On Achieving Victory

I am a fucking god.

There is a reason people come to me with Excel problems at work. It’s because I know how to use it. And I use it very well.

Today, on the train, I knew. Things were either going to go extremely right, or they would go horribly wrong. We were well past the eleventh hour. The clock was ticking. We were at five minutes to midnight.

And somehow, I seized victory from the jaws of certain defeat.

No, not somehow. Mad Excel Skillz.

Did things go extremely right? Alas, no. But they didn’t go horribly wrong, either.

And then, after six, when I was alone in the office, I cranked up the subwoofer on my office computer, and I made the floor rumble.

There’s nothing like being the only person in your half of the floor, and knowing that you can crank the stereo up because there’s no one around to care.

And I was content.

It was the feeling of victory.


I’m thinking of changing my WordPress theme. I’m toying with two options. I may end up going with neither. Or even something completely different.

It’s spring. I feel like making a change. Or something.


A friend e-mailed me today. About writing.

Specifically, to talk about a project I had started and then abandoned. Given my penchant for cryptic anagrams, I’ll call it “DOTFE.”

The story has a long history. I wrote one outline in late summer, and I was approximately eighty percent of the way through a second, and rather different, outline, when a variety of factors caused me to set it aside.

Essentially, I saw no reason to go forward with it. I wasn’t sure if there was a market for the story. While I knew what I wanted to say, I wasn’t sure if this was a story that needed to be told.

My friend offered a different perspective.

Then I found myself thinking of the way that “DOTFE” opens. And some of the scenes and ideas that had really intrigued me.

I’m at least considering his opinion.

I’ll print off the two outlines — the first, deeply flawed outline, and the second, incomplete outline — and look at them over the weekend. I also wrote out, for my own benefit, one entire scene last autumn; I’ll print that out as well.

I’ll look at them over the weekend.

No promises that I will pick “DOTFE” back up. We’ll see.

Published by Allyn

A writer, editor, journalist, sometimes coder, occasional historian, and all-around scholar, Allyn Gibson is the writer for Diamond Comic Distributors' monthly PREVIEWS catalog, used by comic book shops and throughout the comics industry, and the editor for its monthly order forms. In his over ten years in the industry, Allyn has interviewed comics creators and pop culture celebrities, covered conventions, analyzed industry revenue trends, and written copy for comics, toys, and other pop culture merchandise. Allyn is also known for his short fiction (including the Star Trek story "Make-Believe,"the Doctor Who short story "The Spindle of Necessity," and the ReDeus story "The Ginger Kid"). Allyn has been blogging regularly with WordPress since 2004.

2 thoughts on “On Achieving Victory

    1. Don’t count DOTFE out entirely.

      Now that I’ve started thinking about it again, I’m getting re-excited by it. At the point where I put it away, the wind had gone out of my sails entirely and the creative ocean was becalmed.

      I can’t promise that it will ever come to fruition, but the winds are stirring again, and the ocean is beginning to kick up again.

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