Jeremy Zimmerman's Blog, page 3

The Bolthy Manifesto (2015 Edition)

As I watched my 40th birthday slowly creep up on me, I sought opinions on what I should do to commemorate it. One friend suggested I write a manifesto. At first I thought I couldn’t do such a thing, assuming that I would have some sort of answers about life when I don’t. But I looked up what a manifesto means: “A manifesto is a published verbal declaration of the intentions, motives, or views of the issuer.”

For whatever reason, the thought of it being about my own views rather than some fundamental truth made it easier. Since my thirties have been a time of re-evaluating my life, I thought summing it up could have value for me if no one else. I will not claim this is brilliant or insightful. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that these are things that some people deal with much better than I have. It’s just what I’ve been struggling with and the answers that I found helpful.

I meant to publish this on my birthday, but I didn’t manage that. So here’s the belated manifesto.

The Dirty Thirties

This picture makes it look like I’m offering you a pill that will let you see reality as it is. Actually it’s a pretentious selfie where I’m holding some DayQuil. This is a metaphor.

In 2006 I turned 31, and around that time (loosely) the foundations of what I thought was true began to fall apart and I also embarked on some new experiences. My trust in my marriage received a hefty blow and pushed me into the deepest depression I’ve experienced to date. I also experienced what I can only call a crisis of faith in connection to my Buddhist beliefs. I also started working at the County, which wasn’t as traumatic but was a definite change in my life and impacted how other things worked. And I started writing regularly for the first time in over a decade.

Since then my life has changed: I’ve divorced, remarried, dropped out of my old Buddhist sangha and struggled to find a new one, gotten fiction published, killed off one small business and started a new one. My work has been unsatisfying, but has at least been a stable source of income that has helped support my quest to figure out what I want to do.

The crisis of faith came to one basic shift in my beliefs that frames my manifesto.

There is probably no God. And if there is, it probably doesn’t matter.

Before I explain that better, I figure I should explain my background on the subject. I like to describe my upbringing as “ethnically Lutheran.” I was mainly raised by my grandparents who had stopped going to church for whatever reason. I was told I was Lutheran, I was given many children’s books of Bible stories, and that was really it.

I didn’t attend an actual church until I was probably 9 years old. One of my friends invited me to his church where his father was the minister. It was Missionary Baptist. An elderly woman goaded me to go up to the minister to “ask to be saved,” even though I didn’t know what that meant. It was the first of many negative experiences I had with Christianity.

In high school, a couple things changed. First, I had a crush on a girl who turned out to be born-again. She didn’t date non-Christians. Up until that point I had always thought of myself as Christian, because as a white kid in a middle class neighborhood, I couldn’t imagine being anything else. But when actually presented with an opportunity to commit, I didn’t.

Around this time, I also got a chance to play Dungeons and Dragons. As someone who likes to tell stories, this was an amazing experience. By unrelated coincidence, the mother of the classmate I played D&D with was a professional astrologer. As they became something of a surrogate family for me, I started to explore a bunch of new-agey stuff. Mostly astrology, but I had passing knowledge of a lot of other stuff.

In my late 20s, a friend of mine passed away and I found myself re-examining my life. Mainly because my last conversation with him made me realize what a self-absorbed asshole I was. Wanting to find some way to be a better person, I took a meditation class through a Buddhist center. That got me interested in Buddhism. I ended up even being part of the council for the center, enjoying the fun of trying to figure out how to pay the bills for a non-proselytizing religious organization that could only ethically request donations and could not just demand payment for classes.

(This is a large part of why I don’t volunteer my time anymore.)

When I had walked away from Christianity, it was in large part because it didn’t make sense to me in the big picture. You look at the vast scope of the universe, how mind-bogglingly huge it is, look at all of the cultures on the planet, the thousands of years of recorded history. The thought that some guy 2,000 years ago, who was only influential in a very small stretch of land, was the sole source of information about the cosmological underpinnings of existence? That seemed absurd.

But astrology, reincarnation, and other new-agey stuff made sense to me at the time. In hindsight I can’t really explain why. But as unreasonable as I found Christianity, I somehow found new-age/neo-pagan and Buddhist cosmology believable.

