What day is it?

So here we are in the middle of everyone’s favourite week of the year, and I’m not even sure what day it is. It could be Tuesday, maybe it’s Wednesday. I’m pretty sure, but not 100% certain, that it isn’t Thursday yet, but I could be wrong.

I think having Christmas Day fall on Thursday, naturally leading to Boxing Day being Friday, and the weekend following on immediately after that, has led to a weird space-time expansion of that liminal void between Christmas and New Year, which normally runs for about five or six days, but this year seems to have stretched on forever.

Jane’s been working through it, and I keep intending to do some work, but I keep getting distracted by reading a book I picked up on a whim. It’s a fantasy novel called Malice by John Gwynne, and I’m pretty impressed by it.

Unlike a lot of fantasy, the writing is spare, almost Spartan in places, but Gwynne seems to lean on the simplicity of his prose to deliver the story as quickly and efficiently as possible. And he delivers heaps of it, too. The first novel is over a thousand pages long, and as I was delighted to learn, Malice is the first of a Quartet.

I came to the series late and was stoked when I read that he’s already finished the series, so there’ll be no waiting around to see whether or not the final chapter ever drops.

I’m justifying the indulgence by telling myself it will make my own writing much better to spend a pleasant week doing not much beyond reading all day and eating the Christmas leftovers.