Update: February 2023 is go!

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My birthday was last week, and it was a big one: I am now fifty years old. I’m…adjusting. It’s weird. I’m trying to treat it like another day, another year, like nothing has fundamentally changed. But this really is the point where you start coming to grips with the fact that more of your life lies behind you than ahead of you. I still have a lot I want to do, but I’m also having to budget my energy in ways I didn’t when I was thirty. The last few years have been a struggle, and it’s hard to differentiate between what I’m struggling with personally and what’s just the world in general being difficult. I’m trying not to let it all mess with my head.

A friend of mine likes to say, “You can do anything, but you can’t do everything.” I’m feeling that.

This month’s lesson: Writing Superhero Stories. I’ve written superheroes in a couple of different contexts: My novels After the Golden Age and Dreams of the Golden Age, and as part of the Wild Cards shared-world series edited by George R.R. Martin. Superhero fiction tends to be a visual-focused genre, but prose offers some unique opportunities in portraying the superpowered and their lives.

I have some new stories out:

• “Time: Marked and Mended” is my third story about Graff, a secret cyborg who is also a bit of a hedonist. I love him. Yes, I’m writing lots more about him.  It’s free to read on Tor dot com. 
• This month’s Lightspeed Magazine includes my story “Learning Letters,” set in the same world as my novel Bannerless and featuring Enid.
• And coming soon: Wild Cards: Now and Then, an original graphic novel (speaking of superheroes)! Art by Renae de Liz. This is my first comics script and there’s definitely a learning curve there. I could talk about that in a future post if you’re interested. I’d like to do more comics work at some point. It’ll be out in July – it seems so far away! 

So yeah, I’ve been producing stuff even when it doesn’t always feel like it. Trust the process!

Work: I’m continuing with this Cormac novella that might end up being a novel, poking at a couple of new short story ideas, and waiting to hear back on submissions. Always with the waiting. I’m told I’m prolific, and if I am it’s because I distract myself from waiting by writing new things and holy cow there’s a lot of waiting in this business.

What I’ve been watching: I have so many shows to catch up on. So much I haven’t been watching. I’m making a list, but instead of all the great new movies and shows I keep watching weird documentaries about fungus and volcanoes. Oh – I did see The Pale Blue Eye, the one with Christian Bale and Harry Melling (who played Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter films and I’m so glad he’s getting a new career as an adult. He was also the villain in The Old Guard, which I loved.) Melling plays a young Edgar Allan Poe, who is often credited with inventing the murder mystery genre, and here we’re invited to speculate that he discovered murder mysteries by helping to solve one at West Point when he was (briefly) a cadet there. This is a great concept and I should have loved it but I didn’t, because it devolved into clichés, and each cliché it introduced made it less interesting. Gillian Anderson is also in it, though at times she appears to be in a different movie than everyone else, flouncing through the dour gothic setting with a high degree of melodrama, which is delightful. I’m a big Gillian Anderson fan.

I started rewatching Castle from the beginning. This was my favorite show for years, until it went off the rails, and I skipped the last season entirely. The last episode of the second to last season is such a perfect end, there’s no reason to keep going. This rewatch reminds me of what made the show great. The mysteries are relatively straightforward, engaging but not baroque. We really watched for the characters – the slow unfolding of what makes Castle and Beckett tick, the way their first impressions hide complex layers. He’s an ass, but he’s a really good dad who loves his family. She’s incredibly prickly but has depths of caring. I like how much Castle talks about writing and his process. He’s still a Hollywood version of a writer, but it’s clear he actually, you know, writes. There’s an early scene where Beckett observes that his plot board is a lot like her murder investigation board. I love that. So good. The whole series is on Hulu.

Okay, second month of 2023 is go! Time to put our heads down and charge through the late-winter chill (here in Colorado) and build that momentum. Onward and upward!

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