Solus wants to be a musician.
26/12/2022
Well over 60K words now. Second arc complete. I haven’t touched OM in about half a month. The diabetes and cholesterol diagnoses have led to some much-needed changes in my life. On the whole, adjusting to meds, wrapping up Watchdog work for the year. I’m not worried about the book anymore: it’s at that stage where the words write themselves. I keep returning to Origami Meteorite; as the world gets more chaotic, it’s a reminder that even in chaos, there is great beauty, and that one must imagine the proverbial Sisyphus to be happy. The tapestry is much richer than I originally imagined, and I just need to sit down for things to come to me.
21/9/2022
Work continues at a steady clip. I estimate I'm getting about three days a week in, at between 1400 and 2400 words a day. The heatwave in Colombo is now my biggest enemy - by daytime the walls start radiating heat inward and turn our brains into scrambled mush. I’ve reset my writing time to 7:45 AM to compensate.
31/8/2022
Rewrote opening arc (35 K words); structure is now satisfactory and lets me access the rest of the story. New interlude structure is much more enjoyable. Porting to separate folder in IA writer, cleaning up.
By Jun 2021, I was done with both The Salvage Crew and The Inhuman Peace. I had spent most of my time locked down, ploughing through work on machine learning for misinformation detection.
Despite the fact that I had several books lined up, I couldn’t bring myself to write anything. The Inhuman War (the planned sequel) was a dark book. The State of Data required heavy revising after COVID-19. These were books on contract. Expansions of the Numbercaste and Salvage Crew universes had to go through some serious logistics before they became reality. I was at a point in my life where I was burned out and increasingly depressed, both with myself as a researcher and as a writer.
I had long been a fan of a category of music mostly found on YouTube - instrumental backgrounds, mostly generated on synthesizers. There are some insanely talented artists out there - Celldweller and Audiomachine were old favourites, and as I went through the YouTube rabbit hole I stumbled across others that really set a mood. Especially Bertysolo and TellingBeatzz (Thomas Hodek); these tracks felt like set pieces for what was going through my head when I sat watching the rain, at night, with a cigarette in hand, wondering whether it was worth waking up the next day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiVw7Ag1ZZs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GjNX7jcLK0