Kimberly Hirsh

Lars-Christian noted that month notes work better than week notes for him due to the cadence of his life, and I think this will be true for me, too. So! I’ll be trying month notes for a little while and reevaluate if they start to feel off.

Early this month was rough, as both M and W had pinkeye. I had respiratory symptoms and felt quite miserable but managed to dodge the accompanying eye infection.

We booked a beach condo for a week vacation this year. For almost 20 years, W and I, and then M when he came along, have spent a week at a beach condo owned by W’s bonus mom Cindy and her sister. When Cindy died, W’s dad inherited her part of the condo. But he hates the beach and Cindy’s sister didn’t go down there much, and the property taxes, bills, and maintenance for the space were very expensive. So they decided to sell it, which meant we needed to find a new place to stay for our beach week.

We had hoped to go with another family and get a big house but that didn’t work out, so we found a condo at a beach a little closer to our home than the old one and have a contract to rent it for a week in June. We’ll see how it goes.

I started doing Leonie Dawson’s 40 Days to a Finished Book course. (If you buy the course through that link, I will receive a commission.) I’m writing a little booklet about how to be a better player in tabletop role-playing games, because there’s a lot of advice out there for game masters but only a little for players. I set a target of 10,000 words total. This means I have a very manageable daily goal of 250 words, which so far I’ve been able to for 20 days. When I hit 5000 words early, I worried I didn’t have anything left to say on the topic. I decided to just freewrite the other 5000 words and try to make it all make sense when I’m done. I can write 250 words in 5 or 10 minutes, so this is a really doable practice that I hope to keep up even after the 40 days are over.

On Valentine’s Day, W and I had an early dinner and coffee together. We began answering The Good Trade’s 99 Questions To Ask Your Partner To Get To Know Them Better. The questions are clearly written for young couples who haven’t been together very long, not couples who have been married for 15 years and together for 25. But they were still fun to answer.

One of M’s school mates from kindergarten and preschool had a maritime-themed birthday party at a local park and that was super fun as well as being an opportunity to catch up with some of those kids’ parents whom I haven’t seen in a while.

W and I saw Fat Ham at Playmakers Repertory Company. It was super fun with a stellar cast. We also went to Clue the Movie at the [Retro Film Series[(https://carolinatheatre.org/series/retro-film-series/), which is always a delight.

I had an eye exam. I learned that my eyesight has only gotten a little worse over the past year. I ordered new glasses that look almost exactly like my old ones except they have a narrower frame width so they should fit better, plus some fun prescription sunglasses.

I played Super Mario Bros 1 through 3 and started Ocarina of Time. W and I have been watching Home Economics and it’s a delight, but it makes me wonder how much TV writers know about how publishing works. I’ve been tearing my way through the Immortals After Dark series at a pace of two books a week and listening to the accompanying episodes of the [Fated Mates[(https://fatedmates.net/) podcast, plus hanging out in the Fated Mates Discord a lot.

I’m almost done organizing our pantry. I’m planning to eat down what we’ve got in the pantry, fridge, and freezer, and then try eating from the Real Easy Weekdays plan.

I think that’s about it for me for February. What have you been up to?

🔖 Read The Memex Method

Virtually every sentence that contains the word “brand” is [BS]…

Cory Doctorow on the value of a blog as a commonplace book.

🎮 Okay people of the Internet. I’m about to start Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth. See you in a couple hundred hours.

Finished reading: You’re Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop by John Scalzi 📚

This was a re-read. A bit of a time capsule from the web of 2005-2007, a web I greatly miss.

🎮 Finished Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 2, and Super Mario Bros. 3. Classics all, only accessible for me due to the rewind feature in Nintendo Switch Online’s NES software. With my limited hand-eye coordination, age, and time constraints, this is the only way I was ever going to play these.

“Books always heal the hands they come through.” Leonie Dawson, 40 Days to a Finished Book (If you purchase the course through this link, I will receive a commission.)

📝 I wanted to respond to Lars-Christian’s post asking what the point of daily writing is. Here’s what I said:

I wanted to let you know you’re not alone. With big creative projects, so many of us hit a point where it stops feeling worthwhile.