Until I didn’t. It dawned on me one day that all religions are born out of some small part of the world and grow out from there. And the odds of some localized belief system being the Truth, when there are so many Truths out there, is low. I was stuck with the image of the world as billions of souls living and dying for thousands of years, all with the same hopes and dreams, being born, living, and dying over and over again. A 3.5 billion year long self-perpetuating chemical process with delusions of grandeur. It gave me little hope that any group of people had insight into the cosmology of the universe.

Astrology and other forms of prognostication had an extra problem: If there was a reliable way to predict the future, wouldn’t it be everywhere? I mean seriously. If businesses could reliably know what would happen, wouldn’t they use it to make more money? When that was pointed out to me, I just couldn’t let it go. (The response from those who believe astrology or the like is usually a belief in some sort of vague conspiracy of haters who want to suppress the truth.)

As an aside, a book that got me through this period was Stephen Batchelor’s Buddhism Without Beliefs, and it’s why I still identify as Buddhist. I’d read it with my Buddhist group’s book study group and was one of two people who liked it. Everyone else reacted very negatively to it. It’s one of the reasons I ended up leaving the group. It strengthened my feeling that there is value to symbols and metaphors, even if it’s not a literal truth. They can be an invaluable lens to examine our lives through. The hard part is the frequency with which people think that it’s a literal truth.

This also isn’t to say that there couldn’t be some higher intelligence that made the universe. But given the complexity and vastness of the Earth, I can’t believe that it has anything to do with human speculation on divinity. Or really humans in general. So if it exists, humanity is more likely to be a footnote than some precious and special creation.

I didn’t mind the thought of losing God. But losing some sense of destiny or cosmic purpose unnerved me. Without karma or merit or rebirth or whatever, I felt pretty rudderless in the world. Which brings me to my next point.

There is no Absolute Should.

When life is an elaborate chemical process clinging to a rock hurtling through the void, there isn’t an inherent morality in the world. There is no divine judgment for wickedness. Atrocities committed fade into the grinder of history. There is no higher power that proclaims one group of people superior to another. There is also no higher power that proclaims two groups equal.

Whatever we hold to be true is something we choose to hold true. The choice may be invisible, lost in the social conditioning, mental health, and genetic predisposition that sculpts the sense of self to which we cling. Sometimes our particular brain chemistry makes it impossible to choose something else. As someone who takes a fistful of drugs every day to deal with depression, I know how limited choices can seem when I’m not medicated. But my main thrust is that these things don’t exist outside of us.

For the pedantic readers, I’ll add a couple provisos. This doesn’t mean that physical laws don’t still apply. You can’t counter gravity through the Power of Positive Thinking. And there are what I will call Provisional Shoulds: If you want to be able to pay your rent, you should probably do something to earn money so you can pay it. If you want to run a marathon, you should probably run regularly to build up stamina. Provisional Shoulds form a lot of the social contract that keeps me from living out in the street. But even then, Provisional Shoulds are not guaranteed to be accurate.

For me, a lot of Buddhism is a Provisional Should. It outlines a course of action for dealing with existential angst like mine. There are other routes. Some involve playing “Let it Go” on loop. But Buddhism is not a mandatory/absolute thing. It’s just a provisional thing.

I suppose a more noble person might ponder what the path of virtue is in all of this mess, and that sometimes creeps up in my brooding. But really it makes me wonder what to do with my life. I’m sort of selfish that way.

In my teens, I worked the obligatory dead-end fast food jobs. I got through it by believing that I was so inherently awesome that I would leave these knuckle dragging barbarians in their redneck backwater. This was bolstered by assurance that astrology suggested I would be financially successful!

But I’m forty now. No signs of greatness. I’m not the next Neil Gaiman. It’s statistically unlikely that I ever will be. (Though he was not much younger than me when Sandman came out.) This doesn’t mean it’s impossible. But I can’t pin my worth on being some definition of “successful.” There’s no way to know where my choices will lead. There is no fate or destiny awaiting from me. Just a series of events until I die.

