NEWFANGLED DEATH released!

NEWFANGLED DEATH now available in eBook ($2.99 USD) and print ($6.99 USD)! Please visit the newly opened www.derekachoy.com to see your buying options and read an excerpt!

Description: A volume of sad/strange/silly stories featuring weirdos and sweethearts, immobile birds and neglectful planets, all flavoured with a loving dash of death.

Post Mortem!

After copies of the print version of Newfangled Death arrive for me to approve, we're ready to go! Ideally this will be 1-2 weeks and there will be no glaring errors that stealth bomb me.

The final page count is 54. Here's the description from the back cover:

Sad/strange/silly stories featuring weirdos and sweethearts, immobile birds and neglectful planets, all flavoured with a loving dash of death.

The eBook version will be available for $2.99 at Amazon.com (Kindle MOBI) and Smashwords.com (ePUB, Kindle MOBI, and PDF). Eventually it will spread to other stores like iBooks and Kobo as well.

Physical copies will be available for $6.99 at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk (and other Euro Amazons) and Lulu.com. Sadly, I'm not able to list on Amazon.ca for fellow Canadians, but Lulu ships from Ontario if you live here at least.

I went crazy several times during the writing of this project! I'm glad I'm pursuing one of the few professions where lack of sanity is a prerequisite, however.

Next up, work has already begun on a volume of poetry! I think I've warned you already, but it won't be very meter/rhyme-heavy as I've stuck to in the past. You'll get ample free samples from this one though, to see if it's to your tastes. More details as I write!

See you, space cowboy

I can't help big brain-smiles of glee when I see the pictures coming in from Curiosity, the NASA rover that landed on Mars this month. Space always has a way of melting me into doe-eyed wonder, and to see these shots, to know that this is what you would see if you were standing on Mars makes my head blow up BIG BANG STYLE.

I don't care if it's a hunk of red dirt. It's another world that we're seeing like never before.

And think of how much more there is to see out there! What do the Earth-sized storms on Jupiter look like? When do we get a good sight of a black hole? (Or what's around it anyway). How about the unfurling edges of the universe?!

Obviously I'm not expecting any quick answers there, but this stuff has been infecting my dreams since I was a kid, and I'm ecstatic to see even the smallest scrap of it for real.

Patience, my eyeballs—someday I will launch you out there too!

Dummy

Sometimes I wish that for every work I produced, I were a new person. Some fresh crash test dummy who never has to worry about what comes after his job's done. No precedents to set. No expectations to meet. Just a fresh, disposable body that no one even needs to know.

It's a little silly. I'm a nobody as it is! But even still, there's always a desire to distance myself from what I've done already. It doesn't matter if I liked it, or if I made it yesterday or years ago. I don't want to be trapped in the same car, crashing into the same wall, flying out the same windshield, no matter how good I've become at it.

That's probably why I've always been drawn to starting new projects. But lately I've been wondering how much of that is a desire for novelty and how much is just plain running away. Would I ever be able to devote myself to, say, poetry, for more than a few years? Being completely honest, that's what I want to do the most. I know I wouldn't have to do it exclusively, but I wonder if I'm capable of a true, long-term focus regardless.

Suppose we'll find out soon enough. Maybe I just need to crash the same car till the wall breaks.

That empty, follow feeling inside

Hey! Facebook page! Twitter feed! Probably two avenues to the same updates, because I'm lazy!

Newfangled Death soon! As usual! (I know, I'm terrible!)

(P.S. Thanks to everyone for the feedback in the last post)

Fresh Price of Bel Air

Good news! Newfangled Death—my little collection of stories—is near complete (for real this time) and should be available for everyone to purchase or ignore (or both!) in the coming weeks. New development: print editions will be available as well, for a few more bucks! They will be kind of skinny books, but they will love you all the same.

But, bad news, I've run into a minor dilemma, and I was hoping for some input from you guys.

I was planning on a $1 price point for the eBook version. That doesn't have to change, but here's why it became an issue:

- Amazon discourages any price below $2.99 by plummeting the royalty rates down.
- Apparently there are a lot of negative associations with $1 works (flooded "bargain bin" sentiment)
- For the amount of work and time involved, I need to price future releases of this length at at least $2.99 for any hope of ever supporting myself. Will people be upset to pay more for the same length of work?

