Greetings, and happy spring to southern hemisphere peeps! This newsletter has been a long time coming; I won’t drag you through the dregs of it all, but needless to say it’s all been documented on the blog if you feel like a dig.

It’s November, anyway, and for a very long time that meant NaNoWriMo for me. After the implosion and fragmentation of the parent site, November lost a lot of its mojo. People are still writing novels in a month, but in different places, and a lot of the magic has fizzled away. I briefly signed up for the one being run by ProWritingAid, but realised that was just one giant advertisement, and so stepped away from that one. Someone on Mastadon posted a link to writingmonth.org, which looks a little more “homegrown.” In any case - I’m writing this month, aiming to finish a fifth draft of a very long-running novel, by roughly mid-December.

I’m mostly doing it using Obsidian, tracking word counts and writing sprints with a python script which also calculates daily goals and gives me a little markdown file which looks cute in my obsidian dashboard.

But I’m also working from this thing:

Post its and index cards are the absolute best; I love that I don’t have to commit to a structure or plan but I can still get all the moving parts moving. I’m going to do a bit more of a deep dive at some point on the blog, but for now it’s quite nice taking a higher-level view of a story that’s been fermenting in my brain for a while, and pushing it along a bit.

Books

I’ve been reading heaps this year. Standouts include:

Central Station, by Lavie Tidhar

I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, by Hu Anyan

many books by KJ Charles

A Drop of Corruption, Robert Jackson Bennett (the first book in the series, The Tainted Cup is also very good

And lined up I have a couple of Olga Tokarczuk books (I am already wanting to reread Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead), Nicky Hager’s Dirty Work, and Death and the Gardener by Georgi Gospodinov, which I’m really looking forward to.

Travel

I’ve had a few trips around as well this year, including a trip to Christchurch to farewell my Uncle Clare who passed away at the start of the year, my godmother who passed in Taupō, and another trip up to the lake to spread some of Mum’s and Colette’s ashes. We do also have another trip to Christchurch planned at the end of the year for—gasp—a wedding this time.

Even though it’s obviously not amazing going to so many funerals in one year it was still a nice opportunity to take a few road trips with my dad, and going back to our old stomping ground in Taupō was quite uplifting.

Games etcetera

I don’t have a Playstation, and so missed out on playing Death Stranding when it came out. But I did pick it up not long ago, not really expecting a great deal as a “post-apocalyptic walking simulator” (as some have called it) wasn’t high up on my list of must-dos. It took me a while before I really got much of a handle on things, but as a casual (almost cozy?) pick-up it slowly started growing on me. The story is…still weird, and I confess I let most of the lore just wash over me. But there is something extremely satisfying about traversing the wide-open landscapes of the game, stumbling over rocks and across streams, using climbing ropes and ladders, or building bridges and watchtowers, fighting off bandits and even creepier hostile creatures, all while trying to keep your cargo intact. I’m enjoying it quite a bit now, and not rushing at all with it. It’s become a bit of a meditative experience for me :)

Other things

• the blog had a revamp and is now looking rather spiffy

• I gave a few of my book covers a refresh

• I started an ink webshop

• I discovered the Hanada method

In any case, thank you again for sticking with me. I realise the newsletter is an extremely sporadic beastie, but I appreciate your support.