“Since death alone is certain and the time of death uncertain, what should I do?” That’s a quote that has come up in various forms in Buddhism. Probably other places. And it haunts me. I know it doesn’t haunt other people. I’ve pitched that question onto social media a few time to see how people react. Either they misread it to mean that you have 24 hours to live or something, or they don’t find the question meaningful. “You mean, the way life is? Yeah, I’m already doing that. Had that insight already.”

Thanks asshole.

“What should I do?” That question freaks me the fuck out. That horrible sense of, “If I don’t do this important thing that I hate doing there will be long term consequences. Unless of course I die tomorrow, in which case I will have spent my last night on earth doing something I hate.”

It makes me want to run around and scream, “Why does anybody do anything?” The answer I came up with is not entirely helpful.

Do the things you want to do, to the best of your ability, so long as you’re not hurting other people.

That’s the best truth I’ve found. But it’s not easy. People are not simple. Anyone who tells you otherwise probably wants to sell you a book. (Granted, I’d gladly sell you a book, but that’s not what this is about.) I don’t mean for this to be a dewy-eyed platitude about “pursue your dreams, no matter the cost!” My attitude is that life is shorter than you would like, so you may as well do something you enjoy. But there are consequences to your actions. You also need to take care of things for which you are responsible. Because pursuing your dream is not as helpful if you are miserable and making other people miserable.

This truth is not entirely helpful for me because it’s not really satisfying, and it’s not easily answered. So much of my last decade has been trying to figure out where the line exists between what I personally want and what other people have convinced me that I should want. What I can do and what it will cost me. We get all sorts of messages from TV or our parents or whatever, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to what makes our lives worth living. That’s just someone else’s suggestion.

I have a mountain of debt and I work at a job that can help me pay off that debt, as well as provide my wife and I decent health coverage. It doesn’t nourish my soul, but it supports me enough that I can squeeze in doing stuff I enjoy on the side. Unless I become someone like Neil Gaiman (who I bring up a lot because he seems like he has a cool life) then that’s really the world I have to live with. Until I can finagle some way to get someone to pay me full time to dink around with story ideas and occasionally play games, that’s life.

“Why would you want to save the galaxy?” “Because I’m one of the idiots who lives in it!”

If you’re the sort of asshole who has to actually ask, “Well why the part about not hurting other people?” Then first I would like to ask you to go fuck yourself. Secondly, Guardians of Order provided me with a phrase that has stuck with me over the years. It’s not as good as being paid for the work I did, but it’s a pretty good phrase: enlightened self interest.

If you cannot find it in yourself to help others because it is nice to help others, then there’s always enlightened self interest. You can help others because it helps yourself. I’m not talking about cosmic rewards or something. I’m saying: If people are happy, then the world you live in is better.

If people have food, lodging, health care, education, and freedom from harm, then the world is a better place. There can be less crime, less addiction, people able to make changes for the better. In the United States especially, we have so much surplus it seems ridiculous to have these problems.

If everyone is allowed to live free of the suffering caused by not having the necessities of life, then that means that the starting point for accomplishing great things is that much closer to everyone. Even if you don’t give a shit about people being happy: What if everyone was better educated? What if they didn’t need to bend or break the law in order to get food or shelter?

One acquaintance of mine, to whom I no longer speak, got really wound up when someone said that if you were stranded on a desert island, you were more likely to survive if someone else was with you. Somehow he twisted it up into his only value being breeding stock or something. It derailed the whole conversation in a different direction, so I didn’t think to point out the obvious: If you break your leg, you have a better chance of surviving if there is someone else there who can splint your leg and help you out until you heal.

We are where we’re at by luck. You can try to tell yourself that you pulled yourself up by your bootstraps, but really you’re just a chemical process that has been shuttled into a place of comfort by the world’s most elaborate Rube Goldberg device. But we have the benefit of being a chemical process that can choose to create a safety net so that people overall are better.

 

So there you go. That’s what I’ve managed to bungle into a coherent belief system over the last decade. Hopefully in the next decade I’ll come up with something better. And if you think you know better than me, write your own damn manifesto. Somewhere else. Far away from me.

