Books I Read in 2017

It's possible that I'm doing this to show off, I'll come out with that up front. But if I can try to step back and use myself as an example: as a writer, you should be prepared to read a LOT. Voraciously and omnivorously. Poetry, nonfiction, avant-garde, pulp, scholarship, everything. Read it all and then get back to me if you still want to be a writer.

The reason I am nominally doing this is because I realized I've never done it before on this blog. I keep a paper-based book journal where I write brief impressions of everything I read and I always count up my books at the end of the year, but I've never taken the time to list and organize them. This was a more-than-average year for me as a reader (for half of it I was no longer getting a master's degree for the first time in a few years). Last year I read 72 books; this year it looks like about 120. In 2017, as compared to past years, I read more extremely short books and more poetry, and I audiobooked very efficiently, so that's part of why this list is so long. Another part is how book reviewing kicked me in the flank to read more toward the end of the year.

Here is a list of most of what I read in 2017, alpha by author. The starred ones I read part of and gave up, or didn't read word for word (anthologies or similar). I stopped keeping my journal diligently in August and tried to reconstruct it all in November, but I'm positive I missed a few. 

Fiction:

Abani, Chris - The Secret History of Las Vegas*
barlow, duncan b. - The City, Awake
Bowles, Paul - The Sheltering Sky
Brandeis, Gayle - The Book of Dead Birds

Burnside, Matthew - Postludes

Butler, Octavia - Kindred

Cain, Amina - Creature
Dickens, Charles - Our Mutual Friend
Ferrante, Elena - The Days of Abandonment
Fritz, Marianne - The Weight of Things
Halasa, Malu - Mother of All Pigs
Harrison, A.S.A. - The Silent Wife
Harrison, Kathryn - Thicker than Water
Haskell, John - American Purgatorio
Haskell, John - Out of My Skin
Jones, James - From Here to Eternity
Kang, Han - The Vegetarian
Kasai, Kirsten Imani - The House of Erzulie
Karr, Mary - The Art of Memoir
Kearns, Rosalie Morales - Kingdom of Women
Leddy, Annette - Earth Still
Lee, Mira T. - Everything Here is Beautiful
Mandel, Emily St. John - Station Eleven
McCullers, Carson - The Ballad of the Sad Cafe
Metalious, Grace - Return to Peyton Place
Metalious, Grace - No Adam in Eden
Metalious, Grace - The Tight White Collar
Moshfegh, Ottessa - Eileen
Munro, Alice - Julieta
Rhys, Jean - Good Morning, Midnight
Robbins, Tom - Still Life with Woodpecker*
Ruocco, Joanna - The Week
Ruocco, Joanna - Dan
Schumacher, Julie - Dear Committee Members
Smith, Ali - How to Be Both
Szilágyi, Anca L. - Daughters of the Air
Tiller, Carl Frode - Encircling 1
Williams, John - Stoner
Yuknavitch, Lidia - The Book of Joan

Nonfiction:

Anderson, Alice - Some Bright Morning, I'll Fly Away
Brandeis, Gayle - Fruitflesh
Brandeis, Gayle - The Art of Misdiagnosis
Brooks, Louise - Lulu in Hollywood
Crawford, Christina - Mommie Dearest
Einstein, Sarah - Mot
Goldsmith, Barbara - Other Powers
Grealy, Lucy - Autobiography of a Face
Hall, Lynn K. - Caged Eyes
Hare, Robert - Without Conscience
Hollars, B.J. - In Defense of Monsters
Jacobson, Mark - The Lampshade
Klebold, Sue - A Mother's Reckoning
Lovell, Mary S. - The Sisters
MacDonald, Helen - H is for Hawk
Peckham, Joel - Body Memory
Roy, Simon - Kubrick Red
Sicherman, Claire - Imprint
Solnit, Rebecca - The Faraway Nearby
Vance, J.D. - Hillbilly Elegy
Washuta, Elissa - My Body Is a Book of Rules
Wunker, Erin - Notes from a Feminist Killjoy
Yuknavitch, Lidia et al. - The Misfit's Manifesto

Poetry:

Anderson, Alice - The Watermark
Benavides, Denise - Split

Berdeshevsky, Margo - Before the Drought

Božičević, Ana - Joy of Missing Out

Brandeis, Gayle - The Selfless Bliss of the Body

Campbell, Erik - The Corpse Pose
Carson, Anne - If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho
Choi, Chiwan - The Yellow House

