Two Bookshelves

I'm not quite on schedule on the bad film book, because May has been a Break. I've tried to rest and sleep aggressively to get my body back to normal after stopping horse work at the end of April. Of course that means I have insomnia and weight gain, and I've almost completely lost my concentration. I'll get back on track in June, I hope, with the book and my body. I'm trying to finish a cross-stitch project that turned out to be a hell of a lot more work than I thought, and when that is done, a small daily residue of despair, of not-finishing, will evaporate. It should be done in the next few days. 

It's a very fun piece, but larger than expected (I even misjudged how much Aida I'd need, which is why the upper and lower borders are tiny), and the purple is just...so much. I'm going to end up using two full skeins of embroidery thread on it, which I believe I've never done on a non-kit project. My larger projects have tended to represent a show I was binging while I stitched, and this one is Bob's Burgers. Just started season nine. 

I'm reading Zelda Fitzgerald's Save Me the Waltz, and it's...interesting. I don't know if I'd call it a good book, but it's absolutely worth reading: dense with beauty and steeped in a rare way of seeing the world, breathless with love, seductively artless. Few books have the persistent, seemingly haphazard, lapping movement it has. I half-wish I'd read it while I was a Fitz fangirl in my early teens, or at least known then that Zelda was a writer too. I find it interesting that my education on Fitz didn't include that information. 

I'm also audiobooking The Secret History. Outlook hazy so far. And I'm reading shorter books at as fast a clip as I can manage while still working on Lisa. This month I reorganized my bookshelves, you see, and discovered that I have two entire bookshelves full of books I haven't read. Like, not two shelves, but two bookshelves, two shoulder-high pieces of furniture fully loaded with books not yet read. So I'm trying to move through them. 

My bookshelves have been messily stacked instead of organized for over a year. It used to be my favorite thing to do when we moved, but the last two times, I organized them just a few months before we were asked to pack them up and move again. So this time I waited ages before organizing them again. As many books as I have now, it's tedious instead of fun to keep doing it (and I really didn't want to jinx us into moving again). But I finally got to the point where it was more annoying not to find the book I wanted than to spend a week stacking them on the living room rug and reassembling them on my shelves. 

In forward-facing writing news, a bunch of stuff has appeared or been published lately. This essay about the Teen Agers, which surprised me by doing pretty well, and this essay about Cop Rock, which surprised me by sinking like a stone. This interview with Kate Durbin was a small part of a large raft of publicity for her new book, but it meant a lot to me. This podcast featured me, about as enthusiastic and opinionated as I ever get. This issue of a fascinating literary project featured a bunch of my horse cross-stitches (keep clicking on the spinning object at the bottom). And this very nice review of Ceremonials appeared. 

In inward-facing writing news, I started a new blog for the book project I might be doing after I finish the bad film book. That project is a catalogue of the films of 1977, and I'm not sure of the final form it will take - a general discussion of trends and significance that mentions many films, or an encyclopedic listing of the films and how they cohere to trends and significance. In any event, I'm watching as many films from that year as I can, and offering up my notes on them here. It's less a blog like this one than it is an online notebook to help me track my progress. 

One thing I'm less learning than I am seeing in action is how much old years are like new years. Most of what I'm watching is mediocre, or genuine dreck. While I still think 1977 is meaningful in cinema history, I also think I've likely seen most of the gems already, because they have lasted and been talked about. There's a lot of cinematic dreck in a given year and we live through it in real time, but the stuff that's worth watching later usually sits in the thresher, glittering, while the chaff blows off and away. Watching more of the films from a given year demonstrates that films aren't getting worse; we just don't usually watch the bad ones four decades later. 

What's ahead of me is a lot of hard work, no matter how you slice it. After I finish the bad film book, I've either got the 1977 book or the Casablanca book ahead, and I have three finished or near-finished books I'd like to get published, all of which have very different audiences. I should probably find an agent if I can, although I'm frustrated and doubtful about that, and it's too long to get into why. I'm contemplating plunging into an extremely difficult long-term project (not writing, but literary) and am genuinely scared of the work it will take to do it. 

I'm feeling discouraged, is the point. Lots of things are clicking, and I'm certainly counting my blessings. But although there are five shelves of books I've read, my eye keeps jumping back to those two I haven't. 

There's one other thing on my mind, to do with talent and effort. I tried writing it here but it ended up long enough to be its own post so I will post it another time. Stay tuned. 

Reduced to Summary

On February 10, a book blogger wrote a post dissecting some of my reviews at Locus, mostly of books by people of color. She discerned a pattern in my reviews that indicated racial prejudice. I believe that she called me out usefully on some mistakes, and that she otherwise selectively read and quoted me in ways that misrepresent my body of work. 

This was all ignited because I reviewed the second volume of an epic fantasy series without reading the first volume. That choice infuriated readers and book bloggers, whose attitude toward books differs in significant ways from that of book critics. One blogger decided to look closer at my work, and these two issues - my purported racial prejudice and my choice to start with book two of a series - got conflated, when I'm not sure even the blogger intended that. 

There's a great deal to be said about all this. The question of whether it should be a requirement to read books in series from the get-go in order to assess later books is an interesting one, when I stand back from it. Up close, the philosophy dissolves. For a few days I was a useful strawman for a lot of necessary arguments on Twitter about book criticism, even though I don't believe everything that's been said about my work and my critical posture is accurate or even helpful. I'm glad that my work has stirred up conversation about diversity in publishing, even as I'm devastated about being the subject of so much wrath. 

I think I became a target for everyone who is mad about authority imbalances in book criticism. I respect that, but given how little I'm paid and how little I'm known, I find this silly. Hitting me is not really punching up for almost anyone. 

I drafted a very long blog post explaining what I think and feel about this whole incident, how painfully it hits me given my history with race and racism, and some of the personal and professional aftermath. Ultimately, I don't think it's useful to make public. The above is all I want to say for now. 

Also, there's a lot more for me to tell you. 

Electric Dreamhouse Press, a UK publisher headed by my friend Neil Snowdon, is going to publish my second book this year as part of their line of Midnight Movie Monographs. My monograph is about Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space. I wrote this short book in the space of about six weeks in mid-2020, and I haven't had such fun writing a book since Highbinder (which still languishes, alas). I'm really pleased about joining the small but scrappy field of Ed Wood studies. 

The book contains my central arguments about why it's worthwhile to study bad film. I've been building on those arguments to write a series of essays that I hope will be a whole book about bad film, eventually. I've written about Ruby (1977) and about a series of 1940s films starring "the Teen-Agers," and up next is Death Bed: The Bed that Eats. Other essays will be on Cop Rock, Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman, and a tricky dual piece about Showgirls and Staying Alive. I'm ahead of the schedule I made for these essays, which feels good. 

However, I keep getting intuitive signals to work on the Casablanca novel, which has been at a bare simmer in the back of my head for years. Last night I attended a reading with Lance Olsen and Lidia Yuknavitch, and something Olsen said temporarily turned up the heat on that burner. I've made a very tentative plan to write that book once I'm finished with the bad film essays - sometime in the fall, ideally - but if this keeps up, I'll have to pause the bad film essays and set to the novel. I simultaneously feel excited about the project (I haven't written a novel in years) and preemptively annoyed. It's going to be so much work. 

