Chris Fritz's Blog - Posts Tagged "updates"

I would be lying if I said the recent covid 19 pandemic hasn't affected my life in any way. When I'm not writing I'm a stand up comedian and all the comedy shows got canceled. That was the biggest bummer of my household. That job did involve a lot of writing so I think it runs parallel with my authorship. I also have a day job that I work at full time. Recently I got cut down to part time do to the pandemic. These two circumstances have given me a lot more time during the day to write. Before the pandemic my life was a precarious balancing act of work, stand up, writing, and somehow playing video games most of the time. With two of these activities pretty decimated it's given me more to write and play video games. I like to think some other authors have been given just as much free time and will use it to write some very compelling pieces of literature. I can say without hesitation that I'll release my second novel ahead of schedule. I wish I could say that the virus itself has inspired me to virus themed story but that is not the case here. From a narrative stand point I think it would be kind of boring to have a virus antagonist as it cannot be seen, heard, smelt, touched, or tasted. But maybe I'm being pedantic. I hope the general populace has had more time to stay inside and read more books. I even tried to sell my first novel by making a Facebook post that said stay inside and read my book so we can flatten the curve. Something like that. Now the only times I can go out into public are for work, groceries and black lives matter protests. With this imperative my next book will be done before I know it and it'll be a rip roaring and curve flattening read. Follow me on twitter if you can @chrisfritzcomic and I'll see you later.

So I recently joined a platform called Wattpad. For those of you who don't know what it is it's a place where writers can post stories that they have written and for readers to read those fiction stories. I see it as way for people to get exposed to what I've written. Before I joined I heard mixed things about Wattpad. I've heard some people say that it's not a good place to get exposure and I've heard other people say it's a place for poorly written fan fiction. Like really a lot of bad stories are being published there mostly about Harry Potter having sex with Draco. So the question here is why would I join this platform if I heard bad things about it? Well I was listening to an interview with George R R Martin and he was asked to give some advice to new writers. His advice boiled done to before you write a full length novel start out writing short stories and try to get them published in literary magazines. That will give you a better foundation in writing fiction and maybe you'll even build a fanbase. That advice is absolute garbage because literary magazines have essentially dried up and gone the way of the dodo. They were probably popular when Martin was getting his start so advice like that would seem natural for him. Unfortunately times have changed. The internet has risen and changed the way we read. Enter Wattpad. Despite its criticisms to does have a lot of users and it has done its best to create a platform for engaging with users as well as become a place to publish short fiction in an official professional capacity. Nowadays if you want to publish short fiction there are barely any traditional publishing routes to do so. Wattpad might have just well replaced those literary magazines the Martin spoke so highly of. Plus I do feel a freedom of being able to publish any bit of writing I want. That's very appealing to me. The demon monkeys that live in my hair will finally have their message heard. So if I feel I want to start writing about the sex lives of Harry Potter characters then I write to my hearts content. And who knows maybe somebody will enjoy what I've written about the sex lives of Harry Potter characters so much that they'll check out my original works and then I've gained some new fans. Oh well wish me luck and if you're on what pad right now and you want to follow me here's a link https://www.wattpad.com/user/chrisfri...

Till next time
Peace

This is the post that will kind of sum up my professional endeavors for the year as well as give some insight as to what I’m working on for the year ahead. The first thing I have to say is that I’m sorry. I’ve written my second novel and I wasn’t able to release it before the end of the year. I thought I would have been able to release it before the New Year but the editing process is taking a while. I can say with certainty that my next book titled the Well of Destruction will be out sometime in 2021. I can tell that most people would remember 2020 as a truly awful year. To those people I would say be grateful for the things you do have and know that there will be a tomorrow to make things better. Personally I think I’ve had a very decent year I independently published my first novel and I’m on the way to publishing the second one. But I did experience great loss. I do stand up comedy and do to this year’s calamity all comedy shows I would do, have been canceled indefinitely. It could take years for my local comedy scene to recover from this year. The scene was barely hanging on by a thread before everything happened and this particular economy may never fully recover. So I’ve had to switch to a different creative outlet, one that I can do while social distancing. So all of the energy I would put into writing new jokes now has to go to writing stories. So we’ll see if I ever do stand up again. Now let’s get into what I’m going to do in the New Year. I’m playing around with starting a gaming channel on twitch. I think maybe I’ll try to tell some jokes and play video games as well as maybe get some of my comedian friends to come on with me. If I can ever find the motivation to get that going look out for that. I’m also working on starting a patreon page. So if there’s anybody out there who really likes my novels and wants to read more of them, kicking in a few dollars a month would go a long way to helping out. It might be hard to corner the market for people who are fans of fantasy novelist/stand up comedians but we’ll see how that goes. I have an idea for a special offer on my patreon page. If any of my patrons wants some personalized content for $20 and a subject I’ll write you an original short story. What do you guys think? I’ll keep you posted on how things like that go. So there is a lot of things to look forward to in the New Year. I assure you all that I am extremely far from running out of things to write about. I can’t wait to publish new stuff.

