I stepped out from my student’s office onto Patriarch Evtimi, where the sky was a cold, bright blue and pigeons swept up the faces of the buildings.
I’d been up for ten hours and I didn’t feel like swimming. I had to buy coffee, and I didn’t want to do that, either. I wanted to just turn left and go down the stairs into the subway. I’d read my phone on the train and go home and have a snack. I wanted someone else to buy coffee and swim for me.
But, and I know this sounds silly, I remembered a post I’d read on Substack: “Work out every day so that you can be the sort of person who works out every day.” As I walked between the cliffs of Shesti Septemvri, I repeated that to myself out loud. I hope other people thought I was on my bluetooth.
I found the coffee shop, where the bags were very small, but the grinding machine was large and impressive. The barista had an elegant little broom he used to sweep up every spilled miligram of precious grounds. That would do me for the next five days, maybe.
After that it was just one foot in front of the other all the way to the pool. Get naked, shower, swim until done, but here’s what’s strange: I wasn’t tired or hungry when I finally got home. I finished my desk work, it was now my twelfth hour awake, and I was neither stumbling nor moaning.
I was a zombie two days later, though. Thursday seemed like it lasted a week. Thank God my kids are on the spring schedule now and I don’t have to wake up every day at 6.
In other news, Upstream Reviews posted my review of the anti-litRPG Invading the System .
Another review: I wrote this one for C.M. Kosemen’s All Tomorrows, soon to be published: A Portrait of the Future
…and that started a conversation that resulted in The Future of Humanity, a little essay I wrote thinking about future of human evolution.
I posted The Ritual of Undescent, my second poem in Ancient Thracian and English, from chapter 19 of Wealthgiver.
Finally, thank you to my new $10 Patron, Anthony. He and my other patrons at that tier and above can read up to chapter 28 of Wealthgiver. Every Thursday I’ll post whatever chapters I’ve finished that week, and patrons can join me right at the coal-face.
And I read some things:
Running Lean by Ash Maurya
I’ll have to read this book again. The first revolutionary thing it says is that in the same way businesses once switched from valuing products to valuing intellectual property, the era of IP is in turn giving way to the era of the business model. Can your process produce something that attracts customers? I’m working on it.
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
I first tried and failed to read Dostoyevski’s The Devils. Now that I’ve read Brothers Karamazov, I have a better idea of what he was driving at. These people are vicious, mean-spirited, self-defeating fools. Yes, and so are you, reader. Now watch: this is how you practice compassion.
The Pilgrim of Hate by Ellis Peters
Another book I first listened to 30 years ago. Ellis Peters has aged less well for me than John Mortimer - I guess because Brother Cadfel isn’t as funny as Rumpole. And although there were some action scenes, Peters’s story is so very girly. One man has a gleaming curtain of raven hair.
DanDaDan by Yukinobu Tatsu (Science Saru Studio)
One Thursday night in January, this anime absolutely wrecked me. I’ll give you the premise: teenage girl (who isn’t as much of a delinquent as she likes to pretend) gets into an argument with boy (who is exactly as much of a dweeb as he appears). He’s obsessed with UFOs, she’s embarrassed by her grandma the ghost-wrangler. After arguing about whether UFOs/ghosts are real, they challenge each-other to spend the night in a haunted service tunnel (him) and an abandoned hospital (her), where they are, respectively, possessed and abducted. That’s the first 15 minutes. You won’t get to the part that made me cry until episode 8.
And I read a draft of a book for a friend, but I can’t say more until it comes out. It was good, though ;)
See you next month.

My garden gate has a latch that hasn’t worked in at least sixteen years. To keep it closed, somebody welded a pair of hex-nuts to the gate and wound a thick wire of appropriate length around the frame. When you exit the gate, you can, if you turn around and use both hands, hook the wire through the hole in the outermost nut and close the gate.
It was a Sunday afternoon, chilly and bright gray. I closed the gate behind me and turned from it to stride off in the direction of dinner with friends. I was thinking, “Finally. I broke the dragon’s back.”
At 9 AM on Saturday, I had called Pavlina, away on a team-building, and told her I planned to relax and “play with Thracian.” I shut my laptop on Sunday, at 1 AM.
I know more or less what I was trying to do. There are two fairly good examples of the past tense used in inscriptions on Thracian grave markers: igekoa and gegeoeka. It’s plausible that they are both past tenses of “I live,” related to English “quick.” The i- at the beginning of igekoa looks like the augment that prefixes Ancient Greek and Sanskrit past tense verbs (English “I lived”). These languages also reduplicate the first syllable of a verb to mark the perfect aspect (English “I have lived”). The -k suffix might also indicate the perfect, as in Greek. Was it the same in Thracian? In pursuit of this question, I burned my entire Saturday.
There is nothing that it’s like to be caught up in an obsession. It’s a flow-state, a fugue, when awareness, reflection, and memory are swallowed up by the task. 1st person active present athematic. 1st person active present imperfective. 1st person active present thematic. I ground down my list of Proto-Indo-European verb suffixes, walking each through the sound-changes I’d derived, comparing each to Ancient Greek, Phrygian, and proto-Albanian. Every mistake or new interpretation would pull me back up to the top of the list to start the grind again.
Did igekoa mean “I had been living” and gegeyoeka “I had lived”? The truth is that there isn’t enough material to answer questions like that. If Thracian were just a little better-preserved, I’ve be able to definitively answer questions about its grammar. If worse, I could just invent whatever I wanted without fear of contradiction. But the language is just the right combination of known and unknown to draw me on. Endlessly, I now see.
That’s why I smiled on Sunday. Before, for years, there had always been family or work to force me out of my fugue. I’d think, during a class or a meal or a trip to the beach, that if only I had enough uninterrupted time, I’d be able to determine for certain how an ancient people spoke. When I finally got that time and sacrificed it, the answer I got was “You won’t.”
On Sunday, I slept in, had my breakfast, called my family and went back to my book. When people read Wealthgiver, they’ll like it for its characters, their relationships, and the atmosphere of exotic danger that surrounds them. Only once they’re drawn in will they bother to read the made-up words in italics, and very, very few will ever examine the suffixes. I want those who do to find something, but “world-building” is fundamentally decorative. These active-indicative-past-perfect flourishes might amuse or intrigue, but they will never warm a heart or nourish a soul. For that, I need to live a life.
With this in mind, I finished the translation I hadn’t even started on Saturday. It was the last one I’ll need to make, since the rest of the book is in English. With the dragon’s back broken, I went downstairs and took a hot bath. I soaked and read about determinism until it was time to get ready for dinner. I got dressed, went out to see my friends, and closed the gate behind me. Those eight seconds of messing with the hook gave me more to write about than fourteen hours of obsession.

