This week has been busy, busy, busy. The reorganization of my apartment continues, my editing business just got flooded with projects—which I’m certainly not complaining about—and I’m continuing to plug away at the revisions for Bloodlines. With all of the busy-ness going on in my life right now, I feel like I barely have time to lean over to tie my shoes. But as funny as it sounds, I rather thrive in environments like this. I’m not one of those people who enjoys going out and doing lots of social things—I mean, I don’t mind it occasionally; I’m just more of a homebody who really enjoys chilling in this little nest I’ve built. Anybody else like that, or is it just me?
A Few Things
For those of you who missed the news, the audiobook for Wicked Creatures, which is the third book in The Unnaturals Series, is currently on sale for 50% off at Audiobooks.com! You can check out more details on how to get your copy by clicking here.
As a side note, the audiobook for Revelations, book three in The Becoming Series, is still on sale for 50% off, but that sale ends on 2/14, so you’re rapidly running out of time to get your copy of that, too! You can get more details on that sale right here.
Just for fun, since I’ve been including my music listening on these weekly updates, I decided to start putting together a monthly playlist where I pick a song that I listened to for each day of the month. Who knows? Maybe you’ll find some new music to listen to for yourself! You can check out the playlist for January on Spotify and on Apple Music. You’re also welcome to follow me on either platform to check out my playlists and such; I’m thinking about putting together playlists for some of my books eventually, when I have spare time for things like that!
Now, onward!
Writing
I’m continuing to truck along on revisions to Bloodlines. I’m deep into the last segment of the novel and making some pretty dramatic changes that I think will up the ante and make things a lot more interesting and entertaining. As I said on Facebook, I’m so glad my characters aren’t real people, because if they were, they would really hate me by now with what I do to them in my books.
At least I got 8,636 words of that written this week lol.
Total word count for this month so far: 13,995
Total word count for this year so far: 42,511
Editing
Over the past few days, I’ve gotten absolutely slammed with editing work, but as I said in the intro to this post, I’m definitely not complaining about it! Fortunately, it all lines up pretty well where it just dominoes one right behind the other, so I’m going just grind them out and get them taken care of.
Total word count edited this month so far: 222,955
Reading
I’ve been trucking along on reading all sorts of things this week, a lot of news articles (anybody else following this weird spy balloon/UFO stories going around this past week?), and doing my usual thing where I’m taking notes and saving articles in my inspiration folder in Evernote just in case it eventually sparks something new. As one does.
One thing that jumped out at me this past week was a blog post on Chuck Wendig’s blog Terribleminds, where he chats about the state of social media, especially for writers, which reminds me of something I wrote about at the end of last month right here on this blog. A quick excerpt from Wendig’s blog:
Is social media serving the writer well? In…any direction?
[…]
It ain’t good out there.
Social media is a fucking turdfire for writers right now.
Why is this? Part of it is what Cory Doctorow brilliantly calls the “enshittification” factor … The basic gist is, when a platform needs users, it serves the users. Then the users become the product, and are abused in favor [of] larger businesses who can use the users in proxy, and then inevitably, the platform fails the businesses along with the users and the whole thing violently diarrheas the bed.
[…]
We are definitely at the part of social media where these platforms have all fully enshittified themselves almost in grand simultaneity.
Which is to say, they are bad for users, and in particular, bad for writers.
He goes on to break it down by platform, discussing Twitter, Instagram, Facebook (or whatever they’re calling themselves nowadays), TikTok, Tumblr, newsletters, Mastodon (which, frankly, I have no idea how to operate and gave up on in about five minutes because it’s too complicated and I just don’t have time for that), Hive (which I signed up for before it promptly shit the bed itself), and a few that I’ve never heard of.
All of this is why I made the decision to drive as much of my contact with you guys to this blog right here—it’s easier to direct everyone to one specific place to catch up/chat with, and I’m all about trying to simplify my life right now. (Not to mention the idea of keeping as much of my own stuff in my own control as possible.)
In the book world, I managed to finish reading Please Please Tell Me Now: The Duran Duran Story by Stephen Davis. I love me a good music biography (one of my favorites is Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain by Charles R. Cross), and I pretty much grew up on Duran Duran’s music (and still like some of the work they did), so it was super interesting to read about what was going on behind the scenes for a band that was, unequivocally, one of the biggest bands in the world during the eighties. Highly recommended for those of you who enjoy a good music bio.
Watching
A lot of rewatches this week, mainly because I was looking for some stuff that I could watch on a more mindless level while I was working.
I finished rewatching season one of Daredevil, which was a fantastic refresher on exactly why I think Charlie Cox is one of the best-cast actors in the Marvel universe.
I also rewatched 2002’s Spider-Man, the one with Tobey Maguire playing Peter Parker. I think it’s literally been a decade—maybe even more—since I’ve seen this movie. It has the slight cornball-ness of earlier superhero movies, but in a fun way, and it held up surprisingly well.
The Matrix was another movie that I decided to rewatch, and after getting so used to seeing Keanu Reeves in the John Wick movies, he just looks like a baby in this one haha. He looks so young. The movie was as good as I remember, even though there were spots here and there where the CGI looks rough (compared to today’s CGI), but I remember that being absolutely revolutionary in 1999.
And lastly, I rewatched the 2016 version of The Magnificent Seven, which was directed by Antoine Fuqua and stars the always amazing Denzel Washington in the lead role. If you ask me, this movie was seriously underrated; I like how the writers slipped in the characters’ backstories and personalities and such through the writing via showing, rather than just telling the viewer about it, and it was overall just a fun, entertaining movie that I think got released at a time where westerns weren’t something moviegoers were really looking for, much to its detriment.
Listening
I continued my ongoing 2023 search for new music to listen to, and I think it shows on my Last.fm stats for this past week.
Number of scrobbles from last week: 171 (171 tracks)
Top track last week: “A Deep Slow Panic” by AFI
Number of artists: 90
Top artist last week: The Ataris
Number of albums: 121
Top album last week: Blue Skies, Broken Hearts…Next 12 Exits by The Ataris
Percentage of albums that were new: 77%
A few highlights:
1. First, I’ve started building a monthly playlist of songs from the month, one for each day, and here’s the January 2023 one on Spotify and on Apple Music. Enjoy!
2. I’ve never actually listened to a full album by The Ataris before, but I reached all the way back to 1999 and tackled Blue Skies, Broken Hearts…Next 12 Exits on the recommendation of a friend and enjoyed it. I think “San Dimas High School Football Rules” is one of my favorites from the album for sure. A very fun alt-rock album that I definitely liked.
3. As an aside, I have no idea how Last.fm calculates the top song on their website for the week, especially since I only listened to “A Deep Slow Panic” by AFI exactly once and had multiple other songs I only listened to once. Go figure.
For those interested in that sort of thing, you can see my entire last.fm profile right here. Feel free to follow me over there! I don’t really interact much, mostly just scrobble and track my stats, but I do like looking at my followers’ profiles for new music suggestions! (And if you don’t use last.fm, I can’t recommend it enough—I’ve been on the platform since 2008, and it’s great!)
What have you been reading, watching, and listening to? Let me know in the comments!