Congrats to Bomb Bay Doors and to his parents!
I’ve retired.
No, not as in “I’m not working for money any more”, I’m retired from the road for the time being. Not only are the immense majority of jobs in my branch of IT now being offered as “work from home”, I’ve just been extended by my current client “until one of us gets sick of the other one”. Man, it’s sooo nice, being able to tell every agent “sorry, not available and no idea until when, it could be years.”
Now if I can get my butt into gear with the archery I might even get in a shape different from that of a chair…
Good news, Nava! Hope we will be seeing more of you around here. We’ve missed you.
Congratulations!
Such a nice thread! My eldest nephew (of 4), Daniel, got married last weekend to Sarah, his partner of 9 years. It was the first time most of our extended family met hers and we all got on splendidly, plus the ceremony was intimate, informal, and very endearing. Besides their lovely day, we all had a great excuse to buy nice wedding suits and outfits.
Thank you! I would love to read it.
It’s been a long time since I was in this thread, so here’s a minor update.
Okay, not so minor. After the compilation was published, I returned to my own stories. And Akosua (formerly known as Jackie) has helped me bring a children’s story into the world!
It is called “The Lonely Little Fridge”, based on an idea I had in Children’s Lit class at Durham College. I have self-published it. It is being printed (on demand) and distributed by Ingram Content Group. Ingram distributes everywhere. They and their partners have printing plants worldwide.
The book is available from Amazon and other online booksellers from Singapore to Brazil to Poland to the USA to right here in Canada. And I have shiny hardcover copies — and a payment terminal — in my bag for when I sell a copy in person (as I did last night to a co-worker).
But that’s not all! I vowed that I would get it translated into as many languages as I could get away with. So far, these include Esperanto, Portuguese, and Klingon. I’m halfway through assembling the Toki Pona translation into a book. And I’m looking at French and Indigenous languages.
And there’s more! Akosua and her team are teaching me and the online writer’s group I belong to about marketing. To that end, I and my books are now on GoodReads. And we are looking at getting into things like local author showcases.
But the big preparations I am doing are all toward the Esperanto convention in Montreal in August. I am proposing doing a presentation on how to publish a book: what do you do after writing it? All the stuff about self-publishing versus traditional publishing and print-on-demand and setting up book files and getting ISBNs (easy and free in Canada; evidently you have to pay in some countries) and distribution and ways to market…
And the marketing doesn’t end with a book. It’s more about a story world and different ways into it for different audiences. And different media would show different bits of the overall world. The children’s book shows different things than the Young Adult novel, which shows different things than the game or the movie…
And I have always intended that my stories would become movies. I imagine in movie form. I even dream in move form. This is why I went to animation school at Sheridan many years ago. This is why I joined the screenwriting group and took courses at LIFT in Toronto.
To that end I am about halfway through writing a screenplay for “The Lonely Little Fridge”. Then I will storyboard it and make an animatic, a rough draft animation intended to suggest how a finished movie might flow.
All that is an exercise and fun, but is also a form of marketing. I would love to be able to show the animatic at the end of my presentation at the conference. And I hope that it will increase interest in my books.
And I have stumbled across a community of incredible artists on LinkedIn of all the weird and unexpected places. They are layout artists and character designers and 3-D modelers, and many of them have worked at major studios. There’s one person sharing backgrounds they did for “Turning Red”, the animated movie set in Toronto!!! (Do you know how wonderful it is to look out I to the world and see your places, your home, reflected back to you?) There are others sharing stunning figure drawings or graceful animations or (in one case) jaw-dropping drawings of places and people that look like technical illustrations crossed with magical realism. And the colours!
I would normally be intimidated as heck by this outcropping of galactic-level talent… but somehow I’m not. They are friendly and welcoming. And I’ve already found more than one work that brought me to tears and caused me to beg the artist to please let me buy a copy…
If I’d seen this kind of stuff and its context when I was at Sheridan, maybe I never would have left. As it is now, I’m being pushed forward to create. I’ve even been practicing figure drawing intensely since October. For maybe the first time in my life, I’ve gotten to the point where I can actually use my people-drawing books!
