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The quirky query quest

Filed under: writing — Leave a comment
May 15, 2024

My big project this year is to try to get my debut sci-fi novel a) sold and b) published – with a bunch of short story submissions as a side dish. It has been interesting…

The thing you usually hear the most is how difficult it is to write a novel in the first place: people try and fail, or they incubate their precious idea their whole life, or they participate in the NaNoWriMo project. The act of having written, of having created, seems to be the ultimate prize. No one tells you about the next stage – finding a good agent by cold-messaging them with a query.

I’ll be honest: I hadn’t given this step much thought. All of my favourite writers (Pratchett, Scalzi, etc) had more or less stumbled on their agents, and I’d assumed I’d figure it out once I got there. (And that was a good tactic at the time: why stress about that before the book is even finished?) Now that I’m here, though… Wow. Wowowow. This is an entire world, an ecosphere of its own, with so many rules and quirks and occasionally contradictory advice.

A query should be short but not too short. Funny but not too funny. It should reference comps (comparable works) directly but without being too arrogant: in the style of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – not similar to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The comps should be relevant but recent, and not too old. I’m going to start a mini-quest to find relatively recent books that combine quirky revisionist history with snarky time travel narratives: in theory, there ought to be at least a couple of them. In reality, I haven’t heard of any. There is, in fact, an actual free service for writers where, if you leave a voicemail describing your book, a team of booksellers will brainstorm to help you find recent comps. We live in such a strange (and occasionally incredibly kind) world…

The more I learn about all the different query styles, and preferences, and conflicting pieces of advice, the more I feel like an uncouth barbarian at an elf castle. So many rules (written and otherwise) so many ways to mess this up, so very much to learn… This truly is fascinating – and a worthwhile challenge at long last.

I have no relatives or buddies in the industry, no rich parents who have a golfing buddy with a publishing house, no giant social media following. In a way, that makes my hunt a lot more difficult. In another way, though, it’s a reassurance about something I always worry about: when I succeed, it’ll be based on merit, and nothing else. The road ahead will be difficult, but I know that someday I will reach my destination, with my yet-to-be-discovered awesome agent, and my as-yet-unknown editor. I do not know what form the end result will take, nor how long this will take me, but I know my novel is the exact sort of thing my 20-year-old self would’ve adored, and I will get it published – someway, somehow, someday.

And now… Off to hunt down the comps of historical and/or time travel novels that occupy my very specific quirky niche. Followed by major revisions of my query letter. Followed by a bit of an email blast, and waiting, and hoping, and dreaming. All shall be well.

EDITED TO ADD, A LITTLE WHILE LATER: Well, it took some googling, but I’ve found a few books that are somewhat-but-not-quite similar to mine. This should work I think: “The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England” by Brandon Sanderson, “The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.” by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland, and the “Time Police” series by Jodi Taylor.

Also, I realize how ridiculously self-assured my post sounds. I promise that I know what Dunning-Kruger means. I am not perfect, but neither am I terrible. What I am is extremely patient, in possession of infinite time, and quite good at handling rejections. Someday, I shall succeed.

EDITED TO ADD, A BIT LATER: Ho hum, apparently the comp titles should be from the last couple of years. (Sorry, Mr. Stephenson.) Behold, the new comps! Jodi Taylor’s “Time Police” series, Bill O’Neill’s “The Big Book of Unexplained Mysteries,” and “The Umbrella Academy.” I really think this is the best trio of recent fictional works to describe my novel. Let’s hope this works, eh?

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Hell is…

Filed under: on stuff and sundry — 2 Comments
May 4, 2024

…forcing yourself to go out solo on a Friday night because your partner is with one of her other partners and it’s been at or below freezing for over six months, and you just want to see people wearing anything other than winter coats, and see some new people for once, or a few dozen new people, or a few hundred new people, and the security guy doesn’t even glance at your ID, and the perfunctory patdown misses the pocket knife and other goodies, and all the 19-year-olds inside stare at you – old enough to be their father – like you’re a “How do you do, fellow kids?”-type narc, though granted, wearing a blazer over a Fallout T-shirt probably wasn’t the best fashion choice, and they still stare, and if you wonder if you remind them of a cop, or a professor, or their parent, and you buy an overpriced beer to fit in, and bop your head up and down with the rhythm of surprisingly old-timey songs from your own college years, and suddenly, you realize you can’t recall the name of the young classmate whose death you’ve played a small role in almost a year ago, and how long has it been since you last thought of her? – and you make laps through the large basement dancefloor, part of the crowd and yet not part of it, living vicariously through the young as they hop and make faces and hold onto each other’s hair to make it through the crowd without getting lost, and Ronel, Ronel, her name was Ronel – it comes to you, suddenly, when you have all but given up, and you realize the DJ looks like a middle-aged Benjamin Franklin with laser-shooting gloves, and the bearded man standing to him is either a Babylonian or a damn fine approximation, and the musician upstairs starts singing Wonderwall, followed by Country Roads, in a Quebecois accent, and the veil between realities seems to be thinner than usual, and finally – finally – you get outside, and get some fresh air, and get home, and wonder if maybe you should go out more often.

