Falling, Falling

I have mixed feelings about fall.

I'm happy for everyone who enjoys it, whether the source of that enjoyment is Halloween or pumpkin spice or sweater weather, but I am not in that camp. When I lived in New England, fall was an arbiter of The Bad Time, when cold and snow would dominate my experience of the world. The crisp air spelled approaching doom.

I don't know how to explain my emotional experience of winter in a way that will convince you, especially if you're a winter-lover. I hated and hate cold, I hated and hate snow unless it's firmly outside a cozy window (and someone else is responsible for clearing off my car), I hated and hate having to bundle myself in garments before going outside and then having to shed them all again once I get where I'm going. I don't just find these things annoying or a little upsetting. I hate them with my whole body, with my whole heart, with my whole pineal gland. There's a reason I never want to leave California again; the climate is a matter of emotional survival for me.

And it's not because I have no experience with snow

October is my birth month, and I always like my birthday. However, the accompaniment to my birthday is always an extended eye-roll about Halloween. Whatever the gene is that gives people Halloween joy, I don't have it. So I coo dutifully at dressed-up little kids and shrug about Sexy Gene Roddenberry costumes and wait for November.

In California it's better, because the weather doesn't portend anything in particular (it was 96F this week). Bad feelings about fall have started to loosen in me, especially because here, months greater than 9 mean the rainy season is on the way, and rain in LA has a strange, supernatural, holidayish feel to it. I no longer feel like fall is an ending, and instead I feel more like it's a spot in a cycle.

All that said: I don't remember living through any prior October in which I felt so overloaded and so wildly incompetent to the task of my life. On Monday movers came and carried the stuff that we couldn't carry ourselves, but for the prior two weeks I'd been moving stuff from one apartment to the other, filling and emptying box after box, a slow, steady, muscle-aching bucket brigade of books and clothes and Stuff. It took me another three days to finish clearing out the old apartment of kitchen, closet, and garage stuff. I am very tired but my delts are ripped, bro.

I took the month off from reviewing, which seemed before I did it as if it couldn't be done, but was the right choice. Not that I could've kept up my regular traffic anyway, because along with the move, I have been working on a copy editing job that has been...just...terrific. The work is fairly easy and quick, the content is silly enough to amuse me, and I'm getting paid. It's a real bright spot in the grinding work that has been my freelance life this year. But I'd hoped to at least do my regular Locus reviews along with a few books from my favorite presses. Instead I made my apologies and did no reviewing at all, and almost no reading.

Because there was plenty more this month. For most of the month I was teaching my first online class, which finished up around when the movers did. I was selected to participate in a thing that I can't reveal, but which makes me very happy and proud. The film series I've been co-curating for a few years at CSUN has suddenly, inexplicably taken off, with much bigger audiences, more attention, and actual funding. I got an acceptance that I don't want to jinx by saying what it was, but which surprised me enormously, as I wrote the piece at the very last minute before deadline, which usually leads to terrible work for me. And it's a long time coming - I've submitted to this place a lot, with pieces I really care about.

In between all that, I watched almost 100 episodes of Parks and Recreation for the first time, as well as more than a dozen movies. I needed something to sit on the couch and do while resting between carrying loads of our stuff from one apartment to the other. I've rewatched old pals (Black Christmas) and tried some new stuff (Millennium Actress). It's been nice.

When October is over, I'm looking forward to enjoying reading again. That's the curse of this job: the traffic of it, and the nature of reviewing only new books, means the bulk of my reading isn't for pleasure. Someday it might be again, but not this season.

One's Gotta Go

September, uh:

Just updated my website and discovered I set a record last month: in September, fourteen (14) reviews, covering sixteen (16) books, were published on the internet with my name on them. pic.twitter.com/yEbAVEmmYm

— Katharine Coldiron 🌟 (@ferrifrigida) October 1, 2019

Fourteen reviews is a lot for one month. I didn't file all of them at the same time or even within a few weeks of each other, so it's a little disingenuous about the nature of my productivity. A little. But not a lot.

Now that September is over, I'm looking forward to doing fewer things. October has, oh, six or eight books to read, and November has even fewer than that, largely because I've been saying no to things and keeping well away from Nectar Literary's delectable newsletter.

Idly, I've been wondering what to do next. I'm trying to slow down the reviews because they're not leading to steady income (yet), and that's starting to become a priority. Freelancing is exhausting, and while I'm better suited to it than to a regular job, I'm so worried and keyed up all the time that I'd like to have something else in place by mid-2020.

I'm applying for various opportunities and putting my intentions out there. Irons in the fire include a podcast a friend is launching with me as a rotating guest, a one-time editing job that's going to be helpful on my resume, and of course the book I'm 9/10 of the way done with. The film series I co-run at CSUN has suddenly taken off in popularity, based on our newsletter numbers and an invitation we got for a Halloween event. I'm trying to teach off- and online. But underlying all this is a question mark about making the Venn diagram work for me.

I don't know whether to lean into stuff that I'm good at and makes money (legal work, detail management), or to keep limping along at what I like. I've lived both ways now, and I like this way better, but I sleep better the other way.

In April and then from August until yesterday, I watched the five seasons of The Wire, which I knew was some kind of phenomenon, but which I didn't comprehend as the monumental work of art it is until I was a few episodes in. I started tweeting it, and couldn't stop, and now I have this huge thread of tweets across several months that covers my emotional & critical reactions to the show. People who have seen the show have really enjoyed the thread, they tell me. I've decided to collect the tweets into a little paper zine, because making an internet-based text into a physical text always tickles me. Don't know when, but hopefully sometime in the next couple of months.

Now that I have one essay left, I'm balking at writing it. Even though I get great satisfaction from finishing things generally (TV shows, boxes of tea, leftover dinners), I don't like finishing creative stuff. I went over this in therapy last week and I think it's tied up with fear of success, and/or disappointment that the best part of the endeavor (the making part) is over, and the part I like least (the fixing part) has to begin. Luckily, I found a contest that it'll suit, and its deadline is October 15. So that's a good prod to make me do the work.

Along with that, I'm planning to reread Highbinder this week. An agent event happened on Twitter recently, so I pitched three folks, and got a full request from one yesterday. I haven't read it all the way through in...gosh, over a year? More than two years? Don't remember. It's time to give it another read. I was thinking about it the other week because I know I named a character Malcolm, and I have to change that because the only male character in Ceremonials is named Malcolm. They both look like Malcolms in my head, just of different kinds. But one's gotta go.