Firestone, Jennifer - Gates & Fields*
Forché, Carolyn - Blue Hour
Glück, Louise - A Village Life*
Hancock, Jennifer Rane - Between Hurricanes

Kaplan, Genevieve - In the ice house
Knorr, Alyse - Copper Mother
Knorr, Alyse - Annotated Glass

Lewis, Robin Coste - Voyage of the Sable Venus
Molotkov, A. - The Catalog of Broken Things
Morgan, Bill - The Art of Salvage

Myles, Eileen - I Must Be Living Twice*

Novo, Salvador - Confetti Ash

Pessin, S.E. - Thank You for Listening
Piazza, Jessica - Interrobang
Rebele-Henry, Brynne - Fleshgraphs
Savage, Claudia T. - Bruising Continents
Vuong, Ocean - Night Sky with Exit Wounds
Whittall, Zoe - The Emily Valentine Poems

Cross-genre:

Ali, Kazim - Bright Felon

Asuncion, Hossannah - Object Permanence

Cusk, Rachel - Outline
Day, Dalton - Exit, Pursued

de Vigan, Delphine - Nothing Holds Back the Night
Dorantes, Dolores - Style
Dworkin, Craig & Kenneth Goldsmith - Against Expression*

Ervick, Kelcey Parker - The Bitter Life of Božena Němcová

Friedlander, Christine - Avant Gauze

Gladman, Renee - Event Factory
Greenberg, Arielle - Locally Made Panties

H.D. - Kora and Ka*
Haake, Katharine - That Water, Those Rocks

Haake, Katharine - Assumptions We Might Make About the Postworld
Haskell, John - The Complete Ballet

Higgs, Christopher - As I Stand Living

Higgs, Christopher - The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney
Higgs, Christopher with Blake Butler & Vanessa Place - One
Ives, Lucy - The Hermit
Léger, Nathalie - Suite for Barbara Loden
Markson, David - Reader's Block
Millman, Debbie - Self-Portrait as Your Traitor
Myles, Eileen - Afterglow

Ortiz, Wendy - Hollywood Notebook

Ortiz, Wendy - Bruja
Rankine, Claudia - Don't Let Me Be Lonely
Warren, Alli - I Love It Though
Whitener, Brian - Face Down
Wright, C.D. - The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All
Zambreno, Kate - Heroines

Books I expect to finish before December 31:

Herbert, Julián - Tomb Song (update: yep)
Sebald, W.G. - The Rings of Saturn (update: yep)
Bernhard, Thomas - Correction (update: nope, it was more complex than its page count)
Fink, Joseph & Jeffrey Cranor - It Devours! (update: yep)
Update: I also finished Coulter, Kristi - Nothing Good Can Come from This and G'Sell, Eileen - Life After Rugby

Some sads: no Georgette Heyer on the list this year, and virtually no sci-fi. No Atwood. Happies: almost as much cross-genre as fiction, which is appropriate since it's what I'm trying to do as a writer. Very few Great White Males: Paul Bowles and James Jones, and Dickens, and I think that's it. (Does Bowles even count?) Jones was my Big Book this year, and I'm really glad I read him.

I plowed through all of Grace Metalious's output, and the only good book was the original Peyton Place (which I read last year). Save your strength and don't bother with the other stuff.

I also read five of Dorothy's 16 books so far. I love so much what they're doing. Their books all have an especial quality that I can't really put my finger on, something slightly alien and aggressive about the language, and it's mesmerizing.

Various people, in various contexts, have said "You must read really fast!" I don't think I do. But I don't watch television, and I commute six hours a week (was 10 hours a week for much of the year). Sinking most of that time into reading/listening instead, I do pretty well. I read about a page a minute on most print layouts, which means a 300-page book, one that really hooks me, takes...what, five hours? Closer to six, probably. That doesn't seem really fast to me.

It amazes me that I failed to finish three books of poetry, when poetry books are usually so short. But the Glück was such a snoozer I couldn't keep at it, the Firestone was doing something I totally didn't understand (but which a friend, a Dickinson expert, loved), and the Myles was a compendium of decades of her work and I was reading it to procrastinate writing a review of her memoir and so I finally gave it up after 170 pages and got down to business.

