I am shocked at how quickly this month has moved along. I have had a lot of things working in the background - including a bunch of blog posts - and even though I FEEL like everything is moving at a good pace, time just...keeps going!
So there is more promised blog writing coming up, in particular my review of the essays found in NOVELIST AS VOCATION by Haruki Murakami. Murakami has been an inspiration of mine for years, his fiction is surreal and beautiful and makes me feel weird in a way that nobody else can, like I've woken from a dream that feels somehow very important.
But more importantly, his book WHAT I TALK ABOUT WHEN I TALK ABOUT RUNNING was one of my favorite pieces of non-fiction, so to have him dedicate a whole book to talking about writing as a career was really exciting. Thankfully, Nick was on the ball and told me about it (thanks Nick!).
I've gotten about halfway through it, and it was my intention to write a blog post about each essay after I finished reading it and dissecting it. The problem is, the first half has been so amazingly transformational for me that I started WRITING A NOVEL and that has taken a lot of time I would've normally been doing blog posts.
Also, if you're a frequent blog post reader, you'll note that a lot of my posts are drafted while I'm walking the dog. It has been too cold (for me, a Californian) to walk the dog some days (she's not a cold weather dog so anything below 45F (7C) is out of the question), and even if I do walk I don't have the willpower to dictate a blog post, since I'm spending most of my time thinking "wow it's so cold out here when do I get to go inside again."
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"Ah, a novel!" you say to yourself. It is not Jane 3. It's something else entirely, though it's composed of pieces of things I had been working on over 2021 when we were still mostly in lockdown (and some things from like 2010). I don't want to talk more about it. I'm very superstitious about my novel writing process, and one of my rules is that I can't talk about it until it's done.
I think it has to do with something about the mental satisfaction of the task. There was research about something one time that said that if you tell someone a cool idea you have for a creative work and they say "wow that's so cool!" that part of your brain has checked it off as "oh, okay, that's done then." Because you got the positive feedback you were craving as a creative, even though you didn't actually do any of the work.
I'm very easily influenced by that sort of thing, so I need to keep my mouth shut.
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PODCAST UPDATE!
If you're not a Discord member, then you don't yet know that Matt had COVID through November, and thus we ran out of episodes. I have some guest stuff cooking up and had planned on releasing it throughout December, but again December has sort of ambushed me. One of the guest episodes (it'll be two, actually) is already recorded and will be up for the yearly December 23rd release to help those of you who are travelling or need a distraction from all the other holiday chaos.
The second will probably drop in Jan, then I will need to record the other guest episode, and then hopefully regular recordings with Matt will resume.
ALSO, the first recording of STAR WARS BOOK CLUB will probably happen in January. I'm not sure if that'll be Patreon or main feed (probably start on Patreon and then eventually go to main feed) but I'm excited about that. Leslie, Nick, Seamus and I are reading the classic ROGUE SQUADRON by Michael A. Stackpole. I've been listening to the audio version, which is VERY GOOD. It has music and sound effects!
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That's it for now. Only one more day of work and then hopefully some breathing room for everything else.