This’ll be a quick proof-of-life post. Couldn’t get this in last week, or much of any other writing for that matter. Yeah, when I post my April stats, it’ll likely look like March–unimpressive, but not nothing. Still, maybe I was a little too cocky thinking I was as fully back on my bullshit as I thought I was last time.
This is typical for this time of year. My dayjob is on an academic calendar which is nearing the end of its semester when work traditionally takes a lot out of me. And while my mood over the past weeks might not have been the best, the basics of life are still happening. So yes, there’s a little bit more urgency to “get back on the stick” as it were, where the writing is concerned. But I’m resisting the usual lamentation of “Woe is me, I haven’t done anything, I’m a loser, blah blah blah….”
READING
I finished Mia Alvar’s IN THE COUNTRY. It was tough to get through because of how hard it hit home, but well worth it. I felt compelled to follow it up with Isabel Yap’s NEVER HAVE I EVER, and I’m about halfway through it. So far it’s pretty much what I expected having read and enjoyed the story “Asphalt, River, Mother, Child” when I first saw it on STRANGE HORIZONS.
Of course, I can never read one book at a time. Nor can I resist a good discount code, which I got after attending a couple of very enlightening virtual salons from Belt Publishing. I picked up three.
- The one I’m reading right now alongside Yap’s collection is Edward McClelland’s FOLKTALES AND LEGENDS OF THE MIDDLE WEST. Exactly what it says on the tin, including not just Indigenous tales but immigrant/settler ones as well.
- I’d never read the work of Claire Winger Harris, a speculative fiction writer with Cleveland connections who published, very roughly speaking, in that early WEIRD TALES era, making her a contemporary of other writers I like, such as Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman and Margaret St. Clair. So when a scholar compiled some of her work in THE ARTIFICIAL MAN AND OTHER STORIES, I knew I had to have it.
- I also picked up Phil Christman’s MIDWEST FUTURES because aside from the subject matter, I’m a sucker for micro/brief essays.
LISTENING
I don’t know if I’m going to do this every week, but I wondered what it would look like to push out a weekly playlist of the grooves in my head. Besides, it’s not like I’m doing much else with my Spotify account.
IN THE WILD
Maybe I’m projecting, but Mazikeen has always seemed like her father’s daughter. I mean, this is pretty much the pose and the face I’ve had for the past couple of weeks…
