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

Is There a Chance the Track Could Bend?

Migraine is bad today, and I'm feeling vulnerable and foggy but also have the desire to create. 

--

I've been thinking a lot about how my "career" as a writer has developed in the last three years, since Ceremonials was published. Part of this thought was inspired by the Cait Corrain fiasco, which I feel really sad about but have no useful opinions on. Well, no, my sole opinion is that Goodreads has too much influence on major publishing and editors need to stop using it to make decisions, but that leads me back to the main thing I've been thinking for the past eight months: I'm really glad I haven't landed a deal with a major publisher. 

It was all I wanted for a dozen years, all I was writing toward. I perceived a book deal with a real advance and lawyers and a publicity team and all that as a bunch of things at once: a stamp of approval from people who know what they're doing; access to a whole solar system of opportunities that I could never get on my own; and an invitation onto a specific monorail car. That car would take me up the same track as a jillion other writers and all I'd have to do would be to ride, rather than - as indie authors must - be the train conductor, the architect, the security officer, the repairman, the ticket-taker, and the rider, all at once. I wanted to be at ease on the journey rather than be Vishnu. 

Yes, Vishnu on a monorail, just work with me here

I want to emphasize that I wanted this, a Big Five book deal, very badly. I cried about it. I screamed about it. I felt jealousy so hot it left ash in my mouth. Then I hung around the edges of the book world for a few years, with the intent of learning more about how to get what I wanted, and what I observed changed my mind almost completely. 

Watching (from distances ranging from very close up to very far away) dozens of other people take this ride, I am so glad I'm on a different train. By riding passively, they have learned a lot less about where they're going and how the monorail works. They are locked into one experience; changing trains is almost impossible. Whoever is conducting the train takes riders into whatever neighborhoods the conductor needs to go, rather than what the rider wants to see. Sometimes you're riding in comfort and you get booted off the monorail for no discernable reason, and you have to walk all the way home. 

I didn't know any of this when I was yearning for that agent-contract-advance cha-cha. I learned a lot about the publishing industry and how it grinds up debut authors while I was a freelance critic, but I also watched a number of colleagues from my debut year go from hopeful and lucky to stuck and lost. Or just disappear. Because the rewards of publishing are great, but the disappointments can be greater, especially if you aren't emotionally prepared. 

Putting something into the world that you have created, but not healthily disconnected from, can be wrenching rather than joyful. (Ask any parent.) It can make you never want to do it again. If you can't maintain reasonable expectations, if you don't have someone telling you to calm down it's just a book there are hundreds every year, the process can turn you into a monster. I watched it happen in slow motion over Facebook with an acquaintance a couple of years ago. She forgot that it was about the writing. It's gotta always be about the writing. She hasn't published anything since. 

All that said, I wouldn't mind getting a big advance and a splashy marketing campaign for which I only have to show up, rather than create my own graphics, print my own postcards, arrange my own interviews, etc. One of my books that's out on submission, I'd like a large deal, please and thanks. But the cost of such money and idyll is significant, and I can never lose sight of that. 

--

On the book I've been researching and working on for about two years (not counting when I actually started it, which was 6+ years ago), I've now written 60,000 words, most of them in the past six weeks. I think I'm about 2/3 through the draft, but it might be closer to 5/8. The book uses Casablanca as a jumping-off point (forgive me if you're hearing this for the 80th time). That movie takes place in December 1941 and I started the story in 1935. Now it's 1939, and although I've seeded in many aspects of the movie, I've finally gotten to a place where I need to weave the movie's story more directly into the book's story. That's exciting, but it's also briefly stalled me out with how. 

I keep thinking about Wide Sargasso Sea and how angled and obscure it is, and how little I liked that quality when I read the book. (One of my secrets is how confusing I find Jean Rhys, because she's a writer's writer that a lot of folks speak of in reverent tones. I read two of her books and floundered through both.) I keep thinking about Alexandra Ripley's Scarlett and how much I enjoyed it despite it being critically trounced. I keep thinking about all the Pride & Prejudice Universe books (Mr. Darcy's Daughters et al) and how yes I like them, but stylistically they stick to the script. 

Among these choices, I'm not sure what kind of book I'm writing. I had a big dramatic conversation with Matt about this a few weeks ago, because I'm afraid I'm writing a commercial novel with transparent prose (Scarlett) rather than a literary novel with lyrical sentences (Sargasso). The former wouldn't be bad (and I've written work like it that I'm proud of), but it doesn't last beyond a few years. Then I get to thinking about whether I care if I have a legacy as a writer, whether it matters to me to be read after I'm gone or whether I want to be a perfectly fine contemporary writer who's suitably forgotten, and I don't know the answer to that. Not that I can really control it, who can control their legacy?, but I can decide what kind of book I want to write now, and that choice will ripple into the future. 

Ultimately the answer to this dramatic conversation was predictable: write the book the way the book comes out of your head and don't worry about your future. That's the advice I give to everybody and I'm usually able to give it to myself. This book has been so immersive and so challenging, and I've been so full of anxiety about whether I'm writing a book that belongs to me or not, that I forgot it temporarily. 

Anyway, now that Ilsa has moved to Paris and she's about to meet Rick, after I established so much about who she is and how she acts and what she wants, do I go impressionistic on the parts that were already laid down by Warner Bros in 1942? Or do I tell it from her POV as meticulously as I've told the story up to now? I started with the latter, but I'm pretty sure that day's work is bad for other reasons so I want to throw it out and start over anyway. 

--

We announced officially that I'm leaving XRAY in February. I learned a lot there, but it's time for me to go. Among a bunch of reasons, it was too much to promote Junk Film, write steadily, and also keep up with XRAY responsibilities. In fact it's still too much, right now, to do everything on my plate as a writer and still do XRAY, and I'm behind on stuff for it and Barrelhouse and my regular fucking life. Next year I've got at least one book coming out and possibly two (the Poltergeist anthology is the other) and I had to give myself more room. 

