This is Human + A. I collab artwork and I own the rights to it.
Man life is so exciting, so much exciting oh my God!
Partly, because I never expected to say this, like ever.
Partly because it’s just so full of beauty and things worth discovering.
No naiveness here folks, I know the other part of it, oh boy do I know the dungeons and the pits of this world, and even other hostile worlds. But that’s an even stronger reason to be excited and love the beautiful parts of it.
Let me begin this article by saying: 18 subscribers to my blog, oh my God! And the only one is family, lol, cause I’ve made sure not to tell my relatives to cause this is a side of me I don’t want to share with most of them. So that means 17 complete strangers read something I wrote one day and thought “well maybe this guy’s worth reading again later”. And you know what? I take it back, you’re not strangers, you’re a beautiful, growing jjosuminded community and I thank you from all my heart for being here with me.
OK, so WTF’s up with the soda?
Yeah, yeah I was about to get to that, but gosh you’re so intense sometimes!
So, I’m in the last couple of days from my vacations for this year, then the weekend, and then a full week being on call 24/7 for cybersecurity incidents (man, the contrasts in this life). But I’m making the most of my vacations and part of it is reorganizing my artistic projects, and in general, assigning a lot more weight to my artistic life and coming up with strategies to accomplish this while keeping a roof over our heads.
As you probably know from previous articles, my biggest efforts in this second half of my life are focused on being able to get to a point where I can dedicate most of my time to arts and culture, which means eventually leaving my day job and it begins with literature but encompasses more than that.
It’s turned out to be quite the rabbit hole fellows, quite the fucking rabbit hole indeed! But it’s been fun, in fairness.
This is Human + A. I collab artwork and I own the rights to it.
The toughest thing is the balance between publishing continuously and building my community, and then writing in the way I want to write. So for those of you who are writers (I venture saying a big part of you are), you may find this familiar:
- I start writing a poem. I was dark, waaay to dark, scary dark… so I think to myself “fuck, this has to be a poem attributed to a character, no way my conscious mind will accept this to come from me”
- Okay cool, so what kind of world/ story does this belong to crime thriller. Okay, crime thriller it is, I begin writing a story.
- Crime thriller story becomes so, so potentially good that it’s no longer an excuse to publish the orphaned poem, no, this really touches some fiber and some philosophical concepts I’m quite interested in. Scary moment: the idea becomes a novel (I did announce it a couple months back in this blog).
- OK a lot of education and serious research beings in how to write novels, I buy a ton of new books and start taking notes and analyzing, I write some of it (paradoxically not what I’ve been doing the most). But OK, novel incoming.
- Well, what do I write to keep my audience engaged? I mean, the novel can very well take a couple years, especially being psychologically complex and being my first novel, so…
- “OK, OK, I know, I know… I have this idea I’ve been entertaining for more than a decade which is a fantasy/sci-fi medieval saga what better time to do it than right now! Not only that, paired up with my new obsession with Human + A. I digital artwork collabs I’ll get to publish an amazing story with groundbreaking community-oriented publishing, and blah, blah, blah… (see image below of concept art on this saga).
- So as it turns out, the saga does require a lot of research on Central Europe in the Middle Ages, famous characters of that century, occultism and alchemy, and some “relatively accessible quantum mechanics”. Well shit, so much for releasing episodes weekly, at least until world and character building are crystal clear and it’s gonna take some time. So novel #2 is incoming, but still nothing for short-term publishing.
- “Okay, it is my literary ignorance and laymanship (I know it’s not an actual word) that’s biting my ass, the solution is simple: short stories!” Indeed, this is the approach I’m currently taking but hear me out: I start brainstorming and come up with four killer ideas for episodical short stories related to a single theme, I ask my wife which one she likes the most and she picks one that’s about teenagers as a psychiatric institution, I start working on character development (world building it’s easy for me, cause I was a teenager in a psychiatric institution, lol) and bam! Guess what? It becomes to complex, intertwined, and emotionally engaging for me to keep it a series of episodical short stories, it deserves to be a big volume of its own. “Oh shit, not again”, yup, incoming Novel #3. (See concept art at the end of this list).
