The Week in Review – January 25, 2025

We can safely say that I'm not a huge fan of summer, and late January and February precisely, because hissss... sunlight and armpit sweaty-heat. But mark my words, in six months' time I'll be bitching about how I don't cope with the relentless cold. That's Cape Town for you. We don't do things by half-measures here. Although my expat friends kindly remind me that Scottish summers are like Cape winters... Can't win, can we?

So, anyhoo... last week I was reminded yet again why I must moderate comments on my blog when some delightful individual tried to kindly tell me to unalive myself repeatedly. And this was purely from me making a post about how my media is a safe space for LGBTIA+ folks. [sigh] And if you can listen to Bishop Mariann Budde's impassioned plea for kindness and mercy, and respond that she's committing the 'sin of empathy' then I don't even know anymore. I am feeling inordinately rebellious at the moment.

All Things Egyptian...

I've been a bit ... let's say ... obsessed about ancient Egypt since I was a wee lass, so this year sees me returning to being a paid-up member of The Egyptian Society of South Africa. They meet monthly at the St George's School in Mowbray, and have wonderful lectures, as well as access to a library to end all libraries. I've been editing their newsletter for almost two decades now, so I think it's time that I start showing face again considering that I'm planning to write two novels set in ancient Egypt. This month's lecture on January 28 will be presented by Ona Viljoen and is about the Nubian pharaohs who ruled Egypt. If you're curious to know more, do go check out the Society's website. 

If You're Feeling Hopeless...

Let's not kid, the news has been pretty kak this past week. I've found myself muttering almost on the hour, saying, "Oh my fucking dog, can people really be this dumb?" Of course, there's not much I can do about things, but if I learnt a few tricks during 2020, it's about having coping mechanisms. Here are my five:

Stop Fucking Doomscrolling

I get it, you get sucked into your phone and then whoops, you've lost half an hour of your life. Staaaapittt. Just stop. Step away from your phone. If you must, check and respond to your notifications. But step away from social media. This is sanity saving. Trust me.

Touch Grass

Go outside (and yes, this follows on from the preceding point). Be it your balcony, your local park, your garden, if you're privileged to have one. Go spend at least half an hour or so outside. Walk the dog. Feed the birds. Spend a little time gardening. I do a little gardening every morning before I start work. It makes everything better and makes me realise there is still wonder and beauty in the world.

Read a Book

No seriously, I mean it. I set aside half an hour or so every day to read a few chapters out of a dead-tree book, the phone far away from me. I step into another world for a little, and it's glorious. Not only is this a genuine stress-reducer, but it's a way for me to make myself feel a little less guilty for being an irredeemable bookdragon. My hoard is now so teetering that one day there will be news headlines that go along the lines of 'local author crushed beneath a collapsed pile of books'.

Enacting Change

You may not be able to stop arseholes from being arseholes, but you can effect change in your immediate space. Whether it's volunteering at your local animal shelter, picking up litter, helping with your local community garden, or starting a book club in your hood – look at needs in your community and pitch in. I recently started hacking alien vegetation on the mountain behind my house, and this week I'm getting my handyman to build a Little Free Library that I'm going to endeavour to run. Last year, I started sponsoring my domestic worker's son's ballet lessons, so each week I'm doing the whole ballet auntie routine. I also sponsor all my workers' kids' school stationery each year. The bottom line is you can do small things for the people close to you to make their lives better. Pay it forward.

Governments are the Suck

Politicians are giant douchenozzles. We can't trust them to get anything right, and people vote in the most absolute turnips. So if you've got spare time, cash, or mad skills, consider supporting at least one NGO that does work you believe in that's doing the kind of work you feel is for the betterment of society. Whether you're feeding children in Gaza or helping to plant trees, every little bit helps. Kindness costs nothing, but offering material assistance (when you are in a position to do so) to those who are on the ground can help make a tangible difference in this shit show.