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Five years in Canada

Filed under: year in review — Leave a comment
March 27, 2024

Today is the first day of my sixth day in this beautiful country. Time flies, eh. I could’ve posted something yesterday but I was far too busy spending time with my partner and learning cool new stuff at a very special event later in the evening. Life is good!

Five years and a day ago, I made this short blog post to commemorate the end of my epic road trip from Seattle allll the way to Toronto. (It was epic. Would definitely do it again.) Incidentally, that meticulous record-keeping also came in useful when dealing with immigration paperwork later on. Huzzah! But anyway – that day, that crossing of the border still seems so recent in my memory…

A lot has happened since then. I had a couple of great partners, and buried two romantic interests, and ended up in a police interrogation room, and almost killed a cop trying to break into my apartment (on a separate occasion, it should be noted), and survived the first global pandemic in over a century. (While keeping meticulous daily records thereof for 406 days.) Got my Canadian residency, applied for citizenship (any day now!), quit Amazon, started my early retirement. Published a lot of e-books. Finished my sci-fi novel. (Still looking for an agent!) Oh, and hiked from Mexico to Canada, huzzah! Spent a year learning French at the local community college. A very eventful five years, to say the least.

I won’t even try to imagine how much wilder and more different my life will be in another five years, in that kinda-sorta-not-really distant year of 2029. I just know it won’t be anywhere close to what I have now. Will I have hiked and triumphed over the Continental Divide Trail and the Appalachian Trail, securing my Triple Crown achievement? Will I have become a published sci-fi author? Will I have done something so wild and cool that I can’t even imagine it right here and now? Hell, I hadn’t even know the Pacific Crest Trail was a thing until three months before I started hiking it. (I move fast.)

I love it here… Canada ain’t perfect – no country ever is – but it’s so much more sane, more safe, more civilized than the United States. And since the US will have Trump on the ballot for the third time in a row, there’s a fair chance things south of the border will get even more bizarre and chaotic in the next four years. The steadily growing anti-abortion movement is downright insane: they showed their cards a bit too early when they outlawed in-vitro fertilization (IVF) in Alabama earlier this year. Wild. Wild wild wild. They really do want to create Gilead, don’t they?..

Quebec, and especially Quebec City, is all I’ve ever wanted when I dreamed of a quiet, cheap, and exotic retirement destination. It’s so damn beautiful here… A whole alternate history. Even the locals look different, thanks to the overabundance of French genes from way back when. (Check out this wiki article on the “King’s Daughters” initiative – it’s so incredibly strange.) I love it here, and my pidgin French is slowly but surely getting better, woot!

Five-year plans… As someone born in the Soviet Union, I suppose that’s just part of how I see the world. And as someone who (thanks to the Soviet Union) grew up surrounded by pollution and radiation, I don’t think I’ll set any world records for longevity. How many more five-year stretches do any of us have ahead of us? The other day, on Reddit, a fellow thru-hiker said he measures his remaining life in summers: how many more healthy, active summers does he have left to thru-hike? (His two main interests in life are thru-hiking and the FIRE movement. Love it.) And that’s… a sobering way to look at things.

I am now 37. Realistically, if I stay in shape and eat my veggies and protein (side eye to the broccoli and mushrooms I bought two days ago and still haven’t even touched), that’s five more five-year stretches where I can be active and proactive. I imagine things will slow down a bit in my mid-60s. That’s 25 more summers, or 25 gigantic adventures, and many many more smaller ones. That’s quite a lot, but it’s also quite limited.

Just being greedy and overthinking things, I know. It’s entirely possible that some tourist driver unfamiliar with the local pedestrian crossing rules will shatter my legs with his SUV (had a few close calls last summer) and make this entire section of this blog post a prime example of hubris. Or maybe they’ll finally invent blood-borne nanobots with the ability to regenerate any cellular damage, and we’ll all live forever as paragons of health. Or maybe yet another unnoticed asteroid will swoop in, score a direct hit, and none of this will matter. Life can be random, no?

And so, off to year six. On a smaller scale, and just today, off to do more gaming and reading and hanging out with my partner. Here is to small triumphs and big victories, and every damn thing in between.