Anyway: the Plan 9 book represents pure joy for me, as it was an intellectual problem which I got to solve to my satisfaction. That the result will be a book (and a beautiful book at that, given EDP's past performance) is extra whipped cream on an already-nice sundae. I found out about the Midnight Movie Monographs series around three years ago, and idly wondered what movie I could write about for 100 pages. My mind supplied Plan 9 from Outer Space, and even though it was a weird choice, the more I thought about it, the more I supposed I could do it. How would I write 100 pages about Plan 9? Well, last year, I wrote until I found out. Thankfully, Neil was interested in what I produced. 

Both of my first two books, as it turns out, will be about weirdnesses my mind picked up and played around with, private obsessions I never thought would go public. Of everything I've written, these two books are the most fringely me, and I'm bemused that they are the two going out to bookstores in bound form. I think this means you ought to write what you love, or at least that I ought to write what I love. 

As for the third book, I recently made a (digital) handshake agreement with Blue Arrangements to publish my conceptual novel, Victorian Spam. It's a tee-tiny press, just two people, and all of us are burdened by lives and jobs and other projects, so we are all taking a relaxed attitude to the timeline of this book. I estimate that it'll appear in 2022, and it, too, is super weird. Yay! 

None of these three books has anything to do with any of the others. Ceremonials is lyric fiction, Plan 9 is straight nonfiction, and Victorian Spam is...other. All of them are ekphrastic in some way, and I created all of them, but those are the only two elements I can think of that they have in common. 

As for the fourth book...I finally, finally, finally finished the Misfits essay back in December. A couple of weeks later, I got an important blessing from one of the real-life characters in the essay. Thus, Weird New Shit, my book of hybrid film essays, is really truly completed. It's taken me four or five years to write and assemble these essays, which is four or five times longer than I usually work on a book, so I'm thrilled to be done. I'm shopping it to a few presses I think will like it before I try agents, and have consequently racked up a few rejections. 

I don't think there'll be news on that one for some time yet. My expectations for it are so large and unrealistic that it's probably better to let it settle as a project before it goes into the world, anyway. But I do suspect it'll be the fourth book. Mostly I'm glad to be done. 

Somehow I never put it on the blog that an essay of mine was published online at Conjunctions a few months ago. It's called "All Cities Burn" and when I shared it in November, I said I thought it was the best thing I've ever written. These days, with so many different projects coming to fruition, I don't really know if that assessment has meaning. Read it and let me know what you think. Maybe the most arresting thing I've ever written? Either way, being in Conjunctions is an honor. 

While I was struggling through the emotional aftermath of the February 10 incident, I started cross-stitching tiny portraits of the horses I work with. I've made about a dozen, using various patterns and editing them as needed to communicate what the horses look like (and act like), and have a couple more to go. My plan is to give these to the owners of these horses as parting gifts; I've given my notice at the barn, and will be stopping work there within the next month or so, I hope. I'm sorry to go, but the work is tearing up my body, and I'm turning 40 this year - too old to withstand another summer like 2020's. 

The one portrait I can't seem to settle on how to make is for Quinn, a gorgeous Friesian cross who is smart and eager and generally a lovely horse once he gets out of his anxious head. But he almost never succeeds in doing that. I love him so much and will miss him so much and I don't know how to capture him in cross-stitch without doing a massive, photorealistic portrait, much bigger than 3 inches wide. I don't have time for that. But how can I sum him up in such a small space? 

How can any of us, horse or human, be reduced to summary? 

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.

Irrevocable and Important, Yet So Petty and Dumb

I've now put out all the most worrying fires that got started while I took the month of October off from reviewing. There are plenty of emails that need answering, and a whole chain of labor to do related to a relatively minimal chore (must print shipping label and proofs of freelancer pay, must move printer to desk in order to print, must organize desk in order to move printer, must organize rest of office in order to organize desk, must figure out bookshelf situation in rest of apartment in order to organize office), and o, the pile of books to read. But I feel okay about the future for now.

I do have lots of thoughts and ideas flying around in my head, which is usually evidence that I need to write a blog post. So here I am.

One's Gotta Go

September, uh:

Just updated my website and discovered I set a record last month: in September, fourteen (14) reviews, covering sixteen (16) books, were published on the internet with my name on them. pic.twitter.com/yEbAVEmmYm

— Katharine Coldiron 🌟 (@ferrifrigida) October 1, 2019

Fourteen reviews is a lot for one month. I didn't file all of them at the same time or even within a few weeks of each other, so it's a little disingenuous about the nature of my productivity. A little. But not a lot.

Now that September is over, I'm looking forward to doing fewer things. October has, oh, six or eight books to read, and November has even fewer than that, largely because I've been saying no to things and keeping well away from Nectar Literary's delectable newsletter.

Idly, I've been wondering what to do next. I'm trying to slow down the reviews because they're not leading to steady income (yet), and that's starting to become a priority. Freelancing is exhausting, and while I'm better suited to it than to a regular job, I'm so worried and keyed up all the time that I'd like to have something else in place by mid-2020.

I'm applying for various opportunities and putting my intentions out there. Irons in the fire include a podcast a friend is launching with me as a rotating guest, a one-time editing job that's going to be helpful on my resume, and of course the book I'm 9/10 of the way done with. The film series I co-run at CSUN has suddenly taken off in popularity, based on our newsletter numbers and an invitation we got for a Halloween event. I'm trying to teach off- and online. But underlying all this is a question mark about making the Venn diagram work for me.

I don't know whether to lean into stuff that I'm good at and makes money (legal work, detail management), or to keep limping along at what I like. I've lived both ways now, and I like this way better, but I sleep better the other way.

In April and then from August until yesterday, I watched the five seasons of The Wire, which I knew was some kind of phenomenon, but which I didn't comprehend as the monumental work of art it is until I was a few episodes in. I started tweeting it, and couldn't stop, and now I have this huge thread of tweets across several months that covers my emotional & critical reactions to the show. People who have seen the show have really enjoyed the thread, they tell me. I've decided to collect the tweets into a little paper zine, because making an internet-based text into a physical text always tickles me. Don't know when, but hopefully sometime in the next couple of months.

Now that I have one essay left, I'm balking at writing it. Even though I get great satisfaction from finishing things generally (TV shows, boxes of tea, leftover dinners), I don't like finishing creative stuff. I went over this in therapy last week and I think it's tied up with fear of success, and/or disappointment that the best part of the endeavor (the making part) is over, and the part I like least (the fixing part) has to begin. Luckily, I found a contest that it'll suit, and its deadline is October 15. So that's a good prod to make me do the work.

Along with that, I'm planning to reread Highbinder this week. An agent event happened on Twitter recently, so I pitched three folks, and got a full request from one yesterday. I haven't read it all the way through in...gosh, over a year? More than two years? Don't remember. It's time to give it another read. I was thinking about it the other week because I know I named a character Malcolm, and I have to change that because the only male character in Ceremonials is named Malcolm. They both look like Malcolms in my head, just of different kinds. But one's gotta go.

