Weekend Catch Up!

Hello Friends!

I hope you're doing well. I hope there's no tropical storms heading your way, no heatwaves just starting, and that it isn't grossly humid (unless you like being moist all of the time). If there are I hope you have good friends, tasty snacks, safe places to hide from the weather, and decent ways to pass the time.

I'm more contemplative and reserved than I have been other weekends. I mostly just feel quiet, I want to sit back and sit with things. It is July. I can't believe that. Things keep happening no matter how improbable or ridiculous they are.

What I've Been Watching

I've been watching European festival streams where the sound is absolutely atrocious (and a crime against some artists) this week. Oh. We basically binged rest of Interview With The Vampire.

Interview with The Vampire

We finished season 2. What a beautiful adaption of the novel. Such a perfect final episode too! I appreciate Interview With The Vampire more now than I did when I originally read it. Older me has more grace to extend to Louis than younger me had. For a novel based on the trauma of losing a child, of how as a partnership can you come back from that (can you come back), and how we create stories about our lives as means of understanding or protecting yourself after, this adaption did super well.

I am very interested in how The Vampire Lestat will go.

What I've Been Reading

There's a couple of Reactor links this weekend. I've been leaning into escapism via magical realism more than usual. Maybe it's spite, maybe it's out of comfort but magical realism is where I go to hide.

The bees come home at teatime. They dust pollen on my hands, track it along the straight rows of my braids, then light on a dish filled with tumbled agates and fresh water to drink their fill. The hives dot the rooftop, surrounded by flowers and herbs that shouldn’t grow here, but under Mama’s hands, they do. I sit at a table next to the glass dome that fills the stairwell with light, the surface sparkling clear after a washing. Sunlight passes through the glyphs of protection painted on every crystal-cut pane with blessed water, pouring good fortune and safety inside.

C.L. Polk is a local-ish writer, and I wanna share more local-ish writers. Magical bee stories are a niche fave of mine, I love the notion of bees being magical or possessing a different sort of magic than say fortune tellers or alchemists or mages, and I was not disappointed. This a pretty rad (if long) read about a magical girl trying to keep a girl she loves safe. St. Valentine, St. Abigail, St. Brigid feels like a read outside in the twilight or early morning sorta story.

Noah went to one of the big forums—I won’t name it, but one the neckbeards in your life probably frequent. He used my VPN and created a new account. He typed up a post with the subject line: “WHY CAN’T THEY JUST DRINK OCEAN WATER?”
His post was trash. He thought every existing pipe system could take the same volume of water. He wanted to disperse water using aquamancy that “literally everybody knows how to do.” His post called the government and the wizard industry lazy for not thinking of using oceans as water supplies.

John Wiswell's "D.I.Y." is a delightful disability magical realism short story. I love Manny and Noah, their world feels so incredibly real. Wiswell's writing is warm, he also does something I love which is show how characters become radicalized. This story reminded me of The Year Without Sunshine from last week in the if people work together as a community, amazing things can be done.

In Jai, perhaps she was looking for a rescue. A small skirmish against loneliness. Something that told her that before seeing a new place, a new planet she could call home, before stepping on an alien land, her fingers wouldn’t just clasp around the frail, mottled hand of her mother’s, but perhaps a strong, muscular arm, of a man she could love for the rest of her life. GShipLovex, SpaceDate, StarMate, and the five other dating apps operating on the feeble Internetworks of the generation ships traveling to Sonagrah Prime were meant for the sole purpose of keeping loneliness at bay. Because the travel was long, and space was vast. That was the first lesson drilled into the heads of everyone who was crazy enough to take a thirty-year voyage across the stars, to start whatever remained of their lives on a planet that wouldn’t kill them after five breaths.

An offering from Clarkesworld "I Will Meet You When The Artifacts End" by Amal Singh. It's kinda how to keep on going, even when it feels like a never ending voyage to a place that's better than the place you left kinda short story. Noori's and Jai's relationship reminds me of digital friends (especially the ones made in forums or tumblr or gaming) and how I'd check for my mutuals everyday to see how they were doing. It also reminded me of the pandemic, the tumblr exodus, twitter's implosion, and every time we'd platform switch (or return) people would be missing. Wave after wave of people you used to see digitally missing. Did I imagine them? Where the people that kept us going imaginary the entire time?

Small Mammal Update

The coldest Summer of the rest your life ended and we are now in The Sun is gonna bake you into the ground if you go outside between 10am and 5pm. What this means for the smaller mammals is they've become puddles of goo. They've been napping significantly more because it's like a thousand goddamn degrees when the Sun is out, so we have nighttime shenanigans instead.

It is too hot for the solar princess herself, so now Potema wanders from cold room to cold room, napping in the AC.

I hope this is the only heat wave this summer. I would like my puddles of goo to resume their small mammal forms.

What I've Been Working On

Writing is hard. Revising is hard. Trying to figure out how to end something when it feels like it wants to be longer is equally hard. Have I gotten too attached to any of the sentences I've written, and does it feel ridiculous to cut them?

I need to cut like 1.5k words.

So another revision and aggressive editing.

I've been working at the one short story I told y'all about last Catch Up. I'm not upset or mad or sad about it. Well, I am just not for craft reasons. I'm kinda upset at my process because I feel like I should be way faster at this. It's something that happens, you stop working at a skill, it takes a little longer to get back up to speed, and there's a frustration because it feels like you used to be much faster.

Anyways, thanks for reading! I hope you're not baking to death (metaphorical only please) in the Northern hemisphere.