Tired, sore, and plumb wore out... but hanging in there
Hey folks,
Sorry it’s been quiet around here—I’ve been on deadline and overwhelmed with tasks and some lingering post-surgical complications (yes, from 2021, bodies are the worst. I’m okay but I may need to see a specialist long-term and I might wind up needing another surgery which I am not looking forward to. Long story short, the lymphedema is still causing problems and grr, argh, basically.).
So this newsletter has been falling through the cracks, I’m afraid.
Also I just… haven’t had much to say about much. I was sick for a week, and I finished and revised and did a pretty intense rewrite of a work-for-hire project that’s still under an NDA, but I will tell you the details about that when I’m allowed to. And I’m back at chipping away at The Folded Sky, which is at the immensely difficult “Now I have to somehow bring these four plot threads together into a satisfying conclusion” stage.
But at least I’m finally feeling pretty good about the first 100,000 words of it.
I finally finished David Quammen’s The Song of the Dodo, which is brilliant and depressing, and I beta-read a couple of books for friends, and I finished Ruthanna Emrys’s A Half-Built Garden finally (extremely relatable protagonist on that one, even when I wanted to yell at her to stop making snap judgments but well, that’s part of the point!) and I am hoping that actually making progress on finishing books means that I’m starting to get some momentum back.
Then I polished off Barbara Hambly’s One Extra Corpse, which was reliably quite good. (After all, it’s Barbara Hambly, one of the best around.)
Y’all have probably seen on the social medias that Scott now has his own horse. Spóla is a nearly-9-year-old Icelandic mare. We haven’t actually met her yet: she went directly from Iceland to a trainer up in Vermont where she can get settled in and adjust to her dramatic change in circumstances, as well as learning a few things about America. :D
She’s stunning, and looks a lot like Magni. Maybe someday we’ll be able to train them as a matched pair for carriage work… or do drill team with them.
Ormr’s doing great and really enjoying being a therapy horse for an assortment of little girls. He tolerates me, but he really adores children. Lots of recent photos of his shagginess over on my Instagram and Twitter.
For as long as Twitter hangs in there.
I have been spending fifteen or twenty minutes most days playing the Glitch reboot Odd Giants (usually while watching a little Columbo) and I’m really enjoying it. Basically somehow all my habits and rituals got cattywumpus and I am trying to reconstruct them—I have solemnly sworn that I am not going to bed tonight until I (1) write this newsletter and (2) actually pick up my guitar.
Which has also been very neglected.
All right, back to the coal mines. Pirates are attacking, and they won’t gun-battle-on-a-space-station themselves.
Best,
Bear