Nonfictional Tales #2; Spring burn edition
Updates, thoughts, photos, and what I've been reading and listening to lately. Not a story, so if that's not your jam, move along.
It’s spring! Supposedly. It also snowed last night.
But that’s what I get for living in north-ern-ish Canada.
In this last year I’ve become obsessed with taking photos of sunrises through trees. And sunrises and sunsets in general. I took this photo on the Spring Equilux, thinking to compare it to a photo I took two days after the Fall Equinox.
I definitely leaned on the saturation pedal of the second photo a lot harder than the first. Though the major difference between the two was one was taken using the Iphone’s internal camera app, whereas the other was taken using Hallide Pro Camera app, which allows you to take a DNG file with less automatic editing done to it. Both were later edited in Lightroom Classic.
I’m still deciding which of them I like more.
It’s been a minute, what’s in this update?
Living my Burnout Era
The Flying Canoe Volant
Being interviewed on a podcast for the first time as a writer
The value of feedback in both art and relationships
The willingness to listen to people you disagree with
Flowers
Living my Burnout Era
I kept reading about fiction sub-stackers trying to build an audience eventually hitting a burnout wall and giving up, and then I hit a burnout wall. And kinda gave up. Took… 9 months?
This was a pretty interesting first hand experience to go through.
I’d committed to trying to get notes posted on Wednesdays, Saturdays, and felt some obligation to post on Sundays as well - with the Warrior Wednesdays, Swords and Saturdays and Funny Sundays community fiction amplification efforts being run by such great people as The Brothers Krynn, the Man Behind the Screen and Addam Ledamyen. These are good missions, but definitely amplified my posting anxiety.
Substack has been evolving it’s “twitter-esque” notes section as a method to help newsletter writers to grow their audience and get more subscribers onto their pages. I’ve never been particular good at, nor interested in, Twitter or any social media - really ever. So as the pressure to become a notes poster, and the effectiveness of subscriber recruitment losing way to followers accumulation - my desire to play ball with this ecosystem started getting pretty choked up.
I have to confess. I don’t like social media.
I do like writing stories. But writing tweets to get people to notice them? Not so much. I don’t want to do it. The ‘ick’ factor is real for me.
It has something to do with the value I put on in person relationships. Quite a high value on them, actually. It has something to do with the wild distrust that I have for app services like “Tinder” and their tendency to make us all hyper-focus on individuals of high value, and then discard the 90% of people.
Tik Tok, Facebook, Instagram… they all do something similar. They push us towards whatever the algorithm seems most interested in supplying. Not what would actually be most beneficial to us. Only what is most mesmerizing. That which sustains and maintains your attention, to feed the ecosystem.
And what is most mesmerizing is rarely what is most beneficial.
Point is I’ve grown exhausted with the obligations and requirements of social media, and I’m feeling a strong desire to pull back and focus on the writing - leaving the social media dance to others. Frankly I think it’s making us all sick, and entitled to the free content creations of others.
So this is going to result in some changes to how I’m managing this newsletter in the near future, but I’m still plotting out how that’s going to occur. More of my posts are going to start appearing behind a paywall soon, however, as part of my burnout is the feeling of obligatorily free content creation in exchange for the theoretical dream of faster subscriber growth.
There may also have been girl trouble.
Give away your work and they will come they said.
“I volunteer as Tribute!” I cried. And the subscribers… sort of… came?
I did get some exposure.
People also die from exposure.
Well. Tried that approach. Now for something different.
🔥🔥🔥
The Flying Canoe Volant, and the importance of Cultural Festivals;
The Flying Canoe Volant has come and gone, ending near the beginning of February this year. For those of you who don’t know what this is, it’s a French Canadian cultural festival in Edmonton, AB, that I’ve been helping my brother (who has been the lead artist since it’s inception) build, manage and install lanterns throughout the Mill creek Ravine most years for the last 12 years.
It’s a pretty all consuming art project for a good month, at least, and for him, longer.
One of my favourite things about my brothers art is it’s natural ability to create magical settings at night to capture in still or video. Most of my photography experience was honed trying to capture good night time shots with sub-par cameras.
Which is a huge pain in the arse.
This was the first year using Hallide Pro, so it turned out very differently than I was expecting. I’m still getting used to how that App manages night time lighting.
Link to the album → https://photos.app.goo.gl/E7fD1ocBrJQWABMW8
Living further north, you really feel how the loss of “sun time” during the darkness of winter leads to encroaching mental health problems for you and the people around you. You feel the rising levels of anxiety and depression in the communities around you the further removed we get from getting adequate sun exposure, and as the cold drives us to become more and more isolated.
