119: October 2024

I signed the paperwork for the second edition of Becoming Alien this month, which means I'm officially under deadline. I write best when I'm under a deadline–it's how I write reviews week in and week out–but most of my work is a sprint, and book-writing is more like distance running. Not quite a marathon, since I'm building off an established foundation; maybe it's closer to a 10K. It's still a lot of new words to commit to paper between now and my deadline.

This month a good chunk of that writing happened while I was traveling. I took advantage of cheap round-trip tickets for a trip back to Seattle that I've been threatening to take for years now. I went to undergrad there, and consider it to be one of my hometowns, although now I've lived in Chicago twice as long as I lived in Seattle. One morning during my trip, as I sat reading in a coffee shop, I realized that I was on the edge of a neighborhood I used to haunt, on a road that used to be part of my commute a decade ago. I also realized that if I'd stayed in Seattle, I'd be a completely different person from the one I turned out to be. I'm grateful for the person I became instead, and I was grateful for the opportunity to let those two worlds touch, even if it was just for a few days.

What I wrote:

Quite a lot that isn't yet ready to be published–including work on the second edition of Becoming Alien! For Seeing & Believing, I wrote reviews of Joker: Folie à Deux and The Outrun, which you can read now.

What I talked about:

It's been a little over a year since we traded in our microphones for the newsletter. We're both incurable Tolkien heads, so Kevin and I decided to jump back in to the recording studio (aka the home office in my house) and talk about season two of The Rings of Power.