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

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(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. 

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.

Through the Jungle, Through the Dark

This week I took a short trip to Minnesota - a state I'd never visited - to meet a longtime over-the-internet friend. It was a relaxing visit, and interesting, and I got to spend time with two sweet dogs and see Tremors for the first time.

I also got a good amount of reading done. I'm going to a writing workshop in July with Cheryl Strayed and Pam Houston; the original partner for this workshop was Steve Almond, so I dutifully read a couple of his books, but he dropped out due to (I presume) pregnancy (his wife's, not his). Houston replaced him, which meant I needed to pick up her books, too. I read her Waltzing the Cat (short stories) last weekend, and then a novel, Contents May Have Shifted, over the course of my trip. They were both books I appreciated but that I wouldn't necessarily have chosen to read, and the novel was frankly a pretty frustrating experience. I liked the short story book better. I also reserved her memoir at the library, because it seemed to me through reading both of these books that that's what she should have been writing all along, and I'm curious about what the shift in medium will bring to her work.

I read some more of Ghosts by Gaslight (last mentioned here), and I'm glad to be over halfway through it. Some of the stories have taken my breath away but some of them have been tedious. On a friend's good advice, I'm only reading a story or a couple of stories every few days, instead of reading it every day like I do with a normal book. I feel dumb that I never knew how much easier anthologies were to read if you take your time.

I tried to read some more of Irene Iddesleigh, which I've been reading snatches of here and there in the last couple of weeks, but reading it on the plane was too difficult. To appreciate Ros's badness you really have to be sitting in a quiet place, preferably with someone nearby to whom to read aloud the worst bits.

And finally, I read Chelsea Cain's third Sheridan/Lowell book. I raced through the previous one and mentioned to Matt how much I was enjoying it, and he said "This is a series, right? How many of these has she written?" and I said "NOT NEARLY ENOUGH," because the answer is five, and now I've read three. There could be fifteen and it would probably be about right. Evil at Heart was a little bit...messier than the first couple, more haphazard (in my opinion), but I loved it anyway. These are great characters and it's a blast to spend time with them. Amazon indicates that another one's coming out in August, but its title is Let Me Go, which says to me that it might be the last one. :(

I missed California even during the four days I was away. Not just because of the weather, but because of the California-ness of it. The essence of being here. On the plane I read two issues of The Sun, and one of the "Readers Write" columns was about the theme of home, a concept that my mind turns to often. I think my next writing exercise will be on the topic, because there's so much I wish to say about "home" and what it means to me. In truth, it might be an exercise that begins now and takes me the rest of my life to complete.

PHEW

I don't know how it is for other writers, but every time I take a long hiatus from doing fiction, I always have this little needling worry that when I decide to write again, the machine will be broken, and somehow words won't come out when I put my fingers on the keys. It's a relief when the machine chunka-chunka-CATCHes back up again, coughcoughSPUTTER, and the words come.

Last night I wrote my prologue. Just shy of 2,000 words, and I wrote it good, in words I'm proud of.

The ache in me won’t subside. Couldn’t Racchi have been kind? To betray once, and then twice, and for it to have cost him nothing, encourages a cool voice to say that I’d been wrong about him all along. That there is no taming a thaiad, even a half-blood, and he was just a chimpanzee trussed up in evening clothes of my manufacture. He’d still screech and mess himself. Nothing but an animal.

But then, perhaps the same is true of me.

I decided semi-firmly to write this one in first person. I've stayed away from first person in the last few years, for the most part. Most of my juvenilia is in first person, and I tend to get lazy when I write in it. I make my character a lot more like me than like herself (or himself), and I do a lot of asides and emotional explaining, and the whole thing gets to be a lot more like a blog post than a work of fiction. So it'll be a disciplinary exercise to write this in first person and not do all of that.

One of the ways I got around this problem in the past was by writing shifting first-person for my sci-fi novella. I had a genuine purpose to the three characters I chose to rotate - they all had very different things to contribute to the story, and they shared a particular fate that took place at the end - but when I read over it the last time, I agreed with one of my beta readers that shifting between the characters, all "I"s, was a little confusing. I think I managed to give the characters distinct voices, but when they were working on the same thing, sometimes you didn't notice the name change in the chapter break.

