💌Hanlon’s Reader #12: Augseptober Newsletter

"So if you wake up one morning and it's a particularly beautiful day, you'll know we made it." 🚀🌞

Nov 02, 2024

💌 Monthly Update: Augseptober 2024

Hello Readers,

There are times in deep summer where my shadow seeks out a soft spot of shade to lie in and hibernate through the long heat. This year, I let it rest.

However. While my shadow may have gathered strength, I am best described as… tapped out. Job stress is getting to me. Election-year fuckery makes it hard to focus on anything else. And I wouldn’t say the well has run dry, but I’ve lost the bucket down there somewhere and getting it back has been beyond my powers. It’s not writer’s block, it’s just plain exhaustion.

Writing consistently takes discipline. I was always more of a “when the inspiration strikes” kind of guy at heart and inspiration keeps missing me for some reason. I’ve just been letting it slide.

Inspiration is… explosions? Maybe I don’t want inspiration to strike after all

Well, anyway, I felt my shadow tapping me on the shoulder the other day. From the bubbling, inky thought-murk, the first line of this post rose and formed clearly, attached to this urge to write it down like it means something worth expressing. When this happens I’ll work it over in my head until it feels how it should, which is just whenever it hits me right.

Sometimes I forget to write these things down though, and that always sucks. Sometimes they come back like a thunderbolt, and I’ll scramble to write it down before I lose it again. (I’ve got notebooks all over the place and so many random notes on my phone.)

So that’s me, and here I am writing my tripled-up Augseptober newsletter as we’re just around the corner from a 2024 coin-flip of a presidential election, where tails means American fascism. It’s a pretty weird time right now.

Let me tell you a story about myself.

When I turned thirteen, my parents had this sort of family tradition that they started with my older brother where on our thirteenth birthday we’d go out for dinner somewhere, just the three of us, and they’d ask what we thought was the meaning of life. I knew it was coming, so I had to time think about it.

When we got there and sat down at a table, they asked, “So James, what’s the meaning of life?”

I just kept saying, “I don’t know.”

I was like… I mean, how should I know? I’m thirteen years old. Maybe in a way I felt like it was too big of a question and narrowing the whole meaning of life down into one answer would make it too concrete. As though whatever I said, if it’s the meaning of life, it’s something I should pursue throughout my life, right? So whatever I said, I’d have to follow through on it somehow.

It reminds me of the story of how I picked my favorite color. Back in elementary school, I had an assignment to color in some cartoon animal. But the instructions were like this: fill in the animal with your favorite color, red or blue.

I hadn’t thought about it like that before—really, it doesn’t even make sense to put it that way. My favorite between the two? What if red or blue wasn’t my favorite color? And it’s not like I literally had to choose, I could have just filled it out while having my real favorite color be whatever I wanted.

But I went ahead and thought about it. And it’s hard, red and blue are like the top dogs of colors. They’ve got gravitas… would I be fire type or water type? Hot or cool? Summer or winter? If I truly had to choose as my favorite between just red and blue, what was it? And I realized I actually liked both red and blue a lot and I didn’t want to choose a favorite.

Eventually I did choose red though because I needed to finish the thing and foxes are cool. In fact, the first real “short story” I ever wrote in school was about a boy making friends with a red fox.

Life is full of choices like this. At my thirteenth birthday dinner, my parents and I kept talking about “the meaning of life” throughout dinner and I finally thought of an answer I liked enough to make it my official response.

The meaning of life is to be happy.

That way, even if I commit to it and end up changing my mind later, I won’t regret pursuing happiness, right?

I think (among other reasons) this mindset is why I chose writing, ultimately. Somewhere along the way, I probably could have tried a STEM path instead, but that sounded like a lot of difficult, complicated work involving deep study that would land me a job doing something I hadn’t set my heart on and wouldn’t enjoy. Or maybe I would have!

If I had done that, I’d probably wonder what stories I would have written and didn’t. Or maybe I would have written the same stories anyway without getting a formal writing education. Who knows!

Either way, my attempts on this current path continue…

🔃 In Progress

📗 Strange Harvest: Broken Dome

Part I: Coalescent Acts of Desperation

Concluding the *Strange Harvest* short series

Strange Harvest Part I: Surface
Larval Haze Part I: Safe and Warm and Dry

This will be the next batch of content I post. The world-building posts have been fun, but I need to get back into this story before it gets too dusty.

What does the organized labor movement look like hundreds of years from now on a thriving jungle planet in a distant, marooned star system cut off from the rest of the galaxy?

Wes Jackson doesn’t have a clue, but he’ll soon find out. He’s made a classic adventure-seeker’s blunder in the wild swamps of Surface: shipping out unprepared while thinking to himself, how bad could it be?

One security contractor in over his head becomes a splash of fuel igniting a smoldering years-long conflict at the prestigious Royal Lotus Harvesting Company…

❗ Upcoming:

After I finish out the Strange Harvest arc I’ll be getting back to our young heroine Bee as she continues her journey away from home with Captain Anson, Myra, and the crew of Wanderlust.

🎁 Bonus Content:

Can you guess these yet-to-be-guessed quotes? 💬

It’s time for more hints edition

💌#4: "If there's a bright center to the universe, you're on the planet that it's farthest from." ☀🏜

Spoken by a young Mark in a sandy, sandy desert

💌#5: 😎 "Kaneda! What do you see?!" 🌞

Pre-Captain-America-Chris-Evans tries to blow up the Sun… in a good way

💌#7: 🃏➡ "A Kansas City Shuffle is when everybody looks right, you go left." ⬅🃏

Why’s he called Mr. Goodcat?

💌#9: "Sometimes, you have to roll a hard six." 🦇L⭐

Series has a great start and a terrible ending, I will fight you

💌#11: "I can't lie to you about your chances, but... you have my sympathies." 🥛

You’ll always be Bilbo to me, Ash