Now, in December, it is the month of sales. My alternate history Tesla-punk romance The World’s Other Side is now on Kindle Unlimited, so you can read it for free if you’re a member. And even if not, it’s not that expensive and it has hover-cars. Treat yourself.
While you’re at it, take advantage of my sales on Patreon and Substack, where for less than $3 a month, you can join the readers of Wealthgiver and tell me whether I got the imaginary verbs right.
***
And I read some things in November:
Undermining the System by Inadvisably Compelled
The previous book in the series ends with Cato freeing one planet from the oppressive artificiality of the System. Now he has to do the same thing on as many planets as possible simultaneously, facing resistance from enemies who take him seriously. The author digs deeper into why someone might support the System, although some of the arguments are better than others.
Kim by Rudyard Kipling
I listened to this audiobook on my morning runs, and it make pre-dawn exercise a pleasure. I was reminded of Tom Sawyer, except it’s set in turn-of-the-century India with international espionage as the plot. Otherwise, there similar humor and compassion, with brightly-colored impressions of broad, deep characters. “She chuckled like a parrot over the sugar-lump.”
What Christians Believe by C.S. Lewis
Lewis takes you from atheism to "a child saying a child's prayer," then to the problem of evil and the nature of Christ. I appreciate his religion as a way for people who are already adults to continue to grow up. I'll have to read it again.
Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain
Like Innocents Abroad, this is a collection of short essays, descriptions, and reminiscences that the famous author wrote as a famous author. Some of it seems to have been written to give his readers something to do, but there are a few spots of real inspiration. The story of Twain’s past as the pilot of a paddle boat are the perfect balance of fact and feeling.
Biomedical Self-Engineering by Jon Svenson
When Carl, a divorced night watchman in his 70s, is bitten by an alien, he becomes an animorph. He absorbs DNA from every animal he touches and can use those genes to alter his body. So, after he clears out his tumors and shrinks his prostate, Carl touches a dog so he can sniff out buried gold, which he uses to invest in failing business. It’s…not what I would do if I had DNA powers, but after a while I really wanted to know if Carl would be able to turn that restaurant around! Like most LitRPGs, this book is idle wish-fulfillment, but it’s saved from being boring by an unusual protagonist with interesting things to do.
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
This is the most distance I’ve seen between a book’s reputation and its content. At best, people talk about Atlas Shrugged like it’s a shoddy story straining under its philosophical burdens, but when I read it, I saw a Russian science fiction novel.
In one scene, a group of government functionaries on a train need to be in California by midnight. Because most of the rail line’s employees were hired for political reasons, all rail lines but one are closed and there is no functioning diesel locomotive. The management, also political, is less concerned about fixing these problems than passing the blame, so the decision of what to do is finally made by a mid-level manager. This manager had a brother who killed himself after his workplace was nationalized by the People, and the news of this suicide was suppressed so as not to damage the People’s morale. Now, the manager orders that the a coal-burning locomotive should pull the train through a tunnel in the Rocky Mountains, a solution that will asphyxiate all its passengers but get their corpses to San Jose on time. “And?” the manager thinks to himself, “who is on that train? I bet it was People.”
I’m going to have to write a longer review of this book.


See you next month.

So there I was, teeth gritted, knuckles white on the wheel, grinding down Vasil Kanchev on a flat tire at eight kilometers per hour. The garage was close. I could see it. I could leap the traffic meridian and be there in less than a minute. To do that, though, I would have to abandon Pavlina’s Nissan Leaf, the car I had lamed. On I ground, because I had promised myself I would and because there is no way to make a goddam left turn on Angel Kanchev.
It was my lack of experience and trusting nature that had put me in these straights. When the “Tire Pressure Low” indicator came on on Pavlina’s dashboard, I plugged a gas-station air pump into one tire after another and crouched there while it hissed, as if I knew what I was doing. The indicator stayed on.
During my next attempt, I experimented with waiting longer. I even considered the numbers displayed on the air pump’s gauge. 28. Remarkable. Would that be in PSI? Bars? The guide on the inside of the frame of the Leaf’s driver’s side door said 36PSI/2.5BAR, so perhaps I should aim for number 36. It sure was taking a long time to pump the tire up to that level.
A panicked gas station attendant stopped me before I’d gotten must past 32. Staying I’d over-inflated the tire, he depressed the head of the valve with the metal tip of the air pump. I give reader the licence to judge who was the greater fool in this situation. And now that you’ve had a moment to consider, it won’t surprise you to learn that by next morning, the tire was flat.
When Pavlina pulled out of our driveway on her way to work, the front tire on the passenger side of the Leaf made a noise like a wet tarpaulin dragged across gravel. She turned right back around and stowed the car, which she’d deal with later.
By God, I vowed, she would not.
“I am a good husband,” I said as I forced the car another meter down Angel Kanchev. “This is the highlight of my day!”
To my left, the barrier rail crawled by. To my right: crying toddlers in the arms of their parents, on the way to school. I fought the shimmy in the wheel, my ears filled with the despairing flap of flaccid rubber. I imagined the state of the rim as the traffic cavorted around me, honking. Finally, I reached the end of the street, which was an 18-way double intersection.
Like a pilot in a squall, I set my jaw and tightened my grip. There was no light to aid me and the traffic was going out. My only chance was a U-turn. So I hove to, and rounded the meridian.
The Nissan Leaf gradually flopped back up Vasil Kanchev, to where a provident parking space waited in front of the garage. The physical trial was finished, but now began the economic and psychological examinations. I only had enough money for one new (used) tire, and the mechanic didn’t want to make only one replacement.
“Can you walk with only one shoe?” he asked.
While I meditated upon this koan, he embarked on his own exploration of patience and compassion, working down a list of suggestions from replacing all four tires to just the front two to just the flat one, in exchange for my promise to have both front tires replaced as soon as possible.
In the time it took me to walk to the ATM and back, the job was done. That evening, Pavlina said, “Oh, good. I don’t have to do it,” and I felt like an admiral.

In October I began serializing Wealthgiver. As of the time of this writing, we’re up to five chapters, with another twelve edited and ready, a buffer that stretches to late January. Two thousand words a week seems like a pace I can keep to. Knock on wood, readers should be able to get a new chapter every week until the book ends in June.
Paying readers. The first seven chapters will be available to the public, but in two weeks (the 21st of November), I’ll erect my pay-wall. My goal until then is to attract as many free subscribers as possible. Please help me with that; subscribe on Substack or Patreon. If you enjoy Wealthgiver, please recommend it. You can even buy a gift subscription for a friend.
In other news, Upstream Reviews released my expanded review of Space Pirates of Andromeda, which you can read here. I’m rather proud of it, and of course I had a blast reading the book itself. I do wish someone would comment, though. I want to know what other people think. Go read the review, read the book, and tell me what you think.

And I read some books I read this month. (note: the links are Amazon affiliate links)
Invading the System by Inadvisably Compelled
I have a weakness for Progression Fantasy, where the protagonist gains skills and levels up like a video game character. Take the gamification too far, though, and you have a LitRPG. Compelled gets that.
In this book, post-singularity Earth was invaded by the System and turned into a deadly game of wizards killing monsters (and civilians and each other) in return for power. Survivors in space used biotechnology to fight back, and managed to drive the perverse incentive structure off Earth. But just as the last portal to the other System worlds was closing, one post-human super-soldier slips through. He calls himself Cato, and it is his mission to pursue the System to its source and annihilate it. A fun, fun book.
A Man at Arms by Steven Pressfield
I was greatly inspired and instructed by Pressfield’s War of Art. I got some good use out of The Story Grid, too, but here we see Pressfield’s system fail to deliver transcendence. In a story about a Jewish boy and a dishonored Greek mercenary dodge a cruel Roman legionary to help a girl deliver Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians, I didn’t feel much. The story painted one numbered step after the next and rushed me into the end.
There were a few moments of grace, though. The novel’s worth reading for the line “I am all stings.”
Rich Man’s Sky by Will McCarthy
I usually give up on bad books quickly and don’t bother to write reviews of them. This book, however, wasted enough of my time that I feel it my duty to warn you off. It was very disappointing.
The premise is excellent, but I suspect McCarthy tried to stretch the first act of his story into the first novel of a trilogy. We end up with a book that is mostly filler: digressions, characters who have nothing to add, meaningless sex, and a protagonist who keeps not getting it. Because the author doesn’t allow her to see what’s in front of her face, she comes off as clueless and bitchy. Corcoran’s Aristillus series is much better, and so is McCarthy’s earlier work.
Storm Between the Stars by Karl K. Gallagher
I’m getting used to Gallagher’s style, which relies on the reader to figure out the characters’ feelings from their words and deeds. At first, it feels like you’re reading an after action report, but the effort it takes to notice them makes the emotions more serious. My heart really did speed up as I watched the oppressive Censoriate bear down on our plucky space-traders. Will they make it out with lives and freedom intact?

See you next month.