The Additional-Fire Effect

Just now I opened up edits on a review and I had one of those moments where it all crashed on my head, the whole and entire weight of what I've gotten myself tangled up in for the last two years, all at once, CRASH. The edits were asking me to do the exact opposite of what I've trained myself to do because editors generally prefer it (reiterate the same point in the intro and conclusion, don't be too colloquial, don't go on weird tangents). So I thought about putting myself in the mindset of this editor's wishes, when I had just spent the whole morning in the mindset of editing my own non-review-related work, and had only an hour or so before I had to put myself in a teaching mindset, after spending a few minutes first thing this morning in self-promotion mindset...[pop]

All summer, the tarot has been telling me to be patient and things will improve. Things are improving exactly at the time and in the ways the tarot said they would. This is spooky, but also great, but also, even as things improve, my responsibilities are not decreasing. CRASH.

The best thing to do when I'm feeling overwhelmed is to accomplish a pile of small, overdue things. Getting the oil changed in my car, calling my website vendor, doing some chores for an authors' group I'm involved with. But instead I'm just making list after list of things to do and worrying about email replies I haven't received. Rearranging rather than doing.

There's good news. The last couple of weeks have been emotionally unnerving, but I channeled that energy into writing the Last Tango in Paris essay I'd 3/4 given up on. I couldn't stop working on it for the past two days, not even to go volunteer with the horses. Now, it's essentially done. That means I've written nine of the ten essays for Weird New Shit, which means I'm on track, and not behind. I will finish it by the end of 2019. That feels so good that it throws a blanket on some of the fires elsewhere burning in my freelance life. The blanket is semi-flammable. I elect to feel good about the smothering effect today and worry about the additional-fire effect tomorrow.

via GIPHY

In the past couple of months I've stopped drinking almost entirely. I tried this out early in the year as a Decision, but it didn't stick, and so instead I'm trying it as a habit with occasional exceptions. My relationship with alcohol has never been addictive, so my motivations for the teetotaling habit are about feeling good, changing the physical cycles my body goes through daily and weekly, and sitting with psychological discomfort instead of blotting it out. I'm using vaped cannabis a little bit here and there, but it's so different from booze. I can't really get used to it or predict how it will affect me, so I like it less. Also, I have only been marginally successful at rewiring my brain to believe that cannabis is OK. Drugs were very, very not okay in my family, and that training has lasted despite the increasing legality of weed and, you know, being an adult with my own judgment.

Next week an interview that's been in the works for two years is actually being published. I think. I won't believe it until I see it. This week, a review is going up at a publication I labored to break into. Ask me about it sometime.

All right, enough, I need to spend the afternoon accomplishing small, overdue things. Oh fu--CRASH

My Back Burner

I haven't updated my website since May. Plenty of reviews and articles have appeared, but I've let that aspect of self-promotion slide. I'm a little bit sick of the sound of my own voice (the sight of my own words?), so that's part of the reason, but it's also just a chore entailing minimal reward.

This week I've been writing little stray-thoughts posts on Facebook attached to pictures of flowers I take on my morning walks. Matt has been working 60-80 hours per week recently, so partly I'm releasing the flotsam I'd otherwise tell him over dinner. I also want to publicly reinforce the drilled-down experience of being alive in the world, with flowers and music and food and quirky encounters, at a time when I'm overwhelmed by the world's larger ugliness.

I've also been using this week to clear off my back burner. Because I didn't have many firm deadlines from June through late July, I couldn't figure out how to set work-ahead priorities. I got paralyzed by everything due in September and ended up not being able to work at all. Finally, last weekend, I made a list of the things I'd been meaning to do for months or years: a comparison essay between two February books that I pitched but no one wanted; an interview of more than an hour I needed to transcribe; an article I pitched that the editor wanted, but didn't have time for immediately, so "whenever" was the deadline; a phenomenal book about Vertigo I wanted to read but needed to pay real attention to. It seemed like about a week of work, and I had one week left in June that I couldn't settle on a use for. So I put those two hands together, and now it's Thursday and I'm done with 2/3 of that stuff. Much of it is homeless as of yet, but at least it's getting done, making room for more.

Depending on how you look at it, I either started or got into a fight this week in the literary world. It hasn't been a pleasant experience, and it may have burned a bridge or two. (The worst stuff is happening in private groups.) I wish it hadn't gone down the way it did, but differing opinions are inevitable. And I can't make people look into my heart and see my intentions when all I have is words.

I got two really dumb rejections this week. One I actually laughed aloud at, and the other gave me the impulse to write back and say, "You misunderstood my pitch." (Of course I did not.) Onward.

I also got a pair of really heartening acceptances. One will let me write about a phenomenal book for an outlet I always love writing for, and the other will let me make a little money at something I've been wanting to do for a couple of years.

Two well-paying magazines are stringing me along. A handful more aren't writing me back.

And I spent my first few hours volunteering at RideOn, an equine therapy organization just a few blocks from my house. I scooped poop and curried horses and (incorrectly) cleaned saddles. It was a fantastic experience and I hope to do it a couple of times a week from here on. The manual labor was almost enjoyable because horses were nearby. Maybe the secret to cleaning my kitchen is getting a pony to keep near the sink?

The week of promotion for "After Gardens" is over at last; the final gesture was a short guest post about my weird revision process. I learned A LOT. The main thing I learned is that the ecosystem of book blogging is not one I want to be involved in again. Not because it inherently sucks, but because it sucks real, real bad for me. I don't get my first royalty statement until August, but I'll be biting my nails until then to see if all that promo worked.

Plan Vaguely

Last week I worked intensively on my next hybrid essay, a study of the 1975 film Jeanne Dielman. I'm nearly finished. It's less hybrid than the pattern has been so far, as I didn't have any ideas for a thread of fiction to weave in. Instead, I integrated quotes from Cixous, repetitive thoughts, and, if I'm lucky enough to find a graphic designer to help me, a few diagrams. The only titles I've come up with are either lame or obvious, so I'm hoping a good one comes along soon. I wanted to submit it to True Story, because I thought it might wind up long enough (>5,000 wds), but it did not. So who knows.

It's good to be almost finished with this one. Dielman is the most sophisticated film I've written about for this collection so far, the least mainstream. I worried about how that would impact my writing about it, but it seems to have come out okay. Also, the more of these I write, the less it seems like a fluke that I'm writing them, and the more it feels like a collection. That's a big relief.

Three more to write this year. Next is Last Tango in Paris, which I'm not really looking forward to seeing again, but which makes a point I've never seen another film make. I hope to finish that one before the end of July. In August I've arranged to spend a week away, in a nurturing creative environment, and I want to draft the one about Mildred Pierce there. (I was also thinking about starting on a bigger project involving Plan 9 from Outer Space during that week, but I applied for a couple of residencies with the Plan 9 project so maybe I should leave it alone for now.) The final hybrid essay will be on The Misfits, and my calendar says "fall" for that.

I didn't want to give myself really tough deadlines in case some other project or job became a huge, unexpected time-suck. There's nothing worse, for me, than setting a goal and not meeting it. Doing that makes me feel worthless - a whole different thing than just reworking a calendar. I can make writing plans a few months in advance, but beyond that I try to plan vaguely, then sharpen up my intentions when the time comes. If the next two essays go really well, I might end up finishing the Misfits essay in September, but I'm not ruling out being in-progress on it by the time December comes.

