What I just listened to... twice: Help Me. I was entirely expecting a snotty send-up of a sad and self-involved self-help industry, in the tired "My year of being a crazy fill-in-the-blank" trope. And it tries to start out like that. For about a minute. Then it goes shockingly deep and intimate and informative, while also being funny and real. Also, I feel like I don't need to read the original books any more, and my intuition was right about Tony Robbins. Validation!
What I'm appreciating: My vision board. Because 2022 was 2022, I got around to a new viz board in July, but everything is happening exactly as it should (my viz board says so). I make my viz board digitally, where I can scrounge the precise images I want online and get all graphicky with it. Then I can put it on my desktop and stuff; print it out to tack up everywhere. I spend way too much time on it, making it perfect. Which may be the most important phase of it all. And it makes me feel shy about anyone seeing seeing it, and a little squidgy, and that's how I know that I am reaching. I am stretching my beliefs, like yoga. Did I mention how much of my last viz board happened, even in a year with cancer? MOST of it. And in unforeseen ways.
What I'm excited about recording: Wherever is Your Heart, by Anita Kelly. Anita Kelly, wow... I first encountered her writing voiced by Lindsey Dorcus - the sweet, heart-filled queer romance Love and Other Disasters, and Lindsey knocked that narration out of the park! So I was floored to be cast in the first Moonlighters novella, Sing Anyway (and also thought the standards were set pretty high!). Sing Anyway was the first time I got to first-person voice a non-binary character, and I was deeply moved by how authentic and true it felt, and what a gift it was that books like this exist, and that I got to step into a character whose skin just FIT.
Now this is the third Moonlighters book. As I excitedly effused with another narrator on Discord (who was working on the second book), We. Love. Anita. Kelly. Her writing is extraordinary.
Anita Kelly writes love. Sweet, vulnerable, human love, so delicately and real that it ceases to matter what queer identity our characters have, it's just people loving people, as it should be, and this, in my opinion, is a supremely beautiful accomplishment.
What I'm looking forward to: This puzzle.1 Goddamn this artist is incredible. (Lucille Clerc.) I did the 50 Trees puzzle, (twice) and had to seek out the 50 Plants puzzle, because the art is so good.
What's on my ipod (yes, that's an old, wonderfully indestructible ipod nano. I have a collection): Petrea Burchard's Camelot and Vine. Have I had the ebook for literally years, but waited for the audiobook? Yes. I now read-read almost nothing. Casey is learning that her fashionable Hollywood boots are suboptimal footwear when time-traveling to King Arthur's time. And I love the horse. I'm glad the horse is on the cover.
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