Hail and Well Met, Newsletter Friends!

Well, a lot sure happened in the last three weeks. I probably don't need to recap it all for you here, so I'll just say that one of those thing that happened was that I kept writing Short Steps (in between, you know, everything else). Chapter 6, The Point is Not to Avoid the Restructuring, it is to Win it, has now been published.

Crowley was hoping he might get to sit down, so that it won’t matter if his gelatinous legs spontaneously betray him, but Sable is halfway through an explanation of why the three of them will, in fact, remain standing.

“It’s all about incentives, you see.” His teeth are very, very white, as though his toothpaste contains scouring powder, or maybe bleach. “You sit down, you start to relax, and then suddenly people are talking about their kids, or what they did last weekend, and your whole meeting is wasted on pointless unproductive chatter. You hold a meeting standing up, people don’t waste any time!”

“At our offices, we sometimes have jogging meetings to keep everyone on track,” Zuigiber adds. Crowley really needs to ask these people where they buy their toothpaste. “You’d be amazed at how much you can get done on the go. Plus the health benefits! Healthy employees are the most productive, you know.”

“You know what they say, no profit in dead employees!” Sable chuckles as his own joke before regaining the point. “But we’re not here to revolutionize the modern meeting: we’re here to talk about you, Crowley.”

Don't worry, he'll be fine. Eventually.

Here's a fun little tidbit from the annals of fanfic history: Charlotte Brontë wrote Duke of Wellington RPF as a teenager, and we can still read it because people like collecting Brontë juvenilia (although the writing is...awfully small). Scholars will often link this with her long-running interest in brooding Byronic heroes, most famously Mr. Rochester of Jane Eyre. Can you imagine a future two hundred years from now where some famous dead author's Wattpad account gets excavated and analyzed? "We can see an early interest in issues of female desire and agency in the novelette 'Zayn's Secret Girlfriend' published in 2013 under the pseudonym _d1rect1onator_..."

I'm being a little facetious here, but I'm sure it will be a rich and fascinating area of study. Alternately, in the spirit of Brontë, you could write you own Duke of Wellington RPF right now.

On the WIP docket: everything! The world has been booted into a new orbit, and a weird side effect is that right now I have way more time than usual to write. So, everything's on the table---Short Steps, Broadchurch stuff, all those oneshots that have been gathering dust, and also new things, because I still have an incurable case of shiny new object syndrome. I have no idea what the next thing to be published will be, but it should appear in less than the three weeks it took to produce this chapter.

Stay safe out there.

---unsmilingchuck