Volumes Eight And Nine Status Update

This is still bonkers to me every time I think or talk about it: I continue to make steady progress on Volumes Eight and Nine of the Joel Suzuki series.

As I mentioned in this post, I actually finished a first draft of Volume Eight a few weeks ago. I was originally going to put it aside for a while, but instead, after a three-day cooling-off period, I dove right back in and started doing first-pass edits. Mind you, these are just to check for minor issues like missing words, punctuation, and such (I'm saving the heavy-lifting story revisions for later), but still, it's something. So as of right now, I've reviewed up through Chapter 15, which leaves 14 more chapters to go. And as for Volume Nine, I am now up to 17,500 words, or about 70 pages.

Will this continue? We shall see!

A Show? Yes, A Show!

Remember in this Band Update post from March when I said that Second Player Score, my now-mostly-a-multimedia-production-team-but-still-sometimes-a-band, had shows booked for May and June? Well, the time has arrived!

If you're in the Vancouver, WA/Portland, OR area (or happen to be passing through, or have frequent flyer miles to burn), you can check us out THIS SATURDAY, May 16th, at The Snug in NE Portland. We'll be playing with Six Sundays and Craig James & The Hawthorns, so you know it'll be a rockin' good time. There's no cover charge, and as a bonus for old people like me, the show starts relatively early at 8pm and should end by around 11:30pm at the latest (it actually does kind of have to end by then, since The Snug is in a residential neighborhood). We'll also be debuting our brand-new song "Edge Back," along with a new-old song (written in 2018 but never officially recorded or performed live until now) called "Think About Baseball."

Hope to see you there!

Momtistic

Recently, I was fortunate enough to receive an advance reader copy of Momtistic, a forthcoming memoir by my friend and fellow author, Laura Donovan.

It's her story about becoming a mother, having two sons on the autism spectrum, and discovering as an adult that she might be neurodivergent herself. And I have to say, I absolutely loved it. Here's a review I wrote for Goodreads:

"This was the first "unputdownable" book I've read in a while. It was funny, touching, and I could relate to it in so many ways. The tone reminded me of Jenny Lawson while the style and voice were uniquely the author's own. Highly recommended for parents, anyone with a connection to the autism community, and/or fans of memoirs (or just good books) in general."

I was introduced to Laura by Shamim Dana aka The Autograph King, who you might remember from this post from last year. Both Laura's book and a documentary film featuring Shamim are scheduled to come out this September, and I'll be interviewing Laura for the Fall issue of Spectrum Life Magazine (I previously interviewed Shamim last summer).

In the meantime, you can pre-order Momtistic from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, Walmart, Target, or the publisher, Cynren Press. All the links are here. Do it now, you know you want to!