January 2026 in Review
Hello Funny People,
Besides the awful happenings further north, I have been able to take some joy in small things, like good TV and books.
The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold by Evelyn Waugh
Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes by Rob Wilkins
Cold War: A Necrotek Novel by Jonathan Maberry
The Mystery of Charles Dickens by AN Wilson
While this month, on a personal level, has been quite positive, everything going on out in the world, along with the horrid weather, only serve to bring to mind those infamous opening words from Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Richard the Third:
"Now is the winter of our discontent..."
A Brief Recapitulation
December saw me, not only trying to take some joy in the holidays, but also earnestly hunt for a new full-time job following my boss's passing and the end of my days as a caregiver. And, to my surprise, despite the many reports of the job market being perilous at the moment, I actually found myself practically having a job interview a week. Yes, there were plenty of immediate nos, but it was nothing compared to what I'd faced in the submission trenches of short fiction.
Anyway, one of the jobs I'd applied for was a secretary position at the local community college here in STL. I'd had my initial interview the week before Christmas, at which I thought I'd made a pretty good impression. (When you make your interviewer(s) laugh and leave them speechless with good questions and exhaustively comprehensive answers to their questions, you're doing alright.) Then came the holidays and no follow-up (for obvious reasons), until after the new year, when I got a message for a final interview.
Sure enough, I went in, even got there 20 minutes early. However when I arrived, one of the department heads who'd interviewed me previously said my interviewer wasn't there. I asked why. Well, turned out her child had woken up ill that day, and she'd gone into mom mode to make sure her kid was alright. At first, I thought we would reschedule, but thankfully, Melissa, the department head from earlier got my interviewer on the phone and we set up a call over Microsoft Teams (Bill Gates' version of Zoom).
Between my decent interview answers and my ability to pivot with reasonable ease, I got the job. After that, it became a matter of on-boarding paperwork, background checks, and arranging direct deposit. Now, with everything nearly settled, I can confirm that I'll be rejoining the workforce, and at a community college at that.
Some of your reading this might be asking, "Why didn't you find another job at another tax firm? Or better yet, pivot to something else in finance?" These are legitimate queries, so I'll give you straight answers.
My reasons are twofold.
First, as much as I enjoyed the work, it was less the job and more the workplace I miss from the days of working for my old boss. The clients. The atmosphere. The work, however, was just work, so going back and doing the same sort of job without those trappings didn't appeal to me. Besides, I learned a number of other things that are perfectly transferable to this new position (and from what I gleamed in the interview, I'll be gaining new ones as well).
Second, but even more important, is the mission statement. You see, in the years I worked for my old boss, her priorities had shifted radically. In many ways, she'd stopped running her business like a business. Instead, she ran it like a true service, where her job, as she saw it, was to help people understand the convoluted world of taxes and tax law. Keep in mind, she had lots of clients who didn't have the luxury of a college education—and some graduated from high school on a plea bargain. Ask any of those nasty entrepreneur gurus and they'll always say, your first priority as a business owner is to maximize profits and minimize expenditures. More so, your long term goal should be to increase the former and decrease the latter every year. This leads to some truly disgusting practices, the reductio ad absurdum of which lead to the very state we find the world in at the moment. Frankly, I hate the business world. So, rather than going back into such an environment, where the first priority was profit, I wanted to go somewhere I could be of service, where the priority is to maintain the viablity of an institution of self-betterment while helping people improve their chances in life. Where better than a community college to do that?
The Writing Life
After the mess of the last two years, I made a decision most authors and writers would lose their mind over. I stopped writing for the month of January.
How could you do that? Don't you know you're supposed to write every day?
I'll admit it took me a little while to get used to the notion, until I rememberd my last good writing year in 2023. Back then, I purposefully chose not to write in January, mainly because the old tax firm was still going and January was a month of the controlled chaos of hearing cats. Or, to put it another way, it was a month of trying to get people to send us their 1099 information so we could file it with the IRS and then mail out their copies by the 31st, alongside the W-2s for our small business clients.
So, I again made the choice to not write in the month of January. And I must admit: it's left me eager to get back to it.
My top priority come February will be finishing the closing chapters of my steampunk dark fantasy novel. After that, I have to make a decision as to which longer project I want to tackle. I have several opening chapters for a few potential projects waiting for my attention. It's really just a question of which I wish to turn to once I handle the first item. I'm thinking it's time to do something in scifi again after so much fantasy...
In addition to that, I also have two outlines/detailed synopses to finish up as for for future projects.
However, the big item on my plate at the moment is a pure positive: I'm going to be a published novelist.
The contract's been signed and I've submitted a few things requested by the publisher, but the book naturally won't appear until next year. Also, I can't say anything about it, beyond the fact that it's happening, until official announcements are made by them.
This time next year though I'll be a real novelist.
Miscellaneous
Like everyone else who's been kept inside their home due to this horrid snowstorm, I've been keeping abreast of the news.
Like most, I was horrified by the events that transpired after the new year in Venezuela. Horrified, but unsurprised. The US has a long and disgusting history of interfering with the governments of Central and South American countries through activies carried out by the CIA. It's an open secret, but not something we teach our children. After all, why would the good old US-of-A want to both screwing with countries full of more blatant corruption than our own? However, the attack that killed civilians as the regime kidnapped Maduro was a blatant first. As much of a pinche pendejo as he was, capturing and reshaping his government in order to remain in power, the US's interference was the first salvo of how awful this government truly is, on the international stage.