In any case, I think I'm going with first person for this one. I might change my mind a few chapters in, if I can't distinguish Berra's voice from my own, or if it doesn't feel right. This decision was also drawn from the urban fantasy I read - two of the series books I read were in first person.

Speaking of reading, I am finally almost done with a steampunk anthology I started about a month ago. It's a 500-page anthology, in my defense, but honestly, after this experience, I don't know if anthology reading is for me. I find it emotionally exhausting to read all these different authors and all these different stories all mashed up against each other. The same is true in miniature in books of short stories by the same author. I get immersed in the world and the characters, and then the author yanks me out of it and we go on to the next thing. Like living a hundred lives in a single day.

Finally now I have read good steampunk, thanks to this anthology. I enjoyed some of these stories immensely, and some of them I found really blah. All of the writers seem to have enthusiasm for the trappings of steampunk, but not all of them make those trappings integral parts of the stories. Some of them are just telling a story with clockwork and airships duct-taped on top. (Dear God, please let that not be true of what I'm writing now. I don't want to overdo it, and I don't think pure steampunk is really me, but there will be clockwork and there will be Victorian fashion. Later there may be Zeppelins.) I wish I hadn't felt compelled to read every story in the book for the sake of Research, because I might have enjoyed some of the stories a lot more and felt free to skip others that weren't working for me. Oh, well. Nearly done now.

In other news, this week I saw Don Giovanni in a summer encore movie-theater presentation. (No need to read the next few paragraphs if you have no interest in opera.) I feel like an uncultured jerk, but I didn't love it as much as I hoped I would. There are a lot of parts to why:

• The staging was not terribly interesting. Straight-up late-1700s costumes, a sort of multiple-balcony setup that they really took zero advantage of, and taking the words of the opera literally. (I started imagining a staging in the 1970s with Giovanni as an actual pimp, and the last scene with all the food referring to girls, instead. I kind of love this idea, and any opera-stagers reading this are free to steal it.)
• Some of the cast actually seemed incompetent to the task of the opera. There were some not-quite-hit notes and some inability to keep up with the tempo of the syllables. I know how this sounds, because they know opera better than I'll ever know opera, but I don't think I was imagining it.
• One of the sopranos (Donna Elvira) seemed to have a range wrong for the part; she was loud and soft at weird times.
• All the above bullets despite the fact that this was the Metropolitan Opera of New York. WTF?
• Mostly male voices. Male voices do a lot less for me than sopranos, in general. (Tenors fail to move me at all 90% of the time. Crazy, right?) This show was mostly baritones, and Giovanni himself had a lovely rich velvety voice, but I just didn't feel very much.
• The last scene. Although it included the biggest laugh of the production thanks to Don Ottavio (played by a very homely fellow with few acting skills, unfortunately)'s sole good acting instinct, I found it totally tacked-on and lame. The supper scene was arresting, astonishing, I felt absolutely stripped when Giovanni got dragged down to Hell, and just when I thought I'd leave in a post-opera emotional fog, the whole cast tramped in and distracted me out of it. Learning that this scene was mostly omitted until the 20th century made an awful lot of sense.

Like I said, uncultured jerk, right? Flaubert said that Don Giovanni, Hamlet, and the sea are the three finest things wrought by God. I'll agree with him on the last two - I reffed Hamlet in my writing last night, because I wrapped it up in the last two things I wrote, and why break tradition and write something new? - but Giovanni just didn't captivate me. It could have been due to the not-quite-live performance; I know that the orchestra sounded a lot flatter than it should have in the movie theater, because I didn't have the same shock-to-goosebumps that I always have at the opening notes of the overture. But I think ultimately it's just not really the opera for me.

There are three more summer encores in July, and I haven't decided whether I'll go to them or not. They're showing Lucia, which I don't plan to attend because I had such an unforgettable experience with that opera and don't want to blot it out even partially. The other two are operas I'm not familiar with, Les Contes d’Hoffmann and Der Rosenkavalier. I mean, $13 for an opera is the best deal ever. So I'll probably go.

THERE, done. Now to work...and thence to writing, this evening. I'm actually excited to get to work again, instead of feeling dread and inadequacy like I have for so many weeks. Oh, but I have a question for you. Answer the poll, pretty please?