Blessings Inside My House

I made this, and you can buy it here

I'm working on weaning off socials and deleting the majority of my tweets. I don't know what my long-term strategy is - possibly Canada - but for the next however long I don't want my words being farmed and scraped by that emerald miner. I'm going to try to put them here, on Medium, and in my notebook instead. 

A bunch of stuff just came in for me to read and evaluate, which is pretty unusual these days. It'll keep me busy for a couple of weeks. I'm also trying to get rid of stuff in my house, which is hard for me: a constant process of swallowing terror about impermanence and departure. 

First weekend of November I went to the Portland Book Festival, which was fun. Not much like what I expected. I saw everything I really wanted to see in the first half-hour, spent another couple hours hanging out at the Autofocus/Split Lip booth, and then I went home. Or back to my hotel, actually, which was an absurd, hipper-than-thou establishment, where I had an uncarpeted room with no extra blanket and no fan in the bathroom. Don't stay at the Moxy unless you are 23. 

wet and cold, the PNW way

We're having a stupid problem at our house that is turning out to be expensive, stressful, and lengthy to try and solve. It could be a lot worse, but it could also not be happening, that would be okay. 

Some of what I'm reading is books by Richard Dyer, one of the only people who cares about star studies to the extent that I think most film studies people should. I'm also still slogging through biographies of powerful men from the 1930s. On the plane to PDX I started taking some real notes about how to write this thing, the different ways I want to set up the stories of each narrator and the interpretive problems I'll have to get past. 

On the plane back, however, I reread The Godfather, because I was prepping to record a podcast episode about it and the film version (pretty obscure, you might not have heard of it) with my friend Emma. That happened on Wednesday, November 6. We agreed to just pretend it was not Wednesday, November 6, which meant we had a wonderful time. That episode should be out in a few days. 

There are a lot of blessings inside my house. So many books to read, things I made with my hands or things that were made for me. What I know is so small. 

Residual Don't-Wanna

August was bad. Not for any specific external reasons aside from the oppressive heat, but because I could not get my head out of an existential mole-hole. Everything was vague and far away and meaningless; nothing got through to the internal chamber where I have willpower and feelings, nothing sounded appealing. Yes, this is a description of depression. I slept a lot, missed reasonable benchmarks for taking action, couldn't write much, probably gave bad advice and did a bad job as a friend. I likely missed an email or two, as well, so if you're waiting to hear from me, drop me a line. 

pretty sure I'm going to buy this?

Feeling better now that it's September, but I do have some residual don't-wanna hanging around. Mostly having to do with my next project, which will either be the Tom Paris book (have written >7K, didn't enjoy much of it) or the Paul Bern novel (have researched a good deal and taken notes). 

As I said back in June, the only writing-related thing that sounded good all summer was lying on my back and thinking about the Bern book, taking no action on it, just thinking, agonized dreaming, like a lady on a chaise longue. I pushed into the Tom essays, mostly via self-nagging rather than the pleasure of writing. It did me good to complete some work, but it felt like writing instruction manuals, not essays. Finally, I asked Matt about this (not for the first time) (it's fun to be married to me) during a road trip we took over Labor Day, and he told me to write the project I wanted to write rather than the one I thought I should write. 

There are so many reasons I shouldn't write the Bern book now, but all of them are practical, and the inspiration and passion I feel about it are not part of a practical calculus. So he's probably right. But my practical side keeps sowing doubt. 

After my last post, I went on and did the revisions to the last section of the Casablanca book, which were agonizing but took less time than I thought. I gave it to new readers, they got back to me, and yesterday I did the final pass. Now I have to do all the surrounding stuff - synopsis, query letter, agent research, yadda yadda. I feel more ready to do all this than I did during August, but I don't even want to know who actually likes doing such annoying work. Not me. 

I closed Barrelhouse reviews submissions for the month of August, the first time I've done this in the five years (!) I've been running the section. The submissions traffic I get there isn't too burdensome, but I was ready for a break anyway. It was the right move. Of course once I reopened them they started trickling in again immediately, like barely a few hours later. I don't want to express public annoyance about that, because it's not polite and also not completely correct (I feel good about doing the work, overall). But I have to say no so fucking often in that space, and the karma of that wears on me. It's never gotten nicer or easier to say no to subs that mean well but aren't suitable. 

