Status Report

After heroically keeping up with my plan to post weekly for half a year, my fledgling habit faltered after I came back from vacation. I could go into a rant on how I’ve been busier than usual with my day-job, but that was only true in August. No excuse now! I’m just too lazy for it. Not just the creation of content, which is hard enough because the journalistic style doesn’t work for me; but also making myself believe that I actually have something to say that’s worth my time to write it and anyone else’s to read it.

Heavenly Art from Heavenly Eros

Stepping back into the shrunken Mass Effect fandom, in which the Saren/Nihlus ship has always been a niche that is now kept afloat by literally a handful of unrelenting enthusiasts, I did not expect to find a new friend and creative ally (Sixtus), let alone two!

HeavenlyEros descended among us just as I came back from the summer hiatus and stirred the sleepy turian community into a state of cheerful excitement by showering us with art of unearthly beauty.

Fanart (!) for Ghost in the Machine, and Announcement

My friend Gladius created this phenomenal illustration for the Virmire chapters of Ghost in the Machine. The joy of seeing an offscreen moment such as this, that would otherwise exist only as a vague idea in my imagination, would be hard to overstate. Perhaps more importantly, this is hugely motivating and invigorating as a token of interest. I am honored and deeply grateful.

Dark and Divine

Mind-blown by this beautiful piece of art, I reblogged it on Tumblr and retweeted it on Twitter and posted in on Facebook and drowned the author, Sixtus/Gladius, with repeated outpourings of praise and glee. But I still have more!

Muddy Middle

Recently, I bragged about having completed the first draft of my Mass Effect fanfiction novel seven years after starting to write it, and boldly stated that I wouldn’t mind spending another seven years polishing it. But several months into it, I’m ready to go nuts.

(There will be no spoilers. This is about craft and whining. Your suspense is safe with me.)

An End is Like a Little Death

Last night I finished a novel that I started writing more than seven years ago. It wasn’t the first, or the last novel that I wrote with enthusiasm up to the 90% mark just to burn out on the last hundred yards. I am, of course, happy that I finished it. It’s a quiet kind of happiness: not the kind to make one jump up and down and clap their hands with glee, but more like relief that something that was wrong has finally been righted. I’m also hopeful that it means I might some day finish my other abandoned works and lighten the load of debt and guilt they’ve been weighing me down with.

But at the same time, I’m sad. Sad that it’s done and in a way — gone. A story is born inside the author’s mind, and there it grows and shifts and changes, and so long as it’s not written, it has a peculiar freedom to go in different directions, a potential to develop in different ways. The act of writing turns it from imagination to banal reality and thereby robs it of some of its magic. Infinite possibilities collapse into imperfect words. In a way, a story dies as it’s created.