Acceptances and self-publishing

I am pleased to announce the acceptance of two poems of mine (titled "Underwhelming" and "stolen stage") to an Australian online and print litmag called Otoliths. Its website can be found here. And in less immediately-exciting but still similar news, a poem of mine (titled "Actual Glue") will be published in a Singaporean online litmag called Eunoia Review. With this, I believe I'll have had six acceptances from foreign publications. Six. I'm proud of myself, I really am. I've got this huge doofy grin right now from thinking of it.

And in other writing-related news, I am definitely earnestly looking into self-publication for my novella, The Week of Dreams.  I'm currently thinking I'll publish it through Lulu (a site on which you can self-publish books and things). I'm right now at the point where I'm trying to figure out how the thing is going to be formatted, i.e. fonts and margins and stuff. Fonts. I never could get the hang of fonts. I'm getting there, though, and I've even got an artist for the cover of the book. (Granted, this is someone I know personally, so it's not as though I've done anything as cool as hire a pro artist but art is art.) So it's coming along reasonably well.

I feel so great about my writing. Really, I feel like I'm a great place with my writing right now, and it's fantastic.

Sadness and SPACE

So today, I learned that the guy who used to direct the creative writing program at my old school (it was an art school and I attended for creative writing) is retiring. That was pretty sad for me. It was like some fundamental part of the universe went wrong. And it fully hit me, too, that most of the people who were my friends and acquaintances last year from that school graduated this year. And both of these facts felt like real personal losses to me. And I'm not trying to get melodramatic or anything, but I think one of the parts of my life that makes me saddest is the fact that I keep "losing" things (i.e. stuff enters my life and it leaves almost as soon as it enters, or I lose parts of my life I never thought I'd lose). And these losses made me sad.

And I was thinking about this stuff and being very sad over it, and Doctor Who came to mind for some reason. I don't know if you watch the TV show Doctor Who (I love it) but the actor who plays the current Doctor (the Eleventh) is leaving the show this year at Christmas. We'll be getting another actor who plays the Twelfth Doctor (he hasn't been announced yet, but this is one of the things I've been looking forward to because even though I'm losing my favorite Doctor, I'm gaining a new one). So I thought, "Well, at least I'll gain something in seven months, when the current guy leaves Doctor Who and we get the Twelfth Doctor. Because at least getting a new character on my favorite TV show is something." And then I realized this WASN'T really gaining something, because it necessitated the loss of one of my favorite Doctors, and this was sad to me.

However, my mood recovered when my aunt needed me to do something for her and I ended up going to her house and hanging out there. She got me food, which was probably the main thing that did it, in terms of restoring how I felt. She got me pizza and she let me eat the tiramisu in her fridge. It was while I was eating these rather unhealthy foods that I realized something.

I'm in space.

Allow me to explain. I am in the universe. This is a pretty undeniable fact. But when you think of "the universe", you think of outer space, don't you? And you would be correct. The vast, vast most of the universe is in what we'd call "outer space". And if you were from another planet, I bet you'd consider Earth to be "outer space". "Oh, those Earth people, those space folks, doing their own spacey sorts of things...eating pizza and cake, going to art schools..." Something like that.

But technically, this means I'm in outer space.

Once I got over the surreal shock of this fact, I realized that it made everything I did at least 1,000% more awesome. "I'm eating cake...in space!" "Doing the dishes...in space!" "Walking down a hall...in space!" "Crashing into a wall...IN SPACE!"
No matter what losses I suffered in my life, at least I could take a small bit of comfort in the fact that, no matter what I lost, I lost it IN SPACE. And I don't know about you, but for me, if I'm doing it in space, then it can't be all that bad.

My advice to you, then, is this. No matter what losses you suffer, no matter who leaves where, no matter what you have to say goodbye to for a bittersweet gain, just remember. It's happening in space. And when you realize that it happens in space, it gets a little bit better.

Possible novella publication

I am pleased to announce that a series of events has caused me to seriously consider self-publishing as an option for my novella The Week of Dreams. I am currently looking into different self-publication options, and I will keep you, my probably imaginary readers, posted on the results of this venture.

That said, if anyone reading this has any advice about self-publishing, hearing it would be brilliant.

Two facts of interest.

First off, I've had another poem accepted by that lovely Romanian litmag called Nazar Look. It can be found here.

Second off, I have joined the dark side and gotten myself a Twitter account. It can be found here. I promise not to be a stupid Twitter user. Mostly I just post about writing and/or the humorous things my family happens to be doing at the moment, though.

That's really all I wanted to say right now.

Carpe Diem and Steak Sauce

I recently became aware of the importance of the mindset encapsulated in the phrase "carpe diem" - seize the day. It occurred during a long, drawn-out thinking session in which I realized I was comfortable with my typical routine of doing pretty much nothing worth speaking about (which is all right in its way) and I was too comfortable with the prospect of this never changing (which really isn't that all right at all). I kept saying I'd do things, on the condition of "sometime later". In other words, I kept putting off the mere idea of doing things that I hadn't done a thousand times before.

Carpe diem is slowly becoming my motto, and while I'm not an incredibly active follower of its advice ("baby steps" - doing things slowly but surely - is one of my other mottoes), it fortunately leads me to get out and do things (or even stay in and do things) that I didn't previously think I would do and that lead to enjoyable situations or at least good stories.

