Monthly Blog – May 2024

What I did:

For most of the month I did fuck all, then for one week everything happened. My uncle came over from Australia, so we spent a lot of time with him. That week was also full of birthdays and other family events, including my mum’s birthday, and my grandad’s 90th. So there was a big party at my aunt’s house and I got to hang out with a bunch of my cousins. My brother and his girlfriend also went, so everyone got to meet her and my nephew. He loved it there, especially since there were friendly dogs and lots of chocolate. This kid was grabbing fistfuls of Maltesers while his mum tried to pull him away. I was also playing fetch with one of the dogs and accidentally threw the toy on top of the hedge and he was so upset with me. I kept trying to get him to play with other toys, but he wasn’t interested. I’d go to pet him, and he’d just move away and look pointedly at the hedge. Eventually, my uncle got a ladder and got the toy down. Everyone laughed at me, understandably.

At the start of the month, Mum invited her friend over for a pamper evening and I got roped in. We had a lot of fun, got drunk, and mum almost inhaled a lip plumper which made her laugh, putting her at more risk of inhaling the lip plumper, making her laugh harder.

On another day, we went for a family walk in the woods, mostly for my Nephew’s sake. Mum and Dad got him a little camping chair and they wanted to test it out. After our walk, we had a picnic, and Nephew decided his chair should go in a little house in the playground – it’s furniture, after all. We also put him in his waterproof suit and let him go to town in muddy puddles. When not outside, he likes to sit in his little chair with it pointed at the telly, like an old man.

I’ve mostly just been applying for stuff. I finally finished my uni application and my play sample. I received an offer at the university I wanted! I’m going back to uni in September to do a Masters in Creative Writing! Now that that wave of applications are over, I want to focus on three things: finishing editing my novel and send that off to publishers; finishing my Eurovision essay; and finishing a short story for an anthology I want to submit to. Please bully me if I’m not doing one of those three things.

What I Read:

All Systems Red – Martha Wells

A really good, fast-paced story. It was short, but lasted as long as it needed to and didn’t overstay its welcome. I just wish I had books 2 and 3 already. I’m holding off on buying more books, though. Also Murderbot is a great character. I wanna read more of it.

Penance – Eliza Clark

This was a fascinating story-within-a-story that took me on a trip to the darkest corners of tumblr, corners even I never dared to explore: true crime. I’d heard about it, and what things the worst of the fandom got into: writing fanfiction of school shooters and the rampant bigotry towards their victims. The story follows three teens who murder their classmate on the eve of the Brexit results. It’s about the four girls’ lives, their families and their communty, all of which have been torn apart.

The book is presented as an account of the crime, written by a true crime author whose career is riddled with scandal. This author’s own distaste for the true crime community is evident throughout the book: he starts each section with a transcript from a podcast discussing the case in a disrespectful or blase manner, the hosts often making poor-taste jokes about the girls involved. At the end of the book, though, we find out this author is not much better, in ways I won’t spoil.

To Strip the Flesh – Oto Toda

An interesting collection of stories, the main one being about a trans man who has put off transitioning for years, for his father’s sake. The story follows him finally coming out and starting to transition. The other stories are odd, in a good way.

The rest of the Thomas series

I’m glad this is over, and I should’ve stopped reading sooner, but I was fascinated by the direction these stories went. Over the decades, they went from low-stakes, rather repetitive stories of trains misbehaving and being punished, to train refugees. Train. Refugees. There’s trains trying to escape to the Island of Sodor to avoid being scrapped.

The author also tends to reference real-life trains, now a handful preserved in heritage railways. A lot of the characters were always based on real trains, but now these real-life trains are also characters, or the characters will stop and talk about their “twins” and encourage those around them to visit these railways.

I then started reading Winnie-the-Pooh and gave up. I hate that fucking dipshit bear so much. This guy makes his friends’ lives actively worse because he can’t stop eating honey. The worst example was when Eeyore was sad because everyone forgot his birthday. Pooh decides to get him some honey, but on the way back to Eeyore forgets what it’s for and eats it. Now, I have friends with ADHD, and if they said they’d accidentally eaten my birthday present, I’d think it was funny and not be mad. But that would involve owning up to it. Pooh doesn’t. He just cleans the honey pot and gives it to Eeyore as a pot to put things in. Piglet, meanwhile, was going to give Eeyore a balloon, but on the way trips and bursts the balloon. He tells Eeyore and apologises, but Eeyore likes the balloon anyway. What are we supposed to learn from Pooh’s actions? That it’s okay to lie?

I also had a flick through some of the poetry and thought it was pretty bad. But it’s poetry for small children, so maybe it works better with small children. And I have to say, what I did read of Winnie-the-Pooh was full of love and tenderness. Every time the author mentions his son, I can feel the warmth radiating from the pages, and I really liked that.

It just wasn’t for me, and there’s a different children’s series I’d rather spend my time reading: Earthsea.

Gothic Dreams: Steampunk

This is in the same series as the zombies one I read last year. It’s basically a worse version of The Steampunk Bible, going into far less detail and just rattling off a list of media with anything resembling steampunk elements, including some pretty mediocre ones. I know a lot of art that isn’t called steampunk contains steampunk elements, I think maybe this section could be shorter, and maybe books like these could devote more time to people currently making art in the steampunk subculture. People often overlooked, who are hard at work adding new spins on the subgenre. It just seems more worthwhile than summarising the 2007 Golden Compass movie.