"Maybe you don't recognize me," he said. "I'm Kaloyan's dad.* I'm on a diet and exercise regime and I've lost 20kg. You've lost weight too!"
I had approached Ellie's birthday party with calm determination. She wanted to celebrate in Sofia with her friends in a "children's center," which meant Pavlina and I would have to stay there the whole time, talking to the other parents.
This wasn't my first rodeo. I pre-ate. I made myself coffee at home. I went into the parents' area and turned down the music and the space heater. Now in a bearable environment, sated on protein and coffee with milk, I could speak from a position of strength about diet and excerisze. I was profoundly grateful to be given this topic of conversation.
It was true that I didn't recognize Kaloyan's dad. The embarrassing fact is I have a habit of zoning out during Bulgarian conversations. Although I could focus on remembering people's names and faces, or even deciphering what they're saying, I often prefer to save that energy for inventing excuses for my incivility.
But that's a hard way to live. I don't want to be the guy who spends the party squinting at his phone. I want to be able to talk to my neighbors, other parents at my kids' school, other writers in Sofia.
Now comes my second admission: it's that last necessity that pushed me over the edge. I need to be able to participate in the writing scene in Sofia. In order to do that, I need to be able to sit at a table and talk with Bulgarians.
All right, then! Challenge accepted. I couldn't motivate myself with appeals to courtesy, neighborliness, or filial duty, but professional development I can do. 
I talked with Petar about his busy Saturday schedule, and the reconstruction at TSUM with another dad whose name I can't remember. Kaloyan's dad wanted me and Ellie to go "winter-skating" with him. I don't remember how we got onto the subject of Dimitar's escape from Russia.
I knew that one of Ellie's friends was from Russia, but I assumed his parents had just dropped him off and left. The bearded man at the other end of the table had spent most of our conversation squinting at his phone, but when he spoke, it seemed to me that his Bulgarian was perfect. He even had the Sofia accent where unstressed /o/ becomes /u/. It was only after Kaloyan's dad complimented Dimitar on his Bulgarian that I focused and heard his /je/ rather than /e/. But even then I might have just assumed he was from Pleven.
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It turned out that Dimitar's dad had been Bulgarian, so he'd only had to recover his childhood language after moving here last year. His own son, though, had only come to this country with two words of the language.
"That teacher is good," said Pavlina. "Ellie's older sister's teacher recommended her to us because she knows what to do with bilingual children."
"We couldn't believe it when we came here," Dimitar said. "We step out of the plane and there's a public Russian school? It's very good for us, of course, but how can you use tax money to teach kids Russian? Why not German or French?"
There are public German and French elementary schools in Sofia, too, but we all knew that the real question was "why learn Russian at all?"
"Pavlina heard some high school students ask that question," I said. "Do you remember? Last year."
She took the cue. "At the graduation ceremony," she said. "I was backstage with Ellie and I overheard some seniors talking. One of them asked, 'what will we do with Russian after we graduate? We can't go back to Russia. We can't work for a Russian company.' But another one said, 'we know a whole language. We can find something to do with it. We don't know what will happen in the next twenty years.' During the ceremony, one of those boys recited 'Monument' by Pushkin,' and it was excellent."
Dimitar was pessimistic about the next twenty years. "Russia had democracy for one month in 1917 and one year in the 1990s. Otherwise it was Fascist, then Communist, and now it's Fascist again. Next, you know, the thing in a clock," he made pendulum motions, "will swing the other way and Russia will be Communist again."
I understood that Dimitar had checked out of Russia. He wanted to think about the future of his family in Europe. I was just glad for him that they'd gotten out.
The conversation continued, but after a while I realized I hadn't understood most of what was being said. I'd been working by Bulgarian social muscles for an hour and a half and the carbs in that piece of cake weren't doing my brain any favors.
I excused myself and went for a walk until the party was over. When we got home, I lay on my bed, exhausted, until it was time to go to sleep.
We got to do what we got to do. More than that, we got to be able to do what we got to do. That means exercise. Work the muscles, develop the skills, so that when the challenge comes, you can meet it. Nobody know what will happen in the next twenty years.

As I’m sure all of you know, I have begun serializing Wealthgiver both on Patreon and Substack. That crunchy cover art is the work of Artyom Trakhanov, who is always a pleasure to work with, and whose skills speak for themselves. I literally only just now noticed the skulls on the ground under Andrei's feet. Cheers, bate.
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And I read some books this month.

Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton

I picked up Chesterton because he was an influence on C.S. Lewis, but I have to say I got more out of Lewis. Chesterton gets preoccupied with his own choice of words, so doesn't always get to where he's going. That's fine for the autobiographical aspect of this book, but as far as theology goes, I don't think he convinced me of anything I didn't already believe - and I want to believe. Still, this book was a comfort.

Zero to One by Peter Thiel

I liked it. My wife really liked it.
It's a pared-down book, which I appreciate. The Basic mental tools - definite optimism, the important truth question, zero to one - are useful. I'll have to come back to this book.

King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard
I tried to read this once, stopped, and came back to it as an audiobook. I wasn't put off because of the slow start - in fact my favorite part was the detailed description of outfitting an expedition through the Kalahari desert. But the lost tribe they found was disappointing. I would have been more interested in learning about the real 19th century Zulus.
Space Pirates of Andromeda by John C. Wright
It's not often you get to read a real homage, in which the writer loves the source material and extends it. Here, John C. Wright asks "what if the Star Wars sequels were good?" Space Pirates of Andromeda gives us a very satisfying answer.
Wright plays his usual trick of packing an epic trilogy's worth of detail into the backstory, of which he then reveals very little. There's a robot in a tophat and a winged pirate queen, but you don't get to hang out with them. You're mostly on a pirate ship. To be fair Wright dumps so much punishment on his protagonist that you spend most of your mental energy wondering how the boy's gonna make it out of this one.
I also have to admit I loved the little asides about why robots are all built with hands and why supertech guns shoot balls of plasma rather than bullets. Those are some sweet justifications.

Theft of Fire by Devon Eriksen
Theft of Fire is a brutally honest blast, pulling us through the development of a relationship between people who cannot, but must, trust each other. I wasn't satisfied with the ending, and I don't think the science fiction goes far enough to distinguish itself from Firefly and The Expanse, but the characters really work. The sex and violence, as intense as they are, work too.

What Is Art? by Lev Tolstoy

It would be better if Tolstoy had spent more time describing what art is rather than what it isn't. There's quite a lot of complaining. But Tolstoy does answer his own question: art is the infection of a one person with the experience of what it is like to be another. I don't have a better suggestion.
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword by Ruth Benedict
The best anthropology is the kind that tests hypotheses. In The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, Benedict's posits that the apparent contradictions in WWII Japanese society were caused by a basic desire to be respected, and what is worthy of respect is to act wholeheartedly, holding nothing back. It's a good explanatory model, and more importantly it produces prescriptions that seem to have worked. Benedict unapologeticaly offers advice to Douglas MacArthur's SCAP government on how to best govern Japan according to American interests. It seems to have worked.


