Recalibrating
Recalibrating
Whew, it sure has been a long time since I've done one of these hasn't it? You probably thought I was done filling your inboxes with my musings and recommendations, but nope, I just have had a summer of contemplation and recalibration. (And not to mention the excessive heat). This summer has been a weird one but I'm not here to fill you in on the details but to reflect on a certain thought that has been in my mind for a bit, the idea of recalibration.
In mid-April of this year I moved which lead to me having to recalibrate my routines and living spaces. Luckily we didn't move too far away from our old place so the neighborhood and outdoor routines remained relatively the same, but with a new place comes new ways of thinking of how you go about your life. Which, to be honest, really disrupted my writing since I used to write in a specific place in the old house. It's a dumb excuse but it's how I felt during that time. Luckily I was able to figure out where to work in the house. And then stuff at work began to change.
Back in mid-May some changes were made at my job by upper management that just put a halt of my creative process in my brain. I could barely even read. After seven years at my current workplace I realized that the new people in charge don't align with my work goals so I spent the better half of the summer contemplating what to do next. My creative pursuits became dammed up by a boulder in my brain that I couldn't remove not matter how hard I pushed. After about a month and a half of contemplation I decided to go job hunting. After a few interviews I decided to call it quits at my old job. What happened next was that almost immediately after I made that decision it felt as if that bolder had been lifted and removed. Finally I could focus on reading and my desire to create came back to me shortly after. Its been about two weeks since I made that decision and I'm ready to create once again.
With that being said I haven't started my new job just yet. I still have a few more weeks at my present workplace. So there's not telling how the new gig is going to affect my creative output. However, I do know that that bolder is gone which should lead to more updates, stories, and recommendations in the future. Its been a lot of recalibrating over the summer and there's more to come but I'm damn sure that I'm happy that that bolder is finally gone. See ya in the next one!
Flash Fiction & Short Stories
The Final Temple
What happens when the old god of madness and destruction returns to the realm of man to bring upon a new reign but can't seem to get past all those pesky citations written up by the city's code department every time he tries to erect a temple to himself? Why he'd do what any old god would do: open up a time portal that pull his most loyal follower and architect of his ancient temples from deep into the past and send her straight to the present. Futureshock be dammed. (Part of the Adventures of Dar'goth series.)
You are viewing selected reviews for Raine’s Spells & Potions, LLC
It ain’t easy being a small business owner, especially in such a trendy market such as witchcraft. The worst part is putting up with all of those pesky Yelp reviews. Give a young witch a chance!
I Am Human. I Am Human.
Some might call me a fanatic, others obsessive. I just like to think of myself as a connoisseur of the human form. After all, what makes a human if not the flesh upon their bones? (A semi-sequel to "Pretty Eyes")
The Department of Unholy Deals (Or My Life as an Antinatalist Demon)
Torturing human souls was fun for the first eight millennia or so, but after that it just became the same old same old. Luckily my idea of having humans make a deal with the horned devil himself in return for the first born son took off, and one of these centuries humans will hopefully stop having kids all together once we scare them out of having them. Then I can finally retire and take of knitting.
Recommendations
What I've Read / Am Reading
Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer
There are few books I've read more than once, and even less that I've read more than twice. Annihilation is the only book I've read four times and counting. It is my favorite book of all time and ever since I started taking writing more seriously as a craft I've reread the book at least once a year to fully immerse myself into it and take note of how Vandermeer is able to tell a story, not to mention that the prose is as unsettling as it is beautiful. There's a 2018 movie by Alex Garland that loosely adapts the book. While I think that the film does a great job at capturing the spirit of the novel (and I really do enjoy it as a movie), the book is just a masterclass in atmospheric horror that's hard to capture in a big box office film like Garland's.
Random quote:
I thought again of the silhouette of the lighthouse, as I had seen it during the late afternoon of our first day at base camp. We assumed that the structure in question was a lighthouse because the map showed a lighthouse at that location and because everyone immediately recognized what a lighthouse should look like. In fact, the surveyor and anthropologist had both expressed a kind of relief when they had seen the lighthouse. Its appearance on both the map and in reality reassured them, anchored them. Being familiar with its function further reassured them. With the tower, we knew none of these things. We could not intuit its full outline. We had no sense of its purpose. And now that we had begun to descend into it, the tower still failed to reveal any hint of these things. The psychologist might recite the measurements of the “top” of the tower, but those numbers meant nothing, had no wider context. Without context, clinging to those numbers was a form of madness.
The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
This was the comfort book I needed this summer. The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet follows the crew of the Wayfarer a small ship that is designed to punch holes into space and establish permanent wormholes between two different locations. The story is just a great light hearted adventure tale about the various crew members of the ship as they make their through uncharted space in order to construct a wormhole between an isolated nation and the greater galatic territories.
What I'm Playing
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (Nintendo Switch)
And seriously, who isn't playing this game right now? The long awaited sequel to Breath of the Wild has finally arrived and it's sucked me in just like that game did. I will never not play a Zelda game, it's a series so near and dear to me that every time a new one comes along it's like catching up with an old friend and seeing how much they've changed over the years.
That's it!
Thank you for reading this edition of Dispatches from Quadrant Nine. See you in two weeks for another edition! For more, you can follow me on Substack, Instagram, and Reddit. I also have a small subreddit dedicated to discussing all my writing over at /r/QuadrantNine that you can subscribe to. There's also my writing website where I post writing updates and short stories, and my personal blog where I share my own musings occasionally.
See you in the next edition!