What the heck is going on?

No blog posts in over a year, no newsletters since last December, no website updates since January, and nothing published since I snuck (sneaked?) The Lost Portrait onto Ingram Spark? I have been posting occasionally on Facebook and X, but it’s true—I’ve basically been AWOL.

Break’s over!

The second edition of Enemy Closer is live. The eBook is available here, and the paperback will be available as soon as Ingram Spark gets its act together. Of all the second editions, Enemy Closer changed the most. I’m very happy with how it turned out and so grateful to my amazing editor for fitting it into her busy schedule.

I also gave my website a facelift, fulfilling two lifelong dreams: fitting my whole website on a single page, and making a site that looks as good on a small screen as it does on a large one. Sure, both of those things are super easy when you use pre-built templates; but when you write every last line of HTML and CSS by hand because you’re obsessed with having total control of your website and making it as simple as possible, it can be a little tricky.

Republishing everything has been a slow process, and my timeline needs an update.

  • Anna Bowman Thrillers and Prequels: Books 1, 3, and 4 are out now. Bigger Fish and No Port in a Storm were already edited, so I went ahead and got them published. Book 2, House on Fire, is coming next. The prequels will follow after in good time and will likely only be available in eBook until the series is finished and I can publish all five together.
  • Short Stories: Underworld will be available in eBook in June. As for The Beast and the Books, The Institute, and Anywhere But Home, best I can do is say they’ll be available this year.
  • Sam vs the Black Hat and Tiger by the Tail: I’m aiming for 2026 to get these re-written and published.

But wait! There’s more!

  • Anna Bowman Thrillers Book 5 and Prequel 5: Book 5 is almost finished, and its companion prequel is still in the contemplative phase of writing. I plan to publish both this year (a year early)!
  • Sam Book 2: Sam vs the Double Eagle will come out next year, after Sam vs the Black Hat and Tiger by the Tail return.
  • Crimes of the Art: That’s the official name of the Claire Riordan (of The Lost Portrait) series. The second book is already written… in my head.
  • Untitled psychological thriller: I don’t know if this will be a full-length novel or a short story, but it will be the darkest thing I’ve ever written.
  • Bannerlight fantasy series: I’m still planning on publishing this series on Patreon. It’s low priority, even though the three-book series is about 75% written.

And that’s only what I can reasonably expect to finish by 2027. There’s a lot more in the works. Stay tuned.

-AK

Revenge of the Fifth

Today is Anna Bowman’s 37th birthday.

This isn’t going to be a great post in terms of structure, organization, and [third synonym]. It’s more of a free-flowing expression of my thoughts around the debut of Bigger Fish, my writing style, and the reason Anna’s birthday is May 5th.

So before I lose you, let me throw in a link to the Anna Bowman Thrillers, two of which are free today and tomorrow in honor of her birthday.

And if you stop reading here, you might as well enjoy this snapshot of my orange cat slapping LRRR, RULER OF THE PLANET OMICRON PERSEI 8!

Now for the meat and potatoes.

Fans of Sue Grafton’s alphabet murders may note that Anna shares her birthday with Grafton’s MC, Kinsey Millhone. That was deliberate, something I hope will be considered a respectful homage rather than a lazy sort of literary theft. There are only 366 possible birthdays anyway, and Anna is such a Taurus.

My top 5 favorite authors, in order, are Stieg Larsson, Sue Grafton, Michael Crichton, Elizabeth George, and J.R.R. Tolkien. I know, it’s not exactly a list of super cool authors you’re not cool enough to know about yet. As the list goes on, you won’t find any surprises. JK Rowling, C.S. Lewis, Kathy Reichs, Brian Jacques, and George R. R. Martin round out the top 10. (What? You’ve never heard of Brian Jacques? Oh my goodness, you must check him out!)

I don’t read much, especially for a writer. Friends have helped me discover new writers (or are themselves writers whose work I enjoy), but I always go back to the same books I’ve read many times before. Many people, maybe all the people, appreciate the easy comfort of a book or movie that contains no surprises and asks nothing  of us. That’s certainly part of the reason I re-read books, but it’s not the only reason.

My favorite books, like my favorite movies, absolutely must be read or watched many times over. Like the Bible I grew up reading (occasionally attempting to read cover-to-cover only to crap out two chapters into Leviticus), they give you something new every time you care to look.

Like any good preacher, I came prepared with exactly three examples:

1

I have to start with the movie I will watch again and again and again until someone makes it illegal, and then I will keep watching it until I get caught and sent to prison, and then I will break out of prison and steal a VHS player so I can take my 30-year-old copy of it up into the mountains with a solar-powered CRT TV and keeping watching it.

