This is by way of introducing myself. I don't expect to maintain a regular Web log here, since I'd rather focus my energy on my own Web site at http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/, but as a new un-upgraded user I can't do much else than post Web log entries as I wait for the upgrade. By the way, it still says I have one item in my inbox and that I'm not allowed to read my inbox. There's a forum thread saying that can be fixed by logging out, reloading, and logging back in again, but it doesn't work. I'm hoping that when I get upgraded to the point where I can post stories, I'll also be able to read my inbox.
I've been writing fiction - mostly short stories - for a number of years. I used to post regularly in talk.bizarre before Usenet died. Since then I've been keeping my writings on my own Web site. I wrote a novel and serialized it on talk.bizarre, and another one for NaNoWriMo 2002. I figure the next one will be professional-quality.
And my plan is to finish that one later this year. I've been poking at it intermittently ever since 2002, but everything else has gotten in the way. I finished my computer science PhD in 2008 after seven years of misery in Waterloo, Ontario. You know that old folk song "The Cruel Mother" in which the woman kills her children and then it lists the punishments she has to endure? Seven years a fish in the flood, seven years struggling in mud, seven years as the tongue in the warning bell... that's more or less what it was like for me in grad school, with unrelenting loneliness on top of it all. That wasn't the kind of life I wanted to have. I'd been planning on spending four years on the project, not seven, and I'd been planning on not still being single and celibate in my thirties.
Now that I've graduated I feel like I'm many years behind where I ought to be, and almost all my chances to actually have a happy and successful life are gone. I can't date the women who are actually attractive to me as an equal anymore - now and forever I'm an Older Man - and if I want to have children, I'm going to have to find someone who either is significantly younger than me, or get busy on the project very fast, or both - and neither of those situations is going to improve with delay. Nor will it improve with advancement in the academic system. There are some pretty big things that have to change immediately if I'm to have a chance at all, and those must be objective changes, outside of me. Just having a different attitude isn't enough; other people, not me, have to behave towards me in a way fundamentally different from anything I saw in Waterloo. I categorically reject self-improvement bullshit.
So I've moved to the big city with the start of this year. If the environment I was in was toxic to me, I hope a different environment will help. I managed to work out a way to do research with some people at the University of Toronto who I really wanted to work with, even though they don't have any money to pay me. I have enough savings from other things to live off of for all of 2009, and I'm thinking to spend the first half of it doing research and the second half of it writing my novel (though really, both will overlap into the other halves of the year). I'll need a real job after that and I have some leads, but it must be in a position where people come to me. I'm no longer willing to put in unlimited amounts of initiative and have it go unnoticed, which has been the story for me in academia up to now. I've always been the one who had to go knocking on doors; I always had to put in the initiative and nothing would happen unless I was the one to start it; but even when I did, most of the time I'd be ignored and punished and nothing would really happen. Who do I have to be to have people come knocking on my door? It's been treated as my fault when other people didn't live up to their obligations, even though I lived up to all of mine. I don't know what kind of job will allow me to expect without question that the people around me will really show initiative independently of me, but I'm quite capable of walking away from computer science and my PhD entirely if it can't provide that. Maybe I'll be an astrologer and card reader instead - I've got the skills for it and at least it would probably bring me into contact with more women.
Along the way I decided I'd also like time already served, and a lot more recognition for my existing fiction work, which is what brought me here. My sneaky plan is to re-post some of the stuff that's been sitting on my Web site for years but not getting readers, and hope to attract some attention that way. If I get readers and favourable comments I might write some more short stories to post, though most of my fiction-writing time is going to the next novel. Maybe I'll even serialize my existing novels. Then when my next novel hits the streets in a couple years, there'll be that many more people who'll buy it.
