August 2024
A short update this month. I’m going on an adventure!!!
This month’s lesson: A post on what I’ve learned about public speaking.
New story out! “Between Above and Below” is up on Lightspeed. This is one that came out of a really nice hike in Rocky Mountain National Park awhile back. (This is my own response to a prompt I posted a couple of years ago.) Speaking of, I should get up there before the summer is out.
Working on: I’ve finished a very rough draft of the surprise! novel from December. It still needs a lot of work. I have a whole list of work that it needs. But I’m setting it aside, because I have another novel I need to get started on, with an actual deadline.
I’m also taking a bit of a break to write one, maybe two short stories that have been cooking in my back brain. Can’t stop won’t stop!
I’ve mentioned the podcast If Books Could Kill before. They have an episode on J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy that’s worth a listen. Just because I don’t often talk politics doesn’t mean I’m not paying attention. Harris in 2024! Let’s do it!
Media consumption:
Did I watch any of the serious, award-nominated movies that have hit streaming over the last couple of months? The Holdovers, American Fiction, all movies I’ve told myself I want to watch? No, I did not. Instead, I watched The Great Wall, a big dumb action movie noteworthy mostly for having nearly incomprehensible trailers when it came out. It’s swarms and swarms of indistinguishable CGI lizard monsters versus swarms and swarms of indistinguishable CGI soldiers. My reward for turning on the big dumb action movie is the surprise that Pedro Pascal is in it as Matt Damon’s ethnic comic sidekick. If you consider Spanish to be ethnic. He keeps saying “amigo” so I think we’re supposed to. Anyway, it’s about how the white European is better at fighting the monsters than the thousands of Chinese soldiers who’ve trained to fight them for generations. Whatever.
I also watched Butterfly in the Sky, a Netflix documentary about the long-running PBS show Reading Rainbow hosted by the beloved LeVar Burton. It made me cry. I’m working up to watching the documentary about Jim Henson, which I know will make me cry. Oof.
And… I started The Decameron, an adaption of Boccaccio’s 14th century collection of stories about the Black Death. Y’all, I have a lot to say about it. It’s unhinged. It’s absurd. It’s Commedia dell’arte. Can’t wait to finish it.
But right now: Olympics! I’m watching the Olympics! Yes!
Have a good August, folks. Summer’s rolling on.