Now get off my lawn.

Originally published at Jeremy Zimmerman. You can comment here or there.

Final Norwescon 38 Schedule

I have received my final schedule for Norwescon 38 (April 2-5, 2015). Because I know you care, I am offering it up to all of you! If you want to see the rest of the schedule for Norwescon, click here.

Worldwide Dead

Thu 3:00pm-4:00pm – Cascade 9

Nathan Crowder (M), Pat MacEwen, Jude-Marie Green, Arinn Dembo, Jeremy Zimmerman

The Power of Free

Thu 6:00pm-7:00pm – Cascade 10

Esther Jones (M), Diana Copland, Frances Pauli, Jeremy Zimmerman

Gamer Etiquette: Use Your Words

Thu 8:00pm-9:00pm – Cascade 9

Sar Surmick (M), Jeremy Zimmerman, Eric Cagle, Ogre Whiteside, Lola Watson

Reading: Jeremy Zimmerman

Fri 10:30am-11:00am – Cascade 1

Jeremy Zimmerman

Short Stories: At the Cutting Edge of SF

Fri 3:00pm-4:00pm – Cascade 5

Cat Rambo (M), Alex C. Renwick, Jeremy Zimmerman

Autograph Session 2

Sat 3:00pm-4:00pm – Grand 2

Jeff Sturgeon, Django Wexler, Randy Henderson, G. Willow Wilson, Kristi Charish, Frog Jones, Richard Hescox, Darragh Metzger, David J. Peterson, Esther Jones, Jeremy Zimmerman, John (J.A.) Pitts, Kevin Radthorne, Laura Anne Gilman, Michael G. Munz, Rhiannon Held, Leannan Sidhe, Steven Barnes, Tim McDaniel

Top 15 Best GM Habits

Sat 7:00pm-8:00pm – Cascade 10

David Nasset Sr. (M), Wolfgang Baur, Jeremy Zimmerman, Ogre Whiteside

The Next Generation: Gaming with Kids

Sun 11:00am-12:00pm – Cascade 10

Jeremy Zimmerman (M), Patrick McKinnion, Adrienne Carlson, Wednesday (Nessie) Phoenix, David Fooden

Originally published at Jeremy Zimmerman. You can comment here or there.

Where do we go from here?

A few things have occurred in the last couple weeks. First, I did my final assignment for my Passion Search workshop. Second, SFWA announced that they would be accepting self-published authors under specific criteria. Third, I went on a three day silent residential meditation retreat.

And with this stew of events in my head, I feel like I’ve come to something resembling provisional life path to pursue.

My final assignment for my Passion Search workshop was to develop a “vision statement.” One was supposed to be a general life path statement, the other specific to what I want out of work. Here’s what I came up with:

Life Path: I want to find a way to combine my love for stories, problem solving, and variety.

Work: I want to have a job that allows me to explore my creativity and problem solving, working with a small group of similarly creative problem solvers. In a perfect world this would also involve being able to use these stories to expand equity and social justice.

On a certain level, I felt frustrated by this. Because I felt I knew this already. Over the course of the class, I feel I learned a lot about myself and learned where some of my challenges started. But in the end I had really hoped I would find a next-step. Which I guess is why the offer a separate workshop called “Vision into Action.”

In this state of frustration, word spread about Science Fiction Writers of America creating criteria for self-published authors to join. The official info is now out, and you can join if you earn $3,000 in a year from your novel. It’s comparable to their normal requirement for authors to get a $3,000 advance on a novel published by a big firm. And, for the record, you just have to accomplish that once.

I have very complicated feelings about SFWA and the criteria for being a professional writer. At a certain point, I decided I just wouldn’t care any more about trying to join. I’d learned that SF writers tend to not make much of a living off of their writing, which is sort of emphasized by how much a professional writer is expected to make on a novel sale in order to qualify for SFWA. (Because, seriously, you’d have to sell four books a year at that rate to reach poverty level.) I just focused on projects I cared about instead of worrying about finding an agent or getting the coveted qualifying sale to join SFWA.

