These three books were waiting for me when I got home. That’s Sisters of the Lizard, the sequel to my ninth-favorite book of 2025, She Knows All the Names, the sequel to my twelfth-favorite book of 2025, and The Last Contract of Isako, the first book in a new trilogy by Fonda Lee, whose last trilogy was my favorite book of the year three fucking books in a row. And next week I get a new Dungeon Crawler Carl book, the latest book in a series that was first in my list of favorite books of 2025.
Come on, God damn it. Slow down. I read faster than 95% of the entire human race and that may be an understatement, and I can’t keep up with this shit. I need all the writers to get together and put themselves on a schedule. This is crazy.
The boy wasn’t feeling well today, so we both got to stay home since my wife is out of town until Friday morning(*), and … blech. I tend to spend all day gaslighting myself when I’m home because I’m sick, and when I am absolutely not sick at all and home anyway the feeling is powerful indeed. Like, I’m union; I get family sick days and frankly no one gets to challenge me on my sick days one way or another anyway. But I’ve spent all day being twitchy and nervous for no goddamn reason at all.
I, uh, don’t really have anything other than that. Today didn’t suck nearly as hard as the rest of the week has but that’s not exactly a difficult bar to clear. Hopefully I can get through tomorrow without any illnesses, car accidents or people getting shot. We’ll see.
(*) Because my schedule means I leave before he gets out of bed, and because my wife has a job where she can work from home effectively any time she wants at the drop of a hat, she is nearly always the one who stays home. Not because hurr durr sick kid is Mom’s job.
… but guess what I had to buy four of on no notice tonight?
The good news: turns out I can afford a sudden low-four-figure emergency! Which doesn’t mean that I want to spend that kind of money, or that it doesn’t toss me into a shitty mood for the rest of the night, especially when it takes just over an hour to get the new tires installed. And especially especially when I can feel my stomach lining eating itself while I’m waiting, which leads to a 3500-calorie Burger King dinner, and I think I’ve already eaten enough in January and February to last me until March.
And it’s going to end up being three nights in a row, too, because tomorrow after school I have my weird little gay kids club and then after that I have TRIVIA NIGHT for probably longer than I think. I haven’t done TRIVIA NIGHT in a while but feel free to read this and this to find out how the last one went.
Went to bed last night feeling fine, slept through the night without issue, and realized I wasn’t going to work within ten seconds of waking up this morning. I slept all day and right now I still kind of feel like hell but I’m going to try to go in tomorrow because writing lesson plans for the 3rd day of the semester is kind of a nightmare. But God forbid I forget to put up some kind of blog post, right?
I am bored and kvetchy and it’s making my anxiety act up something fierce. I actually got quite a lot done today– no big projects, but a ton of little jobs around the house and I got the oil changed on the car– but since the sun went down I’ve turned into a mess, and I can’t concentrate well enough to read.
That part’s the alarming part, honestly. It’s rare that I can’t focus enough to read. I’m watching someone else play a video game while I’m writing this, and I’m starting to think I need to dive back into Skyrim or something like that; I simultaneously need something new to do and am kind of aching for something familiar and comfortable I can just fall into.
I’m also, for the first time in several years, pretty excited (or at least not actively dreading) Christmas, mostly because I feel like I definitely won Christmas this year. I don’t know if other families do this thing, where they’re competitive about who gets each other the best gifts– hell, I don’t know if my family does this thing or if it’s just me– but one way or another it’s me, hi, I won Christmas, it’s me.
Anyway, I’m going to go take down the wallpaper in the library or something.
Please, for your interest and edification, note this Bluesky “skeet” from me, written roughly four months ago:
At the time I wrote that, I believed it to be true. And it is possible that it’s still correct; after all, Paige Mahoney has been getting knocked out for five books now, and Vis from Hierarchy has only had two. But it has got to be true that Domitor Vis Telimus Catenicus Leathfhear Diago Carnifex Deaglán Silverhand Siamun has been grievously injured more than any other character in the history of the written word. And it gets so much worse when he gets split into three, because then they can just totally throw logic to the wind and hurt the hell out of him in every chapter, because you’re not going to remember that spear wound in his thigh in six chapters when you come back to him, and the other two versions of him don’t have the spear wound. It’s absolutely nuts, and it’s one of those things that can’t be unnoticed once you notice it. This man has had at least seventy concussions. You’re ideally not supposed to be knocked out so hard you don’t wake up for a week even once in your life, and Vis has it happen multiple times over the course of the maybe a handful of years that both books take place over.
The second special bonus gripe is connected to Islington’s world-building, although this is not at all something that is unique to him, and in fact I’ve been seeing it a lot lately across multiple authors. Y’all, if you’re going to make “Gods!” or “Hells!” a swear word in your fantasy series, the gods or the hells need to have some presence in your book other than the swearing. Maybe this is another example of me being a sloppy reader, but there are a handful of gods named in a glossary at the end of the book, and there’s whatever the hell Religion is (I don’t know! There’s literally just a thing that the graduates can join called Religion! I don’t know what it is or what they do.) but worship and/or fear of and/or basic acknowledgment of divinity is damn near entirely absent from the book. Vis certainly doesn’t worship anything. And I’m sorry, but if any form of the concept of Hell made it onto the page at all beyond “Hells” being a swear word, I missed it. It’s lazy, especially in a world where they already both use standard English profanity and a made-up word, “vek,” that is a pure expletive in the way you might yell “Shit!” or “Fuck!” if something bad or startling happened. There’s no verb form. No one veks, and nothing is ever described as veking (vekking?) anything. But we don’t need “gods” or “hells” or “gods-damned,” which is somehow worse, and it’s one more annoying detail in a book full of them.
I was not expecting that word search to be nearly as difficult as it turned out to be. No one came close to finishing it, or even finishing half of it, although a couple of my more obsessive kids told me they were taking it home over break and would bring it back on Monday, and I started poking at it myself around noon and as of right now, at 8:30, after putting another hour or so into it, I’m still missing 37 names. This generator does this absolutely wicked thing where they like to make clusters that are almost names but off by a letter or two, or let you spell a name if you make a right turn somewhere, and … damn. I’ve never in my life quit a word search because it was too hard, and this one won’t break me, but it’s coming close.