And to be totally up front, the length of this work is approximately 55-65 pages the size of an average book.

I was considering the following:

- Stick to $1 this time.
- Make it free for the first day! Then price it $2.99.
- Make it $1 for a week or month, then bump it up to $2.99.
- Give it all up and become a blind jazz musician.

Any of those would be fine with me. What do you think?

Cookies

Sometimes it seems like there's a recipe to everything. As if no matter what you're doing, it's just a matter of throwing in the same ingredients, doing the same grunt work, and you'll get your cookies. Yeah it's rarely that simple at first, but once you get something right—or at least sort of right—it's so easy to get locked into the behaviour that achieved it.


Positive reinforcement can lead to genuine self-improvement for sure, but there's always the annoying danger of complacency on the side. Especially if it becomes something you start to crave or need.

Humanity was brilliant to invent money. Look how much good and bad it does, and all for a cookie we can't even eat.

...You can buy some though.

Getting there

Sometimes I wish I could crumple up my monitor like paper and throw it in a wastebasket. Yes! This is an update about the short fiction collection, which has proved to be much more time consuming than I thought it would be, especially for a project of relatively short length.

Thing is, I'm learning how to write better prose as I go, and I keep having to rework the broken little babies that seemed perfectly healthy the other day. I've also had to toss some out, bring in some new ones, and just flail madly at my keyboard in general.

I won't pretend to know when it'll be done anymore, but I hope it's soon. As fun/agonizing as this has been, I'm dying to move on. Next project will be a volume of poetry—a medium I'm much more comfortable with!

Let's
let's
let's
let's
let's
let's
let's
let's
be
okay.

Okay?

Skullhole

In a way, it still seems like there's a big hole in my head. Other than my mouth.

When my brain became a time bomb towards the end of last year and proceeded to go kablammo, I was waiting for a long time afterwards to get back to normal.

Now I'm wondering if "normal" helped wire the thing up in the first place.

Don't know if to let it grow back.

Is it wrong to be a broken person, and happier for it?

Excuse me, my baby come out wrong

But he's still my Johnny

This Gen

A perennial complaint among people who aren't exactly young anymore (including me) is the good ol' "Music today sucks!" This is fun to say, but really not fair. Think of it this way: what if the generations of music were like the cast of a movie? You have your leading men and women, impressive ensembles, maybe the eye candy on the side and the comic relief—all the usual roles to fill.

Well, then the past has been filmed and released already. All the awards have been handed out, and everyone is relatively immortalized for their impact: artistically, culturally, or both. You can argue whether they deserve it or not, but you can't argue the fact that they've survived time so far, and that doesn't happen without reason. They did something big. All the people who didn't? They faded away, and you're left with those who really stood out. (Yes there are always great people who get overlooked, but that doesn't mean those who do get cemented in the spotlight weren't deserving.)

So that makes the present day an immensely crowded, years-long audition for who gets to survive and be heard beyond the next five minutes. Of course it's going to look like a lot of shit with all the masses trying out almost American Idol style. The ratio of bad to good may be worse now with the accessibility of technology and proliferation of mass media, but still! Get over your favourite generation! You should absolutely highlight and remember what was awesome, but you can't pretend it all was or even most of it was. It wasn't.

I'm not saying everyone is going to have a cultural phenomenon like The Beatles, or whoever holds that throne in your heart, but the lack of a worldwide darling doesn't imply a lack of good music. The public eye is fickle, so especially in the present, especially if you're older and have heard a lot already, you need to look more for yourself. There will always be new, incredible people making new, incredible music. Find them, and give them a chance!

Easter Legs

Grab bag blog! (Grab blag?)

First: Happy Easter! Just like Jesus, I had a dream the other day that my cousin was dating Rosie O'Donnell. She rode a tricycle. I'm pretty sure it was actually a glimpse into an alternate dimension and/or heaven.

*

From "You Are Not So Smart" by David McRaney:

"Bargh conducted a study in which Caucasian participants sat down at a computer to fill out boring questionnaires. Just before each section began, photos of either African-American or Caucasian men flashed on the screen for 13 milliseconds, faster than the participants could consciously process. 

