#69: All I Want for Christmas...

Oh, god, not that Mariah Carey song again!

Welcome to another Writing Update—a weekly journal where I document the ups and downs of my writing life. I spent most of this week reading like a madman, trying to catch up with my goal of 50 books read in 2018. Two weeks to go, five books to read. It should be fine.

The annual insanity of Christmas shopping peaked this weekend, but the chances of getting run over by a sleep-deprived delivery driver, working 20-hour shifts on a minimum wage, will remain high throughout all of next week. Be careful out there!

I like Christmas, don’t get me wrong, and I buy presents too. But the frenzy with which people raid the shops at this time of the year in pursuit of some televised holiday perfection never ceases to surprise me. I had to go to the supermarket over the weekend. Frankly, it’s a miracle that I got out there alive.

People take out payday loans to buy the latest fashionable gadgets and overload their trolleys with food of questionable quality, half of which they’ll end up throwing away. We aren’t bad or stupid, but the carefully optimised retail industry is too hard to resist. Emotions run high, and peer pressure is real.

As writers, we have an opportunity to counteract this enormous marketing machine with stories that celebrate the true value of the holidays. Like O. Henry did in The Gift of the Magi, we can show how absurd things can get. Through our fiction, we can demonstrate that it doesn’t matter what you give or get as long as it’s heartfelt, and that excess isn’t mandatory. After all, Christmas, like stories, are about human connection.

We may not have as much manpower as all those retail conglomerates and department stores working around the clock to make people buy things they don’t need. Fortunately, the truth is on our side. Stories have much more power than TV commercials or Instagram ads. We just need to use it.

One day, Santa will ditch the Coke truck and go back to his sleigh.

What I Am Reading

I thought that I would be reading Killing Floor by Lee Child, but I heard J. Thorn and Zac Bohannon mention The Martian on one of the recent episodes of their podcast and realised that I haven’t read it yet. I made it jump the queue and am reading that instead.

The Martian by Andy Weir

Am I the only one who finds Andy Weir’s writing style very similar to Ernest Kline in Ready Player One? Anyway, I’m enjoying it. When I finish it, I would like to pick up a book about writing again, but I still need to decide what that will be.

Short Stories

I also read these short stories last week:


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