I speak of course, of Jurassic Park.

It’s not merely because I’m the Cards Against Humanity white card, “A little boy who won’t shut the f*ck up about dinosaurs.” I appreciate the part where I see something new every time I watch the film.

To wit, the scene where Hammond and Sattler are eating melting ice cream in the cafeteria and talking about the illusion of control. As a child, all I noticed about the mural behind Hammond was that it was a black-and-white painting of some dinosaurs. As a woman with a shiny new bachelor’s degree in art history, I watched it again c. 2012 and saw something new. The mural is Picasso’s Guernica, re-imagined with dinosaurs. Passages of the movie artwork are copied directly from the artist’s monochromatic mural. Don’t believe me? Look it up.

It is the opposite of Chekhov’s rifle. It is definitionally superfluous, an homage to a mural only an art historian (or a Spaniard) would recognize, an admittedly heavy-handed metaphor if you know why Picasso painted Guernica. When I spotted it over a decade ago, a quick Googling generated no relevant hits. If anyone else had noticed it, Google wasn’t blabbing. In 2024, the homage is common knowledge.

It takes a deep devotion to storytelling to even think about tossing in a detail like that, let alone doing the requisite work to make it a reality. It takes a nuanced understanding of the writer of the novel that inspired the film. It takes a pedantic insistence on intellectual challenge that most people are too damn lazy to appreciate even if they notice it.

I love it. I love it.

I am not only, as you might reasonably assume, a jackass who likes to feel smarter than other people. I am that, but I’m not only that. I’m a devoted follower of minutiae, a small-picture person, a human microscope. Through conditioning I’ve learned to zoom out and look at the big picture as needed, but only briefly. My default zoom is 1600%. I read no faster than I speak because each word is an entire universe of meaning that deserves my full attention.

And I’m prone to burrowing down into self-indulgent nonsense instead of moving on to the second example.

2

Knowing I’d find something new, I re-watched my second favorite movie, Clue, just for this post. If my accounting is correct, this was my 8 billionth viewing of the 1985 cult classic.

Here’s what I and others have noticed in the past:

  • The characters’ cars – at least the ones we see – match their game piece colors. Ms. Scarlet’s is red, and Professor Plum’s is a dark purple. When they’re running into the house, you see a green car and a white one (Mr. Green and Mrs. White, respectively) next to Wadsworth’s black car. We don’t see Mrs. Peacock’s car at all – could that be because peacock isn’t a color?
  • When Wadsworth tells them all the police will be there in about 45 minutes, start a timer. Almost exactly 45 minutes later, another undercover policeman shows up. It only works if you stop the timer while Wadsworth is going through his theories of the murders  and restart it when “But Here’s What Really Happened:” comes on the screen.
  • All the characters have a lot of trouble fitting through doorways, between furniture, etc. They try to go through at the same time and get bunched up. Could that be a reference to the way the game pieces move?

This time around? I chose my top three observations, but there were about 20:

  • Everyone ogles Yvette except Mr. Green, who is undercover as a gay man. He volunteers this information during the “Who’s Being Blackmailed for What?” scene because it’s not actually in Wadsworth’s notes. You can see Wadsworth going through them looking confused while Mr. Green is talking. Except for ignoring Yvette, he’s not that great at his cover and acts like a cop the whole time. For example, he tells everyone tape recordings aren’t admissible evidence – something not many people would know back then. He finally “unmasks” himself by taking off his glasses right before he shoots Wadsworth.
    (Here’s a not very fun fact: Until 1995, being homosexual was grounds for being denied a security clearance; and until approximately 2015, it was considered a matter of security interest in the conduct of background investigations, allowing investigators to ask subjects if their sexuality could be used against them by a blackmailer.)
  • After Mr. Body is supposedly killed and they all return to the library, they play musical chairs and Mr. Green is left standing – there was one seat per game piece, and Yvette, a non-piece, took one of them.
  • Ms. Scarlet makes fun of Yvette’s French accent because she knows it’s fake.

I still have some unanswered questions about this movie. I thought I was keeping pretty good notes about who had what weapon where when, but it all fell apart. Tim Curry’s powerhouse silliness distracted me.

3

Sorry, the last example is from my own novels. Come on, you knew this was a self-promotion.