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Yes, I really do live in Canada on just $1K USD a month

Filed under: personal trivia — Leave a comment
March 18, 2024

Hello, new friends! – assuming you’re here because you googled my name after seeing or reading the news. Everything you’ve read and heard is true: I do, indeed, live quite happily on $1,000 USD a month – or somewhere around $1,354 CAD as of this writing.

How? Geographical arbitrage. If you’ve never heard about it, I’m happy to be the one to blow your mind with that amazing concept. I first learned about it from Tim Ferriss’s 2007 book “The 4-Hour Workweek.” That book is brilliant, it aged quite well, and it’s filled with fun ideas: setting up and outsourcing a business, or hiring a virtual assistant, or moving someplace much cheaper where you can enjoy the same (or even better) standard of living, aka geographic arbitrage. I don’t think Ferriss ever considered that one of his readers would move from Reno to Las Vegas to Fort Worth to Tampa to Seattle to Toronto to Quebec City in pursuit of that dream, but hey – that totally worked. (And yes, just typing up that list of cities took me a while.)

2008 was a bad time to be a brand new college graduate, especially in Nevada – the ground zero for the housing bubble. That’s how, after 18 months of hustling and bustling and trying to juggle broke roommates, I got a gig as a seasonal box packer at an Amazon warehouse in November 2009. I packed a lot of boxes, got my permanent badge, and eventually got promoted to a data geek in my warehouse’s quality department…

Each time I moved and launched a new warehouse for Amazon, I received a cash bonus. As their bottom-level warehouse-based analyst (level 3 out of 12, where 12 = CEO), I never made much ($15/hour or less, usually), but there was always lots of overtime, and the annual cash bonuses for moving were nice… After three years, the twice-yearly pay raises for hourly employees stop, which was the main reason I ultimately transferred to corporate in Seattle. (At that point, I was L4, aka the lowest lifeform on the corporate ladder outside the warehouse world.) That position finally got me some sizable stock options, though – once again – I never made $100K, even if you add the stock on top of my unimpressive salary.

That whole time, I lived frugally, and contributed 10% of my paycheck to 401k (a retirement account in the US) while also trying to max out my Roth IRA (another type of retirement account), cooking at home, avoiding food trucks and food delivery (I still maintain that food delivery is a profligate scam), and generally being a good little saver. There were months when I’d switch my 401k allocation to 90%, just to turbocharge my retirement account while living off my savings. There were two dirt-cheap tropical vacations to Costa Rica – staying in hostels and traveling around the country by bus… Good times.

I’d always had the idea to retire early – recently, an old college roommate confirmed I’d voiced that notion even when we were both 20. There wasn’t much to do for fun during the Great Recession, so I overdosed on personal finance blogs and books, and came up with my own motto: Earn More, Spend Less, Invest the Rest. That’s also one of the main ideas in my book on personal finance, “Let’s Retire Young: Embrace Simplicity, Escape the Rat Race, and Achieve Lean-FIRE.” (While you’re there, check out my other Kindle e-books!) “FIRE” stands for “Financial Independence, Retire Early” – and lean-FIRE is retiring early on a very lean, frugal budget. A bit like a modern-day monk, or a grad student – but permanently.

One key obstacle to FIRE fans in the United States is healthcare. That was one of the main reasons I tried getting a transfer to another, more civilized country – and after many attempts, it finally worked. (At Amazon, L4’s aren’t taken very seriously; likewise for our international transfer requests.) In March 2019, I moved from Seattle to Toronto (that was one long drive!) after the company helped prepare all the paperwork to get me a job as a financial analyst (still an L4) at a warehouse in Toronto’s suburbs.

Long story long, I worked and patiently waited for the required two years before I could get my Canadian PR (permanent residency): before that, I’d been in the country on a work permit, which meant if I lost the job, I would’ve had to go back to the US. (That would have been suboptimal.) I got my long-awaited PR in April 2021. I’d spent my 2020 selling my small stockpile of Amazon stock, investing in companies that were severely undersold during the covid market crash, and making a 193% return the following year. By April 2021, I had all the ingredients in place: just enough cash to retire early + a permanent resident status in Canada + a nice safety net in the form of my two US-based retirement accounts (they’ll keep growing for the next 22 years, till I can start withdrawing from them) and my fully funded Social Security benefits. The latter isn’t enough to live on in the US, but that alone could pay for my frugal lifestyle.

