I’m still trying to explore what I want to do with this newsletter. I was talking about it with a friend the other night and I think I’m overly stressing about it. My main goals are to: write more often so as to feel less rusty, write what comes to mind and not worry about it so much, and maybe (??) facilitate discussion with my awesome readers. Which I definitely want to do more of!
Currently, only paying subscribers can use commenting on Substack and my newsletter is (currently, at least) 100% free so we can’t use that. BUT! I highly encourage y’all to let me know your feelings on the things I’m talking about—or just whatever you want to talk about in general. I’m on Twitter at passingfair pretty much at all moments I’m not at work so feel free to tweet at me (or DM me. My DMs are open!) whenever you want to chat.
If you haven’t guessed by things I have already stated in these emails, I’m a bit of a nerd. This manifests in oh so many ways but the particular way I want to talk about today is D&D.
Dungeons and Dragons is having a bit of a renaissance at the moment, being a popular past time of cool hipster kids now rather than just the stereotype of basement dwellers of the 80s. Most of my friends are creatives (writers, artists, general cool people) and a hobby that’s based around storytelling is pretty much up everyone’s alley so in the past year or so, I’ve started playing. And I love it. I’m only in one (internet-based) ongoing game but I’ve done a few one-shots and they’ve all been outstanding.
My friend Kevin has been DM for the past two of them and he is just phenomenal. He works super hard to create super original, quirky, fun stories for us and I’m constantly impressed by how great he is at it. I got to do a super cool one-shot with just him, one on one, last summer which is going to be the first story in an all one-on-one one-shots actual play podcast he’s putting together that’ll be out real soon that I will be sharing with all of you when it goes live because you need it but this past weekend, we had the first session in a new one-shot heist game we’ve been planning and it was SO. FUN.
We’re a band of thieves that are stealing artifacts from the magical world equivalent of the British Museum to give them back to the cultures they belong to. We’re a strong silent tiefling battlemaster, a charismatic (???) yet cowardly warlock, a strategist sorcerer, and an inquisitor rogue tabaxi (cat person) (me, obviously). All the super cool pictures of our party were drawn by our sorcerer, my super talented friend MK Reed. My character Aggie comes from money so I got us an invite to an exclusive party and we spent our entire first session just …. going to the party and annoying people at it. We talked to pretty much every person there, found one grumpy guy that everyone attempted to cheer up/talk to/annoy, and pretty much just ate food and looked at stuff. Did we accomplish any of our task? Well, we found out where one of the artifacts we have to swipe is. Because it is on the table across from the snacks.
We’re having our next session this coming weekend and I could not be more stoked. We’re going on a tour. We’ll probably bring chips. It’ll be great.
Today in Fun Things You Find Out as a Children’s Librarian:
To help a kid’s summer reading, I was looking around Rick Riordan’s website, finding out which book was the first in each of his different series. After the question was answered, I was poking about the website because it’s just really cool and well designed when I found this page that has all these AMAZING character portraits for pretty much every character in every series. I mean, LOOK AT THIS PERCY JACKSON!
Official art is usually more … stilted. Super impressed, I tried to find out who the artist was and imagine my delight to find an article from a few years ago explaining what was up. Apparently, a lot of fans of the series were seriously unimpressed with the official art and there was a fan artist named Viria (real name: Viktoria Ridzel) who everyone loved. Welp, good ol’ Rick Riordan decided to just commission that artist to make all the new official art. I’m so beyond charmed. And it looks so good!
This is what a good author/readership relationship looks like.
If you ever felt like people change, apparently they don’t. Because, out of curiosity the other night, I looked up one of my very few youtube videos on a now defunct profile where I gave a tour for friends back home of my new apartment in Tokyo back in 2010. Next month, this video will be nine years old. Looking back on that time in my life, despite a lot of hardships I went through at that point (oh hey, tsunami, how you doing?), my general, personal, opinion is that I used to be a lot cooler when I was in my early twenties. Sure, I was living abroad for most of it but it was more than that. I had an ease about me back then that current me envies. I thought this would shine through in this video.
As I watched it, though, I noticed that I have the exact same verbal tics, the same bad jokes, the same embarrassment at not being able to open a cupboard that I would have if I made that same video this weekend. Sure, I was in a much more exciting place than my current abode (my childhood bedroom) but I was still very much me. And that’s something I don’t know if I would have ever found comforting before but I definitely do now.
Of course I’m going to show you the video. Fun fact: this is not the smallest apartment I’ve ever lived in.
Brief horn toot: One of my books, The Cardboard Kingdom, won the Dwayne McDuffie Award for Kid’s Comics this past weekend! It’s a pretty big deal and the whole team is very excited! Fingers crossed for an Eisner in July!
I have just finished Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee by Casey Cep twenty minutes before writing this and it is SPECTACULAR. If you like true crime, biographies, Harper Lee or just bonkers stories in general, you need to check this out.
If you, like me, are fascinated and mystified by the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, the definite article has been written on it. The section about what most likely happened, staging the scene, is so incredibly eerie, I can’t get over it.
Which brings us back to the demise of MH370. It is easy to imagine Zaharie toward the end, strapped into an ultra-comfortable seat in the cockpit, inhabiting his cocoon in the glow of familiar instruments, knowing that there could be no return from what he had done, and feeling no need to hurry. He would long since have repressurized the airplane and warmed it to the right degree. There was the hum of the living machine, the beautiful abstractions on the flatscreen displays, the carefully considered backlighting of all the switches and circuit breakers. There was the gentle whoosh of the air rushing by. The cockpit is the deepest, most protective, most private sort of home. Around 7 a.m., the sun rose over the eastern horizon, to the airplane’s left. A few minutes later it lit the ocean far below. Had Zaharie already died in flight? He could at some point have depressurized the airplane again and brought his life to an end. This is disputed and far from certain. Indeed, there is some suspicion, from fuel-exhaustion simulations that investigators have run, that the airplane, if simply left alone, would not have dived quite as radically as the satellite data suggest that it did—a suspicion, in other words, that someone was at the controls at the end, actively helping to crash the airplane. Either way, somewhere along the seventh arc, after the engines failed from lack of fuel, the airplane entered a vicious spiral dive with descent rates that ultimately may have exceeded 15,000 feet a minute. We know from that descent rate, as well as from Blaine Gibson’s shattered debris, that the airplane disintegrated into confetti when it hit the water.
I promise I will do my best to never leave you without a picture of Jamie ever again. Here he is back in December cuddling with his true love, plastic bags.
Have a great week! You’re crushing it!
Molly xxxx