Once they completed the task, the computer flashed an error message on the screen telling the participants they had to start over from the beginning. Those exposed to the images of the African-Americans became hostile and frustrated more easily and more quickly than subjects who saw Caucasian faces.

Even though they didn't believe themselves to be racist or harbor negative stereotypes, the ideas were still in their neural networks and unconsciously primed them to behave differently than usual."

*

Still plugging away at the stories I'm writing, but they're coming along. The trouble is, I'm getting reacquainted with writing prose as I go along and keep spotting new problems that I would've missed before. This is good, but is also slowing things down. Still want to get them out this month.

And I think I need to start that obligatory dance with social media if I want to take this seriously, so expect at least a Twitter feed and Facebook page to haunt as you please.

*

Jaw-and-entire-face-dropping performance of "The Bad In Each Other" by Feist at the 2012 Junos. Awesome big finish!

*

Question: Do you have any tried and true methods for thwarting the procrastination monster? A simple but effective one for me has been flicking the wi-fi switch off on my laptop. At the very least it makes me think twice about what I'm going to be using the net for.

Marooned on Popo Island

The past few days I've been helping to keep an eye on my grandma (Popo) in her little condo. She's had a couple strokes and doesn't talk much, so when I'm there she often sleeps the whole time and the room becomes a fully furnished box of solitary confinement.

I started to get a bit nutty today on the third day, which is strange in a sense because I usually go out of my way to be a hermit.

Maybe it's harder to be alone outside your own shell.

Or maybe it's her hospital bed that goes BRZTZRTZRTTT every twenty seconds.

She did wake up when my mom came once, and they sang Oh My Darling Clementine together which was really nice and funny to see.

Predetermined Free Willy

Do you believe we have free will?

The popular position among neuroscientists seems to be that it's nothing more than a handy dandy self-delusion that keeps society going. Our actions are merely the shiny, polished products of an extremely complex input-output program: our brains.

According to them, there is no "I chose to do this" in the terms most of us are accustomed to—just a big wad of neurons that weighs all the options with prior experiences and makes you do things. In oft-cited studies by a researcher named Benjamin Libet, the brain even lit up and revealed its intentions before subjects noted their own awareness of what they were doing (although I admit I'm a little dubious of evidence that relies on self-reporting.)

A common argument for free will has people saying "Well sometimes I want do something but then I don't!" But if, for a relatable example, you were deeply in love with your best friend's grandma, the act of resisting that mighty craving wouldn't mean you've conquered your impulses and your brain.

Many a scientist would say that before you even became conscious of it, good ol' brainington already considered that pursuing gammy would probably damage your friendship, alienate you from society and that she might reject your too-smooth body anyway and break your heart. Even if it was a difficult conclusion to come to, it was out of your hands.

But this all just a sloppily paraphrased version of one theory.

Is it so unfathomable to think that this sense of being on autopilot might be the illusion? That there's something we've yet to fully understand about how the brain, consciousness and our perception of reality works? Sure, maybe. Maybe it doesn't have to be so strictly one or the other, freedom versus determinism. Maybe it depends on how you define free will.

What's scary is the notion that if it somehow, someday it becomes a consensus that there is no free will, what would that mean for our legal systems? I didn't do it; that awful meatball in my head did.

5 foot dreaming

I saw an interview with singer/songwriter Regina Spektor the other day and thought it was interesting how she described her old dream of being a classical musician. She compared it to a person whose dream is to be the tallest person in the Guinness World Records but only grows to be 5 feet tall. While she admits that that kind of dream fades away on its own, she insists the first dream doesn't have to be the last one. Or even the right one.

I'm guessing most people can relate, at least to some extent. Sometimes it just seems like there's a natural dead end to what you're doing, and I'm not just talking about a limitation of innate talent (neither was Regina Spektor, I don't think). Maybe you just grow out of it, or you get stolen away by a new passion. But for a lot of people, it could be what some psychologists call the O.K. plateau.

This is when you come to a point in your growth where reaching the next echelon would require an amount of focus, passion and hard work that you're not willing or ready to commit. Whatever your rationale may be, you're content to stop. It doesn't mean you can't ever start again, but sometimes you just know when to leave it behind, even if it's disappointing.

