Lit City Blues

Hey, remember when I wrote my elected officials about the potential cuts to NOAA and the National Weather Service? Remember when the cuts went ahead anyway, and there are now delightful tweets like this one floating around? I want to say again: I'm not against cuts. I'm not against shrinking the size of the government, but what I am against is cutting off your own nose to spite your face. I am against this delusional idea that absolutely everything of value must go regardless of its good or not. This is not good. Don't believe me? Go talk to any meteorologist, and they will tell you that these cuts are a terrible, terrible idea.  (The interesting thing-- if such things could be called interesting-- is going to be how people react to this when the cuts are felt in a real way. I do not think we will be frogs in boiling water that's turned up slowly-- I think we're going to be frogs in suddenly boiling water and we're going to be pissed off. At least I hope so.) A...

The Missus read this book a while back and really liked it, so after hearing her talk about it for months , I finally got around to picking it up and seeing for myself what the fuss was about. In essence, Michael Easter is arguing something pretty unusual that grabs your attention right away: we're too damn comfortable. "Embrace discomfort to reclaim your wild, happy, healthy self." That's the tagline on the front of the book, and quite honestly, going into it, I was a little bit dubious. I don't know why: I got really into the whole mushroom thing that went around a few years back, and I will happily take Lion's Mane until the end of my days because I found all the mushroom science I read to be somewhat convincing. (I am, I will admit, also the type of person to say, "hey, that supplement sounds interesting, maybe I'll try that," so there's a little bit of that there I've got to be honest about as well.) I've heard all the Joe Rogan ...

 1. Look, I've been saying it for years now, but this has to be the year of Book 4. It's grinding away, little by little but at minimum, I'm going to get this damn thing into a workable draft format this year. If I'm very lucky and write very well, I might be into revisions by the end of the year and beating into shape for a final draft and a release. I have no idea why this is taking so long. I have no excuses to offer. I just really, really want to get this- at a minimum- closer to the finish line this year.  Quarter One revealed to me that Book 4 had a structural problem. I'm working on re-tooling it a bit now and I want to get back into it sometime this month and have palpable progress to report on by the end of this quarter. (For more details, you can see my Substack update.) Do I think I'm still on track to get this thing closer to the finish line by the end of the year? I do. But when I started writing books and putting them out into the world, I mad...