- Right, so I thought: “The second idea out of those four, that one has to be the one, that’s perfect for short, well-written stories and give the people a taste of my writing while I work in the terrifying amount of 3 novels for a beginner author, yeah that should keep my sanity”. And indeed, this week I began with both the research and the structuring of it. What do you think? Am I alone here? Too fucking crazy still or just an ordinary writer’s journey. I’d love to hear your thoughts, you beautiful reader who can actually consume a full article I write.
Concept Art for the novels mentioned, just to get you excited 😉
This is Human + A. I collab artwork and I own the rights to it.
This is Human + A. I collab artwork and I own the rights to it.
Josué… seriously, what’s up with the S.O.D.A!?
OK, ok here it is:
This is Human + A. I collab artwork and I own the rights to it.
Are you ready? (drumroll…)
Bubbly-Mirror-Starry Soda is the short-story series I told you about that was second on my short story list (OK, it was first but I decided to be a gentleman and please my wife with her choice, then it became a novel, oh well…)
The whole concept is related to the subconscious mind; see I’ve been reading, viewing, and listening to a lot of content about Carl Jung, and his breed of psychoanalysis, also some Freud but I’m in the earlier stages there. I’m absolutely fascinated by how behavioral patterns appear in the conscious life and decisions that are actually hidden and triggered by events, perceptions, and characteristics we have no clue about.
Moreover, one of the most direct ways of accessing these hidden treasures and horrors (both maybe?) is true dreams. Dreams are a window to a version of oneself that’s able to act out of the cultural, moral, and social restrictions that shape the conscious mind of an individual.
Bubbly-Mirror-Starry Soda aims to show this, with a degree of artistic license, through a series of short stories that will poke your mind and get you thinking about the depths of human consciousness and the contrast between the carefully constructed self and the denied self.
Now, what’s special about BMSS?
Answer: Bubbly-Mirror-Starry Soda is the version for fans, hence I can guarantee you will read much more personal and less filtered stuff in this version of the series exclusively here on jjosuminded.com, I’m not lying folks this is a token of gratitude from me to you because I love all of you 17 friends and all the others that I don’t have a record of in WordPress but are also here.
I hope you will love it, but you know what? Since we’re getting intimate and friendly now, let me ask you for two things:
- I’m not a native English speaker. If you would like to help me on my path to becoming a better writer and would like to go full “grammar nazi” on me, I’ll actually welcome it. Likewise, if you’re a writer and you notice flaws you find concerning (even if it’s not something idiomatic), I’d like to hear from you.
- As a clarification: I know what a proofreader is, and I know what an editor is. I intend to invest and risk my own buck when the time comes, to have pros do their job analyzing mine so I’m not trying to take advantage of you. It’s just special to me, to have my community send feedback because then you get to be more involved in my success story.
- Would you also share my work if you really, really like it? But only if you really like it enough to share it with people who are close to you.
A final disclaimer: you see how I said Bubbly-Mirror-Starry Soda is a version of this project that’s exclusive for jjosuminded.com community? Yeah, that’s because there’s another version, and it’s more oriented to be commercialized, you know part of being able to become a full-time artist is to be able to pay bills with my art. But I’m not getting greedy, and I’m releasing the first 10 stories here first, then I’ll look for some PR and marketing and will try to find a way to commercialize it (if you have any ideas, I’ve so far only thought of “novella” or trying to sell the rights for T.V, etc), possibly making it a book of short stories and self-publishing it, although I might knock at some editorial doors.
This other version is also gonna be quite something, I believe. It plays with the same concept of the subconscious, but it has a more macabre angle to it, I’ll let you figure it out for yourselves as I publish the first 10 stories here. The commercial angle comes from the fact that the stories will deal with a deceased famous person in history or pop culture, so I’ll also let you figure that one out 😉
The series is called “In The Wings of a Raven”, and here’s the concept art for it:
This is Human + A. I collab artwork and I own the rights to it.
Well, that about does it, I’m going to turn 36 in exactly 6 hours, and I’m very enthusiastic to begin another year of my life surrounded by these beautiful projects and characters. Thanks for reading me, lots of good stuff in the oven for you, please buy my books when I publish them, I promise you’ll have a good time and it will change my story forever, for the better.
I will start pasting my LinkTree to every post from here onwards, I’d like to be available for you, read your messages and be able to reply to you personally, and the best way to do it is through my social media so feel free to reach out to me if you’re liking my work.
Cheers!
J.V
jjosuminded 