For me, for five or six years I was devoted to animation, comics and illustrated poems. For most of that time, that was where my dreams were. But I exhausted where I could go with all of them.

It came down to the fact that I'm a doodler, not a full-fledged artist. Anything beyond the simplest poses and drawings were complete agony for me, and I had little to no interest in actually developing my skills to make it less agonizing. Sometimes I'd just think of the headache of it all and procrastinate forever.

This severely limited the kinds of stories I could tell, and before I knew it, I felt like I'd used them all up. I hit 5 feet, and you can only go so much farther with your high heels of Photoshop know-how.

I won't say I'll neverevereverevernenevnenreever make a comic or animation again. If it's a side dish, I don't care as much about pushing my limits. But I know what I loved best about both was the writing. They were perfect playgrounds for an insecure writer to cut his teeth because the visual charm can be so disarming and what you write never has to stand alone.

I'm more than ready to just write now though. I'll try, anyway. I'm not so naive as to prematurely assume this is the right dream, but It's already better in that I crave to work at it every day.

So let's hope I can be a little taller this time! Or at least fatter. I'm tired of being skinny.

Recalculating

Sometimes you just don't know where it is till you get there, uh huh? Huh uh. Uh.

The newerfangled Newfangled Death -- that poetry collection I was supposed to be working on -- has mutated  several times and undergone extensive stem cell therapy since I last spoke of it. But like the mighty Frieza, I believe it's found its final form and is ready to fight suddenly blonde people.

So yeah, it's now a collection of short stories! And a couple poem/short story cross-breeds. Some are short, some are long, but all of them will love you equally. There's an overarching theme of death, but it ain't all doom and gloom. If you're familiar at all with the black humour and sad-smiles I seem to gravitate towards, this stuff shouldn't be too scary.

Looking at a total length of 7000-ish words. Still $1 price tag for eReaders or computer reading. I'd suspect early April somewhere. No foolin'! Print editions to come later, compiling a few of these kinda volumes -- probably both at Lulu and Amazon.

Now I need to run off and be a sickly recluse again. It's one of the perks of being a writer.

Snapeshots

Severus Snape is "a professor with greasy black hair, a hooked nose, and sallow skin." His eyes "were cold and empty and made you think of dark tunnels," and he has "uneven, yellow-ish teeth."

Do you see him in your head? Or do you see Alan Rickman?

Before the Harry Potter movies, every reader's Snape would have been unique in how the individual put his key features together and filled out the rest.

After the movies, I think it's safe to say most of these millions of Snapes have been usurped -- or at least annexed -- by Rickman. Yes, he has that wicked tuba voice and is perfect in the role, but I'm not concerned about him personally. It's the Snapey homogenization that brings up some mixed feelings.

I'm not attacking movies or visual media. And I'm not longing for some fanciful purity of imagination, because even if it were possible, it'd make us all islands and erase our shared experiences. It can be really beautiful, everyone seeing the same awesome thing.* And in cinema, Alan Rickman's Snape is as iconic and awesome as it gets.

I just still kinda mourn the Snapes that lived in people's heads, even if they can't measure up to Big Ricky. But I know they aren't all lost and it'd be melodramatic to really claim they were. Evidence of Snape diversity is readily available in fan art land, an always growing and occasionally disturbing menagerie.

So, I'll just say long live Snape, whoever he is to you.

*You could argue we don't see the same thing even in a uniform image, as individual responses are unique. But that's another matter! Sort of.

Aha!

There's something remarkable and uniquely satisfying about the eureka moments that you unearth as you try to put together a creative project. The sudden connections, the sudden answers, the sudden ends of the dead ends.

Just as powerful is what can happen the day after

when you realize it's all wrong.

When are you most creative?

According to this it's when you're sleepy. A cloudy brain makes it easier to connect ideas that would've been separated by analytical walls otherwise. And then when you're more awake, you can assess whether it's insight or insane.

Any truth to this in your personal experience?

For me, the one benefit of insomnia is the rush of ideas that occasionally comes with it.

Or maybe it's the rush of ideas that's keeping me awake.

