Update: December 2024
(Reminder that this post is mirrored on my Patreon page!)
Wait what day is it?
I don’t even care, I’m taking the rest of the month off. Ha!
State of the desk: I finished the first draft of The Glass Slide World. It’s a book! The next step: the editor reads it and sends me notes and feedback. We’ll likely go through a couple of rounds of that. Meanwhile, I’m trying not to think of the book at all. The darn thing needs to sit a while. Settle. Think about what it’s done. Ferment. Sprout fungus. I don’t know.
On that note, for this month’s lesson I’ll write a bit about what happens to my brain after finishing an entire novel. Because there’s a… let’s call it a recovery phase. Oof.
Hey, I went to the movies! To see a movie! The Wild Robot. The best part was getting to see it with my brother, sister-in-law, and niece and buy them all movie snacks. The movie itself was fine, kinda sweet. I mean, it’s halfway about a bird, so of course I’m there for it. I admit, I was a bit surprised that there was a big Avengers-style laser gun fight in the third act. Wasn’t expecting that and it seemed tonally off. But this kind of movie also reminds me that I’m a huge cynic who’s seen way too many movies like this and may be a bit judgmental as a result.
The other one I saw was streaming: Matrix Resurrections. I’d been avoiding it because the other Matrix sequels are…well, they’re not great. They took the philosophy of the first one and undermined it with a videogame aesthetic. Which means I went into this fourth film with lowered expectations… and let me tell you, it was NOT what I was expecting, because this one goes full meta. With a double layer of meta. It’s basically Lana Wachowski’s giant middle finger to The Matrix’s toxic fandom that took entirely the wrong messages from the first film. I am so here for it. It’s great. “Nothing comforts anxiety like a little nostalgia.” YES, BRING IT. I think middle-aged Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Ann Moss have more chemistry than they did as young goths.
TV: I’ve watched all of Star Trek Prodigy (on Netflix rather than Paramount because of rights issues, I think?) and I think it’s a more cohesive, compelling story than anything Star Trek Discovery did. Mind you, I didn’t make it through the second season of Discovery because I got fed up. Ostensibly a kids show (kind of like how Star Wars Rebels is a kids show) Prodigy has a big found family element, a big galaxy-spanning ongoing plot, lots of callbacks, and a story I’ve been waiting for in Star Trek: what does life look like outside Starfleet? Outside the Federation? This gives us a taste. I liked it a lot.
Next up: Sorting my yarn stash into new projects, starting some other new projects. The Holidays? Yeah, we’ll do some of that, too. Happy December!