In about 10 days I'm going to the Midwest for a quick three-city tour: St. Louis, Oklahoma City, and Lawrence, Kansas, all in five days. If you live in any of these cities and want to say hi, let me know. I don't have any events planned - my planning for this trip mostly happened in dreaded August, and hence I messed up a lot of it - but I'm hoping to have some fun and see two cities I've never visited. 

I'll be putting out a newsletter with some recent publications as soon as I get around to it, but otherwise that's the news. I'm so grateful August is over. I'm really looking forward to temperatures in the 80s. I keep putting words down, one after another. 

Free-Floating Stuff

Barrelhouse Writer Camp was really wonderful. I didn't do much, except socialize and probably gossip too much, but I relaxed and spent a lot of time outside, which it's becoming impossible to do here for the next six weeks or so. 

I am doing everything possible not to revise the last section of the Casablanca book. It's becoming more urgent, but I reeeeeally don't want to and I'm acting like a huge baby about it. 

Watched The Revenant, which I'd heard was a sort of contest rather than a film, and that assessment was wrong. It took my breath away. The idea pinged into my head while watching to write an essay about DiCaprio, which is an idea I should've had long ago but now that I finally have, it's another great thing to do rather than revise the last section of my book. 

Still on a wild, woolly, expensive perfume journey. Have ordered a bunch of perfumes both vintage and not, and none of them has even come close to the first one I tried: Mitsouko. It's truly like nothing I've ever smelled. 

Actual writing isn't going well, but reading is going OK and thinking/churning/editorial is going OK too. 

I still haven't unpacked my duffel bag or my backpack (got home seven days ago). I remember there was like one trip in my whole life where I unpacked the next day like a good girl, and every other time I unpack whenever I can't avoid it any longer like a chaos muppet. 

While away, I went to the Sleeping Beauties fashion exhibit at the Met, and I gotta tell the truth, it was incredibly disappointing. So much an exhibit meant to make people talk rather than making them think. I know a thimble's worth about fashion and perhaps a little less about about museum curation, but I know enough to know the way this was set up and curated was about flash, not meaning. It was a pain in the ass to get there and get through the exhibit, plus I dragged Matt along with me, which made the disappointment all the more frustrating. 

I keep thinking I need some kind of strategy to cut down on my phone use and social media use (different categories that overlap a lot), but probably what I need is to just stop. Hacking my brain has never, ever worked; tricks or strategies are generally wasted on me. The I stopped smoking was to stop buying cigarettes and putting them in my mouth and lighting them. Quitting a habit or an addiction is more complicated than that, but it's also not, and I feel like the "also not" is the place I need to get to for my phone/socials use. 

Wire Mothers seems to be well-received. I'm surprised about this, but pleased. Some external stuff reportedly coming in the next couple of months (review, interview). 

A writer I admire bottomlessly has reached out about her next book and we've had a kind of shy, gentle meeting of the minds. I am so happy about this I want to cup it in my hands like a firefly. 

I hate deadlines, and I need them. 

I hate routines, and I need them. 

I wish it was September. 

The Tangible, Textural Past

In promotional news, if you're in New York City, come see me and Toby at Quimby's on June 24. We still don't know what we're going to say to each other, but we always have a good time talking. He's smart as a whip and a tremendously elegant critic. 

And listen to the most recent episode of the Take-Up, a podcast of which I can now officially announce I'm a cohost. Someday I'll get that Rotten Tomatoes critic approval, dammit. 

This week my husband and I celebrated our 13th wedding anniversary. Thirteen is a lucky number for me, not an unlucky one, so I felt good about it; but this week has been emotionally cruddy for me and work-intense for him, so our celebration amounted to a couple glasses of prosecco and a medium-good noir. 

