December 2021 Dispatch
Hey all! I hope everyone who went to MFF had a fun time (and a safe time!) there. We had made tentative plans to go but there’s too much other travel going on this year, and regretfully we decided to postpone our Midwest FurFun until 2022, we hope.
However, FC is just down the road and we will be attending there, and I’m inching toward making my TFF plans definite. Not sure what other conventions I’ll be hitting in 2022 between TFF and (maybe) MFF. BLFC seems most likely but nothing is definite yet.
If you did NaNoWriMo last month, I hope you now have 50,000 (or so) words of a shiny new draft to be proud of! Whatever number you got to, you should be proud of; that’s all work toward a new book. Now finish it up during the holidays and then set it aside for NaNoEdMo (I think that’s March).
Me, I didn’t work much on first drafting. I’ve got a completed novel draft (well, two) that I’m working on editing, and a new project (the fantasy epic with fuzzy protagonist) that I’m trying to outline so I can get a better handle on it. That’s where I’m splitting my time these days, along with the Patreon stories.
Squeak Thief is rushing toward its conclusion, while Ty the Knot is mired in the uncomfortable middle—they are 68K and 61K respectively, so you can tell they’re going to be very different length books when done. Squeak Thief probably will land in the mid-70s while I’d be surprised if Ty the Knot came in under 120, around the length of the OOP books. It’s a multiple-POV book so that figures.
In December I’ll be working on new stuff, hoping that in January (after FC) I can get to editing Return From Divalia so we can have that ready for the summer cons. And that’s what I’ve been doing!
I’ve mostly been watching Taskmaster and re-watching The Haunting of Hill House (after reading the book finally) so I don’t have much to recommend streaming-wise. But we did watch some movies!
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings was fun. The incorporation of martial arts movie fights into the Marvel universe worked well, I thought (being not at all an expert on these things), and I thought the lead actors had good charisma to carry me through the film. The end battle was heavy on the CG but that doesn’t bother me as much as it seems to bother some other people.
Booksmart was great. It feels like it was pitched as “Superbad but with smart girls” but it’s better than that. The leads are terrific and all the side characters feel like real people. I don’t remember the end of my high school being quite as chaotic as this, but then, I only got invited to a couple parties and they weren’t the cool ones, as I recall.
Jungle Cruise was not a good movie and for stretches it wasn’t even a fun one. It seems to try to merge Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl with the first Brendan Fraser Mummy movie and falls well short of both. Dwayne Johnson is a fun guy and I’ll watch him in pretty much anything—for now—but he can’t keep this movie afloat all by himself, and he has more chemistry with gay brother Jack Whitehall than he does with Emily Blunt. I mean, that’s fine for my purposes but I don’t think it was the intention of the movie. Anyway, there’s some fun stunts and Jesse Plemons is a pretty good villain (Paul Giamatti feels wasted) so if you have Disney+ and a couple hours to spare, sure, why not.
Also we watched Source Code, which two of us hadn’t seen before and enjoyed a lot! Jake Gyllenhaal is a good lead and Michele Monaghan and Vera Farmiga are also excellent in it. Fun plot, good action, twisty bits.
Happy all the holidays everyone! Have a safe and joyful holiday season!