So this fact has lead me, on more than one occasion, to ponder the value of large cultural festivals that provoke or induce a state of wonder or awe in it’s participants. Something like 50 - 60,000 people come each year to visit the ravine that the lanterns are set up in, and take part in storytelling, musical performances, and wandering through the ravine ‘tripping out on the lights.’
What is the value of that from a societal mental wellbeing perspective? The emotion of Awe and Wonder is supposed to create a neurologically protective effect on the emotional stability and positivity of the feeler than can last for weeks after the experience, depending on how powerful an affect that is. A therapist would say “seek meaningful life experiences” but I think that’s such a horribly sterile way to talk about *Awe* or *Wonder*.
How many conflicts does such a festival avert, simply by changing a human’s baseline of contentment? How many acts of self-neglect or self-harm are averted?
Who knows. I don’t. But I wonder.
These thoughts underline the power and importance I feel we, as a society, must place on large cultural festivals - and how devastating the loss of such gatherings would be if they were to be neglected or discarded out of a “need to tighten our belts” or other such austerity nonsense.
You save a lot of money not buying groceries.
”Tightening that belt” both metaphorically and literally.
And then you die.
An Edmonton cultural festival that could use help in surviving is the Fringe. If you haven’t heard, the Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival had to cancel it’s 2020 year due to Covid, and it took a staggering $3m blow to its finances as a result. Many cultural projects have been destroyed or significantly financially impacted due to Covid lockdowns.
So if you’re in a position to help this festival, please check out their request for aid page on the link above.
I was on a podcast and we barely talked about my writing!
One of my longtime friends and a fan/subscriber of my stories has been building his own podcast for some years now, recently renamed “The Yoga Connection with Zorananda.”
Some of you know him, most of you won’t.
We’ve both been longtime members of a “I can’t believe it’s not a cult” community known as Arcatribe - and we go deep into conversing about mental wellbeing, the importance of community and belongingness, and how “I can’t believe Robin’s not a cult-leader.”
Which I’m not. I swear. And would prefer to stay that way.
Though I guess if being a fantasy fiction writer fails, I can always try out L.Ron Hubbard’s approach to paying the bills. Seems like it worked for him.
Give it a listen. Or don’t. I’m not your dad.
Unless I am, in which case we need to talk. And clean your room.
The value of feedback in art and personal relationships.
I stopped putting pull-quotes/footnotes with sarcastic jokes into my stories. Couldn’t tell if anyone liked them or not. *I* found them funny, and went a bit overboard with them on the second draft of my “Unvalentine’s Flower” story.
My father, who has editorial chops, pointed out I had quite thoroughly gone overboard. After a second look, I had to agree. I was making the “footnotes” a meta-story that was distracting from the story itself.
It was also… mid-February and had been going through a tough time.
And the tough time did -not- stop in February.
So I was prepared to say “no one cares!” and then stop the whole thing. Being a writer & an artist is tough. You scream into a void and maybe someone notices.
So I put together this feedback form. Because who wouldn’t fight depression and uncertainty with google-forms and spreadsheets?
I was a bit surprised when I got actual feedback that the footnoting was a real feature that you enjoy - and wish to see it continue. But specifically as pull-quotes, and not as actual end of story footnotes
So the “footnotes” are back!
Not that these have *anything* in common with classic footnotes.
They’re more like 4th wall breaks at this point.
Substack’s *actual* footnoting sucks as bad as their fiction categories. It’s as though their platform developers are recalcitrant teenagers who aren’t allowed to go to their friend’s house until their work is finished.
Half done, in half the time, headphones on and they’re out the door before you can do any quality assurance.
Another piece of feedback I received was that the stories, in many cases, are continuations of other, earlier, stories - and it’s not always apparent what the heck is going on. So a request was made to link earlier stories to new ones, to show the timeline and progression of the character arcs.
This made sense to me. Not everyone has read my stories 10 times a piece like I have. Most of you have read only half of them.
I’ve begun to add links to previous stories into new ones. I’m still playing around with how to include those in an aesthetic and seamless manner. If anyone has suggestions on best practices for that, I’m all ears.
I’ll also release a “Table of Content” post in the near-ish future (meaning whenever I have time to build that) so you can reference which stories are linked to which other stories, and in what order they should be read.
“Master of Contents”?
“Content Legend”?
Still workshopping the name.
This also leads me to a point of appreciation for friendships where the person feels brave enough to offer feedback on how I show up in the world. Particularly when I don’t like what they have to say.