Favorites? Impossible to say. What you'll like depends on who you are, not who I am, and some of these altered the way I was writing and thinking even though I liked them less than others (Heroines, for example). By that same token, the fact that I read it does not mean I endorse it; many of these I found mediocre and some of them I roundly disliked. But I'd love to talk to you about them, anyway.

TBR shelf (partial) 

Mostly Bullet Points, Some Filler

First, in case you missed it:

• My review of Eileen Myles's Afterglow appeared in Brevity on November 6.
• My review of John Haskell's The Complete Ballet appeared in Anomaly on November 29.

Three more reviews have been accepted but not run; a fourth has been accepted but not yet written; a fifth has been written but not yet accepted. I like books.

Also, I put up a six-word story on Medium the other day.

It seems like book reviews and reading therefor are all that's kept me from sleeping through the days I have off. The world is hard to bear right now (fires, literal and figurative) and I am tired and processing the last of jet lag and fighting off viruses from all sides. I'm writing largely on deadline instead of writing ahead, and the time I don't spend on deadline is spent reading and pitching. (The one is lovely and the other is exhausting.)

To keep me honest, here's a list of projects I need to work on for the rest of December and in the year ahead. It's a long list because I'm so behind on everything except reviews. This is about half stuff I should've been working on since summer; some of it is definitely for 2018's spring or even summer, not now; some of it is new to me as of fall 2017 but I should've started on it by now.

• Essay involving Gayle's book
• Zine (written)
• Essay about Five Million Years to Earth (solicited)
• Essay about a film that never was (solicited)
• Bits and pieces story for the Cupboard (not solicited) 
• Celebrity story for Enumerate (not solicited)
• Casablanca novel
• Conceptual novel 
• Essay about blurry love
• Medium story about YA
• Medium story about eating disorder
• Essay about Apocalypse Now
• Essay about Jeanne Dielman
• Essay about Last Tango in Paris
• Collaborative thing with Higgs (part done) 
• Outline for Plan 9 novella
• Outlines for two workshops (happening by March)
• Book reviews: nine (9) for now, more next year, surely
• Endless, self-renewing pitches and queries and proposals and submittals for essays, stories, book reviews, craft book, Highbinder, secret project, whatever else I finish
• Put together writing about the following topics:

1. The tree where I left the blue stone
2. Visit to Santa Fe and all I saw
3. The Salton Sea and the St. Andrews Cathedral
4. Trip to Oregon and the fires there
5. Meow Wolf

• Interviews with

1. Duncan
2. Samantha
3. Tomas
4. People who haven't gotten back to me
5. Whoever else says yes, later

Damn, that is a long list. No wonder I'm stressed out.

Maybe this is a moment for me to reiterate how I work. Once I get going, I am a fast writer, and according to an external observer I'm a very fast reader (though I don't tend to think so). I can turn around a read and review for a book in about a week. When I'm writing other stuff, I need several months (how many of them depends on the project) to get my thoughts together, but once they are together I can write an essay in just a few sittings. For example, "The Girl on the Bike" came together very quickly, in two drafts a couple weeks apart, but I'd been thinking about the stuff in it for years. I wrote Highbinder (93,000 words) in I think five or six months, where I know many (most?) writers take years to write books.

So even though this list looks really goddamn long, even to me, it'll take me probably a month to write, finish, or execute half of the stuff on it. Which I should really just do, in most cases, instead of sleeping and avoiding it because finishing is scary. The other stuff is longer-term, or I haven't even come up with what to write for it yet, but that's the nature of my profession: some projects cook along in the background, like beans, while others get sauteed and eaten rapidly.

Did I say finishing is scary?

I do this thing where I get hung up immediately before the finish line on a task and then dawdle and stall before doing the rest of it. This is true in all areas of life: cooking & cleaning, my day job, writing projects, reading books, correspondence, research, shopping, thank-you notes, et cetera. Like, I'll get through 47 pages of entering my attorneys' billing slips and then my brain tells me to take a break and eat something and maybe nap before doing the last three. Three pages! After I've been working two and a half hours on the first 47! Whyyyyyy do you do that, brain?

