Mug lore: Gather round, children. A long time ago, I worked in the glamorous world of TV News. This was not on purpose. I moved to a small town to go to school and for every job available there were ten starving college students with resumes ready to go. I applied to every location I could find, including to be a dishwasher at the Country Cousin. I was declined.
Increasingly desperate, I turned to the one place that (though I didn’t know it at the time) was always hiring: the local TV news station. [Side note: if a place is desperate to hire, that is the reddest of red flags. Unfortunately, I was just as desperate as they were.] The station was hiring a “tape deck operator” to work from 3:30am—9am Monday through Friday. I had no idea what that meant. I sent in my resume.
My interview went something like this:
Interviewer: “So why do you want to work at STATION?”
Me *sweating*: “Well, you know, I’ve always liked writing and working at STATION seemed interesting and—”
Interviewer *flipping through my resume*: “Wait, you have a college degree?”
Me: “Yes?”
Interviewer: “You’re hired.”
Apparently a bachelor’s degree is not common for the 3am press three buttons in the correct order job. Who knew?
Tape deck operator turned out to be not as scary as advertised. A month before I showed up, the station had replaced their old system of inserting and playing VHS tapes (hence the “tape deck”) for their on-air videos with a digital player. (I’m not ancient, I swear. This was in the 2010s. Small stations are just like that.) My job was to wait for a cue from the director and press “play” on the correct video. When the video was done playing, I was to hit “pause” and then “advance” to go to the next video. Stunning stuff. For this I was paid the wages of nine dollars and zero cents per hour. In college terms: I was basically rich.
From there it was discovered that I could spell (thanks, extremely strict grammar school I attended growing up) and I was put in charge of manually spell-checking the graphics that popped up during our show. Then it was discovered I could put sentences together and I started writing copy. Then they offered to give me a two dollar raise to become an Assistant Producer. Heck yeah, I might be able to afford groceries AND gas at that rate. Sign me up!
Little did I know I was moving into the perfect Venn diagram overlap career of low wages, high stress and extreme burnout. But that’s a tale for another time. Suffice to say I had firmly moved in to a “producer” role at the station JUST in time to cover my first-ever presidential primaries. The year was 2015.
I guess the good news (haha) is that I’d never paid much attention to the primaries before, so I had nothing to compare them to. I thought 2015 was simply an average representation of how our presidential election process worked. Which is to say: absolute insanity. However, the upside is after all the election dust settled, and Trump became president, Russia and Putin became a hot topic. Which led one of my good friends (the daughter of a Russian immigrant who was now a US citizen) to purchase me an Andy Warhol-style “Shot Putins” mug, because I was covering the Putin-Trump stuff so exhaustingly much. She thought it was hilarious. I agreed. It remains one of my favorite mugs of all time.
What I’m drinking: A delicious milk oolong tea I picked up from Pat’s Pantry in Astoria along the Oregon Coast. I can’t stop drinking it. The shop was quite cute and fun to visit. If I’m ever in the area, I’ll definitely stop by again.
What I just finished reading: The Blacktongue Thief by Christopher Buehlman. It came highly recommended and ended up being an average reading experience for me. I enjoyed Buehlman’s writing style enough that I plan on checking out at least one of his other works (either the prequel to this series, The Daughters’ War, or Between Two Fires).
I enjoyed the characters and the world building of the book but the story seemed random, almost like a D&D campaign filled with one-off episodes designed to get the party to the dramatic conclusion. An assassin is here now. Now we’re fighting a bull-man. Oh no, a kraken. Oh no, goblins. Normally I don’t mind a winding path to the finale but this one felt disjointed. Likewise, the strong world building felt purposeless. We learn about dozens of gods and kings and countries but very little of it impacts the plot in any meaningful way. I suspect the book is meant to be the first in a series, in which case some of the threads may be paid off later on.
That’s not to diminish the strengths of the book, of which there are many. The characters alone are so fun to read about they dragged me through even the most random of plot coincidences. The fight scenes are exciting and I particularly enjoy how Buehlman plays with his in-universe languages (usually to tell a dirty joke). There are some genuinely clever moments and times where I laughed out loud. I give it a solid 7.5/10.
What I’m reading now: Delving into Pet Semetary by Stephen King. Most of the King works I’ve read so far have been thriller-ish, not horror-ish (at least to me). I’ve heard this one is scary. I’m excited.
I also have a random assortment of books borrowed from friends/coworkers/the library on my TBR shelf (which keeps getting longer and longer) that I’m flitting between. The eternal The Brothers Karamazov is also steadily underway. I’m about 450 pages in, with another 250 or so to go. More than halfway and things are picking up!
What I’m writing now: I’m 62k words in on my WIP (Work In Progress) and took a brief break to offload 2k words on a different project that’s still in its inception phase. My brain likes to think circles around a story before I actually get down to writing it which is why I have so many notes. On occasion, though, a scene is so insistent I have to stop whatever I’m working on and write it down just to get it out of my head.
Breinthewild 
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