I know it's the migraine talking, but I really hope 2024 is better than 2023. I had a good year in a number of visible ways, blessings I do definitely count, but emotionally, internally, it was an extraordinarily difficult period. I'd like to spend less money and be in less pain, all around. And I didn't do a lot to uplift other writers this year compared to previous years, so I'd like to do better at that. 

Spite Is a Shallow Well

I write this from Portland, Oregon, where the majority of my writing community lives. I was here for a trio of excellent events: a concert, a film screening, and a conversation at Powell's. Luck that the first two were 24 hours apart; guided luck that the third occurred soon after. 

The conversation was between me and Shawn Levy, a fairly eminent biographer of famous actors who happens to be in my Portland friend group. (Not the Canadian director of the same name.) He was fresh from the clusterfuck of Burning Man 2023, but we had a good conversation nonetheless. I sold and signed a bunch of books and gave away a bunch of handmade chapbooks. Folks asked engaged questions and I had fun. 

To promote this event, a local TV station in Portland interviewed me. That clip is here. I thought the segment was happening because of Shawn, so the fact that they never mentioned him surprised me and stroked my ego quite tenderly. I don't know if it brought anyone in to Powell's for the event, but it did notch up the markers of eminence I can claim as a writer: sold books to strangers, was recognized by reputation during group reading event, appeared on TV to promote book. 

And it was part of the general cascade of good news that has drenched me since the release of Junk Film. It's continuing to discover new readers and (important distinction) new corners of readership. I feel happiness about this, but I also feel a particular emotion that surely has a German word attached to it: the fulfillment of spite. 

I wrote previously about reaching the end of the line on a book of essays (although I haven't, in fact; it's out again to two more presses), and mentioned that I did reach that point on JF. The rejections I got for it weren't as numerous as for Ceremonials and the essay collection - not even in the same neighborhood - but they were painful anyway because I homed in on suitable presses so carefully. And yes, I'm still obsessing over the agent rejection I got in 2021, the person who told me a big press wouldn't take the book. Perhaps they wouldn't've, but this book has proven it has an audience, and the money being made by Castle Bridge and by me - she could've had a piece of that. 

Agents always gamble, in rejecting as well as accepting; it's the nature of the job. She was always going to be the wrong agent for the book if she couldn't see its potential. These are the reasonable reactions to how events have unfolded. The unreasonable reaction is

Emoji Middle Finger GIFfrom Emoji GIFs

(couldn't get Blogger to center this!) and that is increasingly how I'm feeling about it, as I get incredible, unexpected emails from people who want to work with me or the book goes through cycles of selling copies on Amazon every time I appear on a podcast. You coulda had a bad bitch. Maybe at some point I'll grow up enough to stop feeling that way, but I'll be 42 in just over a month, so...probably not. 

This is the part where I turn my personal lesson into an overarching writing lesson. I think it's not a bad thing to be motivated partially by spite, and to feel an ugly, satisfied thrill when that spite works out for you. But it's a bad way to live your entire artistic life. You've got to find a deeper well than that. The shallow well works when you're writing a CV or a book proposal and you have to let your ego out on the page, but the deeper well has to remain accessible for when you write the next book. 

The other thing is, life happens the way it happens. Wishing it would've or could've happened another way is not as fruitful as working with the way it did. In my case, that means analysis of what "the way it did" has to teach me as well as simply counting the blessings of it. 

Appropriately, I have a bounty of other good news. I can't share any of it; nothing is finished enough to be an announcement. I can tell you that I'll be on the Dana Gould Hour again, soonish, to talk about my book. And about the inimitable Ormonds, filmmakers of, consecutively, exploitation films and religious films in the two epochs of their lives. I recorded something like six or seven podcasts in August and they're trickling out over time. 

Oh, but there is news that I want to share as far and wide as possible: I'm co-editing an anthology of Millennial writing and art on the 1982 film Poltergeist. General submissions open in October. More info about that project is here, including a link to sign up for our newsletter so you'll know the moment we open subs. 

Lots of changes coming in the spring. I hope you'll stick around until then. 

The End of the Line

 

Almost three years ago, in late 2020, I finished the final essay in a collection of them that I'd been working on since around 2015. I started shopping the full manuscript in early 2021. The essays, nine of them, are hybrid: they contain creative nonfiction, film criticism, fiction, and various textual strategies (collage, list, diagrams). I know that my work in this book is rare and I know it's good. 

I've sent the manuscript to sixteen presses, not counting the half-dozen presses and scattering of agents I pitched with a proposal. All have rejected it (except the two who are currently In Progress on Submittable, along with the ones who never got back to me). 

I chose these outlets carefully. I wanted:

• presses that routinely submitted to book awards, because I think this is an awards-type book. 
• presses with a history of publishing bold hybrid work, because I knew I'd encounter fewer editorial obstacles when working with folks who knew what my manuscript was doing. 
• presses that had had at least one hit book (covered by major critical outlets or sold well, one or the other), because just in case my book was a hit, I wanted a press that had experience with that. 
• presses that didn't publish mostly white men. 
• should be obvious, but presses that hadn't been determined to be fraudulent or run by shitty people, per Writer Beware and my own whisper network. 
• presses that accepted unsolicited/unagented manuscripts, whether through open reading periods, contests, or an open-door policy. Because I don't have an agent and I think I've exhausted the relevant favors my network owes me. 

When I sifted the gigantic list of presses I'm aware of through the mesh screen of these priorities, it narrowed out my choices to a couple dozen presses. And I've submitted to nearly all of them over the last two and a half years. So I've almost reached that dreaded place: the end of the line. 

Both of my previous books also reached this place. For Ceremonials, the criteria included a press that'd publish a very short prose manuscript as a book, which is harder to find than you'd think, and with Junk Film, the list of presses that wants such a particular kind of nonfiction is shorter than I'd ever imagined. For Ceremonials, only complaining about the manuscript on Twitter led me (miraculously!) to the right press, and for Junk Film, I decided to work with someone I knew and liked, even though his press had different priorities than I had envisioned, rather than keep trying to sell the book to a dwindling list of possibles for another year or two. 