Maybe "scary" is why. If I finish, I won't know what to do with myself. I'll have to start a new task that might not go as smoothly as the almost-done one is going (since it's almost done, after all) and then I'll have to work harder (or be more anxious) and if I sit in this almost-done moment for as long as possible, I won't feel anxious or guilty or frustrated.

Yikes.

This may be an explanation, but there's no excuse for letting my to-do list get as far out of hand as the above is. Get to work, Coldiron. Butt in seat. No solitaire. No YouTube. Get that zine printed up. Update your website. Write a list. Write a pitch. Just do what you gotta.

(secret confession: I get a bit turned on when dudes do that hand-mouth gesture.)

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.

Famous Men, Travel, Paradox, and Miscellany

My friend Ravyn told me in September that she was impressed by my ability to hold two contradictory ideas in the same hand. She called it a capacity for paradox. She also said that she thought I had not yet fully explored the power of two yet. I agree with her, inasmuch as my intellectual strength seems to come from threes instead of twos. Right now. I'm not sure about later.

This capacity for paradox is what powers an essay of mine published this week in the Offing: "Famous Men I Have Been Asked to Forgive (Abridged)". It's also what powered the original version of the essay, "Everything I Think About Woody Allen", which I threw out completely in order to write the new one. The original was more of a cinema-focused piece, more experimental, more specifically about Allen and his films than about the wearying topic of Bad Men. In between the time I submitted the original and the Offing said "sure, but can you revise it?", and now, the field of Bad Men and their deeds got wider and deeper than anyone could have imagined. So then I wrote what you see.

The revision used to open with a short discussion of Madonna, and how my father's judgment on her made me ask questions very early on about the relationship of artists to their art. I think the kind, gentle, responsive Offing editors were right to ask me to remove this, but I'm pretty sure it's going to appear somewhere else. It's illustrative.

Paradox seems to drive all my recent work. It's difficult enough to live in that I've been writing mostly book reviews lately, instead. But, for instance, an essay I'm working on (slowly, agonizingly) examines a photograph that could depict any GI, from any time period with war, but also has very specific time and place markers because of the clothes of the non-military people in it. Picking that apart is harder than considering what an author is up to in a novel or a memoir.

I write this at the tail end of a two-week trip that took me to the east coast of the US and then all around the UK, from Scotland to Wales to London. Many people have oohed and aahed over this trip when I explained it, but I've had about 50% of a good time. For the first part I was dogged by migraines, which spoiled a lot of people's fun aside from just mine, and then we had a terrible time with our travel arrangements from the US to the UK.

After that - it may surprise you to learn that November in Scotland is quite cold and wet, and that doesn't suit my disposition very well. Then we had a lot of time on trains in the week that followed, and I did not know until we were in the thick of it that Matt does not consider it fun to sit on a train for a good part of the day. (I do.) But doing so was integral to our vacation. So I felt guilty and he felt anxious and we were tired as dogs from all the trouble before we left Scotland and I had the same experience I always have when I leave home on trips that are not road trips: this is not worth the trouble it took to get here.

Until we got to Portmeirion. Which was magical. Profoundly so.

I took this picture. Click to embiggen. 

It was worth the trouble it took to get there. But - and although I am not conscious of prejudice on my part regarding this statement, there are all kinds of factors that could make me mistaken about it, such as the season or the way we came across or some other variety of cultural disjoint - the Welsh are not a very friendly people. They had this way of saying "no problem" that made it sound like "I hate you" again and again. They didn't laugh at Matt's jokes and they didn't return my smiles, and when we tried to help them with our baggage or dishes or whatnot, to smooth the way, we were treated like children trying to use the stove. No no no. Let me get that. You silly idiot. We could not figure out how to make them not hate us.

EVEN SO, Portmeirion is the second best place I've ever been (after Chautauqua, the place we chose to get married in), and I want very much to go back sometime. Maybe they'll be in better moods in the spring?

I hoped to get a lot of writing done on this trip and I did not. The countryside through which our trains cut so beautifully was too interesting, and our plans left us too little idle time that was not spent sleeping or just recovering. There's still an 11-hour plane ride ahead, but I find it very hard to concentrate on planes. On this trip, I wrote one book review, completed edits on the Offing piece, read a few books, and pitched a couple of reviews, but I'd hoped to write my next Medium piece and two more reviews as well as working on essays and the novel. Oh, well. December will be calmer, I think.