I don't know how the years compound into decades. That's the element I can't countenance about time passing. I understand how months slide up into years, how weeks collect into months, but in terms of time passing unexpectedly, too quickly, it's all about the mysteriousness of decades for me. I sent someone my From Me to You posts today and had to acknowledge that the first one was written a decade ago. That was impossible to believe. It's been 18 years since Matt and I moved in together. Equally impossible. I don't know what happened to 2014-2019 in particular. 

Enough of that. 

I've mentioned here that I'm working on two projects simultaneously: essays about Tom Paris and a novel about Jean Harlow's second husband. "Working on" is disingenuous, because all week I've gotten nothing done except reading. I haven't felt well in either body or mind, but I'm also pretty unmotivated right now. Ironing out certain issues with Wire Mothers has been draining, and the Tom Paris project has stalled. I know it's because it's a book I know how to write and that's not as exciting as a book I don't know how to write, and also it's essays, which are kind of naturally less exciting for me than fiction, because I'm arranging (landscaping) rather than inventing (growing). I wanted to Produce, just so I didn't get in the habit of not producing. I haven't. Maybe next week I will. 

The thing I want to do more than any work is lie on my back and think about Jean Harlow's second husband, about just how cynically Norma Shearer married Irving Thalberg, about whether John Gilbert could have beaten the bottle and remained a star - about all those circumstances and the ways I want to sketch and narrate them, and specifically about the tangible, textural existence of those days. I ordered some samples of the perfumes Jean supposedly preferred (lots of fiction and legend, unclear what's true), and those smells have proved so evocative that the actual work of writing, outlining, characterization is all less appealing than the thinking. I tried to go to Grauman's to look at and touch Jean's handprints (again), but the courtyard was closed that day so I'll have to go back. I've looked at their house, which is still standing, on Zillow. I bought a poster of the Hollywood sign as it existed then, with the -land attached, and put it up in my office. 

I want to daydream about these lives, consider them while I listen to scratchy jazz, mourn for them while I breathe in Mitsouko. Don't worry, I'm not Christopher Reeve in Somewhere in Time, pining to death for an age I'll never live in. But in starting to take steps toward telling a famous yet unresolved story, I feel a strong desire to psychologically inhabit a vanished time and place as fully as possible before I get going (rather than flatly researching it, as I did for Europe in the 1930s). 

Speaking of compounded decades. 

Hollywood changes constantly, in a technological and architectural way, but some things about it (danger, allure, fortune, dishonesty) haven't changed in a hundred years. It's the details I seek, pinning down the scents and sounds and objects so I can tell the story as freely and as instinctually as possible. 

On a related note, I got some feedback on the Casablanca book that I'm pretty sure is right but I can't figure out how to fix without knocking big holes in the timeline. And I really need another paper copy  of the manuscript to work with in order to solve these problems, which is (take my word for it) deeply annoying. Whine, whine. 

The other project on my plate is an hour-long talk about...myself as a writer? I think? that I've been asked to give to a group of older folks in late June. I'm looking forward to the event, but my first draft of the talk was not suitable, and time is running out to write another one. Another thing I couldn't motivate myself to do this week. 

Next week, instead. Somewhere between the thinking and the daydreaming and the whining, there will be work. 

Untethering from the Doom Box

The other day I was in a bad mood and I dragged myself outside for a walk with Matt. I told him all about the book I'm reading (a biography of a producer in early Hollywood), and the sunshine and fresh air plus my interest in the stuff I told Matt improved my mood extraordinarily. When I got home I picked up my phone and looked at Twitter, and I felt my good mood drain away. I felt it, the way you can feel your bladder deflate when you pee. 

I looked at the phone in my hand and I went: oh. 

Later, I told Matt about this, calling my phone the Doom Box. Now, every time I pick it up, I think about that phrase. I keep opening Twitter and feeling that draining sensation. It used to make me happy to interact there, but not so much now. I know I'm not getting the best of it, for obvious reasons, and I'm sick of fighting the algorithm to see and be seen. I had been thinking about taking a long break from it once Wire Mothers was out, and now that I've had this insight, and I'm near the end of the initial promo cycle for the book, I'm closer to doing so. (As for the other monsters in the Doom Box, Facebook is scrapple to Twitter's steak for me, and for whatever reason, IG offers almost no dopamine hits compared to the others.) 

