​Here we go again with Thanksgiving. It almost completely slipped my mind. I’m not planning on going anywhere, but that’s not just because of safety precautions. At the risk of sounding like a pessimist, this holiday gets less exciting every year. It’s nice getting a break from work, but it isn’t a long break. There’s usually a football game on, but I’m more of a baseball fan. There are plenty of people who enjoy turkey, but I can’t cook one of those to save my life. The last few years I’ve opted out of cooking birds and have gone with fish instead. They taste better, they’re easier to cook, and a lot easier to debone. There was one year my dad deboned the turkey before throwing it in the oven. It came out tender and juicy but the prep work took too long and required precise knife work. It’s more effort than I’m willing to put into a single meal. My favorite holiday has always been New Years. It isn’t heavily rooted in historical events. It’s just the end of the year so we all might as well blow off some steam. There’s something comforting about celebrating just for the sake of celebrating.
Even it I wanted to get into Thanksgiving dinner this year, it’s unlikely I’ll have time. These last few months in school have been a punch in the face. I forgot how heavy the coursework gets toward the end of the semester. On top of that, I decided to try NaNoWriMo again this year. Those two things combined with work has resulted in a month of sitting at the computer pretty much all day. Even with the late nights I’ve still fallen behind in my NaNoWriMo project and only just passed the half-way point yesterday. Getting caught up is going to take a major push next week, right after the last exam. It’s going to be worth the effort. I’m happy with the way the story has been developing and before sending it to publishers I might submit it to the Book Pipeline competition. The winning story in that contest is pitched to studios to adapt it into a movie or TV series. I have a friend who just made it to the finals of that competition. If and when Unrelenting hits theaters I’ll be able to say that I didn’t just read the book before seeing the movie, I witnessed it being written.
Anyway, that’s the plan for the holiday week. Instead of butter balling meat and chopping vegetables I’ll be studying and getting lost in one of my many fantasy worlds. Since I won’t be able to visit family, it seems like the best I could have hoped for. If you can’t do anything fun, you should at least stay busy, and it doesn’t look like I’ll have any trouble staying busy for the rest of the year. 

Thanks to the efforts of people at Artotems I had a chance to be interviewed about the book and my experience writing it. Here is the link to find information on the date/time and to get tickets:
jeancocteaucinema.com/event/virtual-author-event-hugh-fritz/?instance_id=2133

I'm very thankful for a friend in town who happened to have a camera and editing software. Due to enforced shut downs, the bookstore is keeping everything virtual so instead of going in front of a crowd I printed off a set of emailed questions and was recorded responding to them. Public speaking is not one of my strengths so avoiding being in front of people made the event somewhat less nerve wracking. However, I'm not accustomed to talking about anything for an hour and knowing this was going to be seen by an audience was enough to bring some anxiety. I'm happy with how the video turned out but there is something I regret. Throughout the interview I tried to promote as many other authors as I could, but I was stumbling over my words so much that I after a while I just wanted to get through it as fast as possible and in that haste I forgot to mention my brother and the book he published. I want to take the time to do it now, so here it is: 

The book is Monsters by Chris Nichols. It's about a human rights worker who wants to help a survivor of a massacre in her home country, but gets more than he bargained for. 
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