Kimberly Hirsh

Finished reading: Eight Kisses by Mindy Klasky 📚

Eight Hanukkah romance stories. I read one each night. My favorites are the one with the Frisky Bean coffee shop and the one with empty nesters reconnecting.

Finished reading: In the Event of Love by Courtney Kae 📚

A lovely place-based friends-to-lovers second chance. As often happens, the third act breakup made me want to yell at the main character but the book had me happy-teary by the end.

📚🗨️

When people who don’t have fibromyalgia ask me how it feels, I tell them to imagine the last time they had a bad flu, then to picture going shopping, cooking, or exercising while feeling like that.

• Ginevra Liptan, The FibroManual

🔖📚 Read How To Get Started Reading Romance Novels by Stephanie Fallon (The Good Trade).

This is an excellent guide. Also? If you have unkind things to say about romance as a genre, please say them somewhere else. They’re not welcome in my replies.

Me: My heel hurts.

My doctor: Have you tried using that ointment I told to use for pain on it?

Me: I will now.

I just don’t feel like writing a year-in-review post, y’all. So I might not.

I have 3 one -month gift subscriptions to Jami Attenberg’s Craft Talk to give away. Let me know if you want one.

Me: I’m going to take a 20 minute nap (sets alarm)

Narrator: She took a 90 minute nap. She did not hear the alarm.

🍿 Watched Home Alone and Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.

My kid’s first time seeing both. Home Alone is, of course, a classic. Home Alone 2 isn’t a revelation but is super fun.

🍿📺🎄 Watched The Christmas Train.

Based on a David Baldacci novel & bringing a bit of star power with Dermot Mulroney, Joan Cusack, and Danny Glover. A journalist runs into an old flame on The Christmas Train. Cute stuff. Almost too high-quality actually, for the vibes I’m looking for.

Book Character, Age 25: Seeing her has me feeling seventeen again.

Me, Age 42: Please. You’re only 25. You’re barely not 17.

2006 Me, Age 25: (shaking her fist at 2023 Me) Stop being so ageist.

🕎🖖🏻 I would like to thank s-h-a-s-e on Tumblr for this Hanukkah gift of Sarek, Amanda, and Spock celebrating.

In the words of Adam Sandler:

You don’t need Deck the Halls or Jingle Bells Rock ‘cuz you can spin the dreidel with Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock—both Jewish!

I was using Bing to play with ChatGPT-4 and I asked it who I am. It returned what is perhaps the most truthful answer.

Today’s stay poor slowly scheme: open a romance-only bookstore. 📚

Happy Hanukkah from this honorary M.O.T., whose 41% Jewishness is all on her dad’s side. 🕎

Finished reading: Written in the Stars by Alexandria Bellefleur 📚

The first holiday rom-com of a month where I hope to read many. Elle is an astrologer who dreams of a big love. Darcy is an actuary who’s terrified of having one. This book’s heat level is sensual, a couple explicit scenes. A lovely book but I wish the third act break-up had been resolved more quickly so I could’ve had more joyous reunion time.

📚 Today’s library haul. Catching up on Holigays22 and some other holiday reads, plus a YA biography of my hero Sarah Bernhardt - quand même!

Kate McKean’s Agents and Books newsletter yesterday includes a flowchart to help you plan writing goals for next year.

I’m in the “I need a new idea” bubble, or rather, I have lots of ideas fragments but I’m not psyched enough to write any of them yet so I want to hoard even more ideas. So my goals are to:

1. Read more. Sure, I’ve read 41 books this year but I know I can read more. Let’s have a loose, gentle goal of 50, counting audiobooks, comics, kids’ books, everything.

2. Journal and blog. I’m going to do at least some of Esmé Weijun Wang’s Rawness of Remembering: Restorative Journaling Through Difficult Times. I’ve also got Austin Kleon’s The Steal Like an Artist Journal and Leigh Bardugo’s The Severed Moon. So I’ll look to those for help, and of course I’ll blog, too. I’m not setting a specific blogging goal but let’s say I’m shooting for some form of long-form journaling at least once a week.

3. Have fun. If I’m doing 1 & 2 and it’s not fun, I’ll figure out how to make it fun.

🔖 Read Bring back the blog by Alan Jacobs.

Hear, hear.

It reveals something about my character that I’m really psyched about being on someone’s dissertation committee.

Fun with migraines: in the past year or so I’ve started having vertigo in the prodrome stage, tilting involuntarily when I walk. In the past couple of months I’ve developed olfactory hallucinations. I don’t like migraines, y’all.

🔖 Read True/useful by Seth Godin.

Seth shares a handy matrix for helping us stay resilient and cultivate belief, shaking off cynicism and avoiding traps.

🔖💻 Read The Hacker Manifesto.

the beauty of the baud

I love this turn of phrase.

We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn’t run by profiteering gluttons…

This was published in 1986.

🔖💻 Read The Indie Web Manifesto.

Before the IndieWeb, there was the Indie Web. This was published in 1997.

🍿 Watched Airplane!.

Super fun. I can’t begin to imagine how delightful it must have been for the people who saw it when it was first released.