A newsletter about not much at all

Except some orcas, an octopus, my next book, and HRT

Sitting in Kalk Bay as I write this. It’s hot and humid, but a slow, cool breeze is starting to drift in from the sea. There was an orca in the harbour last week! There’s usually a fluster with the appearance of orcas, but honestly I’d take an intelligent mammal over a toothy fish any day and frankly I haven’t heard of any orca pod developing a taste for human flesh…yet.

Did you know that each pod has its favourite dish?

The pod that hangs out here enjoys shark liver; there’s a pod in Norway that Tom’s nephew swims with that eats herring only. ‘You’d think they’d eat them in bunches,’ he told us. ‘But they eat them one by one and spit out the bones.’

My physio told me the other day that ‘killer whales’ was actually a mess of their original naming which was ‘killer of whales’. I’m not sure if that’s true, but I like it and it gels with the story of Old Tom and his pals who would hunt alongside the whalers of New South Wales in Australia at the turn of the 20th century.

But I digress. Where was I? It is hot and humid and a slow cool breeze is drifting in from the sea and making the mugginess bearable.

I’ve always loved summer in Cape Town but it is not good for writing. There’s a reason authors in the cold north can pump out books – there’s nothing else to do! At least that’s what I tell myself while I lie on the beach and soak up some summer smells (Salt! Sea! Nivea suncream!) and snorkel about in the water. I saw a HUGE octopus this past weekend and thought I was having my ‘octopus teacher’ moment, but then it shuffled away and hid under some seaweed and made itself spikey and seaweedy and perfectly understood that it was done with this human interaction nonsense.

Relatable.

Anyway.

I’ll be talking more about my upcoming novella The Akashic Records of the Last People as Written by Neko in the next post. By then it should be with my editor and well on it’s way to making my – entirely self-imposed – launch day of 19 March.

But I have to make dates, right? Otherwise it goes nowhere.

Neko came back from my readers about two weeks ago and I still haven’t done anything. Tom says it’s because I’ve got self-publishing PTSD from The Fulcrum. I think he may be right. It doesn’t help that I now have to start the usually utterly irksome process of writing blurbs and mini-synopsis – which is what you’ll be seeing in the post. So, actually, now that I think about it, you’re like an accountability buddy! Thanks for that.

Also. I did promise myself I wouldn’t whine about any part of self-publishing Neko so my do-over is: OH MY GOD I AM SO FREAKING EXCITED ABOUT WRITING THE BLURBS AND MARKETING MINI-SYNOPSIS I CAN’T WAIT…

Sigh. I should probably get on that shit now instead of gabbing about orcas with you.

Til then.
Love & light etcetera

(OH! BTW. Started on HRT and, my god, friends, I am sleeping again, my body is able to thermoregulate, my speaking words are coming back, I am not so sad. Hormones for the fucking win. Just to reiterate for my female-bodied people: If you're moving into your late 30s and 40s and your body is starting to do weird shit, consider brushing up on your knowledge of the perimenopause and HRT. There is no reason to suffer.)

Photo by Gabriel Tovar on Unsplash