And now this self-publishing option hit, and it’s left me wondering if I could sell that many copies of Kensei. What would I have to do to sell that many? What would I be willing to do? Because as little as $3,000 is compared to my day job salary, it’s astronomical compared to what I’ve made as a writer. I’ve maybe broken into triple digits with my short fiction. For Kensei, I’ve made a grand total of $39.10 since it first published in 2012. (This doesn’t factor in Patreon.) All of that has been since I self-published Kensei last November. I would need to sell almost a hundred times as many books to do this. Which is extra hard when it’s difficult to give it away for free.

And so then I come to the meditation retreat. From Friday night to Monday morning, I was in a silent meditation retreat at Cloud Mountain Retreat Center with about forty other people. I’d never done one before. The experience was transformative. I have no other words for it. I’m not going to say it was perfect bliss, but I can’t remember ever experiencing a greater moment of contentment than I experienced on this retreat. Returning to the real world was not easy.

Yeah, I totally Instagrammed it.

It was while at this retreat that I had a small epiphany. A big hurdle between my status quo and taking risks to pursue fanciful dreams is my mountain of debt. I’ve done a lot to cut my expenses, but it’s still a slow-going slog that seems like it will never end.

And so the first part of my small epiphany was: It would probably help if I were able to make more money at my writing and publishing. Especially since I consistently lose money at this. Mad Scientist Journal has an all-time net loss of about $10,000. Last year alone was a loss of $3,000. It would help my debt situation if I wasn’t losing $3,000 a year producing MSJ. The other books I’ve put out (Kensei, Crossing the Streams, The Devil, You Say) have also been a net loss thanks to cover art.

The second part of my small epiphany was: I could be doing more with my time. People talk about writing being a second full time job. But lately I’ve only been putting in about 10 hours a week at it. I think I could easily double that and not cause myself undue burden. (Or maybe 30-40 if I gave up doing ANYTHING ELSE. But there are some things I’m not willing to sacrifice.)

So that’s my master plan. Invest more time into things I love, try to find a way for my creative projects to pay for themselves. I don’t know exactly how that will work, but that’s a question for another blog post.

Originally published at Jeremy Zimmerman. You can comment here or there.

Bringing it All Together

Next Tuesday marks the last day of my Passion Search workshop. By that time, I’m supposed to have my final homework completed. This consists of two things: One is something visual that’s supposed to remind me of what is important to me. The other is at least one “vision statement.” For the latter, I can pick from an assortment of aspects about my life to make the vision statement about. It could be a statement about my path in life, it could be about work, it could be something else entirely.

In a rare moment of studiousness, and following the instructions I’ve been given, I’ve gone back through all the notes. I also listened to the one workshop session I had remembered to record. (So I got to spend 45 minutes “enjoying” the sound of myself talking. Ugh.) I’ve picked out keywords, written them on note cards. Then I wrote on the back of each of the cards what those words mean to me. And now I’ve been staring at these cards infrequently, trying to find some sort of meaning in it.

This has mostly resulted in a wave of panic hitting me. In my mind I’m flinching back and flailing my hands in front of my face in a vain attempt to protect myself. I haven’t literally done that. It’s just the best description I have for my mood.

All I’ve been able to figure out is that it involves “stories” some how. That’s what I’ve managed to pull together after almost two months.

Guh.

Originally published at Jeremy Zimmerman. You can comment here or there.

Tentative Schedule for Norwescon 2015

I’ve been invited to Norwescon as a panelist for the first time, and I’m super excited! I’ve received my tentative schedule, which I’m providing below. Times and dates are subject to change. I’m also not including the two instances of the the writing workshop, where I’ll be participating as a pro. (Yay!)

Thu 15:00-16:00

Worldwide Dead

Not every ghost is an American Civil War soldier or Victorian spinster. The cultures and folklore of unquiet dead from around the world bring a spirit all their own to horror.

Thu 18:00-19:00

The Power of Free

Selling’s a slog, but giving stuff away is easy… and it can actually boost your sales. Harness the power of giveaways to better serve your fanbase and build your readership.

