Week On

I'm gradually learning that I do best at this freelancing thing when I work week-on, week-off. Like, last week I wrote one or two reviews every day, knocking out a massive pile of assigned galleys. But this week I can't bring myself to write anything, and I'm reading, sleeping, and tending to other responsibilities instead. This schedule seems unworkable in a field where deadlines don't happen on a biweekly basis, but my brain gets quite mulish if I push it. And there are professions that run week-on, week-off, so it's not unheard of.

It would be nice if my brain was more cooperative. I'm reminded of when I started teaching yoga, and I figured out that a profession which relies almost entirely upon the consistency and strength of one's body, which is a changeable, inconsistent actor even when one is young, is a taxing, stressful profession. It's a different thing than a profession which requires your body to be present; you can come to work at an office job with a twingey knee and virtually nothing will be different. As a yoga teacher with a twingey knee, everything is different. This goes for athletes, too, and dancers, and people who otherwise employ their bodies for 90-100% of the work of their profession. You live in your primary workplace all the time, and the livelihood that your body represents gives you a strange relationship with the flesh you inhabit.

Now that I'm in a profession that uses my brain as entirely as teaching yoga used my body - a profession where I can't go to work and pretend to be interested for half the day but am really just marking time, where I have to truly think for every minute of the time I'm doing my job - I feel similarly stressed and taxed, and hadn't acknowledged it until, well, right now.

I think that's why a schedule is shaking out, almost involuntarily, where I'm doing that 90-100% thinking work only half the time I'm alive. Otherwise, I might collapse. Perhaps saying that my brain is uncooperative is wrong; its resistance could be keeping me from becoming a pile of unthinking goo.

All that said, this has been a pretty interesting week for me as a writer. Two reviews on which I worked unusually hard went live, along with a few other less labor-intensive pieces. An article I previously wrote as a blog post was featured on Medium, and the soil it turned over had all kinds of horrible creatures living in it. If you're not a member of Medium, I think you may not be able to see the comments left on the piece by members? Or something? Trust me, though - it isn't fun. (For a sample, see the comment on my previous blog post.) The negative feedback characterizes me as everything from "misandrist" to "borderline psychotic." One guy tried to convince me that I needed to see my own teenage experience in terms of the feelings of the boy I was with. Mmhmm. The positive feedback was nice to hear, though.

As for the hard-work reviews:

I wrote a review of Tana French's latest novel, The Witch Elm. I used the review as an occasion to write about a cultural/feminist theory I named the Lucky Loop. I made three charts to accompany the article. The Mantle ran two of them, and this is the third:

French's novel illuminates all the issues I pulled out in this piece, so it's not so much me coming up with these ideas as packaging them, but I'm proud of doing that, anyway. The charts were surprisingly fun to make.

I'm a Tana French superfan, so the argument exists that I might have spent the entire last year working insanely hard to build a portfolio as a book reviewer just so I could get her book earlier than its release date, for free. I can neither confirm nor deny this argument.

I also wrote a detailed review of Shelley Jackson's first novel in years, Riddance, the subtitle of which is The Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers and Hearing-Mouth Children. The rest of the book is as elaborate as the subtitle. Opinions have varied widely on it; Publishers Weekly starred it, while Kirkus called it tedious. I loved the book, but I predict a lot of people will buy it because it sounds cool and then will never finish it.

Otherwise out in the world:

I reviewed a remarkable anthology, So Many Islands, for sinkhole. I doubt I ever would have read a sentence of writing from most of these people if not for this anthology, and some of the island nations from which the writers hail I'd never heard of. If you're a traveler and/or you like anthologies, pick this one up; it's good.

I did a kind of book profile, including some quotes from the author, of Barbara Barrow's The Quelling for an interesting website called the Inquisitive Mind, or In-Mind, run by a very nice pair of PhDs. I found it via Googling magazines similar to Psychology Today (PT did not respond to my pitch). I thought that profiling the book for an audience interested in psychology would do better for the book than a regular review. It was an extremely readable book with wild conflicts, and I'm watching the author with interest.