My main question about this is no longer "how do I promote myself?" - because the Wire Mothers launch has not gone smoothly, and I seem to have sold copies nonetheless - but "what do I do with my time instead?" I think the answer has to do with the Star Trek: Voyager project I've semi-begun and am going to start in earnest when Jami Attenberg's yearly 1000 Words of Summer project begins on June 1. But I also hope to write some more about film on my Medium page and some more about myself here. And I want to read some damn books; my writing/reading balance has been way off lately. 

I've said this before, but: as a writer, I didn't really make career progress until I engaged on Twitter. I got most of my cornerstone opportunities there, whether by chance or by effort. I don't know if I have enough career momentum to slack off on it and still find success, but I want to try it and see. I'm in a phase now where writing is its own reward, and finding people to read my work isn't like selling encyclopedias door to door. That won't be true forever, but it is for now, so it might be a good time to untether. 

It's spring here, which means the exact weather that people think happens all year round in LA: sunny, mild, pleasant breeze. The weather is nicer and more consistent than any May I can remember in LA. It was over 100F in May 2017, the month I got my MA from CSUN; it was an annoyingly hot weekend to celebrate. 

Tomorrow Matt and I are going to the Academy Museum to look at a Casablanca exhibit, as well as the Dykstraflex and whatever else is on at the moment. We got a flyer in the mail that shows some of the Casa objects on display, and one of them is the model globe from the opening, which is grayscale in color. It hadn't occurred to me that they'd use a black and white model of Earth, because it's Earth, why wouldn't it be in color, but it appears they did. I eternally love movie stuff/secrets like this. 

Speaking of which, I just finished a biography of Jean Harlow's husband Paul Bern, who died under mysterious circumstances in 1932. Even though the likely cause of his death has filtered through to the public after 90 years of MGM coverups, the circumstances are still swathed in questions that no one can answer because everyone is dead. Death surrounds this story: Paul, Jean, their close associate Irving Thalberg, Paul's previous wife, they all died unexpectedly, all prior to 1938. One of the few major players involved who lived a long life was LB Mayer, of whom this book has given me an appalling impression. Jack Warner may have been a cartoonish supervillain (with unerring instincts), but Mayer was the kind of to-the-bone horrible that doesn't make for good stories after the fact. He was just bad, just mean, just selfish. Perhaps this book was wrong in casting him as such a perpetrator - it's wrong about a bunch of other things - but I tend not to think so. 

As Conrad Nagel's eulogy of Paul put it: 

Hollywood is cruel and brutalizing to those seeking success. In no other place is the struggle for success so cruel. It is difficult not to bow down to one of Hollywood's false idols -- the keenest and most dangerous being insincerity. 

But I still fall to my knees. I can't help it. The fact that I'm considering another novel set in the 1930s and intricately entangled with film, despite how the Casa novel exhausted me, demonstrates how helpless I am, how strong is Hollywood's power over me. 

Done and Undone

The only way this post will make sense is if I outline it: 

1. Collection soon 

2. Book finished 

3. New project 

1. My mini-collection of short stories, Wire Mothers, releases in just about a week. Confetti emoji! I am long overdue on making the announcement that I'll be appearing in Brooklyn in late June to promote it, but I haven't gotten my ass to Canva to make a graphic for that event, because April was messy (see 2). 

Art by Bri Chapman. Order here.

I've gone on record lots of times that I don't consider myself a great writer of short stories. I have gathered this from the world rather than believing it in my heart. I've tried (a lot) to write New Yorker-style minimalist short fiction, and I just can't do it. My stories, thus, got rejected constantly for the better part of a decade. And yes that is a very normal thing for a writer to report, stories getting rejected constantly for the better part of a decade, but whatever mold I was supposed to be reshaping to pour my short-form fiction into over all that time, so as to make it suitable for magazines - I never managed to find that mold's schematics. My acceptance rate didn't improve post-grad school, post-having a firmer grip on my craft. I write what I write, and magazines rarely like it, and I've accepted that (even if they won't, ha HA). 

