Goodbye Cruel 2025
Can't wait for this year to be in the rearview.
Auto-woe-tive Hijinks
I’ll start with an update on the car front. This is a bit of a rant, so bear with me. For Nikki’s car, we dropped her car off at the dealership and was told, despite having an appointment, that it would be 3-5 days for them to run a diagnostic. After almost a week and a half of radio silence from the Hyundai dealer, I ended up calling to get an update. It took days to get an answer, and what I got was a short voicemail without much detail. The voicemail told me that they had started the process to replace the engine. Without any kind of notice to me. Or authorization from me.
It took another day to get to talk to a person, which was the manager of the service department. He was apologetic at both the lack of communication and situation in general. What was never explained to us before was that they had applied to Hyundai for a warranty engine replacement, because her car was indeed misfiring. And that misfiring damaged the engine bearings. And her car was still in the window… by a month.
The service advisor on our case was brand new, and decided on his own that he was going to wait to inform us of what was happening after the approval from corporate. Which I can understand, giving difficult news is hard. But any kind of troubleshooting or diagnostic job is not a job where you give good news. You’ve got to give accurate news. Keeping the customer, patient, or client informed is by far the best thing you can do. His desire not to give us “bad” news meant that we were waiting in limbo for an extra week.
The manager promised that we would be kept informed, daily, from that point onward. The approval was expected to take another few days, and then it could be a week or more until the new engine arrived. I said a text was perfect if there was no change, but I’d like a call if there was any movement. That was agreed upon. The next day, I got a call that there was no change.
The day after that? I got a text at 10am saying the car was done and ready for pickup. Hyundai covered the engine replacement under warranty, and the dealership waived all the diagnostic fees and everything. So it was zero cost to us… but it is absolutely wild to me that after a complete and abject failure to keep us informed… that they did it again immediately.
Like call me crazy, but when I fuck up big time with a client, I try not to fuck up the exact same way a day later. When we picked up the car they rushed us out the door. Needless to say, we won’t be going back.
As for my car… after an entire month, we finally got my car back. That was unfortunately not a warranty job, and cost many thousands of dollars. And on top of that? They missed a part! The part in question is an engine cover that also ducts air towards the filter. So the engine runs, just maybe a few percentage points less efficiently. The Subaru dealer at least immediately ordered the part and scheduled an appointment to replace it.
So quite literally the last month and a half has been just inundated with car woes. It wasn’t all grim sadness though! While we had to rent a car for a few days, we had a lovely friend who was gracious enough to let us borrow her Mini Cooper while she was out of town. And then Subaru gave us a loaner for almost two and a half weeks.
Look I’ll be honest, driving a 2025 car really drove home (ha) how out of date our 2015 Subaru Forester is. It is absolutely wild what cars can do. If nothing else, I dearly miss not having to manually sync my phone to the car every time I get in. And not having the Bluetooth randomly drop out while driving. One day…
On the writing front, not a lot of progress happened in November. With the car situation and looking for work, there just hasn’t been enough actionable time to work. I’m hoping that December will give me some openings to do things.
SPSFC5
Judging has officially begun! As I said last month the competition was just starting up, and as of a week or two ago it’s in full swing.
I have a team of four excellent judges. All are new to the competition, and I’m happy to be shepherding them through the process. Please, take the time to check out their links below. I’ll also be creating a page on my website to host reviews from the team and I’ll be encouraging to post as much as possible on their websites and social media.
This team has a great breadth of experience, so we should have some good insights coming! The first phase lasts for six months, and our bracket has 25 or so books. Without further ado, here are my fellow judges:
R.E. Holding
Jimiflan
Jimi's Wordpress
Jimi's BlueSky
Ida
Champ
The only downside right now is we need a team name! “Team Jake” is a terrible name.
November Showcase
My showcase last month went well! I sold more copies of Pallas Lost than I have in the previous year. Granted, that was a really, really low bar to step over. But for my first in-person event, it went great.
I’m definitely going to apply to more events in the area in the coming year!
Goals Update:
This calendar year is shockingly over! This continues to be the longest I’ve stuck with something like this SubStack. Usually my motivation to do a journal/blog kind of thing peters out pretty quickly. I really want my writing to be successful. Hopefully at some point something takes off.
Please, share this with your friends, family, strangers on the street, and more!
Thank you so much for following and reading! Don’t forget to subscribe, like and comment. Let me know what you want to see more of from this newsletter! Engagement is crucial. I look forward to posting throughout 2026!
Ugh cars! I'm sorry that was such a pain for you! I've been there and it sucks 😫