See you next month
*None of these names are real

We rounded the corner of the university and walked up the street, the two of us. I stooped and leaned sideways, eyes scanning the concrete as I thanked Professor Yanakieva for agreeing to meet with me.
"It's no trouble," she said. "I'm retired. I just don't know how I can help you."
We hadn't reached the cafe yet, but I took the opening. "Did Thracian have cases?" I asked.
The Thracians were a Classical Age people who lived north of the Greeks. Unlike the Greeks, however, they didn't write much down. Aside from four inscriptions, a handful of words recorded in Greek sources, and some names of people and places, there is no surviving documentation of the Thracian language.
There are coins, Professor Yanakieva said, that show the name of the Thracian king Seuthes with the spelling "Seuthou" - the Greek genitive case - but others that show "Seutha." Is that the Thracian genitive? We crossed the street and walked into the small park behind the national library, past the lawn-bowling pitches and into the shade of a circle of large walnut trees, where a cafe surrounds a mostly dry pond. We ordered a pair of espressos.
"Okay," I asked. "What about aspiration?"
"We just don't know," she said. "Sometimes a Thracian name will be recorded with a delta and sometimes with a tau or even a theta. Maybe Thracian plosives had different qualities from Greek. This is all in my paper."
It was. I'd read all her papers and input their data into my succession of huge spreadsheets of Thracian sound shifts.
"What exactly do you want to do with Thracian?" she asked. "You said you were writing a novel?"
I told her I did. When I began Wealthgiver, I had thought it would be a straightforward task to track the sound changes between known Thracian words and their Proto-Indo-European ancestors. Six years later, I have learned a great deal about classical Greek, Phrygian, Proto-Albananian, and Indo-European linguistics. I'm on my third version of the spreadsheet.
"And you want to include whole sentences in Thracian?"
I intend to include prophetic poetry in Thracian. I didn't say that, but Professor Yanakieva was still cautious. "Have you heard of the Bessian Bible?"
"Oh that," I said.
What happened is someone got a hold of a Coptic bible, noticed the Greek loan-words in it, and pretended that everything else was a descendant of Thracian.1
"I've read many conspiracy theories," I said, much to her relief. "My project is a speculative reconstruction, like paleontologists make of dinosaurs."
"But paleontologists have a whole skeleton!"
I thought I heard some envy in the thracologist's voice, and remembered my friend Vladi, who is thrilled to unearth a single fragment of a femur. But I didn't want to get sidetracked. "Okay," I said, "so we have a tooth."
She laughed. I felt like I'd passed a test. "Do you know about Zoni? It was a church in Greece, but the church was built on top of a temple to Apollo. Worhippers would write a prayer on a clay pot and smash it, so we have many examples of the ritual formula "Abolo Uneso somebody ekaie." Abolo is the god and uneso probably meant holy."
"Yes!" I showed her my notebook with copies of those inscriptions:
(they're written right to left)
"And that e in ekaie. Is that," I asked, "augment?"
She lit up. "It might be!"
I could feel the coffee taking effect, and see it in my guest, as well. But I looked at my watch. "I have to go pick up my daughter in about five minutes," I said. "I'll pay for the coffees."
I had time for one more question. "I only found one paper on the Zoni inscriptions," I said as I came back from the bar. "This one by Brixhe. But there are many more, right?"
"Yes. All the inscriptions from Zoni are published in the year-book of Sofia University 1954. They include the bilingual tablet."
"The what!?" I said, thinking of the Rosetta Stone. Also, I had to go pick up my daughter from Russian camp. But a bilingual inscription? That was revolutionary! It could blow the Thracian language wide open!
"It's damaged," said Professor Yanakieva. "The top of the Greek part and the bottom of the Thracian part are missing, so we can't decipher it. Didn't you say you have to pick up your daughter?"
"Well, she can wait five minutes."
"How old is she? Eight? She'll be frightened if she has to wait."
In fact, I was the one who had to wait because Ellie wasn't done making her noisemaker. I didn't mind because my brain was on fire. A bilingual inscription. I poured over it for the next month, and I have a sketch of a translation here. Professor Yanakieva says it's "amusing" and sent me links to more papers.
My reconstruction continues, a dinosaur based on a tooth. Maybe I got the legs wrong and put the nose on backwards, but I'm not afraid of making mistakes. I write speculative fiction, and my goal is plausible wonder. I think I got it.
***
In the month of June I finished working on the penultimate draft of Wealthgiver and...started working on the Thracian language that will appear in Wealthgiver. Here's my plan: I'll work on the language stuff over the summer (and writing up some of it for you, my readers) and getting ready to begin serializing Wealthgiver here on Patreon in the last week of September. I will polish the manuscript as I serialize it, the way I did for Fellow Tetrapod, so your feedback and advice will have an impact on what you read.  
***
And I read some books this month
The Initiate by James L. Cambias
There's a thematic point in this book where someone tells the main character, "you tell me not to do it because it is evil, and you tell me that evil is what I should not do. For we, who do not fear judgement, what reason is there to do anything other than what pleases us?" The main character answers him - I won't spoil the book by saying how. I will say that the first time I read The Initiate, I was disappointed with that answer, but now I see that Cambias had a different, better one for us. I won't spoil that, either. Go read the book.
The Knight by Will Wight
I'm trying to figure out why the books in this series bore me so much more than the excellent Cradle series. It's not the change in genre, because in fact this problem started to manifest in the later Cradle books as well. Since 2020 or so, Wright's novels have become longer and less substantial. A lot of things happen, but the connections between one event and the next are weak. The characters don't react as deeply or stand out as strikingly as they used to. Certainly, the word-level writing style has deteriorated. I couldn't even finish The Knight. It felt inflated and thoughtless, as if it was compiled rather than written. Whatever process Wright has adopted since the pandemic, I hope he returns to the old one.
The Higgs Boson and Beyond by Sean Carrol
Ironically for a summary of particle physics from the standpoint of quantum field theory, this book is too certain. Electrons ARE waves. Interactions with the Higgs field IS mass. There's none of the nuance of "according to this model," or "experiments have shown." There's too much space and too little substance devoted to the funding and construction of particle accelerators, and we're left without knowing much about Higgs boson itself. Carrol does okay with his central metaphor about a celebrity try to move through a crowded room, but he doesn't take it any farther. Why is being slowed down by the Higgs field a good explanation for inertial mass? What does that have to do with gravitational mass? PBS Eons goes deeper.
The Character of Physical Law by Richard Feynman
God damn I love reading Feynman. When other physicists proclaim, he clarifies. When others offer up half-baked metaphors, he gives us thoughts experiments that are both helpful and funny. How precisely could we determine the a bowling ball's velocity and position by bouncing ping-pong balls of it? What would an Aztec astrologer say to Galileo? What if mysteries in physics never run out, but new discoveries get harder and harder to make? In that last case, Feynman would consider himself very lucky to be born when he was.
Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis
A friend of mine read this book and argued about it with me in high school. Maybe I wasn't ready for it then, but I was now. C.S. Lewis explains what he thinks Christianity means, for example when it comes to God as an anchor for objective good. He is not so much persuasive as illuminating.
How Asia Works by Joe Studwell
This is one of those books that changes the way you look at everything. I now listen to Economist podcasts about the French election and think about DeGaul's post-war industrial policy. I see what you did there, orienting on exports. Or my wife tells me about A Suitable Boy and I recognize the importance of agricultural land reform. My friend Paul in Japan was incensed when I told him that cherries are too expensive there, but I'm right, and now I know why. What a pleasure it was to read How Asia Works. A heartfelt thanks to Mr. and Mrs. Psmith, who recommended it.
Wintersteel by Will Wight
This is the apex of the Cradle series and Wight's best book. It asks an important question: how can you dedicate your life to improving yourself without leaving your loved ones behind? In answer, there's a kiss.
The War Revealed by Karl Gallagher
The renaissance fair that was teleported to a fantasy world has overcome their first orc invasion. Now it's time to meet the elves! Again, Gallagher's characters are very true to their natures. An agorophobe magician doesn't thank the protagonist for helping her develop her power of flight. She's mad at him! He scared her! Again, Gallagher lets this truth shine through prose that is so clear it feels like a synopsis. You have to slow down and imagine before you're hit by the emotional impact of what you're reading. I didn't like this one quite as much as the first one - maybe because there were fewer surprises. The biggest was that this is the second book in a fantasy series, and it ends. Good job!
Guest Law by John C. Wright
Hypocritical medieval courtiers...in space! As with most of Wright's work, my only complaint was that this one was too short. The future history he describes could and ought to support a trilogy at least.
Taboo: 10 Facts You Can't Talk About by Wilfred Reilly
The outline of this book is good, but it lacks something in the execution. Reilly is a political scientist, and would have done well to team up with a statistician or an economist. That could have elevated his examples from anecdote to data. Does the media really fail to report the police killing white people? Reilly found instances where that seems to be the case, but specific instances aren't enough. When I repeated the arguments Reilly made to my wife, she got angry at me. Maybe she would have been less angry if I'd had some more rigorous data? Don't worry, we apologized to each other.
 Misty of Chincoteague by Marguerite Henry
I read this book to my daughters. Ellie (8) was bored and demanded yet another repetition of Dory Fantasmagory, but Maggie (11) liked the horses and the grandpa. What struck me, though, was a scene where the child protagonists are incensed at the sight of captured feral colts being separated from their mothers, and take their complaints to the manager. He tells them that this is how young horses grow up. It's hard for the children to understand now, but when they get older, they'll see that this is for the best. And he's right. I can't think of any children's book written since the 80s where the adult was right and the children were wrong, and I'd like to see more.
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Animal Farm covers a lot of the same ground as The Gulag Archipelago, but in a much condensed and more impressionistic form - not so much a story as a description. I wondered as I listened to this audiobook what Orwell would have changed if he had known Russia's history from 1989 to 2022. Maybe not much.