So that’s where I am. Pushing forward as hard as I can towards the conference while I plan my next children’s book. (It will be the original concept for the “Parts: an Industrial Fantasy” book. I have an eighty-page script for “Parts” as a Young Adult graphic novel, but the first concept was a children’s book called “The Adventures of Gordin and Laisa, the Adorable Little Parts”.) No reason I can’t have both! And they are set in the same story world as “The Lonely Little Fridge”.
This whole thing connects directly to so many to the things I have done in my life: technical writing, animation, web development, drawing, writing… and imagining story worlds, which I have done since before grade ten.
Now I can sleep and dream of stories…
It did. They’re both out now, in ebook, paperback, and hardback versions.
Congratulations, @AHunter3 !
This week will mark 25 years at my current job. I get a chair and a plaque to commemorate it.
Congrats. I had a feeling of déjà vu and I see this is the culmination of this earlier thread.
A wheelchair?
I’m having cardiac ablation on Wednesday. Yes, I’m posting in the right forum. I’ve had SVT for decades and it’s gotten to the point where the meds aren’t working. I’m so happy that I will soon feel better and can fully enjoy my retirement that happened on May 6.
May all go well for you!
Good luck!
In other news, I am at the 107th World Esperanto Congress in Montreal! Only 3.5 hours away by not-incredibly-fast VIA train, but a world of difference.
I have finally kicked my Diet Pepsi habit. Yes, there are far worse habits to have than diet soda, but the aspartame was messing with my body. I can now report that, while still overweight, my gut doesn’t feel bloated and I survived the withdrawal headache, which, combined with a Covid headache was an absolute doozy.
Have I kicked soda completely to the curb? Not yet. I started in on the diet soda to keep the caffeine but remove the sugary taste, which I didn’t like. But I’m finding that if I drink a sugary soda (one, not 4-5 per day), I also don’t crave snack food so much. That’s a small win but I’m borderline diabetic, so I’ll be working on kicking the soda entirely now. But I’m very happy with this bit of progress.
I had cardiac septal ablation last April – I think it may be a different part of the heart; mine was for asymmetrical septal hypertrophy. I wound up with a pacemaker (a known risk) but things otherwise went smoothly and I’m feeling a lot better.
I’m getting a promotion! From lowly part-time Grants Coordinator to full-time Grants Manager. It may sound like a trivial difference, but in my line of work, it’s a significant distinction. A 20-year veteran in senior leadership is stepping down and I have been chosen to take over her federal grant administration duties, which means, in addition to my existing duties, I’ll be responsible for the application, oversight and administration of about $3 million in federal grant funding. No pressure.
And my boy started daycare yesterday! Good timing. This being the modern era, we’ve been spying on him via livestream. So far he has shown zero interest in other children and spent most of the day staring into space. We may be related.
I know it’s been a while. How are you doing with this? I quit soda cold turkey in February. It was painful, but worth it. I had quite the addiction going. Got tired of cavities, stomach distress, not being able to sleep at night. I’m now living the caffeine-free lifestyle. It ended up snowballing into a ton of other healthy changes. It started with kicking the caffeine habit, now I’m getting up every day at 6am to go run in the cold. I’m a cautionary tale, is what I’m saying.
First, congratulations on the promotion. That sounds exciting. No, really, I mean it. I am a writer so grant writing is something I wish to try.
I’m doing pretty good with the soda thing. I’m only doing one can of the sugared stuff a day which is a huge drop from 4 cans (or more) of diet soda which had been my daily intake. My tummy is happier. I have one mug of black tea in the morning, the soda in mid-afternoon, and maybe a green tea before dinner if I feel desperate. Next up is cutting that one can of sugared soda and substituting it with herbal tea. I know I’m going to miss the carbonation, but I won’t miss the sugar hit. I don’t like it, which is why I was drinking diet in the first place. (Please don’t suggest sparkling water, it’s not for me.)
The one sugared soda shouldn’t be too hard to give up. Yesterday, I realized that was craving sugar like crazy, which I wasn’t expecting. I think that that one Dr. Pepper is causing the craving so I need to cut that sugar tie. I should run out of the pop in a few days and then stay away from it.
I had forgotten about this thread, so I’m late with this milestone.
July 1st was the 30th anniversary of my husband and me living together (not married that long, of course, that’s only 7+ years). Not the first LTR for either of us, but now far the longest.
Congratulations! Hope you celebrated!