August 2022 Dispatch
Hey, it’s August already. How’d that happen?
July was busy. We went back to San Diego ComicCon for the first time in three years, and found it much the same. There were some great costumes, some really interesting people to talk to, lots of amazing creativity on display, and many, many people stopping right in the middle of a walkway to look at something or check their phone. SDCC had an indoor policy to require masks, which most people followed except for the vendors at the booth right across from us, so we made fun of them all show.
I got a draft of Price of Thorns done, out to final beta read, and a cover will be done enough to reveal this month or next, whenever the publisher (Argyll) wants to do it. They will likely be sending it out for pre-publication reviews, so it’ll be officially released sometime in the spring (maybe TFF), but they miiiiiight have pre-release copies available at MFF and FC. We will see how things go. I’m pleased with this draft and excited to have it out. Also, I’m getting a map for the world for the first time in any of my books (discounting the map I made for the Forester Universe). It looks so good!
I’ll be spending the first week of August remotely participating in a writing retreat, and the rest of the month maybe starting work on the Unfinished Business sequel. That’s the plan, anyway!
Speaking of…Unfinished Business is out! If you haven’t pre-ordered it, you can straight-up order the e-book at the publisher today, and print + e-book everywhere else tomorrow. Get in on the ground floor of this new queer werewolf urban fantasy series.
Return From Divalia is on track for a release at MFF, as of now; The Price of Thorns I discussed above.
Audiobooks: The War and the Fox is out on all audiobook sites now. Still trying to find time to review the Giles audiobook so I can get that out, and I have an agreement in principle to do an audiobook for Unfinished Business, but that hasn’t gotten started yet. Ty Game, Titles, and the rest of the Love Match series are in Savrin’s paws, waiting on them to have time to finish up.
Streaming: Kit and I have been watching “Rutherford Falls,” the latest from “The Good Place”/ “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” / “Parks and Recreation” creator Michael Schur. “Rutherford Falls” starts a little slow, but the second half of the first season is better than the first half, and the second season is (so far) better than the first. They have a Native American co-creator and several Native writers on staff, and the show centers the Native experience in a way that only “Reservation Dogs” has done in my recent experience. They’re very different shows, both pretty great. “Rutherford Falls” nominally stars Egg “Ed” Helms (that’s an Aunty Donna joke) as the scion of a colonizing family coming to terms with his legacy and his family’s history, and his best friend, played by Jana Schmieding, as a Native woman dealing with her own relationship to her community and her history. I’m sorry I keep recommending Peacock shows to y’all but really, this one is worth watching.
We also watched Jurassic World: Dominion, which sure was a movie with dinosaurs, or maybe it was like three different movies with dinosaurs. At one point I thought that the Jurassic World cast were acting in a “Mission: Impossible” spinoff they’d all written themselves. They go to exotic locations for no reason, and only two-thirds of the way through the movie does it revert to the familiar Jurassic Movie plot of “we have to get across a dinosaur-filled area.” It was good to see the Jurassic Park actors back, I guess. I didn’t have an attachment to the original movies, so ymmv if you were one of the Jurassic Park generation, but at the very least this is a fun movie to watch dinosaurs run around in if you can turn your brain off.
We’re into season three of “Infinity Train,” which started out as a cute show about a girl and a talking corgi and is now a slightly surreal meditation on ethics? Anyway it’s very good and somewhat queer and is in eleven-minute chunks so it’s easily watched in short spans of time.
Oh! We enjoyed “Ms. Marvel” a lot. Kit and I had learned about the Partition before our trip to India eight years ago, so it wasn’t new to us, but I wasn’t surprised to hear that a lot of people didn’t know about it. I thought they handled that very well, and I loved the cast, especially Iman Vellani. She’s fantastic and I can’t wait for “The Marvels.”
How are y’all going to wind down your summer? Hope everyone is staying nice and cool!