To get the manuscript for Bigger Fish ready for my editor, I read through Enemy Closer and House on Fire again. I didn’t want to miss any minutiae! Lo and behold, something popped out at me. Unfortunately, to adequately impress you, I’ll have to get into the details and drop some nasty spoilers for anyone who hasn’t read any of the Anna Bowman Thriller series:

In the prequel 2.15.2020, Anna and Tommy are undercover in Houston and get ratted out. Anna gets out alive, Tommy doesn’t. Though the trauma and near-death experience weren’t part of Jim’s plan, the part where Anna has to track down Luke to question him about that night (in Enemy Closer) is central to it, as explained in House on Fire. In Bigger Fish, when Tommy shows up not dead at all, the question is asked: Why did they (meaning Jim and Anna) think Anna and Luke were the only people who made it out of that warehouse alive that night?

Why did I, the writer, also think that?

Apparently because Philip (the person who personally killed everyone else) told Anna as much not halfway through Enemy Closer.

“Well, DUH!” You’re thinking. “You wrote it, dummy.”

Yeah, I wrote it about a decade ago. It’s tucked away in a section of text I hardly ever review because there’s no sex or car chases in it. It’s all plot. I forgot I wrote it.

When I read it this last time I realized Philip had told Anna something imminently germane (thanks, thesaurus), my jaw dropped. That one line of dialog had been sitting there for ten years just waiting for me to go back and read it and understand that this story had been alive in my head, as near sentience as a fictional story can be, all that time. I had been writing and re-writing Anna’s story for years without consciously knowing I knew parts of it.

So Anna’s birthday is May 5th because Kinsey Millhone’s birthday is May 5th, because I want to write what I want to read: books people buy physical copies of. Books people take on vacation, books people pack up and move umpteen times because giving them away would be like turning off the part of your brain that dreams crazy ass dreams from time to time, books you keep cracking open even though that stack of TBRs is right there waiting to become new favorites.

My editor said Bigger Fish is not a standalone book. She said it “REWARDS the readers who have already read Books 1 and 2.” I agree. Bigger Fish rewards people who take the time to store Anna’s story in their precious brains and actually care about the questions that plague her, too. I can’t describe how much it means to me that anyone (besides me) would give up room in their brain for Anna’s story. People like that deserve a reward. So I’ll publish it knowing more than one person will buy Bigger Fish, attempt to read it, be angrily confused, and leave me a bad review because it doesn’t make sense — and I’ll do it again next year when Book 4 is published, and again when Book 5 is published in 2026 (unless I get hit by a bus).

I might even try to make the books in my mystery novel series more standalone, but probably not.

P.S. Bigger Fish comes out on June 4, which is National Cheese Day in the United States. I bet you can guess what Anna’s favorite food is!

– AK

Review: Paint by Murders

Edit: I repeatedly refer to the Prologue as Chapter 1, Chapter 1 as Chapter 2… adjust accordingly.

My review starts under the stars below; but first, an existential crisis:

Are my standards for what constitutes a 5-star read too low? Are the stars I dish out worth less than those given by more discerning readers? Do I need to provide you with some kind of currency exchange formula so you can decide if you really want to trust me and read what I recommend?

I was worried about that, not gonna lie. I’ve read so much more this year than in previous years, and for a while I was loving all of it. Five-stars, give me more, I don’t want it I need it. I’ve already discovered three independent writers without whose stories I now cannot live, totaling five 5-star books so far. One of them isn’t even in my preferred genre, and it was so good I’m now loving the shit out of the sequel.

Then I picked up a new book (not the one I’m reviewing below) and started reading. This was one of those books you’ve heard about for a while and are primed to love.

I tried. I slogged through the first few chapters and tried to focus only on the aspects I enjoyed. The book has a great MC with tons of potential, and the subject matter is inherently cool to me; but, at the point where I put it down, I’d give it two, two-and-a-half stars. I’m not going to rate it until I finish it, and it could very well average out to five stars. A banger ending or killer twist can make up for a multitude of slow starting and typographical errors.

If I don’t feel at least four stars by the time I finish, I’m not going to review it at all, but I am absolutely going to finish it. Every writer who puts his or her work out there deserves that much. So, I’m sorry, Kurt Vonnegut, for not finishing Player Piano. You can’t do that to a cat and expect me to keep reading.

Now that I’ve defended the value of my stars, let me tell you about five more of them.

five stars
Five Out of Five Stars!

Read it: Paint by Murders (Emily Ellis Thrillers Book 1) by Amanda Jaeger

Spoilers: Some. I’ll highlight them in red so you can gloss over them if you want.

