The story short: Wealthgiver starts today 

The long story:
I'm serializing my new novel on Patreon and Substack. As with Fellow Tetrapod, I’m doing the final edits on Wealthgiver as I serialize it. This is exciting for me, and it means that I’ll be changing things based on reader feedback. So that’s more exciting for you.

Wealthgiver will continue until July 2025, at which point I’ll make the complete novel available for purchase and begin serializing it for free on Royal Road. Until July, only my paying patrons and subscribers will be able to read the novel or effect its writing. After that, I’ll have some new stories ready for you.

In the mean time, my previous novels are now available for purchase on Patreon. Patrons can already read them, but if you're a non-patron and you want to try out some of my work, I can recommend PETROLEA, THE WORLD'S OTHER SIDE, and GROOM OF THE TYRANNOSAUR QUEEN. Meanwhile, FELLOW TETRAPOD is still free for everyone.
​
Speaking of free, free subscribers and patrons will still get my newsletters once a month. In fact, they'll get them a week earlier than before. Paid subscribers, on the other hand, will get Wealthgiver, the next serial novels and short stories for $3 a month.

So, join me, readers.
And thank you,
Dan

I find it best to just dive into the sea. Get the shock over with. And anyway, we were in Greece. The water wasn’t cold.
It was early September in Nea Iraklitsa and we still had to keep the air conditioners on all day. Maybe that was the problem. I sneezed one day while hanging laundry out to be scorched and two weeks later I still felt like my head was stuffed with mucus. So it was that I toppled, top-heavy, into the Aegean, where I left my snot behind.
There are surprising fish down there. Goatish ones that nose through the sand where you’ve stepped, slender ones striped or yellow with black eye-spots on their tails. I once saw a pipefish and another time a cuttlefish rippled up to me where I stood in the shallows and flashed Rorschach patterns before jetting away.
This summer, though, was the first time I’d seen the surface-feeding fish. They’re about the size of a car’s electronic keyfob, oval and very thin. From below, their narrow, pale bellies blend in with the sunlight shining through the surface. From above, their dark blue backs are invisible. You can stand in the midst of a school of them and be totally unaware of it. At dusk a surface fish might jump after one of the mosquitoes you’ve attracted, but all you’ll hear is a plup.
Maggie figured out how to spot the surface fish. With your goggles on, you dip your face into the water until the surface is at the level of your eyebrows. Then you look straight forward to see the wheeling ranks of silver-blue ovals.
I tried to do it and coughed. Deep, somewhat frightening coughs that fizzed and rattled in my chest. I didn’t like it. I wanted to be rid of it, so I reached down into myself and brought up a thick, yellow wad as big as my thumb. A clam, as the kids called it in elementary school in Maine.
I treaded water and breathed deep, watching the yellow clam until a fish ate it.
And with that, what better enticement can I give you to buy a paid subscription?
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More details to follow in a separate post.
August was a surprisingly busy month. I experimented with sharing my process and wrote a few posts about constructing the fictional, Thracian-derived language of the Good people of Wealthgiver.
Aside from swimming, conlanging, sneezing, coughing and spending time with my family, I also wrestled with the identity authentification system of Stripe until I finally got it activated and enabled paid subscriptions on Substack. But more on that in the next email.
And I read some books.
Closing Down by Yakubian Ape - This short story was good enough for me to recount it to my wife. That’s a high bar. It’s about a ghost - the ghost of turn-of-the-millennium America. The big box stores have gone bankrupt and are full of junk that’s only just barely worth the price of hauling away. Although maybe the price is higher than you think. Go read it.
Causes of Separation by Travis J.I. Corcoran - I was going to wait longer and stretch the time between the first book of this excellent duology and its sequel, but I couldn’t help myself. Causes of Separation gives us the invasion of the Moon by the Earth. In fact we get two invasions - the one we should have gotten in the first book and the other, bigger one.
I do have my complaints. This second book felt rushed, with fewer of the fun digressions of the first. It wasn’t just that I missed the Dogs. Corcoran had a chance to illustrate how a libertarian people would fight a war, and he doesn’t make the most of that chance. Important things that should have happened on screen do not, and the end was only okay.
But I can only gripe like this in the first place because I read the book, and I read it because I enjoyed the hell out of it. The science fiction is well-balanced and the jokes are funny. The characters ring true and so do their problems. I don’t know if Corcoran plans to stay in this universe or move to another for his next book, but either way, I’ll follow him.
Terrors of Pangea by John C. Wright - What a blast. Other authors would give their adventurer a break to recover. Our hero escapes the villains with the help of a fellow warrior or friendly native or ancient god and gets a beautiful nurse to feed him and tend his wounds so he’s ready for the next action sequence. Or at least he gets a nap.
Nothing of the sort for Preston Lost on the Last Continent! Lost is relentlessly attacked, pursued, drowned, stung, and hurled off precipices starting at about page two. The friendly native doesn’t speak his language, the fellow warrior is crippled trying to kill him, the ancient god doesn’t have any food to hand, and the beautiful nurse is a prisoner in need of rescuing. The whole book treads the line between presenting impossible problems and solving them.
When I was younger and less wise, I read the first chapter of Terrors of Pangea and put it down because I thought it was silly. It is, but the Gray-piloted flying saucers and albino dinosaurs are underpinned by a great deal of careful thought. Everything hangs together: the action, the world, the exploration of the main character, who is “not a reckless man.” I’m holding the sequel in reserve for when I’m feeling down.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain - I’d only read bits and pieces of this before - episodes from Tom Sawyer’s last summer of boyhood. That makes sense, since this book is so episodic, but there’s a real through-line with the boys and their games bumping up against real thieves and murderers.
Starship’s Mage Omnibus by Glynn Stewart - This book went its entire length without ever getting quite boring enough to make me quit. I was really hooked by the premise: the royal monopoly on magical warp-drives has intentionally crippled the spaceships it sells, so that if it ever comes to a war, the Mage King will have an overwhelming advantage over his clients. Except an outsider mage jailbreaks his ship, turning it into a major threat and a target of the Mage King and every pirate, gangster, and planetary government who wants to learn its secret.
But then Stewart keeps failing to deliver. The scary warlords and witch-hunters turn out to be reasonable people who were never really a threat. I was disappointed.






