Life update (04/03/2024)
Check out this post on my personal page, where it looks better
---
I’ve returned to work after the Holy Week holidays. I’m one of those authors who can’t earn a living through his works, and who clearly never will: I only write because my subconscious demands it, and I find myself disquieted by human company (to put it mildly), so networking is out of the question. My job as a computer technician at a hospital forces me to interact with non-technical-minded people who are generally also chatty, which is by far the worst part of my day, and I hate working at an open office, which forces me to absorb inane bullshit from coworkers. However, my job puts me in front of a computer for hours, and it allows me to edit my texts between tasks. I’ve settled into the routine of waking up at five in the morning to freewrite the next part of my story, then editing it at work. My editing process takes about fifteen times as long as producing the first draft, and it would likely drive anyone else insane, as I sieve through every single word to ascertain their place in the scene as well as the story at large. I also consider many alternatives along the way. Thankfully, due to autism and OCD, I find that process comforting; I’m uniquely suited to such painstaking tasks.
Also, I have experienced the private shame of returning to past texts and finding them awfully written, even though I was sure they would be good enough. The worst recent example was when I was commissioning the cover for my previous novel in English, titled My Own Desert Places. I linked the artists to the first couple of chapters, back then up at this site, warning them that they would require a revision. When I reread them, I was appalled to find out that the first few chapters were abysmal, nearly incoherent, to the extent that I questioned my mental state back when I uploaded them in the first place.
I think that during a shortish period of time back in 2020-2021, I prided myself in pushing out 4,000-6,000 words out a day, which isn’t hard at all to do if you rely on an outline, lack a social life, and freewrite everything. My Own Desert Places ended up being about 100,000 words long, and I finished it in a couple of months. Compare that with my ongoing narrative titled Motocross Legend, Love of My Life, that has reached 20,000 words in nearly four months. For me, though, the difference in quality is extreme. Although I loved that novel and I’m generally proud of it, one day I intend to revise it, republish it, and lead readers toward it again, but I dread what I’m going to find there.
Anyway, I’ve come to the troublesome realization that, although I dislike working as an IT guy at a hospital, it’s probably better for a writer, regarding the quality of their stories, to keep a full-time job unrelated to writing fiction, as long as it allows you to edit your texts. When you’re constantly aware of how little time you have to produce something meaningful, you don’t pad it with crap. Many full-time authors become self-indulgent, end up believing that anything goes. They are also required to push out books on a regular schedule to support themselves, therefore imposing extraneous deadlines on the material. I’m of the belief that a story takes as long as it needs to take, and somehow I’m always surprised when my stories end up ballooning far beyond my expectations, while feeling that what I have to include is necessary. For example, I was quite convinced that Motocross Legend, Love of My Life would take about four chapters, after which I would return to working on my ongoing novel. However, it will likely reach sixteen chapters, and along the way I have had to discard many moments that would have been good enough, but that ultimately weren’t necessary.
Although I write stories that in general terms could be considered literature, I barely read novels these days, opting for manga instead. In the last few years, I have failed to finish, or even get far into, the novels that have landed on my hands. More often than not it’s because the author is confusing their duty of telling a story with that of propagandizing a political ideology, which seems to be the default position in this rotten modern world. You likely won’t get published otherwise. Japanese narratives, at least manga, are free from this rot, and if you want Western stories that won’t stink like someone is just checking boxes and pleading not to be canceled (assuming they don’t have a far more sinister goal in mind), unless you come across a special author, you have to delve into the pre-2001 stuff, before the last remains of sanity were demolished.
I can count on one hand the amount of novels that have affected me as if I had lived through those events, that have connected with me so meaningfully. One of them, read when I was twenty or so, was Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood. Unlike in most of his other stories, that one felt to me like Murakami was expiating a sin, as if he truly needed to tell the tale of a doomed girl and the adrift young man who loved her. Many years later I came across details of the author’s life that clarified for me that he was indeed expiating something: he had betrayed a college girlfriend of his, only for her to end up doing something irreversible. Norwegian Wood is, at least for me, clearly imbued with that regret, with the need to go back in time and save someone. I have something of a savior complex (plenty of my dreams or daydreams over the years have had to do with literally going back in time and saving people), and I’m hopelessly attracted to doomed females, with goes a long way to explain my attachment to that book as well as to other narratives such as my favorite manga series: Inio Asano’s Oyasumi Punpun.
