Carpentry

March Newsletter

"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?

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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.

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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.

See you next month