See you next month

"Her mom divorced him. Her sister won't talk to him. He lives alone in a little apartment with all his guns."
It was a long, peaceful July evening in Sofia, and I was finally out of the hospital. I had nothing to do but regrow my internal membranes and repeat gossip about the family of an old friend. I'll call her Irene.
"It's sad," I said, "because this man spent his whole adult life building his family. Marry, buy a house, raise three daughters, and it all just falls apart."
I lay on my back on the couch in our lawn, watching the bats work against the darkly glowing sky. My daughters were inside, probably watching videos on their phones.
"Irene? Wasn't she the home-schooled girl?" asked my mom. She had flown out to help me recover. "Her family was always a little weird. Very religious."
I didn't share her disapproval. My recent contact with death had left me aware of my need for religion. It was as if a clinging sheet of plastic had been pulled off my face, and I could no longer ignore the things that mattered.
"Yes," I said. "Weird. Someone said something a bit too extreme, and the normal people went to find another church. That would leave a group that was less normal on average. Now someone else would say something more extreme and the community would get even smaller.”
Pavlina knocked her wine glass against the arm-rest of her chair. "Brain Drain. When everyone who's smart and ambitious leaves, you get," she said, "what's left."
We three sat there, considering the fact that we were in Bulgaria. My mom had been horrified by the black mold growing on the bathroom walls of my room at the hospital. She didn't even know yet that my second surgery had only been necessary because of a doctor's mistake after the first one.
I was past caring about that. Leaning on my rack of fluid-filled bags, learning how to walk again, I had asked myself "why did this happen?" "Because one molecule bumped," into another was like trying to eat sand. "Because your enemies attacked you," was like drinking lye. I’d spent a month reading Terry Pratchett and watching the kestrels that nested in the hospital's neglected attic. I was glad to be in Bulgaria. Also, if I'd gotten a colostomy in the US, the medical bill would have bankrupted us.


