I've spent most of my break from work adding to my Spotify playlists, bingeing the Muppets, reading a book about the history of psychedelic drugs in religion that so far has taught me more about spirituality and the human condition than 29 years in the LDS Church, celebrating that my asshole roommate is gone for a long while, and trying to get my money back from a scam company. I have plenty of time, and no excuse for not writing a long, thoughtful post except that I don't feel like it. I do feel like reminding people, however, that my humorous science fiction novel is out. I've sold at least three copies, and I don't know how many more because the purchases take over a week to show up. But I need to sell many, many copies, and I have no advertising budget, so I'm going to be a bit of a nuisance about it. This is my lifelong dream and my only hope of escaping from a life of mediocrity and borderline poverty we're talking about here. ebook - reminder that this option is cheapest but gets me the most money because it has no printing costs. paperback hardcover Now here's a nice underrated song for the new year. Of course, the numbers we attach to dates and times are really meaningless, and nothing is going to magically change at midnight tonight, but celebrate if you want to. Myself, I'm just happy to be at home with no responsibilities and no roommate.
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The Kindle ebook of my novel is available here. You don't need a Kindle device to read it, you just need to download the app. Paperback and hardcover options should be available within a few days. Setting up the ebook was super easy, barely an inconvenience, but sizing and formatting the covers for physical printing has been a long ordeal that's left me feeling like Hitler in that movie clip where he goes ballistic. I can only hope it's over now. The Kindle version is much cheaper, but will get me more money per sale due to the absence of printing costs. I'm going to charge $24.99 for the paperback version, and if anyone buys it, I'll get less than a fifth of that. Of course I need to get enough sales that the amounts don't matter.
This novel goes back over eighteen years, all the way back to the daydreams I had in seventh grade study hall after seeing what was then the last Star Wars movie ever and reading Splinter of the Mind's Eye, the first Star Wars Expanded Universe book ever. These daydreams eventually became an attempt at a book, and then another attempt at a book, and then another attempt at a book. I've started many books. The last attempt, in the summer of 2010, was two pages long when I gave up on it. The next year I came home from college for winter break and found it on the computer. At that time, I felt inspired due to recently discovering several sci-fi abandonware games from the early nineties, so I got back to work on it, and I kept working on it off and on until the summer of 2013, when it became my first finished book. Then I just had to revise it several times until it was perfect. Then this past summer I became so frustrated at entering my second year as a bleeping substitute teacher with a bleeping Master's degree that I decided to stop procrastinating on my dreams, and I gave myself a deadline when I would have to decide it's good enough and put it out there. I chose December 15, 2153 because that's the anniversary of me discovering those old games and also 130 years before the book takes place. I'm obsessed with dates and anniversaries. So here it is. By self-publishing, I've avoided all the rejection and arguing over creative choices. Today's Cache Valley Unitarian Universalist service was a celebration of the winter solstice, with the lights down and the curtains drawn until the very end, and candles and chanting. It was the most spiritual I've felt in a while. Spiritual feelings don't come easily to me. I've been looking forward to the solstice so that it will be over and the days will start getting longer again, but just celebrating it for the sake of itself was a nice perspective shift. Every week CVUU also does "Joys and Sorrows," where people are encouraged to light a candle and share a joy or a sorrow with the group. Today I shared my joy, and people were really happy for me, and it felt wonderful. Alluding back to a recent service on the topic of book-banning, I told them that if they want to support me, they should challenge my book and try to get it banned so I can get free publicity. They laughed, and it felt wonderful. I really don't have any publicity since I'm self-publishing. My original plan to build up a large following on my blog and then tell everyone to buy my books never panned out, and every social media algorithm seems hell-bent on keeping me invisible. But I honestly think my book is so funny that it could become a success through word-of-mouth. That's its greatest strength by far. I didn't set out to write a comedy, I just wrote the kind of thing I would want to read, which happened to be something very funny. That's not conceited. It's just a fact. If you don't find it funny, you should see a doctor to make sure you aren't clinically dead. I've completed the final pass through my novel, I just have some more description and other touch-ups to add, and then I hope to get it published by Friday, though that partially depends on whether the artist I hired comes through with the cover in time. If he doesn't, I'll be kind of pissed, but it won't be the end of the world. Anyway, I'm very sleep-deprived even by my standards. A couple of nights ago I had multiple nightmares, and I don't even know why. First, I either woke up and had sleep paralysis or dreamed I had sleep paralysis and then woke up. I imagined a shapeless white ghost thing coming through my