And I wrote a regular review of Donald Quist's first story collection, For Other Ghosts, for the Arts Fuse. This is the third-to-last story collection I plan to review for quite a while. It was very good! I'm just not the right reviewer for short stories.

Boy, You Gotta Hammer That Nail

I am tired of rejections. That's all I have to say about it right now.

Recent reads include the fifth Chelsea Cain thriller, Kill You Twice, which was as awesome as the rest of them, if not more so; Tana French's first book, In the Woods, which didn't commit as much Olympic-level emotional archery as Faithful Place but which was very nearly as good; Lorrie Moore's Anagrams, which was genuinely interesting but not something I'd necessarily recommend; Douglas Starr's The Killer of Little Shepherds, which was fascinating and well worth reading but stopped just short of being ah-may-zing; and Elyn Saks's The Center Cannot Hold, one of the best books about mental illness I ever hope to read. Remarkable in more than a few ways, and gave me a far superior handle on schizophrenia than I'd had before. Also, I finally finished Ghosts by Gaslight, and what a mixed anthology. Some of the stories bored me silly, and others were so captivating I wanted to read them again when I was finished.

I know there are more books I've finished recently, but I neglected to write them down. Do you guys want me to link to Amazon for this stuff? I could, but I don't figure I have the kind of influence where you want to run right out and buy a book that I've loved. (Plus, four of six of the books above came through my library. Love your libe!)

...

Okay, so maybe that wasn't all I had to say about rejections. I reread my New Year's resolutions this week, and one of them was to be in beginner's mind when writing. I think I'm succeeding at this, slowly; trying to just write well, make each story better than the last, and zip up any consideration of anything else. I get frustrated with the question of how good it has to be before I get a bleeding acceptance, of course, but attempting to write well for the sake of writing well feels good.

Nevertheless, when I am certain I'm improving, when I've read stuff in the market that's exactly like the stuff I'm sending, when I just want to be thrown a bone, it's depressing.

Too, this has been on my mind a lot lately. Go skim it and come back.

The list of mags that's rejected him and the number of times they've done so (near the end) just will not leave my head. 13 tries at one magazine? I never ever would have thought of being so persistent. After five tries, I'd probably say "okay, their style and my style don't mesh" and move on. But no, not this guy. And I note that he has piles of publishing credits, all over the place, and I think, well, obviously he knows something I don't know. And I think the thing he knows that I don't is PERSISTENCE, which is a different quality than persistence. (I'd like to pin this on gender, but that doesn't seem like a wise idea.) The latter is just continuing to try and get published, sending stuff out to market after market; the former is hammering at the same nail until it goes directly into the concrete.

I don't know about that, though. Aren't you just going to bend the nail? Further thought is needed.

On Sunday I drive north to Big Sur, to Esalen, where I'll be at a week-long workshop with Cheryl Strayed and Pam Houston. I am looking forward to this so much that I'm jealous of myself. So, until next week (or perhaps the week after), adieu.

Yet More Misogyny and Recent Reads

So there's a big flap going on about the sexist content of the recent bulletins of SFWA, the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America. To be clear, the bulletins aren't just little shitty newsletters, they're glossy printed magazines, and a one-year subscription will set you back $32 for four issues. To be further clear, I don't feel like saying much about this issue is really up to me, as I'm not a member of SFWA and haven't personally read the controversial content in question. So I'll summarize that from what I've read - and Googling and spending half an hour reading blogs and forums seems to be the only way to find out what went on if you don't have access to the bulletins themselves, which is why I'm talking around this instead of speaking to it directly - this is more gender bullshit from entrenched misogynists in the SF/F publishing industry, and it's worth getting pissed off about.

