January 2025 in Review

Hello Funny People,

Not going to lie. The start of this year was, in a word, rough. Every year, since about 2018, I've always been able to console myself over my failures by setting goals and having a clear direction of what I knew I was going to do over the next year. This year? I was rudderless, directionless, and had no clue what I was going to do. At least not at first...

A Brief Recapitulation

How best to describe my January? Two words: fucking freezing 🥶. 

The first polar vortex dumped about seven or eight inches of snow on STL, which I spent the first Monday after the new year shoveling. Even once I had, days of fluctuating temperatures, most of which had below freezing temperatures, kept the snow, and eventually the ice from it, on the ground all the way through the end of the month.

And the second three-day polar vortex over MLK Day weekend didn't help. Thankfully, none of those days were particularly windy; I've always found that bitter kind of cold easier to bear without gusts of wind to make things worse.

For the most part, the day job has been it's usual beginning of the year craziness. Nothing I haven't handled a number of years before.

The Writing Life

The year began on a good clip on the Writing front. For the most, I spent what Writing time I could scrounge between new year festivities and snow shoveling focusing on finishing the first third of rewrites on the space opera. By the end of the first full week of January, I'd managed just that. The first part of the novel expanded from 20 chapters to 26 as I fleshed out certain scenes, took material from a single chapter and converted it into four, greatly expanding one character's presence in the first part as a result. I did a preliminary word count once I reached the end of what had been part one of the novel. The results: 👇

Current Word Count for Part One of the Space Opera following the first round of rewriting.

For context, the initial word count for this section of the novel totaled 33,334 words. Now, what was a mere third of my novel has eaten up over half of the novel's word count. I may sound panicked over this, but in truth, I'm not. I know how to cut something long down, after all. You don't spend a year cutting down a 178,000 first draft to 120k words without retaining a thing or two about how to cut words while retaining meaning.

However, I also took it upon myself to take out an old story from mothballs and start polishing it up. My long-time friend, Diane Callahan, drew my attention to an open call from Frivolous Comma looking for speculative fiction mysteries. She knows that I have something of a knack for such stories (she was a critique partner on "Boltstone and the Black Cat"), so I was grateful for this chance. The story I intend to send in is a science fiction mystery that takes place on a deep space expedition ship exploring exo-planets. Whether or not the anthology accepts this story, of course, will be up to the editors, but I still plan to make it as good as I can to heighten my chances of an acceptance.

Still waiting to hear back from the zine that held my flash story last September. With each day, I continue to bear in mind that late Ray Daley's words: "Most hold notices don't lead anywhere." So, it's definitely a holding out hope, but not holding my breath situation.

Miscellaneous

So, the orange oaf is once again the most powerful man in the world, and he and his circle jerk of Billionaire twatwaffles are in charge of the country. What now?

Well, assuming Mango Baby Nero's toadies in Congress don't manage to amend the Constitution to repeal birthright citizenship, (something it would take more cooperation that I think he can manage, even on a less-psychotic day), and assuming another GOP nominee doesn't end up in the executive mansion come next presidential cycle, that EO dies with his administration. Assuming also that those same toadies don't find some means of circumventing the guardrails laid by the framers to amend the Constitution to keep him in office indefinitely, he's done in four years. 

That said, these psychotic conservatives seem hell-bent on turning back the clock to 1963, maybe even before that. Maybe all the way back to 1920—except without the economic prosperity for anyone except the rich?

And for what? Cory Doctorow mentioned something that's stuck with me; he quoted a phrase called Wilhoit's Law, a maxim proposed Francis Wilhoit, and reads as such:

"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."

And the MAGA majority (he won the popular vote by 2 million...for once), honestly believe that they're part of that in-group. Using all thar dog whistle rhetoric, they came to believe that their whiteness would make them members of the club. Horseshit. It's no different than any other time in history since the conservative perspective became the only perspective within the GOP; using whiteness to bullshit poor working people to vote against their own interest just to stick to the people who don't look like them, sound like them, or think like them. And they don't even realize they're as fucked as we are. They're the majority after all, so they'll suffer alongside the rest of us as they raise taxes on the poor, cut Medicare and Medicaid, cut Social Security, and gut the ACA, all to keep these goddamn Billionaire tax cuts for at least another four years, if not longer. Moreso, the two of the 30 pieces if silver they sold-out the country for by voting for this citrus colored goon—cheaper eggs and cheaper gas—don't appear to be on the horizon in the near future, not with bird flu ravaging the chicken population and driving prices up. Not that the wealthy will notice. But the majority of MAGAs damn sure will.

