Le Pendu

I came here and opened a new post because this blog is about writing, and I have a few things to say about that, about writing and my writing life, and my plans for the future. But I don't completely know how or whether to say them. 

A few Hanged Men (et al) from my Tarot collection

One of the books that came in for me to read for a book prize is a first novel from Atria, and everything about it made me angry. It's so clearly a piece of work from a privileged white woman in her 20s, someone with mere glimmers of life experience, someone who has thought down one or two levels about big knotty issues but not any further. Plus, it has a bunch of glaring first-novel issues that I can't believe passed by all the barriers between writing and publication (along with a laughable set of mistakes about living in Los Angeles). Her author photo is a glamour shot, duckface and all. 

This pissed me off, made me petty and cruel, because I'm jealous. She did all the steps in the right order, got the right kind of education from the right institutions, published stories in the right magazines. She wrote a pretty rudimentary novel about an unusual subject, and subsequently she got herself a book contract and a desirable blurb and a hardback first printing. 

I did none of this - I did the education and the steps and the publications haphazardly, unstrategically, cold-querying, without wealth. (I could never get my hair as smooth as hers for an author photo, nor my lips as glossy.) I learned by email yesterday that, nearly five years in, Ceremonials still hasn't sold enough copies to break even with its costs. 

The way I've worked through this kind of jealousy in the past is by remembering everything she doesn't know about this horrible business that I do know. All the practical underbelly stuff I learned via reviewing. Likely, no one has told her what to expect, emotionally, about publishing a first book and then writing a second. How to moderate her ambitions and talent against the market and the reader. All this is hard-won knowledge, and it's part of why I've hung on for so long rather than giving up: the knowledge that this is just hard, which she doesn't yet know and is likely suffering for not knowing. 

That self-reminding is not helping this time, and I'm just angry and sad and jealous. 

This has been an autumn full of disappointments specific to writing: painful rejections, insulting suggestions, delays on any news that would offer a little sunlight, that would be meaningful or fulfilling. I've tried to make my own sunlight by reading and by plotting new courses. But the fact is, I'm tired of these disappointments. I'm tired of being confronted with lesser talents getting what I want. I'm tired of breaking a path, and I don't see a way to follow someone else's path without such severe compromise that it wouldn't be worth the walking. 

Friends have told me they believe in me. Individual readers have said they loved my stuff. That's nice, and it does matter to me personally, but it doesn't change the practical work of path-breaking that I am tired of doing. By the cruelest math: it's nice if you like my work, but it doesn't do me any good unless you're an agent. That's ungrateful and shitty but it's where I am after everything that's happened this fall. 

What I'm dancing around is that I'm thinking of giving up writing. 

Sort of. I'm thinking of giving up on writing as a career. Giving up trying to get work published in the same ways I've been trying to get work published for 21 years. I'd like for it to be fun and hard in quantities that won't keep breaking my heart, and for publication to be incidental. Those goals require a wholesale rethink/rework. 

The last time I was down this bad about writing was February of 2021, when a bunch of circumstances collided to make me give up reviewing. I still haven't really gotten over that episode, and I can't conclude whether I made good or bad decisions. I don't miss the hustle of freelancing, and how little time I had to read what I wanted to read, but I do miss many aspects of reviewing. What will I miss about writing as I do it now if I give it up? 

I do have a plan for what to do instead, and it's a good plan, and I like it. In the meantime I have some transitional ideas: releasing a collection of genre stories one at a time on Patreon before self-publishing them in a volume, for instance. But first I have Out There in the Dark coming next summer, and what I elect to do about all this will depend somewhat on how that book is received. For the next few months I'm going to read, keep assembling the Poltergeist book, and write cosmic horror. 

The Tarot card I keep thinking of as I consider this year is the Hanged Man. I waited a lot this year. Having to do that caused major emotional havoc for me throughout 2021, but this year I feel like I learned (better) how to embody this card without anger, without anxiety. Just to dangle there. To enjoy the kind of freedom that comes from, for example, being at the airport early: there's nothing that needs doing until your flight takes off, so you can sit there and spend time freely in a way you simply can't in other areas of life. 

The Hanged Man is twelfth in the Major Arcana. I like to think of him as waiting for Judgment to come and cut him down, but that card is twentieth, and in between lie a bunch of other elements, as vast and meaningful as the Sun and the Moon. And Death, which is usually not death but change. 

I could use a few more omens. Perhaps I'll go back to daily or weekly Tarot work. Maybe that would give me an idea of what to do with my ambitions, my abilities, my expensive, worthless brain. 