As Austin Kleon says, problems of output are problems of input. If you feel stuck, maybe reading something new would help.

🔖 Read What Is Mental Load? (And Why Is It Important?) by Randi Donahue (The Good Trade).

It feels a propos that I read this sitting in the dentist’s office a couple yards away from where my kid is getting sealant on his 6-year molars.

I’m lucky to have a partner who carries a lot of this load, but list-making and note-taking also help me immensely.

📝 I’m doing a writing project currently and I set a goal of 10000 words but ran out of planned stuff to say at 5000, so today I added this to the document:

Because I’m not sure how to get the next 5000 words of this book out of me and because I don’t want to read anything I’ve written until I hit my 10000 words, my goal now is to just freewrite 250 words about [the project’s topic] every day. Then maybe in that 5000 words there will be something that fits with the other 5000 words that I can use when all 10000 words are outside of me and I’ve stepped away for a bit and can come back with an editor’s eye.

Finished reading: Kiss of a Demon King by Kresley Cole 📚

Finished reading: Kiss of a Demon King by Kresley Cole 📚

Finished reading: Dark Desires After Dusk by Kresley Cole 📚

🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ I tore through this one so fast. I think it might partly be because the heroine is a PhD candidate.

Finished reading: Dark Needs at Night’s Edge by Kresley Cole 📚

My favorite Immortals After Dark book so far. A burlesque dancer becomes a ballerina, ends up a ghost, and falls in love with a vampire who is trapped in the New Orleans Gothic manor that she haunts. 🌹👻🩰

Finished reading: Wicked Deeds on a Winter’s Night by Kresley Cole 📚

🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ as always. Werewolves continue to not be my thing but I love witches.

Finished reading: No Rest For The Wicked by Kresley Cole 📚

Listen, all these Immortals After Dark books are 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️, okay? That’s just what’s up. I like this one better than the one that came before it, definitely more my vibe.

Hello, Internet! I hope you have a great day today.

📚🗨️ “This union was supposed to be for eternity—it followed that their courtship would be extended.” - Kresley Cole, No Rest for the Wicked

See, that’s why W and I were together for 10 years before we got engaged. ("‘Til death do us part" is for quitters.)

I added “Citizen of Romancelandia.” to my bio everywhere.

📚 This is your reminder that The Frame-Up by Gwenda Bond is out today!

I’m currently doing Leonie Dawson’s 40 Days to a Finished Book ecourse and I love this that she said:

It’s a collage of words.

You don’t have to start at the beginning and write until you get to the end.

(If you use the link above to buy the course, I may get a commission.)

I’m taking a deliberate break from all things academia and academia-adjacent.

I spent the past 2 years working on a big project as the key academic personnel on the project. It’s not done; when my contract ended, I had to hand it off to my colleagues. (We couldn’t extend the contract for administrative reasons.)

I’m sitting on a couple of freelance academic opportunities but as I think about pursuing them, I know it’s just not time yet. I can feel internal resistance and it’s telling me that after being in an academic headspace for more than 8 years, it’s time to do something different for a while.

Do I plan to come back to these freelance gigs and be available for academic contract work in the future? Yes. Do I plan to return to FanLIS and fan studies more broadly after I fill my well? Absolutely! But right now, that’s not where I’m at.

It’s kind of like taking a sabbatical.

Finished reading: Two New Years by Richard Ho 📚

Winner of the 2024 Sydney Taylor book award.

Finished reading: The Truth About Dragons by Julie Leung 📚

A 2024 Caldecott Honor winner.

Finished reading: A Hunger Like No other by Kresley Cole 📚

Incredibly high spice level, all the chili pepper emoji 🌶️! A Valkyrie/vampire hybrid and a werewolf (there wolf) fall in love. I’m reading this as I listen along to the first season of Fated Mates.

Finished reading: Nacho y Lolita/Nacho and Lolita by Pam Muñoz Ryan 📚

Pam Muñoz Ryan won the Children’s Literature Legacy Award. This was where NoveList Plus recommended starting with her work.