Newsletter #3 - September 25, 2018: On Historical Fiction and Writing by Hand

Good day!

Still hard at work with Music for Parasites. I saw an ad in the school newspaper for a starting position with a local extermination company. I'd jump on it if my semester weren't ramping up.

That reminds me: if you know any interesting facts about bugs, or have experience with extermination, feel free to write back. I love researching for my writing, and it's great when people help out.

On a totally different note, Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See is a great book. It takes place during WWII, during the German occupation of France. Knowing its subject matter, I hesitated to pick it up. WWII has been so thoroughly mined for movies and film that such stories often feel tired to me. Of course Nazis are bad. Of course the experience was horrible beyond imagination. However, if a story's effective, it captures crucial lessons from an era. We study history so we don't repeat it. This is a great and important book.

On another totally different note, below is a photo from Angkor Wat. A lot of the additions to Music for Parasites were written by hand during our travels abroad. I continue to write a lot by hand. It encourages a different rhythm of thinking.

Infinite Regards,

Jay