As they do this, as a distraction for the marks, the administration is already at work trying to round up Undocumented people. In the first week of the administration, ICE units have scrambled into action across the country. Chicago, Southern California. New York. Even here in Missouri, in all our mid-sized cities, ICE agents have been spotted roaming. 

I can only hope that the Dems rally and resist as much as possible—but, of course, they'll capitulate as much as possible because they don't care about average Americans. Not if their goddamn donors tell them not to; and just who are they? The same damn people who hedge their bets by contributing to the other side. 

I only hope that the Dems retake the house in two years though. Whether we like it or not, the entire legacy of 20th Century Progress (Women's Sufferage, Civil Rights, Voting Rights, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Anti-Trust, etc.) is on the line, and the only ones who can keep it from all going down the drain are the Dems, useles, spineless pieces of chickenshit that they are.

They have about 94 weeks until the midterms. Hopefully, they figure out their messaging to at least geld these assholes and their agenda. The rest of us, in the meantime, have 206 weeks of this shit to go before this Orange Oaf and his Turd Reich Cabinet are out on their asses.

With two exceptions, this month's watches feel like a mix of catch ups on films from previous years. Then again. I'm nearly always about two years behind on everything. The hype train leaves early, and I hate waking up early.

Matlock (2024)

The latest news episode of Matlock arrived the last week of the month, and I was not disappointed. Things are heating up as Maddie has now narrowed her search from three suspects to one. And the tension to find the evidence only continues to rise as her hunt for the smoking gun continues. Her relationships with her coworkers have deepened and grown closer than would be ideal, and the longer she remains in the rat's nest of Jacobs & Moore, the likelier it is that one of two things will happen. Either, she'll get found out (especially with that redheaded human lie detector shadowing her), or once she finds the evidence necessary to put someone in jail, she'll have come to care for them too deeply to pull the trigger. Which will it be? I haven't a clue; however, I know I'm going to keep watching to find out.

The Pitt (2025)

This might be my new weekly obsession. I only started watching The Pitt after its first four episodes had aired. If I had to elevator pitch it, I'd describe it as ER meets 24. We join Michael Rabinavitch, or "Dr. Robby," as he begins his 15-hour shift in the emergency room, the eponymous pit, of a fictional Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania hospital. Why is this day so significant? It happens to be the anniversary of the death of one of his mentors, from COVID, who passed in the very emergency room Robby works. So, as he's coping with the PTSD of being in the place where he watched someone important in his life die, he must all struggle with two extra forms of stress: the daily chaos of working in an emergency medicine clinic and teaching new student doctors, all of whom have their own quirks, hangup, eccentricities, and flaws. In theory, the show will run at least 15 weeks, with one episode per week, each covering a single hour of Robby's shift. And with several, potentially earth-sahttering balls in the air already,  combined with the consitant stream of curveballs set to fly in the direct of the staff of the Pitt, I can't even fathom what to expect.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023)

After saying for months that I was going to watch this movie, I finally did. And I can only say one thing: I get it. 

I get it at last why so many people LOVED this film. They finally got D&D to work as a film, and they did it by figuring out the tone. They struck that careful balance between silly and serious. D&D, like all RPGS, is, frankly, a silly concept (see: Owlbears). But that's what makes it fun. And because it's fun, anyone can take it seriously while keeping their tongue firmly in their cheek. Until now, most D&D movies have been too serious, too melodramatic, presumably out of some shame towards the source material. But this movie? They have a masterpiece here. Why there aren't more greenlit, I haven't a clue. One person on BlueSky, when I posted about this movie after watching it, even suggested they could keep the same cast, but have everyone play different classes of characters—which is a brilliant idea. It would keep things in the spirit of D&D; once the campaign ends, successfully or otherwise, another begins, with new characters, even though the players may stay the same.

They could do dozens of these movies with the right screenwriter and production team. Whether it will happen, I suppose, is up to the morons in Hollywood.