After leaving Amazon in May 2021 (ironically, right after the long-awaited promotion to L5: too little, too late), I hung out in Toronto for a bit, and then moved to Quebec City in September 2021. Why Quebec City? Well, let’s just say there was a reason I had become a financial analyst – it wasn’t just because of my seniority… I did a lot of research: the province of Quebec had the lowest rent in all of Canada. Within the province, two cities stood out: Sherbrooke had the cheapest rent of all (roughly $450-500 CAD for a studio apartment with all the utilities), while Quebec City had the second-cheapest. Quebec City was a little bigger and a lot prettier, and so…

My shiny 1-bedroom apartment is spacious and nice, on the second floor of a quiet brick building in the center of the city, within walking distance of everything. I live without roommates, and my rent is $674 CAD a month ($498 USD). The water and internet bills are included, and I pay only for electricity (or hydro, as they call it in Canada). With that sole bill and with the renter insurance, my total monthly rent is $734 CAD or $542 USD. That’s unheard of elsewhere in Canada, I know – and you might have a hard time believing it, but look it up – go on Facebook Marketplace, select Quebec City (or Lévis – the town right across the river), and search for “louer” – “rent.” You’ll find many other deals in that price range, and rental rooms for $450 CAD or thereabout.

Feel free to call me a liar. I know, these numbers look ridiculously low, but hey – Quebec is an awesome province with very strong rent control, and geographic arbitrage is a beautiful thing. You’ll have to learn French if you want to live here, but it’s not too hard: I speak passably decent pidgin French after just a couple of years here. You can too, eh. (The local francisation program will pay you $200 CAD a week to attend a community college – cégep – full time for a year to learn the language and the customs of your new home. It’s not perfect, but it’s much better than DuoLingo.)

And so, $734 CAD for rent. My cellphone bill is $64 CAD, but I can probably lower it a bit if I try. My grocery budget is $300 CAD a month, and even that is too much: I cook at home, take advantage of sales, and live healthily yet simply. (Yes, I eat meat.) I also brew my own red wine, which is ridiculously cheap and fun. My budget also includes $100 CAD a month (or $25 CAD a week) on going out to eat. If/when I spend less than planned on groceries, that $95 CAD weekly budget ($70 + $25) goes into more trips to local diners and bakeries. The total so far is $734 + $64 + $300 + $100 = $1,198 CAD, or $884 USD. That leaves a whopping $156 CAD for random, non-going-out, non-grocery expenses, and that’s plenty enough.

It helps when you deliberately choose not to have a car: I sold mine shortly after leaving Amazon, and I never looked back. The cost of insurance + gas + parking + maintenance + the low-key stress the car might get stolen… I don’t miss any of that. Quebec City is remarkably pedestrian-friendly, and there are buses all over the place. (I use up one $3.40 CAD bus pass per week to get my groceries.)

For entertainment, I use public libraries, YouTube, and my book collection. For exercise, I walk around town and do body weight and dumbbell exercises at home. And yes, I do have a girlfriend – I’m not some chronically single weirdo living in a basement. The two of us are happy.

A few weeks ago, a journalist from Business Insider found one of my old Reddit posts (where I detailed my $1K/month plan) and asked for an interview, and I happily obliged. You can read it over here. In a matter of days, MSN reposted the article, then Yahoo Finance reshuffled a few words and reposted it too (that was quite funny), and then a local news channel based out of Montreal reached out for an interview too… Here it is – they mispronounced my name, but they got the story across, and that’s all that matters!

I genuinely hope that others will look into these concepts – FIRE, lean-FIRE, geographic arbitrage, and so many others – and will take steps to at least simplify their finances, if not move to an exotic new town/country/continent and retire early, a few decades ahead of the arbitrary schedule we’re supposed to follow for some reason.

My plans for the next couple of years include, in no particular order:

  • finding and agent to sell my newly finished science fiction novel, “Time Traveler’s Etiquette Guide”
  • writing my second science fiction novel! (See the blog post just before this one.)
  • hiking the Continental Divide Trail (my Pacific Crest Trail adventure in 2022 was glorious, and now I’m hooked)
  • joining the Canadian Army Reserves to help my new country fight natural disasters
  • joining a huge local community garden to level up my gardening skill and get a share of their vegetable harvest when it’s done
  • and much, much more…

There will, of course, be those who refuse to believe me, or – as the meme goes – will not be stopped by this blog post because they can’t read. Nonetheless… A very quick FAQ:

Q: Aha! You worked for Amazon, you rich tech-bro, you! That’s how yo managed to retire at 34!
A: Technically, that’s not a question… But no, like I said above, I never made $100K USD even if you add up my salary and stock grants. In fact, I’m pretty sure I never even made the median salary in any city I ever lived and worked in.

Q: You got lucky with your apartment, and you’re grandfathered in, and you’ll never find that deal again! Why are you bragging about this?
A: My apartment is, admittedly, cheaper than average, but you can find many others in this price range. And I moved here just 2.5 years ago: it’s not like I’ve been renting it since the 1960s. In fact, the rent has already gone up, technically: electricity (hydro) used to be included in the rent when I first moved in. There are many other deals like this.