I also wrote a handful of other things, articles I didn't expect to write and a couple of reviews. And I read a bunch of books and sent a bunch of pitches and shot my mouth off on Twitter, resulting in more opportunities, for some reason. I'll never understand this. It's like how, in Mass Effect, rude-ass Shepard is treated exactly the same as kind-hearted Shepard. Why. People should be nicer to nicer people, shouldn't they?

I continue to count down the days until my little women's fiction story, "After Gardens," releases from the Wild Rose Press. You can preorder it on Amazon here. Eight more days!

Interacting with the Material World

You might have seen it on social media, but KERNPUNKT revealed the cover art for my book. It looks like this:

Art by Mariana Magaña

It's so much prettier even than I imagined. I love it.

Managing the book release in early stages has reminded me a lot of wedding planning. A great deal can be done a long time in advance, but a lot of what must happen has to wait for the right moment to be planned. Calendaring and lists are essential. I was born to do that kind of work.

There's a bunch of other stuff going on, too. A long story I wrote, "After Gardens," known on this blog as "the hot springs story," is going up for sale at the Wild Rose Press as a standalone ebook in mid-June. This press has been supportive and helpful all throughout the process of turning "After Gardens" into a commercial ebook, and I'm very happy it found a home there. However, the way this ebook requires promotion is completely different than the way Ceremonials does. Different audience, different kind of press, different goals, different approach. It's like switching alphabets. For this reason, I've been dragging my feet on promoting "After Gardens," but I need to get going on it.

Less striking, but just right for the content 

It's being sold as women's fiction, which is about right. (For the record, it's hard to find markets for short stories that qualify as women's fiction. Both readers & publishers prefer that genre in book length.) I hope it does well for the press, of course, but I feel weirdly indifferent to this project. Submitting to TWRP was my last shot with this story before I trunked it permanently, so I'd nearly severed my investment in it when it was accepted. Of course I'm very happy they accepted it and are selling it, and I'll do my best to promote it, but it feels like someone else's work, and that makes it more of a chore and less of a pleasure to promote.

A few weeks ago I put together a schedule for writing the remaining hybrid film essays I have to write for the collection I'm assembling. I gave myself ample time to write them in order to be finished by the end of 2019. At the time, April still had some days left in it, so I set a goal to finish something else nagging at me that isn't part of this project, a partially written essay about abandoned places, before May began. I succeeded (and the process of writing it was fraught, so hooray, go me, I did something hard), sort of. I thought I had a three-strand braided essay, but what I actually had was one lyric two-strand essay and a separate, much more straightforward single essay. When I was finished with both, I knew the lyric one was missing something, but I submitted it to an urgent opportunity before figuring out the missing bit. (This is a rookie mistake and I'm ashamed of making it. Oh, well; I'll fix it and send it out elsewhere, when it's actually ready.) Mostly I'm pleased that I met the goal of finishing those two pieces, which have been dormant for over a year, waiting for me to put butt in chair and finish them.

There are three main threads in my creative work right now: a) books, b) hybrid film essays, and c) everything else. What I wrote at the end of April falls under c), but now that it's done, I have to return to b). The one I scheduled myself to write in May is a little obnoxious, as it relates to Jeanne Dielman, a static three-hour film mostly about a woman doing domestic chores, but I knew I needed to get it out of the way before I went wild writing about Mildred Pierce.

Earlier this spring, I bought a handmade creativity candle. I wanted, on the first day of May, to burn it and do a tarot reading to restart/redirect my creativity. I've written easily 100,000 words of book reviews in the past 18 months. That's great, but considering that volume of work, I think I need a genuine ritual to direct energy into the collection I want to finish, which requires more intuition and less brain than reviews.

I didn't succeed in that goal. May has come in strange. I feel like I need more time to think, and then I get bored and anxious inside my own head. I'm sleeping thickly, with upsetting, disruptive dreams. My emotions are labile, slippery. [private circumstance], in a way I haven't been since my early 20s, and I have no idea what that's about. Literally all of this could be stress, the unbearable stress of freelancing, built up over time, refusing to come to an actual head but bubbling ceaselessly under a thin and all-too-permeable layer of self-control.

I'm writing this here instead of somewhere private because it's all of a piece, the emotions and the creativity and the stress and the book(s) coming out and what I'm accomplishing and failing to accomplish. For me there's no separation between succeeding at writing that lyric essay - which I think is one of the more meaningful things I've written, if not really one of the best - and failing to do the laundry today. At the end of a given day, the measure of it is how much I have interacted with the material world instead of shutting it out. That's the only mark of success or failure I have to go on right now.

I worry that this sounds too bleak. I'm sorry. I feel weird right now. There's a big deadline coming up in about two weeks, so I could use that as an excuse, but of course there'll be more coming after that and after that; if it's an excuse, it's a permanent one. Seeing Avengers: Endgame yesterday overclocked my emotional state in a way I can't explain at all, since I don't have a lot invested in the MCU, and I'm still recovering from that, which is embarrassing to admit but absolutely true. Ceremonials being a real thing that's coming, all five of my desired blurbers agreeing to review the MS, people jumping in to offer their influence to help me and the book, is exhilarating, but also a brand-new experience that I don't seem to be integrating easily. I landed a fascinating opportunity this summer, but it'll drain my financial resources instead of adding to them, which is a very unkind cut at the moment. Etc. All the great stuff is as overwhelming and stressful as the less-great stuff, and often they seem to be entwined.

At least I cleaned the apartment over the weekend. Looking at the clutter was getting to me, and now it's a lot better.

Directing the Fire Hose

The biggest news in books this week is this piece about an editor and author, Dan Mallory. He is not as blatant a grifter as Anna March and not as absurd a plagiarizer as Ailey O'Toole, but he lied his face off for many years about his life and his hardships. In return, he attained bigger and bigger rewards from the ivory tower and the literary world. Eventually, he picked up a seven-figure advance for his novel and a big hunk of money for the screen rights.

Here's what pisses me off most about this article: Mallory got so many things that I myself want, audiences and editorships with people and publishers with whom I salivate to be involved, acceptance into fancy colleges that I never could have touched. He did it dishonestly, and that meant that he took on prestigious editing positions before he was 30. I'm doing it honestly and it's taking me yeeeears even to get a book published. I'm not capable of Mallory's dishonesty, so I must do it the slow way, and that annoys me in a desperate, hollow kind of way.

Talent plays a role, certainly. Mallory surely has talents as a writer and salesman that I do not, and I acknowledge that it's not an equal situation, where I definitely could've had a $2 million advance if I'd only lied once or twice. But I can't help thinking if he could pull off this shit, why can't I? 

I mean, the wages of this kind of dishonesty are eventually ruin and ridicule, and that isn't ideal. And I don't really want to be the person who got a big-deal editorship by lying my way into it. But it seems like he did genuinely good work as an editor (when he could be arsed). He needed a shortcut to get there, and he needed to lie a lot in order to not come into the office for months at a time (what the hell was he doing during all that time, by the way? GTA and cocaine?), but while there, it seems like he did strong work as a book promoter and editor. And he did come through with an actual book that seems like it sold enough to justify its gigantic advance, even if it might've been a tiiiiiiiny bit plagiarized. He needed the boost of lies to get where he wanted to be, but he seemed to succeed, mostly, once he was there.