Anyway, I figured it was time to get back into reading novels, but I didn’t want to waste my time with stories that wouldn’t affect me meaningfully. I went the route of searching for novels similar to Norwegian Wood. Unfortunately, book recommendations rarely work for me; too many times I’ve been recommended stuff like Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, which I found abysmal. My brain works differently to other people’s, so necessarily I don’t enjoy nor want the same things others do. Regarding stories, I want the author to put me then-and-there along with the point of view character, to experience their lives as they do. The narrative usually has to delve deep into mental issues, solitude, attempts to understand the world, and so on. I hate authors who waste people’s time with unnecessary material for pseudo-ideological reasons, for example forcing you to slog through paragraph after paragraph of noise because the real world is like that. Plenty of postmodernists fall into that category. No thanks: I’m fully aware of how annoying and ultimately meaningless the world is, and I read to escape from it. Also, any story has to compete with my daydreams; if they can’t offer me something more engaging than what I can effortlessly picture in my mind, I won’t struggle through it.
Unsurprisingly, some of the recommendations included Murakami’s other books. One of them, Sputnik Sweetheart, published in 1999, was the second of his I bought in Spanish after Norwegian Wood fascinated me. I have the distinct memory of having read through the book twice over the years, but apart from a few quotes that I likely came across on Goodreads, I couldn’t remember any single detail of the story. Now that I’ve gotten three quarters of the way through it, I’m disturbed to have found out that, indeed, I have forgotten every single detail of the story, as if I had never known anything about the aspiring author slash love interest that most of the narrative focuses on, nor the woman that the author was interested in, let alone the generally plain narrator. It makes me wonder about my state of mind when I read the book those two previous times, or if I’m genuinely losing mental faculties. I remember very little about my life, I suspect due to my lifelong issues with clinical depression; most of my twenties draw a blank. But at least I could rely on stories making a lasting impact on me.
Anyway, I think those are the only impressions I wanted to post on here for reasons that aren’t clear to me. Work is underway on my ongoing novella Motocross Legend, Love of My Life, which I should be able to bring to a satisfying conclusion, even though I suspect very, very few people care; I have never had such a low engagement with a story as with the sad tale of one aspiring motocross rider and the man who was left behind. I have no idea why, because I think it’s quite good. Check it out if you want.
---
I’ve returned to work after the Holy Week holidays. I’m one of those authors who can’t earn a living through his works, and who clearly never will: I only write because my subconscious demands it, and I find myself disquieted by human company (to put it mildly), so networking is out of the question. My job as a computer technician at a hospital forces me to interact with non-technical-minded people who are generally also chatty, which is by far the worst part of my day, and I hate working at an open office, which forces me to absorb inane bullshit from coworkers. However, my job puts me in front of a computer for hours, and it allows me to edit my texts between tasks. I’ve settled into the routine of waking up at five in the morning to freewrite the next part of my story, then editing it at work. My editing process takes about fifteen times as long as producing the first draft, and it would likely drive anyone else insane, as I sieve through every single word to ascertain their place in the scene as well as the story at large. I also consider many alternatives along the way. Thankfully, due to autism and OCD, I find that process comforting; I’m uniquely suited to such painstaking tasks.
Also, I have experienced the private shame of returning to past texts and finding them awfully written, even though I was sure they would be good enough. The worst recent example was when I was commissioning the cover for my previous novel in English, titled My Own Desert Places. I linked the artists to the first couple of chapters, back then up at this site, warning them that they would require a revision. When I reread them, I was appalled to find out that the first few chapters were abysmal, nearly incoherent, to the extent that I questioned my mental state back when I uploaded them in the first place.
I think that during a shortish period of time back in 2020-2021, I prided myself in pushing out 4,000-6,000 words out a day, which isn’t hard at all to do if you rely on an outline, lack a social life, and freewrite everything. My Own Desert Places ended up being about 100,000 words long, and I finished it in a couple of months. Compare that with my ongoing narrative titled Motocross Legend, Love of My Life, that has reached 20,000 words in nearly four months. For me, though, the difference in quality is extreme. Although I loved that novel and I’m generally proud of it, one day I intend to revise it, republish it, and lead readers toward it again, but I dread what I’m going to find there.
