December Books: 4/4 (Edited Out and It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Mischief)
Howdy, squiders. We’re a week out from Christmas, so that’s a thing. I could probably use a few more stocking stuffers, but we’ve reached a point where anything shipped won’t get here in time, and I hate braving real retail spaces in December in general, so it may be what it is.
I’m most of the way through my fifth mystery of the month, and I’m flagging a bit. To be fair, this book is annoying me content-wise (It’s A Wonderful Christmas Crime, and the author has taken things in a direction, character-wise, that I do not like and if she doesn’t change things by the end of the book, I may be done with the series. Alas, and after I talked it up last week too). But in theory we’re also going to get Five Golden Wings (now I’m #13 in line on 8 copies, so that’s not moving quickly) AND I bought myself The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries which was perhaps a little ambitious, and maybe we’ll just keep that for next year.
My eyes, they are bigger than my stomach.
I don’t tend to read the same genre in a bunch, so I suspect I’d get sick of anything eventually. Genres have genre conventions, and they tend to get repetitive after a while, so that makes sense.
Anyway. It’s been a LOT of mysteries and maybe I should have paced myself, especially since two of them weren’t even Christmas themed.
I have a horror novel ready for pick-up, and the manga series I started is science fiction/horror-adjacent, so mixing those in may help. Or not, because mystery can be horror-adjacent as well. Maybe I need to read some romance or cozy fantasy.
On the writing front, we’re making some baby steps. I’ve written 1000 words on a short story that came down from on high. Been a while since we’ve had a fully form story fall out of our brain ready to go, and I’m choosing to see that as a promising sign. I’ve also started to outline some of the horror shorts we talked about. And I’ve been poking a couple of writing books I’ve been in the middle of for months.
At some point here, I need to sit down and do some soul searching and put together a long-term plan for January and onward. That, I think, is something for that weird liminal week between Christmas and New Year’s, when time has no meaning.
How’s your December going, squider? I hope that whatever holidays you celebrate are going well! We may get back here before Christmas, but I make no guarantees.
