Weekly Goals 17-8-26

 It's probably the busiest two to three weeks of the year, so of course I've picked up a bug.  It's not terrible and hasn't stopped me from doing anything yet, but I don't feel that great.  It seems to be settling in my chest too which is not wonderful.  In the middle of the night I was certain I'd need to take the day off work today and was trying to figure out how to shuffle everything around to make that work,  but now that I'm up, I think I'll probably be okay to go in.  So long as no one minds me coughing like a dog barking...

So again, this week is going to be about getting through it.  I have a lot to do to get ready for the new ticketing system to go live next week, plus I'm going on tour one the weekend.  Not to mention, I have tickets for six films between now and Thursday!

Which leads me to the films I saw over the weekend.

The Best Summer is a doco by Tamra Davis that she made from some old video tapes she found when packing up stuff to escape the fires in LA a couple of years back.  In 1995 she went with her then husband, one of the Beastie Boys, on a tour of Australia and Asia, filming behind the scenes and concert footage as she went.  With the line-up including Sonic Youth, Bikini Kill, Foo Fighters, Rancid and more, this film captures the camaraderie, the youthful exuberance and excitement of these young bands on tour.

Kim Novak's Vertigo is a fascinating doc about the blonde star of Hitchcock's most enigmatic film.  Having left Hollywood while still relatively young, Novak has spent years living with a range of animals and painting which was, apparently, her first love.  The director has access to her attic where she's stored all the memorabilia and trinkets associated with her long-gone film career and manages to get her to open up about her acting (or, as she describes it, re-acting) and the two characters she portrays in Vertigo.

Goodbye, Cruel World is a French film about a young boy, bullied relentlessly at school, who decides he's had enough.  He writes a letter, makes enough copies to post to everyone in his class, firmly laying the blame at their feet, and goes to kill himself by leaping off a bridge into a fast-moving river.  But he doesn't die.  Frustrated, he hides out in an abandoned nunnery, knowing he can't go home.  When he's discovered by a classmate walking her dog, she hides him in an unused room at her mother's hotel and they quickly become friends, then more, making plans to leave together and build a new life.   I enjoyed this one, but felt like it stayed very much on the safe side.  There was a lot more the writer could have done with the premise and it annoyed me a little that the story didn't push outside its comfort zone a little more.

What are your goals this week?

Celebrate the Small Things 14-8-26

 

It's the end of the week so it's time to celebrate the small things!

So what am I celebrating this week?

It's the weekend!

Although, not much of a weekend for because we have concerts tonight and tomorrow night.  But in between I plan to do a lot of resting and relaxing because this week has been mayhem.

And seeing some films since the film festival has started.  I've only seen two so far, but I liked them both.

Father, Mother, Sister, Brother is the latest film from Jim Jarmusch who I've been a massive fan of since the early '90s.  This is an episodic film, three distinct, yet linked stories about familiar relationships.  In the first, siblings (played by Adam Driver and Mayim Biaylik who look eerily like they could be related) go to visit their father  (Tom Waits) in his ramshackle house in the middle of nowhere.  He's a shambling guy, always underemployed and his kids have had to help him out frequently with groceries and household repairs.  Yet everything isn't quite what it seems on the surface.  In the second vignette, a mother (Charlotte Rampling) is having her daughters over for afternoon tea.  Apparently this is the only day of the year they see each other, despite all living in Dublin, so it's a big deal.  Again, not everything is as it seems on the surface.  And the final piece is about a brother and sister, twins, dealing with the sudden death of their bohemian parents and clearing out their belongings from their Paris flat.   I really enjoyed this film.  It's quiet, but has the same subtly delicious humor Jarmusch always manages to capture, yet was also quite heartbreaking in all the different ways family relationships can be broken.

Mouse was a pleasant surprise.  I couldn't remember what it was about when I went in, and it ended up being a beautifully captured portrait of grief and grieving.  Just before going into their senior year, besties Minnie and Callie are dreaming about the future.  Callie, the outgoing, exuberant one, has huge plans for her life, while Minnie has smaller ambitions.  But when Callie is killed in a car crash, it sends Minnie spinning.  Callie's presence gave her life meaning.  Who is she now Callie is gone?  Alongside Minnie's story is that of Callie's mother, a once-promising concert pianist who gave it all up to be a mother.  As she and Minnie deal with their individual grieving, their lives become increasing tangled which may or may not be complicating things as they try to reset their own lives.  I liked this one very much and it was a lovely continuation of the themes from the previous night's film, with its focus on mother-daughter relationships.

I have another three to see over the weekend... I'm tired and a little sick, but hopefully I'll make it through them all.

What are you celebrating this week?

Books I've Read: Lycanthropy and other Chronic Illnesses

I picked this one up at the library because of the title.  I mean, who wouldn't?  And it was a super fun read that I whipped through in just a few days.

Priya is at home again after getting sick while studying pre-med at Stanford.  The fallout from her Lyme disease leaves her weak and in constant pain and she feels like a failure for not being able to live out the dreams she worked so hard to achieve.  Yet every day is such a struggle to get through, she can't imagine going back to that life.

The only bright spots in her life are her online pen-pal Brigid and the support group they form with other chronic illness sufferers.  Here she can be honest about how she's feeling, how hard it is to get through each day and know the others will relate.

When Brigid suddenly vanishes from the group and won't respond to Priya's messages, she decides she needs to take matters into her own hands, steals the family car and drives to Brigid's house in the next state.

Where she finds something that might be a werewolf?  And the werewolf might be Brigid?

As their friendship deepens and Brigid's condition worsens, both young women have to face up to the fact this might just be their new normal.

