Hello, empty room.
It’s been more than two years since my last update. If you, occasional passer-by, thought that this website and associated projects were dead, you’ll be forgiven for thinking so. There was a time, last year, when I thought everything was dead. But that’s not the case. Let’s call it apparent death for all intents and purposes.
I’m starting to grow tired of the term Project
Today online everything seems to be a project. It’s become an umbrella term for anything, from artworks to app development, from business endeavours to, well, writing fiction.
Is Minigrooves a project? In the sense of proposed or planned undertaking, maybe it is. The original idea was to write a series of books of short stories. Minigrooves is a term I’ve used to refer to the series as a whole, but also to each story. Each short story with its particular mood and character, is a minigroove.
Minigrooves is also this website, which I originally created as a means to introduce prospective readers to my books and to myself as an author, keeping things separate from my main website, which is more technology-oriented.
In the Minigrooves series, I have published two volumes of short stories so far. The only updates one can reasonably expect on this front are related to a possible Volume 3. And about this, I have unfortunately little to say. At the moment, it’s all still in the ‘taking notes’ stage. I’ve considered the idea of giving Volume 3 an underlying theme, and writing a few short stories that follow this theme. I’ve written down a few ideas so far, and that’s it.
Writing is hard, especially when it’s not the only thing on your mind
I felt the need to clarify this, because over the past two years or so I’ve received the occasional email from people asking about ‘updates’ regarding Minigrooves as if it was something unfinished. Technically, it’s not. Minigrooves is not a blog that ‘needs updates’. It’s a series of books. Writing takes time. Maybe you’re thinking of certain prolific writers you know and love, writers who publish a novel every year, and so you can’t conceive it’s taking me more than 5 years to come up with a third volume of short stories.
Alas, I wish I could devote all my time to writing fiction. But I have a day job as freelance translator, and over the past two years it has become increasingly demanding. I spend a lot of time looking at a screen, reading and translating stuff I sometimes care little about (content-wise) but I must care about to carry out my job properly and professionally. It’s a process that drains a considerable amount of time and energies. So, when I finally have some free time, the idea of spending it looking at a screen, reading and writing — even if it’s something I deeply care about — makes me weary.
I thought I could take advantage of the first months of hard lockdown when the Covid-19 pandemic hit in the first quarter of 2020, but I ended up working more, and given the whole situation, to avoid a terrible burnout, I said to myself that all leisure time left at the end of a day or at the end of a week had to be spent relaxing. I was having a creative block anyway, so I decided to take it easy as a coping mechanism, to stay sane.
Sometimes a creative block works like insomnia. You cannot sleep, so you stay in bed, trying to sleep so hard, trying to shut down your brain so hard, that you end up even more awake and sleepless than before. Similarly, when you’re trying to write new material and the inspiration doesn’t come, forcing its hand is (in my experience) unwise. Often the result is just more frustration and a poor draft.
“Three years of creative block, man.”
It’s a drag, but since I started writing fiction 30 years ago, I’ve seen worse. This time, I’m doing my best to deal with this through a ‘zen’ approach. I’m trying not to overthink the whole situation. I’m waiting for inspiration to strike again. I just can’t write anything good when I’m uninspired — it’s as simple as that.
But in this state of wait, I’ve become crazily perceptive. Every time an idea worth noting comes to me, I quickly write it down. I have tactical paper notebooks for all my ongoing projects (sigh, that word again), and during this period of creative drought I kept adding notes to each and every one of them. There are signals. There is work going on in the background — this is the important thing — but it being in the background means that on the surface the landscape appears frozen and barren.
So, about the ongoing projects:
- Off the Grid series (What is Off the Grid?): I’m still working on Episode 06 – Exposed in the light, and have written about 60% of it so far. As I wrote in the previous entry on this site, I’ve definitely not abandoned the series, especially because of its connections with my main novel, Low Fidelity.
- The Ian Charles Winterman series: I’m still writing the fourth story, and my plan is to write at least two more stories and publish the series as an ebook.
- Low Fidelity: Currently writing Chapter 25 of the 32 I originally planned. I honestly don’t have an estimate on when the novel will be finished. I’d really love if I could finish it by the end of 2021. This is the work in progress that’s been in progress the longest, and it’s the one I care about the most. I want it to succeed, because I want to write other novels set in the world of Low Fidelity.
One more thing…
Perhaps some of you remember Vantage Point? It was a compact digital magazine I published on iOS between 2014 and 2016 that worked as supplement and extension of my main website, Morrick.me. The Vantage Point Magazine reference website is still online on Tumblr, if you want to have a look at how each issue was structured and read more about the magazine. (It may contain dead links, and definitely do not try to subscribe, as the magazine is not available anymore).
After ceasing publications in 2016, most of the articles I published on Vantage Point have not been republished elsewhere; it didn’t feel fair towards my few, loyal subscribers.
I’ve never received much feedback about Vantage Point, but after reading the post-mortem I published on my main website in November 2016, a couple of people reached out and told me that, in their opinion, I was closing shop too prematurely; that it was a cool project I should consider picking up again and/or repurposing down the road.
Believe it or not, this feedback has stayed in my mind as a ‘background process’ all this time, and I’ve finally decided to… do something about Vantage Point. I still don’t know exactly in what shape, form, or medium, but I want to relaunch the magazine, possibly involving other people this time. And that is all I have to say about it for the time being.
And that is all for this long-awaited, and possibly disappointing, update.
The usual friendly reminder
If you like what I write, if you’ve been enjoying what little I’ve published here for free, if you appreciate my more tech-oriented musings on my main website Morrick.me, or my explorations in vintage Macs and software at System Folder; or if you just like me and want to help, consider checking out my fiction and purchase my Minigrooves short stories, or send your contribution via PayPal. It’s truly appreciated.