The Company of Birds Now Available on Preorder

I've been totally sucking at the whole promo thing, but I do have a book coming out in February. The Company of Birds is possibly one of the best books I've ever written, and sadly it got eaten by the pandemic (it released late 2019, and we all know what happened during 2020). Sadly, the publisher and editor, Storm Constantine, passed away in 2021, and I had the rights reverted to me not long after. I was absolutely blown away by Mirari Press's enthusiastic response when I offered them the rights for the South African edition. Previously, the book was not really affordable to most of my South African readers as it had to be imported at great cost, so I'm totes frabjous that we have a local edition releasing. And just look at that cover art by the amazing Stephen Embleton. Preorders are absolutely vital for publishers so that they can estimate print quantities, so if you've yet to read this epic tale, do consider ordering your copy now ahead of release. I will love you to bits and pieces if you do.

The Week in Review – January 18, 2025

So, anyhow, it's been A Week. Work has really kicked my butt, and I'll not be having much weekend, but it is what it is. I'm just grateful I have work and that I can do it from home. Which means I am kind to myself – taking time-outs in my garden and also walking the dog.

LOL WHUT?

So, one of the things that happened this week was that the most inconsequential little posts on Threads went viral. What I thought was basically just a cute little story from my day has exploded. My notifications are *broken*. I expect it will die down, but as my DH pointed out, I put so much effort into crafting novels, and then this little snippet skyrockets. I am somewhat bemused, but also grateful that some new folks have decided to give me a follow. Hi! *waves*.

Playing Flirty is out!

Then, I must just spare a moment to tell you about my friend Shameez's new book. She's an amazing fantasy author here in Cape Town, and I was incredibly privileged to attend the launch of the third book in her Selene Trilogy. But this past week saw the release of her romance (in my mind fantasy romance) novel Playing Flirty, which is a contemporary romance that speaks to the gamer fantasy geekgirl in me who loves LotR and yes, plays video and board games. While I still have to do an official write-up for my reviews, I will say here that this little book was exactly the palate cleanser I've needed as an antidote to all the dross in the world out there. It's a perfect slow burn, frenemies-to-lovers tale about True Love.

Authors Behaving Badly

In other news, in author circles this week, there was a certain author whose best-selling book was revealed to have 'editing' (and I use the term very loosely here because using ChatGPT to 'edit' your book is not editing) artefacts left over by ChatGPT. This suggests several things to me: the author did not read through her manuscript again before pressing send; they likely use generative AI for nearly every part of the process; and they are a lazy-as-fuck grifter who's more interested in schnaaing readers for their clams than actually putting in the work. Seriously, mense, using generative AI to write, revise "your" writing, and no doubt generate the cover art is so fucking disgusting. I'm not afraid to say that you are a kak person. And I'm not afraid to lose followers over this statement.

But anyhoo, I'm not in the mood to go on (yet another) anti-generative AI screed. I'm sure I'll have more moments in the year ahead.

Neil Fucking Gaiman

Now the meat and bones of today's post is about Neil Fucking Gaiman. Seriously, as my friend Matt the Librarian said in a post a while back – Fuck Neil Gaiman. Yeah, I know the whole thing about heroes and pedestals, but his work on The Sandman comics that hit me with the intensity of a runaway steam train in my young adult years made him one of my favourite authors for many years. 

My sense of utter betrayal when all those allegations from women he'd SAed over the years came out was immense. Here was a foundation stone in my creativity that was knocked out from under me. For years I'd been telling everyone about how my absolute favourite authors were JRR Tolkien, Neil Gaiman, and Storm Constantine. Well, shit... It's caused me to question myself. To wonder about how I can separate the art from the artist (in this case, I can't).

While I've not tossed all my NG books in the dumpster, they've all been moved to the bottom shelf in the study, where I don't have to see them.

This week past, there was an article in The Vulture, that goes even deeper into this vomitous shit pile of a travesty. I got about a third of the way through then couldn't. NG also came out with an apology on his blog. I couldn't read that either, but folks pretty much confirmed to me that it was the mealy-mouthed BS one would expect from a noxious predator who refuses to acknowledge that he has a problem with consent. I'm not even going to go deeper into this shiz-ball of a pit because I've already exhausted myself emotionally.