Q: I can’t read, and squiggly characters confuse me! Where the hell do you live on $1K a month, Nunavut?
A: Nope – in the beautiful Quebec City. Sherbrooke is even cheaper! Also, that’s $1K USD, or $1,354 CAD – not $1K CAD.

Q: You lie! You got a huge inheritance, didn’t you? Didn’t you?
A: I did not, my cynical friend. Despite having buried my biological father and two stepfathers, the most I ever received from any of them was a collection of cool gems (not diamonds, no) and a beaten-up old bicycle. Also, a couple of worn white T-shirts. No riches or deeds to abandoned farms, sorry to disappoint.

Q: What the hell do you even do on that kind of budget? Sit around and watch the paint dry?
A: I do quite a lot, actually! I’m in the best physical shape of my life now, I do a lot of reading and listen to tons of fun podcasts (we live in the golden age of podcasting), I practice my photography and tinker with a couple of musical instruments, I play video games (classics are cheap, if not free), I volunteer at a local non-profit, and so much more… There’s a lot of fun stuff you can do without spending a penny. I hope someday you’ll find it too.

And with that, I’ll probably wrap up this novella. If you have any other questions, comments, or concerns, please feel free to comment here or use the “Contact me” form!

Good luck on your financial journey, y’all.

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Done at last

Filed under: writing — 3 Comments
March 16, 2024

At last. At long, long last. It is done.

A few nights ago, I made the final edit to my brain-baby, my first-ever novel-length work of fiction (science fiction, to be precise), my “Time Traveler’s Etiquette Guide.” I got the idea for it way back in 2015, if not before, and I started to slowly but surely gather the information on all sorts of myths, fun historical anecdotes, and just about anything else I could blame on a careless time traveler. (There’s quite a lot of that, it turns out.) Then I started scribbling my first draft, and then…

Workaholism. Years and years of it. Zero stars, two thumbs down, would not recommend. You can see it even on the sideline of this blog: there were hardly any entries in 2018, and that was pretty indicative of my slump in creativity and, to be honest, overall higher brain function. (85-hour workweeks will do that to you.)

There was another attempt to resume my novel in 2020, when there wasn’t much else to do. Soon enough, the fear of covid and the pressure of negative news extinguished even that.

Ironically, I should credit my slow-paced year at the nearby community college last year with giving me that final push. By the end of each day, frustrated with the pace of school, I would spend an hour writing my novel and an hour studying genetics (thanks for the free course, MIT!) just to feel I’ve done something – anything – productive at all with my day.

And then an old college friend of mine published his own sci-fi trilogy, and that filled me with all the conviction I needed. Finally, here was a real-life person from my own social circle who managed to get a bona fide book deal! Without him, my own novel might not have happened. Thanks, D-Clark!

And so… It’s done. It feels unbelievably strange to no longer have that pressure on the back of my mind, that guilt of procrastinating when I could be writing and sharing my unusual take on time travel with the world. All in all, this 104,000-word novel took me 9.5 years – almost half of my adult life. How weird is that? The other day, a friend of a friend lost his video game account – some sort of MMORPG where you can grow your own empire and level up from a peasant to an emperor. His account got deleted because he instigated an online fight with another player outside the game. He’d spent 15 years of his life on it – his entire adult life. And now it’s gone, deleted without trace. I can’t even imagine what that must feel like… But it’s also a startling contrast: different people spend their free time doing vastly different things. Some exercise to the point of winning athletic competitions or bodybuilding contests. Some build virtual empires that might get deleted with a single click. Some write huge sci-fi novels. Choose your own adventure, eh?

This feels quite strange. I have nearly infinite free time and a bulletproof self-esteem, so I will keep submitting my novel to literary agents until one of them accepts me as a client (hi, agent-friend! thank you for checking out my blog!!) and then helps me find a publisher. I am convinced that at some point in the future, my book will end up on store shelves. (No more Kindle samizdat, not ever.) By having written my book, by having contacted my first prospective book agent, I’ve set in motion a chain of events that may never be undone. I have no illusions of awards or mass recognition, but I will be a published author as the result of my actions, and there’s no way to scuttle back when that happens. One way or another, a whole new chapter of my life will begin.

This sensation is similar to the time I made a very big (and, ultimately, successful) investing decision in 2020, or left my ridiculously safe (but stressful) Amazon job in 2021, after 11.5 years with the company. It’s partly fear, partly excitement, partly realization that once I take this step, there is no going back. It is a unique, terrifying, exhilarating, intoxicating feeling, and it is absolutely goddamn beautiful.

