October is my favorite month because there is a basic white girl inside me somewhere, apparently. I fall more on the spooky season side than the Christian girl autumn side, but my house does smell like pumpkin spice for as long as Dunkin Donuts sells it.
It’s also Bear and my anniversary month. <3 17 years and counting!
Most of October was lost to a social media experiment of mine, wherein I decided to put some effort into making reels to see if that does, well, anything. Instagram is...a lot of work, especially as I’ve been trying to get the algorithm to recognize me as an author and actually show my posts to my followers. Apparently this means reels.
I’m not in the thick of promotion season for Zhara yet, so I’m in the try-anything-to-see-what-sticks phase, but also the try-anything-to-see-what-I-actually-enjoy-making phase. And to be honest, I don’t actually mind doing reels, but it took a while to switch my brain into video from photo. Of course, being ADHD, I had to lose about 2 weeks of my life learning Adobe Premiere Pro so I can edit them to fit my over aesthetic because I am nothing if not That Person.
But I think this is good practice for me, mostly because I have some travel planned coming up, and I sure as fuck going to mine the shit out of it for content. Apologies in advance.
🧩 lexical gap: muggeseggele
Muggeseggele (also Muckenseckel) literally means refers to a housefly’s scrotum, and is a German idiom referring to a very small length of time. I love these sorts of nonspecific measurements—when a recipe calls for a “titch” of a certain spice, a “tad” of this, or a "smidge” of that. In Korean, my grandmother once told me I needed to apply no more than a “nostril-sized” (콧구멍, literally nose-hole) amount of eye cream to my face. I feel like other languages are so much more evocative than English when it comes to imagery, although I think English does take the cake when it comes to how evocative it can sound.
✍🏻 writing updates
Had my first in-person event in three years with the incredible Nita Tyndall! We celebrated the launch of their latest book, Nothing Sung and Nothing Spoken, at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill. Thank you to everyone who came and apologies to everyone to came for subjecting them to our language nerdery.
If you want behind-the-scenes content for all my books, as well as access to a Discord server and an entire unpublished novel, why not consider becoming a paying subscriber?
I haven’t written nearly as much on Guardians 2 this month, and that is mostly due to my social media experiment and...
🥀 tales from the underground
...the fact that I spent the month of October celebrating my debut novel on Instagram. I hosted a readalong for Wintersong, and many people have asked for a readalong for Shadowsong as well. Unfortunately I won’t have much time for the rest of the year due to travel and the holidays (and drafting ㅠㅠ) to host one for my second book, but definitely in the early part of 2023. Maybe in time for its fifth anniversary?
Anyway, I’ve written a retrospective on Wintersong, if that interests you.
🎧 listening
달려라 방탄 (RUN BTS) HAS CHOREOGRAPHY. I REPEAT, 달려라 방탄 (RUN BTS) HAS CHOREOGRAPHY.
Sorry, I know about less than 1% of my subscribers are interested in BTS, but I had to get this off my chest. As Dr. Lester from Being John Malkovich says, “I've been very lonely in my isolated tower of indecipherable speech.”
ANYWAY. Moving on!
Yet to Come in Busan. The boys of 방탄소년단 uploaded the playlist for their concert in Busan, including the comments they made during the concert itself. Excuse me while I bawl my eyes out. That transition between “Epilogue: Young Forever” to “For Youth” will destroy me forever. It really does feel like the end of a chapter now. ㅠㅠ
Midnights by Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift is sort of the opposite of BTS in that I always know what to expect from her. If every album or performance from BTS is a surprise, then Miss Taylor’s entire discography is comfortingly familiar. While I may get variations on a theme, the theme nevertheless remains the same. This is all to say that I enjoyed Midnights. Maybe not as much as some of her previous albums, but her only flop has been reputation, and that was really only a flop in concept, not really content.
The Car by The Arctic Monkeys. I am not going to lie; the first time I heard this, I wondered whether or not David Bowie had some secret album Alex Turner managed to dig up and release as his own. Honestly, I’m a little shocked how little he sounds like himself, or rather the Northern English boy I first heard in a tiny pub in London in 2006 for £15. Where did that Sheffield accent go? Of course, that was an entire lifetime ago and Alex Turner has developed into a really impressive artist that’s miles away from the protagonist of “Bigger Boys and Stolen Sweethearts.” Admittedly, I feel more emotionally distanced from anything the Arctic Monkeys have put out in recent years than they did in their earliest, but I can’t fault the musicianship.
📺 watching
Hocus Pocus 2. Was this good? No? Did it matter? Also no? This sequel was just a tad too self-aware to hit the heights of camp greatness achieved by the original, although Bette Middler, Kathy Najimy, and Sarah Jessica Parker all donned their old cloaks with zeal and aplomb. I’m a little iffy on the “redemption” of the Sanderson Sisters through love and the slight girlbossification of Winifred in the beginning. Why can’t evil just be evil? Why can’t evil just delight in being evil? It’s more fun that way! Nevertheless, I did have a good time, which is really all I could ask for in a media landscape littered with drab, dreary, and dour narratives (I’m looking at you, Andor).
I finished 작은 아씨들 (Little Women) and it was...well, there is a word in Korean, 막장 (makjang), which means taking things to the extreme. I’ve only ever heard the term applied to media, and specifically to dramas, where the meaning becomes something like melodramatic and nonsensical. Think of the most stereotypical American soap opera twist — secret baby, evil twin, yadda, yadda — and they would all fall under 막장. In the case of 작은 아씨들, it wasn’t that it was filled with secret babies so much as...in order for the plot to work, not a single brain cell could be had amongst the characters. The sheer naïveté and obliviousness of the protagonists made me want to tear my hair out, not to mention this drama relies on “shocking” twists that are explained in flashback. And yet...here I am, having finished the entire thing. I didn’t really care by the end, which is a pity, because it started out with so much potential. At least it was only 12 episodes long.
I’ve also started The Vow: Season 2 because I, like so many other middle-aged white women, am super into lurid cult documentaries.
The French Dispatch. Yes, I like Wes Anderson movies. I am that sort of person. The thing I enjoy about Wes Anderson’s movies is the surety and decisiveness of his artistic vision. Here is someone who knows what he wants to say and moreover, knows how he wants to say it. I aspire to that level of artistic integrity to be honest.
The Truman Show. So...the movie I have seen the most in the theaters is The Truman Show. I’m not sure why. I was 12 when this movie came out and I remember just being...moved. Touched. I can’t really explain what the feeling is, except to quote The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman:
[Lyra] felt as if she had been handed the key to a great house she hadn’t known was there, a house that was somehow inside her, and as she turned the key, she felt other doors opening deep in the darkness, and lights coming on.
At its core, The Truman Show is the story about free will, and about the triumph of desire over fear. Truman wants nothing more than to see, to know, to experience the world outside what he’s known his entire life despite circumstances conspiring to keep him trapped. And he’s willing to quite literally risk it all to realize his dream. The end gets me every time — not the moment he bids farewell to his false life — but the moment he pounds his hands against the walls of his prison, understanding for the first time that he is a prisoner. Ugh. UGH. The feels, man. I have so many.
That’s all for this month! In November I will be traveling back to Korea for the first time since 2019 with my mother and little brother. I intend to do a bit of personal photography, filmmaking, and maybe even write a few meditations here and there about diaspora feelings. Perhaps I’ll even share them with you while I’m there.
하트,