These were harder decisions than they sound like in that practical little paragraph. The despair I felt at the end of the line on Ceremonials was mammoth. It took me months, and a wholescale rethinking of my trajectory as a writer, to mentally accept the conclusion I came to with JF. In both cases, these were the right choices, and my reservations proved totally unimportant in the end. But it could've gone the other way. With two other projects I won't specify, it did, and I suffered heartbreak and hard lessons. 

I'm writing this post because the end of the line is a hard, lonely place to be as a writer with a worthy manuscript. I want to offer sympathy, but also options, based on what I did with the prior books and what I'm doing next with my hybrid essay manuscript. 

One option that's always available is to give up, either temporarily or permanently. As Gus tells Tina, 

Maybe you don't quit being a writer, or give up on the manuscript entirely; maybe you set the manuscript aside for a while and try to find a home for it later. Maybe you write another book, an easier one to publish. I firmly believe that opportunities come up at the time they're supposed to, especially in writing. So if you haven't had success at chasing down those opportunities, sit for a minute and see if they arrive on their own schedule. Success at publishing a project doesn't always have a lot to do with how worthy the project is, and giving up temporarily or permanently can be about time, place, and available opportunity rather than writing quality. 

Another option is to ask around. Go to AWP and visit press booths. Go to readings. Join writers' groups on Facebook. Look at the spines of books that resemble yours to see if you've missed any presses in your research. This might be very frustrating advice to some of you - it would be for me, as I'm very tuned in to the small press world and do not need help finding presses - but for others it might be the window to a new round of submissions. 

The third option is to change your standards/priorities/criteria for presses. Right now, I'm leaning toward removing the "submits to awards" and "hit book" criteria from my list. This means I'd start from the top again: first I'd pitch the manuscript to friends who run presses, then to presses that know me from my time as a reviewer, and then cold-submitting. I already did that process for this book to presses that met all the above criteria, so I'd have to do it again once some of the criteria have been eliminated. 

A strategy related to this option is to shift your goals for the eventual book. My initial goal with a manuscript is always to sell half a million copies and win a MacArthur Genius Grant. As I gather up rejections, that goal shortens and narrows. The end of the line is the place where the goal shrinks to bring this book into the world. For some books I've written, that goal is not sufficient for how far I think the manuscript can go. The urban fantasy book, for instance, would find a great home on the Barnes & Noble SFF shelf, and I'm sure that goal is reachable, so I'm not going to submit to presses that won't suit that goal. I won't lower the goal for that manuscript to bring it into the world, because I don't think that's enough. 

For this hybrid essay manuscript, I'm almost, but not quite, at the point where I need to decide if my goal is going to shrink any further. It started out enormous, and now it's reasonable, and I really don't know if I want to make it smaller. I have to decide within the next couple of months, after the final two presses respond. 

I'm not quite at the end of the line for this book just yet; these last two presses have it, and after that I still have some options, even if they aren't ideal. But I remember the sensation I'm feeling right now from both of the prior books - the mentally looking around at an emptied room that was once bustling with possibilities. It's almost time to close the door on that room and open a different one. 

I will weather it, because it's my job to do so, but it would be a mistake to minimize how difficult this process is. You feel helpless, and angry, and sad, and indignant, and maudlin. You feel the train coming to a gradual stop, the stuff that was whizzing by now moving so slowly that you could put your head out the window without any danger at all. It's frustrating to be moving like that, not able to accelerate or hit the brakes yourself. 

Toot toot. 

JUNK FILM DROPS TODAY!

Today, my third book releases: Junk Film, the product of about five years of research and writing about bad movies. Aside from this obvious fantastic news, I've had a streak of bad days and annoying problems lately, so I'm a little distracted. Trying to focus on the positive and be happy about the book being out. So far I've heard nothing but joy from friends who've received it and/or read it, and I'd like to think those trends will continue. 

Consider this a placeholder for a post later in the week where I share the related stuff that's going up this week (a piece in the Economist, unbelievably, which is previewed below; a podcast episode; an interview in a Kansas City paper; something in LARB related to another topic but which I suspect will sell books anyway). In the meantime, if you haven't bought the book, go here to do so. Amazon is bad for indie presses, but can be good for indie authors, who don't necessarily have other distribution channels. For this book, Amazon is the place to buy. 

Click to embiggen

I'm going to be doing watch-alongs to promote the book, probably one per month for the rest of the year, and the first one will be After Last Season on May 18. Stay tuned! 

stitched by me, designed by someone else

Desire Paths

Recently, I spent about a week writing a short story set in the imagined West. It integrated Lovecraft mythos (or, so as not to invoke the name of a hilariously antisemitic and inadequate prose stylist, cosmic horror). This mix of genres is known as "weird West." 

I've been wanting to write a Western for some years now. I'm (increasingly) in love with the genre, particularly with how its environment is quite precise but its manifestations are nigh infinite. That is, the imagined West is a desert place, usually but not always in America in the late 19th century, with saloons and fast guns and horses and leather. Within that, you have certain character types: villain, antihero, innocent, Othered enemy. You have big, vague forces: the Law, modernity, temptation, Mother Nature, money, grief, the shadowy past. But you can mix and match any number of other elements. Gender and race can be whatever. Technology can be anachronistic, if you want. (Neo-Westerns have an even more flexible set of characteristics!) Because no one really believes the imagined West is factual, it can be molded to the story you want to tell. That's why the weird West is such a fertile blend: Cthulhu slides into the setting with ease. 

While trying to overcome anxiety about the Casablanca novel (I have added a decent number of words to it over the past month, but I might have bitten off more than I'd like to chew with the historicity), I wrote this story, based on an idea of Matt's about two opposing characters who both accept supernatural favors on one particular night in a silver mining town. I had so much fun writing it, and I broke a bunch of my own rules of revision, including reading today's words today (you gotta let 'em sit!) and submitting the day after I finished a draft (YOU GOTTA LET IT SIT!). 