See you next month


1 In fact, Coptic is a descendant of Ancient Egyptian. Way more interesting than a dumb conspiracy theory.

For the most interesting thing that happened to me this month, see The Cyclist. I didn't think it would be in good taste to combine that story with my self-advertising and book reviews.


I spent the month combating my lust for the Thracian language. Every time I sat down to do anything, I had to make myself not play with Thracian instead. So expect more news about the language soon. At the time of writing this, I'm up to W in the catalog of sound shifts.
I finished the "skin" draft of Wealthgiver, which means I'm on track to start serializing it starting in October (or the end of September on Patreon). I'll give it another revision as I serialize it, the same as I did with Fellow Tetrapod. I hope in this way I'll still be emotionally involved in the story while the readers are reading it, and I'll be motivated to do a better job with advertising.
If you want a chance to really get involved, why not critique this draft of Wealthgiver? Send me a message and I'll send you the current version.
The serialization of Petrolea is nearly done. It got a bit of attention on Substack, but I think the fact that I've already finished writing it means I'm not excited about advertising it. Once again, if you like robot dragons and discussions of the pros and cons of environmentalism, give it a try.


And I read some books this month
The Fifth Head of Cerberus
This is very much a first book. All of Wolfe's things are there - memory, growing up, girls - but he's trying to be somebody else. I was reminded of LeGuin and Solzhenitsyn. I do appreciate his ideas in embryonic form, though, and I'd recommend the first of the book's three stories.
Outlaw of Gor
I read book one of the Gorean Chronicles several years ago and gave book two a try after reading there was some interesting sexual philosophy in it. Well, it's not my thing, and the story isn't well-developed enough to make the book fun otherwise. The language was neat, but that was about it for me.
The Art of Writing and the Gifts of Writers
Finally, some advice on how to write a book review. C. S. Lewis tells us to avoid the trap of inventing stories about the author's motivation and he shows us what real love looks like for an author and his or her work. I need to read me some Rider Haggard and Dorothy Sayers.
The Powers of the Earth
What a book! I haven't felt this way since I read The Martian. And like the Martian, Forces is idiosyncratic in a way you wouldn't see in mainstream science fiction. There are two stories, one about an exiled soldier hiking on the moon with a pack of illegal uplifted dogs, the other about the libertarian misanthrope who helped found the moon colony and must now overcome his antisocial nature to build his home's defenses against an upcoming invasion from Earth. The novel doesn't do what you'd expect. It neither begins nor ends where an agent or editor or writers' workshop instructor would recommend. It's just utterly enthralling. Not because of its message or its use of tropes or language, but because it's a labor of love. Corcoran loves Brin and Heinlein. He loves engineering and dogs. He loves playing with the toys he's made, and he's sharing them with you. This is everything fiction should be. Endless thanks to Jane Psmith for recommending this book.
Traction
I read this so I would know what my wife was talking about when she described the "new process" she's using with her CTO. Since I'm self-employed and don't have a team yet, there was a lot in this book I wasn't ready for. My best take-home was the concept of a 90-day project horizon. Yes, looking back I can see that my projects all run for about three months before I have to take a break and switch to something else. Good to know.
Swan Knight's Sword
In this medieval tale of chivalry set in the 21st century, a boy grows up and claims his inheritance. I appreciate what the author has to say about temptation, and the magic and setting are top notch. As always, Wright is generous to the point of profligacy with his storytelling. Magically hidden states, runaway witches, history professors corrupted by the secrets they've read, ideas that other authors would horde away for future books, Wright throws at you in passing. I would have liked more development of the love story, which we got in book one, but needed more of in book three.
Vanity Fair
This is the story of the good Amelia, the wicked Rebecca, and the compassionate, befuddled author who judges them both. Each woman gets the life the other wanted, and Thackery comments on this, their time, and the human condition. I appreciate what he was trying to do, but I found he lost his way somewhere after the war. I liked Anna Karenina better.




