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.