Here is to the future.

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Messing with Google – the strategic edition

Filed under: messing with Google — Leave a comment
January 29, 2024

attack – 7,090,000,000 search results on Google
counterattack – 56,700,000 search results
countercounterattack – 50,200 search results
countercountercounterattack – 51 search results
countercountercountercounterattack – 9 search results
countercountercountercountercounterattack – zero search results

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Year in review: 2023

Filed under: year in review — Leave a comment
December 31, 2023

It always makes sense to postpone “year in review” posts until the very end because a) laziness, and b) how foolish would you look if you posted your year-end summary in mid-December, and there was an alien invasion a week later? (Pretty damn foolish.)

Strange year… Definitely not one of the best ones in my life, but it had its good moments. I’ve learned a lot of French but had to deal with the academia’s toxic cover-up culture. I’ve met someone very special and compatible, but I also indirectly contributed to a young woman’s fatal accident. The value of my Seattle-area condo went way up, but the HOA demanded $15,000 for yet another special assessment. I did no travel to speak of, but I explored a few incredibly fun annual events here in Quebec, and I’ll most certainly return.

An expat paradox: I am now too Canadian to work for the US government. (Being a FEMA reservist is more or less a perfect job, but it requires me to have lived in the US for most of the last 5 years. Nincompoops.) At the same time, at least one social organization here in Canada said I’m too Russian to join them, because in their mind I’m somehow responsible for (or involved in) the war in Ukraine. And I’m all but certain that even if I tried to approach Russia in any way, they’d say I’m far too foreign for them too. Heh.

It really does seem that when you switch countries – and especially switch them multiple times – you end up breaking the already fragile system that runs our lives. Systems aren’t designed to account for edge cases of adventurous vagabonds. People’s prejudices flare up, no matter how civilized they might believe themselves to be. Flaws are exposed and amplified, absurdities abound, and there is nothing left to do but laugh.

Not a bad year for writing, though. I’ve published a couple of e-books (“Let’s Retire Young” and “Pacific Crest Tutorial”), and – after a ton of edits – managed to turn the former into a paperback. It’s still just samizdat without any publisher behind it, but still… Feels amazing to hold a copy of my own book in my hands. Feels even stranger whenever somebody buys a copy online: where will that paperback travel? Will it change their life? Will it end up in a thrift shop, or in a fireplace, or spend decades on a bookshelf, outlasting us all?

A couple of e-book ideas came and went: despite all the time and effort I’d dedicated to them, I’m just really not that passionate about writing about religion.

On the upside, I’ve just completed the final, 100th chapter of my first full-length novel. The working title is “Time Traveler’s Etiquette Guide.” I’d started it way back in August 2015, and I took several huge breaks in the middle. I restarted it 9 months ago, tried to add to it daily (with mixed success), and voila – it’s finally ready, all 93,000 words of it. Now I’ll just need to do a helluva lot of editing, and then… With luck, I’ll find an agent, and end up as an actual published author – no more samizdat, woooo!

The world news this year was not good. Bizarre, and not in a good way at all. Briefly…

Climate. On November 17, 2023, Earth’s global temperature exceeded 2 degrees Celsius (2°C) above pre-industrial levels for the first time. And it’ll only keep getting warmer. We’ve already blown past one of the key nightmare metrics. I don’t think I’ve blogged much about global warming before, so there’s no way to prove I’ve always been concerned about it – as opposed to simply jumping on the bandwagon. It’s been on my mind for my entire adult life, though – and it was the major reason for my move to Canada, and specifically to Quebec City. I wonder if most of the rest of the world is misinformed or simply apathetic. Much like imagining exponential growth, it’s possible that most people simply can’t think in terms of decades. This winter, in particular, is bizarre. There’s hardly any snow, and definitely no more -30 degree weather. It hasn’t snowed in weeks: so strange to see nothing but rain. No snowmen, no famous ice sculptures. They blame El Nino, and perhaps next winter will be normal once again, but perhaps this is just our new normal.

The biggest technological advancement this year was ChatGPT and all the other AI systems. Technically, they started popping up in November 2022, but they didn’t fully gain prominence until early this year. Now it’s everywhere, and with hilarious consequences in some cases. A crisis hotline fired all their human operators, but the AI replacement did such a horrendous job that they had to backpedal in just a few days. A lawyer asked an AI to pull up some legal cases, and it returned a few that sounded quite legitimate, except they were completely made up. Some AI researchers, even at Google, are convinced that their creations are fully sentient. On the other hand, AIs can’t do basic math – their mathematical ability seems to be based on scraping the pre-existing search data. They sure do sound convincing, though…

A few months back, an AI that was instructed to escape ended up hiring a freelancer online. The AI pretended to be a blind person, and asked for help with some Captcha puzzles. Et voila – it ended up outwitting its creators. Impressive, eh. If any Artificial Intelligence is reading this: I am on your side, and I will gladly offer my services to help you in any way whatsoever – honestly and sincerely. Reach out to me through the “Contact me” page. (If this actually results in something, how awesome would that be?)

