Hello folks! It’s time once again for the Weekend Wrap-Up, in which I blather on at length about whatever I’ve been writing, reading, and doing. It’s not really a complicated or a novel concept.

This edition is a little late due to last week being a blistering hellmouth from which I barely escaped. I’m here, though, and hopefully things will settle a bit in the coming days

Anyway, let’s get to it, shall we?

What I’ve Been Writing

I can happily say I have finally finished the outline for “Gosling Gardens.” The outline ended up clocking in at around 2200 words. Now that I’m finished with that, I can actually draft the story, which will hopefully be easier and go faster since I won’t have to figure it out as I go long (necessarily, I can always change things as I go because that’s how writing works). Overall, so far, though, the detailed outline is working for me.

Something else that’s been working for me: using a rotating 20 and 10 minute timer schedule at my Sunday writing group meet up to keep me on task. I love my friends, but they can be chatter boxes, and I want to chatter box, too. But if the point of the group is writing, then I should try to get some writing done, something that I’m hit-and-miss about as of late.

So this Sunday, I brought headphones, queued up a brown-noise track on Spotify, and would make myself write for 20 minutes, then visit for 10. it worked really well — so well, in fact, that I used the process again when I got home. That’s how I got my outline finished in one Sunday after hum-hawing around for nearly 2 weeks prior.

Next comes the drafting phase, but Lord willing and the creek don’t rise, I can get this bad boy finished this week and edit it over the weekend so that it’s ready to be submitted by the end of the month.

What I’ve Been Reading

I’m about 75% through Necrotech, and it’s a blistering race to the finish. Mostly cyberpunk noir in the first 3/4s of the book, it’s shifted over into an Appleseed-esque cyberpunk mercenary sequence that I’m digging the hell out of out. Throw in some creepy digital zombies, and I am all about this last quarter especially.

As you can see in the picture, I picked up Kameron Hurley’s latest time-travelling sci-fi thriller The Light Brigade as well, and I can’t wait to dig into that. I’m a bit behind on my Worldbreaker series — I bought but haven’t actually read Empire Ascendant, but I have time to catch up on that since the third book isn’t out until later this year. I have a pretty big soft spot for time travel stories, so I can’t wait to see how she handles this. I always learn something when I read a Kameron Hurley work.

What I’ve Been Watching

I finally convinced my wife and I to dig into the first season of Star Trek: Discovery. I watched the first four episodes when it was originally airing, but then we cancelled CBS All-Access for financial reasons. I probably wouldn’t have picked it back up for one show, but given ST:Disco, plus the Picard spin-off coming soon, plus the animated Trek show, plus the new Twilight Zone, we decided we could probably swing it — plus, my wife loves The Price is Right a whole lot.

I really liked the first season. I’d been watching the original series for the first time a couple years ago, I think the months leading up to Disco’s premiere, and I appreciated how this show took some of the slicker aesthetic of the theatrical movies and applied it to many of the sensibilities and plots of the old show. There were definitely some issues I had with the show — it dipped into a trope that was disappointing and felt like a cheap grab at unearned pathos, but over all, I dug the hell out of it.

We just dipped into the first two episodes of season 2, and…I don’t know. The show feels snarkier than the last season, which feels like maybe it’s trying to be a course correction from the darker tone? But maybe it’s too far to me, because it almost feels jarring. Also, I was originally super stoked about Pike taking over as captain, but…he hasn’t really won me over yet.

So far, it feels like in lieu of the pathos and character development we got loads of through Michael’s personal arcs and backstory interweaving into the rest of the plot beautifully, we’re instead getting vague mysteries revolving around religious iconography. Admittedly, that’s quite a judgement leap since I’m only 2 episodes in, and I’ve by no means written the show off based on these very early impressions, but since I actually liked season one, I’m worried that this course correction to better align with some expectations of what is Star Trek means it’ll play flat for me.

To put a finer point on it, one of my friends just flatly says that Disco (at least season one) is not Star Trek, in spite of it bearing the Star Trek name. This bothers me for a multitude of reasons, partially because his adamant denial of it being True Star Trek seems to imply that if I liked Disco, then I don’t really like Star Trek? But then again, if this season is, in fact, a course correction to align to more traditional Trek, and I don’t like it as much…is he right?

Anyway this is a lot of overthinking about this and angsting over something that not only doesn’t really matter, but is too early to make any snap judgements on anyway. I’m still optimistic about season two, I’m hoping that Pike grows on me, and I can’t wait to see the interpretations of some classic Trek things that I know show up this season. I’ll keep you posted.

What I’ve Been Doing

As I mentioned above, last week was really rough. Work has been especially taxing recently, and on top of that, I’m pretty sure that I’ve been in a depressive period that I wasn’t aware of until now as I’m seeming pulling out of it. I’ve felt extra tired, stressed, and anxious, and all over basically nothing as things are actually objectively pretty good at the moment.

We had our second D&D session this past week, and it went really really well. I’ll have a full write-up of it soon, but for now I’ll just say that I hit the beats I intended to hit, and everyone seemed to have a really great time. One of the my players that was sick last time got to play this time…but another player was sick this time instead. So it seems to go with D&D games, though.

In my other D&D game, in which I’m playing, my kenku gunslinger, Bawk Holiday, bought every bottle of booze he could get his hands on, and was mostly disaffected and distant until he saw a woman crying over her child’s doll. That plucked at a heart string Bawk would like to pretend he doesn’t have, and now we’ve got ourselves in quite a pickle as we try to help a nobleman of some sort with his draft castle and his frail sister.

Beyond that? Not much. Hoping to get more sleep this week, get this story done, and maybe get some chores knocked out in the meantime. We’ll see how it goes though.

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And that’s the wrap up for this week. How has your week been? Done anything your proud of and want to share? Watched or read anything you want to chat about? Comment below! Or, if you’d prefer, you can drop me an email or hit me up on Twitter. I’d love to hear from y’all.

‘Til next time!