Dancin' in September

Hello! I’ve picked up a few new subscribers since the last one of these went out, so welcome! This is basically my monthly check-in with what I’m doing and recommendations for cool things. So let’s just get into it.

Watching

For fans of Great British Bake Off—a new season of which is dropping now!—Netflix has a baking competition show called Blue Ribbon Baking Competition, which is basically American Bake Off with a state fair theme. It lacks a little of Bake Off’s charm, but it’s good background TV. (The Paul Hollywood of this competition is Sandra Lee of Semi-Homemade fame. Her wardrobe is right out of 1978, and she overuses the word “exquisite,” but she’s fine otherwise. The other judges are good.)

If you want a movie rec, I just saw The Fall Guy with Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt and thought it was really fun. It’s a rom com with action sequences, so there is truly something for everyone in it. (It’s streaming on Peacock as of this writing.)

And I’m re-binging The West Wing with the rest of the Internet. I have extremely mixed feelings about Aaron Sorkin’s whole oeuvre, but I loved The West Wing. (Also, A Few Good Men is one of those movies that, whenever I run into it on cable, I have to watch it to the end. Yes, I still have cable. Yes, I also own A Few Good Men on Blu-Ray. Shut up.) Anyway, some of the politics are pretty outdated; the Bartlet White House was timid about pushing too hard for things that have since come to pass (like marriage equality) and Sorkin has some weird preoccupations (flag burning pops up a lot; see also The American President). But I think politics are kind of beside the point. The show works because the characters are great. (Allison Janney is, I think, the real standout. The writing is constantly trying to undermine and embarrass her—Sorkin feels some kind of way about powerful women—but CJ always rises above it, and I think that’s a credit to Janney more than it is to the writing.)

Reading

Speaking of The West Wing, I just bought the new book by Melissa Fitzgerald and Mary McCormack about the show (What’s Next?). It’s a huge book, but I’ve read the first 150 pages or so and it’s fun. The one bit of trivia that really stood out to me so far is that Eugene Levy was almost cast as Toby. That could have been a really different character.

I devoured Apprentice to the Villain, the second book in Hannah Nicole Maehrer’s Assistant to the Villain series, about a sunny young woman who gets a job with the Villain in a quasi-fairy tale world. This series is delightful and funny and suspenseful, and I highly recommend it, although be warned that both books 1 and 2 end on cliffhangers. (Worth it, though.)

I also just read The Ornithologist’s Field Guide to Love by India Holton, which is a delightful mashup of genres—historical, fantasy, romance, adventure—and is also laugh-out-loud funny. It’s set in Europe in a version of the 1890s in which some birds have magical properties (for good and for ill, as some species are quite dangerous) and our protagonists are ornithologists competing for a birding prize, which sounds dull if you aren’t into birding, but I promise it isn’t. In other words, rival academics are forced to team up to capture a specific magical bird, continuously run into adversity, and fall in love along the way. Holton subverts a bunch of tropes in a great way and I really enjoyed it.

A friend of mine has been pushing Fourth Wing, and I just got my hands on a copy, so I guess I’m going in on that next.

Writing

I am a member of an online writing group that is doing a write-a-novel-in-90-days challenge. Coming up with an idea for it involved a lot of thinking, because suddenly all my ideas seemed tired and stale. But I plotted out a murder mystery with romantic elements. So that could be really fun to write, I think! We’ll find out starting October 1.

Publishing

No real news on this front, but since I last sent a newsletter, I sent a book out on sub, so fingers crossed I hear back something about that soon!

I’m working on some stuff for my writing newsletter, so if that’s your jam, consider subscribing. There’s a lot going on in Publishing Land right now, including the continued spread of some wild misinformation about how publishing works on social media, and I have a lot of opinions.

See you next month!