So these five stories are the result of that process, of figuring out what kind of writer I am and accepting that I'm unacceptable. I like them a lot. I like how they turned out. I hope you will, too, but I long ago stopped believing that people who like regular American short fiction will like my stories, so it's OK if you don't. 

I'm moaning about lack of publication but the fact is, three of five of the stories in Wire Mothers were previously published. (This is not the average ratio for the stories sitting in my hard drive.) Fun fact: the editor who published "To-Do" in 2015 wanted to remove the bullet points. If/when you read that story, enjoy thinking of it without them. Editors can be idiots. 

2. For the first 12 days of April, I was at a residency, my first ever. It was at Yefe Nof, which is located at Lake Arrowhead, California, which is 5,000 feet above sea level. I did not think this would be a problem, because I've visited Denver multiple times, did a long weekend in Colorado Springs, etc., and never noticed the altitude. But I was increasingly ill the entire time I was there: digestive problems, anxiety, poor sleep, shortness of breath, et al. I pushed through and wrote a staggering number of words, successfully finishing a draft of my novel, Men from Other Countries. Then I went home early and hugged my husband. 

For the following couple of weeks of April, I stayed more or less in the zone, revising and rewriting and working through the draft, until I had something I was ready to give Matt. He read it, and gave me useful feedback, and now it's with my second reader. The door isn't completely open to more reader-friends yet, because I need one more line edit plus more feedback re: Matt's points before I can consider it really a finished draft, but it's functionally finished, and I'm so relieved. 

I started this book in 2017, but then I got sidetracked by Ceremonials and Junk Film. Gun to my head, I'd say I've been working on it for about two years, especially considering research, but the majority of the word count was written in two huge bursts in November 2023 (30k) and April 2024 (40k). I'm explaining this for transparency, and because when the book gets published, people are going to ask how long I worked on it and I want to have an answer to hand. It's not an answer that lines up with the historical record of me working on this book, but it's spiritually close to say two years, on and off, with inconsistent work and gaps in between for other priorities. 

It's a good book, and I'm proud of it, but it was rarely fun to write the way Highbinder was (and nowhere near as fun as Junk Film was). I remembered the fun I had with that book as I was reskimming it the other day, and the comparison was stark. Other Countries was serious business, and I only enjoyed myself on a handful of occasions (eg I came up with a reason for my gay character to hide in a closet). So, for my next trick... 

3. ...I'm going to write something that I hope is a lot more fun: a series of essays to form a character study of Tom Paris from Star Trek: Voyager and explore my stupid crush on him. 

just look at this idiot. God I love him so much

The project is also intended to reflect some more light on Voyager as a metaphor for family relationships and a much better Trek show than it's given credit for. But mostly it's about Tom. 

I'm a little concerned that it's my rebound project after working on Other Countries so intensely, and that it won't amount to anything. This concern is amplified because I'm telling people about it, instead of waiting to see if private work on it comes to something. That tends to be a jinx. But my list of undone projects includes this Tom Paris thing, a really dark hybrid essay I'm not ready to write yet, a very annoying revision of my grad school thesis that I have to read philosophy to do, and a huge undertaking about Jean Harlow's husband, which is likely some years away from being ready to write, if I even decide to do it. So I thought I'd start rewatching Voyager and taking notes and going from there instead of just waiting for my second reader to get back to me (hellish), or getting a real job (equally hellish). Very casual work for a possible fun-writing reward, no pressure. 

4. Misc: I've been wishing I had something good to write about re: movies, like the essay I wrote about The Zone of Interest here, but I haven't happened upon anything just yet. I gulped the entirety of the Hannibal TV show in less than a week, but most of what's generally useful criticism about that show has been said already, whether in words or in fan art. Pretty sure I'll be making this x-stitch pattern, though. 

found here

My Peculiar Monstrosities

Something I learned in 2023, like really seriously learned it, was to slow down. My father said to me so many times when he was teaching me to drive, "Don't get in a hurry." This phrasing stuck in my head and repeated itself to me again and again when I was in Norway and Sweden in September. Writer/editor me would revise him to "don't hurry" or "don't rush it", but "don't get in a hurry" expresses the heart of the advice in a way the revisions don't. Get in a hurry. In a hurry as a state of being, rather than hurry as a verb. Don't get there. Stay out of a hurry. 