Anyway, I’ve come to the troublesome realization that, although I dislike working as an IT guy at a hospital, it’s probably better for a writer, regarding the quality of their stories, to keep a full-time job unrelated to writing fiction, as long as it allows you to edit your texts. When you’re constantly aware of how little time you have to produce something meaningful, you don’t pad it with crap. Many full-time authors become self-indulgent, end up believing that anything goes. They are also required to push out books on a regular schedule to support themselves, therefore imposing extraneous deadlines on the material. I’m of the belief that a story takes as long as it needs to take, and somehow I’m always surprised when my stories end up ballooning far beyond my expectations, while feeling that what I have to include is necessary. For example, I was quite convinced that Motocross Legend, Love of My Life would take about four chapters, after which I would return to working on my ongoing novel. However, it will likely reach sixteen chapters, and along the way I have had to discard many moments that would have been good enough, but that ultimately weren’t necessary.
Although I write stories that in general terms could be considered literature, I barely read novels these days, opting for manga instead. In the last few years, I have failed to finish, or even get far into, the novels that have landed on my hands. More often than not it’s because the author is confusing their duty of telling a story with that of propagandizing a political ideology, which seems to be the default position in this rotten modern world. You likely won’t get published otherwise. Japanese narratives, at least manga, are free from this rot, and if you want Western stories that won’t stink like someone is just checking boxes and pleading not to be canceled (assuming they don’t have a far more sinister goal in mind), unless you come across a special author, you have to delve into the pre-2001 stuff, before the last remains of sanity were demolished.
I can count on one hand the amount of novels that have affected me as if I had lived through those events, that have connected with me so meaningfully. One of them, read when I was twenty or so, was Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood. Unlike in most of his other stories, that one felt to me like Murakami was expiating a sin, as if he truly needed to tell the tale of a doomed girl and the adrift young man who loved her. Many years later I came across details of the author’s life that clarified for me that he was indeed expiating something: he had betrayed a college girlfriend of his, only for her to end up doing something irreversible. Norwegian Wood is, at least for me, clearly imbued with that regret, with the need to go back in time and save someone. I have something of a savior complex (plenty of my dreams or daydreams over the years have had to do with literally going back in time and saving people), and I’m hopelessly attracted to doomed females, with goes a long way to explain my attachment to that book as well as to other narratives such as my favorite manga series: Inio Asano’s Oyasumi Punpun.
Anyway, I figured it was time to get back into reading novels, but I didn’t want to waste my time with stories that wouldn’t affect me meaningfully. I went the route of searching for novels similar to Norwegian Wood. Unfortunately, book recommendations rarely work for me; too many times I’ve been recommended stuff like Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, which I found abysmal. My brain works differently to other people’s, so necessarily I don’t enjoy nor want the same things others do. Regarding stories, I want the author to put me then-and-there along with the point of view character, to experience their lives as they do. The narrative usually has to delve deep into mental issues, solitude, attempts to understand the world, and so on. I hate authors who waste people’s time with unnecessary material for pseudo-ideological reasons, for example forcing you to slog through paragraph after paragraph of noise because the real world is like that. Plenty of postmodernists fall into that category. No thanks: I’m fully aware of how annoying and ultimately meaningless the world is, and I read to escape from it. Also, any story has to compete with my daydreams; if they can’t offer me something more engaging than what I can effortlessly picture in my mind, I won’t struggle through it.
Unsurprisingly, some of the recommendations included Murakami’s other books. One of them, Sputnik Sweetheart, published in 1999, was the second of his I bought in Spanish after Norwegian Wood fascinated me. I have the distinct memory of having read through the book twice over the years, but apart from a few quotes that I likely came across on Goodreads, I couldn’t remember any single detail of the story. Now that I’ve gotten three quarters of the way through it, I’m disturbed to have found out that, indeed, I have forgotten every single detail of the story, as if I had never known anything about the aspiring author slash love interest that most of the narrative focuses on, nor the woman that the author was interested in, let alone the generally plain narrator. It makes me wonder about my state of mind when I read the book those two previous times, or if I’m genuinely losing mental faculties. I remember very little about my life, I suspect due to my lifelong issues with clinical depression; most of my twenties draw a blank. But at least I could rely on stories making a lasting impact on me.
Anyway, I think those are the only impressions I wanted to post on here for reasons that aren’t clear to me. Work is underway on my ongoing novella Motocross Legend, Love of My Life, which I should be able to bring to a satisfying conclusion, even though I suspect very, very few people care; I have never had such a low engagement with a story as with the sad tale of one aspiring motocross rider and the man who was left behind. I have no idea why, because I think it’s quite good. Check it out if you want.
No comments have been added yet.
