m still doing a lot of things, but most of them are behind the scenes and not for public consumption — a chunk of this week is actually being spent helping out someone else on their project, entirely behind the scenes, which feels like double-plus not for public consumption — which is something that always leaves me filled with a strange nervous energy, as if failing to produce something that’ll be read by the internet at large is an actual problem that I need to correct as quickly as possible.

Objectively, I know that’s not true, of course; there’s nothing in any of my current contracts that suggests that I have to produce a certain amount of material to be published on a daily schedule. (I do, however, have a lot of deadlines on a number of things to write over the next few weeks; eight or so, by last count, which means that I’ll have to buckle down and make things happen sooner rather than later. But still.) And yet, I’m in recovery for being an internet writer who grew up in an era where daily publication was a must to stay alive and keep a career going. Years later, I still feel as if something has gone wrong if I’m not putting my name out there, day after day.

I assume there’s some kind of study that’s been done on this by someone, just as I assume that I’m not the only person who’s gone through this. After all, there are generations of writers, online and print, who’ve transitioned from daily deadlines to something more relaxed; with that many going before me, there’s no chance that I’m the only one who’s experiencing these kinds of jitters. In fact, maybe I could look into that and then turn that into a story to write for someone. That could work, couldn’t it?

I was talking to Chloe earlier about what we described as our shared inability to accept compliments, but the more we talked, the more it dawned on both of us that the problem was, perhaps, that neither of us were particularly good at even recognizing when we were being complimented in the first place.

The conversation started upon seeing mutual friends take credit for comments that weren’t, necessarily, compliments aimed in their direction, all the while taking great pains to ensure that everyone knew just how humble they really were, of course. It was something that amused both of us, not only in how obvious their egos were, but in the fact that both of us realized quickly that we lacked whatever DNA we needed to do the same thing.

Instead, both of us have something that could, at best, be described as an anti-ego: something that hears a comment about us and immediately assumes, if not the worst, then at least the most bland and generic. We could both receive compliments that seemed on the face of them to be sincere and wholehearted, and instead either hear them as half-hearted attempts in the name of being polite, or else subtle sarcasm intended to suggest that we’re actually the very opposite of whatever was actually being said.

Such an anti-ego can be both a blessing and a curse — although mostly the latter. There is the upside of it preventing either of us from getting a big head, which is always a preferred outcome… but then there’s the fact that neither of us are particularly gracious in the face of people who genuinely are trying to compliment us, because we simply don’t quite believe what they’re saying. Instead, we both just have developed the impulse to mumble semi-gracious thanks before desperately trying to change the subject as quickly as possible.

Thinking about it, it’s good that neither of us have won any kind of award. Just imagine how bad the acceptance speech would be.

I miss eating out.

That’s not a euphemism; with one single exception, I haven’t eaten at a restaurant or cafe or coffee shop or, basically, anywhere that isn’t in the same place where I’ve been sleeping since lockdown started in March 2020, and it’s been long enough that I can admit to feeling really kind of strange about that now.

It’s not that I’ve not eaten food prepared by anyone outside of my immediate family in all that time; I’ve ordered more than my fair share of takeout in that time — what can I say? I really like both fancy American fusion food and McDonalds, and see no real reason to deny myself either as long as I can afford it and don’t overindulge — and eaten some pre-packaged snacks and frozen meals across the past 24 months, as well. But I haven’t actually eaten a meal anywhere that isn’t my house.

(Oddly enough, as I’m writing this, I’m wracking my brain to imagine if I’ve even eaten anything as much as a candy bar outside the house in all that time, and I don’t think I have. That can’t be right, and yet, I have the horrible feeling that it is.)

We’re at the post-lockdown point now where everyone seems to have just… accepted the pandemic as a fact of life and an acceptable risk, with seemingly everyone around me wandering around without masks and the various restaurants allowing sit-in custom again. I have to confess, I’m tempted to just throw caution to the wind and eat out for the first time in two years, just for the thrill of it. Imagine the decadence you’d be feeling!

Except… except, as I said before, there’s one exception to all of this: a birthday meal for a family member at a restaurant, last summer. For the entire meal, I felt anxious and nervous, as if this was the moment when COVID would get me once and for all. I could barely enjoy the food, or the company, the entire time.

Maybe I’ll stay in the house for now. But maybe I’ll order some food in, and pretend I’m being fancy, at the same time.

For the majority of my professional writing career, I’ve prided myself on the speed at which I work — an ability to basically sit down, start writing and get to the end of the piece in a surprisingly speedy time, with minimal need to re-read or re-work as much as possible. It’s been something that’s been remarked upon by editors and other writers, with no small amount of jealousy and admiration; hence my lack of modesty about it.

Something has happened in the last couple of months to change that, however. I suspect the change happened earlier than that — I have a feeling it’s closely related to the period of extended writing I did for a couple of long term projects last year, only one of which has come to any kind of fruition as yet — but whatever the timing and whatever the reason, I’ve become a fan of writing things ahead of deadline and leaving them alone overnight, before re-reading them the next day and making whatever changes necessary.

It’s not that I make that many changes the next day; more often than not, I change a couple of words in a vain attempt to get the word count down, or perhaps shift the order of a couple of sentences around. Instead, it’s become a confidence thing, where I find myself feeling far more comfortable just being able to re-approach the piece fresh and see where I’ve gone wrong. It’s a safety net, perhaps, but one I’ve come to rely upon with almost everything I’m writing, these days. (Blog posts aside, of course.)

It’s this safety net that’s had me rework pieces from scratch, knowing exactly what to do to fix them in next-to-no time; it’s the safety net that’s made me more confident in working for larger companies paying me larger amounts of money to write for them. Sure, it’s slowed me down some, but I’m nearing 50. Writing automatic prose is a young person’s game — and it’s not as if waiting one day is going to make a significant change in anyone’s run time, anyway.