I have looked forward to joining SFWA for years, and now I don't think I want to, if/when I'm on the point of qualifying. E. Catherine Tobler has explained the situation eloquently here, and Samantha Henderson has responded more similarly to how I would (i.e. more weariness, fury, and swears) here. I'm a little disturbed that Scalzi didn't do more to halt this (he's the president of SFWA), but there's too much I don't know to place any real blame on him.

On to the reads.

Over Memorial Day weekend, I flew just under 6,000 miles in three days (yes, my arms are tired), and this meant a lot of reading got done.

Before I left, I read Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, a short book by William Styron about his depression becoming a full-blown breakdown. I wanted to read it because I wanted to know what a skilled wordsmith would say about madness, which I mistakenly thought he'd explore in more detail than the (far more familiar to me) business of depression. This brief book unfortunately slimed me a little with the mental ectoplasm of the Great Male Narcissist. I know the essay was meant to be about him and his suffering with depression, but even at that it still seemed overly self-involved. I think this is what happens with depression.

I also read The Quiet Room, a uniquely structured memoiresque book about schizophrenia nominally by Lori Schiller. I walked away with many remaining unanswered questions about schizophrenia, but a better picture of the course of the illness and some of the experience of it. The best part about it was the well-balanced picture of the human cost and tale of schizophrenia - how it affects loved ones over the long term as well as its sufferer. I have a bunch more books about schizoaffective disorders on my TBR list (including one about, get this, identical twins, one of whom suffered from schizophrenia while the other one didn't). It's a mental illness I don't understand especially well, and I'd like to.

On the trip I read Dead Ever After, the final Sookie Stackhouse book. A few shenanigans here and there, but EXTREMELY satisfying (although YMMV if you were an Eric fan, which I decidedly am not). I'm sorry there won't be any more books about her, but I'm also kind of glad. She's in a happy place.

I read the fourth of Chelsea Cain's thrillers about Archie Sheridan, The Night Season, as quickly as the other three. It took several unexpected directions, and I can see how it may have been disappointing for some readers, but I enormously enjoyed it.

And I read State of Wonder, Ann Patchett's latest. It's the first of her books I've read. It reminded me a lot of The Poisonwood Bible, which I didn't particularly like, and I found myself looking forward to finishing, but also reading with enjoyment (Patchett creates narrative tension extraordinarily well). The book seemed limp, dependent on its settings, and much of its plot struck me as outlandish. Yet when I was in the last chapter, I felt like I'd been through a remarkable experience. I looked back at the journey of the novel with amazement and pleasure at what I and the characters had been through. Ultimately I am confused about it.

I felt this way after The Accidental Tourist. Not a book I especially enjoyed, but I'm glad I read it, and bits and pieces of the characters and events kept popping up in my head long after I'd finished. On balance, was this a good reading experience? I have no idea.

I planned to start Redshirts when I got home, and read it halfsies with Faithful Place, a mystery/thriller by an Irish writer named Tana French who was recommended by a blogger I like. I blew through Redshirts in about four hours all told, before I'd even properly started the other book. Rollicking, most excellent fun. I read Faithful Place all last week, and I loved it to pieces. The writing was extraordinary on a sentence-by-sentence basis, witty and delightful, and the character-building and tension were wonderful. In truth, few books I've ever read have made me either laugh or ache as often as this book did. Potent stuff. Off I go to devour French's three other books.

I'm reading more and more thrillers in the last year or so, and I don't really know why. I've read heavy-hitting thriller writers like James Patterson and Scott Turow and haven't especially liked them - they feel pretty blatantly like junk food - and I don't often enjoy standard mysteries of the Christie type. But I keep stumbling upon midlist writers like Chelsea Cain and Tana French and wanting nothing more than to read them all the time.

What I really need to do is get back to my own writing. I've settled on the wikibook as the next project, and its structure is ideal for doing a little bit at a time, a few pages every day, in between research, outlining, reading, etc. But elephant-eating is a difficult business.

Picture credit to Shel Silverstein (obviously)