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