See you next month

I recalled the word at the end of March, when we piled into Pavlina's green Kia and drove to Buhovo to plant some flowers at the grave of her grandmother and visit Maggie's friend.
Proleten umora. Spring fatigue. A Bulgarian friend described it as "when the winter is over and you want to quit your job and do something else."
I didn't want to quit my job, but the sky burned blue behind the black branches of the trees and the my back bent under the weight of the sunlight and the shoving breeze. It was a beautiful spring day; just the sort of weather I hate.
Umora. Like umoren sam. "I'm tired." Or morya se "I get tired" and, more distantly, koshmar. "Nightmare." Smart. "Death."(1)
Something was terribly wrong. I could feel it. Wrangling the kids, buying trowels and tulip bulbs, I ground forward with our plan for the day. Everything was perfect on the outside and impossibly difficult on the inside, just like when I was sick, before they removed the tumor.
I know exactly what this is. I was in pain all through the spring of 2016 and now I associate lovely spring weather with suffering. It doesn't take a genius to make the connection, especially since it's happened every year for the past 8 years. Some springs the Umora lasted from the first cherry blossoms of March to the first of June, when the ritual of Korban finally dispelled it.
I was grateful to finally have something to call it. Up until then, I would say, "I'm having a hard time" or "it's my spring-time sadness." But the first one is too long, and whenever I say the second one, my head fills with that aggravating pop song from 2012. "Umora" fits a lot better. I battled it all through the shopping and the drive to Buhovo, when we got a call from Pavlina's mom.
"Are Maggie and Ellie listening?" she asked over the car's sound-system.
"Hi, grandma!" They said.
"You'd better just tell us," said Pavlina.
"Well...the cat is fine now."
My stomach panged.
"Ama Pavlinche, he jumped from the bathroom window on the fourth floor! I found him crying on the roof of the garage. But I think he's all right. He's walking and eating.
"Does he need to go to the vet?" Pavlina was remembering the same medical emergencies as me. Me, when I had cancer. Maggie, who was born with hip dysplasia. Hospitals and legs sound like something is terribly wrong.
Convincing ourselves that we didn't need to spend the rest of the day in a medical emergency, we drove on. Company helped. Maggie and Ellie played with their friend while Pavlina and I talked to her dad and grandparents, also from the same little town as Pavlina's father's family.
We walked up the hill north of the village and had a picnic of grapes under a flowering apple tree. On the way back, Maggie fell and skinned her knee. It was too much. We had to go. Maybe to the hospital if we couldn't get a tetanus shot at home. Do you see her leg? Do you see the dirt ground into the blood? Maggie, how could you! You can't run down hills. This can't happen again. Can the cat even still walk? We need to buy netting to put up over the windows.
"If we don't, maybe the cat will die," said Maggie.
We were in the car by then. I turned around in my seat to shout at her. "Do you understand why that was a stupid thing to say? Just shut up, all right?"
That was the fuse tripping. Pavlina and I came back to ourselves and realized we had to get a grip. We couldn't just push through the umora. We had to stop using it as an excuse for acting crazy and get rid of it.
It's the sort of thing you have to tell yourself more than once. You see it, you deal with it, but the umora sneaks back up on you. It helped that the weather was cold and rainy the next week. The week after that we went on vacation to Serbia, where none of us had ever gone to the hospital. Today, it's sunny again, the drain in the bathroom clogged, and I feel the temptation to snap. But it's just the umora. I work out, I got swimming, I read C.S. Lewis and Tolstoy to make my life more different from when I was sick. Every year the umora gets a little weaker.
***
This month I looked at my calendar and decided it was time to start the next revision of Wealthgiver. We're on track for serialization in October, and in the mean time, I'll try to post some Thracian language stuff. Stay tuned.
The World's Other Side has gathered four reviews, all thoughtful, not to mention positive. Some highlights: "It was a fun ride", "with subtle romance and always wry humor," "I genuinely found myself caring about them all." "It's intricate, tightly wound, and shines with the sheer amount of thought that was poured into this by the author." If you've read book, please leave a review and tell other people what you thought.
Petrolea is being serialized on Royal Road, Substack and right here on Patreon. It isn't getting as many readers as I'd like, and I'm not sure what to do about that. It's hard to care about an old story when I've got a new one to work on.
***
And I read some stuff this month:
The Great Divorce and the Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis - I need to read more of this kind of stuff. Aside from being entertaining and thought-provoking, it gives me ways to express what I already know. If you figure out how to live in heaven, your time in hell will have only been purgatory. Treat your readers like birds learning to fly, not like birds you plan to sell as breasts and drumsticks. Good advice.
Cannibal Gold by Chuck Dixon - Thank you Upstream Reviews for recommending this book, which did show me a good time. You got a band of time-travelling soldiers rescuing some scientists from a tribe of ice-age hominins. Lots of blood and explosions. My favorite part was the beginning, when we met all the characters. What they actually do felt a bit underdeveloped, though. I wanted to spend more time in paleolithic North America with the Denisovan ghost lineage.
The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare by G. K. Chesterton - It begins with an argument over the merits of civilization versus savagry ("You see the tree by the light of the lamp post, I wonder if you could ever see a lamp post by the light of a tree.") Then the table turns...literally! I enjoyed that one. And I was glad this nightmare had a happy ending. I got some comfort out of it when I laid it over our current situation. Maybe you will too.
A Hero of Our Own Times by Mikhail Lermontov - In one story, the narrator describes a cad. A Russian soldier in the 1820s Caucasus kidnaps a Tatar girl. In the next, the cad himself becomes the narrator. At first, his own words make him seem a better man. Later, a worse one. Also of interest is the story of the Serb, the mad Circassian, and the nature of fate.
The Citadel of the Autarch by Gene Wolf - I am sad to write this review, which reminds me that I finished The Book of the New Sun, and will have to wait before I can begin reading it again. The good news is that there are so many layers to this book, my third reading will surely reward me.
"Have I told you all I promised? I am aware that at various places in my narrative I have pledged that this or that should be made clear in the knitting up of the story. I remember them all, I am sure, but then I remember so much else. Before you assume that I have cheated you, read again, as I will write again."
Diplomatic Immunity by Lois McMaster Bujold - What number re-read is this? The fourth? It's a good mystery, on par with Brothers in Arms, except we don't get rewarded with a new character joining the series at the end. Like most of the rest of the Vorkosigan books, a theme shines through: children change things fundamentally.
The Kreutzer Sonata by Lev Tolstoy - This short story is a transcript of everyone's worst public-transport nightmare. The narrator is stuck in a train car with an old man who begins "he who looks upon a woman in lust has already committed adultery," and extends this logic to "They think that I killed my wife on the 5th of October. It was long before that that I immolated her." Just as Tolstoy took us step by step through death in Ivan Ilych, now he shows us what it is like to murder.
Millennium by Marty Phillips - This isn't a quick book, but it's one worth relishing. Of its four connected short stories, I like the first one best, in which a suicide falling from one of the Twin Towers gets to relive the events of September 11th over and over. The second and fourth stories are more open-ended, really the first halves of stories that I wish the author had finished. But still, thoroughly enjoyable.
The Death of Ivan Ilych by Lev Tolstoy - Tolstoy shows us what it's like to be a well-to-do Russian at the turn of the century. Having lived his life in vain, he finally comes face to face with death and self-awareness. I think it's actually a happy ending if you believe in heaven.
The Histories by Herodotus - It's a long one, and the sort of thing I'll need to re-read at some point with a pen in my hand. This first pass was an audiobook, narrated by the excellent David Timson. Herodotus tells the story of the Persian Wars, with many asides about the people and places of the Eastern Mediterranean in the 5th century BC and before. There's even some good life lessons in there: a bow breaks if it is never un-strung.
The Book of Feasts and Seasons by John C. Wright - This book is a series of short stories based on the important dates of the Catholic Liturgical Year. The one that stands out is "Pale Realms of Shade," the Easter Sunday story, about a ghost of a detective who is forced to see through himself. The whole thing is on Kindle Unlimited, and I'd say it's worth checking out for that story alone.
Agent Running in the Field by John le Carré - The last novel le Carré completed before his death. Agent Running in the Field is one of the very few words of fiction I've read that gets any kind of grip on the world we live in. It takes place soon after Brexit and Trump, when an elderly spy makes the acquaintance of an angry young man. The young man wants to play tennis and rant about the rise of neo-Fascism. The old man subjects himself to both and stumbles into a very tangled international situation. The spy plot sounds very real, and so do the characters.
Undead on Arrival by Trilby Black - Full disclosure: I am a friend of the author and critiqued an earlier version of this book. I then read the current version and wrote this review. This is a story about a policeman who wishes he was more brutal. He sees the merciless gestapo of his post-apocalyptic city state and thinks "if I only was cool enough to join the Blood Guard." Then he gets bitten by a zombie. This book is about the trade-off between justice and mercy. I wish it dug deeper, but it gets us far enough.
Dismantling America by Thomas Sowell - This is a series of essays by the economist Thomas Sowell, whose a perspective I wish I'd had during the early 2010s. Of particular interest are his essay about Israel's retaliation against Hamas, which shows what he turned out to be wrong about. I've also gotten a lot of mileage out of the Lincoln quote about the dog with five legs. Go read it.


(1) The Bulgarian root "mor-," goes back to Proto-Balto-Slavic *marás, from the Proto-European *mór-o-, which in Germanic yielded the -mare in English "nightmare," and the -mar in Bulgarian "koshmar," which is loan-word from French. *mór-o- is the o-grade of original *mer-, "to die," of which the noun was *mértis, the ancestor of modern Bulgarian smart or "death." You see, it all hangs together.
 See you next month

"I love working on wood," said Pavlina's cousin, kneeling before the door I had broken. I stood over him, watching, feeling useless and grateful.
It was two weeks after the late night in the middle of the week when I'd peeked into my kids' room, seen the state of it, and snapped. All I wanted to do was watch a cartoon with them and put them to bed, but Ellie had been papier-mache-ing. I had to get out of their bedroom and into the kitchen to find a sponge, but there was so much junk behind the door that it wouldn't open to let me out. At my wits' end, I shoved the door.
"Well, here's your problem." Pavlina's cousin tapped a knot in the wood next to the hinge. "This was a weak spot. The guy who made the door should never have used this piece for this part of the door."
I would later tell Pavlina I'd done a good job of eliminating weak spots in our apartment.
Her cousin returned from the bathroom. "The door in there sticks. Do you want me to go get my circular saw and take a couple of centimeters off the bottom?"
This was after he'd glued the girls' door back together, screwed a metal mesh onto it, replaced the hinge, and prettying everything up with wood-filler. I'd spent two weeks of fruitless searching for someone to do this for money. Helping my cousin-in-law repair my kids' screen door, I reflected that no paid handyman would ever have put this much care into the work. All my cousin-in-law wanted was pizza.
It was awful, by the way. He likes pineapple and pickle on white sauce. But my point is that you can go through professional channels and get expensive, mediocre work done, or you can go to your human connections and get an event that's worth writing about. What cousins-in-law do you know?
***
​

