Never Yell Help Unless You Really Need Help

The past handful of days has been kind of bonkers and I am not handling it well. I'm behind on almost everything: reviews, interviews, reading, pitching, volunteering, editing, applications, my personal life. The only thing I'm up-to-date on is publicity via social media. Which probably isn't a good thing.

Here is the news:

• sinkhole, in their generosity, has put me on their masthead as contributing books editor. I wrote a special bio just for them.
  
• I found out that my name and review are quoted in the paperback for Red Clocks.
  
• My piece on Medium has racked up 20,000 views.
  
• I wrote an op-ed of sorts about the Stephen Elliott situation, and it got me a flurry of messages and shares and conversation. This is the first time I've been in the vanguard of thinkpieces about a cultural issue instead of tagging along behind.
  
• My friend Ryan mentioned me in his podcast, the Coolness Chronicles.
  
• A close family member has been impacted by Hurricane Michael and I am worried. 

Here is the further explication of that news:

a) I am thrilled to be in this capacity for sinkhole. They are doing truly thoughtful work and their editorial team is so supportive. I don't think I'm supposed to be taking pitches or assigning books, but I will be writing for the site more often. It feels like I have a home.

b) I made a quickie phone video about this Red Clocks thing.

Here's a screengrab of the quote. I took it from the "look inside" function on the Amazon page.

I have a bunch to say about this turn of events, and I'll say it honestly. Some time ago, I hoped that my review of The Book of Joan would be quoted in the paperback edition of that book when it came out, and the Rumpus seemed a prominent enough outlet for that to be possible. But it didn't happen. I'd assumed that if it had, the book would quote just the publication, not my name. I'd know that I was the one who wrote those words - like the way Graywolf pulled my quote for the Encircling 2 page - but I comprehend that the publication has far more authority than I do.

Surely this goes double for the Guardian, I thought, when I considered whether the Red Clocks paperback would quote my review. But the blurb page quotes me by name. Which is pretty thrilling to me: it grants me authority, alongside the publication I wrote for. The rest of the blurbs quote the critics by name too, except for Kirkus (which does anonymous reviews) and Ploughshares (dunno). STILL. In the physical paperback, my cheesy closing lines are on the inner color insert, and my name and the quote above are on the second page of blurbs.

I'm aware that this is fairly insignificant to the shape of my career as a writer or critic. No one is going to take me more seriously because my name is inside this paperback in this capacity. But it's totally exhilarating to me personally.

c) The Medium piece is still gathering trolls and the occasional thoughtful comment, and it's going to be syndicated at a high-traffic outlet next week. I'm quite thunderstruck at the number of views and reads. Of course I have ambitions, wild ones, about how many people I want to read my words. But now that I have proof that so many people have processed my name through their visual cortices, I feel...weird. Shaky. 20,000 is not 20,000,000, but it's certainly more people at a chunk than have ever seen my name before.

d) I wanted to put together a very different kind of article about Elliott, one in which I sourced the voices of others (that authority issue again; I only met him the one time, briefly). But everyone I asked was too disgusted at or exhausted by the situation to talk to me. So I wrote it myself, in about four hours on a Saturday night, staying up until 1 AM and screwing up my husband's sleep schedule. I think it's one of the better things I've written this year.

I elected to write about this despite having no direct dog in this fight (except that I'm a woman who writes, which means I am invested in the SMM list's fate) because it was one of only two things that genuinely shocked me this year in terms of men's bad behavior. One was the fact that Kavanaugh's friend Mark Judge had written in favor of GamerGate. Because 1) I simply can't believe a guy who went to Yale and was buddy-buddy with a SCOTUS justice would have written about something as young-generation-y, as pop-culture-ish, as base, as idiotic, as GamerGate, and 2) I could not have concocted such tidy evidence of Judge's dickishness, were I writing about it in a novel. Not even in an absurdist novel. It's so perfect, so in line, that I couldn't even have imagined it.

Meanwhile, Elliott's lawsuit is so odious, so flimsy, so appallingly self-centered, that I couldn't even assemble all my thoughts about it until I sat down to write. Mentally, I just spluttered. What the living hell. In the essay, though, I'm pleased I was able to loop together legal analysis, feminist analysis, and writing-world stuff. Doesn't mean I'll be able to do anything but shake my head if you ask me about it in person.

e) Ryan watched the 1987 movie Mannequin and asked for comments about it on Facebook. I told him I'd written about it right here on this blog. He was strongly affected by the post, and this week on his podcast, he mentioned me and that post when talking about the film. The Coolness Chronicles, in this season, is about Mystery Science Theater 3000, but detours intelligently into talk about other films. I even recorded a segment for him, which I think will appear later in the season. I'm so glad Ryan saw fit to give my thoughts some attention. And if you're here because of him, welcome!

f) [intense, private worry].

Apart from the list: Tomorrow, something drops that I cannot wait to share everywhere and tell you all about. NINE book reviews have appeared this month, as of the 16th day of the month. What. My ARC pile doesn't quite reach my hips, but it totters higher than my knees. Help. I am so grateful for this life, read read read write write write, but some mornings I wake up and I can tell I haven't relaxed my shoulder girdle through the entire night of sleep.

And last night, worrying about deadlines and timelines, I put my head in my hands and said to Matt, "I just want to publish a book." All this work (gotta be 60,000 words at least this year), and I've met amazing goals and done so well (I mean, see the bulleted list above, there's a lot of accomplishment there), and of course I'm proud, but all I truly want is a book I wrote to hold in my hands. To see on the shelf. To put in my bio. And I don't know if I'm any closer to that than I was a year ago.