Time to Be Human

Here are some things I'd like to put in this space soon:

• A list of all the books I read in 2019 
• My New Year's resolutions and a report on last year's 
• Thoughts on how my last essay of the year is going 
• Pride and concern about how I'm prepping for the Ceremonials launch 

But mainly because of how the last essay of the year is going, I don't know if I can put together all of these posts.

I should have started writing it in November. I should have taken afternoons in the last six weeks to work on it a little bit at a time. Now there are three days left in the year and it's not done. I wanted to finish the essay in 2019 because it's the last essay of the book I've been working on for three years or so, and I want to submit the finished book to a contest that closes on January 31, 2020. I don't really know if I have a manuscript, and I won't know until I finish this essay and put all ten of the essays together. I should have finished the essay in November or mid-December so I could have assembled the manuscript already rather than worrying about getting it done in January.

But I didn't do any of that.

Today I started it, and the problem is the same as it was in November, if not worse: I have so much to say that I don't know how to say it all. I'm likely going to write and then cut a bunch of the draft, which is something I rarely do, but at this distance I'm having trouble distinguishing what's necessary and what interests only me.

I'm also presently reading for two book prizes. One has a deadline in early January, and just this morning I finished enough of the field to feel confident about voting for the choice I wanted to vote for all along. With one exception, the rest of the books in the field are truly wonderful, but my choice is a Mozart book in a field of Salieris. Sorry, everybody else. I really liked your books. The other prize has a deadline in February, and I'm a little less secure about whether I can finish the field in time (bigger field, longer books, I've read fewer of them).

My job has gotten easier both physically and emotionally. My body is recovering better all the time, and I'm starting to be more comfortable with the people and horses at the stable. Getting up stupidly early is working out better than I thought it would. I get up around 5 and spend half an hour settling in to my awake self: eating breakfast, drinking tea, reading Carolyn Hax, maybe doing a tiny bit of correspondence. I need that time to be human, and having it built in to my morning is great, even if it does mean I go to bed around 8:30 PM.

Planning for the Ceremonials launch and tour is going well. I'm done with booking all my travel and lodging and I'm finishing up gathering guests for my readings. I've had postcards made and am spreading them around, I've got plans for window posters for bookstores and little gifts for people who ask questions at readings, and other kinds of promotion are cooking along. I keep buying things for greater convenience while I'm traveling (a special heated brush for my bangs, a warm coat I can compress into a tiny ball) in the hope that I'll somehow be prepared for the tour experience, but underneath I realize this is just throwing capitalism in the direction of anxiety. Some things are worthy - I bought a rolling crate that I can check as baggage to carry my stock of Ceremonials, rather than lugging a cardboard box - but are packing cubes really necessary?

This has been an eventful year, full of highs and lows so numerous I can barely remember them all. I hope I always behaved well in the face of pressure. I can't be sure.

I put stickers on my drafting notebooks to make them mine, and because I know I'll probably fill the notebook before I get sick of the stickers. I've been using this book since 2017. It only has a couple of pages left. With the current essay, I'll finish it up tomorrow or the next day. The Petrified Forest sticker and the Wales sticker are both from 2017, but the Chautauqua and Iceland stickers both came from this year. And I'm visiting the "write" sticker all the time, every year.

How You Get Into the Pool

For the first time in a couple of years, I've hung a hummingbird feeder outside my office window. They've started to find it, the little birds, and they come visit me now with fair frequency. It's nice.

Most of my body hurts, and I'm moving pretty slowly. It's because I got a job a few weeks ago as a groom at a horse stable. I adore the job, and I'm so happy to be doing even the crummy chores required of me at the barn, but I won't romanticize what it's doing to my joints and muscles and spine. Going from 500-5,000 steps per day to 18,000-30,000 steps per day is a big change. I've Googled and Googled and yes, this kind of painful adjustment to a job full of physical labor is normal and in a few weeks I will be feeling better. But I'm a little worried. I'm almost 40, after all, and I can't bounce back from major exertion like I did in my 20s.

November was like how you get into the pool if you're skittish about water temperature. I wrote one thing, and then I read a book, and then I did no reading or writing for days, and then I read a little  more and wrote a little more...by the end of the month I started feeling more like myself, acclimated to the water, ready to read and write with gusto again. But it won't be like it was.

"Burned out" is not what happened to me w/r/t book reviews this year. I just realized, sometime this fall, that I wanted to do more than one thing in a given day, a given week. As I took on more and more books, I watched fewer films, talked to fewer friends, did hasty work with my other responsibilities. If I had a maid, and didn't have a book of my own to finish, I could've kept it up. (Maybe.) Because I am who I am, though - profoundly scattered among interests and desires - it had to stop.

I'm not shutting down my reviewing work completely, but I'm done pitching reviews for a little while except in the rarest circumstances. I'll keep working for my regular folks, Locus and B&FG and a few others. However, I'm more interested in curating, and working on other parts of my creative life, for the immediate future.

More opportunities for curation will be abundant soon; I've been named the new Reviews & Interviews Editor for the VIDA Review. I'm extremely excited about this, and I feel, as objectively as possible, that it's a great fit for everyone concerned. We haven't had an editorial meeting yet with the new staff, so I'm not ready to talk about volume or strategy or pitches, but I hope you'll put a little bookmark on me in your head if you have something you'd like to pitch in the future.

Some Ceremonials news: I got a Kirkus review (no, I didn't pay for it); the first interview with me about the book has gone up; and I finally found a site that had a graphic template I could use to make a tour date postcard. (Soon to be in paper form; thanks, Moo's Cyber Monday sale.)

Many more guests will read than can fit on this postcard 

I will likely come to the east coast in July, and depending on how the book does, I might do a Midwest/Deep South leg in the fall of 2020. Ceremonials releases in two months and a week, or thereabouts, and I will have lots more news and info for you as the time passes.

A couple of publications I want to share here, in case you missed them:

• An essay about Black Widow, a movie I love with absolutely no cult following at all, for Bright Wall/Dark Room. This was the fourth or fifth thing I pitched or submitted to them, and I had some heartbreaking near-misses, so it's gratifying to have something accepted.
  
• This weird short story called "The First Snow," published in a paper volume of Storm Cellar several seasons ago, newly posted on the website this week. My opinion of my own short stories has shifted so much over time that I honestly have no idea anymore if it's a good piece of writing. I'm happy with what I did, so I'm kinda done worrying about it. 

Look for a short essay on Pink Floyd's The Wall coming soon, something I thought about for a lot longer than it took me to write it, and rambled endlessly to Matt about, poor fella. Listen for a podcast with me and my NB sibling from another...nibling, Ilana Masad, coming soon. Get ready for multiple angsty social media posts as December, my least favorite month of all, wears on.