Going forward, I acknowledge that works like The Sandman had a tremendous impact on me, but I will no longer support Neil Gaiman's works or the man. My betrayal is deeper than the Mariana Trench. He was supposed to have been one of the good guys. Likewise, Amanda Fucking Palmer can be yeeted into the sun for enabling him all these years.

But the absolute rotten cherry on this shit cake came this week when Matthew Boroson on Facebook made this post about how Neil Fucking Gaiman ripped off UK fantasy author Tanith Lee's creations and regurgitated them as The Sandman. I am fucking LIVID.

Several things to unpack here:

Storm Contantine was my editor for many years. I worked with her on several stories that were included in her Wraeththu mythos anthologies. She edited the first edition of my novel The Company of Birds. She also worked tirelessly to help bring Tanith Lee's backlist back into print, and was highly influenced by Tanith's writing. And while I've yet to read more of Tanith's work (it's notoriously difficult to get hold of here in South Africa), I nonetheless will respect the author who was a guiding light in Storm's creative journey. They've both sadly passed away, gone far too soon, so I'm seriously a little stabby when it comes to anyone who dunks on their legacy.

While many people in my circles know and adore Tanith Lee and are influenced by her, she's largely gone unrecognised in the wider industry. That slime mould like Gaiman has clearly taken her ideas without credit and remoulded them to make what is no doubt a lot of fucking money, sticks sideways in my craw.

As Boroson states, even GRRM and others acknowledged where they got their inspiration from. NG didn't. While you can't copyright ideas, I do believe that it's important to state what inspired the story. At least, that's my take on it.

But back to my complicated feelings about The Sandman. Something that I felt over the years with Gaiman's work is that he had me at The Sandman, and even to a degree with American Gods. I felt like the latter was him trying to find his creative feet again after The Sandman, and I could sense a mythic resonance in that work, even if his writing felt as though it suffered a hangover from the comic books series. I read his subsequent works – Coraline, The Graveyard Book, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, and I always felt like there was something lacking. Granted, The Ocean at the End of the Lane did feel to me more like it drew on deeper wells, and was closer in tone to the creative nuances that we'd seen in The Sandman.

But considering that NG pillaged Tanith's writing for the core of  The Sandman makes me realise why I felt so much of his later works, while still admittedly excellent writing, just didn't have that something I was craving. That something I get when I read Storm Constantine and the few Tanith Lee stories I've been able to. Granted, I know when I first read Sabella by Tanith Lee years ago, I didn't *get* it. But with a bit more maturity I suspect I'll have a very different takeaway now. It's on my shelf.

Tanith's books are notoriously difficult to find in South Africa. Due to rights management, the ebooks are not available. If you're lucky and can trawl secondhand stores, you might find old paperbacks, but if I want any of the new material, I'll need to import at great expense. Thankfully, a lot of her material seems available on Audible, so perhaps that will be my avenue.

Anyhow, if you've read this far, I thank you. Go out and read more books. Set aside time every day where you put your phone in another room, go settle in a comfy chair or sofa, and lose yourself in worlds wonderful and weird.

The Week in Review – January 11, 2025

I've been thinking a lot about social media of late, and a friend mentioned how with all the social media platforms essentially turning into garbage, we need to relook how we reach out to the people in our circles. I've been a veteran of social media since MySpace days. I even had a Livejournal, though dog alone knows where the login is – possibly tied up with one of my abandoned and now-defunct email addresses. That being said, I've been consistently blogging on this platform since before Facebook even took off, so maybe it's time I look at that again. 

While I do dabble in video content, the written word is still my forte. I'm most certainly not one of these bright-shiny influencer types who's going to slap on a face of cosmetics and do trout pouts for the camera. And now that the Meta platforms are becoming increasingly useless and unwieldy, and the least said about Twitter (I refuse to call it X), the better. I find writing newsletters incredibly stressful, and I'm not in a mood to learn anything new. So that's a no for Substack. I am thinking of perhaps dusting off my Patreon at some point, but let's be honest – I don't have the spoons for that right now.

So, if you've read this far, thank you. You can likely expect more of this from me going forward. 