Domestically, of course, they're no better, and all we need to prove it is look to the events of Minneapolis, Minnesota. The activies of ICE—that society of rotund, former schoolyard bullies and wannabe red-pilled wife-beaters playing at state-sponsored domestic terroism—have killed and kidnapped countless people. Liam Ramos, Renée Good, and Alex Pretti are merely the tip of that iceberg.
Yet, it heartens me to see how much these violent and immoral acts haven't gone without backlash. Not only did the hobbit nazi with the lesbian haircut, Greg Bovino, get tossed out on his ass, but Kristi Noem, the Sadistic Canicidial Girl Scout Leader, is getting raked over the coals for these events as well. Minneapolis literally called for a general strike and got it in response to this madness. Seeing those videos of all those people who refuse to be terrorized into submission gladdens my heart. It gives me a slight bit of hope for the near-future at least.
Besides the awful happenings further north, I have been able to take some joy in small things, like good TV and books.
Bookish starting Mark Gatiss, co-creator of BBC's Sherlock
My new favorite show comes courtesy of my newest subscription: PBS Passport. Given how the current regime has elected to stop funding public TV, forcing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to shut down, I figured it was time for me to step up my contribution and check out their streaming service. And I wasn't disappointed, especially with Bookish on the aire.
This show, starring Mark Gatiss (of Sherlock, Doctor Who, and the first season of Wolf Hall) as Gabriel Book, a full-time bookseller and part-time British gumshoe detective, living in London in the wake of World War II. Besides him is his beloved wife, Trottie, his beloved dog, Dog, and his new shop assistant, Jack, whose connection to Gabriel is shrouded in mystery. If there's one thing I love, it's either a good period drama or a cozy mystery. Bookish is both and delivers on both fronts to my delight. If you haven't seen it, do consider joining PBS's passport and watching it and watch it live as it aires every Sunday on Masterpiece.
My reading this month has been quite eclectic, but I do appear to be getting back to my long unread catalogue of nonfiction titles.
I'd never read a Waugh novel before, but I'd been hankering to do so for a while. So, I elected to read one of his later books first. It was marvelous. Sharp, rapid dialogue that could give Elmore Leonard, Hemingway, or Salinger a run for their money and clear, yet elegant prose both of which serve to paint a portrait of a rather cantankerous, or at least not initially sympathetic. Yet, over the course of this slender volume, Pinfold emerges as a character we come to understand. As someone with a fondness for surly characters, I couldn't help but find myself liking him towards the end. Pinfold may have been my first Waugh novel, but it will doubtless not be my last.
Speaking of surly characters, I reread Wilkins's loving portrait of his Dr Johnson, the late Professor Sir Terry Pratchett, maker of Discworld. This might well be one of my favorite author biographies because of how insightful it is to Pratchett's method of composition. He worked alinearly, writing passages and scenes as they came to him, and only once he'd assembled enough words, did he stitch everything together into a single document. Moreso, years before his unfortunate early PCA diagnosis, Pratchett was already dictating his books for Wilkins to then type, thereby making the transition easier as his eyes began to fail to see the keyboard. It's hard to believe this year marks 11 years since his passing. I wish he were still around; we could all use a good laugh right now.
On the total opposite of the spectrum, we have Maberry's follow-up to his cosmic space horror novel, Necrotek. Unlike with either the Kagen the Damned books or the RTI Joe Ledger books, I didn't reread this novel's predecessor before starting it. But thankfully I didn't need to. While the surviving (loose term here, IYKYK), cast from the previous volume continues to seek out the home world of the true villains who sent the Shoggoth fleet after them in the previous novel, a whole new thread emerges asa other monument of the Shoggoths is discovered by another party in—where else?—Antartica. And the discovering scientists, what do they do? Try to figure out how to interact with it while one of their number decides to raise a Shoggoth baby under their noses. What TF could possibly go wrong?
My last read of the month was this unusual biography of Charles "Boz" Dickens. What makes it so unusual? Rather than attempting any.sympathetic or borderline hagiographic portrait of Victorian England's most beloved author, Wilson opts to go for the throat. He explores all the darker aspects of Dickens character: his tense relationship with his parents, the shame of his time in the blacking factory, his stressful life as a workaholic hack writer in his younger years, the tension and eventual dissolution of his marriage to Katherine Dickens (neé Hogarth), and his seedy, long-time, secret affair with a young actress, Nelly Ternan, near the end of his life. Why drag all these shadowy elements of the novelist into the light? To examine how they might've driven him to write the novels he did, especially his final, unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood. While I do agree that Dickens' shadow self was a driving force for his creativity, I'm not fully convinced of Wilson's implied central argument: that without Dickens' dark half, he might not have been the genius he was. Plenty of artists—like Miles Davis and Stephen King—have been able to bring their demons under control and still create good art. Dickens, sadly, never got the chance to bring them under control, especially considering the mental illnesses he likely suffered (very likely, bipolar disorder), weren't understood, let alone treatable in his lifetime.
To close, all I can say is what I always say: hang in there, Funny People. We'll get through this somehow. It will not be the hand of some sun of York that will make this icy waste glorious summer; it will be the collective efforts of the ordinary people, of us.
Until next time, stay safe, stay healthy, and take care.
— IMC 🙃
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