The submission was rejected almost immediately. This was part of the feedback, edited to keep from spoiling the story: 

"...the opening scenes lacked a bit of tension. I think if I had more insight earlier on into the narrative stakes (such as what [x] in first scene could mean, or what [y] could signal), there would have been a bit more of the urgency I needed." 

Let's be clear. I'm quoting and unpacking this NOT because I'm wounded about a rejection. It was such fun to write this story that I felt rewarded as soon as I finished the draft, and I submitted it with a higher proportion than usual of I-want-someone-else-to-love-reading-this and less than usual of I-want-to-be-published. And, by now, I virtually never care about story rejections, because that's a numbers/persistence game, not personal or meaningful. 

I'm unpacking this feedback because I find it remarkably self-contradictory. In writing this story, I surrounded x and y with enigma so as to keep the reader reading, which, as Donald Maass taught me, is what tension is. How can a scene lack tension when it has enigma? If I'd explained what x and y meant on the first two pages, why on earth would you keep reading? 

It's possible that the first few pages didn't move quickly enough. It's possible that the rejecter misspoke, and meant "lacked a bit of clarity," not tension. But, based on my experience of rejections over the past five years, I think it's more likely that the rejecter didn't know what they meant. I think it's likely that the rejecter didn't like or even notice the sentences (which is part of what I enjoyed most about the first two pages: polishing the sentences until they rambled and rolled like a bowlegged sheriff), and wanted the story to move faster, to jam plot in immediately. 

Sentences matter more than plot to me, but that's exactly why I haven't done very well with my genre fiction. It might not be the root of this rejection - I am not stupid enough to think this story is perfect, nor single-minded enough to think it's perfect for this market - but I suspect it is. 

This rejection is the latest in a whole catalog of occurrences that are making me rethink, altogether, what I want out of a writing career. It bookends the first item in the catalog: an agent rejection for my bad-film book, which I got sometime in 2021. The agent didn't think the book had major-press possibilities. The way she explained this to me, I got the message: she is an agent who makes big deals, not little deals, and she didn't think she could sell the book as a big enough package to make it worth her time. I respected this, but it also surprised me, because I know how many copies make a bestseller and I know the size of the bad film/cult film audience. But I'm not a major critic, I'm not cruel, and the book doesn't have little bite-sized essays, so you'd have to market it pretty carefully. 

Hmm. Okay. So, I used this feedback to rejigger my expectations and I queried smaller or specialty presses for the book. A year & many rejections later, I've finally contracted the book to a terrific indie press, Castle Bridge Media, and I'm thrilled to be working with them. But I really did think this book was going to go to a big press. The result isn't a disappointment, but it's a different path, an alteration in the trajectory I thought I was creating with my first two books. 

I thought the idea was to step up and step up until I had an agent and a comfortable contract/series of contracts. I thought I'd edit and write reviews until I had a book or film column. I never thought I'd make a living wage by writing alone, but I did think I'd be able to stop hustling, stop hanging my own slate and instead have people or objects (publicists, agents, my own recognizable name) to do that work for me. 

These are the ideas I'm rethinking altogether: the ladder, the progression, the comfort, the reliance on others. None of them have come to pass, even though I've jumped through many of the necessary hoops. 

My friend Dave Housley has been running Barrelhouse for many years, and he has published seven books. I don't think he has an agent at the moment, and he's never brought a book out with a major press (although he has with big indies). Writers of many types and sizes know and respect him as a community-builder and a good dude. He's held a day job unrelated to writing all this time, and I doubt anything about his life or work is going to change. I don't even know if he wants it to. He keeps writing and making what he wants, and plunging himself up to his elbows into writerly community and working, and he doesn't have to be a hotshot to do those things. 

I'm wondering if this is a preferable model for my writing. Should I stop thinking about remuneration more completely than I already have? Should I make things and trust that readers will show up somewhere along the line? Should I stop trying to build this thing like a city planner, and instead let my interests make desire paths wherever they want to go? 

I'm considering making my weird West story into a Kindle single type thing for 99 cents. That's where I'm at. I tried self-publishing in my 20s, with a (deliberate) ripoff of VC Andrews that I couldn't figure out how else to sell, and I failed at it and swore never to do it again. Now that I've got 15 years of experience on that writer, I'm thinking about breaking her oath. I don't want to submit this story for two years only to hear feedback that doesn't make sense, I don't want to trunk it until I finally have enough genre stories for a collection (...it'll be a while), I don't want to rely on others who don't understand my work to promote a story I can damn well promote myself. 

I want to put stuff into the world that I love, and help people discover it who will love it too. Doing that has been the goal all along, but it's always been complicated and ritualized and tediously reliant on gatekeepers. Now, it seems possible that I'm at a stage where for some parts of my work, I don't need or want to trade gatekeeping for greater prominence. I've watched a handful of acquaintances go through this and never thought it would be me. And, let's be clear, I could not have published Ceremonials or Plan 9 on my own, nor can I publish Junk Film or most of the manuscripts I'm shopping on my own. But this little weird West story? I think I can. And I think I might. 

I just need to let it sit a little longer. 

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? 

Tuesdays, for Some Reason

When I was in high school and college I was a gigantic musichead. I read Rolling Stone cover to cover; I spent thousands of dollars on CDs; I connected dots between dozens of artists based on producers and studio musicians like Nellee Hooper and Justin Meldal-Johnsen. I knew that Calvin Johnson was the other guy on the cover of Beck's One Foot in the Grave. I could keep going.

It took at least a year for me to recognize patterns in the industry. For instance, that most indie records came out in the fall and that all records were released on Tuesdays. I still don't know why this is. My wild guess is that it's left over from obsolete logistics that meant physical shipments arrived on Mondays (or, if they were late, Tuesdays) and the staff needed time to unpack the boxes and stock the album. But maybe not, maybe it's related to statistics about when people buy things.