Thu 20:00-21:00

Gamer Etiquette: Use Your Words

Personal conflicts? Scheduling hassles? Trying to sort out what snacks to bring and who helps clean up afterwards? In game conflicts that brew into out of game unpleasantness? We should talk about this, and our panelists will.

Fri 10:30-11:00

Reading: Jeremy Zimmerman

Untitled Kensei Sequel – The sequel to Jeremy’s first novel, a tale of young superheroes and the burdens of family legacies. Rated PG

Fri 15:00-16:00

Short Stories: At the Cutting Edge of SF

Novels may get more attention, but short fiction has many advantages, and much of the best fiction, both inside and outside of the genre has been short. Join us as we look at some of the best short fiction of recent years and how the Internet has revitalized the market for short fiction.

Sat 15:00-16:00

Autograph Session 2

Twenty authors in a room to sign things.

Sat 19:00-20:00

Top 15 Best GM Habits

Work with the panelists to define the best game master tricks and methods to create and manage the best games.

Sun 11:00-12:00

The Next Generation: Gaming with Kids (as Moderator!)

Games for the younger generation. What are good starter board, card, electronic, and tabletop roleplaying games for the young people in your life, and what can they help us teach them?

Originally published at Jeremy Zimmerman. You can comment here or there.

My Attempt at Being a Booth Babe

Last October, I came across an ad on Craigslist. It’s been taken down, but here’s the content of it:

EMERALD CITY COMIC CON BOOTH GIRLS!!! (Seattle)

compensation: $100 per day cash

We are looking for SMOKIN HOT!!!! SUPER FUN!!!! ENERGETIC!!!! Booth girls for the 2015 Comic Con!!! This is our first year at Emerald City and we are ready to rock!!! We have a blast at San Diego Comic Con and a rip roaring great time at Star Trek Con in Vegas!!! Are you a gal who likes to work hard and play harder? You into selling merch, and drinking booze?!?!? Not at the same time of course!!! Then, we want to party… Work with you!!!! Join us for three days of radness!!!!March 27th – 29th 2015!!! Please send a head and body shot!!! This… Will… be…. AWESOME!!!!

I’d love a chance to go to Emerald City Comic Con, so I figured I’d apply. Sadly, I didn’t get a response. I don’t know why. But I thought I’d share my email with y’all.

Hi! I’m really excited to submit my head and body shots for your consideration. Some of these photos are older, but I’m sure I can adapt my look in time for the con if needed. I think I fit all of your needs. I look forward to your reply.

Originally published at Jeremy Zimmerman. You can comment here or there.

Daddy Issues

I didn’t know what to expected when I started the Passion Search workshop I’m doing, but I don’t think I expected it to be as emotionally challenging as it has turned out.

A lot of the homework has involved reviewing high and low points in my life and trying to understand what helped or hindered me at that time. It’s brought up a lot of memories I just hadn’t put much thought towards, and I’m finding that some of them are more painful than I realized. Mostly stuff that involves my father.

As a general rule, I don’t think much about my father. And when I do, it’s usually annoyance. I won’t go into my life story. The short version is that I didn’t live with my father until my teens, and he ended up being an emotionally abusive alcoholic. Somehow he managed to be both domineering in steering my life choices while also absent and uninterested in being involved with my life.

He died six years ago, after I had stopped talking to him for seven years. He was fifty-three, and his liver slowly failed him as he puked up blood every day. I can’t find it in myself to mourn his

passing. I feel angry that his other two sons were left wondering about the mystery figure that

spawned them and then disappeared from their lives. I feel disappointed that he will never see how awesome his grandkids are.

But I don’t feel bad that he’s dead.

Somewhere in my twenties, I stopped thinking about life with my dad. Up until then, I’d put a huge weight on the story of my suffering. But I got tired of talking about it. And as I stopped talking about it, I stopped thinking about it. And I felt that it no longer had an impact on me. It had been a long time ago, and besides the man was dead.

