2024-W42 EOW Report

Highlights This Week

• Was a little worn down all week deal to a minor cold? Started on Saturday morning last week. Mostly fine by Monday aside from fatigue. Monday was Thanksgiving. Had my SIL’s family and brother over. Youngest made gravy, middle one mashed potatoes, oldest dealt with the vegetables. We actually sat at the dining room table, extended with the extra leaf. It was… it felt like a “real Thanksgiving” and not me pretending to be an adult the last two decades.
• H wasn’t up for H:tR, so we ended up playing board games. Finally played Betrayal on House on the Hill (2004). Only took three failed attempts over the last decade. What a fun simple haunted house game. It’s so much fun. Simple. Narratively-driven. Tons of variety. F also brought this cute simple Japanese game, ナナ (2021). I think I want a copy. It seems like a simple game to get a party of people to play.
• So DCU Infinite. Yeah. An entire multiverse to catch up on.

Project Status Dashboard

The following are ongoing fiction writing projects broken down to what stage they’re in. Legend in footnote¹

Started a new project based on the new system. It’s not on the board yet. That’s the new directive. It has to be a complete THB before it gets on the board. Technically, BECKY belong up there. The new project is based on Paolo Bacigalupi’s Pop Squad (2006). I think another initiative that might come to fruition next year is killing the vanity metric of “novels read” on StoryGraph. It’s more important I master short stories then force myself to read novels just because… novels. I might even not bother with a “goal”. Or keep it to twelve. I think it would make a lot more sense to maybe even TRACK short stories read as a separate thing under Unnecessary Tracking.

Four Thousand Weeks

Thanksgiving. Driving the eldest home after him volunteering, him sleeping in the rec room, seeing the middle one asleep in her room. Brunch on Saturday. This whole week, just so many quick, brief, quiet moments where I retreated into myself and it hit me how fast it’s all moving. That this is it. That these are some of the final moments as we race to the end of one life stage for another. And so many of my closest friends are just starting their young families. B, L, R, D. And I think back to those early years for myself and my thirties and how I had all these avoidant activities under the facade of hobbies, the frenetic chase for building my career, the constant rush of things, and now, hitting my mid-forties going through what I’m assuming most in my life stage have gone through, the regret, the wishing you’d done more, the knowing-but-not-feeling-it-until-too-late that yes, it does pass by you in a blink of an eye.

Book Reading

• STILL NO NOVEL READING - But about to start a Buddy Read on StoryGraph for a re-read of Too Like the Lightning (2016).
• SO MUCH DC: Green Lantern Corps: Recharge (2005) is EXACTLY what I was looking for in Green Lantern. I had very strong suspicions that there was something about GL that I wanted to like about it. And Rebirth, and last week’s one-shot just confused me. But this miniseries nailed it for me. It’s basically Star Trek without the spaceships. That’s it. A bunch of different aliens recruited to space police academy and there’s duty, and SOPs, and mentor/mentees, and passing the torch, and defending/patrolling the universe, dealing with threats, all that. Waller vs Wildstorm (2023) was all the preveiw of Ackerman’s writing I need. I’m excited for his Ironman with geopolitics, nat sec, intelligence community, black sites, national interest, foreign affairs. And I thought I read Batman: The Long Halloween (1996), but I totally haven’t, and yes, it is amazing.
• THIS WEEK’S PULLS: Both Shalvey’s Mystique (2024) and Grønbekk’s Catwoman (2018) were both execllent spy genre stories. The Exorcism at 1600 Penn (2024) wonderful political commentary. And Ultimate Spider-Man (2024) #10 was about journalism and speaking truth to power. Kinda interesting that so many issue of this week’s pulls were all in the spaces I enjoy of tying superhero comics to real world geopolitics.

Comic Book Issues Tracking

Archive of all EOW reports here