MTWTFS

So huh. It's been an interesting week. This is not a very professional blog post, but I think it's mostly friends who subscribe to this blog anyway. 

On Monday I had a hell of a day: some bad news, some weird omens, and big, big feelings. The situations that initiated these feelings weren't new - they'd just come to a head on Monday, for whatever reason. Big messy terrible situations. I took a long hike, tried to make sense of what to do next, and felt my feelings, something I rarely do with success. 

On Tuesday I felt better: recovering. I also made a decision about something that had been paining me, and although I'm not sure if it's the right one - and it's very rare that I make decisions about this thing without consulting everyone around me - it felt so good to have made it, and especially on my own. 

On Wednesday I did a pile of work I've been putting off for many weeks, and that night I felt happier and more satisfied than I have in some time. I needed the feelings to rise and crest in order to break. To make way. To give me the space to get to work. 

On Thursday I told my therapist about all of this; she was happy for me. I think she was surprised that I made the Tuesday decision before I asked her about it, but she was supportive nevertheless. 

On Friday, I continued the work with great enthusiasm. The situation is far from ideal, but I'm going to make the best of it. I'm not going to give up. I owe it to the people who've decided to go in on this work with me. 

Yesterday I socialized even though I didn't want to, and I cleaned the gutters (a little), and I made Matt go out on a hike. It was raining, or trying to rain, poorly. 

The point is, this has been a medium-transformative week. I think the reason is partly the new vitamins I'm taking (r u depressed or r u just mineral-deficient? bodies are fun!), partly that my time on social media has dropped by roughly 90%, and partly that circumstances which were making me feel bad crested and broke. 

by Sid the Visual Kid, whose work I reservedly love

Weaning off socials has been going well (you're reading this because I haven't been tweeting any of it), but I've gotten a little (re)addicted to doing NYT crosswords on my phone. I've also been reading books - a biography of Garbo, a deeply weird mid-20th c novel called Jamie Is My Heart's Desire, and Betty Gilpin's book All the Women in My Brain. The latter is stunning. Highly recommended for feminists and fans of hers - basically anyone who loved GLOW. 

As for writing, tbd. I'm cooking a story, for fun, part of a cycle of fun stories I started and then abandoned sometime last year. I'm still researching for the Bern book, and although I desperately want to be writing it, my experience tells me it's not time yet. (Starting it now would be like putting semolina dough in the water before it's been flattened and cut.) Might actually return to the Tom Paris essays while I'm still subscribed to Paramount+, which I'm going to cancel after Lower Decks ends. 

I'm still not sure how to solve the problems presented to me on Monday. But it's better to have problems and not hate yourself than the alternative. That's an advertising slogan for Prozac, I think. 

Blessings Inside My House

I made this, and you can buy it here

I'm working on weaning off socials and deleting the majority of my tweets. I don't know what my long-term strategy is - possibly Canada - but for the next however long I don't want my words being farmed and scraped by that emerald miner. I'm going to try to put them here, on Medium, and in my notebook instead. 

A bunch of stuff just came in for me to read and evaluate, which is pretty unusual these days. It'll keep me busy for a couple of weeks. I'm also trying to get rid of stuff in my house, which is hard for me: a constant process of swallowing terror about impermanence and departure. 

First weekend of November I went to the Portland Book Festival, which was fun. Not much like what I expected. I saw everything I really wanted to see in the first half-hour, spent another couple hours hanging out at the Autofocus/Split Lip booth, and then I went home. Or back to my hotel, actually, which was an absurd, hipper-than-thou establishment, where I had an uncarpeted room with no extra blanket and no fan in the bathroom. Don't stay at the Moxy unless you are 23. 

wet and cold, the PNW way

We're having a stupid problem at our house that is turning out to be expensive, stressful, and lengthy to try and solve. It could be a lot worse, but it could also not be happening, that would be okay. 

Some of what I'm reading is books by Richard Dyer, one of the only people who cares about star studies to the extent that I think most film studies people should. I'm also still slogging through biographies of powerful men from the 1930s. On the plane to PDX I started taking some real notes about how to write this thing, the different ways I want to set up the stories of each narrator and the interpretive problems I'll have to get past. 

On the plane back, however, I reread The Godfather, because I was prepping to record a podcast episode about it and the film version (pretty obscure, you might not have heard of it) with my friend Emma. That happened on Wednesday, November 6. We agreed to just pretend it was not Wednesday, November 6, which meant we had a wonderful time. That episode should be out in a few days. 