For those of you who are following my activities on social media, you'll see I've just had my annual pilgrimage to the Karoo. The whole world and their wife visits Cape Town during the festive season, which makes living here in Cape Town's far south quite perilous and frankly unpleasant. The roads become (even more) congested and you can forget about going to the beach or enjoying a simple breakfast in Kalk Bay.

And I get it. The Cape is beautiful. I am incredibly fortunate to live here. But there's a small part of me that remembers how quiet it often used to be, and then my heart starts hankering after open spaces – hence me braving 40°C in the Klein Karoo.

I need to give a shout-out to our hosts for this past week – Ashley and Andre over at Wolverfontein Karoo Cottages. We love staying in Zara Cottage, which is done up in wonderful boerekitsch with a heavy dollop of Tretchikoff vibes. Wolverfontein is a small patch of land boasting its own volstruispaleis (ostrich palace) near the Touwsberg, on the banks of the Touwsrivier between Barrydale and Ladismith off the R62. It's here that I can hear the silence. 

To quote Samwise Gamgee, "Well, I'm back."

I can't say I've missed Cape Town, but I do rather love our little home, and I've missed all my birds and plants, and I realise I'm very lucky in that our little hood feels like a little village. So I have the best of both worlds out here. Close to the city but not *in* the city. And I do intend to motivate the husband creature for us to go away for weekends a bit more this year. Last year was hectic, to say the least.

Work wise, I still have a backlog of editing from 2024 that I need to finish. For those of you still needing work from me, I'm on it. Just approaching it sensibly and sanely. Since the implosion of Now Novel, the company for whom I did coaching, I have retained a few of my writers that I enjoyed working with, and have limited spaces available this year if you are looking for a writing coach/accountability buddy/editor person. Do reach out to me at nerinedorman@gmail.com if you think this is something you want to explore.

Writing is going apace – I'm still very much in the midst of revising book 2 of The Splintered Fool. I don't have a firm release date for The Raven's Path, but know that Toby and I are working on it. I'm also ghostwriting for gentleman whose broad vision has a nine-book science fantasy series. It's been a wonderful experience for me thus far, and I truly appreciate such a good client who trusts me with their ideas. And other than that, I'm busy writing a MG fantasy novel that I'll be translating into Afrikaans for the Lapa competition that closes on November 25 this year. I'm being a bit more clever about it by writing it in English first and translating it afterwards. But yeah, watch this space – let's see how that works out.

Anyhow, for those of you who are on Bluesky and Threads, I'm not leaving the Meta platforms, as I believe in fighting for the space I've carved out, but I am going to be more active on Bsky here on in as many of my friends are now going to be there rather than on the Meta platforms. Do come find me on Threads or Bluesky.

If you follow me on any of my social media and/or this blog, do consider showing your support by either purchasing one of my novels or sharing about ones that you've read. Go check out my work on Amazon.

A World Lit Only by Fire by William Manchester

I'm no scholar, but I deeply fascinated by history, and as an author of science fiction and fantasy, I take pains to do a lot of research – so when A World Lit Only by Fire by William Manchester turned up on my Audible inclusions, I gave it a whirl, thinking, "Hey, I can learn something". 

Manchester, a journalist, initially set out to write a biography of the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, but then went down a rabbit hole researching the time period that led him to write a work of much broader scope in which he explores the history of western Europe.

My initial assessment was that this was luridly fascinating and chock-full with fascinating factoids, and until I perused Goodreads to see what other readers thought, I reckoned this was a good book for folks wishing to get a start into understanding this very broad time period.

And it was like ahem, okay then. Some *actual* historians on the time period weighed in with their opinions on Manchester's research and opinions, so I've revised my initial thoughts.

Thing is, Manchester has a turn of phrase that makes his writing accessible, but gets a bunch of facts horribly wrong and expounds on a bunch of half-truths with his assumptions. That's the crux of it. He's written some titles related to the modern period, which may be worthwhile looking into, because he *can* write, and does so in a way that is compelling and informative. Just that some of his information is not quite as accurate for this to be considered a work that is a paragon of historical greatness. One of the criticisms lobbed at him is that he didn't base any of his research on primary sources. Which might present a problem.

Anyhow, I guess this is a case of "Reader Beware",