January 23, 2020
This is starting to look like one of those attempts at blogging that gets abandoned after a couple of posts, isn’t it?
Well, I have an excuse–I’ve more or less finished the promotional duties for Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen, which took much of my time, and now the novel is happily looking after itself. I’ve been happy to hear from the people who enjoyed reading it—clearly it was a change of pace for me. And it was wonderful to see the welcoming reviews, too, for such an odd project.
Now I’m enjoying the feeling of being done with something before I start something else. It’s been a peaceful time—I started a Twitter hiatus that I thought would last a week but that has now gone on for a month, with one brief check-in to take care of some business. It’s hard for me not to notice that being off social media gives me more free time; also, as a result of being off Twitter in particular, I’m exposed to less daily anxiety, and I get less misinformation. (I don’t think I’m getting less information about the world, though—for example, when that scandal about the Romance Writers of America happened a few weeks back, I was happy to wait until the New York Times digested the story into something I could read in a few minutes. If I’d been on Twitter I likely would have spent hours combing through feeds and reading comments, a minute here, a minute there. I just didn’t need that kind of granular detail for that sort of thing; I didn’t need to spend the time.)
I’ll probably go back to Twitter at some point, I imagine—there are some good reasons to be there, but the mental peace and quiet outweighs them at the moment.
And I’ve been reading the Dune novels, which were re-issued last year in some reader-friendly mass market paperbacks. I’m up to Chapterhouse: Dune, which is what I think of as the final book in the series (having never read the Brian Herbert sequels, and not being interested in them). I find myself thinking that God Emperor of Dune, the fourth novel, was probably the correct offramp to take for someone with my inclinations—as weird as it is, it’s one of the great character studies in science fiction, and it merits pushing through the previous book, which was a forced march for me. But I’m seeing diminishing returns afterward. Still, I’m a completist by nature and I like to see things through.
All for now. I’ll post again… eventually? Clearly I don’t have the will to blog regularly. But you never know.