Picking up patterns in the book world has taken me a shorter time, but I am not distracted by as many things now as I was then. When books come out in the calendar year is often related to their subject matter; uplifting books come out in the summer and serious books come out in the winter. July is a total dead zone. And books, like albums, usually come out on Tuesdays.

Today is Tuesday. And a shocking number of highly anticipated books are coming out on this one day: Sarah Gailey's Magic for Liars, Kristen Arnett's Mostly Dead Things, Ocean Vuong's debut novel, the latest novels from Elizabeth Gilbert and Neal Stephenson, on and on and on. My Twitter feed is sparking and spitting fire. I don't know why the Big Five picked today to dump so many big-deal books. I'm guessing it's the same reason they barely release anything in July - this is the last week to get book dollaz before people start going on vacation and...stop...buying books?

I mean, they know their business (I think) but it seems like, if no one is dropping good stuff in July, maybe be the press that drops something good in July, and the book will do way better than if you put it out at the same time as four other debuts that have been hyped for the past two or six months. This is how March has gradually become a decent month to release films. It used to be a dumping ground for failed Oscar bids, but starting in the late 00s, studios started putting better-than-average summer releases out in March, and now there's plenty of good stuff to see during that month. It seems like the book business could do this too.

Maybe not; maybe they've tried that and it doesn't work. But for the remoras of the publishing industry, like me, a huge dump of buzzy books on one day and then nothing for two months is super unhelpful and frustrating. It means we fight to cover the most popular books in a timely way and then, for weeks, have nothing to do (or get paid for).

All this would be a lot easier if book coverage weren't obsessed with reviewing books at the moment they come out. But it is. I wish that would loosen, because reading a book is a different project than watching a film, and keeping up is so, so, so much harder. But boundaries between the theater market and the home video market have blurred in a way not really repeatable in the book world, so it might be hopeless.

My friend Jen Pastiloff's book also releases today. I haven't said much about it on social media & etc. because Jen does not need help from me; she has a street team, and celebrities like Pink and Patton Oswalt have been hyping her book. But she's a magical person, and her book is as loving and true as she is. It's, well, a great summer read.

There'll be another Tuesday next week, another batch of books coming out from various presses and places. But I suspect most people will still be reading this week's stuff. How good can a book be if it's already forgotten by the time the next week's book comes out?

my to-read/review pile, mostly fall releases 

An Honest Post

There's a lot going on in my writing world - perhaps too much for me to organize my thoughts into one place. I feel like I haven't written an honest post here in a really long time. As the number of people who pay attention to my work grows, I find I'm holding my tongue more and more. I didn't think I'd ever want to do that, but that's where I am. Here's some honesty, though not about everything I have to say.

Four Directions, No Rest

You guys, I am tired. I am really, really tired. Here is the career thing I'm wrestling with on this restless, overcast Monday: I am working in four different directions, and they require totally different kinds of engagement.

Direction 1. Growing my reach, meeting prestige goals. I think this is...professionalization? Trying to get my work into bigger, better-paying, more prestigious publications. Reaching outward for as many opportunities as possible. This is an exhausting direction, made up of hundreds of small moves: emails, check-in emails, calendaring follow-ups, research, networking, sending the same pitch to four or five places and then following up on them all, etc.

Direction 2. Pay. Placing my work in publications that pay money. There's a lot of overlap here with Direction 1. But it's additionally tiring to consider whether to keep pitching Publication X, even though I've never heard back from them and our artistic interests only align in a few places, simply because they pay so well.

Direction 3. Artistic and community fulfillment. Do I get to write what I want to write? Do I get to support a small press or a first-time author? This goal almost always contradicts Directions 1 and 2, though the degree of contrast varies.

Direction 4. Maintain links and relationships with pubs and people I've been working with happily. Keep saying yes to editors and publications with whom I work well, keep sending reviews to publications that will treat them right. It's more difficult than I ever imagined to do Direction 4 and Direction 1 at the same time.

Keeping track of all four of these and how they interact is so hard that, today, I'm thinking about temporarily ditching Directions 1 and 2, just like, never mind, fuck it, I'll keep writing $25 and $50 reviews for the sites that pay me and post my stuff promptly (even though they savage the hell out of my style) (in opposite ways), I'll keep writing for the two magazines that don't change a word I write even though the pieces rarely or never appear online, I'll stop pitching [redacted], fuck it fuck it fuck it it's too much. (And then, no fooling, [redacted] wrote me back this morning asking for more pitches.)

There's also the problem of all of this applying to book criticism AND to my other work, which, by the way, I still can't figure out how to get back to. I've had a bunch of rejections for my hybrid essays in the recent past, which means it's time to send out the work to the next round of pubs. I'm out of immediate ideas for pubs to submit to, so it's time for research. But research is the last thing I want to do right now. It's obnoxious to find pubs that want hybrid essays, particularly when they're as long as mine, and you guys, I am tired.

(Plus there's this weird little Jaws thing that I thought someone would snap up fairly easily but no luck yet and I have no idea who to submit it to next because no one seems to be getting what I'm doing there and I think it's hilarious and why does no one else think so?)

Pictured: me and my workload 

(And man, I'm really discouraged about a non-hybrid film essay I wrote, which has been given the curse of "I'm sure you'll have no trouble placing this elsewhere" - NEVER TRUE, y'all. If you're an editor, never, ever say that in a rejection, because the reason it's not right for you is the same reason it won't be right for anyone else. You all love it and say so, which is nice, but not one of you will publish it. This is the third or fourth time this exact thing has happened to my work. BOLLOCKS on "I'm sure you'll have no trouble placing this elsewhere.")

