ALWAYS POSTED A WEEK EARLIER ON PATREON

Podcast Updates

This past week was an author-centric week of shows.  On Tuesday I had two Vermont institutions come on the show,  the creative team behind the Vermont Humor book, ‘I Could Hardly Keep from Laughing’ author, Bill Mares, and illustrator, Don Hooper!

On Thursday I was honored to have Simki Kuznick come on the show.  She was here to talk about her inspiring and timely book:  ‘Pauli Murray’s Revolutionary Life’.

Project Updates

I was able to plug away on designing the dad joke book cover this past week.  The Vermont Comic Creators group meets a couple of times online to hang out; which in itself is fun and inspiring. 

I also did a bit more on my Toilet Paper Head branching novel outline. I’m not sure where it will end, but I am liking the journey I am on with it so far.

What I’m reading

I am not so good at keeping up with my Kickstarter pledges and often seem to lose track of filling out backer surveys. A was a few months late in filling out my survey to get my book, ‘Jember: Becoming Somebody’, but Beserat Debebe, the creator was kind enough to send me a copy despite the gross tardiness of my backer survey.

The book is over 110 pages, a compilation of the first four issues, but I was able to read it within an hour.  Frankly, I was very impressed by the quality of the story.  I immediately connected with the characters and found the story’s backdrop of Eastern Africa engaging.  Beserat is great at instilling some cultural-specific terms and actions that serve as a nod to his Ethiopian audience and as a cross-cultural educational piece for an uninitiated western audience.

There are also a few well-timed jokes put into the book that positively affects the pacing of the story and adds humor through character development.  I am excited to read more of Beserat’s work.

Personal Updates

Spring is knocking heavily at the door.  We had a warm spell that is doing a good job in melting the snow.

Covid numbers are still staying low and I have seen that COVID-related items that were rare to come by are now in surplus.  A lot of masks and a lot of free test kits are available and at our office, we have a few dozen test kits that are about to expire so we are enticing folks to talk 2 or 3 boxes with them.

In other news, I was way happier than I should have been when it was announced that the U.S. Senate passed a bill to make Daylight Savings time permanent.   Doing the math, there are some benefits and drawbacks.  The benefit from where I live is that the sun will never set before 5 pm; but the drawback is that on the shortest day of the year, the sun will rise at around 8:30 am. As of this writing, we have 3 hours and 15 extra minutes of daylight compared to our darkest day of the year, December 21st.  We have also hit the milestone of 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of darkness.