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.
🍿📺🎄 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.
Happy Hanukkah from this honorary M.O.T., whose 41% Jewishness is all on her dad’s side. 🕎
Today’s stay poor slowly scheme: open a romance-only bookstore. 📚
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.
📝 Planning Writing Goals with Kate McKean
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:
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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.
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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.
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Have fun. If I’m doing 1 & 2 and it’s not fun, I’ll figure out how to make it fun.
📚 Today’s library haul. Catching up on Holigays22 and some other holiday reads, plus a YA biography of my hero Sarah Bernhardt - quand même!
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.
It reveals something about my character that I’m really psyched about being on someone’s dissertation committee.
🔖 Read Bring back the blog by Alan Jacobs.
Hear, hear.