Girls are dying in the town of Volga, and no one seems to be talking about who or what is behind their deaths. Emily Ellis, aka Mills, knows her talent as an artist has a purpose: to tell the stories of girls who are no longer able to tell their stories themselves.

In her hands, Mills’ brushes do the talking. They take over her hands and mind, and what they produce seem to have a connection to the girls and what happened to them. There’s only one person who knows how dark that connection is, and he’ll stop at nothing to use that connection for his own ends. With Mills in his crosshairs, she has to do whatever it takes to survive (Author’s Synopsis).

Initial Impressions

Here’s the thing… I got sucked into this book so quickly, I didn’t even think about pausing to record my first thoughts. I only took a break around Chapter 15 because nature was past calling and was screaming in my ear by then.

After the fact, I’ll say Paint by Murders has a very scary, somewhat disturbing first chapter. I was a little worried that the book would be disturbing throughout, which I can handle but wasn’t super looking forward to.

Nothing that followed Chapter 1 was as disturbing, so if you get to Chapter 2 and are afraid to continue, don’t be.

One of the main locations in the book goes by a name so hilarious that I really did scream-laugh and scare my cat off my lap. I won’t spoil it here. Get to that point in the book, and finishing it is like downhill skiing when you know how to French Fry but can’t remember how to Pizza.

First Star: Art! ART!
The Scream, Edvard Munch, 1893 (Source: Wikipedia)

I will devour anything to do with art, even more so when it’s written by someone who really knows what she’s talking about. Put Jaeger in the company of writers like Elizabeth George and Michael Crichton, who can make you believe they’ve spent their entire life learning how to do or be something. Maybe Jaeger really is an artist, or maybe she’s great at research; but either way, every discussion around art, from the buying the supplies to the sensation of painting a masterpiece, is genuine and deeply felt. They’re beautiful passages that balance out the terror of a serial killer’s mind and the pragmatic struggles of a young college student.

Jaeger just gets art. You’ll never look at Vermeer, Munch, and Van Gogh the same way again.

Second Star: Suspects

Look, I’m not a genius or some kind of crack detective (though I was a background investigator and a PI for several years, true story), but I can usually figure out whodunnit by the third or fourth chapter of a mystery. That does take some of the fun out of it.

Not so here! I picked out a suspect near the beginning, only to jump from one suspect to another for dozens of chapters. You can’t write a successful mystery without some believable red herrings, and Paint by Murders provides.

Third Star: Timeline

Jaeger plays around with the timeline, telling the story in a not entirely linear fashion.

If you’re not paying attention, you’ll miss some very important clues.

Since I pay attention like my blood is made of methylphenidate (it’s a blessing and curse), it was gratifying to see the breadcrumbs Jaeger left for those truly determined to solve the mystery.

If you can’t achieve superhuman focus when you’re reading, never fear! You don’t need to feel “in on it” to enjoy this story. The prose, the characters, the pace, the dialog, it’s all fun to read even if you have no idea who the killer is until the moment they show themselves (grammatical errors included for your non-spoiling consideration).

Fourth Star: Twists

This whole star is a spoiler, but red text is irritating, so this is your only warning. Skip past the picture of Stallone if you don’t want the ending ruined.

For about a chapter and a half, I thought the sorority chick was the killer. I considered going back to the first chapter to see if Jaeger had tricked me into believing the killer was a man.

This wasn’t a cheap, below-the-belt red herring that turns out to be such a stretch that you roll your eyes. She was a believable killer, and I’m not just saying that because I was so painfully gawky in my college years. I mean, the paintbrushes are made of hair, and she had a bag of hair. She seemed like a nasty little dictator-in-training who couldn’t handle challenges to her authority.

When she turned out to be not only innocent but a little bit good and extremely relatable, I was knocked back on my heels. She was one of many false leads. I even briefly believed the MC was the killer.

I love getting mind-fucked by a well thought-out plot.

Source: IMDB
Fifth Star: Cliffhanger

I know some people hate cliffhangers. I learned that after being mildly roasted over my own cliffhanger. If you’ve read Enemy Closer and know what I’m talking about, I can promise the cliffhanger at the end of Paint by Murders is nowhere near as steep. It makes you want to get your hands the next book as soon as possible, but it still satisfies.

There’s something more going on in Volga than one serial killer perpetrating his murdery nonsense. I assume our hero is going to figure it out, and I hope it takes several books, because I want to keep enjoying this series for as long as possible!

-AK

Food Time

Everyone loves food, right? I read this post* recently and got a terrible, horrible, ridiculous idea:

I should make a cooking video in character as Anna!

