Finger breaking chess robots.
+ a new talk show episode + a new optional subletter for updates
First, I want to say that FINGER BREAKING CHESS ROBOTS would make a fantastic band name. If anyone reading has a band, please feel free to use it, but tell me about it so I can brag about it at the local cocktail bar.
As an artist, I think about this quote almost daily.
Hello all,
This is a new monthly post of updates for anyone interested in what I’m up to on my mission to be an author who can buy big sandwiches, and other missions (such as having a talk show panel at San Deigo ComicCon and proving to the world that ‘writing blocks’ are fictional1). It’s monthly now because it means you get less emails, and more value per email. This is also where you’ll find out about live events.
It’s also on its own subletter which should mean that if you aren’t interested in it, you can opt out of this and still get emailed the free short stories and comedy. More on that at the bottom. I can’t claim I know exactly how it works, but a few people told me that it should work.
There is also an audio version of this post, which you can access by clicking this button below.
November.
Wednesday 9th November. I purchased my realphillipcarter.com website domain which I still don’t know how to use. There will be a poll about that below, if you want to help me decide where to put it. I’m thinking here, but a dedicated website with a storefront might be nice. I miss my Wix one but it was costing me £159 per year with not nearly enough visitors to warrant its continued existence, sort of like my Tinder.
Friday 11th November. I began putting the final, longer, shinier draft of that short story WHALE up on Draft2Digital. That should hopefully be done and available by Christmas 2022. It will be a permafree eBook which in turn will direct people here and to the anthology it is going to be included in, SEVEN STORIES ABOUT TIME TRAVEL.
Saturday 12th November. It was my friend’s 30th birthday and I spent perhaps too much money on fancy drinks. I also got her a weird present that involved my friend Ruth, who is a radio presenter. Hi Ruth!
Sunday 13th November. I did the preamble with Augustine (AJ) Pagan in which I worked out what kind of questions to ask and in which order to ask them. AJ is a very funny guy.
Monday 14th November. I prepared the listeners of FabRadio for two upcoming interviews on my own Youtube talk show, The Phillip Carter Show. Those interviews would be with AJ Pagan and Robin Drown. I didn’t know at the time, but for both interviews I would be the very first person to interview those authors. I fully intend to brag about this when they are famous and bestselling authors, as I did with John Coon after his multiple Bookbub featured deals.
I also dropped a quick reference to the ‘How to make friends and find communities’ seminar by Rebecca Ryder, which would happen in the next week.
On Tuesday 15th November I watched a documentary about fake charities which get rich kids to pay for an ‘experience’ helping poor kids, a sort of poverty voyeurism which Frankie Boyle wrote about some years before I think any of it got exposed. Don’t quote me on that, I don’t understand the linear progression of time.
I also tidied my bedroom.
On Thursday 17th of November my friend Ruth took me to see a Sci-Fi play in Manchester which I’ve tried to write a review of, but keep getting stuck on. It was decent, but there was a lot about it that I’d change as an author so writing a review is hard.
On Sunday 20th November I interviewed author AJ Pagan, twice, about his debut novel Brian, Created Intelligence. The second episode would launch on December 4th, and you can watch it by clicking below.
On Monday the 21st I hosted my first ever live radio interview with Rebecca Ryder from SameShitDifferentBrain.
I also interviewed WomenForIran with my co host Stephen. I met Stephen on a Manchester comedy Facebook group and I got into a slot as a recurring guest and later co-host by bringing in silly poems and science news. My favourite was about the chess robot that broke a child’s finger.
That evening I went to a writing group and really enjoyed it, which is rare. I tend to like writing alone, or doing online stuff, but it’s a good group.
Even later in the evening I downloaded Audacity and began playing around with it. And at about 2am I played Minecraft on twitch.tv.
On Wednesday 23rd November I worked on the WHALE story a bit more and began to get tempted to give it another one of my artsy titles, though to be honest the concept of giving them all one word titles is also an artsy concept in and of itself.
I also set a goal to get one more eBook up on bookfunnel before 2023.
On Saturday the 26th I added a few more old books to my little Etsy bookstore. I still need to upload those listings.
On Sunday 27th I worked on a new introductory email to this substack which will help new subscribers cherry pick the content they want from me. This is massively important as I know I’m the ‘mad professor’ type of person who will tell you all about many new projects at a time, and you might not all be interested in all of them (for this reason, I may move my poetry over to an entirely new substack for my small company Halfplanet Press).
On Tuesday the 29th of November I emailed the Press manager of a comic book store to see if they are interested in stocking my books. They weren’t last time, but last time I wasn’t very convincing. This time I have FREE BOOKS to give them, so there is literally zero financial risk. I’ll be surprised if they say no. I’d say yes even if I had no idea what the book was about. FREE BOOKS.
For the rest of the week I wrote a bit of my Synaesthesioid book and explained to my dentist how I need around double or more of the regular dose of anaesthetic, which ties into some stuff in that book. Consequently I spent the rest of the day eating ice cream and sliding around on the floor like a big worm. And I started a new subletter, a satirical newspaper called The Cosmic Cock of News.
And that’s about it for November.
Other stuff.
We did this poll the other day. I realised that whilst you can subscribe, you need a substack account to vote. That explains the low numbers, but I’m still going to listen to this poll.
So 4 out of 7 people like the career updates, but that means nearly half of the people who voted don’t find them useful. I suppose a better question would be “Are the career updates an irritating hurdle you have to cross before you read the stories?” because that’s what I really meant to ask.
If they are, then I have implemented two solutions.
I’m only posting this at the end of each month. If you want more frequent updates, the hashtag #wbthdiary has been in use for over a year on twitter now and will give you information that isn’t here about my writing progress.
Career updates will now be posted from this subletter only, titled ‘Where is Phillip?’ New subscribers won’t be automatically added to this as a result of the poll above, and will instead be told about it in their welcome email. This is also where any live events will be mentioned. I hope that’s better for everyone in the future.
What that second point means is that you should be able to unsubscribe from this subletter if the updates aren’t of interest to you, without losing your subscription to the free stories. At least that’s what a friend on Substack tells me.
Please feel free to try it. But if it doesn’t work, please do come back! There’s a story on the way in the next few days. But I can’t tell you what it’s about yet as I’ve been working on several and am deciding which one to post. It may be about gorillas and time travelling aliens. It may also be about a man unzipping his own head, which is a rewrite of a 2009 story that the stoners in my college absolutely loved.
Writing blocks are funny. Fiction writers decide that they exist, and write posts about them, all the while not realising that what they are really doing is coming up with a fiction that cleverly explains away some deeper issue (such as local roadworks, depression, marital collapse, and other forms of collapse) that might distract a sensitive artsy brain from doing the artsy thing. So they are being creative whilst telling you that they are definitely not being creative… I know I can’t write under flourescent lights, doesn’t mean they are firing writing block lasers. Or does it? Are the lights working against us?
Oh no, did I just start another story???
If you've can comment here, please do reply to this comment. I want to see if I can get this post and others on the 'recommended' area of Substack, and it measures popularity through engagement!