I'm In Me Prime!

Greetings from the 12th Floor. Another productive but relatively uneventful month. My roof is leaking again but I need the weather to be a bit more fair before anyone will be willing to deal with that. In the meantime, I dissociate.

I joined an actual book club, but because I am me, I had to make it as difficult as possible, so I joined a book club in the UK, which meets on a Thursday at 7 p.m. their time, 2 p.m. my time. I work at home and my daily schedule is fairly flexible so this didn’t seem like an insurmountable hurdle, except that my clients and work colleagues seem to get quite bored Thursday afternoons, especially near the end of the month, and therefore schedule calls during book club. I love complaining, but this seems like a bad thing to bring up during work hours. So, while I have read some of the book selections, I haven’t been able to attend a discussion until this month.

This month, we read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark. The general consensus was that Jean Brodie acted inappropriately and was generally insufferable, though I found her quite bold and ahead of her time. I read the novel as a comedy, while some others seemed to interpret it more literally, and of course taking life seriously does tend to hinder one’s enjoyment of it. I expected the story to lean more into Jean Brodie’s admiration of fascism, but it came up only a few times, though the final insertion came at a pivotal moment. I’m pretty sure I’m the only one who connected Miss Brodie’s oft-repeated line - “Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life.” - to Hitler’s famous statement about the Hitler Youth.

My main takeaway from the novel is that I’m glad I live alone, because I spent two weeks randomly screeching “I’M IN ME PRIME!” in a terrible approximation of Maggie Smith’s soprano brogue before collapsing in a fit of giggles, which any sane person would have found unbearable.

Also in this letter:

• Posts from February 2026

• Work in Progress

• Writing Advice

• A Parting Song

Monthly Posts
Last month I talked about goals a bit more, as well as the importance of showing up, which is one of my own goals for this year. I shared a Valentine to writing and a few pointers for designers of book series. And finally, I wrote a long, rambling post about why some writers don’t care what other people think of their writing - which is admirable - but also don’t care about writing well, which is less so.

Your Goals Work for You, Not Vice Versa
A Leap of Faith
A Valentine to Writing
A Gentle Reminder to Book Designers
Write and Be Damned

Work in Progress
Work continues on the repair and redesign of my novel in progress. Finished a few more chapters and am about 20% in, which is where I wanted to be by the end of February. A few happy accidents brought out some interesting background information that strengthens the background story, which was quite nice. So far, so good!

I also finished outlining a new series of blog posts, which will start running in July. That series will take me almost to the end of the year. I like having a plan. The further I map out this series, the more I feel I have something worth sharing. Let’s see how it goes.

My word count slowed a bit this month, but I still racked up about 36,000 words. Makes me wonder what I could accomplish if I had the luxury of writing full-time, with my full attention and energy every day. I hope I still have my faculties when I’m retired.

Writing Advice
I follow about 30 blogs sharing writing advice and bookmark the good stuff. Here are the best posts from February:

• “Bridge Characters” - Elizabeth Sims, Writer’s Digest

• “So Random” - Donald Maass, Writer Unboxed

• “Writers: Dissect Your DNFs” - Tiffany Yates Martin

• “How NOT to Confuse Your Readers” - Erin Halden, Jane Friedman

• “The Thought Trap: Why Most Writers Break Narrative Voice (And How to Fix It)” - Seth Harwood

• “Fix Flat Deep POV: 7 Probing Questions for Better Immersion” - Lisa Hall-Wilson, Writers in the Storm

A Parting Song
A timely release from Celtic-tinged rock band The Killigans, but when has the political class ever not tried distracting the common people away from their best interests?

Just hand ‘em drink; enough to make ‘em pay
We’ll give ‘em sport, and they’ll work another day
A pound of flesh to satiate the crowd
Bread and Circuses will keep the rabble down

Full disclosure: We may disagree about who is distracting whom from what. My take? There’s more than one circus going and plenty of clowns on every side of us.

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