With myself and my fellow countrymen getting vaccinated against the coronavirus I must say that a significant phase of my life is ending and for better or worse a status quo is returning. With this fact staring me in the face I can’t help but look back on how I spent my time over the past year. I had some highs and some lows. I wrote my second book, I got called an essential worker and then got hung out to dry, I had a coworker who absolutely refused to wear a mask over his nose, I marched in a BLM rally, I voted by mail, and a nurse shoved a cotton swab up my nose. But overall I had a good time throughout the pandemic. When I reminisce about those times I’m probably just going to remember the good stuff. Even with all these good feelings going around I can’t help but feel a little guilty. Because there are a lot of people out there who had an absolutely horrible time during the pandemic and just because my experience was rather bright it doesn’t mean their pain isn’t any less painful. The pandemic has forced me to reflect and reevaluate my life and now I feel like I’m at a crossroads. I’ll have to make some big decisions soon. The pandemic has most likely had massive effects on our society that we still have to understand. There are many things I can say about all this and I think a lot of them were encapsulated by the new comedy special by Bo Burnham called Inside. That’s kind of what I really wanted to talk about. Now over the years no other modern artist has made me feel more emotions than Bo Burnham. He’s made me happy, sad, confused, content, afraid, and unfathomably angry. But when I watched Inside I felt all of those things and more. In this special Bo locks himself in a room for a year and made his entire special in this one room. He really focused on writing his songs, performing them in his one room that he makes into a stage, and turning them into music videos. Watching this special now forced me to reflect on all the different stages of the pandemic. What I felt as an individual and how we felt as a society that was disconnected from each other. It forced me to admit that I was afraid sometimes.

Let me tell you a story. During the summer of 2020 and at the height of the lockdown in my city a band of unhoused people came together and built a tent city on the steps of city hall. City hall was vacant at the time so they weren’t really disturbing anybody. It was a month long demonstration to show the people in my city that there is a housing crisis that must be addressed. So I went down to the tent city to see what all the commotion was all about. I didn’t have anything better to do so why not? So with a mask on my face I took a stroll through the tent city. When I took that stroll I was afraid. There were scores of unhoused people sitting in their tents, people were trying to properly dispose of dirty heroin needles, and there were volunteers gathered to try to get people help. I scurried away from the tent city after only a few minutes. I had to admit to myself that I was afraid. Maybe I was afraid of getting stabbed with a bloody heroin needle but if you think about it most times in life you don’t get stabbed with a bloody heroin needle unless you really piss somebody off. My point is that I was afraid and I had to find out why I was afraid. To wrap up this little aside I think I should add that when Trump didn’t get re-elected it felt like this huge weight was lifted off my shoulders but I digress.

The lighting for the special is absolutely astonishing. No matter what I ever say about Bo Burnham he is a good lighting director. Don’t ever let me say otherwise. Inside is truly a document of a man spending time with himself. A man looking back on what he did in the past and accepting himself, looking at who he is now and coming to terms with himself, and looking to the future to see who he wants to be. That process could be the hardest thing that a man can do in life. There are aspects of it that I find condescending. This guy is basically a millionaire trying to convince us that he has mental illness. One lesson I want to impart is this. Mental illness is a serious problem but if you have a shit ton of money you’re in a better position to deal with it. If you’re a normal person with a normal amount of money going through the same problems you’re going to have a much more difficult time. So whenever Mr. Burnham makes art about mental health issues I really don’t see it coming from a good place. Same thing with the pandemic. If somebody has a shit ton of money then they’re going to be just fine throughout the pandemic. Over all I like to think of Bo Burnham as pop culture’s first YouTuber. He makes silly videos about himself and through ways that most people don’t understand he’s made money at it. Hence my unfathomable anger. Who knows maybe I’m just destined to be this man’s harshest critic. Maybe I’ll talk about him more in the future but who knows.
So here I am in my crossroads. I have a need to make my life better and an extreme lack agency to do so. The last thing I want to do is ask you beautiful readers to do something for me. Talk about the hardships you’ve had over the past year. Feel free to write about it in the comments or just write about it on your individual social media platforms. No matter what story you have to tell your story is valid and deserves to be read.

Goodnight and go read a book.

Hello everybody, with 2021 coming to a close I thought I would give you guys a look at how this year went for me. For a long time, I’ve heard the cliché that this year just few by but holy shit that was true this year. This year was a fucking blur man. I did some good things this year. I released my second novel and the second installment in the magic metal war saga called the Well of Destruction. I did start up a Patreon account here’s a link to that so if you want to support on independent author this is a great way to do so for just a few dollars a month. https://www.patreon.com/chrisfritz The page is kind of in the beta stages of production right now so I’m working on beefing it up. Stayed tuned for more on that. I also did some more stand-up comedy. That is a major improvement over last year. I’ve gotten a lot more opportunities to do that, so we’ll see where that leads. I’ve also started writing the third installment in the magic metal war saga. It’s called the Sun vs the Moon and I’m a third of the way through writing it right now. My prediction is this one will be ready to publish in the later end of 2022. Don’t hold me to that that’s just a preliminary prediction. So, I do have a lot of irons in the fire that will keep me busy for the next year. There were some bad things that happened this year. I wanted to start a twitch channel, but I didn’t have the time. I still want to make a twitch channel someday but for now the project is in turnaround. This year has given me a lot of time to think. There are many things that happened this year that didn’t really go my way. Maybe the biggest one would be Netflix making a live action version of Cowboy Bebop and then canceling it after one season. Overall, I’m very optimistic about what the future has in store, and I hope 2021 treated you all well. So, what was your year like? Feel free to talk about it in the comments.