It’s still hard for me to type that without cringing. At least my face will be hidden, but it’s still the dumbest idea I’ve ever had. Or maybe I think it’s dumb because it’s so wildly out of character. Anyway, I’m so cripplingly type A that I can’t even start filming until I’ve thought through and scripted every moment of the atrocity, so it’s a ways out. I have made two practice videos, one little 5-second nothing and one entirely overhead-shot video of me making my favorite breakfast.

I’m so self-conscious about posting this. Not because of the piss-poor camera work (Dammit, Jim, I’m a writer, not a cinematographer!) but because… I mean… looking at this meal through a stranger’s eyes, I’m starting to realize that what I eat for breakfast most mornings is revolting.

Thing is, I hate, hate, hate sweets. All these “healthy” breakfasts–blueberry oatmeal, banana smoothies, yogurt bowls–the mere thought of them makes me a little nauseated. I’ve shotgunned a Costco-brand protein shake out of desperation a time or two, but I’m not proud of it. The dry heaving alone is enough to put me off my lunch.

I developed this recipe about a year ago when I was yet again embarking on a weight loss journey. I needed something that would keep me full for five fucking minutes and also be so tasty I looked forward to eating it. I’ve probably made this 200+ times, and I’m still not sick of it.

That said, it might actually make you sick to watch this. So, beware.

* Linked article is not culpable in any way for the content of the above video.

– AK

Meme Cleaning

This is going to be another snarky post, because my new year’s resolution to be nicer is going spectacularly, thanks for asking.

I was organizing my pictures and decided to share the 11 worst things I’ve screenshat from social feeds. So, in order from least awful to awfullest, here we go:

Not super awful, just a great reminder that every morning my sweet little grandmother wakes up, gets on social media, and chooses violence. Personally, I’d choose Queen.

Orphans. I’m afraid of orphans.

My feed is plentiful with Christianity-inspired motivational quotes and little sayings designed to guilt you into being a better person. No comment on their effectiveness, but seriously WTF does this mean? What am I supposed to do with this information? Much confuse, very don’t know.

Congratulations! It’s another orphan to haunt my dreams! With a little side of identity theft.

But wait, there’s more! I have such fond memories of Mrs. Security Question.

Drink it in. The randomly capitalized words. The comma that wasn’t. The escalation to all caps. The self-congratulatory emojis. The rank desperation to be believed so you can convince yourself you wouldn’t rather be windsurfing right now.

I’m not sure whether I agree with the underlying sentiment of this one. Mostly because I don’t know what it is. Until I read this, I wasn’t worried about “The World” teaching my (rhetorical) son to be a woman. Is that a thing that will happen if I don’t teach him to hold the door open for people? Do I start buying GI Joes now? I’d roast the grammar too, if I weren’t also ignoring grammar for effect.

You couldn’t find a picture demonstrating proper trigger control? Wouldn’t that have worked a tiny bit better?

This one has it all. No further comment.

LISTEN in all caps. Without knowing who’s responsible for this meme, I could draw him, and the sketch would be so accurate the police would be able to use it to alert the public when he steals a golf cart and starts driving around hitting flamingos with an old towel for looking gay.

And finally, the pièce de résistance, the meme that drove to me waste a whole post on this in the first place. This is, by a wide margin, the most boomer thing I have ever seen. It could only be boomerier if it were a scanned photograph of a desktop computer screen on which this meme appeared. ALL GLORY TO THE BOOMERS

– AK

Review: Revelations

Is “Better Never Than Late” a me thing, or a Sagittarius thing? Anyway, here’s my review for January 2023.

Five out of five stars!

Read it: Revelations (Glyph Book 1) by Ronin Romero

Spoilers: NONE

Thousands of years in the future, a rag-tag band of human rebels fights for the survival of planet earth against demigods bent on sucking it dry. Aided by a god in human form, they wage war on two fronts, battling deadly demigod replicas while desperately seeking knowledge that will give them a long-awaited advantage.

Initial Impressions

After the first few pages: Like any sci-fi story, I have no idea what’s going on, where we are, or when we are. Generally within the first few pages I decide whether I care enough to figure it out. I’m still reading, so that answers that question. Also I can literally see the way Agnitius walks, and I love it.

After the first chapter: My mouth was hanging open in surprise at least three times just in the first chapter. Romero does a great job of getting the reader acclimated to this world without overloading on information or being repetitive. Mercelle’s creative swearing and pure bravery, drive, and curiosity make me immediately love her and want her to succeed.