Today, I tried steak sauce for the first time in an attempt to carpe the diem. I was out to lunch with my grandpa (a semi-regular event which I have probably mentioned in previous posts),  and I decided to get adventurous and try the steak sandwich that I'd never tried before. (This is covered in my definition of "adventure".) My grandpa was sort of surprised with this choice, but I explained that I was trying to "do new things, expand my horizons, carpe diem and all that stuff", and he understood.

When my steak sandwich came, so did a bottle of A1 steak sauce, and I decided to be really adventurous and try it, too.

Let it be understood that, while I get into risky situations sometimes, I am at least fully aware of the risks and I do what I can to lessen or at least control them. I did not smother my sandwich and/or chips with the steak sauce. I am trying to live adventurously but not recklessly. Rather, I was prudent enough to put a fair-sized pool of the substance on one side of my plate (far away from the chips, because frankly, I like chips too much to lose them to a substance that I might hate). When I was mentally prepared enough, I dipped some of my sandwich into the sauce and bravely ate it.

I don't understand why anyone would want to put steak sauce in their mouth. It tastes like sour vinegar trying to masquerade as something nastily sweet but totally failing to fool anybody. To each their own, I suppose, but it's very difficult to understand why steak sauce would constitute someone's "own".

As I related this story to my grandma after it actually happened, she asked where I had put the steak sauce (i.e. whether or not I had made the mistake of drowning my food with what was at the time a "mystery sauce"). I had informed her that I was cautious enough to not do that. And in that moment, I realized that there was a very good lesson to be learned in this situation, other than "do things that you normally don't do". Do things that you normally don't do, but do them responsibly. If you know full well that you might not like steak sauce, don't ruin your perfectly good sandwich and/or chips (spare the chips!) with it. If you throw yourself into a new activity that could prove harmful, learn how to do it in such a way so that you probably won't be harmed that much. If you enter into what could be a brilliant relationship (of any kind) with a brilliant person, make sure you can walk away with most of your soul in tact if it turns out to be significantly worse than you'd expected. And it's not always possible to not lose something in the process of carpe'ing the diem. Sometimes you get hurt. Sometimes you lose time you can't get back. Sometimes you waste part of a perfectly good steak sandwich. But you can still have a rather unexpected and adventurous time while taking precautions of some kind.

And that is what steak sauce taught me about following the maxim of carpe diem.

Poet Problems - a poem read aloud

I write about doing poetry and stuff, but I thought it'd be cool to actually read a poem and put it on my blog, so you folks would actually know what it is I do. I wrote this testament to something poets have to go through. I thought it'd be amusing to read out loud and film.

Mental illness: a hypothesis about them, and why I think they're comparable to allergies

I hear people complaining about how "everyone has a mental illness these days" and people try to explain why this is the case. (For the curious - you might know this statistic, but from what I understand, 25% of the adult population lives with a diagnosable mental illness. So now you know what is meant by "everyone".)

People want to explain this fact, why everyone has mental illnesses, and why they have it now, as opposed to how it was in previous times, where mental illness was often seen as a horrible, inherently life-crushing thing, for which there wasn't much information or treatment. Some people want to think it's because "the modern life" is making people insane. Because of computers and technology and our busy lives, we're getting bipolar disorder and depression and schizophrenia and stuff.

I honestly don't think that's a very convincing argument. While "the modern life" does have its drawbacks and can cause legitimate stress (and worsen disorders that people already had), it seems highly improbable if not impossible that it's causing people's brains to resemble a certain way so that the parts that "should" work simply don't. It's not giving us actual legitimate medical problems. Unless it's capable of actually rewriting your DNA so that your brain's structure is different and that, in some cases, it's possibly developed differently for your entire life, I don't think anything can "give" people mental illnesses.

As technology gets better, our sphere of knowledge gets bigger, and our ignorance as a culture grows smaller, we find out that some things are more common than we previously thought they were, and we can better understand what some things are. What I'm trying to say is that I think people are just realizing that mental illnesses have always been this common but we didn't have the tools to understand it or the tolerance to accept it.

"But wait," you might say. "Mental illnesses are really that common? No, that's absurd. I am unwilling to believe that that many people really have these things."

As though mental illness were something you could reserve for a select few people who are (un)lucky enough to be cursed? blessed? burdened? somethinged with them. As if there was only so much crazy to distribute throughout the human race.


I think it's like allergies. I really think it's like allergies. Lots of people are allergic to things (milk, latex, cats); lots of people have mental health problems that make them unable to cope with certain parts of life. There exist allergies to all sorts of things; there are all sorts of ways that mental illness can interfere with or just alter someone's life. Some allergies are more severe than others, with effects ranging from mild irritation to death; mental illnesses come in all ranges of severity, and this doesn't mean that any of them are "less real" or "less valid" than others. Sometimes, you can find ways to cope with or treat allergies; since mental illness is biological in nature, you can treat it medically, too.

It's not that mental illness has suddenly become "more common". Likely it's always been this common. Like the commonness of allergies, so is mental illness an oddly common thing. And since we're slowly becoming better at diagnosing and accepting mental illness, we're coming closer to understanding that mental illness is common and ultimately not that big of a deal. Certainly not as big or bad of a deal as some people make of it.