October 2025 – Infinite Squirrels with Infinite Keyboards

Okay, after all that waxing angst, I thought that it would be nice to use this space to also talk about the things that make me happy that don’t necessarily involve writing and… uh… writing about them.

Anyway…

The Summer anime season just wrapped up and the Fall shows are just starting, so I thought it’d be neat to share what my spouse and I watched the last 3 months or so, which ones we enjoyed, and which were meh.

Anne Shirley

Let’s start with one that actually began during the spring season and continued through the summer. Anne Shirley is a 24-episode adaption of three of L.M. Montgimery’s Anne Novels, Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea, and Anne of the Island.

I never read the books as a kid or as an adult, but I fell in love with this show. Sweet and very slice-of-life in a time before smart phones, A.I. and social media. I give this one my highest recommendations for both fans of the books and complete strangers to the characters and world. It’s just so damn well done from the opening theme to animation to the pacing.

Dan Da Dan Season 2

This one was probably one of my most anticipated shows this last season, the first season completely catching me off guard and quickly becoming one of my favorites of the last 10 years by a wide margin. The second season did not disappoint, expanding the cast in interesting and fun ways while never losing focus on the true heroes in Momo and Okurun who retain their championship for most adorkable couple in anime after season one.

My Dress Up Darling Season 2

Which brings us to the only couple with a chance to challenge for that belt in the form of Marin and Gojo. We had watched the first season after it had come and gone after seeing some positive reviews and fell in love with the characters and premise. Honestly, the best and most refreshing thing about both this show and Dan Da Dan was how they both treated their females leads as people and not eye candy or prizes for the male protagonists, which is something more Shonen and Seinen series would benefit from emulating.

Sakamoto Days Part 2

Sakamoto Days is sorta guilty pleasure shonen show for me. It’s basically what if John Wick became a family man, let himself go, and was still the worst’s deadliest hitman. It’s cartoonishly violent, features a million one-shot antagonists with weird gimmicks and a million other side characters with even weirder gimmicks. Honestly, it’s dumb. Very, VERY dumb. But like dumb in that fun way that doesn’t make you feel dumb for watching or even enjoying it. I’m AM enjoying it and looking forward to Part 3, but I’m not staring at the calendar counting down the days.

Turkey! Time to Strike

Turkey! Time to Strike was quite possibly the oddest duck this season. First off, as this was an anime original and not based on a manga or light novel, no one had any idea what the story was about until it finally aired. When the first trailer came out, it was presented as a “Cute Girls X Hobby” anime about a high school girl’s bowling team with all the expected drama of both being teenage girls and being on a sports team.

So, it was only at the end of the first episode that everyone learns that the studio absolutely and completely bait and switched the audience.

It’s not a “Cute Girls X Hobby” anime. Well, it is, but it’s also actually a “Time-Travel X Isekai X Cute Girls X Hobby” anime, when our five protags find themselves transported via magical pin reset mechanism to medieval Japan (The Sengoku period to be exact). From there an adventure commences as our heroes have to figure out a way back to the 21st century without wrecking the future and their possible existences.

Also, they still bowl. Like, A LOT. It’s still a bowling anime, albeit, for sometimes utterly bizarre reasons.

And it’s GOOD. Like it’s a genuinely fun watch even if you find yourself asking several times “Yeah, but why BOWLING?!” The characters are, for the most part, fun and not annoying or grating. The story itself is pretty good and even with so much potential to go completely off the rails and crash and burn before the end, it manages to actually stick the landing, though not perfectly.

Honestly, this was a bizarre and fun idea, and I can respect it for taking risks in a genre that seems strangely averse to doing such. That said, this show would’ve definitely benefitted if it had been 24 episodes (or 26, if you’re an Old-taku like me and remember when that was the standard length of almost 90% of shows). With 10 protagonists total, basically all the character development feels either very rushed or inadequate. Honestly, I almost feel like 2-4 characters were unnecessary and served no purpose other than to check off a box on the archetype checklist, which is a shame as I would have liked to spend more time with some of them to really understand them as people.

With all that said, I do recommend it. It was fun and weird and sometimes that’s all you really want. Though, I’d still like a straight up bowling anime one day.