But as I’ve been working on the homework for class, all of the angst of being a teenage boy who had no friends and felt unwanted by his parents has come bubbling back up. Which is really a miserable sort of thing to relive. Especially as I’ve started to see the building blocks of problems I’m having with my life now that I’m almost forty. On the upside, it’s helped me understand how that time in my life has impacted the choices I’ve made since then. On the down side, it’s pretty painful to dredge all this back up.

I still don’t know what I want to do with my life. But here’s a fun fact: when I was thirteen or

fourteen, I desperately wanted to go to Mars. My body literally ached with the desire to go there. It marched through my veins like the proverbial radioactive rubber pants.

Through convoluted rationalization, I decided that the best life choice was to become an engineer. It was a responsible career, and I convinced myself that I could leverage into going into becoming an astronaut and going to Mars. And so my life became about “becoming an engineer,” and I forgot about that part of me that wanted to see Mars.

That Mars-seeking part of me is still there. I’m obviously not going to be an astronaut at this point in my life, let alone get to Mars. And, seriously, the thought of me designing planes and spaceships should terrify you. But I feel like this memory is a cookie crumb in the dark forest. That the desire to explore a strange and alien world reflects an essential part of me that I have ignored.

Maybe it’s the same thing that fuels my desire to write. Maybe it’s something else. But I’m getting closer to understanding.

Originally published at Jeremy Zimmerman. You can comment here or there.

The Quest for a Title

I’ve been struggling to try and come up with a title for my sequel to Kensei. The general theme of the sequel is about family expectations. Or, at least, that’s what I’m trying for. Who you want to be versus who your parents (or grandparents, or whatever) want you to be. A lot of family legacies come up for Jamie and other characters.

Mixed into this is that my villain is an Italian WW2 supervillain brought into the present. I worked with an Italian friend to develop the character, and tied the villain into the Italian Futurist movement, which later had connections to the Italian Fascist movement. Especially since there’s an element of breaking away from the past. So I thought I might also tie into that.

Some titles I cribbed from the Futurist Manifesto include:

Sing the Love of Danger
The Love of Danger
The Cure for the World
Demolish Museums
Useless Admiration of the Past
Our Insolent Challenge

 

From looking at quotes about ancestors and inheritance, I turned up, The Violence of Our Ancestors. And then I had also jotted down Heir Apparent and Heir Unapparent, both of which have been used many times.

Thoughts? Alternatives? I appreciate any help I can get, especially from friends that have been beta readers.

Originally published at Jeremy Zimmerman. You can comment here or there.

Catching Up

I’ve been bad about providing updates. Life has been a little crazy. Here are some newsly bits.

With the leadup to NaNoWriMo, I spent most of October working on my outline for this year’s novel. And then I spent November writing said book, when I wasn’t at AmberCon Northwest or sick in bed. This year’s NaNo was the epic bureaucratic fantasy novel that I’ve threatened for years to write. It’s originally based on the short story I wrote several years ago for Crossed Genres. You can read that here if you like. You can read the first scene from the book on my NaNo profile.

Then I re-published Kensei.

My current plans for post-NaNo looks like this:

Outline my ideas for Kensei-related serials to work on.
Get ready for the next Mad Scientist Journal anthology we intend on doing (Selfies from the End of the World: Historical Accounts of the Apocalypse)
Try to finish up a few short stories to include in the mini-collections I’m putting out.
Make solid progress on my Apocalypse World hacks.

In terms of my ongoing quest for figuring out what to do with my life, I’ve been taking meditation classes through Seattle Insight Meditation Society. It’s a different style of meditation than I’ve done in the past. In terms of structure, this has definitely been the best meditation class I’ve ever taken. And my drive to really create change in my life has kept me more disciplined with my meditation than I’ve ever been. I’ve really felt a difference in my life. I completed both an introductory class and a follow-up class with a different instructor.

I’m still trying to figure out how I feel about the group itself. I’ve been missing having Buddhism in my life, and for a long time I hadn’t really found anywhere that really fit with me. In terms of teaching, this certainly fits better with my belief system. Part of why I selected this place was the distant connection to Stephen Batchelor’s Buddhism Without Beliefs. But there hasn’t been a lot of opportunity to connect with people.