What might a shortcut like that do for people who've done enough work to earn it but haven't gotten the breaks they needed? What makes Mallory think he deserves success enough to lie to get it? Who deserves easy success and who doesn't? I'm full of questions about this stupid guy, ballasted by irritation at the publishing industry for being this way, for giving monetary success to people who are good at marketing and midlist success to people who are good at writing.

Last night, someone with interested followers retweeted the Horse Latitudes piece, and it got a whole additional boost of attention and reshares and likes. Today, the author of a book I reviewed tweeted the piece to her significant following and hello, reshares and likes. Lately I'm writing about books and in publications that have momentum separate and apart from what I do in relationship to them. That means I have to do a lot less to make my name visible, which is nice, but weird, in terms of what I'm accustomed to.

About a year ago I decided to hustle whether I liked it or not, and that's what I've been doing, just putting my head down and hustling, even though I mostly hate it. Regular newsletters, regular blog posts, checking on pitches once a week, sharing every single review on FB and Twitter, handing out my business card to anyone who asks if I write, asking for advice about everything I don't know how to do, applying for all possible reviewing jobs, asking for masthead placement from editors I write for regularly, saying yes to weird opportunities that I don't know if I'm qualified for, emailing editors who've rejected me to say they might be interested in X piece that just went live, agreeing to review as many books as I can and worrying about time and placement later, hustling hustling hustling hustling hustling hustling hustling hustling hustling hustling hustling hustling hustling hustling hustling hustling hustling hustling hustling hustling hustling hustling.

I need to slow the pace of all this, or at least change the direction of the applied force. I never again want to be as overwhelmed as I was in January, and part of guaranteeing that is saying no instead of yes (more often and more firmly. An editor a couple of weeks ago interpreted my "I really don't think I can" as "yes!"). Part of leveraging the momentum I've given myself, and now, the momentum others are starting to give me, is directing the fire hose at my hybrid essays instead of my criticism. I never want to stop writing criticism, but I'm concerned that if I keep going with it as I have been, I won't be able to pivot toward the writing that matters to my guts. Nor will I have time (thanks, Chris).

As I wrote previously, my momentum has gotten me rewards I didn't foresee, and not (yet) the rewards I hoped for. I could've lied and said that I got an MFA from Columbia even though I got an MA at CSUN, and say that I used to slush for Conjunctions even though I used to slush for a miniature audio-stories outlet. With those lies I might've gotten further faster, with a lot less trouble and disappointment, and I might've been able to point the hose directly at the work that mattered most to me from the beginning. I could've proved myself once I was there.

But would I want something I had to lie to get?


Out in the world: 

I reviewed Esmé Weijun Wang's The Collected Schizophrenias, which I think is going to be a major book, for LARB.

I reviewed Tonic and Balm, a novel in stories by Stephanie Allen, for the Masters Review. It's out on Shade Mountain, one of my favorite presses, and it's about a nearly lost realm of entertainment: the medicine show.


This picture is completely unrelated to this post but it's hilarious and I need an image so. Click to embiggen if you don't see what's funny. In other news: I am an eighth-grade boy.

Close Reading

This week, a piece I wrote appeared in the Establishment. I'm so proud and happy, because that means:

Two to go. 

I've been wanting to write this essay, in one form or another, for years. I hate the book Stoner. Bottomlessly. I hate it for its mediocrity, for its use of the tired cycle of noncommunication --> bad relationships (which is constantly mined for comedy and tragedy alike), and for its prejudices, which are evidently invisible to readers who want to love characters who love literature. I was grateful for the opportunity to disseminate my annoyance to a wider audience.

But I want to reiterate that I got no complaint with the execution of the biography. I'm sorry to be casting shade on a decent biographer.

The original version of the essay I handed in was much longer than what was published. I wrote some paragraphs of evidence-gathering from the biography and close reading of the novel, which I include below for your amusement, in case you're a literary nerd like me. I wanted the opportunity to prove that Williams is a mediocre writer at greater length than I had to play with in the published version. They're essentially out of context, but if you've read the essay, you can follow along.

One sentence that I wish my editor hadn't advised me to cut, which is not part of the close reading, but is a more general critique on white male criticism: "Perhaps if I didn’t read every book with the underlying question of do I exist in this narrative?, I wouldn’t notice the substandard roles women tend to play, either." That's the question under everything I read, and it's a profoundly important question at this cultural moment - not just for me, a white woman, but for anyone who's not a cis straight white male.

There's more news from me, but it can wait till next week. Enjoy!

--

My Week in Backstory

Hi, here's a post that's backstory on the things that went live this week. It's helping me procrastinate on two essays I'm scared to write. Yay! 

Queen Mob's Teahouse published an essay I assembled from the work of five different writers: me, Lucas Mann, David Shields, David Foster Wallace, and Kate Durbin. This piece started out as a book review of Mann's book, Captive Audience, a memoir on reality TV, but I got really, really carried away. I took angry notes in the margins of his book and when I started typing quotes from him into the Word doc I had set up for the review, I couldn't stop. Somewhere in there I realized I needed help if I was going to critique the book as thoroughly as I wanted to. So it became a collage. Shields, from whose 1996 book I took some of my material, also blurbed Mann's book positively. 

Although the book did make me angry, it also baffled me - so far was it from the values I live within that I sometimes had to stop and squint to make sense of what Mann had written. If he was putting on a more-filtered-than-usual writer's persona for the book, rather than telling the unvarnished truth, the whole thing would make more sense - but it didn't read that way to me. It read as honest, if bizarre. 

I don't feel perfectly good about taking aim at a fellow writer this way, but the book felt that irresponsible to me, was that infuriating. I still don't understand how an examined, educated life can reasonably include reality TV, which exploits and exposes and never enlightens, and I don't understand how Mann can reasonably write what strives to be a memoir of an examined life and not acknowledge the other side of what he's endorsing. 

Also this week, the Rumpus published an interview I conducted with Elissa Washuta in which I talked about some things I rarely talk about - why I never cry, for example - and some things I talk about constantly - women's glossies, for example. I emailed Washuta initially because I've been wanting to have a conversation with her since I read My Body Is a Book of Rules, which I didn't fully understand but which I knew was important. She mentioned on Twitter some months ago that she was looking for promotion for Starvation Mode when it came out in paperback. 

When I reached out to her, I had no idea where I was going to send the resulting interview. Once we were both working on the interview, I pitched a few places (pies in the sky, mostly), but they either ignored me or turned me down. Time grew short, so I reached out to the Rumpus, with whom I have kind of a flexible, friendly relationship. I didn't know that Elissa had previously been on staff at the Rumpus, so I wasn't exactly reaching new audiences with her words by placing it there, which makes me feel bad, that I couldn't put it someplace that would help her more (and stupid for not researching this). I cherish the Rumpus and what it does, of course - I owe a great deal of my current reputation and workload to what it and its editors have given me, and the chances they've taken on me, and I will never stop pointing that out - but it would have brought me (and Elissa too, I think) a new line on the CV to appear in BOMB instead. 