Now for the review. I don’t write many of these, and never in long form, so forgive me if it’s a little rough. I’ll probably get better.

First Star: Setting
Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve, Colorado

Romero’s ability to paint a picture with words took me right back to Great Sand Dunes National Park; to the harsh, overwhelming saturation of the first few minutes of Pitch Black; to the thin, dry air of high desert trails in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Throughout the book, I could feel the vast emptiness that used to be the planet earth we know and love. I could hear dust falling. I could see the ways characters moved. I mention this first because everything else is subordinate: I can’t love a character if I can’t picture her, and can’t follow a story if I can’t see and hear it in my head. Achieving this in writing is not something just anyone can do, and Romero does it exceptionally well, whether he’s describing a character’s beauty or a horrifying battle scene.

Second Star: Heroes

Get it? Each thing I loved gets its own star, so you know I’m not just giving away stars like Oprah gives away cars.

This tale is absolutely saturated with heroes. They are not interchangeable; every single one serves his or her own purpose believably and compellingly. Even the bad guys are given the chance to be understood, even to be rooted for if you’re into that. You think you hate someone, but then you learn why he’s doing what he’s doing, and you can’t say for sure you wouldn’t do the same thing. Heroism isn’t limited to the battlefield, either. There are acts of bravery so small that the reader is the only one who gets to know about them, and courage you can relate to even if you’re not waging an underdog’s struggle against alien demigods.

Third Star: Epic

Epic is used as a noun, not an adjective. Some guy I knew in high school absolutely insisted the word ‘epic’ is not an adjective, and he won me over. Revelations is a classic epic, the beginning of something big, and I hope more people will pick it up, devour it, and shamelessly harass the author a la George R. R. Martin to hurry up and publish the next book. You can tell it’s part of a whole world that exists in the writer’s head, and there’s so much more story to tell.

Fourth Star: Pace

Sorry for the meme. I’m immature, okay? Anyway, do you ever feel like Mr. Squarepants here when you’re reading a book that’s fast-paced in a bad way? I read slowly enough without having to go back every few pages to make sure I know what’s going on. That possibility never looms larger for me than when I’m reading science fiction, which is why I generally avoid it. The good news for anyone who shares this predilection with me? Revelations hits its stride soon, but not too soon; and it maintains a readable, engaging pace right to the end with delightful sprints sprinkled throughout. If you need action like I do, you’ll get it, and you won’t get steamrolled by it.

Fifth Star: Prose

I wish I’d kept a running list of the expressions that made me think, “Damn, that’s good shit.” It’s just as well I didn’t since I’m not sure you could appreciate them out of context. As AI writing gains a foothold and starts bastardizing every aspect of human creativity, you’re going to salivate for writing like this like the characters in Revelations salivate for whatever the hell a “protein wedge” is.

As of this writing, Revelations has two reviews on Amazon and two ratings on Goodreads. That’s it! Please go guy it, read it, and leave a review to support this very talented writer.

– AK

Tiger by the Tail

I’m giving Kindle Vella a try to publish Tiger by the Tail. Episode one is finally live as of this morning, and I’ll drop a new one every Tuesday.

I like to go back and change things right up until five minutes before I hit publish. This is going to be a big adjustment.

Episodes usually come with optional author’s notes and polls, which is also going to be an adjustment. Overall it’s a cool concept.

Hope you can catch episode one! It’s 614 words, so, you know… be sure you’re able to set aside 37 seconds to read it.

– AK

Moanday

I hit my goal weight last year, and like a true 90s girl, I thought that would make me happy. I focused on numbers alone: calories, clothing sizes, and the digits on the scale. Okay, I’m not unhappy. But there’s more work to be done.

This year is about strength, stamina, and overall health. I still get to obsess about numbers, but only when it comes to working out. That’s my positivity for today.

Now for the negativity.

I keep seeing the same idiotic things on FB/IG and translating them in my head thusly:

  • “Watch till the end” means (1) skip to the next reel immediately, and (2) till (like a farmer) instead of ’til (abbreviated until) is here to stay no matter how wrong it is.
  • “Can’t believe I caught this on video” means literally nothing interesting is going to happen.
  • “Hack” means the third dumbest way to complete any task.
  • “POV” means I do not know what POV stands for.
  • “Wait for it” means do not wait for it.

I had to get that written down before it drove me nuts. Obviously, I need to limit my scrolling. Maybe I’ll file that in the “overall health” category.

Here is my handsome familiar, Warlock, to end on a positive note:

– AK