window, and then a vague black demon thing standing over me while I couldn't move. I've read about sleep paralysis, and I don't believe in demons in large part because everything that people used to blame on them has been explained by natural phenomena like sleep paralysis, and it only lasted a few seconds, but it was still terrifying. Then I dreamed that lightning struck hundreds of times simultaneously, all over the sky, and I thought about how much it would hurt to get hit by lightning, and I wondered how anyone could survive that, and I remembered that I was more likely to get hit by lightning twice than attacked by a shark, and I decided that if I was going to get hit by lightning twice, I didn't want to live. It's weird how sometimes my thoughts in dreams are entirely coherent like that. It makes me think my brain is still working too hard. So anyway, this post is basically filler to keep up my goal of writing one every week, and I will continue by mentioning some other things from my Spotify Wrapped that I would have mentioned last week if I hadn't been in a hurry. Spotify said that I'm a "Shapeshifter," and described my listening habits as "eclectic." That's exactly the word I would use to describe it. I also used to use that word for my political philosophy, but then I realized that one side of the spectrum is a much, much, much, much, much bigger problem than the other one. (Hint: it's the one dedicated to fighting against social equality and education.) These were my top five songs, none of which are by my top five artists, because I'm a Shapeshifter. Cerrone - SupernatureA fun Halloween disco track that clocks in at almost ten minutes but is worth it for the way it starts small and layers instruments on each other to gradually build up to the good part. I like it when songs do that. And that's the closest I'll ever get to sounding like a legitimate music critic. Completely out of nowhere, Duran Duran covered it on a Halloween album just a couple of months ago. Omega - Gyöngyhajú lány (The girl with pearly hair)A hauntingly beautiful fantasy song from the sixties that sounds like it must have always sounded old. An English version was released a few years later, but the lyrics are so hard for me to make out that I find it barely more comprehensible than the original Hungarian. Vogon Poetry - Atomic SkiesA fun song about the Fallout games. If you, like me, have never played the Fallout games, then it still works as a fun song about living in a post-apocalyptic hellscape. We'd better practice having a positive attitude about that sort of thing. Yarmak - RagnarokI encountered this banger as the backing track for a compilation posted in r/ukraine of the Ukrainian military prepping to kick Russia's ass. According to Google Translate, this is what the artist said about the song on YouTube: "These lines were written just a few days before going to war. It contains my entire inner state, and I want to convey this state to every brother. A great battle is ahead, after which not only our country will change, but the whole world as well. This is a real war between the warriors of light and the forces of evil, the battle of angels against demons, people against the dead. Each of us must accept and walk this path. Today, the future of the planet is being created in Ukraine, and we must do everything in our power to defeat the horde of darkness. Perhaps this will give someone motivation, know that I will not only be by your side in song, but also physically at the front with my unit. It's time to return yours! This is not a track, not a composition, not a song - this is a spell of immortality!" Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit - If We Were VampiresAccording to this song, maybe love is more precious because it can't last forever because we're all going to die someday. It was always beautiful to me, but it became more poignant after I lost my faith and had to take it more seriously. I still think it's possible that human identities and relationships will persist after death, but I'm no longer confident of that, and I am confident that whatever the afterlife may look like, Joseph Smith's eternal sex fantasy is not it. I heard this song a lot because I have three versions of it on five playlists - my 2010s playlist, my Halloween playlist, my fall vibe playlist, my nostalgia playlist, and my death playlist. It works on many levels. I just realized that I should also add it to my twue wuv pwaywist. The main feedback Steve gave me after reading my book was that he'd like more description to help him immerse himself in the world of the story. He said I'm the one who has all the images in my head, so I need to convey them to the reader. I already knew that writing description was not my strength, but this made me realize that I'm just not a very visual thinker. A lot of the images in my head, whether of my own story or others that I read, are actually pretty vague, just general ideas of people and things and where they are in relation to each other, and long passages of detailed description are just words to me. I think in words. I'm one of those people who has a constant inner monologue running and doesn't understand how anyone else could not. So I need to make a concentrated effort to think harder about the visuals and convey more of them in my writing, but if that came easily to me I would have already done it, so I've procrastinated a lot. I have a tentative release date of December 15. I can change it, but I like that date for nostalgic reasons, and I gave myself a deadline because I've procrastinated too much on publication already. And I really desperately need money. Granted, in college I often did my best work under pressure after I procrastinated, so let's hope that happens again.
