Jun 17, 2023 4 min read this is how you lose the time war

Letter of News: Glasgow, Signed Books, Otherworldly

(This is actually a view from the Helensburgh waterfront.)

Dear Friends,

I'm writing to you from Glasgow, Scotland, where I've been for the better part of two weeks, wrestling with a personally unprecedented amount of jet lag. It turns out that spending two weeks on Pacific time followed by five days of Eastern time before embarking on British Summer Time is confusing for the body, especially when sunrise is at 4:31 AM and sunset is ... well, this was 10PM a few nights ago.

An evening sky glimpsed over a wooden fence and rooftops of detached houses, still full of the bright gold of a sunset's afterglow.

I used to live in Glasgow, and it remains one of my favourite cities full of some of my favourite people. But Stu and I came here to attend a family funeral, so I haven't been able to make the kinds of plans to see friends or organize events or meet-ups that I would have under different circumstances.

Still, it's been very good to wander around the city between errands; I was able to drop in to both the Waterstones on Argyle St and Sauchiehall street to sign copies of This Is How You Lose the Time War, and was surprised and delighted by how many they'd laid in.

Roughly fifty paperback copies of This Is How You Lose the Time War arranged in three equal stacks on a table, with one copy faced out in front of them, displaying a printed sleeve of Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood’s infamous tweet recommending the book. In the foreground is a sheet of Signed by the Author stickers to be put on the books once I’ve signed them. — If you want one with the DIY tweet sleeve, you need to contact Sauchiehall street specifically, but they ship all over the UK!

We've also been able to wander through some local woods and see some local colour, like this beautifully Glasgow take on the Siege Perilous.

In the foreground, a purple plastic chair with metal legs sits empty on the grass in a wood, facing a gigantic fallen beech tree. On the back of the chair, facing the camera, are written the words "Touch this seat again and shit will go down" in black marker. — "Touch this seat again and shit will go down"

(Every single person I have individually shown this to has asked "but did you touch the seat" and I don't know whether to chastise or salute them.)

I've also gotten to see many new-to-me birds, all in a kind of chiaroscuro along the coast: black guillemots, common eiders and house-martins, black-headed gulls and a white wagtail. I couldn't photograph any of them, but here's a photo of a herring gull taken by holding my phone up to my binoculars in order to spend a truly unnecessary amount of time determining whether or not it was actually a Caspian gull.

In other(worldly) news – here's a gift link to my latest Otherworldly column up at the New York Times! It went up while I was Waywarding (about which more soon) and I haven't had a minute to share it. In it I cover Untethered Sky by Fonda Lee, The Witch King by Martha Wells, Titanium Noir by Nick Harkaway, White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link, and Ink, Blood, Sister, Scribe by Emma Törzs. I genuinely loved all of them, as I tried to express more succinctly in this tweet.

Untethered Sky is like, if your heart had a face & a book could just SLAP it; Witch King swallowed me up; Titanium Noir had me CACKLING & saying "oof" out loud by turns; WCBD is like if lace were eating your fingers while you admired it; IBSS is a millefeuille of things I love.
— Amal El-Mohtar (@tithenai) June 1, 2023

I hope you find something there to enjoy!

Anyway that's enough out of me for now – there are many logistics left to wrangle before facing the flight home in a few days. You'll find some postscripts and links below the sealfie (that's a selfie by the sea), but in the meantime I'm wishing you all the best and hoping you're enjoying good books, good food, good birds, wherever you happen to be.

Cheers,

Amal

Selfie in which I'm wearing my sunglasses on top of my head amid a very messy top knot of dark hair, and binocular straps over a dark grey tank top, against a backdrop of grey sea and distant mountains silhouetted in blue on the horizon.

Postscripts of News:

For one day only – June 18! – the ebook of This Is How You Lose the Time War will be discounted to $2.99 in North America wherever ebooks are sold! It's usually $12.99! Get 'em while they're hot!
I saw Across the Spider-Verse and it was AMAZING and I highly recommend it!
Margo MacDonald is a Dora Award finalist in the Outstanding Solo Performance category for Dressed As People, the triptych of uncanny monologues I wrote 1/3 of! I'm so thrilled and so proud of her. The awards will be presented on June 27 and I invite you to root for her alongside me!
In sadder news: Blaseball will not be returning. I had so many feelings about this that I needed to construct an elaborate concluding ritual with far-flung friends and enact it in my dreams before attempting it in the waking world. The short of it is that I defaced a coin and threw it into the sea; the long of it will have to wait until I'm home. But until then, if you loved blaseball and want to commemorate or mourn it by sending money to charity in exchange for apparel, you can do so through the medium of Blaseball Cares until June 30.