"Heart Drain," I said. "It wasn't the smart ones who left Irene's father's church, it was the good ones. The people who stayed were like a tide pool in the sun. They got saltier and saltier."
If my mother and wife rolled their eyes at me, I didn't see it. The sky was darker now and the bats were hard to make out.
"Well, I'm glad she's out of it at least," said my mom. "How is Irene's baby? Say hi to her for me."
Except Irene wasn't out of it, at least from my perspective.
Irene and I kept in touch for years, writing long emails and critiquing each other's stories. I must have sent her hundreds of thousands of amateurish words, but by the time I got to my first published book, something had started to go wrong.
"He likes her because she doesn't remind him of his EX-WIFE?" Irene wrote in the all-caps of outrage. "She reacts to the oppression of the patriarchy by feeding into their classification of her as a child?" She told me I was infantilizing a black character because he was short and had a round face.
I didn't know what to do. Irene was reading my work like she was a censor, but I couldn't tell her that. I didn't want to be mean, and also I was starting to understand that to push back against a certain type of comment might be a career-limiting move. In the end, I couldn't bear to send her my manuscripts. We would talk about other things.
My readers will know that selective silence wasn't enough. Irene's increasingly extreme ideology infected everything we talked about. Food, gardening, our children. Her final email told me how much Irene limited her son's screen time and why that was so important. I read it, stumbled downstairs, yelled at my daughters who were of course staring at their phones, and realized that I had a problem. I had to leave this conversation.
For about five years, I only handled the internet with tongs. My app-blocker was strict. My emails were terse. My posts avoided readers, because readers might comment. I kept my head down and told myself that I still had my agent, my publisher, my colleagues. I would work and that would be enough.
My readers will know that it wasn't. My agent became more demanding and my publisher colder. Every science fiction convention was worse than the last. My fellow writers were angrier, pettier, more likely to end your career for you.
I once asked a stranger at a con what the badges on his lanyard stood for. "Well of course I declared my gender," he said, pointedly. "Why wouldn't you?"
I nodded silently. And I left. I stopped going to conventions. In the words of one of my colleagues, why would I pay to spend time with people who hate me? I hear that subsequent cons have become absolutely unbearable. It's not worth reading much traditionally published genre fiction, either. Heart Drain has hit scifi hard.
None of this is news to anybody, but now we get to my question for you, my readers. What do we do now?
What attracted me to the Literary Right was its kindness and generosity. Come to us and say what you're thinking. We'll disagree with you, and then we'll get back to writing. Now, based on the essays of JE Tabor and John Carter, I wonder if I was naive. If I say the wrong thing to you, will you try to get me fired? Harass my colleagues? Get my books pulled? If I suspect you might, and if others suspect it, you won’t be able to have honest conversations any more. If you become powerful enough to threaten the rest of us, we’ll go along with it, nodding silently, until we leave.
Imagine us in another ten years. Will we be surrounded by fractious, squabbling, honest fellow writers, or will we be alone in our small apartments, surrounded by our weapons?

