1) Next week I am going to have a different byline every single day. A couple of them are pretty big deals to me. But it's going to be a lot of promotion all at once, so if you follow me on social media, gird your loins.
1A) I realized in writing the above that byline = the line where you say who it's by. That pop you heard was my mind being blown.
2) I posted the below on Facebook the other day, and it was popular + about my writing life, so I'm reprinting it here.
On Saturday, my husband spent two hours sitting with me in front of my Excel spreadsheets, website, and "book reviews" document folder, calculating how much work I've done since December as a book reviewer. The point of this exercise was to help me figure out, using DATA and MATH, how to keep myself from transforming into a little ball of stress and split ends.
This came out of a conversation we had last night when he admitted he was a bit worried about me and the stress I've been demonstrating re: my freelance work. I realized in the course of our conversation that he was asking me to put together a budget - not for money, but for time. I knelt next to his chair with epiphanic glee, telling him that of COURSE I can't manage my stress about freelancing, because I can't budget worth a damn! So he agreed to help me figure it out.
The results of our data-gathering were shocking. I've written 49 reviews in the past eight months. Forty-nine. That is so many. I knew it was a lot, but I could not have put a number that high to my idea of "a lot." In that same timeframe, I've published 14 non-book-review essays. Also a lot. (I begin to understand why I've made only middling progress on my book.) I assigned a difficulty number to every review I've written and have yet to write, and averaged out how much difficulty each month held for me. For example, even though I wrote half as many reviews in April as in May, April was a more stressful month, because the difficulty number was higher. SO helpful, and something I never would have considered doing, because my mind just doesn't work that way.
We discovered that, as of August 4, I am full up for the month in terms of work assignments. If someone asks me to write something else in August I will have to say no. I have eight reviews to write, plus two articles, plus placement of an interview, plus a 140,000-word book to copy-edit, plus pitches for October books, plus (probably) edits on the reviews I've filed that haven't been looked at by editors yet. Plus other things too fiddly and tentative to put in this summary.
In sum, I married an amazing dude, my stress is not imaginary, and numbers can be helpful instead of not.
3) I wrote something about James Gunn that, so far, has brought me a lot of heartache and not a lot of happiness. Oh, well. Here's the piece, but because it was a hot take, I missed something a few people have brought up to me: I could/should have added that no one ought to get fired unfairly, but for now, equal opportunity unfairness is better than the alternative. I'm not comfortable with anyone at all getting unfair treatment, but philosophically, I don't think that life will ever be fair. People asking for Gunn's reinstatement seem to think it can be, and I simply don't. What I was trying to draw out is that instead of living charmed lives, maybe white men are closer to living normal, sometimes-unfair lives.
A friend pointed out the uncomfortable political dimension of Disney kowtowing to a right-wing nut, which is important commentary, but which is not where I belong as a writer.
4) Other stuff out in the world:
I reviewed Hunting Party, a book written in French by Agnés Desarthe and translated by Christiana Hills, for the Kenyon Review. This is one of the most prestigious publications I've landed in as of yet. I never, ever could've placed a short story with the KR; I know my limits and I'm simply not that good a writer. Placing a review there has plopped me back into a circular line of questioning I've been running around a lot in the past six months: am I an unusually good critic, or is there a dearth of people willing/able to write book reviews? The mean side of my brain says it's the latter, that a smaller pool means that even a little fish will get noticed. But I can't pin all of the (middling) success I've had this year on that assumption. There's just been too much. Anyway, this book is really lovely, worth putting on a syllabus, and I'm proud and pleased to have placed the review at the KR.
That's actually it for this week. But next week, hoo boy. My tracker says six articles, reviews, or interviews. Might end up being seven or eight.
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