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2024)

This one surprised me. (In a good way, don't worry.) When I heard Aardman was making another Wallace & Gromit film, I expected it to be another half-hour short, like The Wrong Trousers, A Close Shave, A Matter of Loaf and Death, or A Grand Day Out. Instead, I got the delight of watch Wallace and Gromit's second ever feature-length film, after The Curse of the Were Rabbit.

And what we got was, easily, some of the best Wallace and Gromit. We get to see more of the expanded world we got because of Were Rabbit, including a return of everyone's favorite constable, many of the eccentric townspeople around the Lancaster village they live. And we even get a fun cameo of the Farmer from Shaun the Sheep.

As fun as this film was, it's also somewhat bittersweet. This is the first major Wallace and Gromit project following the death of Peter Salis, the original voice actor of Wallace, who played him in all the films from A Grand Day Out through Curse of the Were Rabbit. That said, the film also pays hefty tribute to him. It opens with a lovely honor at the front of the film and keeps the world he had a large part in brining to life with his performance ticking along.

Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget (2023)

Well, after watching the newest Wallace & Gromit, after not watching it for two years, I pulled up the Chicken Run sequel. I'd avoided this movie, mainly because most people said it was inferior to the first. But then I also remembered that I'm one of those people who usually likes to judge things for himself. So, I watched it. And I thought it was great. Instead of The Great Escape with Chickens, we got Mission Impossible with Chickens. And it works. It's just as funny, emotionally touching, and visually creative as it's predecessor. 

That said, some changes were less to my taste. I didn't like the fact that they changed the voice actor for Ginger, despite making sure many characters in the supporting cast returned. U also didn't like that they changed the voice actors fir Nick and Fetcher, but perhaps neither of them were available to reprise. Other changes, I understood. The original vocie actors for both Mr. Tweedy (who doesn't appear in the film and whose fate is left untouched upon), and the original voice of Fowler, the old grey Rooster, had both passed away in the interim between films. (And Mrs. Tweedy is certainly characterized as having had the cheese fall off her cracker that she might’ve killed her first husband after the chickens escaped.) Other choices, such as not asking Mel Gibson back to voice Rocky, I also get. I'm sure Gibson was only shoehorned into the last film to get Jeffrey Katzenberg to shut the hell up about the movie being "too British."

Other than that, Dawn of the Nugget was an Aardman film I definitely wish I'd gotten to sooner and.plan to, in time, revisit.

My recent reads have returned to their usual eclectic trend, with some classics, some non-fiction, and, of course, a few fun reads too.

Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo

This is a reread for me, but it was definitely worth it. Pedro Páramo was one of the first works of Latin American literature I ever read, and even after reading this novel again, it still remains something of a haunting puzzle box. For those of you who've read a book like George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo, this book is that, minus any of the hand-holding Saunders offers in that book, with his constant clarification of who is speaking in that series of monologues. This book is the written equivalent of a cacophony; a chorus of voices, all jocking for attention, some sane, some deranged, all disquieting. A good way of thinking of this novel is to almost think of it as Dante's Inferno meets Madame Bovary. The story begins with a single voice, that Juan Pricado, who within a matter of pages, all but vanishes into the heat and dust of the narrative, and the novel quickly becomes about, not Juan, but his father, the eponymous character, and how his love for one woman slowly drove him to become a monster, a person who sought to build something great, a town and a hacienda he could proudly show off to impress his love. Yet, in that pursuit, he was doomed to failure, to become a man who only created ghosts by destroying the lives of those who got in his way.

In time, I'm sure I will return again to this book to see if I can see the desert through the heat haze, but this new translation certainly has opened my eyes again to how the struggle to understand a book can be half the fun of it.

Burning Boy by Paul Auster

The late Paul Auster spent the better part of three years researching and reading the life and work of Stephen Crane to bring us this book. Crane was one of those authors I read early in my life who I sadly didn't return to until now in this indirect fashion. As a kid, I read a Great Illustrated Classics edition of The Red Badge of Courage in the 4th grade, and the struggles with fear, with shame, and with the determination to save face in the face of a likelihood of death probably failed to connect with me at so young an age. Now, all I want is to dig into Crane's work with a renewed vigor and see what I missed all that time ago. 