There are a lot of blessings inside my house. So many books to read, things I made with my hands or things that were made for me. What I know is so small. 

Residual Don't-Wanna

August was bad. Not for any specific external reasons aside from the oppressive heat, but because I could not get my head out of an existential mole-hole. Everything was vague and far away and meaningless; nothing got through to the internal chamber where I have willpower and feelings, nothing sounded appealing. Yes, this is a description of depression. I slept a lot, missed reasonable benchmarks for taking action, couldn't write much, probably gave bad advice and did a bad job as a friend. I likely missed an email or two, as well, so if you're waiting to hear from me, drop me a line. 

pretty sure I'm going to buy this?

Feeling better now that it's September, but I do have some residual don't-wanna hanging around. Mostly having to do with my next project, which will either be the Tom Paris book (have written >7K, didn't enjoy much of it) or the Paul Bern novel (have researched a good deal and taken notes). 

As I said back in June, the only writing-related thing that sounded good all summer was lying on my back and thinking about the Bern book, taking no action on it, just thinking, agonized dreaming, like a lady on a chaise longue. I pushed into the Tom essays, mostly via self-nagging rather than the pleasure of writing. It did me good to complete some work, but it felt like writing instruction manuals, not essays. Finally, I asked Matt about this (not for the first time) (it's fun to be married to me) during a road trip we took over Labor Day, and he told me to write the project I wanted to write rather than the one I thought I should write. 

There are so many reasons I shouldn't write the Bern book now, but all of them are practical, and the inspiration and passion I feel about it are not part of a practical calculus. So he's probably right. But my practical side keeps sowing doubt. 

After my last post, I went on and did the revisions to the last section of the Casablanca book, which were agonizing but took less time than I thought. I gave it to new readers, they got back to me, and yesterday I did the final pass. Now I have to do all the surrounding stuff - synopsis, query letter, agent research, yadda yadda. I feel more ready to do all this than I did during August, but I don't even want to know who actually likes doing such annoying work. Not me. 

I closed Barrelhouse reviews submissions for the month of August, the first time I've done this in the five years (!) I've been running the section. The submissions traffic I get there isn't too burdensome, but I was ready for a break anyway. It was the right move. Of course once I reopened them they started trickling in again immediately, like barely a few hours later. I don't want to express public annoyance about that, because it's not polite and also not completely correct (I feel good about doing the work, overall). But I have to say no so fucking often in that space, and the karma of that wears on me. It's never gotten nicer or easier to say no to subs that mean well but aren't suitable. 

In about 10 days I'm going to the Midwest for a quick three-city tour: St. Louis, Oklahoma City, and Lawrence, Kansas, all in five days. If you live in any of these cities and want to say hi, let me know. I don't have any events planned - my planning for this trip mostly happened in dreaded August, and hence I messed up a lot of it - but I'm hoping to have some fun and see two cities I've never visited. 

I'll be putting out a newsletter with some recent publications as soon as I get around to it, but otherwise that's the news. I'm so grateful August is over. I'm really looking forward to temperatures in the 80s. I keep putting words down, one after another. 

Free-Floating Stuff

Barrelhouse Writer Camp was really wonderful. I didn't do much, except socialize and probably gossip too much, but I relaxed and spent a lot of time outside, which it's becoming impossible to do here for the next six weeks or so. 

I am doing everything possible not to revise the last section of the Casablanca book. It's becoming more urgent, but I reeeeeally don't want to and I'm acting like a huge baby about it. 

Watched The Revenant, which I'd heard was a sort of contest rather than a film, and that assessment was wrong. It took my breath away. The idea pinged into my head while watching to write an essay about DiCaprio, which is an idea I should've had long ago but now that I finally have, it's another great thing to do rather than revise the last section of my book. 

Still on a wild, woolly, expensive perfume journey. Have ordered a bunch of perfumes both vintage and not, and none of them has even come close to the first one I tried: Mitsouko. It's truly like nothing I've ever smelled. 

Actual writing isn't going well, but reading is going OK and thinking/churning/editorial is going OK too. 

I still haven't unpacked my duffel bag or my backpack (got home seven days ago). I remember there was like one trip in my whole life where I unpacked the next day like a good girl, and every other time I unpack whenever I can't avoid it any longer like a chaos muppet. 