It can be hard to know what other people think of me… and I imagine this is true of others. There are many ways that we show up in the world and are “disruptive to one’s environment” that we are otherwise blind to - because of privilege, positionality, blindness, trauma, dissociation, disinterest or unwillingness to face the darker corners of our own shadows.
*Maayyybbbbeeee* its just me. I doubt it though.
Sometimes it’s just me. In which case…
”I’m Sorry. Please Forgive Me. Thank You. I love you.”
Ho'oponopono Prayer
I am no exception. At those times, it really might be up to someone close to us to say “Hey… did you know this is what you’re doing?”
Some of my most valuable lessons have come from my friends who have said unpleasant things to me - about me. Even when they hurt.
So. Thank you.
That being said - please don’t send me hurtful messages.
Unless I genuinely deserve it.
Which is a stellar bridge into the next thing I’ve been pondering a lot.
The willingness to listen to those you disagree with;
I’m a bit of a culture war junkie. I admit it. I wouldn’t describe myself as a front-line soldier in the culture war… more like collateral damage, an outside observer, occasional combatant, and sometimes victim.
I’d been mostly oblivious to major culture war trends (preferring to research hard power conflicts in the past) until the last few years, when some encounters with wounded humans looking to defeat their oppressors decided I looked like their oppressors.
I am a white cis-het man of British ancestry. So… they weren’t exactly wrong.
But *I’d* never oppressed *them.* I also learned that’s not important.
Those were rough and confusing times for me.
As is my habit when something gets forced on me, or I get hurt by something, I tend to examine it pretty closely. I respond the only way I really know how. Reading and listening.
And according to my friend Matt - whining and indignant outrage.
But who cares what he thinks.
So I’ve been reading and listening to as diverse a set of sources as I could manage and had the time for, and while I honestly do slant more towards the progressive side of politics, my more socially conservative readers might be surprised to learn that there isn’t as strong a “consensus” within progressivism as it might appear from the outside over what is considered “right or true” in how the culture wars have played out.
I’ve also done my best to take seriously the viewpoints of other conservative and liberal commentators, and have been surprised at the thoughtfulness expressed by many of them.
Though some are just demagogues looking to make a buck from our outrage.
That’s also sadly true of many progressive commentators.
Grifters gotta grift.
We are dealing with a complex and uncertain world, and the answers of what the right thing to do isn’t always as clear as we wish they were.
Certainty is a drug.
It makes us cozy in a warm bubble of “don’t make me think about my behaviour and how I may be inflicting harm on others.”
In my meanderings trying to understand what the heck is going on with the culture wars, I was super impressed by this interview between Jesse Brown and Andy Mills (former producer of “The Daily” and “RadioLab”) on the CanadaLand podcast. There are some really thoughtful dives into what it is to be called out and harassed, how one should question if one is “right” or “doing the right thing" - and what it’s like being wrong in public.
I particularly liked Andy Mills distrust of “certainty” - as this is something I’ve been finding growing in my own attitude for some time now. I highly recommend listening to this episode.
One of the podcast shows that Andy Mills helped produce was “The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling.” I’d avoided listening to this podcast because I, being of the more ‘progressive’ variety of politics, had fallen into the lazy trap of judging her based on what was being said about her, and not what she herself was saying.
After listening to Andy Mills talk about this mini series podcast, I felt compelled to dive in and listen.
I was stunned at the level of humanity shown by Mrs. Rowling, the host Megan Phelps-Roper, but also by several of her critics.
And the utter inhumanity of some of JK Rowling’s other critics.
I don’t put this recommendation out here because I feel that you should sympathize with her, agree with her, or reject her. I recommend this because this podcast is a *fascinating* way of exploring conflicting viewpoints, and I think serves as a model for how we need to, as a society, talk to each other in the years to come.
Grace and nuance needs to have a place in our understanding of people’s perspectives and choices, and a willingness to understand that highly educated people may disagree with the conclusions we come to after reading, seeing or listening to the same content or events we do.
And maybe that’s okay.
Unless everyone would rather we just start shooting each other.
In which case, carry on.
aaannndddd….. Flowers;
I’ve been rambling on long enough about my various ponderings that I get up to in between writing my fantastical nonsense. Instead of ending on the previous note, here are some of my favourite flower photos I’ve taken in the last couple of months.
My gratitude for having regular access to an indoor botanical garden during the snowy winter is boundless.
And this nonsense picture I talked Dall-E into making for me on a lark.
I’ve written enough for one update. I’ll be back with another soon once I’ve figured out how I’m going to free myself of social media… while… also… managing a social media marketing campaign.
It makes sense somehow.
Cheers,
Robin George