January 2024 Update!

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Welcome, New Year!

I often try to do a recap of the previous year and mull over thoughts on the new year, but I’m finding this year my impulse is to just let it all go. Don’t dwell. 2023 was strange. Not necessarily bad, for me, but definitely strange, chopped up into different phases marked by big projects and trips. For 2024, I want to slow down a bit. We’ll see how that goes, ha! A writer friend and I were talking about a “word of the year” – a word that encapsulates the tone we want to set for the new year. We had both chosen “renew” as our words, which I think says something about 2023 for a lot of us.

So that’s it, that’s my word: renew. Do you all have a “word of the year?” Share, if you feel the urge!

Along those lines, this month’s lesson is going to be: Self Help for Creatives. Seems timely, right? It’s not really a lesson or advice, but a meditation on this whole string of self-help and creativity/productivity books I’ve read over the last few years because I’m not really sure why. I’m going to get kind of meta here, deconstructing this genre a bit.

News! As you can see in the image above, I have a new Cormac and Amelia novella for you! Broken Roads is available for preorder and due out in a couple of weeks. This is just shy of novel length, so it should be good and juicy for you all who’ve been wanting a bit more heft to these. Kindle link is here. Nook link is here. Others as I get them. 

I’ve been in a bit of a reading rut. I stalled out on three or four novels, quitting halfway through. This means I hadn’t actually finished a novel since October? Been reading nonfiction, but fiction has been making my eyes cross. Finally, on January 1, I finished one: Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. Gotta be honest, it’s a rough read, an openly Dickensian tragedy (ala David Copperfield) set in the rural/Appalachian coal country of Virginia and all that entails. It’s 500+ pages with a vivid first-person narrator where things just keep getting worse and worse, right up until the last couple of chapters. It’s also one of those books with an epiphany toward the end, but you have to get through the rest for the epiphany to mean anything. Beautifully written. But I may be done with beautiful and depressing literary writing for a while. Time for the new Murderbot novel I think.

Media consumption: I saw Godzilla Minus Zero. I reiterate my love for the current string of Monsterverse films and TV that started with 2014’s Godzilla (my review of that film is here). These somehow capture the aesthetic of the beloved early films, but with modern sensibilities. The best way I can describe it is that the monsters in these look like spectacular CGI versions of guys in rubber suits. This isn’t a criticism, it’s great, it totally works. 

I finally dived into the new season of For All Mankind, Apple TV’s alt history where the space race never ended. The first two seasons are brilliant. The third and fourth seasons are…less brilliant. Equal parts great and WTF melodrama. I started Blue Eye Samurai but haven’t finished. My list of things to watch keeps getting longer rather than shorter. Hrm.

And with that, I’m going to sign off and write some words and craft some crafts. Get some of that sweet, sweet inspiration going. Happy New Year!