I firmly believe that every home page should have a blurb describing the author's life so that when people run into each other they can skip past the boring basics and jump straight to that awkward phase of not knowing what to say.

My life, the latest: October 2023

Hello. I'm John Truscott Reese, an unpublished, future-critically-acclaimed writer of speculative fiction, just coming off a 24-year side project of teaching computers not to destroy themselves.

The London placement I mentioned in the last installment ended early, and I returned home, sad to have jerked my cats around by flying them to another country for what turned out to be only a three-month trip, but happy to see my special lady friend again. The Robinhood job ended in October, 2022.

When my disgruntlement at Google began, I remember thinking: it would be nice if I had the option of not working, so that I have multiple exit paths. And that idea wormed itself into my brain. I read up on how to retire early -- how much money you would need, and how to manage it. I read about FIRE, which is a model for financial independence and retiring early by cutting back heavily on your expenses, and the more appealing FatFIRE, where you use the same math, but more money, to live well without working. And due to, maybe, hard work, but also, definitely, a lot of luck and a few years of planning, I've reached the point where I don't need to work anymore to live the middle class lifestyle to which I've become accustomed. I don't have a firehose of money that I can tap any time I want to travel the world, or eat ridiculous food, or donate to political causes; those things require a little more planning now, but I have time to plan and be intentional.

I've been working on finding the right amount of structure to enjoy free time but still do creative things. I have been making shrubs (drinking vinegar) with fruit from the farmer's market, barrel-aging cocktails, learning Portuguese and Esperanto on Duolingo, trading options, doing daily free writes, and nerding out on notebooks, pens, credit card optimization, and the structure of fictional narrative.

Sometimes I sit down for hours to read or write (though I get up at 10 minutes to the hour, every hour, to walk around in circles for 250 steps, when the Fitbit tells me to); once in a while, I take an edible and wander around the city listening to Ken Nordine's Word Jazz.

I'm ramping up for National Novel Writing Month by re-reading the novel I've been working on for 22 years, which is now 1090 pages long, and my plan is to write to the climax this year.

• August 2002
• October 2002
• March 2005
• December 2006
• January 2014
• June 2022

Projects

• I've been attempting National Novel Writing Month every year since 2002. The goal is to write 50000 words of fiction during the calendar month of November. I failed in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2022, and won in 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021. 2023, I'm going to call that a special case. Every year (except for 2016, where I took a break and wrote pastiche in someone else's universe) I work on the same "novel," writing additional chapters which I will later concatenate, although this is technically forbidden by the Nanowrimo rules. So if you're a stickler, I've never won and you can go to hell.
• Titles of yearly efforts:
  1. Flowers Become Screams 2002: The Heresiarchs
  2. Flowers Become Screams 2003: Auto-da-fe
  3. Flowers Become Screams 2004: Litany for the Eldest Battle-Queen
  4. Flowers Become Screams 2005: The Ibex and the Aurochs
  5. Flowers Become Screams 2006: The Country of the Stars Falling
  6. Flowers Become Screams 2007: Till the Moon Burns us Away
  7. Flowers Become Screams 2008: The Garden of Grieving Memory
  8. Flowers Become Screams 2009: Feynman Diagram Over a Fleshpit
  9. Flowers Become Screams 2010: The Sea is Cold and the Sky is Empty
  10. Flowers Become Screams 2011: Of or Pertaining to the Seething Outer Madness
  11. Flowers Become Screams 2012: The Dance that Ends the World
  12. Flowers Become Screams 2013: Cocaine and Sweetmeats, lama sabachthani
  13. Flowers Become Screams 2014: Chooser of the Slain
  14. Flowers Become Screams 2015: The Law of Milk and Horn
  15. Break, 2016: To Sleep in Turpentine
  16. Flowers Become Screams 2017: The Vault of Faith
  17. Flowers Become Screams 2018: The Forlorn Mother and the Cult of Morning
  18. Flowers Become Screams 2019: The Courtship of the Jaguar and the Chrysalis
  19. Flowers Become Screams 2020: Grief of the Jaguar/Temple of the Forlorn
  20. Flowers Become Screams 2021: Eclosion
  21. Flowers Become Screams 2022: The Cassowaries of Fimbulwinter
  22. Flowers Become Screams 2023: The Cuckoo of Heaven
• I tried and failed Script Frenzy in 2007 -- it's the screenplay equivalent of Nanowrimo: write a 20000-word screenplay during the calendar month of June. I got about halfway through, but I lost momentum when my cat died on the 7th, and I never got all the way back in the game. It didn't help that the story sucked.
  1. Scriptfrenzy 2007: The Apparatus War
• Collecting my brother's thoughts on Columbo, 1970s tv detective.
• Yammer.net, a web-based gale client.
• "Photography." Some of it in product form.
• I went to a Spanish immersion school in Mexico twice, which experience I would recommend to others. Slang.
• Ongoing mysterious notes to myself.
• Feeding myself, September, 2000, and the project's conclusion.
• Mesh subdivision demo programs, a summer research project in 1998.
• Fair surface design, a mesh editing tool that incorporates mesh subdivision and linear time Taubin smoothing to allow real-time smooth deformations, for CS 174c, 1997.
• Graphical editor for parallel programs written in mcc, for CS 139c, 1997.
• An arcade game I wrote for CS174a, 1996.
• Wavelet based texture synthesis, project for Peter Schröder, 1995-96.

Uh

• IRS forms
• INS forms
• CA tax forms
• pay parking tickets online

Pictures

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