While away, I went to the Sleeping Beauties fashion exhibit at the Met, and I gotta tell the truth, it was incredibly disappointing. So much an exhibit meant to make people talk rather than making them think. I know a thimble's worth about fashion and perhaps a little less about about museum curation, but I know enough to know the way this was set up and curated was about flash, not meaning. It was a pain in the ass to get there and get through the exhibit, plus I dragged Matt along with me, which made the disappointment all the more frustrating. 

I keep thinking I need some kind of strategy to cut down on my phone use and social media use (different categories that overlap a lot), but probably what I need is to just stop. Hacking my brain has never, ever worked; tricks or strategies are generally wasted on me. The I stopped smoking was to stop buying cigarettes and putting them in my mouth and lighting them. Quitting a habit or an addiction is more complicated than that, but it's also not, and I feel like the "also not" is the place I need to get to for my phone/socials use. 

Wire Mothers seems to be well-received. I'm surprised about this, but pleased. Some external stuff reportedly coming in the next couple of months (review, interview). 

A writer I admire bottomlessly has reached out about her next book and we've had a kind of shy, gentle meeting of the minds. I am so happy about this I want to cup it in my hands like a firefly. 

I hate deadlines, and I need them. 

I hate routines, and I need them. 

I wish it was September. 

The Tangible, Textural Past

In promotional news, if you're in New York City, come see me and Toby at Quimby's on June 24. We still don't know what we're going to say to each other, but we always have a good time talking. He's smart as a whip and a tremendously elegant critic. 

And listen to the most recent episode of the Take-Up, a podcast of which I can now officially announce I'm a cohost. Someday I'll get that Rotten Tomatoes critic approval, dammit. 

This week my husband and I celebrated our 13th wedding anniversary. Thirteen is a lucky number for me, not an unlucky one, so I felt good about it; but this week has been emotionally cruddy for me and work-intense for him, so our celebration amounted to a couple glasses of prosecco and a medium-good noir. 

I don't know how the years compound into decades. That's the element I can't countenance about time passing. I understand how months slide up into years, how weeks collect into months, but in terms of time passing unexpectedly, too quickly, it's all about the mysteriousness of decades for me. I sent someone my From Me to You posts today and had to acknowledge that the first one was written a decade ago. That was impossible to believe. It's been 18 years since Matt and I moved in together. Equally impossible. I don't know what happened to 2014-2019 in particular. 

Enough of that. 

I've mentioned here that I'm working on two projects simultaneously: essays about Tom Paris and a novel about Jean Harlow's second husband. "Working on" is disingenuous, because all week I've gotten nothing done except reading. I haven't felt well in either body or mind, but I'm also pretty unmotivated right now. Ironing out certain issues with Wire Mothers has been draining, and the Tom Paris project has stalled. I know it's because it's a book I know how to write and that's not as exciting as a book I don't know how to write, and also it's essays, which are kind of naturally less exciting for me than fiction, because I'm arranging (landscaping) rather than inventing (growing). I wanted to Produce, just so I didn't get in the habit of not producing. I haven't. Maybe next week I will. 

The thing I want to do more than any work is lie on my back and think about Jean Harlow's second husband, about just how cynically Norma Shearer married Irving Thalberg, about whether John Gilbert could have beaten the bottle and remained a star - about all those circumstances and the ways I want to sketch and narrate them, and specifically about the tangible, textural existence of those days. I ordered some samples of the perfumes Jean supposedly preferred (lots of fiction and legend, unclear what's true), and those smells have proved so evocative that the actual work of writing, outlining, characterization is all less appealing than the thinking. I tried to go to Grauman's to look at and touch Jean's handprints (again), but the courtyard was closed that day so I'll have to go back. I've looked at their house, which is still standing, on Zillow. I bought a poster of the Hollywood sign as it existed then, with the -land attached, and put it up in my office. 

I want to daydream about these lives, consider them while I listen to scratchy jazz, mourn for them while I breathe in Mitsouko. Don't worry, I'm not Christopher Reeve in Somewhere in Time, pining to death for an age I'll never live in. But in starting to take steps toward telling a famous yet unresolved story, I feel a strong desire to psychologically inhabit a vanished time and place as fully as possible before I get going (rather than flatly researching it, as I did for Europe in the 1930s). 

Speaking of compounded decades. 

Hollywood changes constantly, in a technological and architectural way, but some things about it (danger, allure, fortune, dishonesty) haven't changed in a hundred years. It's the details I seek, pinning down the scents and sounds and objects so I can tell the story as freely and as instinctually as possible. 