Of late my thoughts have been running too often to uninteresting topics (my weight, my wallet), and I don't always know what to say here. My work has appeared in a lot of places that make me happy and proud, but my newsletter is the self-promotion place, not this blog. I am reading interesting books and talking to interesting people, and some private things are difficult for me right now. None of that can really be communicated here. I don't know how to talk about what I'm doing without giving away what's coming next, and I don't know how to talk about what I'm feeling without being dull or hurtful. What I'm thinking keeps going into the work.

A consequence of finding publication and gaining momentum as a writer is that my thoughts don't have to go to a ground wire. They can go right to the third rail, to power the work. That's good, but it leaves this space empty.

What do you think? What would you like to see me write about here?

Evidence, Part II

WELL. WHAT A MONTH IT'S BEEN.

I don't know if you're aware of this but I write things, and in the last several weeks I've received evidence from multiple sources that I write things pretty well. This evidence is not yet visible to the public, but if you want to know about it when it happens, subscribe to my newsletter now, and the next issue - which I think will go out during Thanksgiving week sometime - will link you to as many of them as it can.

In the meantime I wanted to write a post, because the next post is already in the can and it's going to be an examination of one of the invisible pieces of evidence, and that would be two of those posts in a row, so here's a something-else post.

And what I want to write about today is severalfold. I'm on a plane right now, having finished a book this afternoon that I'll be recommending for years, Code Name Verity-level interesting, which made me almost cry twice near the end. I want to explain about that, how it feels to not be able to cry during the majority of your waking life because of the medication you're on, and knowing that books rarely make you cry anyway because you're engaged in the language more than the experience of them (movies make you cry more easily, but...still, the medication), and still almost crying at this terrific fucking book, but seeing very well with your analytic mind that the book is too weird for the mainstream, too densely intelligent for most readers, too much and yet so astonishing that you can't even begin to strategize about reviewing it like a normal person, without making the review only three words: READ IT YOURSELF.

I'm thinking at length about this post, though. Much news has come to me in November that is just the same: stuff that Mean Brain can't explain away as not a big deal or due to favoritism. That was two years ago, nearly three, and this is now, and I thought it would take forever and now it's all happening too fast, almost too fast to enjoy.

Some days ago I put up a post on Medium, and I'll tell you why. I knew that the tentpole of it was the kind of mellow life lesson that would play well on self-improvement blogs, to broad audiences, but I did not want to go to the trouble of pitching those places and then having editors "smooth out" my writing. Basically: the same reason that people self-publish. I self-published a gleeful VC Andrews knock-off through Lulu some years ago (and I regret it, for reasons too practical to go into in this post), but I learned at that time that people generally self-publish to maintain editorial control and because they have the marketing chops (or the platform) not to need a press's help. I don't really have a platform, and I definitely have zero marketing chops. But I understand Medium, I wasn't trying to sell anything, what I'd written was short and appealing, and I have a decent social network now.

Lessons. Expertise. Hanging around and listening.

And the problem is that I have no time, I have no time, my life is exploding with opportunities and good news and books to read and people to meet and topics to write about and essays to think about and experiences to have, but what do I do about feeling unmoored and torn in two? Prioritizing writing (REALLY DOING THAT, not lip-servicing that) is one thing; truly having the physical space to unroll my creativity (such a blessing!) is a second thing; keeping the parts of my life from falling in on each other, like cards set against each other too perilously, is a completely other thing, a thing on the other side of some kind of line.

Yet I have the evidence that it is worthwhile. That it is happening, that it has its own momentum now. People are clapping for my Medium story. [redacted]. That's tangible, visible.

From certain political perspectives, the world is kind of burning down a little bit. 2017 has been a very bad year for many of my friends and loved ones. But my shit is blowing up, as the kids say, in 2017, and I feel guilty and grateful in equal measure. What do I do with that? How do I arrange my face? How do I square my next publication announcement with the next school shooting? As ever, life is all things happening at once, not tidily portioned out as in a math problem.

Enough rambling. I have work to do.

The Anatomy of an Essay

Last time we were together, I pointed you toward this essay I wrote, which the Los Angeles Review (online) saw fit to publish. I am so glad about this, because it's a very LA-steeped story, from the location to the pretentious people to the title being a riff on Joan Didion,* who's always prominent in picture collages of LA writers.

