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NEWS AND VIEWS - MARCH 2022
WRITING NEWS More of the same this month. Still working on A City Burnished Silver, but I've been having a hard time finding time for it lately, between my job and my usual insomnia problems. I've probably only put down about 5,000 words this month. Current word count is something like 55,000, and I've probably got another 40,000 words to go, so maybe I'll have it done around August or September? I don't know. As for the new edition of The Signal City Visitor's Guide, well, apart from the short story and the illustrations it's pretty much complete. (If you've got any degree of artistic skill and you'd like to contribute something, please let me know.) * * * * * * * * WHAT I'M READING I finished reading Thomas Penn's The Brothers York this month. This was a good, engaging account of the Wars of the Roses, with an emphasis on the York brothers (Edward, George, and Richard) and their fraught relationship. Penn seems broadly sympathetic to George (the middle brother) and is fair to Richard. He does, however, cite Thomas More just a little bit too often for my tastes (More, a Tudor apologist, was horrendously biased against Richard) and he seems to believe that Richard was directly responsible for the murder of Edward IV's sons as well -- he hints that a pension was given to the widow of one of the alleged killers as a reward. This is old hat, as far as I'm concerned; Paul Murray Kendall did away with these Tyrell-Dighton-Forest theories almost seventy years ago. It's much more likely that Buckingham murdered the princes, to clear the way for himself and for the despicable pretender Henry Tudor. Of course Richard wasn't blameless -- as Kendall says, the princes' fates were basically sealed the moment Richard decided to take the throne, so in that sense he was ultimately responsible for their deaths. (Henry VII and Henry VIII went on to kill dozens of rival claimants, though, and nobody ever talks about that.) Anyway, here's some of the books I've been working on this month: 
* * * * * * * * WHAT I'M WATCHING I watched the first episodes of both Komi-san wa, Comyushou desu and Ijiranaide, Nagatoro-san a few days ago, and liked them both. I especially liked Komi Can't Communicate; although it's mostly a comedy, I found this first episode very moving, probably because it was so relatable -- my own social skills are almost as lousy as Komi's. I'm not comfortable talking to people I don't know well, and I try to avoid it if I can. I even have a hard time greeting coworkers at the office -- just getting out the words "good morning," when I walk by the receptionist's desk is a challenge. 
In fact my fear of talking to people played a large part in my dropping out of college, years ago -- every time I ran into a bureaucratic problem that could only be solved by talking to someone, like a professor or an office worker or my adviser or whoever, I chickened out, and then the problem would get worse. I had a hard time making friends in college, too -- I managed to do it my first year, because my roommate was more social than I was and was always bringing people around, but the next year almost all of the friends I'd made either graduated or transferred to other schools, and when I accidentally ended up getting a dorm room to myself, I shut myself up in there and never went out. By the end of my second year I was so unhappy that I didn't even try to make friends -- all I cared about was getting through the week so I could go home on the weekends. And trying to explain these fears and feelings to my parents, or to anyone else, was next to impossible. Most people don't understand how difficult it can be; they don't understand why you can't just face your fears and get over yourself. As for Nagatoro-san, I was able to relate to that, too -- pretty much every girl I went to high school with was a Nagatoro to me, to one degree or another. Most of the time they didn't even notice me, but when they did, they teased me in the same bratty way Nagatoro teases the protagonist, probably because I was so serious all the time. * * * * * * * * MORE WINTER SCENES Still working on this big project for the local power company. Here's some more photos I've taken while I've been out and about this month. 
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