Newsletter: February 2025 Edition
Notes from the Writing Desk, An Excellent Author Interview, and More
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Photo by Wilhelm Gunkel on Unsplash
Welcome to the February 2025 edition of my newsletter and… Did you watch that Kendrick Lamar Super Bowl Half Time show? I’m sure you did and, if you didn’t—oh man, it was a doozy! Packed full of symbolism, it was one for the ages, surely to be studied and referenced for a long time to come. Without mentions of blunts, hoochie mamas, or bling as many may expect, it was a masterclass in Black history, U.S. political division, Lamar’s place in pop culture, and one of the most biting finales in a hip-hop beef EVER (sorry, Drake. Good luck coming back from this one). I really, really enjoyed it. There were the obligatory social media posts afterwards of “I didn’t get it” and that’s to be expected. Lamar is a next-level artist who can navigate between low and high brow, tell complicated stories, and drop bangers. Dude won a Pulitzer Prize for crying out loud (other popular musicians to do that = zero). Those of us in the business of telling stories recognized his mastery. He did it at the Super Bowl of all places. And the funny thing is, I don’t even like to watch football. I had to power through several minutes of some boring excuse for a sport to get to the good stuff. Anyway, up and onward to the newsletter.
Last month, I completed a first draft of a novel I started working on in July 2024. I’m keeping the title and description under wraps for now. It came out to 74,000 words in length, four thousand more than my target of 70k words. I felt really inspired writing this first draft. It brought me a lot of joy, which is something to celebrate in these troubled political times. Rather than inundate myself in national news, I curbed my desire to do just that and focused on writing this novel. It took a lot of discipline! It would have been easy to sink into the political-news rabbit hole and fume and seethe and grit my teeth, something I did a lot from 2016 – 2020 when our orange-baby overlord miraculously won the presidency the first time. But I was determined to focus on the joy of writing and I did just that.