It was a very busy February.
​
The World's Other Side is now available for pre-order on Amazon. It's been edited, typeset, scrubbed and polished. It's even gotten its first review. It launches on the 29th, so go pre-order it.
If you want to read something right now for free, I've begun the serialization of my novella Petrolea. It's about love and environmentalism in a nest of robot dragons.
I also changed my Patreon: serializations are available to everyone for free, available to three-dollar patrons a week early, and twenty-dollar patrons get access to all of my self-published fiction. So if you want to read The World's Other Side and Petrolea right now (as well as three other novels), go for it.
In the mean time, I'll get on with revising Wealthgiver.
***
​

And I read some things
Going Infinite by Michael Lewis - This book chronicles the sudden rise and suddener fall of Sam Bankman-Fried with an air of aggravating indulgence. Lewis presents this emotionally stunted weirdo as a quirky savant, perhaps so elevated above the human herd that he can't really be blamed for stealing a bunch of money? Come on. My favorite quote: "You ask this kid for a steak and he sticks his head up the bull's ass."
Black Ops by Ric Prado - A fun book to read alongside a John le Carré novel. The tones are totally different, although what they actually do is much the same. Prado is a genuinely interesting person. Although of course it would have been better if he'd revealed more vulnerable secrets, I suppose he said as much as he could.
Existentially Challenged by Yahtzee Croshaw - I enjoyed Differently Morphous, the first book in the series. Listening to this sequel, though, I was reminded of a Soviet-era publishing joke from Arkady Strugatsky: "what do you call a telephone pole? A well-edited pine tree." Existentially Challenged is well-edited indeed, stripped of any joke or plot element that might offend its publishers' political sensitivities. Either that or the author did a rushed and sloppy job.
Escaping the Rabbit Hole by Mick West - I read this book as a field guide to some of the more popular conspiracy theories of the 2000s, and as an autobiography of Mick West. As always, I appreciate testimonials, in this case from ex-conspiracy-theorists who'd rejoined the real world. As far as how to talk someone out of a conspiracy mindset, all I can say is that the techniques in the book haven't worked yet. Maybe I need more time.
All Men Dream of Earthwomen and Other Aeons by John C. Wright - a rich and generous stew of stories, tied together by a theme of transhumanism and its downsides. My favorite story is "The Last Report on Unit Twenty-Two," where I think that theme shines brightest. Imagine an asteroid-mining cyborg with a cloned human brain, sculpting interplanetary rock into little copies of itself: babies it is incapable of having.  
All Things Wise and Wonderful by James Herriot - these books are a tremendous comfort to me. Herriot seems to have tried to tie his vet stories into stories of his time in the army, which didn't work very well because he clearly wasn't interested in his time in the army. He was interested in making sick animals well and miserable people joyful, so he mostly wrote about that. I'm glad he did.
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke - I'd been waiting for enough time to pass that I could re-read this book. It's easily the best new fantasy I've read. By describing a life filled with meaning, it delineates life without, and traces a path to one from the other. 
One Bright Star to Guide Them by John C. Wright - I started this thinking it was a novel. It isn't. It's a novel's worth of plot condescend down into an accelerated summary, with most of the major plot points taking place off screen and related by the main character in his conversations with other characters. I can see what Wright was doing, but I wish he'd just told the story. Anyway, the story itself is fantastic. How do you drive away evil? What do you do once you've grown up? Wright actually answers those questions, and answers them well.
Queen of Angels by Greg Bear - Way back in high school, I listened to this audiobook narrated by the prolific genius George Guidall. He's still the best thing about this book, which I wouldn't have revisited except that a reporter for the Economist mentioned it. I thought I might have missed something the first time around, but no, it's still just as dull and pointless as before. There's a vague sketch of a plot and a vaguer glimmer of a theme. Something about where evil comes from? You could easily read the first and last three chapters and get everything important.  
Dungeon Meshi - Every Thursday my life is a little brighter because there's a new episode of Dungeon Meshi. I describe the premise like this: "in order to cut costs, the leader of a dungeon-crawling team doesn't pack food. Instead, they'll eat monsters." It's like watching an NHK documentary about cooking, and the creator really knew her biology. My only complaint is the gore, which means I can't watch this show with my kids.

There was an old pig in his den,
Who had finished his work once again.
So he quietly sat
With his comfortable cat,
While he rested his brushes and pen.- Pigericks by Arnold Lobel


So there we were, driving back from Lyulin, our new kitten meowing in the back seat, ready for anything.
It was that gray, chilly season between the last leaves and the first snow, when there's too much to do and your head is buried either in your work or in your pillow, trying to get some goddam sleep done before the kids fling themselves down the stairs and tear apart the living room.
But we had made a promise. Back in August, as the scent of the fig trees drew us home from the beach, Pavlina and I told Maggie and Ellie that if they kept their room clean for six months, they could have a cat. Partly it was to head off their grandmother, whom Pavlina distracted with tales of a kitten with a Christmas ribbon around its neck. And there was that family of stray cats living under our veranda and licking the yogurt out of my breakfast every morning. Finally, Pavlina and I had decided that we had grown strong enough to welcome a little chaos into our lives.
With some trepidation, we bought the litter box, the dishes, the scratching post. The grandma wanted to buy a kitten from the mall, but Pavlina held her off while researching cat shelters. There was a single one in Sofia that seemed to be working, and they wanted three interviews, an essay, and photographs of our apartment.
"Why is it better to get cats from a shelter?" asked Maggie on the way home from interview number one. The first answer that came to my mind was "because we're good Democrats," but that was neither helpful nor true. The second was that I thought it was icky to buy a live mammal at a store as if it were a video game console. But I was also creeped out by the way the shelter pretended we were adopting a child. So where did that leave me?
"Uh," I said, "something about stray cats being selected for their intelligence and health, rather than their looks? And hey, remembered the Russian fox experiment? You can select the kitten that's most affectionate, just like that professor did." Secretly, I hoped for a gray tabby, because they're my favorite.
We pushed ahead with the shelter, and got up to interview number two before Pavlina found an old lady in Lyulin with cats in her basement. Maggie and Ellie chose the name "Cookie" back in the summer.
Cookie that Cat has quadrupled in size since we got him. The best way to keep him out of your yogurt is to throw something small across the floor so he'll run off to kill it. He watches me while I pee, which is weird, but yesterday evening he sat on lap and purred while I read. Cat achieved.
***
This was a big month.
I've decided that Fellow Tetrapod needs more work and I've pushed its publication back. In the mean time, I'll serialize an old novella of mine, Petrola, which is about love in a nest of robot dragons. Look for it at the beginning of March on my Patreon and my Substack.
I'm also working on a short techno-thriller called The Barricaded Man, for which I've been doing research on IT sabotage. 
Most importantly, The World's Other Side finished its serialization and is on to the next step: publishing. The World's Other Side will be published on March 29th as both an ebook and paperback. Pre-order it here. 

***
And the books I read:
Early Adopter by Drew Harrison
This is a story like a key. It goes in, it turns, it opens a door. A lonely young man despairs of dating apps and pays for a new "AGI" digital girlfriend. Yes, there's a slider for bust size, and yes, there's a discussion of Searle's Chinese Room. As our hero spends time with this speaking image, he wonders if his feelings might be real. What would he do if they were?
How to Talk to Anyone by Larry King
I found this book while doing research for a class I'm teaching on interview technique. and I found it to be both use and delightful. Larry King's advice is pretty good, but far better are his personal anecdotes about for example, his first day on the job, interviewing an anxious flying ace, and delivering speeches to the mob. It's tons of fun.
What Do You Care What Other People Think? by Richard Feynman
This is another memoir-shaped text formed from Richard Feynman's letters, essays, and public speeches, similar to Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman. It's clear that the good material all got into Surely You're Joking, but Feynman's B-roll is still worth the price of admission. My favorite part was "Mr. Feynman goes to Washington," which was about his work on the Presidential Committee investigating the space shuttle Discovery disaster. Feynman is both the only one who does and does not know what's going on there.