I have a much larger blog post I’m mulling around about Buddhism and meditation. I’ll save further thoughts for then.

I’ve also been working with a new person from HR who has been showing me around through the Gallup Strengths concept. Rather than going with the notion of trying to improve your shortcomings, it instead has the idea of figuring out what you are good at and finding ways to apply that.

From the stuff I’ve been reading about it, it seems slightly different from the Passion Search that Centerpoint does. Or I may be misunderstanding. In the book I was loaned (Tom Rath’s Strength Finder 2.0), it uses the movie Rudy as an example of what not to do.

The movie, which I’ve never seen, is based on a true story about a young man (Daniel “Rudy” Ruettiger) who desperately wants to play football for Notre Dame. He fights just to get on the team, but isn’t allowed to play. It’s not until his last game of his senior year that he gets put on the field for a few plays. He sacks the rival quarterback in the last play of the game. He gets carried off the field like a hero, and has apparently had a long career writing and giving talks about being successful. As far as I can tell, he never played football after that.

Rath describes the love of the underdog story as a mistake. Rudy spent thousands of hours practicing to only get a few seconds of actual play and make a tackle. He was never a particularly good football player. The time he spent would have been better used working to be better at something Rudy had a talent for.

And so I wonder how the notion of Passion interacts with the idea of Strengths. Especially when what you are passionate to do is not something you’re good at.

To be clear, the Gallup Strengths idea doesn’t specify something like “football” as a Strength. It has 34 categories that define the types of Strengths they examine, and they have names like “Intellection” or “Restorative.” And the idea of the Passion Search workshops is not to find that you have a passion for playing football, but rather to find out what it is that appeals to you about playing football and finding ways to find a job that fits for you.

But I can foresee the same problem arising: What if you are not good at what you’re passionate about? I may find an answer in these weird adventures. I might not. I guess it will be interesting.

And, with Centerpoint, I’ve signed up for their Passion Search workshop. Eight crazy weeks of examining my soul and helping others do the same. I’ve had my first session of that, and so far it’s gone well?

I’ve been pondering why I’ve sought out things like the meditation class or this group-activity workshop when I’m such an introvert. Some of it speaks to my strong motivation to figure out a better path for myself. I’m willing to go outside my comfort zone in order to accomplish this.

It’s also made me realize that being an introvert is not quite the monolothic identity that various online comic strips and info-graphics would make you believe. One thing I find important is finding “my people” and being able to talk connect on topics important to me. The hard part is the connecting part. It’s hard to go into a group of strangers and do that, as I’ve found with attending some of the more regional fan conventions like RustyCon and Norwescon. I’m more willing to put up with the mob of people if there are friends I can see. I connect to individuals, and having those individuals mixed in with the group makes me like the group better.

Originally published at Jeremy Zimmerman. You can comment here or there.

Kensei: Rereleased

Two years after being published in the ebook bundle titled Cobalt City Rookies, the rights have reverted back to me and I’ve been given permission to self-publish it. It marks an opportunity for me to do some new things with the book that I couldn’t do when Timid Pirate put it out. First among these is the opportunity to offer it as a stand alone book with a print edition.

Where can you get a copy? I’m glad you asked! It will be distributed a bit farther afield as time goes on, but here is where it is currently available. I will update this info as more options become available.

Goodreads Giveaway: I’m giving away five signed print copies! Winners will be selected December 25th.
Patreon: Patrons who support my Patreon page at $5 or higher get immediate access to the ebook, as well as ever other digital book I’ve put out either as myself or as Mad Scientist Journal. Those who are backing me on December 31st at the $10 will receive a print copy as well.
Amazon: Available on the Kindle or in print. Those who order the print version will also receive the Kindle version at no extra cost.
Scribd: Subscribers on Scribd can read the book.
Other eBook retailers: Smashwords, Txtr, Barnes & Noble
Other Book Stores: Within six to eight weeks (so, around January) this should be available through regular book stores. It’s unlikely to be on the shelves, but you can special order it.

Originally published at Jeremy Zimmerman. You can comment here or there.