I kept trying to rush to and from places, rush experiences, in Sweden and Norway, and the experiences kept going wrong. When I slowed down it was fine. Where I live, I sometimes try to take driving shortcuts when I'm behind, and I wind up being later than I would've been if I'd just gone the normal way. The more I get in a hurry, the worse things go.  

I don't know what this has to do with the rest of the post, but it came up as I was writing about Twitter, and doesn't feel like it belongs somewhere else, so in it goes. 

Lately the films I've been watching are often extreme. I know why - it's self-flagellation, and it doesn't speak well of my mental health, even if it's a better coping strategy than others I'm aware of - but that's not keeping it from happening. 

One direction I considered for this post was writing about Night and Fog, Alain Resnais's half-hour exploration of the concentration camps, blending footage from the 1950s with archival footage that you know exactly what it looks like. (That fucking bulldozer shot.) Having researched WWII on and off for the past...two years? something like that? I knew that some of what was said in voiceover was embellished, if not flat-out untrue. I don't know why, because who the hell needs to embellish what happened at Auschwitz, but I'm sure of it. And I realized as I was listening to the VO and comparing it to what I knew to be true that Resnais had made a propaganda film. In this case the propaganda is for the right side, so it's not objectionable per se, but that's still what it is. 

Another direction is to write about All Quiet on the Western Front, the 2022 version, which I adored even if it was challenging to watch. (If that's a propaganda film, it pushes for full historical contextualizing and to stop shoving children in front of cannons, which are political messages I can get behind.) The main thing I thought about while watching was how world cinema of the 21st century keeps proving that Hollywood has totally lost its way. Not only do we actively discourage the avant-garde in American filmmaking - as we always have - we keep making worse, longer films and elevating filmmakers who focus on narrative/characterization and totally drop the ball on visuals. 

A third direction is to talk about how my book is going. I'm in a strange place. I've written over half of it, and have gotten stuck in a spot where I have to 1) romanticize a character I don't like 2) retcon and fit events into an existing narrative framework, which I thought would be fun, but currently isn't 3) figure out my main character's reactions after she does bad or iffy things 4) write the setting of Paris, which I've only visited once, twenty years ago. A few scenes have been emerging from my pen, but it's a little like gaining ground in a car stuck in the snow - a few inches here, rock back, a few inches there, rock forward. So I went back to the beginning and reread the first 80 pages to start working on the major changes I'm going to have to make (redoing a bunch of conversations, changing the writing style altogether in some parts, altering the main character's age from high school to college). That process was demoralizing enough that after taking notes, I got stuck again on the point of actually doing the revisions. 

I wrote a paragraph on each of these directions rather than going on at greater length on any one of them because I'm considering trying to write something like my peers are writing, a Substackish thing. I think the field is much too crowded for me to enter it the same way my peers are, and I'd have to force myself to write on a regular basis rather than here and there when something comes up. But not being on Twitter means I'm not recording my thoughts on film and the writing process as often as I used to. (Which is good? Fewer opinions on Twitter = a better world?) I was not a wholly unpopular tweeter, so maybe I could grow the audience for my books if I expanded in another place on what I might have tweeted. I'd likely choose Medium if I was doing this. And I opened up a window there this morning with the intention of writing a full post about Night and Fog and propaganda. But again, the field is crowded, and the truth about me as a writer is that I don't want to sharpen my elbows. I just want to do my thing. 

I gained a lot of confidence from staying off Twitter for the past six weeks. I gained a lot of peace. I missed my online friends - I missed their wit, and I missed the reinforcement that I am not alone in my peculiar monstrosities. I missed all the opportunity that grows in that place. It's - this word truly is not an exaggeration - wrenching having to decide between on and off Twitter, and the middle ground of "sometimes" has always been a hard space for me. (And "sometimes" does nothing for literary promotion.) 

I don't know where I'm going. I know I'm not going there in a hurry, or that if I am, I shouldn't be. Twitter is nothing if not fast, so perhaps it's better out of my life, promo be damned.