The first part of 2022 seemed to drag, the days and weeks plodding by as if time itself were feeling an inescapable ennui. Then Memorial Day arrived and all the things which hadn’t happened since 2019 suddenly happened all at once, three years worth of events packed into a couple of months as everyone did everything everywhere. And suddenly July is over and in fifty days Autumn will arrive, suddenly and, given how hot the world is anymore, unnoticed except for the changing of the leaves. I felt no FOMO for two years because there was nothing to miss out on. Now so many things are happening that missing an event seems a luxury.

Thus I am exhausted in the midst of plenty and in desperate need for some quiet time and solitude.

Two new books arrived at the house this week.

First up is K.S. Villoso‘s The Wolf of Oren-Yaro, which I picked up on a whim, as Villoso has been a speaker on several genre podcasts over the past couple of years.

On the right, from Two Lines Press, is Xu  Zechen‘s Running through Beijing, translated from the Chinese by Eric Abrahamsen.

In reading news I burned my way through The Last Emperox, the eminently satisfying conclusion to John Scalzi‘s Interdependency trilogy. I haven’t binged a series like this since last summer, and it felt pretty good.

I rounded out the month with a steady run of The Paris Review, and am slightly less than halfway through my backlog. I just finished the Spring 2018 issue, and expect to be caught up to present around the end of the year.

I still haven’t written anything, but I do have some ideas on how to expand a short story I wrote last fall into a full novel, including sufficient worldbuilding to possibly turn the novel, once completed, into a series. Time will tell. It always does.