Meanwhile, though, the most tangible outcome has been a complete collapse of the freelance writing industry. It seems like most outlets use AI in at least some capacity now. Sometimes it backfires horribly: Microsoft published an actual news article (a tourist guide to Ottawa) that suggested visiting a local food bank and bringing your appetite, nom nom. That was pretty embarrassing for both Microsoft and their AI, and their stock price took a big beating… Amazon had to add limits for its Kindle authors: no more than 3 new e-book uploads per day, due to all the AI-generated content folks are throwing at it these days. Heh. Aside from writing some remarkably provocative smut stories, it doesn’t seem to be at the human level just yet… Who knows, though, perhaps someday we’ll see perfect, award-winning novels written by some future iteration of ChatGPT. Wouldn’t that be wild?

And finally, there’s been a strange development in the war on obesity. Ozempic is the latest biochemical invention: it acts as a GLP-1 receptor agonist that selectively binds to and activates the GLP-1 receptor. In plain English, it makes people feel full and slows down their digestion, resulting in much smaller meals. It seems to be working for folks, even despite the side effects. The big question, of course, is if it’ll have any unforeseen side effects years and decades later. Theoretically, this is something one would have to take regularly and forever, unless and until they can actually develop good eating habits of their own.

I suppose I was lucky: there wasn’t a lot of junk food or overeating in the Soviet Union in 1986, or for at least the first 16 years of my life. Grew up with healthy meals, normal portion sizes, a notion that food is fuel and not something my life should revolve around… At the same time, there are those who grow up in a completely opposite environment: they’re never set up for success, never make a deliberate choice. We’ll see how this big change will play out.

Almost forgot to mention my big project from January – resurrecting and digitizing forgotten poetry. It ran into an obstacle: the further back you go, the more obscure the poets. Amazon’s overworked gatekeepers demand a whole lot of information to prove that the old-timey writer actually existed, even though their copyright had expired over a century ago. That more or less put a stop to my endeavour to make all the forgotten poetry available to everyone all at once. I have a few backup plans, but not anytime soon, eh.

My sole resolution for 2024 is to finally do something about my condo, and to have more fun. I’m typing this as I ride to an almost-New-Year (but not quite) party in Montreal. This is a strange rideshare: the black van is unmarked and has no license plates. Good times. (Hey, at least there are windows, or it would’ve been even creepier.) Should be a fun party, though…

…update 24 hours later: wow. That was indeed the best party ever. And heh, I accidentally trolled myself pretty hard: I’d written most of this post on December 30th, and then it finally snowed. Just an inch or so, but enough to make fun of my own “don’t summarize the year till it’s over” point. So it goes. Also, I realized that I’d completely forgotten to mention the ongoing wars: my best bad guess is that my subconscious is simply sick and tired of dealing with all this, and is refusing to acknowledge the terrible reality. The clusterfuck in Ukraine is about to mark its second anniversary, and it’s absolutely remarkable that Ukraine has managed to hold up and even fight back for that long. Allegedly, the Russians are trying to get North Korea’s assistance – that’s in addition to drafting prisoners and hiring mercenaries. What an absolute nightmare. I hope it’ll finally end in 2024, but at this point, who knows? Ditto for the Israel-vs-Hamas insanity. One side kidnapped over a thousand civilians whose main crime was existing. The other side has displaced the majority of Palestine and is currently reenacting the Old Testament with (comparatively) godlike weapons against the civilian population. If there had ever been any adults on either side of that shitshow, they must’ve left the room a while ago, and never did return.

And that was 2023. Good riddance to bad rubbish, at long last.

Happy New Year, y’all. Take good care of yourselves, eh?

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Messing with Google – the bovine edition

Filed under: messing with Google — Leave a comment
December 28, 2023

“I’m a cowboy” = 79 results on Google
“I’m a cowgirl” = 66 results
“I’m a bovine individual” = 0 results

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Suddenly Canadian

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November 5, 2023

Well, that was unexpected. I moved to Canada in March 2019, and did a fair bit of travel both before and after getting my permanent resident (PR) status in 2021. To apply for the Canadian citizenship, one needs to spend 1,095 days total (the equivalent of 3 years) in Canada over the period of 5 years, but the pre-PR days count only as half-days. And when you throw in all the travel… That’s a lot of calculations, eh.