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

On the way to the village we came to a line of stopped cars.
"Uh oh," I said, and started up Waze in irritation, thinking it was surprise roadwork like last year.
A few cars reversed and turned around, but soon enough the line started moving again. A couple of cars and a truck had pulled onto the side of the road, and we could just get on with our weekend. People on their phones stood around someone on the ground, tangled with his bicycle, bleeding from his head.
"It's an accident," I told told Pavlina as we drove past. "His head is bleeding."
"Should I stop? I can't stop." But a slowed and turned onto a side road into a wheat field.
"You should stop here," I said. "Should I stay in the car with the girls?" Another moment of cowardice on my part.
I might have just stayed in the car looking at my phone if Pavlina hadn't called me. I answered, but she didn't say anything. She wanted me to dig the first aid kit out of the back of the car, but someone else had already given her one, but I didn't know that. I didn't know what was going on, so I left Maggie and Ellie in the car and walked up the road toward the accident, trying foolishly to call Pavlina back.
A wheat field on the left, an embankment full of scrub and litter, and Pavlina kneeling over the cyclist, holding up his head as he took powerful, wet breaths. He was skinny, sallow, maybe in his late twenties, lying on his side with his limbs curled.
I saw what Pavlina was trying to do - keep him on his side so the blood would drain out of his nose and mouth. I squatted down and put my hands on his shoulder and hip. What if his spine was damaged? It didn't seem to be. He didn't seem to be injured anywhere except his head. A gash on his left temple and blood in his nose, but not enough to account for the amount on the asphalt.
I held him there, keeping him from rolling onto his back, while the people standing around us called 112 over and over. "No, he can't walk. We're on Chepintsko Shose. They hung up! Where's the ambulance? It wasn't a car. A dog jumped out at him. I called for an ambulance ten minutes ago!"
Every so often the cyclist would groan and try to move, but we kept him on his side. I let go of his hip and clasped his hand. He squeezed back. His nails were pared very short, but not chewed.
"It's all right," Pavlina told him. "The ambulance is coming. Lie down." She put a water bottle to his mouth, but he was in no state to drink. His face was long and bony, with the beaked nose that's common here. There wasn't much smell. A bit of blood, a bit of sweat. It would have been stronger in a boxing ring.
I'd been squatting too long. My legs hurt, and they kept hurting even when I stood up and stretched them. The cyclist began to move and I squatted again to hold him. We repeated this dance two or three times before I realized I could just put my knees on the ground. So I knelt there, thinking "I'd better remember this. This is the most exciting thing that's happened to me this month."
The police arrived. I was a bit wary, thinking they might stomp around, demanding to see everyone's ID cards. But no. The two policemen left the handling of the cyclist to me and Pavlina while they directed traffic around us and joined the civilians in berating the emergency phone operators.
I have actually talked with someone who was hired by the municipal government a few years ago to reform Sofia's ambulance dispatch system. I would say he didn't reform it enough. As for the police, they were, as Pavlina said, "trained to stop barroom fights," but not in CPR. We continued to kneel on the ground, holding the cyclist.
He pushed against me, trying to sit up again. I was still vaguely worried about "not moving the patient," but I couldn't press him down. I supported him as he rose, bringing into view the gash on the left side of his head. It had stopped bleeding, but for some reason I thought it would be a good idea to wrap his head in gauze. I tried one-handed, fumbling, supporting him and chasing the little roll of cotton as it unspooled on the ground, aware that I was being foolish, but unable to find anything more sensible to do. Blood was coming out of his ear.
The cyclist wiped at his nose. He vomited a thin, brick-colored liquid, and lay back, breathing more easily. Someone found a piece of Styrofoam on the side of the road and Pavlina put it under his head as a pillow.
He slipped deeper into unconsciousness. One of the onlookers asked about his pulse, and after trying a couple different grips on his wrist, I put two fingers under his jaw. The pulse wasn't strong, but it was steady under his clammy skin.
His hands were cold, too. Goosebumps on his forearm. I took a moment to compose the sentence in Bulgarian. "It is cold to him," rather than "he is cold," which would imply something about his character. "Is there a blanket?" I asked.
"Does someone have a blanket?" Pavlina said more loudly.
I switched to English. "Your jacket." She'd forgotten about the cardigan tied around her waist. We draped it over him.
Finally we heard the siren of the ambulance. It parked next to me and a single EMT, a middle-aged woman, got out. She didn't ask questions and she couldn't lift the cyclist onto the gurney. I and two of the bystanders lifted him, raised the gurney, and docked it. The cyclist slid into the ambulance, lying on his back, clutching Pavlina's cardigan.
"Do you want me to get your jacket?" I asked her.
"No," she said. "Let him have it. I hope he wakes up and it confuses him."
I haven't been able to find any reports on this traffic accident. The cyclist's wallet and cell phone were in a pouch on his bike, but I didn't look in his wallet and the cell phone was locked. The police said they'd answer it if it rang.
I won't know what happened to this guy, but I think his prospects weren't bad. He had a concussion, obviously, and he went into shock, but he did finally end up in a hospital, and his breathing and pulse were all right. In the end, that's all I know. That, and the knowledge that although I had the urge to tell Pavlina to keep on driving, and another urge to stay in the car and not help, I did the right thing. Next time, I'll be a bit quicker.
Book reviews and writing news will come next week.
See you then.

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.

The serialization starts now on Royal Road and (last week) on my Patreon.

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.