Growing up in Southern California, I had always imagined September on the East Coast to be the Most Perfect Fall Month,™ with crisp days and chilly nights, the leaves turning the moment the calendar turns to September 1st. Despite having lived on the East Coast for over half my life now, I’ve never quite lost that belief that fall begins as soon as August ends.
The humidity broke in late August, but it has only turned cool in the past week or so. The air conditioning has not been needed for a while, and morning pee breaks with the boys now require the addition of a plush robe to keep warm. We’re only a few weeks away from fuzzy house socks, I can feel it.
I can’t wait.
🧩 lexical gap: zoilus
I love this word because I know quite a few zoiluses (zoili?) but also because it sounds like an old-fashioned minced oath. Zounds! Zoinks! Zoilus!
🎙 podcast updates
So I’ve started uploading my audio essays to YouTube if y’all want to give me a listen over there. I’ve technically had my YouTube channel since 2006, but mostly for personal videos. I have some vlogs and stuff planned for the future, especially for when I travel to Korea, but as with everything else, I’m mostly just parking my social media here while I can.
Anyway, I’ve uploaded the first two podcast episode with subtitles. Listen on YouTube below!
Episode 01: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
Episode 02: Bad faith
🌞 the morning realms dispatch
I had resisted doing reels on Instagram, partially because I’m an Old Man Yelling at Clouds, but also because I suspected my ADHD hyperfixation tendencies would derail me into learning all of Adobe Premiere Pro. I was, in fact, correct. However! Going forward, I will be posting some video content about Guardians of Dawn: Zhara there, starting with a short film about inspiration. Go check it out!
🫰🏻 for my 절친
first look at Zhara’s cover on the private Discord!
A more detailed and honest look at the cover design process for Zhara’s cover
If you want behind-the-scenes content for all my books, as well as access to a Discord server and an entire unpublished novel, why not consider becoming a paying subscriber?
📖 reading
Gild by Raven Kennedy. BookTok doesn’t frequently show up on my FYP, but to be honest, I carefully curate my algorithm to avoid it. I have…um…Thoughts™ about BookTok that I won’t elaborate here (but might in a future essay), but I was curious about the indie published books getting a lot of traction there. I picked Gild at random and, yes, I was correct, it is not for me. So I suppose I shall continue to rigorously curate BookTok off my feed.
The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin. After The Inheritance Games, I was in the mood for another mystery, so I returned to an old favorite (and it’s still unsurpassed, if I’m completely honest). For a book first published in 1978, it has aged surprisingly well with regards to racism and ableism. Not that it’s aged PERFECTLY, but honestly, it’s sort of ahead of many books written today. But of all the aspects of this book that has aged the least well is its…well…its love of American capitalism. Yikes.
The Ink Black Heart by Robert Galbraith. Sigh. So my relationship to JKR’s creative work is…complicated, just like my relationship to Orson Scott Card’s writing. I’m not even talking about Harry Potter, which was, in fact, formative for me, since I read the first book when I was 11 and the last book was published when I was 22. I’m talking about the books she writes as Robert Galbraith which are (well…were) quality mysteries. I’ve loved them all, although they’ve started to declined in quality after Career of Evil, which does coincide with the timing of JKR coming out as a TERF. Does correlation equal causation? Who knows.
📺 watching
Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Life of Brian. There are definitely aspects of these that have not aged well AT ALL, but also…they tickle my absurdist and surreal funny bones in ways a lot of other comedies do not. I do love sketch comedy, but American and British sketch comedies have different sensibilities, and I tend to gravitate more toward shows like Monty Python or That Mitchell and Webb Look than SNL.
泣きたい私は猫をかぶる (A Whisker Away). I am in the mood for coming-of-age romantic anime and this seemed to fit the bill. It was charming, but it’s like getting cotton candy when you really wanted was a German chocolate cake. Basically what I really want is more movies in the vein of 君の名は (Your Name), but I’m having some difficulty finding them. If you have any recs, please let me know!
작은 아씨들 (Little Women). This is more AU gothic crime/thriller fanfic (sort of) than an adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s novel, and…it works???? For me???? Does it make sense? Not really. Do the characters act completely oblivious and/or naive when the plot requires them to? Yes. Do I care? Not a bit. All I’m saying is that I binged the first three episodes available and now I’m mad I have to wait week by week.
RRR. This movie is WILD. I’ve seen the director’s previous movies, Baahubali and Baahubali 2 (which I highly recommend), but RRR is something else. It is essentially fanfic, a sort of “what if” two revolutionary heroes in the Indian fight for independence met and became bros. It is, and I cannot stress this enough, intensely yet wholesomely homoromantic, in the way any film glorifying a fantasy version of masculinity can be. I know earnest expressions of affection between men are far less stigmatized outside the United States (like in Korea, for example), but honestly, would 100% read this RPS on AO3. The villains of RRR are not complex—white people gonna white—but the story’s sincerity and WTF-level visuals deliver SO MUCH CHARM you can’t help but be riled up with BIG emotions. I have seen some criticism of the film as being a piece of Hindu nationalist propaganda, but as I am not Indian, I cannot speak to this aspect of the work. (Although, as you can see in the image, which is an actual still from the film, it doesn’t hide the fact that this is a very PATRIOTIC FANTASY.)
Andor. I love Diego Luna but…I do not love this. Would it kill Star Wars to be…fun…again…? Also, while I understand that Andor is a prequel about how one character joins the Rebellion, there is absolutely no forward thrust. Everything that has happened to Cassian in the first three episodes released so far has happened to him, instead of Cassian driving the story. And I don’t necessarily mind that sort of storytelling, but back when we used to make movies, this setup would take 30 minutes, instead of 3 episodes. Sigh.
🎧 listening
Every book I’ve written seems to have one (1) album I listen to ad nauseam during the drafting phase. For Wintersong, it was Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi The Four Seasons. For Shadowsong, it was the season 1 Westworld soundtrack by Ramin Djawadi. For Zhara, it was the score for the video game Journey by Austin Wintory. For book 2, it appears to be the soundtrack of 君の名は (Your Name) by RADWIMPS.
Honestly there is no rhyme or reason to why these specific albums stick. Sometimes there is a connection between books and the sound (Wintersong and Vivaldi, Zhara and the East Asian influence of Journey’s score), but sometimes there’s no connection whatsoever. The only commonality is that they all put in the right headspace to write. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, amirite?
That’s all for this month! In October I need to hunker down and get this draft of Guardians of Dawn 2 done (or as done as possible) because I’m doing quite a bit of travel through the end of the year. Where did 2022 go? Where????
사랑해,
JJ