Anyway. All possible credit to Elissa and Monet P. Thomas, the new Rumpus interviews editor, for helping this interview to be something special. Which I think it is. 

Also also this week, Submittable put one of my reviews in its newsletter. I had no idea this would happen until I opened the newsletter, and I was shocked to find my own words there. 

I read this newsletter closely every week, and it gives me all kinds of great leads and information, so I am honored and very pleased. Here's the review they're referring to, of Night Moves, by Jessica Hopper. I loved the book, even if it put the song of the same name into my head intermittently for months. University of Texas Press is doing remarkable work, very little like the average scholarship-oriented university press, and I recommend keeping an eye on them as you would a regular indie press. 

In other news - and I'm kind of burying the lede, if you live in LA - I'm reading this Saturday at the Poetic Research Bureau, a terrific little place in Chinatown, with two artists who are much fancier than I am. Here's the Facebook event if you want to RSVP. I am genuinely thrilled and I hope to see you there. I'll bring chapbooks. I owe this good fortune to Kate Durbin and to this t-shirt made of V.C. Andrews book covers. No foolin'. 

The Constant Everything

WOW THERE IS SO MUCH NEWS but it's not time to tell you it all yet. I've been out of the office on and off for two weeks, traveling and learning and doing all kinds of fun things, and in the meantime a bunch of fun stuff I wrote has been released and the ARCs have been piling up.

not actually all of them

I am finally listening to Lucas and my husband about the book thing and I really am going to start stopping reviewing any month now. The problem now is I keep saying yes to books that add to my existing oeuvre in some way (for example, picked up two Icelandic novels following the Icelandic book of poetry and the Icelandic novel I reviewed), that are by authors of color or women, or that are fun, quirky genre fiction no one else wants to review for one specific magazine (staring at two long novels like this right now). There are so many more books in those categories than I believed possible, so I keep saying yes to them because surely there can't be many more Icelandic novels in translation that editors really want me to write about? (Turns out, yes, there can.) I'm still oddly unbooked (ha HA) between mid-November and January, but maybe that's an opportunity for me to relax on it.

I've stopped asking for galleys of books out prior to January. This is a step forward.

I want to blog for you about a couple of specific topics (release/looking away from the horse, driving in California/landscapes of belonging), but I have some other things to tell you about in the meantime. They are out in the world things, but they're more thoughtful than the usual litany of announcements.

1. Quite at random, Medium picked up and featured my story about "the new normal of retail" - indeed, they renamed it that - and I'm so glad they did. I'm astonished at the bump they gave, how positively it's affected my numbers on Medium and spreading out to other social media. If you're reading this because you read that story, well, hi and thanks. If you're from Medium, reading this, I'd really like some more information on how to get this kind of bump on other stories. I mean, text me at 3 AM if you'd like. The piece got thousands of views, which is thousands more views than any story I've ever done.

2. Today, Memoir Mixtapes released its new issue, "Guilty Pleasures," and my piece about Celine Dion, "If You Whisper Like That," is the closer. This is the first catered thing I've written in a long time (i.e. a thing I wrote specifically in response to a call for themed submissions), and I had a blast writing it. I hope you have as much fun reading it. I also want to point out how incredible the Memoir Mixtapes project is, how useful it is to wrap memoir around music. It makes the memories easier to write and shape, and the connection with readers stronger. I hope the editors keep publishing this magazine forever.

3. I interviewed Alice Hatcher, debut author of The Wonder that Was Ours, for the Masters Review. I couldn't place a review of this book, for whatever reason, but I was not willing to give up on promoting it to the world somehow. It was a book that I couldn't stop thinking about for weeks, one of the most interesting books I've read this year, and not being able to review it was super annoying. I also wanted, very much, to give Alice the opportunity to speak about the race issues swirling between her and her material. I felt concerned, when I read it, that many readers (progressive readers who mean well) would dismiss the book out of hand as inauthentic and co-opt-y. I knew from reading that it was not those things. Getting out ahead of this accusation with an on-record interview felt like the right thing to do, and I was very happy to do it.

4. I was featured on horoscope.com! I really was! The piece is a little more commercial and plain than the kind of thing I normally write (especially with the added section titles), but it's about something I did with tarot cards on New Year's Day which I really wanted to explain in detail. I'm not always this kind of person, this horoscopey taroty person, but sometimes I am, and here's the proof. Also, I'm telling you, every one of the monthly cards has been correct. September is the King of Wands, and I'm scared to death of what it could mean. There's a couple of personal projects that could explode into merriment and success, but I don't want to assume and be greedy. I'm so excited that my name is on horoscope.com, though. I don't know why; it just feels really special. Also, I got to commission/pay/promote a friend for the graphics.

5. In the next week or so, an interview I conducted and an experimental essay I wrote will go live. The interview is pretty amazing, but if its flavor is cookies and cream, the essay is salmon-pickle-pistachio. It takes on an established writer with a degree from Iowa, and it quotes a few popular writers at enormous length. I'm worried about pushback, and/or that no one will read it. I'm worried that I've said some stuff I can't take back or contextualize. At the same time, I'm really proud of the piece; it garnered a handwritten rejection from Conjunctions before it landed where it did.

I've learned that being away from routine as a freelance writer is a WHOLE DIFFERENT BALLGAME from being away from routine as a regular worker, or even a copy-editor-from-home. I'm troubled enough by everything on my to-do list that I'm kind of procrastinating finishing this blog post, because then I'll have to start on tasks. A friend said about freelancing that she stopped doing it in part because she was "tired of the everything." Yes. That is exactly it. The constant, neverending everything.

Mostly About Stuff I Wrote

Well, this has not been an especially fun week. Which is a shame, because some really good stuff of mine got published.

For BUST (yay!), I wrote about Mara Altman's well-meaning and intellectually diligent but fundamentally problematic essay collection, Gross Anatomy. In fairness: although her collection veered away from feminism in some critical ways, she seemed to veer back toward it in the short interview with her that was tucked into the galley. Part of me wishes I'd given her more credit for what was in that interview, but a) space did not permit and b) what's in the book is in the book, and I'm reviewing the book. It failed to break the link between women's value and their physical attractiveness, and I'm not letting it off the hook for that.

An article I wrote months ago, about the tandem video game practices of my husband and me, finally appeared on Crixeo. Editorially, it was great to work with them, and they paid me well and rapidly, but the accompanying picture and layout of the article were sort of disappointing (as was the lag time - although I've finally figured out that weeks or months of lag time is par for the course, it's still irritating). Nevertheless, I'm grateful for the chance to write publicly about how Matt and I play together. I've heard that other friends of ours with the same configuration (husband works in video games, wife doesn't but is familiar with nerd culture) do the same thing.

Only one book review this week, and it's a good one: of an anthology about 1990s culture, Come as You Are. It's up at Barrelhouse, where I've been submitting my work since the mid-2000s. If I weren't so distracted by my un-fun week, I'd be over the moon.

Finally, I wrote my first piece for Popscure, a listicle + analysis of five 1970s movies. I stole the "hijinks ensue" bit from a blog post I read years ago somewhere on the internet. If I could remember where I found it, I'd either credit the post's author or remove the bit, but I can't remember. If I stole it from you, please contact me and I'll make it right. The actual article observes something I noticed after I watched Rollerball for the first time (having previously seen Logan's Run approximately 267 times and the other films in varying quantities). I'm looking forward to a similar article being written in 30 years or so about Arrival, The Martian, et al. Not that I think 1970s fashion will ever be bested.

