Making progress with the novel revision and have received very positive, and also helpful, feedback on the first 100 pages or so from a very perceptive beta reader.

Also have been making progress with social media – specifically, with my YouTube channel, preparing new videos.

Want to get the novel revision done by this summer, if possible, and start actually putting out more videos on johnbrookswriting at YouTube – i.e., delivering product.

And product which doesn’t sacrifice artistic integrity.

Thanks to a very helpful, in-person, mid-January consultation with two of my patrons on Patreon – people who’ve provided my writing efforts with gobs of much-appreciated encouragement, I decided to set aside working on the “Trump era” version of “Bonobo Christ,” on which I’d been making steady progress, for the time being and start work on final additions and other revisions to “Through the Valley of the Shadow of Life,” these informed in substantial degree by the #MeToo movement.

These revisions will, I hope, take only two or three months at most, after which I plan to submit “Valley” to agencies and publishers or to self-publish.

(Then – as I start submitting ”Valley” and/or or prepare it for self-publication – back to “Bonobo Christ”!)

My Mother Doing Yoga at 68

Going through a hodgepodge of old family photos (that I’ve brought to Japan from the US now and then during my now almost 30 years of living here), I found these two of my mother, taken in August of 1995, at a yoga retreat in Maine (according to the note on the backside of one of them), doing yoga when she was 68 years old.

These photos brought tears to my eyes. Actually, I flat out cried thinking of my mother pursuing yoga in her late 60s as one of her paths (along with those growing out of her deep spiritual roots in Christianity – in Christianity’s “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” truly virtuous aspects, that is; not its, when (at least sometimes) conservatively lensed, misogyny and other horrid negatives, including its all-too-common real-world hypocrisy) towards greater enlightenment, awareness, or however one wishes to term this sort of growth; or, at the least, to living a healthier life.

Feeling some sort of vague sadness for the past several days – about aging, impermanence and the persistence of various problems, personal and social, which listening to a song I heard – or noticed hearing – for the first time yesterday at the Azabu Juban Starbucks seems to capture perfectly.