May 2025

 It's the last day of May, and I almost missed the monthly update, which lately seems to be the only place I have been getting any writing in. Still counts as writing, though. It's been a busy month with lots of things going on. When you have a kid in school, a lot happens at the end of the school year. Especially when that kid is awesome. 

So here's the rundown.

Movies (basically my Letterboxd):

Oddity: a couple of jump scares and an interesting premise. I was thinking it was going to be a bit more like Friday the 13th - the series or Warehouse 13. Where a team of antique collectors hunt down cursed items. So a little let down. Still liked it though. 

Friday the 13th: The Series - Season 1: I hunted this down after Oddity turned out to be different from what I was hoping for from the premise. I figured I would go to the source. I could only find it on YouTube, and the quality is terrible, but it was a show from the 80s. The bad quality of the upload matched my memory of watching the show on a television with bad reception. I remembered the premise and most of the episodes. The stories are dated, and the acting is terrible, but I read that it was nominated for a couple of  Emmys and won some others. It was a different time. It's in the same universe as Friday the 13th, but aside from that, the stories didn't share anything but the name.

Get Away: A fun Comedy Horror set on an island in Sweden about a family on Vacation, written by Nick Frost, famous for Shaun of the Dead. Heck of a twist

Lastly - Murderbot on Apple TV. As much as I wanted the role to be played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, it's a pretty good take on the first novella.

Books (basically my Goodreads):

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk - This book has been great and weird and fun, and I have no idea why I haven't finished it yet. A great read for anti-hunting, astrology aficionados.

Zombie Bake-Off by Stephen Graham Jones - This is a fun one so far. Definitely one for fans of zombies and wrestling.

Let This Radicalize You by Hayes & Marianne Kaba - It was an introduction to activism and organization for the book club Jen started with the Maine Humanities Council as a way to connect folks interested in reading and talking about difficult books.

 Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 by M.E. O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi - This is the second book we are reading as part of the difficult book club. This one is fiction and imagines a future after the collapse of everything, and it's been built back with the intent of taking care of people. It's tough, though, because it requires a collapse of everything.

Writing (basically my writer blog):

I saw an article about a Porsche showing up in the middle of a hiking trail and thought about the complexities of writing stories that take place in the modern world. If you write about the past, and something weird happens. It's on the news or in a newspaper, or it's something someone mentions when visiting from the town over. Marty McFly was able to drive a car from the future into the middle of nowhere and stuck around for a bit. 

Before the internet - a car could show up. Someone might think ‘Huh, that’s weird’ and then go on their way. Tell someone in town later, maybe it would make the news. In the story I read, web researchers took over, maps appeared, discussions about the possibility or impossibilities took place, and they found the impossible path taken to get the car where it was. It turns out an 80-year-old took a wrong turn and then a few more wrong turns, got stuck, and somehow made it home. His grown ass son was embarrassed for what his father had done

How do you write about the sudden appearance of a car without having to write about how it fits into the chaos of the online world? It's something some writers have figured out, I'm sure, but it adds a level of complication that writers of the past did not have to think about.

With that, I did not spend a lot of time writing this month. It was busy and I took time to practice drawing while watching Friday the 13th 0 the series, and spending time with the family. Maybe I'll have something next month. 

That's it for April

If you are on BlueSky and interested, follow me here: https://bsky.app/profile/spwhite.bsky.social

This is a picture I took on an evening walk, and I liked it.




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