People who've read it have asked me how much of it is fictionalized. The answer is almost none. The parts where the sentences begin with "I imagine" are not true to life, and I changed a name due to circumstances too tangled to explain. But the rest I described as I saw it. You can go to the Standard Hotel, 550 S. Flower Street, Los Angeles, CA 90071, if you don't believe me, and see the well-dressed douchebags and vagina waterbed pods for yourself. I wrote it with a starkness, an aggressiveness, that is not my usual register, and I juxtaposed things kind of unnaturally to make a series of points, and I don't have, like, JAMA studies proving the thing about babies and yellow (though the internet has loads of information about that - I didn't just make it up). But everything I describe in the story happened the way I describe.

You can see the aforementioned pods in the left center of this photo. 

The backstory: two friends were staying at the Standard. They'd come to LA for AWP in March-April of 2016. We were joined in the restaurant by two additional friends, one in town for the same reason but staying elsewhere, the other a resident of Los Angeles; the LA friend stayed for the rooftop experience while the other friend left. That's why the numbers and names get a little jumbled. Trying to explain these circumstances artfully sounded less appealing than just letting it dangle.

The three of us, the two friends staying at the Standard and I, made much of the insane patriarchal environment of the hotel while we were there. It wasn't something I noticed, alone, afterward, and decided to explore. All of us talked about it, laughed about it, yelled about it, and all of us wrote essays. The original plan was to see if someone would publish all three of them, three different takes on the same experience. That didn't work out, alas, but I still love the idea.

I wrote mine pretty quickly, and pretty soon after the event. Not much of my usual stewing & brewing. I wrote it in time to hand it in as a final project for one of my CSUN classes in late April or early May, and I read some aloud to the class. They laughed, and gasped, and asked me how much of it was true.

Then I sent it out - only, as it happens, to the Los Angeles Review. It seemed so intrinsically an LA story that I didn't know if any of my other goal publications would give a damn about it. My memory is that I waited a while to see if my friends wanted to send their essays out too, and once that possibility closed, I'd missed the open submissions period for the LAR and had to wait a few more months. I sent it in late November of 2016, six or seven months after I finished it, and I got a positive reply in mid-June of 2017, about seven months later, and it appeared in August of 2017, not quite a year and a half after the events in it.  On this occasion I wasn't deterred by revision time; the piece was hardly edited at all from how I initially set it down. (Sometimes that happens. Usually not.)

Above: the anatomy of an essay, from inspiration to publication. I'm explaining this because I rarely have such a strong, fact- and date-based memory of how a piece came to be, and such specific detail feels helpfully illustrative to me. This was an easy go, aside from the lag time between finishing & sending and between sending & hearing back.

It isn't always so. A fraught piece I have on my mind right now, about Woody Allen - I don't remember which of the news stories I read about him inspired it, and I don't remember when I drafted it, or whether I edited it with a strategy or not. I have information in my email about when I submitted it and when a publication asked for revisions, and I can tell you exactly why I've been putting off doing those revisions ( = they're too hard). But the beginnings are murkier, and that's the norm for me.

Sometimes I use this blog as a primary source for research on when I wrote things and how I worked on them. But in the last couple of years I have become unhelpfully vague, here, about the stuff I'm working on. Part of this is because my writing practice has changed, grown looser (lazier?), become more binge-y than bit-by-bit-y. I can't tell a serial story about any of it: the idea comes in one day and the essay whooshes out two days (or six months) later, in one big blurt, so there's nothing to say.

Another part is that Caitlin Moran thing when you stop talking to your friends about the guy. My writing process is much less interesting to me now than all the other stuff I've taken to writing about on this blog, and anyway it can't be that unique: I sit down and I write, or I stare at the page, or I read my own words and try to figure out how to replace them with better ones. Sometimes this takes place in longhand, and sometimes I type. Sometimes deadlines help me, but mostly they don't. I hit the same walls a lot: running out of enthusiasm for the idea I started with, feeling like I don't have enough time to do justice to an idea, finding I don't have enough load-bearing walls to build a room. If this isn't interesting to me, surely it isn't to you.