City: The Animation

City is another odd duck. It’s a comedy and there were several times I found myself genuinely laughing hard. But there were just as many times that I found myself staring at the screen, baffled. It’s very Japanese in its humor and some of the best jokes were meta humor around anime and manga itself. I don’t regret watching it, but I’m not sure I would recommend it to everyone.

With You and the Rain

This was both a strange, and yet very grounded show. A writer adopts a stray tanuki and they cohabitate as pet owner and pet. It’s slow, sometimes sweet, and there’s always a hint of surrealism in every episode. It’s very much in the vein of The Masterful Cat is Depressed Again Today and if you liked that, I’d definitely recommend this.

Reborn as a Vending Machine, I Now Wander the Dungeon

The last in our flock of odd ducks, we’ve got another Isekai with a bizarre premise. A Vending Machine otaku (Yes, they do exist) dies and is transported to a fantasy world as an actual vending machine. I’m always a fan of shows with bizarre premises and am happy with creators take chances. That said, I do think Season 1 was much stronger because it focused on our protag, Boxxo, learning about both his new body and the world he’s found himself in. This season, he’s pretty much established and figured out how to communicate, move, and fight and its settling into a pretty standard comedy fantasy, it’s just that the hero is, again, a vending machine. I’ll watch season three when it comes out, but it might fall into that category of shows that we watch when we don’t have a full itinerary for the season.

Kids on the Slope

This show is already over a decade old and came out in 2012, but we watched it over the last 4-5 months, so I wanted to at least bring up a few feelings I had on it.

Feeling one: I wish they would’ve pulled the trigger and actually made this a queer coming of age story set in the 60s. Then again, considering how campy they made the one queer-coded character, maybe it would’ve ended up a total disaster instead of a mild-disappointment.

Feeling two: Die in a fire, Brother Jun. You’re 60’s hipster trash along with many other kinds of trash. I hate you and I am glad I never have to see you again.

Okay, that pretty much covers the anime we just watched last season. We have about a half dozen lined up for the upcoming Fall season and a few on the back burner should we need a show to watch during our down time. If you like this kind of content, and want to see more like it, drop me an email or a DM/Comment on my Bluesky.

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We’re nearing the end of September and we’re finally entering Fall proper, even if we have to drag it out from wherever it was hiding kicking and screaming.

September hasn’t been a great month for me mentally. I mean 2025 as a whole hasn’t been great for a lot of people and I recognize that so many people have it like a gazillion times worse that I will ever have. I’m not going for a gold medal in the Suffering Olympics here. This is me simply verbalizing my feelings and those feelings are that I’ve been in a bad headspace for a while.

animated gif from "Bob's Burgers" in which Tina Belcher slides off a stool onto the ground whilst melodramatically groaning "Ugh." — Dramatic representation of my current mood and outlook about the world

At a macro-level, the world at large is just… uuuuugggghhhhhhhhnnnnn. It’s literally exhausting to wake up in the morning and know that by the time I come back to bed that evening, the world will be a little more, well, shittier in some way or another.

On a personal level, I’m flailing creatively. I don’t think I’ve truly ever adapted to my new routine because of my career change 5 months ago. Before that happened, I was hybrid 40/60 WFH (2 days at office, 3 at home). Most days I would have like 90 minutes to 2 hours of extra personal time to spend as I wished (a portion of which I spent writing/rewriting/revising/editing). I was done at 4PM and was able to get things like the dishes and dinner prep done before my spouse came home and still had time to unwind, and I could even keep on top of things like laundry during the day.

But now, even though I’m still getting up at the same time every day, I’m getting home almost two hours later, and then my spouse and I need to do all the things I used to have already done before they would’ve come home. In short, I’ve lost a lot of the free time I used to have and the already reduced chunk I have now is further eaten away by simply trying to keep a household running like a normal adult. Furthermore, as I have less time, I feel like I need to maximize what I can do in the time I do have, which has never been conducive for creativity for me. I need to properly unwind and clear my head of work before tackling creative efforts and thus, when I force myself to sit down and write, I struggle to the point where I find myself resenting having to sit there.