Point is, I am having this moment where I want to stop striving and just tread water for a bit. Here's a concrete example: I wrote an assigned review, but the finished product didn't work for the publication. The pub gave me leave to send the finished product elsewhere, no hard feelings. So I did that, but got a no on the first round, and I'm feeling like, oh, what's the point, do I really want to keep trying to place this review when the work I like best (writing) is now done and the work I like least (placement) is still before me? I know the review is quality, but I want to just trunk it because of the time and effort involved in placing it.

For just a few weeks, I want to stop pitching. I want to stop answering publicists' emails. I want to stop querying. I want to feel like I'm really absorbing the books I'm reading and reviewing, instead of reading them only just deeply enough. But Directions 1 and 2 are the work that keeps the pump primed; without it, I would dehydrate. Without it, momentum vanishes. I have April and May books that need placement, and it's not too early to start on June and July books. If I wait to pitch those, I won't place them, or at least I won't place them well.

AND YET I AM TIRED.

The usual disclaimer applies: I am not a coal miner. Writing is not, realistically, that hard. But working and/or thinking about work seven days a week is hard for a non-workaholic personality, no matter what kind of work it is.

Major Announcement!

My novella, Ceremonials, has been accepted for publication by Kernpunkt Press. I'm so happy it hurts. Since the project is tangled up with copyrighted material, it might have a different name when it comes out, but it's the same project. The editor at Kernpunkt has told me she's very enthusiastic about the book, so I have high hopes that we'll work it out.

I found out about this on Friday. As a rule, I'm very, very bad at keeping secrets, but watching promised projects go boom after I made a big deal of them in the past, and particularly the last 18 months of pitching/trying/failing/waiting, has made me better at saying nothing until the news is more secure.

The book is due out in 2020. I have 784 ideas about how to promote it, including an LA bookstore tour, an email blast to everyone I've ever reviewed for, and hooking up with a unique book club to get it in tens of thousands of hands.

Because I can't resist making this news into advice: I started work on this project in 2013. That's six years ago. I finished it in early 2016, a span which includes some long breaks due to mental health; writing time was probably a few months, all told. I spent the following three years researching, querying, and submitting to presses. The project is extremely short to be a standalone book, so that limited the presses I could find who would even be interested, and it meant I could not go through an agent. (I tried one, and his email back indicated he saw the word count and didn't even read the rest of the query, which included info about the significant built-in audience.) Some of the presses who read it said it was beautiful but wrong for them. Others sent me form rejections.

It takes a long time, y'all.

Some of the reason is that my project is weird, short and lyrical, rather than a normal novel or memoir or whatever. But mostly it just takes a long time. My friend Marissa has a beautiful, finished, easily publishable memoir that she's been querying for I don't even remember how long now, two years maybe, and it's stupid and criminal that it took until last month for her to find an agent. It takes a long time. 

I have lesser news about other things, but I'm going to let this post stand alone. Can't wait to know more, and tell you more. I've wanted to hold in my hands a book I wrote since I was in elementary school, and I don't really believe it, but that's going to happen. Next year.

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!

--

53% New Footage

Here's a few things I want to tell you.

1) Next week I am going to have a different byline every single day. A couple of them are pretty big deals to me. But it's going to be a lot of promotion all at once, so if you follow me on social media, gird your loins.

1A) I realized in writing the above that byline = the line where you say who it's by. That pop you heard was my mind being blown.

2) I posted the below on Facebook the other day, and it was popular + about my writing life, so I'm reprinting it here.

On Saturday, my husband spent two hours sitting with me in front of my Excel spreadsheets, website, and "book reviews" document folder, calculating how much work I've done since December as a book reviewer. The point of this exercise was to help me figure out, using DATA and MATH, how to keep myself from transforming into a little ball of stress and split ends.

This came out of a conversation we had last night when he admitted he was a bit worried about me and the stress I've been demonstrating re: my freelance work. I realized in the course of our conversation that he was asking me to put together a budget - not for money, but for time. I knelt next to his chair with epiphanic glee, telling him that of COURSE I can't manage my stress about freelancing, because I can't budget worth a damn! So he agreed to help me figure it out.

The results of our data-gathering were shocking. I've written 49 reviews in the past eight months. Forty-nine. That is so many. I knew it was a lot, but I could not have put a number that high to my idea of "a lot." In that same timeframe, I've published 14 non-book-review essays. Also a lot. (I begin to understand why I've made only middling progress on my book.) I assigned a difficulty number to every review I've written and have yet to write, and averaged out how much difficulty each month held for me. For example, even though I wrote half as many reviews in April as in May, April was a more stressful month, because the difficulty number was higher. SO helpful, and something I never would have considered doing, because my mind just doesn't work that way.

We discovered that, as of August 4, I am full up for the month in terms of work assignments. If someone asks me to write something else in August I will have to say no. I have eight reviews to write, plus two articles, plus placement of an interview, plus a 140,000-word book to copy-edit, plus pitches for October books, plus (probably) edits on the reviews I've filed that haven't been looked at by editors yet. Plus other things too fiddly and tentative to put in this summary.

In sum, I married an amazing dude, my stress is not imaginary, and numbers can be helpful instead of not.

3) I wrote something about James Gunn that, so far, has brought me a lot of heartache and not a lot of happiness. Oh, well. Here's the piece, but because it was a hot take, I missed something a few people have brought up to me: I could/should have added that no one ought to get fired unfairly, but for now, equal opportunity unfairness is better than the alternative. I'm not comfortable with anyone at all getting unfair treatment, but philosophically, I don't think that life will ever be fair. People asking for Gunn's reinstatement seem to think it can be, and I simply don't. What I was trying to draw out is that instead of living charmed lives, maybe white men are closer to living normal, sometimes-unfair lives.

A friend pointed out the uncomfortable political dimension of Disney kowtowing to a right-wing nut, which is important commentary, but which is not where I belong as a writer.

