Month of Joy: Audio Commentary by Alex Bledsoe
As both a full-time writer and stay-at-home parent of three children, two cats, and a dog, my days tend to be packed. There is joy in my responsibilities, to be sure, but it’s often balanced by stress, doubt, and the sense of futility experienced by all artists (and parents). However, there is one tiny area where I do find moments of absolute unqualified joy: the audio commentary. I discovered my love for movies – and stories – simultaneously: with the 1977 release of STAR WARS, followed by years of magazines and books that picked over its sources and influences. And to this day, I love movies almost as much as I do books. They’re both ways to tell stories, after all, and the things that make a good story apply in both forms. And just as I learn from every book I read, I pick up things from movies as well.
Month of Joy: Sharing My Joys with My Son by Maria Turtschaninoff
This year, my husband and I have introduced roleplaying to our son. He was 6 at the beginning of the year, so we thought it was time. I never got to role play as a kid. I had the games, and I would have loved to play, but I had no-one to play with. I was the only nerd in my class (not that I even knew the term). I spent hours making characters, drawing maps, and planning adventures. It was difficult to plan the adventures, though, as I did not really grasp how the game was supposed to work, never having tried it for real. It wasn’t until I met my (nerdy) husband, who DM-ed for me, that I got to play. I love that we did that together! I even got to DM for him.
Month of Joy: Music by Mike Brooks
There are, actually, many things that give me joy, despite the rather unfortunate state the world is in at the moment. My wife, my friends, my cats, reading and writing science fiction and fantasy… the list just goes on and on. However, another of the most prominent and important ones is music. As a child, I learned to play the recorder (because that was what one did in primary school), the piano (briefly, badly) and the cornet (allowing me to claim with technical accuracy that I am a “classically-trained musician”, which is mildly hilarious). However, I never had much time for music on the radio. It wasn’t until I was about thirteen and heard The Offspring’s “Self Esteem” when Jamie Dreher snuck a battery-operated tape player along to Scouts summer camp that I realised that songs could actually have a point to them. I didn’t look back.
Month of Joy: The Holiday Party by Mary Anne Mohanraj
Every year, we have a colonial Christmas tea, where I cook a combination of Sri Lankan traditional party food (rolls, chicken patties, mackerel cutlets, ribbon sandwiches, milk toffee, marshmallows, love cake, and arrack sours) with British traditional tea party / Christmas food (cucumber sandwiches, roast beef and horseradish sandwiches, mushroom sandwiches, scones with clotted cream and jam, berry trifle, fruitcake, mulled mead and mulled cider). Plus some extra sweets. I feel that I should get something good out of colonialism, after all, and traditional British holiday fare is delicious. Cooking a feast is an opportunity to put my day job as a professor aside, and even the SF novel I’m writing, and sink deep into food and domesticity, some of my own enduring sources of joy. Especially when I get to share the cooking (and then the eating) with my partner, children, and friends!
Month of Joy: Falling Snow and Rising Spirits by Phoebe Barton
Every December, a holiday-themed zone opens up in Star Trek Online: Q’s Winter Wonderland, a place where players can forget about spatial anomalies and chroniton fluxes and enjoy themselves in a place where no one ever dies, where the only enemies are made of snow and candy, and where it’s always winter. I found myself spending a lot of time there in 2017, even if I no longer have any real in-game reason to, and not just because it was 2017. I wondered why until it clicked — winter, a proper northern winter, is one of my sources of joy.
Month of Joy: The Smell of Masa in the Morning by Sabrina Vourvoulias
There is a particular smell to corn that has been soaked in wood ash lye, then washed and hulled and ground into a fine meal. It is the aroma of freshly made tortillas, of tamales as they steam, of my mother’s huipiles. Really. No matter how freshly laundered, no matter how many cedar balls or lavender sachets have been thrown in the drawer to keep the moths away, the distinctive hand-woven Guatemalan blouses my mother wore retain the smell of a grain turned more aromatic, more flavorful, more nutritious by the nixtamalation process.