And honestly, I’m not even sure what I want to write about right now. One of the reasons I wrote Tales of a Stranger Sister was because I wanted to create something positive and affirming. I wanted to make something to mirror the world I want. Right now? I feel angry and tired, pretty much all the time. I don’t feel like creating something affirming and beautiful, but rather I want to take all that anger and exhaustion to create something visceral and ugly and throw it at the world as hard as I can for being so damned shitty right now.

Ultimately, I don’t think I want to release something like that because I honestly don’t want to add more ugliness to the world that is already overflowing with it. So, this might be a situation when I need to spend time putting something brutal on paper, just so I can get it out of me. Then I can shut it away in a drawer somewhere, never to be seen by another’s eyes. A literary purge of the soul, if you will. Hopefully, after doing that, I can find the focus to create something better and more positive.

There are a couple other factors that are contributing to my current mood of blergh. I must admit that my novel’s disappointingly underwhelming performance during the Narratess sale was a blow to the ol’ ego. Was I expecting to sell hundreds or thousands of copies? Well, no, but I was expecting to do a little better than it did for a three-day event that was supposed to cater to readers seeking out indie and self-published works. That feeling of disappointment was then further magnified as September has come and gone and I’m looking to pitch my first zero sales/zero reads month despite going wide almost a month ago.

Lastly, I need to address how returning to social media has been impacting me and my mood. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I was finally able to write a novel after truly quitting Twitter in 2022. It was not a healthy place for me mentally and cutting out 2+ hours a day of doom scrolling and snark dunking did wonders for me both creatively and focus-wise, as well as emotionally.

That said, now that I have a novel that I’m trying to sell to the world, there are very little options one has to get the word out and promote it that don’t involve throwing disproportionate sums of money at an algorithm and hoping it sticks to someone’s attention enough to generate a click and a sale. So, I rejoined social media somewhat by creating accounts on Reddit and Bluesky and have been trying to use them to both promote my work and rejoin the online community as a whole. Unfortunately, I once again find myself falling into the same bad habits on Bluesky that made Twitter such an awful place for my particular brain.

So, what’s this all mean in the grand scheme of things? Probably not much to anyone outside of me and my immediate family. Blog post like these tend to serve more as form of talk therapy for me than useful news to anyone actually interested in my book or my (hopefully) next one.

I had hoped to use this fall to get a first draft of my next novel written and spend the beginning of 2026 revising it for my alpha and beta readers. As the calendar turns to October, I look at what I’ve managed to get done so far and that plan seems… Unlikely.

Time for a new plan.

First, it’s time to adjust my routine, so when I sit down to write in the evening, I’m actually ready, and more importantly, willing to do so. Second, I need to purge some of this anger and frustration from my brain, so it looks like for the immediate future I’ll be doing some exploratory writing of those feelings to clear out that distracting rubble blocking better things inside my brain from coming out.

Lastly, it’s time to step back somewhat from social media. Not completely because I still need to use it as a tool to promote my work, but I need to better recognize the bad habits I’m falling back into because of it. That means better curating my feed and muting/unfollowing those who mostly post content that feeds into my bad headspace and habits, and also no longer using the explore tabs because that’s where I really get in trouble as that it has become a major source of “Hey, get a load of this asshole and the horrible thing(s) they did/are doing!” content, which only further feeds my righteous indignation about… well, everything.

With that all said, I do actually have one final bit of actual book-related news. Tales of a Stranger Sister and my spouse’s amazing books, The Healers series and How I Became a Therapist in Another World Omnibus 1 will be part of the Promise Press’ two-day Cozy The Day Away Sale on October 11^th and 12^th!

Now, while I hesitate to call my book “cozy” out right, it is at least in the same neighborhood as books that are. The nice thing about CTDA is they offer a category for Cozy-Adjacent books like Tales, Healers’, and Therapist for the readers who dig the vibe but don’t mind a difficult feelings and themes with their tea and magic. The ebook of Tales of a Stranger Sister will be 99¢ (or the closest international equivalent) in all online stores that weekend (and if you happened to have bought my book during that sale and have subsequently visited my site because of it, hello from the past!)

Okay, time to get off the floor, dust myself off, and get back to it. And by it, I mean writing. Also, life. Mostly that second one.