Splat

In this new normal of full-time freelance, every month is weirder than the last. Some months are triumphant, some are jam-packed, some are slow, some are remarkably painful. June was a strange month, when I should have read more and done less meaningless stuff, and July has been intense and, most recently, very bad. Sunday saw the definite end of a hope I'd been nursing for just about a year, something career and creativity related that I hoped would be meaningful to more people than just me. But it fell totally flat, ptt, like missing a step off your porch and going splat into your front walk.

Ow.

I had a smaller disappointment a few days prior that I can't get out of my head. It's a writing-related struggle, exactly the kind of thing that I want to share here, but can't, because you will all think I'm a jerk, and besides I don't want to turn this particular rejection into Writing Material. It's causing me to feel both blue and panicky, and I don't know quite how to negotiate those in tandem.

But I shall rally. I got an email this morning asking if I consented to one of my reviews being translated into Portuguese and published in Brazil, and I was like ¿¿okay?? because it's the kind of thing that's exciting and terrific but that I never ever would have imagined, neither on the yay or nay scale, in no way would I have imagined it as something someone would ask me about, for any reason, ever. But it's nice. I'm happy the review caught someone's eye. In Brazil.

I worked well last week. Many blurbs are in for Ceremonials, all lovely.

Like this one, which is so generous it makes me dizzy. 

I'm churning out reviews at speed, even ones I should have checked the release calendar before writing, oops. I agreed to set up a website for a writer group I belong to and the Wordpress setup is really different for Bluehost than for GoDaddy, and I feel in over my head, but I'll figure it out. The book pile is not getting shorter despite gentle no-thankses to multiple publicists. I just want to help all of them! All the writers, all the books! They all seem worthwhile.

I've had a blog post in mind for weeks, but haven't put it together, because I have been writing for money or deadline instead. That's part of why I haven't been here in a while. Also, I feel like many of my insights have been milked right out of me at this point. This is my 548th post on this blog, and I've written as much as I can about how I've gotten where I am. I know there's plenty more to say, and that there ever will be, but for a while now this hasn't been the first place I think of to say it.

Still and ever I'm trying to figure out what to say here, when it's no longer a steam valve, when it's no longer a default for work that can't go anyplace else, when the politics of the writing world make me shut my mouth a lot more than I did two years ago. I want to tell you backstories of the work I publish, but some of them are too simple to be useful ("they assigned me to interview her, and I did") or too complicated to be interesting to anyone but me ("in fifth grade I was standing in the lunch line when...").

Part of Sunday being a bad day was making a list of things that made me angry, in the hope that I'd purge them. Instead I walked around with them clanging in me for the next few hours. I haven't tried a lot of the standard methods for managing my emotions (journaling, rituals, screaming into a pillow); it's mostly just analysis, tumbling things around in my head until I figure them out and calm down. And sometimes exercise. Or cleaning. I hate cleaning so when I'm mad is the only time cleaning works out for me. On Sunday I just ran over and over the list (there were 23 items), getting madder and madder and not knowing how to let any of them go.

A few of the things on that list resolved, but others have stuck around and are still making me angry. That's how my to-do lists are, too. I accomplish dozens of things every week (due credit), but the things that stick around are amorphous enough to possibly have no solution.

I'll tell you something that made me mixed-mad: reading Axiomatic, by Maria Tumarkin. I landed a review of that book someplace! exciting! and it pissed me off to read, because it's the barest, most exacting nonfiction I've ever read, shaving down every unnecessary word until it's pure meaning, clipping along at an exhilarating, exhausting pace. It's the kind of writing my tenth-grade English teacher told me to stop doing because I was moving too fast for anyone except myself, skipping from point A to point H and not helping my reader come along to all the letters in between. I trained myself out of writing this way, and I don't know how Tumarkin learned to do it in a way that's acceptable to other people. I hate her, and I want to read every single word she's ever written. She makes all of us who write mixed-form nonfiction look bad, even if we're doing different things than she is.

Anyway. Here's some stuff I wrote recently that I'm proud of.

An essay about David Shields and Erica Garza that I hoped would get more attention than it did. I guess I put it off too long. "This is the burden of women who write: we are constitutionally incapable of assuming that our worldview is general, is the default, because we absorb evidence every day, from all corners of culture, that it isn’t."

A short piece about Nick Drake on the 50th anniversary of his debut album. If I'd told college-age me that someone would pay her to write something adulatory and off the top of her head about Nick Drake, she would've dissolved into joy. I would've tried my best not to say "but there's a lot of baggage that goes along with this awesomeness - -"