4) Other stuff out in the world:

I reviewed Hunting Party, a book written in French by Agnés Desarthe and translated by Christiana Hills, for the Kenyon Review. This is one of the most prestigious publications I've landed in as of yet. I never, ever could've placed a short story with the KR; I know my limits and I'm simply not that good a writer. Placing a review there has plopped me back into a circular line of questioning I've been running around a lot in the past six months: am I an unusually good critic, or is there a dearth of people willing/able to write book reviews? The mean side of my brain says it's the latter, that a smaller pool means that even a little fish will get noticed. But I can't pin all of the (middling) success I've had this year on that assumption. There's just been too much. Anyway, this book is really lovely, worth putting on a syllabus, and I'm proud and pleased to have placed the review at the KR.

That's actually it for this week. But next week, hoo boy. My tracker says six articles, reviews, or interviews. Might end up being seven or eight.

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 

Ingratitude and Other Successes

The Thursday thing from the prior post still hasn't happened yet. Nnnghh.

A lot is going on for me. I'm stravaging along in freelancing, but I badly need a new website if I want to make a real go at that. I got turned down for a writing residency in the oddest and most encouraging way, such that I don't really know what to make of it. I spent several hours on Sunday writing a long political piece that I don't expect to be received well, but which I think will be read a lot. Lots of fear there. Also on Sunday, I got two acceptances, which were nice, but which - I can't believe I'm saying this - didn't mean a whole lot to me.

Lemme talk about that a little more. Five years ago, any acceptance would've been cause for me to buy champagne and dance about, but at this stage, some acceptances mean more than others. There's a hell of a lot more traffic going through my inbox, for one thing (pitches by the dozen, several regular submissions every month), and that means that instead of a lot of rejections and one or two acceptances, I get a metric ton of rejections and a handful of acceptances.

Plus, I'm aiming at very different targets than I used to. I've been keeping this conclusion to myself for a while, but I'm just going to say it now: trying to get literary short stories published is a horrible way to spend your time on this earth. I'll grant you that my short stories are not, on average, as good as my book reviews, which is probably part of why I've had more success with the latter than the former. But there are a few stories that I'm still trying to get out there, and the process is just so savage compared to reviewing and writing nonfiction essays. You spend months on a story, you submit it, and then you wait for six to twelve months for a publication no one aside from writers has heard of to say no. Or, if they say yes, you wait another several months to get your contributor's copy and no pay. This is normal. It could be worse.

Tom Gauld

With a review, you pitch them, and if you haven't heard from them in two weeks, the answer is probably no. You might hear from them in a couple of days, or even same-day. If they say yes, working with them to make your review better is, more often than not, fun and interesting.

The two acceptances on Sunday were for a piece of lovely smut that I wrote years ago, which has racked up so many rejections that I long ago detached from any emotional investment in it, and for a nonfiction piece, a list, written in Santa Fe last fall. I knew it was good, so I felt no surprise that it was accepted by a litmag that posts weekly lists. It'll be great to see these things in print, and for one of them I'll get a little money. But I'm waiting to hear on essays, stories, and pitches that matter a hell of a lot more to me than either of these pieces. That hierarchy has always existed, but until recently, the stuff that matters has always been a no. Now that there have been yeses for some of the stuff that matters, yeses for less important stuff don't feel as good as they used to. (Like taking ecstasy too often, I suppose.)

Which is extremely ungrateful, right? I should be happier than this for people liking my work enough to say yes. But it's kind of like when your teacher pins up your least favorite drawing and doesn't look at the other ones. Yay! (...?)

So much changes in this journeyman part of the journey. I wish I'd known. But I suspect there's no good way to tell people that they are going to feel and think differently a few years into doing something. If it could be communicated, it wouldn't be learned.

Out in the world:

My Columbine post from this blog was reprinted last week in the Big Smoke. I'm really pleased about this.

I reviewed Silver Girl for the Millions. It was a phenomenal book. At the time I read it, I'd read three or four debut novels in a row, and the different feeling of this one, which is not a debut, was a bit of a balm. Debuts seem to buzz a little bit with their own newness, and this was surer, slower.

I interviewed Natalie Singer for TRUE. I adored her book, California Calling.

A story I've been trying to place for five years or more, "C-a-l-l-a-s", came out in Luna Station Quarterly. I have many, many thoughts about this, but I think they'll have to wait for another time.

Interference/Interaction

First (click to embiggen):

What I hope is the first of many yoga/writing workshops I will teach with the amazing Alicia Easter. Get in touch if you're in LA and you want to come. I'd love to see you. Facebook event is here.

I'm writing this post to warm up toward writing a review I don't really want to do. The book has been getting praise from all kinds of reliable sources, and the audience for the outlet I pitched fits the book like Legos locking together. But I'm dubious about the book. I'm not sure whether what it says is worth saying. I'm not sure why the narrator is worth rooting for; not that likability is necessary, but there has to be something redeeming or at least positive about a narrating character and I'm not sure that's the case here.

This morning I quit a book I was reading for review after 50 pages. I feel super guilty, because I made a bit of a fuss about getting the book and I had a great idea for a venue that would pay me for a review, but it's an even worse fit for me than the book in the prior paragraph. It's almost Victorian in its explanatory quality, in the plainness of its style, and I kept wanting to pick up a red pen and slash through whole paragraphs.

I didn't think I could afford to be picky at this stage of my work, but walking through mud sucks.

It's okay. The stack of books I have to read/review is still 10+ tall (including commissioned reviews, the existence of which in my wee life is slightly beyond belief to me). I haven't asked for any new ARCs in some weeks because of the backlog, and because I can't keep this up; the stack of non-review books I want to read is now alarming and I really want several weeks to hole up and read for fun instead. I can't keep reviewing at the rate I have been and still continue to enjoy reading. I don't know how this conflict is going to settle out, but that is how my life has been going for the past few weeks: in a pickle and not knowing how to dill.

My new obsession is the small press The Operating System, from which I bought a quartet of chapbooks after reading the wonderful book The Science of Things Familiar by Johnny Damm. The chapbooks are terrific, small and well-made, experimental and heartfelt.

