Thanks A Lot

It's been another two months since I posted about the slow and steady progress I'd been making on my novel draft over the prior two months. Past Me, never able to avoid hubris, said "I have hopes about speeding up," and I am here to laugh ruefully and report that certainly wasn't the case. But I'm also here to issue some qualifications that Past Me neglected to mention, maybe because she didn't consult our shared calendar.

It's been a busy two months in the non-writing department, all for lovely and pre-planned reasons (the best kind of busy-ness). Both sets of my parents came to visit (during separate weeks), and I took two trips (during other weeks). It was all lovely, but it didn't leave a lot of room in the calendar for writing days, especially nice long strings of consecutive writing days. So the progress I've made in these two months is far less than the previous two, but the excellent news is that it's far more than zero!

Of course another thing that happened during this time is the election. I wrote a post in November 2016 that more or less covers anything I might have thought to say now, and then some. Past Me occasionally has some good insights.

Relatedly, I'm on Bluesky now, along with millions of other new users. Way back in the olden days, I used to love Twitter for the fun community I had there. Then the platform went through a series of changes that caused some people to leave, others of us to stick around uncertainly, and the whole thing to grow decidedly less fun. Now enough people are on Bluesky that it has at least some of the old Twitter feel. If you were never drawn to this style of social media, there may be no reason to add it to your life now, but if you're interested and have questions, I'm happy to help.

I'll try not to set up any novel progress expectations for Future Me with this update. Our calendar indicates it's almost the end of another year, and that means more breaks and distractions, and fewer writing days in the weeks ahead. It's also one of the common occasions for gratitude, and I have so much of that. I'm grateful for the time and opportunity I have to write, for family and friends and the time I get to spend with them, and for all the ways I'm fortunate. And I'm thankful to you, for reading!

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Charlie Jane Anders considers whether and how to write for this terrible time: "So now I have to think about the meaning of Lessons in Magic and Disaster in this new context, and whether people will find it meaningful during such a dark time. I think the book does have something to say about the tug of war between living your dreams and healing your wounds. I think it speaks to our need for literature and poetry and the humanities generally, at a time when those things are under attack. And even though it is not a book about capital-p Politics, I think it is animated by a unquenchable thirst for queer liberation. It's definitely a book about building better families and learning to survive."

→ At Wired, Meghan Herbst profiles author Martha Wells: "Wells, who is 60 years old, has averaged almost a book a year for more than three decades, ranging from palace intrigues to excursions into distant worlds populated by shapeshifters. But until Murderbot, Wells tended to fly just under the radar."