It wasn't a good week because I suspect that a pitch of mine got...let's say repurposed, after an editor I've pitched many, many times rejected it months ago, and then published a curiously similar article by a staff writer this week. My own article appeared at a different outlet, back in June, so there's a paper trail. And it could be a coincidence. But I doubt it, which makes the world feel cold and petty.

Plus, my concentration has been really unreliable lately, which has given all my work a slapdash feel to me, even if it doesn't seem that way to others. There's roofing work happening at my place, which is a terrible, scary thing if you work at home and are sensitive to noise. And the gods overseeing weather, the mail, and the very practice of sleep have all deserted me recently.

The good news is that I planned August unusually well. I did okay with deadlines, and I don't have any other books to read or review urgently this month, just edits and check-ups on stuff I've already filed and pitches to push through. I have a practical task which should take me the rest of August to complete, but I'm not very stressed about it. Hence, I have these last two weeks of the month, this and next, to laze around and worry about what comes next.

Oh, well, okay then

What comes next is a bunch of cool stuff in September. Interesting reviews and good essays. But also volunteer work at CSUN, which will get me out of the apartment, which is good for me like flossing is good for me. And a handful of books for October and November that look pretty good, even though many of them are short stories.

I've determined for good and all across this year that I just don't like reading short stories. I just don't! I have tried hard to enjoy them but I do not enjoy them and that's all there is to it. So many books seeking reviewers (instead of books that are already assigned) are story collections, so I wind up reading them a lot, and I'm as fair to them as I can be in terms of craft and characterization and whatnot. But the truth is, I do not enjoy them. I do not, Sam-I-Am. But hey, maybe they're like flossing, too.

Hobby Without a Horse

Even though the oppressiveness of a San Fernando Valley summer is nigh, I'm really happy it's June. May was terrific, full of good fortune and joy, but for whatever reason it felt LOOOONNNNGGG. June is exciting for at least two of the bylines that'll appear. One in particular.

Matt asked me the other day how often a piece gets published that I'm genuinely proud of. I told him it was something like one in 20, which feels like a really low estimate, but one in 10 isn't right either. I put a list of them on my website under "Favorites," but the reasons I am proud vary. Some have to do with me being able to write about something I am particularly passionate about, or something that I feel like I have knowledge of that few others do. The piece I wrote about Encircling, for instance; I don't know that a lot of people, no matter what kind of reader they are, have read all the multivolume books I've read, or would draw the same conclusions about them that I do. That makes the piece fairly uniquely mine. (It also makes its appeal pretty limited - how many people care about an obscure Norwegian literary trilogy? - but I can live with that.) The June byline I'm excited about regards one of my favorite hobby-horses, and it makes me burst with pride that other people are going to read about me riding it. Even if only a few others care.

hobby meets horse

Ideas are flowing but I'm feeling less excited about them, because it's starting to seem like I won't have time or interest enough to execute them all. During my freakout a while back I asked Lucas if he thought I should take a few days away somewhere (same place I went last April, I thought maybe) just to write, to wring all the ideas out of my head and then see which ones were viable. He said he didn't think so, in part because I have all day now alone in my apartment to write, and clearly the ideas aren't motivating me enough to put them down.

Here's the thing, though. The piece I'm so happy about coming out in mid-June - I sent twelve pitches on that piece, and no one wanted it. But I knew it was a good idea, so I wrote it. The accepting editor called the finished piece "epic." Certainly I think I'm at my best in full form instead of when pitching, but also, for some pieces, the execution is simply better than the idea. A handful of my pitches have gotten nibbles but nos, and I am just as sure as I am for this June piece that they're good ideas. I think I ought to just write them and see what happens. But getting a pile of rejections on the pitch is discouraging enough to kill a piece's appeal in my mind.

My review deadlines are pretty far out at this time, though. Maybe I should spend next week just writing, putting short essays down, one after another.

There's one essay that I really have to write, because it does have a deadline, but I don't remember if it's July or it was April, and maybe the kind person who set the deadline wasn't interested enough in my work to tell me when the deadline passed, and I'm too scared to look at the email to find out for sure. I wanted to finish it by the end of May but that didn't happen. (Hire me! I'm not paralyzed by deadlines at all!)

Otherwise, as hinted above, I'm slowing my pace a little bit on reviewing. The pile of books is getting further out, datewise, and shorter. I'm sneaking in books for my own pleasure instead of reading only for review. Last night I started reading Samuel Beckett's Molloy, and even though that sounds hard, I found it kind of soothing, the rhythm of it and the simplicity of the words. Between January 1 and May 31 I read 57 books. Counting them up helped me realize that it's okay to feel a little fried.

Pitches are landing fairly well, but I am 0/7 on residencies/fellowships/contests this year. And those are just the ones that've been announced. I alternate years for when I feel optimistic and when I feel fed up on residencies/fellowships/contests, so in 2019 I won't apply for flippin' anything because to hell with you and your application fees. And then in 2020 I'll be like "but maybe..." and Hedgebrook will get my money yet again.

Out in the world: 

I reviewed MEM, by Bethany C. Morrow, for Locus. I think this book is going to be part of school curricula in the future, so get in on it now. It's great. 

May's Books I Hate (and Also Some I Like) interview was with Sassafras Lowrey, a fascinating writer. 

An interview with me about my short story "C-a-l-l-a-s" went up at Luna Station Quarterly. 

The Mule Philosophy

It's May! It's May! No more April! The stress of April is over! *ssssnnnniiffff* Ahhh, fresh clean May stress. Like warm laundry. Or pollen. *sneezes*

The pile of books for reading/reviewing continues to menace me. It's a good pile, with splendid talent and great variation in it. It's just real, real tall.

I finished an emotionally difficult essay the other week. It was one of my tripartite essays, like "The Girl on the Bike," and this one dealt with my father and Apocalypse Now. I sent it to my mentor and she showed me spots where I could expand it, and I kinda said nah, and she said, well, I'm just looking for stuff to critique about it because it seems finished. So I sent it out. I've had this essay on my back for a really long time; the idea's been around for at least two years, and I started the draft in mid-2017, but the emotional prod has been there since high school. Really, really glad to have it out of my cells.

As for what's next, well. I experienced a minor implosion about two weeks ago trying to sort out what's going on with my potential projects. Thank God my friend Lucas (who's going to win all the poetry prizes one day; get in on him now) agreed to listen to me while I raved for a while about what was in my head. He helped me sort through the ideas and figure out a strategy for knocking them down. Part of that strategy was making a list of everything on my plate, and when I recited it to a couple of friends later they just stood there with their mouths open. More than a dozen essays of varying complexity; more than a dozen book reviews. Two books in progress; four books shopping.

Having new ideas is not the problem. Having the time to write and read is no longer the problem. Having the focus and wherewithal to do justice to the ideas on paper is the problem.