This blog still interests me, for the record. But I'm in the process of determining how to use it for anything other than a promotional tool. I was thinking of explaining a significant hour I spent on the road between I-10 and Mecca, California, but I might knead it into an essay instead. I wanted to talk about my experience at a writing workshop in Santa Fe, but I don't want to step on the toes of the people I met there. The more topics I come up with, the more I divert them away from this space, for one reason or another. It's a puzzle, but I'll solve it.


*After I announced this influence in my newsletter (are you subscribed to my newsletter?), a helpful person pointed out that Yeats originated the phrase "slouching towards Bethlehem," and Didion appropriated it. This is true. However, the appropriation is arguably more famous at this time than the origin, and there's more than a little Los Angeles in that.

Things that Are Happening

Earlier this week I wrote a scary post about a big change I'm initiating gradually over the next few months, a change that's directly related to privileging creativity in my life. Which is basically what this blog is about. But I chickened out on it at the last minute. There are good reasons why I should not put up that post, and I decided to acknowledge them instead of going forward and possibly ending up like this

. But there's so much stuff I want to write about in this space that I kind of have to start blogging after a three-month break so here's a post and I'm sorry it's not the more daring one.

So! Here we are!

1. I have made a zine, and it's called Aphorisms on Surrealism, and it's $3. Please Paypal me, masonklc at gmail dot com, if you'd like one. Include your mailing address and I will send it to you; if you don't include your mailing address I'll just keep your money.

I've never seen zines bound with safety pins, but it was what I had on hand.

In case you know a thing or two about surrealism, yes, the project of writing aphorisms related to surrealism is by its very nature contradictory and improper, and that is the point. You, sir, will enjoy my zine. Three dollars, please.

Another zine, even shorter and only a single dollar in cost, will be coming along shortly. It's called How to Be Cool. There's a longer one I'm thinking about making, but I want it to round up a rejection or two from actual markets before I try and print it myself.

2. I missed the opportunity to share this essay with you. It appeared in the Los Angeles Review in August. I am exceedingly proud of it. There'll probably be a whole post about it sometime, because it came to be in a series of events that are pretty instructive.

3. I am teaching a workshop about sentences on November 11. If you're in the Los Angeles area, please email me, either at the address above or at the one in the sidebar, and we'll talk about whether you would enjoy attending. It's $35 for three solid hours of conversation and guidance regarding sentences. That's a very low hourly rate. Take advantage of it while I'm still cheap. Someday I'll be famous and expensive and then you'll regret not taking a class from me when I was still charging less than $15 an hour for my time, won't you? Yes, you sure will.

4. You may have missed a couple of Books I Hate (and Also Some I Like) interviews that dropped since the last time we were together. Here's one with Zoe Zolbrod, here's one with Jessica Piazza, and here's one with Kristi Coulter. Coming up soon are duncan b. barlow (a very, very nice dude and a fine writer who I thought was British for no reason I can determine) and Genevieve Kaplan (whose interview is different from literally all the others). Plus a couple of other writers who have expressed interest but haven't gotten back to me. As soon as I nag them into getting back to me, there will be more interviews.

Also, I reviewed Alice Anderson's new memoir, Some Bright Morning, I'll Fly Away, for Fiction Advocate.

5. I received two acceptances within a week of each other: one for a pure-fiction short story (the only one I've written in the past couple of years), and one for the Kathy Ireland story, which was a real treat to receive after a pile of rejections on that story. I'm really looking forward to sharing those pieces with everyone once they are published. I also received a painful rejection for the secret project and a colorful assortment of other rejections for various essays. And two rewrite requests: one that I haven't gotten back to, and one that hasn't gotten back to me.

I'm listing all this because people have started to ask me if I've been doing any writing lately, in a tone that makes me feel sort of guilty and idle, and I can say well, not really, but there's been a reasonable amount of activity in my writing life nonetheless.

6. The amount of reading in my life has been minimal of late, because I read a long book I strongly disliked in midsummer and it put me off reading, the way eating an entire pan of brownies will put you off brownies for at least a little while. (Probably.) I've got to roar back to it, though, because I have a special bookcase now for my not-yet-read books and it's completely full.

7. Last week it was my birthday. I am 36 years and seven days old. I believe I've officially passed the common age of rom-com heroines, which is honestly kind of a relief.