We are in the thick of February. For those of you who also have full-spectrum lamps and take Vitamin D supplements, you know exactly what I mean.
I can look back at some of my earlier poems and pinpoint when some of them were written just by the subject matter: days when you can’t get anything done, or you’re just trying not to make anything worse, or, best case, an argument for sleeping until April. This is the time of year when even the practice of keeping to my schedule is enough to derail things; it’s almost like the routine becomes a chore which kills the routine. Good habits eat themselves.
I try to give myself grace. There are days when things like “get out of bed” and “do one functional adult thing” make their way onto my to-do list. I’ve had some success in the early winter using tools like Miro to prioritize things, and I know that exercise and healthy choices are almost a base need for keeping any kind of momentum.
The situation with one of our cats definitely did not help. We noticed some behavior changes with Rupert a few months ago, and repeated medical tests didn’t reveal anything. It turns out that FIP is as difficult to diagnose as it is deadly to cats, and only a few short years ago, it was a death sentence for countless young kitties. Fortunately, there is now a treatment available and he’s showing remarkable improvement; there was a moment a few weeks ago when I literally thought I’d felt his last breath, and now he’s running around, jumping, eating ravenously, being a cat. Science is real.
On the writing front, the good news is that I’m still creating stuff and I haven’t missed a deadline (even though that’s involved going back into the archives a bit for some older poetry). I’m not short of ideas, even though execution is a little slow. And I think I’ve learned more about the backstory of the characters in Quantum Cats.
Actually, that’s an interesting topic: did you know that I’m mostly making it up as I go along? There wasn’t an overarching backstory until at least the first couple episodes were written, and even then it was just a framework. As time goes on, I figure out more of what’s happened, what’s happening, and what needs to happen—if circumstances and characters will allow me.
The standard process of character creation is that you sit down and figure out all the details at the start: not just name and motive, but backstory, eye color, favorite food, relevant traumas, weird habits, etc. I feel like it’s good to know that stuff and it’s important to make the characters’ actions authentic and internally consistent, but doing it all at once feels like asking a stranger at the bar his life story. Let the characters tell you, in their own good time. Build a shadow of a being with a few rough conditions—he breathes oxygen, he has a sword, there’s a dragon, and he’s flammable—and see what happens. The percentage of his person that’s been turned to ash by the end of the scenario is going to tell you a lot more about his whole deal than arbitrarily deciding that he loves soup and once wanted to be a zookeeper.
Unless you’re writing a very specific type of fiction, of course, in which case it’s crucial for your protagonist to know that marmots love Chicken & Stars before you think about typing.
—jr
P. S. I’m on Threads and Bluesky and Substack and still on Facebook and even occasionally on Instagram and that all seems excessive, but the socials are fragmented and I don’t know which is best, so I copy-paste a lot. Please follow or subscribe or whatever.
P. P. S. I have been linking to old stuff and re-promoting it and that seems to be working sometimes so maybe the secret really is playing your songs in parking lots and getting people to listen, one at a time.
