My Brain is a Festive Pudding

The holidays are always a little extra busy for us. Besides Christmas, my husband's family has four birthdays between the 28th and Jan 4th. Normally we get together and do one birthday thing, but obviously we didn't do that this year. So Man Friend's birthday was yesterday and he mostly spent it making himself a chair, because that's what he does now. He would have survived earlier eras, whereas I would have either died of something silly or been burned as a witch. (I'll post pics of the chair when he's done. It's really cool. He also built a new frame for the futon in our garage this week. Glad one of us is doing something.)

I haven't been working. I took several days off because I just felt absolutely exhausted and haven't been able to make my brain work. The very idea of even opening my laptop seemed too much. I managed to burn myself out a little, I think. So I took a few days off to read books and hang out with my kids and watch movies. This week I started a miniseries about Victorian Farming (called The Victorian Farm) which is fascinating. I texted one of my friends that I would absolutely have died during the Victorian era and she said, "I mean, to be fair, most people did?" I've also watched the Hitman's Bodyguard, The Proposal, Last Christmas (someone should have warned me about that movie), and my husband and I turned off Sucker Punch. It's rare that I stop watching a movie. I mean, I've now seen Santa Jaws twice.  I can watch almost anything. But despite having a pretty great cast, that movie was just a depressing slog. At one point my husband said, "Can we tap out? Every single woman in this movie is getting shit on and I'm done. It's just miserable." Off it went.

I did manage to watch Recipe for Seduction, which is Lifetime's "mini-movie" (aka a long commercial. It's 17 minutes.) featuring KFC. Thats' right. A KENTUCKY FRIED CHICKEN LIFETIME FILM FEATURING MARIO LOPEZ AS THE COLONEL. It's bonkers. I have no regrets there. I did learn that "colonel" is a title they can just hand out to anyone in Kentucky. It's not attached to the military. (And by "handing it out to anyone" I mean that it's a recognition of accomplishments or services to the state or nation.) Why doesn't my state have anything like that? Get on it, Washington. I want a weird title.

Other than that, it's mostly been our weird pile up of holiday films and strange explorations into the Hallmark/Lifetime/Netflix area of film making. This year I watched The Christmas Setup (mostly because I wanted to see the first Lifetime holiday romcom featuring two male leads. It was cute.), The Knight Before Christmas (I had a lot of questions. Like, who loans a time traveler from the past their car?), Holidate (pretty funny) and my mom and I rewatched January Man. I love both Kevin Kline and Alan Rickman forever.

Smalls has managed to rewatch Sherman and Mr. Peabody 8,000 times, leaving us with a lot of discussions about people with dog heads (like Anubis or wepwawet like Ed) and the new Pixar movie, Soul, also 8,000 times. (Slight spoiler here) One thing I like about Soul--there's a moment where the main character, Joe, gets his dream and for a minute he's absolutely ecstatic. Pure joy. And then he's bereft because what does he do now? What do you do after you attain the impossible goal you've set for yourself? It's something we don't often think about, discuss or plan for, and it's something I had to grapple with after I sold my first book. I've already rambled too much here, but I might get into it at a later date.

I've also just posted some screenshots from Twitter where I doled out some random writing advice, such as it is, and I thought some of you might be interested in seeing it. I'll get back to normal posting next week. Right now I have to turn my first pass edits from Curses around because they're due on the 5th!

I hope you're all cozy and warm and ready to see the back side of 2020.

-Lish