Nobody Can Do This

Thank you to the handful of you who reached out after the last blog post with support - you are kind, and necessary. I've gotten both good/encouraging news and bad/reinforcing news since then. 

I'm using this period before the end of 2024 - a year I did not enjoy - to dig behind me for a softer place. I'm reading, cleaning, fixing. Selling stuff on eBay and Poshmark. Driving boxes of clothes to Goodwill. Reorganizing the living room. 

My to-do list for January includes deliberately fun writing, rather than thoughtfully challenging writing. After January, I'm not sure. The year is shaping up to be busy, but I have to wait for a few months to find out exactly how busy. 

For example: I found out I won a residency from an organization in the Bay Area. It looks like they're going to be scheduling the residents in January, so I don't know what time of year I'll be doing it, and it looks like they haven't announced it, so I don't think I can either, but...yeah. I got it. I applied with the Bern project, and that's pretty funny in a terrifying way, because I've set that project aside at least until spring to work on something else and heal, so will I be able to work on it as I said I would in my application? Unknown. But congrats to me for news I can't announce yet. 

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After a hiatus, I went back to cross-stitching, both doing some new projects and finishing up some old ones. The hardest one was this - 

- which some of you may remember from an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants. This piece was challenging in ways I didn't expect. I used a really old piece of linen, 22 ct, which is quite different from what I usually use, and which had stains I didn't see until it was too late. I thought I'd do the pattern's crosshatching in a simple way, but counting it that way turned out worse than crosshatching the hard way. Thus, the finished product is full of mistakes, even if no one but me can see them. 

I underestimate how much I like blackwork, because I don't like backstitching and that's basically all blackwork is, but this is the third finished piece of blackwork I've done and I do enjoy it a lot. 

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Most of what I've been reading in the last few weeks has been in the Cthulhu Mythos, both the OG and his descendants. 

not to be construed as an endorsement of HPL's horrible values

I bought used copies of two basic anthologies on eBay and one of them stinks of cigars. That's appropriate, because if you look at the tables of contents for most Cthulhu Mythos anthologies, you will see nearly all male names right up until the late 1990s. (A handful of folks have tried to turn this around in the years since.) 

This is the second time I've contemplated writing a book in a subgenre/field that's still, well into the 21st century, totally dominated by men. I don't want that, I don't want to do that again, to put on a good-natured face about it and try to be heard about it across the publishing/promoting process. But I can't help what I want to (and am qualified to) write about. 

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I have big decisions to make in 2025, and I truly have to live through the whole year before I can make them properly - a prospect which is extremely hard to bear. Thinking this gave me cause to remember this portion of a really phenomenal Hax column about overwhelm: 

I got the best advice on being overwhelmed my first time grading AP exams, on the first morning of eight days. The exams came at you by the hundreds, one after another. I felt a wave of despair. “I can’t do this,” I told the table leader. “Well, can you make it to morning break?” he asked. That was about 10 minutes away. Yes, I told him. “Then, make it to lunch,” he said. “The trouble is you’re looking ahead eight days. Nobody can do this for eight days.” It got me through and I came back for 10 years. And whenever I’m overwhelmed in any situation, I ask myself: Can I make it to morning break?

I can't wait a year to make these choices. Nobody can wait a year for this. But I can wait until spring. Until summer. Until October. Until January. Like sobriety: not just one day, but one minute at a time. Those minutes add up.