Immanentize the Empathy
I didn’t read much this month, mostly due to spending all of my spare moments writing for NaNoWriMo. But what I did read was pretty good.
With the midterm elections mostly in the rearview mirror, barring a couple of races which were so close that they are going into runoff, or are still being counted, the world is returning to whatever passes for a state of normalcy. Donald Trump, along with all of his supporters, was once again proven to be a pathetic loser, and most of the neo-Nazi bootlicks who rode, or attempted to ride, his coattails into political office were rightfully kicked to the curb. There were the usual tears and accusations of rigged elections from the emasculated wingnut manbabies of the GOP/QANON/OANN/KKK/Fox News bloc (which is many different names for the same undifferentiated mass of jackboot fetishists), and there will inevitably be a backlash of new bills introduced which will attempt to limit voting rights to only conservative white Christian men who own property. Such are the goals of conservative white Christians in America.
Anyway. Enough about politics.
Only one new book arrived this week – Death in the Mouth the most of the recent spate of Kickstarter rewards. Friends, this book is gorgeous!
In reading news, I finished K.S. Villoso’s The Wolf of Oren-Yaro. It was great! When I am ready to start buying books again, I will pick up the sequel which, based on the excerpt published at the end of Wolf, should be excellent.
I just started Terminal Peace, the final volume of Jim C. Hines’ Janitors of the Post-Apocalypse trilogy. So far, it is every bit as good as the previous books in the series.
And on a whim, during breakfast this morning, I cracked open Duncan Hannah’s 20th Century Boy, which I can already see I will need to put down until after November, else I will be so consumed reading it that I will not have any time to write.
In writing news, I am at something over 25,000 words in my NaNoWriMo story Cacophonous. Things are going very well so far and I expect to hit 50,000 well before the end of the month.
For the tenth year in a row, I am attempting NaNoWriMo. So far things are going very well, in that I am several thousand words ahead of schedule, and the story I am writing is still interesting to me, which is very important when writing. If my work is boring to me it will probably be boring to everyone else.
No new reading material arrived in the past week, which is fine, as I still have over half a thousand unread books and journals to work through, and that takes time. Lots and lots of time. Therefore, please enjoy this photo of a gravid female praying mantis which I discovered on a walk around Blandford Nature Center on the afternoon of Friday, October 21.
Currently I am reading The Wolf of Oren-Yaro by K.S. Villoso. It’s really good! I should be finished in a couple of days, and then maybe on through a few more issues of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, or something.
In writing news, it is all Nano, all day. Or at least those parts of the day when I am not working or sleeping or hanging with my honey, or teaching or eating or attending to the cats.
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.