So Many Things

Posted by tmycann on May 20th, 2019 in indie, writing | 0 comments

One month flies by faster than usual these days. I’ve been working to ignore the calendar, because I’m waiting for my editing letter… It could arrive any day, and means I’ll be heads-down once more working toward a deadline.

The easiest way for me to ignore the calendar is to read. I just went back to Goodreads… and apparently I read 14 books since my last post, less than a month ago. That seems… excessive, even for me. One of them was by someone I’d beta’d for way back in 2013, and I discovered myself as a named character for the third time. There was a moment of squee.

😀

Since I last posted we also watched Avengers: Endgame (THREE times!). I will happily debate plot points and share spoilers with anyone who asks, though obviously the short answer is that I loved the movie and how it tied up so many arcs established in the 22 movies that have now come out of the MCU. We even spent a weekend bingeing the first three Avengers movies to be better grounded in the stories told to date, and were shocked by how much was foreshadowed in them.

I also read non-book things. Quite a few were from the perspective one might best describe as side views on feminism. Like when Spain gave men equal access to parental leave, and a subsequent study on social attitudes found that all of a sudden they didn’t want quite so many kids. Or the long-form article celebrating Margarete Schuette-Lihotzky, the first woman to qualify as an architect in Austria, who did motion studies to optimize a woman’s kitchen experience in the early 1900s in Germany. The interesting take-away from it, though, is that how we imagine our kitchen experience has everything to do with class and sex, and much less to do with food production than one might imagine. (Interestingly, there was also an article about eating alone being on the rise, something that used to have a social stigma attached for women.) And, of course, the ever-green review of why more and more of us are suffering worse and worse allergies–urban landscapers who decided it’d be best to plant mostly male trees to avoid the “mess” of fertilized droppings.

I also read two articles directly related to science I need to understand for my Planet Seekers series. The first reports that there are contradictory findings about the wildlife in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Some suspect that the mere fact that humans are no longer there means wildlife is thriving. Others wonder what their quality of life is. The second showed a 3D printed Mars habitat.

There are other thoughts playing in my mind about book 2, especially now that I have a completed beat sheet and have started drafting it. If all goes well, I’ll be able to include at least some of chapter 1 of book 2 at the end of book 1 when it comes out. Keep your eyes open for a cover reveal sometime in the not-so-distant future. Once I have that, I’ll kick off my word counter here, but I’m not unhappy to have the first 500+ words on (virtual) paper for it already.

Until next time, keep reading. And let it change you.

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