Also, I learned that it's not just that I'm a delicate, whiny flower when it comes to writing every day. If I write every day (if it's on different projects, not a binge on one project), the quality goes down sharply by the middle of the second week. I banged out a bunch of reviews and a few short essays in mid-April to meet some deadlines, but on one essay I had to break for two and a half days before I could write it well. My sentences turned to mush. So it's not just preference. People who insist that daily pages are the only way to write are flat wrong. 

The only thing that's working for me right now is imagining myself a mule: plod, plod, plod, one hoof at a time. This book in the morning, that review in the afternoon. This research in the morning, those pitches in the afternoon. Don't think about next week, just think about the next hoof on the ground. I am a natural long-term planner, but in grad school I learned how to live one day at a time, one item on the to-do list at a time, one bite of whale at a time, in order not to lose my damn mind from the stress of everything I had to do by the end of the semester. It was a major adjustment. And one of the best lessons of my adult life, so far.

At this time, though, the inundation of review work and the occasional picked-up pitch for normal nonfiction essays means that the lyric essays and the novel are falling by the wayside. Immediate deadlines aren't abating at all; in fact, they're increasing. Which is bad. The big drawback of the mule philosophy: long-term projects wither.

I think this will resolve as I get further away from my day job, and as my reviewing settles down and stops depending so heavily on pitching. (The latter, for the record, works like this: the more I land pitches, the more editors want to work with me again, which means that I have to work less hard to land the next book pitch--or I just get books assigned to me. Researching and pitching is enough work that taking it out of the equation lessens my workload greatly.) I realized not long ago that April was a month of recovery for me--from the unfortunate way the day job ended, from the major transition I coordinated at the day job before I left (which caused me such stress that I dreamed about work constantly), from the continued forcing of my square self into the round hole of an office job for three and a half years.

It sounds ridiculous that I'd have to recover from a perfectly normal job that I once loved, but once I applied the idea of recovery, a bunch of my behavior and limitations made sense, so I can't really deny it. Toward the end of April I started being able to spend most of the day working instead of about half of it resting, and I started being able to do normal chores without world-shaking dread. It hasn't been that way since last fall. I don't feel all the way healed, but I feel better.

It helps that I am happy every day. 

Out in the world: 

I reviewed Allison Coffelt's tiny book about Haiti, Maps Are Lines We Draw, for Brevity. It was terrific. I always love working with Brevity, too.

I couldn't make this article work in a longer form for any publications I had in mind, so I put it on Medium. It's about a scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, but it's also really deep, about life and stuff like that.

I'm in this issue of Beacon Quarterly, but I don't know what my contribution looks like because I haven't gotten a copy yet.

I interviewed Neil Snowdon, who is totally wonderful, for Books I Hate. He gave it an enormous amount of time and thought; his insights there about horror are beyond the beyond.

After I read Ty Burr's fantastic book about the history of celebrity, Gods Like Us, I wrote a sort of review/endorsement of it essentially for fun, because I wanted the topic of his book (star studies) to be more widely known. This was years ago. It was too formal to post here and too short/casual to turn into something scholarly. I kind of desultorily looked for a place for it, and this week, it found a home: PopMatters. Burr himself retweeted it, generously.

Oh, that reminds me: I'm on Twitter now. I'd love for you to follow me, but just so you know, for now I'm using it for promotion rather than as a personal outlet. The latter is what Facebook is for. 

From Me to You: Hard Truths

In the same week, I gave a presentation at CSUN about how to submit your work, and I got into a conversation about what to expect when you're submitting your work. Both of these situations made me realize that I've left something important out of the From Me to You series: hard truths. That is, the parts of the writing life that just suck and are painful to internalize, and that you can either learn about on your own over many annoying years, or that you can listen to crusty old me about today.

Elmore Leonard 

Byline Extravaganza!

Newsy/statusy post. Deep-thinking post probably soon.

This has been an extremely difficult month, for emotional reasons that are inappropriate to describe here. As well as the flu. As well as all the deadlines and bylines and accompanying promotion. As well as missing friends because I'm too frenzied to see them or answer their texts, but being in the awful position to consider them irritations because too much on my plate. I'm excited to say so-long to February and hello to March, in which I will be exchanging good criticism for good pay at least once, and in which my heart won't be cleft so bloodily in twain.

Depicted: Beatles fans and a security guard who forgot his earplugs.
Their noise = my brain. 

In the meantime, I opened a Ko-fi. This is a small-change donation site where you can chip in $3 for my Fund To Not Get Thrown In Debtor's Prison. The idea is that you're buying me a coffee. I appreciate any generosity you toss my way, but you're certainly not obligated to contribute. I've been blogging for free since, oh God, 2006? and don't plan to stop anytime soon.

I'm hoping to assemble a long-distance writing workshop for mid-March over Google Hangouts. I don't know how I'll do this, but so many people in places other than Los Angeles have told me they want to work with me that I don't want to put off any longer trying to make that happen. If anyone has insights on how to assemble a multi-person Google Hangout, or if you want to be part of a beta test team to see if it even works, PLEASE get in touch. I'm ready for any advice/help at all.

I believe I'll do How to Get Unstuck. I have plans to teach The Unwritten Scene and The Heroine's Journey, but because the tech will be new, I thought teaching something I've taught previously would be wiser.

Out in the world (it's a lot this time, but there'll be even more in a week, which is why this post isn't deep-thinking, because I didn't want to wait any longer to have time to think deeply in fear of overloading this section even more) (wow, parenthetical much?):

My review of Kingdom of Women by Rosalie Morales Kearns. Probably the best book I read in 2017, and I am pleased beyond measure to have placed my review in VIDA. It's still a bit surreal; even though I've had a lot of bylines in the past six months, the ones that have meant something to my nerves and bones have been rarer, and this one is like that.

My review of The House of Erzulie by Kirsten Imani Kasai in the Adroit Journal. I loved this book as a reader more than I loved it as a reviewer (it was right up my personal alley, but that's not a wide alley). I tried to communicate that by not being as rapturous as I felt about it but still indicating what the intense pleasures of the novel were. If you like Gothic lit and/or melodrama, this is your book, but if you don't, you won't like this.

Books I Hate (and Also Some I Like) with SAMANTHA FUCKING IRBY. I wish this byline indicated that we had met in real life, but as the title of her book promises, that will probably never happen.

"The First Snow" was published in Storm Cellar. As my work goes, this is pretty straightforward short fiction. In my dotage I grow increasingly grumpy about short stories, whether reading or writing, and I shouldn't make predictions that are unlikely to come true, but it feels like I won't be writing another short story for a damn long time. I wrote this two+ years ago, and I haven't felt called to short fiction since. So I hope you like this one. There's a paywall, but for the PDF it's pretty low.

My review of Anca L. Szilágyi's Daughters of the Air. Locus published it in their paper magazine last month and in their online arm this month.

A personal essay on Medium in the form of a letter to my teenage self, who was anorexic. I believe in this essay, even though certain parts of it are sentimental and other parts are controversial. Over the years it's been rejected by every single place I thought would want it, including a few once-prominent mags that have since folded or lost their good reputations. That's how long I've been sitting on this thing. So up it has gone, at long last, on Medium, on the first day of 2018's National Eating Disorders Awareness Week. Share it, please, with #NEDAwareness. You never know who will need to hear it.