On the personal side of things, I was honestly surprised by how much I ended up liking Crane, the man, by the end of this book. While he certainly was a product of his time in many ways (one of them being his inexcusable racist views, which to Auster's credit, he does not overlook or sidestep), there were things about him I found irresistible. 

Chief among those was his solidarity with working class Americans during the heat of the Guilded Age, which he lived all the way through. In some of the journalism that he produced for McClure's Magazine (well before the celebrated muckrakers earned their name), Crane condemned the conditions under which mine owners expected miners to labor. Before the days of minimum wage, the right to organize, the 5-day work week, the 8-hour day, and the 2-day weekend, when Robber Barrons hired Pinkerton and his private army of strike-breakers to ensure compliance, Crane's journalistic rhetoric cast off such heat, his editor regularly censored him. This of course was merely a manifestation of his own surplus empathy. The same empathy he employed to write Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and self-publish it about a slum girl, whose environment slowly dehumanizes her until she ends up like everyone else around her: a faceless woman of the night; the same empathy he employed to write the novella Monster, about a self-less black man who saves a young child from a fire, only to have his face badly damaged to the point that the people who once proclaimed him a hero now only wish he'd died because of how ugly he's become. (Wonder if Kafka read him in translation before writing The Metamorphosis.)  The same empathy that enabled him to compose numerous short stories nearer the end of his brief life about a diverse slew of characters, weaving words on the page the way Van Gogh laid paint onto a canvas.

But the most compelling thing I enjoyed about Crane was the simole story of his struggle to be a writer. It's something I understand far too well: the drive to see a project to completion, hoping that perhaps someone would give it a chance and offer a few dollars to print it. Seldom was he ever flush, and when he was, he seemed to live in the moment, not thinking of long term security (the opposite of which is my struggle). Never afraid of writing for money, whenever he tried to sellout fully, his own artistic integrity kept him from doing so, again something all creatives hope would be the case for them.

Despite his hardships though, he left behind a wonderful legacy of work, which I hope to dip into and explore in the near future. 

Deep Silence by Jonathan Maberry

In the final book of the initial Joe Ledger sequence, Maberry shows once again that he's a master of his craft. 

Not only does he bring to ahead the growing rift between the DMS and the US Government that had been there since the near-cascade failure of Code Zero, but he also continues to build upon what he already had set in place. For instance, the introduction of Cthulhu Mythos elements that began in Kill Switch once again returns in full force here, as does the interconnectivity of the various villains and adversaries the DMS has dealt with, including former operatives-turned-enemies. It becomes clear from these events that the DMS's conflicts can no longer remain bound by US Government oversight, not with psychotic egomaniacs demanding more control. So, when in the epilogue Rogue Team International emerges from the ashes of the Department of Military Sciences the adrenaline rush is palpable.

Also, this book easily contains one of my now favorite quotes from any novel, and considering the timeline and epoch in which we find ourselves now, it jumped out at me more poignantly than it might have otherwise:

"There is no such thing as an alternative fact," said Rudy. "The truth is only ever the truth. What changes is whether we accept it, even if it is inconvenient and contrary to the truth we'd prefer."

— Jonathan Maberry, Deep Silence: A Joe Ledger Novel, Chapter 71

Burn to Shine, the next book in the RTI sequence is due out on March 4th of this year. Knowing Maberry’s prolificity, it will be out that day, so either March or April will be the month I revisit all the RTI books, culminating in my reading of the latest. Nice little 32nd Birthday present to myself 🎁.

Artificial Condition by Martha Wells

Following on from All Systems Red, Artificial Condition follows Murderbot as it seeks to find answers to one major question from its past. Before we readers met it, Murderbot committed an act that made its name apropos, yet it cannot remember whether it hacked its own government module then, or if someone else was responsible. So, to find this answer, it's heading out to someone who can show it the truth. Unfortunately, a bunch of stupid people get in trouble before it can reach its destination, and despite no longer being a bodyguard for hire, someone in its core programming can't allow people to walk blindly into danger. Wells found her calling when she created this character. Murderbot will be a companion in my reading for the rest of the year.

As a final note, funny people, I can only say, hang in there. We're all in this together, and together, we'll make it through. Stay safe, stay healthy, and take care.

— IMC 🙃