Being nicer to myself.
I don’t know where the sentiment of “not enough” comes from. I swear, my parents never looked down on me. They never told me I wouldn’t ever amount to anything.
They didn’t do the opposite either. They didn’t smother me with great expectations.
Popular wisdom says that the sense of “not enough” comes, first and foremost, from bad bad BAD influences from parents–but, for the life of me, I can’t tie my feelings to my parents.
Well, no matter where these feelings come from, I gotta get rid of them. It was okay living with them while my vertex was “write a lot and write until the day I die,” because, well, that is doable anywhere and anywhen, pretty much. It is one of the beautiful aspects about writing–that it doesn’t take an inordinate amount of time, money, or manpower.
But now? Now. A bigger, brighter, shinier vertex. I can’t get there without dealing with this first.
Mainly, I gotta stop being so cruel to myself because I don’t produce as much fiction as in the years before 2022.
The two podcasts are continuing.
The two blogs are continuing.
Ithaka O. did fold her newsletter, but ํ์์’s newsletter still exists. (Although not actively.)
๊ณ ๋ง์ฌ๋ continues.
MODERN GROTESQUE TIMES continues in the background, as I translate our next book, Noir Urbanisms.
On top of that, I have enough fiction material to publish for the entirety of 2023.
So, objectively speaking, I should not blame myself so much.
This is my goal for the next month: get used to the new normal that I am okay with myself doing what I do now. There will be (more) time for new fiction. I aim to live to be 120 years old. (Yeah, I mean it.) I have decades left. No rush.
Pure Fiction
๐ค โ๏ธ ๐
A life in service of a greater good is a life worth livingโฆ
โฆat any cost?
Aria, an aidbot technician, once again finds herself at the airport. Sheโs ready to leave this city behind and go wherever the next available flight takes her to. Nothing holds her back. Sometimes thatโs freeing. But mostly, she feels terribly restless.
Lucky her, because she runs into the great bot engineer Antonius Wang. And when she sees that this old man needs help due to his malfunctioning aidbot, she gladly volunteers. Clearly, this encounter is mean-to-be.
Problem: Mr. Wangโs aidbot is 200 grams overweight and isnโt allowed on any aircraft. And because of those 200 grams, Ariaโs travel plans take terribly unexpected turns in a world of intelligent bots, replaceable humans, and some beings in-betweenโฆ
โBand 1โ is a chronological collection of previously published short stories by Ithaka O.
Each of those stories is available individually, with its own cover and blurb. If you would like to get a feel for each story, searching for them might be worthwhile.
But this collection has its own purpose. Mainly, it exists for the paperback version; some short stories are too short to exist as their own paperbacks and require being collected with other stories. After the creation of such a paperback version, there was no reason not to create an ebook version as well, for readers who prefer one handy collected title instead of many different titles on their reading device.
In short: pick and choose according to your preferences. Maybe you like individually-published short stories; maybe you like the collected version. The stories are the same in both cases; how you feel might be a different matter.
Either way, enjoy.
List of stories in this collection
- Moonlight Through the Manhole
- To Me Who Is Useless
- Because They Donโt Bleed Red
- Silver Lining
- Replaceables
- Museum of Earth Art
Sponge
ํจ์ด ํฝ์
โ๋ฌถ์ 1โ์ Ithaka O.์ ์ด๋ฏธ ์ถํ๋ ๋จํธ ์์ค๋ค์ ์ฐ๋์ ๋ชจ์์ง์ด๋ค.
๊ฐ๊ฐ์ ์ด์ผ๊ธฐ๋ค์ ๋ฐ๋ก ๋ฐ๋ก๋ ์ ๊ณต๋๋ฉฐ, ๊ฐ๋ณ ์ปค๋ฒ์ ์ค๊ฑฐ๋ฆฌ ์ค๋ช ์ ๊ฐ๊ณ ์๋ค. ๊ฐ ์ด์ผ๊ธฐ๊ฐ ์ด๋ค ๋๋์ธ์ง ์๊ณ ์ถ๋ค๋ฉด, ๊ฒ์ํด ๋ณด๋ ๊ฒ์ด ๋์์ด ๋ ์ง๋ ๋ชจ๋ฅธ๋ค.
ํ์ง๋ง ์ด ๋ชจ์์ง์๋ ๊ธฐ๋ฅ์ด ์๋ค. ๊ฐ์ฅ ๋ํ์ ์ผ๋ก๋, ํ์ดํผ๋ฐฑ ๋ฒ์ ๋๋ฌธ์ ์กด์ฌํ๋ค. ์ด๋ค ๋จํธ ์์ค๋ค์ ๋๋ฌด ์งง์์ ํ๋ก ํ์ดํผ๋ฐฑ์ด ๋์ง ๋ชปํ๊ณ , ๋ค๋ฅธ ์ด์ผ๊ธฐ๋ค๊ณผ ๋ชจ์ผ ์๋ฐ์ ์๋ค. ๊ทธ๋ฐ๋ฐ ๊ทธ๋ฌํ ํ์ดํผ๋ฐฑ ๋ฒ์ ์ ๋ง๋ค์, ์ ์์ฑ ๋ฒ์ ๋ ๋ง๋ค์ง ์์ ์ด์ ๊ฐ ์์๋ค. ๊ทธ๋ฌ๋ฉด ๋ ์ ๊ธฐ๊ธฐ์ ์ฌ๋ฌ ์ถํ๋ฌผ์ ๋ด๊ธฐ๋ณด๋ค๋ ํ๋์ ๋ชจ์๋ฌผ์ด ์๋ ๊ฒ์ ์ ํธํ๋ ๋ ์๋ค์๊ฒ ๋์์ด ๋ ํ ๋๊น.
์์ฝํ์๋ฉด: ์ทจํฅ ๋ฐ๋ผ ๊ณ ๋ฅด๋ฉด ๋๋ค. ๊ฐ๋ณ์ ์ผ๋ก ์ถํ๋ ๋จํธ ์์ค์ด ์ข์ ์๋ ์๊ณ , ๋ชจ์ ๋ฒ์ ์ด ์ข์ ์๋ ์๋ค. ์ด์ผ๊ธฐ์ผ ๊ทธ๋๋ก์ง๋ง, ๋๋์ ๋ค๋ฅธ ๋ฌธ์ ์ผ์ง๋ ๋ชจ๋ฅธ๋ค.
์ด๋ ๋ ์ ๋ ๋ , ์ฆ๊ฒจ์ฃผ์๊ธธ.
์ด ๋ชจ์์ง์ ๋ ์ด์ผ๊ธฐ ๋ชฉ๋ก
- ๋งจํ ์๋ ๋ฌ๋น
- ๋ฌด์ฉํ ๋์๊ฒ
- ๊ทธ๋ค์ ๋ถ์ ํผ๋ฅผ ํ๋ฆฌ์ง ์๊ธฐ์
- ์ค๋ฒ ๋ผ์ด๋
- ๋์ฒด๊ฐ๋ฅ์
- ์ง๊ตฌ ์์ ๋ฐ๋ฌผ๊ด
์์ ๋๋ฆฌ๋ฐ
THE END.