Featured Image: “Magical Girl Uraraka” by Hannahsrrex.
I haven’t posted for two weeks, but I have reasons or at least excuses.
Partly, the more I get settled into being a published author with a book out and two on the way, the less I have time (or interest, even) in watching and reading other stuff to review. This is perhaps inevitable.
Also, my computer is on the fritz. I’ve long known that this little laptop, though it has been a good machine all things considered, is well past its sell-by date. Recently, I managed to fry its keyboard with spilled beer (yes, really) so I can no longer type on it without a peripheral keyboard.
Also, it has stopped talking to my printer for reasons I’ve been unable to figure out. It’s possible the printer itself is to blame, but I doubt it, since all its diagnostics claim it’s working just fine and communicating with the network just fine. It’s just that the computer can’t see it. Turning off all the firewalls and antivirus software doesn’t appear to help, and beyond that I don’t know what to do about the problem. So I effectively have no printer, which will become a problem in the near future when I get back the edit requests for my last submission.
Basically, the computer needs replaced, and has for a few years, but I don’t really have the money for it, especially since I just had to replace my car, which I totaled in a flood. Part of my disappearance here came from the time it took to make sure everything was backed up.
Rag & Muffin Update
Speaking of which, as I’ve mentioned before, Rag & Muffin is finally out of the house. I expect it to need more editing before it’s ready to publish, but it is at least underway. It has taken an embarrassingly long time to get that novel completed and submitted, but I have reasons/excuses for that, too—it is my first novel, though I have two others preceding it to publication, and a first novel always takes the longest. It also took an enormous amount of rewriting and reshaping, partly for reasons I don’t say in public. Although its basic premise—”Fancy Nancy in Dungeonpunk India with guns and Kung fu”—is quite silly, it’s a very personal novel in some ways and was difficult to finish. The earliest drafts were quite lurid; they were torturous to write and I’m glad to have them behind me, but I’m comfortable with the content in this penultimate version I recently sent to my editor, even if it contains more than my usual number of cuss words.
Next Project
I am trying to peel myself away from meddling with Rag & Muffin while my editor has it and instead turn my attention to Son of Hel, which will require more research to do it justice.
I’ll do a whole post on this in the near future, but one thing I will say is that, as I look at the various interpretations and reworkings that have been done of Santa Claus legends, I’m surprised at how few modern interpretations—none of them that I know of—want to connect Santa Clause back to the original St. Nicholas. Since nobody else wants to do it, I figure that’s one contribution I can make. My plan is to conflate as many characters and concepts of Santa lore as possible, so the monk who was bishop of Myra has also become the reindeer-breeding gift-giver with an army of elves in his workshop, accompanied by several interesting companions ranging from a Russian snow maiden to a half-demon to a murderous butcher.
