Next week
Maker: Continue outlining SNOWDRIFT STARLIGHT.
Manager: NA
Marketer: Actually rough out a promotion plan for circa August. It can be a couple of lines of thing, just anything.
Last week
Work: ✅⬛✅
Inputs:
- ORCA, Steven Brust ✅
- ISSOLA, Steven Brust 🌗
- JADE WAR, Fonda Lee, read by Andrew Kishino ✅
- A HEAD FULL OF GHOSTS, Paul Tremblay, read by Joy Osmanski 🌗
- BETTER CALL SAUL S6E8, “Point and Shoot”; S6E9, “Fun and Games.” ✅
- STILLWATER vol. 3, “Border Crossing,” Chip Zdarsky, Ramon K. Perez, & Mike Spicer ✅
- (If Books Could Kill) “Nudge” Part 1: A Simple Solution For Littering, Organ Donations and Climate Change ✅
- (If Books Could Kill) “Nudge” Part 2: Mr. Nudge Goes to Washington 🌗
- (FiveThirtyEight Politics) Does It Matter if King Charles is Popular? ✅
- (FiveThirtyEight Politics) How Immigration Shapes American Politics ✅
I’ve been hitting hard resistance on outlining SNOWDRIFT STARLIGHT. I thought I had a lot more written already, and what I had was… not particularly structured. There just wasn’t much more than I already had in my head, apart from some character sketches that were so thin and provisional that I could probably have come up with something just as good off the cuff. It felt like it was too early to write even something as noncommittal as an outline.
But the lesson is always the same: Sparks follow marks. Head-thoughts are great, but only because they’re so blurry that they always look perfect. Put a mark on a page, and things start happening. (This is also, secretly, a reminder to get my ass in gear on this promotion thing.)
I was in the market for a fence post driver this weekend, because I finally put up my shitty fence-post-and-netting fence and it turns out I can’t drive the posts far enough down myself to keep them from falling over in a stiff breeze. And I was solo parenting because my spouse was watching the golden-throated Josh Groban chew the scenery as Sweeney Todd in New York. So I hauled my kids to a hardware store. We didn’t find the fence post driver, but we did find today’s featured image, an axe that raises far more questions than it answers. In what units is destructiveness measured? What is the baseline destructiveness against which an axe ought to be compared? How much destructiveness is needed for common household tasks? Is “Destroy more!” an indictment of the KonMari method, or its apotheosis?
Currently listening: A HEAD FULL OF GHOSTS, by Paul Tremblay, read by Joy Osmanski.
If you’re a fantasy reader in the market for a different twist on dragons, have a look at BRIMSTONE SLIPSTREAM, the opening novella in the Streets of Flame series — free to download on all the major retailers.
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