The Discreet Charm of the Big Bad Wolf by Alexander McCall Smith
The core of this book – the mystery and the personal dramas – were as good as ever, but this book missed something of the sweetness of the previous three, especially around the middle, when the ennui rose high. The modern world with its microaggressions and canine medical justice looms over the lives of the small, kind, bewildered characters. What's the world coming to, they themselves, then look guiltily over their shoulders. Are they allowed to ask that question at all?
Cocktail Time by P.G. Wodehouse
My favorite Wodehouse book so far. Jeeves and Wooster stories are all a bit the same, but Cocktail Time isn't part of that formula. The good-natured uncle trying to solve everyone's personal problems is also the prankster who's creating them. And there's a bit more kissing, which I appreciate.
The Trees in My Forest by Bernd Heinrich
Along with The Wood for the Trees and The Hidden Lives of Trees, this book ranks second in the micro-genre of "elderly scholar musing about trees." The ecology and conservationism are all what you've heard before, but I appreciate the economics of forestry and the evolutionary biology of very tall plants.
Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart
I'd forgotten pretty much everything about this book since I read it back in high school, so re-reading it now was an unalloyed joy. There's a soppy ridiculousness to the whole thing – as when our heroes, pursued by the legions of a cruel and deathless tyrant, leap from a cliff onto the only stretch of shoreline not bristling with pointy rocks – overlaid with a firm grip on the human condition – as when the waves roll back and we discover halfway down that there are rocks down there after all. How can our heroes possibly survive this one??
Effective Editing by Molly McCowan
I read this book in preparation for my own editing project, and it did help. It does a good job at introducing editing on three levels: book, scene, and word. I got the most out of the scene-level advice, especially about how to determine what you should cut. The author sells her own services a bit, but not to egregiously.
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
My second time with this story. I chose the audio book as a treat over the Christmas vacation, and it was one. Hail Mary perfectly balances humor and pathos, scope, and stakes. This time, although I already knew about the mystery, so I could sit back and enjoy a story about man who chooses friendship instead of despair.

So there I was, bent over sideways, lugging a duffel bag full of booze through Lozenets at 1:30AM.
It was two weekends before Christmas and not a taxi was to be found in the town of Sofia. We'd been forced to drive to the party, which meant we had a car to drive home.
"We'll get a taxi and pick up the car tomorrow morning," said Pavlina. "But we should put the booze in the car first." It was a duffel bag branded with her company's logo, filled with everything her employees hadn't drunk that night. I switched it to my left hand and bent the other way.
I used to hate parties like this. Honestly, I still don't like them much, but I no longer hate myself for checking out after a couple of hours to sit in the corner and read with my earplugs in. One mistake I did make was to arrive at the party hungry.  I'd taken too many cornflakes chicken things with my whiskey and now I felt mildly sick.
Pavlina's assistant had found a good source for her merch. The duffel bag creaked under the weight of undrunk drinks, but it did not explosively fail me on that long walk. Apparently there's a section of Roman wall there, but I didn't notice it. I was focused on getting that duffel home. We'd be stocked up on wine. I'm rarely in the mood of beer, but it keeps, doesn't it? Given how heavy this thing was, we should have a supply until spring. My shoulder hurt and snow gently fell.
"How about I drive?" I had my wallet with me and it carried my American license. Adjust the mirrors, push the seat way back. But this isn't a story about driving. It's about that beer.
I decided to leave the duffel in the car that night, but the next morning I hauled it up the four flights of stairs and through our apartment to the balcony. It was only there that I opened it and discovered that was almost entirely full of Moretti Zero. Non-alcoholic.

After one last spate of writing, research, and conlanging, I put Third Realm to bed. The heart of the story is there, and now it needs to rest while I forget about it and work on other things.
Such as Fellow Tetrapod! I am now getting my claws into the final revision of this oversized manuscript, and I'm cutting. If you want to tell me what you want me to discard and what to keep, there's still time for you to beta-read the current draft.
And The World's Other Side is nearing the end of its serialization. It's time for me to start getting it ready to publish on Kindle Unlimited, and more importantly, advertise it. So here's a question: how do I introduce this book to potential readers without feeling gross about it?


***
And I read some. Actually, I read a lot. A lot. It was a good vacation.
Dirk Gently: The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul (BBC Audio) by Douglas Adams
Listening to this radio show was a good way to make me want to read the original. Humor that works as narration fails when it's said aloud by a character. On the other hand, the plot in the dramatization emerges more starkly from the jokes and digressions, but on the third hand, jokes and digressions are the whole point of a Douglas Adams story And I did not appreciate the Hitchhikers Guide references.
The Russia House by John le Carré
I love how real John Le Carré novels are, and this one was so real it was spooky. During the small window between the beginning of Gorbachev's reforms and the end of the Soviet Union, a drunken, womanizing reprobate of a book publish receives a manuscript for a novel written by a Russian physicist. The book contains military secrets - turns out the red army isn't all it's cracked up to be. What the author is really interested in, however, is whether his book will be published. That resonates.
Swan Knight's Son by John C. Wright
A tale of knightly chivalry transplanted into 21st century America. It mostly works, and at times, such as our knight's battles with elves by word and sword, it's great. The greatness is hampered by a terrible lack of proofreading (the use of "woses" in the singular was a mistake) and Wright's auto-plagorism. Why did he re-use mermaid girlfriends and villains with impenetrable body hair in two separate series? Surely he can come up with other monsters. These frustrations aside, I did enjoy the book. I'm saving the next one for when I feel sad and need some encouragement.
Thank You, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse
Jeeves takes a break for Bertie, but the young idiot's problems grow so large that Jeeves can no longer in good conscience avoid solving them. A house is burned down, a marriage is arranged, and in the end, there is no other employee whose sentences Jeeves would half so much enjoy completing.
Agatha H. and the Siege of Mechanicsburg by Phil Foglio
I wouldn't have bought this, but the audiobook was included in my audible subscription. I read the Girl Genius webcomic, and I did enjoy this reminder of the plot from three or four years ago, some of which I'd forgotten. I admit the romance was nice. The reader was very uninspired, though. The Foglios and their friends do a much better job with the voices in their podcasts. These are ridiculous larger-than-life satire monsters, and they should sound ridiculous.
The Engineer by Will Wight
I read this book during a Christmas party, so I appreciate it for the relief it afforded. But I have to say this second book in the series repeats the problems of the first. The beginning is fast-paced and exciting as the crew of the Last Horizon rescue/recruit their engineer, but then we hit a wall. It's like the book ends and we begin a new book building up to a battle with an enemy from the engineer's past. The whole thing feels clumsy and bloated, like it followed its outline too closely and was published before it was ready.
The Aye-Aye and I by Gerald Durrell
This is one of Gerald Durrell's last books. It's written by an old man with unreliable hips and a younger wife, with a tendency to chastise the reader for not doing more to protect vulnerable species. Between all that, there is enough humor, beauty, and animal behavior to keep the you going.
The Sword of the Lictor by Gene Wolfe
I don't have the skill to do justice to this book, even in summary. This was my second reading, and only now did I understand what actually happened between Severian's work in Thrax and his time as a wandering outlaw. I have a friend who's read these books several times, and when we last spoke he quoted a line from The Sword of the Lictor to help me think about a personal problem. It did help.
The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain
Not enough character development. But seriously, I would have liked a bit more editing between me and Twain's travel diary There were occasionally bouts of deep consideration (such as when he visited Golgotha), and real humor ("bring us a fresher mummy") separated by long stretches of humdrum vacationing.