Month: December 2015

“Glory to God in the highest, and peace on earth, good will towards men.”  (Luke 2:14)

I suppose wishing for peace on earth and goodwill to all is a stretch, but that’s what this time of year is about.

Listening to Handel’s “Messiah” at the moment, and will probably listen to more Christmas music to get myself in the Christmas mood.  I will try to stay away from Mariah Carey’s “All I want for Christmas is you,” since it’s ubiquitous and almost tiresome for me.  For some reason, I’ve been amused lately by Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmas Time.”

Come to think of it, I’ve never seen the original video, so… this is… interesting…

I was recently watching the original “Miracle on 34th Street” movie and I realized more than ever how it was a funny way to go into the whole Santa and the law thing. I’m still amazed by how Kris Kringle’s lawyer pulled it off, but considering that the burden of proof/persuasion in civil litigation is that much easier than in criminal law, plus considering it was about Kris Kringle’s sanity, so the lawyer expedited the process – well, it is impressive!

Some holiday items of interest:

NPR on Santa’s cookie and milk habit.  Personally, I think that Santa really has to get over this snacking thing.

And NPR on how NORAD got into the Santa tracking business…

Over at the A.V. Club: The evolution of that Christmas thing from Saturday Night Live, “I Wish It Was Christmas Today,” with Horatio Sanz, Jimmy Fallon, Chris Kattan, and Tracy Morgan, looking festive and silly.  And, I mean silly – it’s goofy to watch them do that thing over the years.  And I totally didn’t realize that their song (or Horatio Sanz’s song, since he did the singing with Fallon, as Kattan just held the keyboard and bopped his head and Morgan energetically danced) had a cover done by someone else (I’ve heard the song on one of the car commercials on tv, but didn’t realize that it was THAT song).  Ultimately, there’s something positive to be said about silliness and Christmas.

Stay tuned: tonight on BBC America, it’s the Doctor Who Christmas episode.  The Doctor has a reunion with River Song.  Their out-of-time love story continues, I suspect.

Further stay tuned: the 2015 Reading List and TV List will eventually be posted.

Currently reading: A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway.

(cross-posted at sswslitinmotion.tumblr.com)

And so another National Novel Writing Month (a.k.a. NaNoWriMo, a.k.a. November) comes to an end.

I made it at final count of 58,986 words; tentative title: “Masquerade: Starting Over” – a redo (more or less, with a slight sequel-ish element) to my last year’s National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) project.  I technically “won” at 50k on Saturday, November 28, 2015, thanks to the encouragement of the folks of NYC NaNo – especially the peeps of our regional IRC chat room.  I’m probably going to keep at it for a proper revision, since it’s a mess and ended with “to be continued.”  (this also assumes I’ll ever learn to revise my fiction; this might the exercise that I’ve been looking for to learn to do it?  We shall see!).

Anyway, Wrimos/Nano’ers – we did it again!  Whether you made 50k words or didn’t, you wrote something. You tapped into creative energy, and that is good.  In a world where everything’s a mess, make something positive (or positively something to you; I say that because, hey, some people like to write dystopic futures or zombie apocalypses, even though I don’t think of that as my cup of tea).  That’s the spirit of NaNoWriMo!

Now, on to December.

Crap, December already?!  I am so behind on writing other fiction, reading books, watching television, and resuming the war against clutter.  Goodness…

(cross-posted at sswslitinmotion.tumblr.com)