Everyone and their brother is having a newsletter now, so I thought I would get in on it, too. As usual, I am not at the bleeding edge of this trend, but wallowing in at what might be the end. However, we shall persevere.
This week I have …
What am I Listening To:
It’s the beginning of April, and one of my discord servers has a habitual sharing of our receiptify results for the previous month. To that end, here’s mine from March:
Some excellent selections for the month of March.
I’m intrigued by the inclusion of the Bat For Lashes song, as I do not actually recall hearing it during March. I definitely remember listening to the Oh Hellos a lot, and they do not appear at all on this list. Sometimes, I think receiptify is lying about my music listening habits, but who knows.
Definitely recommend that Gregory Alan Isakov tune if you haven’t heard it.
What am I watching?
Well, not much to be perfectly honest. The merge games on my ipad have me in their iron grip. I still need to finish The Last of Us, of which I have only one episode remaining and I both want and do not want to finish it - what if it doesn’t live up to my expectations? What if it does? Oh, the horror of enjoying a TV show.
My partner often puts on movies to fall asleep to, and since I am usually in the room, I end up either turning them off to save them for him or watching them through to the end if they engage me enough. This week, he put Broken Arrow on and 1) stayed awake until the end and 2) I also watched it until the end. What a silly, ridiculous movie that was nevertheless extremely entertaining.
John Travolta is gleefully demented as a corrupt pilot with a plan to sell a pair of nuclear warheads to the highest bidder and then live on the dividends of a purchase of, I want to say Nissan? stock? and a young and (oh man, he does do it for me) hunky Christian Slater is the hero aided impeccably by Samantha Mathis’ character. It’s extremely a movie of it’s time - the mid ‘90s - and the ending is very cheesy but Slater and Mathis have great chemistry. There’s no forced romance - which I was SO pleased about, because like, there’s nuclear apocalypse to stop, no time for a soft-focused love scene, okay?
(Also they don’t even know each other’s names until the very end of the movie which I thought was absolutely hilarious.)
Anyway, I definitely enjoyed and have further cemented my desire that, as a society, we go back to making dumb, 90 minute long action thrillers again for movies, because they’re fun and uncomplicated and really, why did we stop making them?
What am I reading?
Well. Also not much.
To be perfectly honest, the month of March kind of ate me alive. But we are crawling out from under it and it is starting to get sunny again, so I can feel my desire to do things unfurling alongside the leaves of the tulips that are coming up in my garden. So, maybe I will get to read things again.
I did take a stroll through a writer I admire’s bookmarks on AO3 over the last week and a half, and re-read a half-a-dozen old favourites, so there’s that, at least. Maybe, someday, I will go back to reading a book.
Writing (or the lack thereof)
I don’t know, man, Q1 is murder on the creative brain for a lot of people, me included. Last year’s feverish posting of 22k of Yennskier fic notwithstanding, the beginning of the year is HARD for writing, so some ungodly reason.
However, I think we’re over hump on that now, as I feel like I’m settling into a rhythm of actually writing most days of the week. I published a short fic late last week, which has provided me with the gratification that I desired in the form of comments from my ever-loyal readers, and I am also pleased to report that I finished the very rough first draft of the next piece I’ll be having published by the Press.
I’m really looking forward to this anthology we’re putting out in the summer. You cannot go wrong with queers in space.
I have until the end of April to polish it into something I feel okay about having our editor look at and then the real work of back and forth edits and turning it into publishable material begins.
For this coming week, I want to get more stuck into the second draft, as well as reviewing an existing fic WIP for an event one of my discord servers is putting on, which I think will be fun!
Miscellany
I don’t know about you, but I am rooting for the moose.
You can’t make a man look like Vash the Stampede in the new Trigun and not expect me not to want to throw him down some stairs (affectionate).
SFP has two books on Amazon now - Office Hours & Snapshots - if you don’t want to give Bezos your money, you can buy them directly from us but please leave your review on the almighty internet retailer’s website.
Watcher released a one-off special ep of Weird and/or Wonderful World and all my crops are watered.
Be kind to each other, see you next week!