Waiting for Athena

I bought a copy of Your Hate Mail will be Graded when it was released by Subterranean in 2008. I was just starting this blog and prolific bloggers like Scalzi and Wheaton were an inspiration.

Along with the hardcover, Subterranean Press sent a chapbook entitled Waiting for Athena, a short collection of posts Scalzi wrote during his wife’s pregnancy. The subject of parenthood was not really forefront in my mind, so I promptly loaned the chapbook to a coworker who also happened to be a new father. It was returned at some point and it found a home on a shelf and pretty much hung out there for the last couple years.

I no longer share an apartment with my wife, which is a longer story that I’ll return to later. The chapbook surfaced as I moved stuff into my new place. Reading about new beginnings seemed to fit my general mood, so I finally read Waiting for Athena.

I’ve not been writing here for a while, but writing about reading about new beginnings seemed to be a good place to start. Potential parenthood is a good topic and Scalzi weaves his anxiety and excitement into pieces that I’ll definitely return to if I find myself approaching fatherhood. That’s not the next stage in my life, but I hope I can weave something productive out of my personal anxiety.