Other parts of my life are interfering with writing, or possibly writing is interfering with other parts of my life and the other parts are retaliating dramatically. 2018 did not begin well, personally. The huge Tarot spread I did on New Year's Day tells me better things are ahead in February, but I'm unsure whether I'm supposed to be taking action or not. This is why trusting stuff like Tarot is so risky: you start to wonder whether the cards are interacting with your proactive efforts, or if you're supposed to sit still and let the world work.

Out in the world:

An essay about work, which I wrote over a year ago and which kept getting rejected. I knew it was oddly shaped and unparallel to itself, but I didn't want to change it; I wanted it to wind, like a story. Gayle didn't want to change it either, which is why I'm so happy that it's on Lady/Liberty/Lit. The title is a reference to The American Way of Death, which has become obscure, I think, even though no books have come along to replace it that I'm aware of.

A Books I Hate interview with Tomas Moniz. He is a very nice man and a fine writer.

Victorian Spam columns three, four, and five.

The Fate of the Kathy Ireland Story

So this thing I wrote, "Underside," showed up in Rivet: The Journal of Writing that Risks on November 27. I have called it "the Kathy Ireland story" many times in this blog. I wrote it after I read John Haskell's book I am not Jackson Pollock, the experience of which I've written about right here. I tried for myself the thing that Haskell did, the blending of film talk with fiction, the imagining of scenes that never were, and the result was "Underside" (which I know needs a better title but I couldn't think of one).

I wrote it with a kind of abandon I had never known in words before. I worked hard, but with the air of a joyful experiment. I had no idea what it was I'd written when I finished, but soon enough I realized I'd embarked on something meaningful.

Novel-Writing / Blue-Footed Boobyness

In setting up the Casablanca novel, writing the early chapters, I've heaved a lot of existential sighs. It feels so tedious, having to tie the rigging and erect the masts for my model ship. As the New Yorker brought to my attention, 

in an interview with the Guardian last August, [Rachel] Cusk said that she had recently come to a dead end with the modes of storytelling that she had relied on in her earlier novels. She had trouble reading and writing, and found fiction “fake and embarrassing.” The creation of plot and character, “making up John and Jane and having them do things together,” had come to seem “utterly ridiculous.”

That's a terrific article if you read the whole thing, and it expressed a feeling I'd started to have about writing short stories at the time I read it in 2015. Writing fiction had begun to seem even more farcical than reading fiction usually did. Inventing people and setting them off on journeys felt hollow. Like playing with paper dolls in scenarios unimportant and soon forgotten. It was part of why I began to sway toward nonfiction, metafiction, hybrid work. Not only am I not especially good at writing regular short stories, but I don't enjoy it. 

In the Casablanca novel, although I'm writing mainly about one character and her journey and her interior life, I have to put together other elements of character and plot in order to sustain that journey, as well as - critically - the reader's interest. Okay, so I've invented a teacher who's a member of the French Resistance, and a principal who colludes with the Nazis, and a wife who's left her husband over fascism, and little teenage friends who are uninterested in the war. But making them all hang together as a whole tapestry, making cause and effect happen in a dance of inevitable surprise - that is the stuff that, in my opinion, makes it a novel. And that stuff is annoying and difficult and not nearly as interesting in the course of its invention as I ever think it will be. 

Writing all the other stuff is the work, and writing about my main character is the fun. I wish I'd remembered that novel-writing works this way before I decided to undertake this one, but I didn't, and now I'm stuck.

I hoped I would have more to say about this situation, above - enough to make a decent-sized post - but I do not, alas. Except to say that I read the book that New Yorker article was about, Outline, and it was one of the dullest, least fulfilling books I've read in yonks. Since it was the first book of hers I've read, I don't know if I don't connect to Cusk, or if her transition away from fiction has made for an awkward book or two.

Anyway, that's not enough data for a full post, so here's a few bits and pieces.

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I briefly expressed this here in May, so forgive me for repeating myself. Since I reviewed The Book of Joan - gratitude to Julie and Brian, always and always - I've been tentatively asking various publicists and presses for ARCs to review, because I like reviewing books and doing so might lift my profile some more. In reply, I keep hearing "sure, okay, what's your address?" and it's making me ask WHAT EVEN IS THIS FARCE WHEN AM I GOING TO GET MY LITTLE DUMB LIFE BACK PLEASE DON'T LET IT BE SOON.

(ARCs are advance reader copies, un-proofread versions of books that are printed a few months before the book is actually released to the public. They are sent out to book reviewers and to writers at some level of fame who are willing to say nice things about the book. They are sometimes called galleys.)

People who have been doing book reviews for a while might think it's silly for me to feel gratitude and awe at getting ARCs, because I've heard tell of the phase where ARCs take over your mailbox and become an annoyance. But as of now, I still feel excitement.

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I had another No Really I'm So Done with Facebook day last week, and then the next day there was a Carolyn Hax column I simply had to talk about and I got into an interesting conversation on her wall and agh, I was dragged in again. Honk if you relate.

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I'm applying for residencies and whatnot for next year, a process so very uninteresting that it's almost not worth the possible reward. It feels like a slow, weird, conceptual dance I'm doing. That is, it's not the energetic, buy-what-I'm-selling song-and-dance that a salesman has to do, because it's in print and it's related to art, not commerce. But it's still self-promotion and self-exposure. Like a super-crappy mating dance. Same steps over and over, full awkwardness on display, uncertainty flapping in the wind.

I'm also assembling essays for a collection to pitch. The hybrid film essays are not yet ready for a whole collection, so this one's different - odds and ends, really. Some of them come from this blog, some from elsewhere. It's a weird experience. Copying stuff from the blog into a Word doc, changing the font, reorienting aspects of the context - suddenly the words feel more official. Figuring out how it all goes together, and whether it does, is equally weird. It's me, I'm the consolidating factor. Is that enough?

All this is on deadline, which gives it a stress blanket I do not enjoy. At least it means the unpleasantness of these processes has an end point.