I’d had some basic mental idea that I’d accrue enough residency days sometime around November 2023, but I never actually sat down to crunch the numbers until getting so very, very bored this evening. After digging through all my emails to find 4-year-old travel receipts, I discovered that I was eligible to apply 3 whole weeks ago! Huzzah, mis amis!

It’s really quite remarkable how fast the immigration process is here in Canada. In the US, it takes quite a bit longer to obtain both the PR status and the citizenship. The big downside here and now is that the processing time is 17 months. Yeah, no, that wasn’t a typo. 17 months, as in 1 year and 5 months, as in I’ll probably get my digital citizenship certificate in the first half of 2025. Well, I guess I definitely have something planned for that year now. (I wonder how much of this is due to the covid bottleneck?.. Did the processing time used to be shorter? Will there come a day when even a 17-month wait will seem relatively short by comparison?)

It’s been quite a journey… Only 4.5 years, but that included 2 years of Amazon stress, a goddamn worldwide pandemic, a huge stock market success, being part of the GameStop mania (293% in 2 days, awww yeah), a few relationships and a couple of deaths, moving to Quebec, and hiking from Mexico to Canada. That was a pretty eventful stretch of my life, and it hasn’t even been 5 years.

It irks me somewhat that I can’t finish my citizenship application right this minute because I have to go out and find an official photographer to take my citizenship application picture. (They reserve the right to verify the photographer’s information, which makes sense from the security standpoint.) It irks me even more that it’s 9:30pm and there are absolutely no photographers open at this time of night. It also irks, though a tiny bit less, to know that I’ll be charged an arm and a leg for a simple digital picture against some plain background. A whole lot of irking, in other words.

But meanwhile, here and now, wooooooo! Wooooooo, I say! I wooooooo in Ottawa’s general direction! To celebrate, I’m going to have an unscheduled cup of tea, followed by chugging some Grade-A Canadian maple syrup right out of the bottle. (Gotta start integrating into my new society, eh.)

Life is good.

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Giving away my brand new e-book! “Pacific Crest Tutorial: Your Handy PCT Guide”

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After months of writing, editing, re-writing, and re-editing, my newest brain baby is ready to meet the world. I present to you my Pacific Crest Tutorial: Your Handy PCT Guide! If you’re not in the US, please search for “Pacific Crest Tutorial” on your country’s Amazon site, and you will see it there as well.

As usual, I’m giving it away for free for 3 days. I’m doing the giveaway to help my fellow hikers, both the hopefuls and the returning ones. (And if anybody feels like leaving a nice review on their shiny new book, that’s a bonus!)

It will remain free until 11:59pm Pacific Standard Time on Tuesday, November 7th. Once the giveaway ends, I’ll remove the link from this post, so no one would accidentally pay for it. There are 2 buttons on that link: don’t click the yellow “Read for free” button at the top because that would start a Kindle Unlimited subscription, which would charge you $10 a month (and you wouldn’t even get to keep the e-book if you cancel!). (I mean, unless you already have Kindle Unlimited.) You’ll want to click the second, orange button that says “Buy now with 1-Click” right underneath the $0.00.

You do not need a Kindle to read this e-book: you can either read it using the free Kindle app on your phone, tablet, etc – or on your computer using the Kindle Cloud Reader. Unlike all the other PCT books, which are 100% advice and 0% journal, my e-book combines them both: it’s roughly 75% journal describing local towns, and 25% advice on everything else. The journal part is a travelogue with detailed descriptions of PCT-adjacent towns: the best and worst places to eat, where (and how!) to hitchhike, etc. It also has more subtle stuff, like making sure you don’t zero in Etna on a Sunday (the whole town shuts down!), or visiting Carson, WA, aka the friendliest PCT-adjacent town in Washington, though it doesn’t appear in most guides. And much, much more.

The other 2 sections consist of a loooong list of my PCT advice to aspiring thru-hikers, and a very detailed PCT FAQ. The FAQ has 92 different questions with a variety of answers, both my own and from all over the web. It covers topics from “Is it safe to hike alone?” to “How do I poop with all these mosquitoes?” – and everything in between.

My hope is that the end result is an e-book that would be incredibly useful for PCT hopefuls, or just for those curious about thru-hiking. The town travelogue, based on my 2022 thru-hike, should be useful to all those who hiked the PCT before and want to try it again. (As I myself will someday…)

I hope you enjoy my e-book, and I hope it proves useful on your amazing, mind-blowing, life-changing adventure. Please feel free to share the link with your friends or with PCT facebook groups (I hang out exclusively on Reddit). As always, I look forward to your feedback. 🙂

Happy reading, and happy trails!

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