week 42 / 2024

Well, that was a week.

If you're wondering how things are going with the renovations, I have three words for you, and those three words are "they found damp"—three words which mean "add at least another week to the duration of the project", and also more expense.

(On the upside, I am back in my apartment and working, or at least trying to! On the downside, I am doing so to the soundtrack of a dehumidifier running 24 hours a day... though this isn't as big a chore as you might think, because honestly the pink noise is quite a pleasant contrast to my mild but stubborn tinnitus.)

So, yeah—let us speak no more of this, hmm? On with the show!

ticked off

• Twelve hours brainstorming and outlining on PROJECT HORNIMAN. (This is a non-fiction academia-adjacent writing project with collaborative elements, but I'm steering the thing conceptually and, I suspect, will be putting the majority of the hours in on it. The early stages of a project like this are great fun, slapping ideas down and moving them around until you get a structure and thru-line you like the feel of; things get tricky after you get the green light, and begin encountering the obstacles to realising this crazy thing you've thought up. But the energy of the early stage can carry you through all that, if you keep the furnace stoked... so keeping momentum is gonna be the key to this thing, I reckon.)
• Six hours working on This Very Website. (Mostly editing the transcript of the ADH interview, the first half of which went up during the week; I didn't really know what I was doing when I recorded this one, and so the transcript needed a LOT of work. Pleased with the result, though, and looking forward to rolling out the second part next month.)
• Four hours of admyn. (This is a guesstimate, really; there are more admyn hours blocked in the calendar than four, but I can say with confidence that they were not very focussed, for reasons already discussed. Selah.)
• Ten hours of undirected reading and writing, as always.

See, this is why this is a valuable exercise, at least for me: I thought this was a pretty lousy week with regard to getting the hours down, but that's thirty-two accounted for already!

kinmaking

Attended a couple of events connected to Deb Chachra's visit to Malmö, most notably her lecture at Media Evolution. Deb is a dear friend from The Good Old Days, so we also did some hanging-out and catching-up... but I guess that's less kinmaking than kin-sustaining, or maybe kin-restoration?

Went to a two-hour seminar on marketing yourself and brand-building for creative entrepreneurs at STPLN in uptown Malmö. I was a bit leery of the framing of this one, to be honest, and the direction that it took—the now-familiar litany of "sell experiences and community and access to yourself as creator!"—did little to assuage my angst. As I remarked to another attendee who identifies first and foremost as a writer, we scribblers produce something which doesn't really fit that model at all, unless you decide on a fandom-first approach which is pretty high-risk in its own right) But I'm sure we can't be the first writers they've had pass through, and there's a second workshoppy leg to the thing in a few weeks, so we'll see how it goes.

I went to a "game writing breakfast" at GameHabitat on Friday morning. The first of what is hoped to become a regular networky hang-out event, this was put on jointly by Centrum för dramatik (an association for screenwriters in Sweden) and Dataspelscentrum (which advocates for digital games as an art form). Despite the label, hardly anyone attending was already a writer for games, but rather interested in getting into that scene. We had a bit of show and tell from a local indie developer/writer, which was a valuable peek behind the curtain of the process; I'm hoping there'll be opportunities to find out how the industry operates, and seeing where a consulting worldbuilder might fit into it.

I also spent an hour in conversation with Andrew Merrie of Planethon. (Andrew's a contact from my time in academia, as we were both doing narrative-driven futures work in Sweden during the same period, and—believe it or not!—that was not a huge demographic at the time.)

That's maybe ten or more hours of kinmaking activity this week, which I think rather redeems the lower-than-usual count on working hours...

reading

Artifact Space by Miles Cameron. This was a recommendation from Jay Springett, who deemed it a true page-turner. I can't argue with that: it's admirably pacey and moreish, but mostly devoid of the really hammy hooks and manipulative hangers that sometimes characterise such titles, and Jay's observation that Cameron is very deft at braiding subplots is likewise on point. But while I can—and do!—damire the craftspersonship on display, the story is not really me.

For starters, I don't read much of mil-sf any more, and I never did read a lot of it, so all the "This is Red Lobster to Dog Fort, over" stuff feels to me like padding I don't need. I'm also not big on the zero-to-multicompetent-hero bildungsroman, either: our protagonist certainly carries some demons from her difficult childhood, but is otherwise so well-intentioned and instantly good at every damned thing she turns her hand to that I was rolling my eyes a lot before I even hit the halfway point.

The whole "put-upon orphan flees the farm and gets on the fast track to becoming king-of-the-region" thing is a tired template; it's a bit more novel in sf than in fantasy, perhaps, and it's certainly refreshing for the put-upon farmboy to be a young woman of colour in a space orphanage, but I grew up on this stuff, and I ask more of my fiction these days. I'm long past the point where the book might reasonably pull out some unexpected new twist on the subgenre... so while I'll surely finish it (which won't take long) I doubt I'll be chasing down the sequels.

(Don't let that put you off, though! If you enjoyed The Expanse, for instance—whether on paper or on screen—I think you might quite enjoy this book; it has that widescreen quality to it, and the pace of a good binge-watch serial.)

a clipping

This week's clipping was an easy choice: when Irena Dumitrescu drops advice on creative work, I drop everything else. This is because she's remarkably clear-eyed and honest about the realities, which means that—in a post on energy management, like this one—you don't get three initially inspirational but ultimately vague and empty directives, like you might from some big-name influencer, but instead get twenty-one bullet points which become increasingly specific (and hence, for me at least, realistic and applicable).

Here's the first of those bullet points:

When it comes to creative or intellectual work, amount of time available is not nearly as important as energy. It still matters, but it’s not the main thing.

Go on, go follow the trail. You were procrastinating anyway, weren't you?

That's all for this week, I think. Thanks for you comments and emails, it's always nice to hear from readers—not least because it's a reminder that they exist, and I'm not just hurling this stuff into the void. 😄

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 42 of 2024. Thanks for reading! If you've enjoyed them, it's free to subscribe, but please consider supporting this research journal with a small monthly payment. You'll get access to the occasional bit of Exclusive Content™, and you'll be funding free subscriptions for those with fewer monetary resources, but first and foremost you'll get the warm glow that only ever comes from enabling fully independent and climate-focussed foresight research to continue.

(If you are already subscribed, please send to a friend who you think might also like it!)

Have a good weekend.