An Update in June.
It’s June already. June 17, 2025. TIME FLIES!
When I span the news of the world I see missiles and I turn it all off right away.
I’ve been buying a lot of books these past few months. I also renewed by Los Angeles Public Library card and I have been borrowing books, such as First Man in Rome by Colleen McCullough, which I had read when it came out on paperback in 1991-1992, and found engrossing. Now, however, I read less for escape or entertainment than for craft.
As as exercise, I do copywork of passages. What is copywork? It’s hand-copying passages from books. I started doing this several years ago, and I feel it has improved my prose. As an aside, I do not enjoy doing copywork out of my Kindle because it times out way too often and the screen goes dark as I write. For this reason, and others, all the books I have been buying are on paper.
I like to buy used books, first because they are generally cheaper, and because books aren't used by reading the way spicy samosas are used by eating them. Books can be read over and over by many people, and should be!
I have been using the site & app Pangobooks to buy (mostly) and sell my books, and I have nothing but good experience with them. They are my first choice when I look for books to buy. Check them out at pangobooks.com. (Sadly they are US only.)
In May I have been helping my friend Fred with his latest poetry book project. Fred and I used to work together in the restaurant business in Los Angeles in the 1990s. Now he lives in Paris and we do Google Meets calls during which he shares the screen of his Mac and we try to do the interior formatting. It's a lot of “fun”. We also worked on switching him from some local publisher to bookvault.app, a UK-based on-demand printer, which prints from many countries and produces good quality. I also want to use them. Next Project.
I have been drawing also. I made this drawing available on my shopping site—The Words and The Doodles (Which I need to revamp with an industrial water sprayer and a bulldozer)—as a first test of how this will look:
Gelato
I put in the link above to see what it would do and it seems to have made it, well, clickable at least with a preview! Whew!
I have drawn a lot more, and I am looking at placing more of them online.
Work wise, I still have the corporate job. I do Lyft occasionally, and it’s been fun. Oh, I started writing anecdotes of my driving for Lyft, and I have a few down. I enjoy driving, meeting people, and discovering Los Angeles (and the cities nearby—or not so nearby). I will make a book people can buy out of them.
A note on AI. While I recognize that for some people, and in some situations (job market in the US at present—uggggh) AI is a necessary evil, I do not use AI in any capacity in my writing, or in any of the art I create. I once had an account with ProWritingAid, and while it was helpful for a time, I realized continuing to use it would weaken my claim of no-AI, as it uses AI to recommend better grammar and turns-of-phrase. Now, all the bad grammar and weird sentences are mine! My own! My Preciousss.
I have a Patreon site that has been languishing, and a Substack that is also anemic. You can find them linked on my website at christophermahan.com.
What books am I reading now? King Leopold’s Ghost. First Man in Rome. Elif Shafak’s Three Daughters of Eve. I just received Relic, which I read a long time ago, and The Terror, which I saw the Netflix miniseries of, and was pleased with.
Finally, a little poem I wrote two days ago:
Agricultural
across the vast agricultural plains
only grass stands in the darkness
here and there a shed with tools
and a tractor under a tarp
silent sentinels who watch the crops
and I, in bed, I think not of them
but in my sleepiness I wish
to be with someone to feel
whose heart like the sun
pushes me to grow
whose soul like the moon
watches over me
then, then suddenly I sleep
and enter the land of dreams
a land when moon and sun are together
hand in hand in creating
the life we live beneath the sky
I hope you have an amazing day!
With love and affection,
Chris.