I have some fruits to show from the labors of Jake Bode Fleming, the artist designing the cover for my novel that I hope to self-publish next month. After the first five artists I had in mind couldn't do it or wouldn't talk to me, a friend recommended him because he's done work for her Star Wars podcast, and he gave me a discount for being friends with her, so that was great. I've had this cover in my head for a very long time and I can't believe it's becoming real. The story revolved around a magic crystal, so the cover is going to depict the crystal with the major players' faces reflected in it. Jake started off with these very rough sketches and asked me to choose which I prefer and give any additional feedback to refine the design. Admittedly, I felt a touch of disappointment because none of these were quite what I had in mind, but I've never worked with an artist before and I told myself that I can't expect one to be psychic and get it exactly how I want, so I'd just have to settle a little. One of these designs reminds me of the Salt Lake LDS temple, which actually features in the book, so I thought maybe I could do something with that, but no, I don't want to make the temple that significant. Since his phrasing was ambiguous as to how many preferences I should pick, I picked four, gave some additional detail about the placement of the characters, and asked if he could make it asymmetrical. And then, blammo: I don't know how, but he incorporated my feedback and made these sketches that gave me a lot more enthusiasm. I love the first two so much that it was hard to pick a preference. I'm in awe of anyone who can do something that looks to me like inscrutable magic, whether it be art, music, computer programming, or romance. I just work with words. There are only so many words that exist, and for the most part I just choose which ones to use and which order to put them in. So then today he gave me this rough layout with color, and I'm still thinking about what adjustments to make, but I'm super stoked. In other exciting news, my friend Steve got married yesterday. He's a really great guy and an absolute blessing to have in my life, and he deserves all the happiness his heart can carry. We met in the summer of 2016. At that time there was this girl that I used to write about on my blog under the pseudonym "Debbie" because I cared a lot more about people's privacy back then. Some evenings, Debbie would text me an invitation to come over and talk, and I'd drop everything and get over there. She lived on the second floor of a small building with only four apartments, and we'd sit out on her balcony/porch thing. But often while we were talking, her next-door neighbor Steve would come home from work, and she'd be like "Steve, come join us!" I didn't like that very much. One time in particular I remember that we had three chairs, and I propped my feet up on the extra chair and hoped he would take the hint, but he just stood and leaned against the railing. I feel bad about that now. Anyway, he's remained in my life for much longer than she has, and years later I found out that he was jealous of me at the same time as I was jealous of him. In 2019, when I had to move and heard about an opening in his building, I jumped at the chance to be his neighbor. Pity he only stayed there for another year.
Steve has been a better friend than I deserve, and until recently when I let him read my novel, I don't know what he's gotten out of our friendship. I'm not that interesting or even that nice. We both love Star Wars and we split the cost of a Disney+ subscription. I guess that's something. But Disney is about to crack down on it. A couple of years ago, when the woman I loved with every fiber of my being broke my spirit for the second time, he drove up from Salt Lake and stayed the night. The next morning, we were watching The Simpsons together when another friend called him, and he talked to her for half an hour or so. I didn't say anything, but I was a little annoyed at that. Then he had to drive home to go to work, and I got on Facebook and saw that it was his birthday. Just wow. Incidentally, that same friend who called him spoke at his reception last night and described him as one of the most Christlike people she's ever met, and I had to agree. I want to be better because of him. Of course at the reception I saw several of his old roommates and other mutual friends, and I got the same feeling I got when I hung out with some of them in Green Canyon this summer. It was the feeling that I love these people and I desperately hope my friendships with them will last after we're all dead. Of course the romance between Steve and his new wife was beautiful and made me think that maybe it would be nice to be married, even though I was just thinking earlier that day that if I spent as much time writing and reading as I really should for my career aspirations I wouldn't have time for a wife, but far beyond that, I felt overwhelmed by gratitude for my place in this extended posse that's conglomerated around him, and I need it to continue forever. I felt a mixture of nostalgia and trauma as many of the people there reminded me of yesterday when I moved into the Logan YSA 46th Ward in 2019. I was reminded that my life is slipping away insanely fast, and it will be over before I know it, and then if I forever lose the connections to my chosen family, it was all for nothing. I used to be so confident in my beliefs. Now the only thing I know is that I don't know anything. I saw last night how happy some of the reception attendees were about the beliefs that used to make me happy. Good for them. I got off on a tangent here, so let me just end by reiterating that Steve is great. |
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- Amelia Whitlock "I don't know how well you know Christopher Randall Nicholson, but... he's trolling. You should read his blog. It's delightful." - David Young About the AuthorC. Randall Nicholson is a white cisgender Christian male, so you can hate him without guilt, but he's also autistic and asexual, so you can't, unless you're an anti-vaxxer, in which case the feeling is mutual. This blog is where he periodically rants about life, the universe, and/or everything. Archives
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