Hours Spent
mid-hell's front porch edition
Howdy! Welcome to the high-summer edition of That Thing About the Thing. It’s hot. There are bugs. I’m having trouble sleeping. Also it’s hot. But I’ve got a longer version of that summary for you, so LET’S GO
Hours Spent
Early this morning I had a nightmare. Just as someone put a hand to the back of my head and another to my forehead and was about to snap my neck, I woke up.
I could give that some context, but I don’t think it’s necessary—you get the idea. I couldn’t go back to sleep afterward.
But the image soon dissipated and I was left to meander along the usual paths my brain takes during that hour or two where it has decided it’s too late to fall back asleep but too early to get up. Things like lost opportunities, all the sh*t that needs to get done that day and probably won’t, the things I should have done in my thirties but didn’t, the things I did in my thirties but shouldn’t have, etc etc.
Somewhere on that path through the overgrown swampland of middle age I thought about what it must be like to grow up with tech. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have all this stuff as a kid. Or even as a younger adult. Back in the day, if I wanted someone to read a letter like this, for example, I’d have to get a publisher and write an entire memoir, or send it as snail mail to my five friends. And now it’s online, maybe “forever,” available to be scraped and added to some AI’s collective consciousness. Now I’m truly immortalized. Amazing!
If I’d had tech as a kid, there would not have been hours spent roaming the undeveloped land surrounding UC Irvine in the 1970s, discovering secret kid club headquarters hidden in dry, dusty ravines, or entire summer afternoons spent avoiding detection at the movie theater so we could watch Xanadu three times in a row. There would not have been hours spent lying on my stomach in front of our crappy stereo, memorizing the lyrics on the sleeve of James Taylor’s “JT” and “Gorilla” albums. No pretend game show recording sessions with my mom’s cassette recorder (the original podcaster’s kit), no skateboard, no baseball mitt.
I was a latch-key kid. It would have been me and my iPad.
Summertime Is Here
Marcus’ flowers are in full swing out in the yard. He started with a flowerbed (well, it was 2 vegeteable beds started in 2020 but that was short lived), but flower seeds spread like, well, seeds, and now the patio is surrounded so I can’t get to the compost bin, and where the compost bin used to be are also flowers and two tomato plants (not planted by us). There used to be two squash plants but he pulled those, they go everywhere!
We’ve got bees, butterflies, moths, hummingbirds—the whole gang is here.
Earlier in the summer, two brown thrashers built a nest in the bush right outside our kitchen window. I was out of town when Thrasher Junior made his appearance, but Marcus got a photo:
When the thrashers moved out, two catbirds moved in. They are so cute, with their little black toupees and all the wing flapping. And they really do sound like cats! It’s adorable.
They’ve been popping in and out of the bush for a few weeks, and yesterday I heard the very first peeps of a little Junior Catbird. So exciting! Of course, I’ll probably be out of town when Junior makes her debut, so I’ll have to hope Marcus can get a photo.
I have not been home this time of year for two years, so it’s nice to see what nature is up to. Heat, thunderstorms, cicadas, flowers, bird babies.
Blurb Update
Last week, I spent an hour working with a “blurb specialist” on my book description for The Blingsters. She’s located in Australia and we hopped on Google whatever-their-chat-thing-is and hammered out a version that I’m really happy with. It’s way better than any AI crap! And also better than the one I did myself. I just had a hard time being objective, and for some reason I’m also terrible at the elevator pitch story summary. I guess I need to hire someone to help me with that too.
Writing a blurb is a much different animal than writing a book and I just couldn’t do it. It was really enlightening to sit down with a real copywriter and put something together. Want to read it? Let me rephrase that: I’d love it if you’d read it in its natural habitat and tell me what you think!
It gave me the confidence to try the blurb for my next book—the one that will come after The Blingsters. It’s called The Big Cheese, and it’ll be out in January 2024. I think I did much better on that one. I’ll show it to you soon.
