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.