Nobody Can Do This

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Le Pendu

I came here and opened a new post because this blog is about writing, and I have a few things to say about that, about writing and my writing life, and my plans for the future. But I don't completely know how or whether to say them. 

A few Hanged Men (et al) from my Tarot collection

One of the books that came in for me to read for a book prize is a first novel from Atria, and everything about it made me angry. It's so clearly a piece of work from a privileged white woman in her 20s, someone with mere glimmers of life experience, someone who has thought down one or two levels about big knotty issues but not any further. Plus, it has a bunch of glaring first-novel issues that I can't believe passed by all the barriers between writing and publication (along with a laughable set of mistakes about living in Los Angeles). Her author photo is a glamour shot, duckface and all. 

This pissed me off, made me petty and cruel, because I'm jealous. She did all the steps in the right order, got the right kind of education from the right institutions, published stories in the right magazines. She wrote a pretty rudimentary novel about an unusual subject, and subsequently she got herself a book contract and a desirable blurb and a hardback first printing. 

I did none of this - I did the education and the steps and the publications haphazardly, unstrategically, cold-querying, without wealth. (I could never get my hair as smooth as hers for an author photo, nor my lips as glossy.) I learned by email yesterday that, nearly five years in, Ceremonials still hasn't sold enough copies to break even with its costs. 

The way I've worked through this kind of jealousy in the past is by remembering everything she doesn't know about this horrible business that I do know. All the practical underbelly stuff I learned via reviewing. Likely, no one has told her what to expect, emotionally, about publishing a first book and then writing a second. How to moderate her ambitions and talent against the market and the reader. All this is hard-won knowledge, and it's part of why I've hung on for so long rather than giving up: the knowledge that this is just hard, which she doesn't yet know and is likely suffering for not knowing. 

That self-reminding is not helping this time, and I'm just angry and sad and jealous. 

This has been an autumn full of disappointments specific to writing: painful rejections, insulting suggestions, delays on any news that would offer a little sunlight, that would be meaningful or fulfilling. I've tried to make my own sunlight by reading and by plotting new courses. But the fact is, I'm tired of these disappointments. I'm tired of being confronted with lesser talents getting what I want. I'm tired of breaking a path, and I don't see a way to follow someone else's path without such severe compromise that it wouldn't be worth the walking. 

Friends have told me they believe in me. Individual readers have said they loved my stuff. That's nice, and it does matter to me personally, but it doesn't change the practical work of path-breaking that I am tired of doing. By the cruelest math: it's nice if you like my work, but it doesn't do me any good unless you're an agent. That's ungrateful and shitty but it's where I am after everything that's happened this fall. 

What I'm dancing around is that I'm thinking of giving up writing. 

Sort of. I'm thinking of giving up on writing as a career. Giving up trying to get work published in the same ways I've been trying to get work published for 21 years. I'd like for it to be fun and hard in quantities that won't keep breaking my heart, and for publication to be incidental. Those goals require a wholesale rethink/rework. 

The last time I was down this bad about writing was February of 2021, when a bunch of circumstances collided to make me give up reviewing. I still haven't really gotten over that episode, and I can't conclude whether I made good or bad decisions. I don't miss the hustle of freelancing, and how little time I had to read what I wanted to read, but I do miss many aspects of reviewing. What will I miss about writing as I do it now if I give it up? 

I do have a plan for what to do instead, and it's a good plan, and I like it. In the meantime I have some transitional ideas: releasing a collection of genre stories one at a time on Patreon before self-publishing them in a volume, for instance. But first I have Out There in the Dark coming next summer, and what I elect to do about all this will depend somewhat on how that book is received. For the next few months I'm going to read, keep assembling the Poltergeist book, and write cosmic horror. 

The Tarot card I keep thinking of as I consider this year is the Hanged Man. I waited a lot this year. Having to do that caused major emotional havoc for me throughout 2021, but this year I feel like I learned (better) how to embody this card without anger, without anxiety. Just to dangle there. To enjoy the kind of freedom that comes from, for example, being at the airport early: there's nothing that needs doing until your flight takes off, so you can sit there and spend time freely in a way you simply can't in other areas of life. 

The Hanged Man is twelfth in the Major Arcana. I like to think of him as waiting for Judgment to come and cut him down, but that card is twentieth, and in between lie a bunch of other elements, as vast and meaningful as the Sun and the Moon. And Death, which is usually not death but change. 

I could use a few more omens. Perhaps I'll go back to daily or weekly Tarot work. Maybe that would give me an idea of what to do with my ambitions, my abilities, my expensive, worthless brain.