In either case, I'd still rather sleep.

Sometimes.

Newfangled Death

...that's what I'm working on now! It's the tentative name of a mini-collection of new poetry -- both free verse and rhyming -- coming in a month or so to all eReaders and PC/Mac/whatever. It'll be $1 USD and have probably 20-30 poems depending on how their lengths unfold. But no illustrations this time around, because of compatibility with eReaders and because I'd like to take a more direct route to your brain now anyway, if you'll kindly creak open your skull.

And for people who like physical books, the current plan is to release three or four digital collections like this fella and then make a print anthology of them available on Amazon.com. Somewhere under $10 I'm hoping. Somewhere within the year I'm hoping. Shipping may not be great for outside the states (that includes me!) but I'll explore other options as well.

So, I'll keep you updated on that. I'd be thrilled to sell anything at all really, with no self-deprecation intended. I'm glad there are some people who already follow what I do, but this is uphill territory regardless.

In the meantime, I spent a good juicy chunk of February writing a short story for a contest in the Toronto Star, a newspaper around here. When my girlfriend and I went to drop it off (on deadline day, naturally), the box was stuffed full of envelopes. One was even inexplicably housed in a hamster cage by the reception desk. The competition was streaming in and out the door, and while they looked like nice people, let's hope hope they are all awful writers.

I have mixed feelings about the story I wrote, which ended up being a kind of fairy tale somehow, but it's done and it was fun to flail madly at a deadline again.

Oh,

and a week ago, my sister's cat vomited a rubber band.

It was kind of cute.

Shorts

I've always leaned towards writing shorter things. They're like gunshots! They have to pack a lot into a little, or the bullet just sputters down into a penny at your feet. But if you get it right, you can take aim at your favourite organ and notch up a quick kill. I do really appreciate the kinda slow burn pandemic that only longer material can provide. But for my own work, I prefer assassination over annihilation.

It comes from the weight of brainstorming. If nothing else, I'm good at seeing many alternate paths and directions that any particular idea can take. That said, it's usually too many. More than half of the diverging paths are stupid dead-ends, but at least I can see the options. This works out well enough in small projects: there are a limited number of stops to the destination, so at least the convoluted network of good and bad roads are all in the same city. It's still an agonizing process in which I can dwell on a single word in a sentence for hours, but there are only so many sentences to torture. And if some serendipitous asteroid blasts the whole bastard to bits and reveals a better approach -- which happens again and again -- a two-thousand-word death count is just collateral damage.

I've tried longer projects, but they always feel like a giant chess tournament in my head. There are too many players, too many pieces, too many alternate routes any single game can take. Ideas clash at every move, every board, and nerds get into slow fistfights where they stroke their chins between puffy puffy cotton ball punches. When an asteroid hits, everyone dies and is simply relieved.

Of course, I might just need to get better at organizing my thoughts. But for now, let's keep it short.

Fallout of Educational Brain Explosion

I was a teacher in training, and then my head blew up. I'm not the steadiest skinny chinese man to begin with, so with the germ warfare, insomnia, endless workload and screaming children, pop pop pop went my skull.

Near the beginning I knew it wasn't really something suited to my personality type (dysfunctional), but the prospect of actually being a useful person with tangible worth made me stick to it. Plus, this wasn't an explosion without its charms.

I'll absolutely miss my kids. They were funny, crazy, loud, smart and all-around endearing. And since these are Grade 3 students we're talking about, there was an especially paternal aspect to my role with them. It hurt to leave. I also met some already inspiring teachers and people in the program. They were awesome comrades on the front line.

But I've been picking up the pieces of my head over the last couple months. Unfortunately, it kept exploding in the process. Other insane and sad things happened, but it's all helped me face up to which pieces I really want to keep and what I really want to do with my tiny grenade life.

It struck me that for all these years of holding on so tightly to the dream of being a writer, I never even tried to do it. I was too afraid to ease my grip and let it take its baby steps, because I wasn't convinced it could even learn to walk. So that's what I'm trying to do now. At least for a while, at least once, and then I can go be practical again.

This new blog, complete with new ridiculous name, will serve as the headquarters for these writing adventures. Thanks for reading, whether a little or a lot.