I really enjoyed this book.  The idea that lycanthropy is a chronic illness kind of tickled me in the best possible way.  All the characters felt very real in this book and even at their most preposterous, the challenges they faced were handled with conviction and flare.

But the best thing about it is the depiction of friendship and the lengths people will go to for their friends.  Even if it does cause friction within your own family.  And then, to boot, it's also great fun.  Especially when photographers catch sight of Brigid in her werewolf form and internet rumors start to spiral...

So I'd recommend this one.  It's fun and silly, but has a lot to say about chronic illnesses and the way people suffering from them can be treated.  Especially when it's not something easily visible to others.

But don't just listen to me.  Here's the blurb:

Teen Wolf meets Emergency Contact in this sharply observed, hilarious, and heartwarming debut young adult novel about friendship, chronic illness, and . . . werewolves.

Priya worked hard to pursue her premed dreams at Stanford, but the fallout from undiagnosed Lyme disease sends her back to her childhood home in New Jersey during her sophomore year—and leaves her wondering if she’ll ever be able to return to the way things were.

Thankfully she has her online pen pal, Brigid, and the rest of the members of “oof ouch my bones,” a virtual support group that meets on Discord to crack jokes and vent about their own chronic illnesses.

When Brigid suddenly goes offline, Priya does something out of character: she steals the family car and drives to Pennsylvania to check on Brigid. Priya isn’t sure what to expect, but it isn’t the horrifying creature that's shut in the basement.

With Brigid nowhere to be found, Priya begins to puzzle together an impossible but obvious truth: the creature might be a werewolf—and the werewolf might be Brigid. As Brigid's unique condition worsens, their friendship will be deepened and challenged in unexpected ways, forcing them to reckon with their own ideas of what it means to be normal.

Weekly Goals 10-8-26

 The next three or four weeks are going to be the busiest weeks of the year, I think,  in terms of my day jobs, so I'm not setting any goals outside of that.  We have until around the 24th of August to get the new systems up and running so the season launch on 4 September goes smoothly.

I'm teaching five classes at the gym this week on top of that, plus the film festival starts and I have tickets to several films.

I also have concerts Friday and Saturday night and my son's band are playing their last ever gig on Wednesday.

To say I'm overcommitted would be something of an understatement.

So, this week I'm not setting any goals for myself in terms of writing.  I've told my critique group I'm out for three or four weeks and I'm going to use whatever spare time I might be able to find to rest and read and do things that don't require much brain power so I can try and make it through this crazy period.

What are your goals this week?

Celebrate the Small Things 7-8-26

 

It's the end of the week so it's time to celebrate the small things!

So what am I celebrating this week?

It's the weekend!

It has been a crazy week and next weeks is going to get even crazier, so I'm going to try and do as much nothing as possible this weekend.  I do have some gym work to do on Sunday, and that involves learning a new class, but other than that, I'm not planning to do much work this weekend. 

My big project at work is going well, but time is very quickly ticking away and we're getting very close to the wire with finishing it.  We have less than a month until the new season launches and less than three weeks to get all the new systems to support it up and running.

Ack!

So, I haven't had any time to write or to really think about writing.

And the film festival starts this week.  I suspect I may have been a little ambitious in buying tickets to thirteen films when we have five concerts in that time too, plus all these new systems to get up and running.

But we'll see.  I'll do my best to do it all.  I can sleep in October.

What are you celebrating this week?

IWSG - August 2026

 It's the first Wednesday of the month so it's time for the Insecure Writers Support Group!

Thanks so much to  Shannon Lawrence, Diedre Knight, Liza, and Pat Garcia for being our hosts this month.

This month's question is a good one!

As a writer/author what is something you regret? Or something that you wish you'd done differently in your writing process?

I'm not sure if it's really regret, but if I knew what I now know, I would have done things quite differently in terms of my writing career.  I'm not unhappy with what I've achieved, but I definitely think I made a few mistakes along the way.

My biggest mistake, I think, was not trying to get a new agent as soon as possible after mine left the business.  The world, and most particularly the publishing world has changed immensely in the 10 years or so since then, and my experience trying to get an agent now is very different to the one I would have had if I'd just jumped right back into the trenches then.

But, at the time I was kind of traumatized by how everything had happened and I didn't feel like I wanted to go through it all again.  So, I accepted a small press offer and went ahead with publishing my books that way.  And don't get me wrong.  I'm proud of those books.  I'm thrilled with the emails I get from readers whose lives I touched, and the reviews have been almost universally great for all of them.  I just can't help thinking they'd be better books and would sell better if they'd had the benefit of a bigger publisher.

Not to mention, I might have a better chance at getting an agent now if I didn't have six well-reviewed books with a very low sales figures (except one: my first published novel, An Unstill Life, has been an Amazon bestseller twice) to my resume.

But, it's too late to change anything now.  I made the decisions I made at the time for a reason, so now I have to live with them.  It doesn't stop me wondering where I might be now if I had taken a different path back then...  

What is something you regret about your author-life decisions?

Weekly Goals 3-8-26

 The next month or so are going to be crazy busy for me at work, so I'm trying not to set myself a bunch of unrealistic goals around anything else.  Between my main job and teaching 6 classes this week, I'll be lucky if I find the time to even do any critiques for my writing group.  Luckily I finished my beta read yesterday, so that's one more thing off my plate.

I will try to write a few pieces of flash fiction just to keep that part of me satisfied, but I'm not hopeful about getting to one every day.  Last week I managed one.

I figure things will settle down a little innate September or October and I'll be able to start thinking about writing again then.

What are your goals this week?