On a related note, I got some feedback on the Casablanca book that I'm pretty sure is right but I can't figure out how to fix without knocking big holes in the timeline. And I really need another paper copy  of the manuscript to work with in order to solve these problems, which is (take my word for it) deeply annoying. Whine, whine. 

The other project on my plate is an hour-long talk about...myself as a writer? I think? that I've been asked to give to a group of older folks in late June. I'm looking forward to the event, but my first draft of the talk was not suitable, and time is running out to write another one. Another thing I couldn't motivate myself to do this week. 

Next week, instead. Somewhere between the thinking and the daydreaming and the whining, there will be work. 

Untethering from the Doom Box

The other day I was in a bad mood and I dragged myself outside for a walk with Matt. I told him all about the book I'm reading (a biography of a producer in early Hollywood), and the sunshine and fresh air plus my interest in the stuff I told Matt improved my mood extraordinarily. When I got home I picked up my phone and looked at Twitter, and I felt my good mood drain away. I felt it, the way you can feel your bladder deflate when you pee. 

I looked at the phone in my hand and I went: oh. 

Later, I told Matt about this, calling my phone the Doom Box. Now, every time I pick it up, I think about that phrase. I keep opening Twitter and feeling that draining sensation. It used to make me happy to interact there, but not so much now. I know I'm not getting the best of it, for obvious reasons, and I'm sick of fighting the algorithm to see and be seen. I had been thinking about taking a long break from it once Wire Mothers was out, and now that I've had this insight, and I'm near the end of the initial promo cycle for the book, I'm closer to doing so. (As for the other monsters in the Doom Box, Facebook is scrapple to Twitter's steak for me, and for whatever reason, IG offers almost no dopamine hits compared to the others.) 

My main question about this is no longer "how do I promote myself?" - because the Wire Mothers launch has not gone smoothly, and I seem to have sold copies nonetheless - but "what do I do with my time instead?" I think the answer has to do with the Star Trek: Voyager project I've semi-begun and am going to start in earnest when Jami Attenberg's yearly 1000 Words of Summer project begins on June 1. But I also hope to write some more about film on my Medium page and some more about myself here. And I want to read some damn books; my writing/reading balance has been way off lately. 

I've said this before, but: as a writer, I didn't really make career progress until I engaged on Twitter. I got most of my cornerstone opportunities there, whether by chance or by effort. I don't know if I have enough career momentum to slack off on it and still find success, but I want to try it and see. I'm in a phase now where writing is its own reward, and finding people to read my work isn't like selling encyclopedias door to door. That won't be true forever, but it is for now, so it might be a good time to untether. 

It's spring here, which means the exact weather that people think happens all year round in LA: sunny, mild, pleasant breeze. The weather is nicer and more consistent than any May I can remember in LA. It was over 100F in May 2017, the month I got my MA from CSUN; it was an annoyingly hot weekend to celebrate. 

Tomorrow Matt and I are going to the Academy Museum to look at a Casablanca exhibit, as well as the Dykstraflex and whatever else is on at the moment. We got a flyer in the mail that shows some of the Casa objects on display, and one of them is the model globe from the opening, which is grayscale in color. It hadn't occurred to me that they'd use a black and white model of Earth, because it's Earth, why wouldn't it be in color, but it appears they did. I eternally love movie stuff/secrets like this. 

Speaking of which, I just finished a biography of Jean Harlow's husband Paul Bern, who died under mysterious circumstances in 1932. Even though the likely cause of his death has filtered through to the public after 90 years of MGM coverups, the circumstances are still swathed in questions that no one can answer because everyone is dead. Death surrounds this story: Paul, Jean, their close associate Irving Thalberg, Paul's previous wife, they all died unexpectedly, all prior to 1938. One of the few major players involved who lived a long life was LB Mayer, of whom this book has given me an appalling impression. Jack Warner may have been a cartoonish supervillain (with unerring instincts), but Mayer was the kind of to-the-bone horrible that doesn't make for good stories after the fact. He was just bad, just mean, just selfish. Perhaps this book was wrong in casting him as such a perpetrator - it's wrong about a bunch of other things - but I tend not to think so. 

As Conrad Nagel's eulogy of Paul put it: 

Hollywood is cruel and brutalizing to those seeking success. In no other place is the struggle for success so cruel. It is difficult not to bow down to one of Hollywood's false idols -- the keenest and most dangerous being insincerity. 

But I still fall to my knees. I can't help it. The fact that I'm considering another novel set in the 1930s and intricately entangled with film, despite how the Casa novel exhausted me, demonstrates how helpless I am, how strong is Hollywood's power over me.