If the sun never rises: Friday Update
News:
After the polar vortex dipped down here to blister my toes with chilblains, we slipped into a false spring. It’s been warm, but also cloudy and rainy. I like cloudy and rainy, but after a while, missing the sun disrupts the sense of day rising and night falling. The temperature is beautiful (even a little warmer than I prefer) and doesn’t look like we’ll get a big winter front for a while (if at all), but there are a lot of clouds in the forecast. Makes me drowsy.
There’s no immediate news really, although I can tease that I received another great blurb and did my first podcast interview for Question Not My Salt this week. First podcast interview ever, actually.
If you missed it, I put out the Puppeteer (Thorns 4) playlist. You can find all the book playlists under the Thorns series header above. The links are under each book listing.
Works in Progress:
I finished the second edit of erotic horror novella A Woman Alone and brought it down to under 40K words, which was the goal. Since January submission calls ended and February calls opened up, I submitted that, plus a novelette and a few more short stories. I also finished what might be my last poems for the Autumn section of my seasonal poetry collection. Now I just have to write for Spring.
On January 31st, I felt weird starting something new right at the end of the month, and I didn’t have any more small projects to fuss with, so I took the day off to binge-watch Buffy, Angel, and The Mentalist and feel sorry for myself because I’m still struggling with leg pain. Sometimes you just need to wallow. I don’t really take days off and often downplay my own work as actual work—even though I put in full effort seven days a week—because I don’t receive commensurate compensation. But rest will occasionally force itself upon you
Wallowing over, I started on Silver & Steel (Meridian 7) yesterday, and it started pretty strong. I broke from my usual style for the series and decided to do it in first-person present tense. Whether I finish it mid-February or not, that’s when I’ll clean up my resume and start putting out job applications. Hopefully, winter doesn’t decide to come back with an icy vengeance at that point. It did when I started my last job nine years ago.
Books I’m Reading:
IT by Stephen King
Midnight Blue-Light Special by Seanan McGuire
Ending in Ashes by Rebecca Jones-Howe
Things I’m Listening To:
Sara Bareilles
Eurielle
Timber Timbre
Agnes Obel
Tina Guo
Things I’m Watching:
Bullet Train
Saltburn
Taken 2
Buffy the Vampire Slayer series (watchalong)
Angel series (watchalong)
CSI series
The Mentalist series
Abbott Elementary series
Helix series
All Creatures Great and Small series
Murder, She Wrote series
Poem of the Week:
save your vitriol for someone
who wouldn’t eat your soul
instead of a sandwich
if it satisfied their hunger
more efficiently
