Sameness

This morning I dreamed that I had to unclog a drain. I pried the top off of a side-loading washing machine and used a plastic snake on the drain, which was around the diameter of my spread hand and covered with a flat white cap. Eventually I pulled out a clean, dry, thick lock of hair, tied together with a ribbon, about five inches long, which was the same color as mine. Then I discovered that the white cap was actually black, and it had been covered by a piece of bread and peanut butter, pressed PB-side-down on the top of the cap to further clog the drain. 

Once I had scraped and wiped this, I started scooping a bunch of junk out of the machine - it was white and curded, like cottage cheese, or melted Styrofoam. No smell. I noticed that the junk was yellower and more hardened toward the northeast corner of the machine, and realized I had to break up and remove that part first. I began to worry that the junk was actually part of the machine's workings (an insulator?), and that I was doing the wrong thing by removing it. Once that uncertainty had truly penetrated, I woke up. 

I've long wanted to write a blog post about all the good writing news of the past two months, but this dream was so specific - the textures, the emotions - that I had to get it down somewhere. I do not know what it means. I did watch The Stuff yesterday, so that's probably where the white junk comes from. (Don't give me Freud, please.) 

It feels weird not to do resolutions this year, but I don't know what I would resolve to do. Clean more, maybe. Stop complaining about the stuff I always complain about. Keep to my book schedule, so as to write all the things I mean to write by the end of the year. But I'll only fail myself if I fail those intentions, and I do enough of that, thanks. 

The days are all the same, and I thought I knew what that was like, since life in southern California moves like that, and I've worked at home for long periods before. But this kind of sameness has a hellish edge that reminds me of one of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes, where the petty criminal thinks he's gone to heaven because he always wins at the casino table and bangs as many pretty women as he wants, but in fact it's hell, because there's no challenge, he always wins, there's no danger or risk, and life without risk is...not heaven. 

I'm not saying that contentment and peace are bad. Just that I always had the option to get in my car and go somewhere if the sameness of my lovely life started to make me itch. I'd look for a workshop to take, sign up, and have something to look forward to, particularly if it was somewhere I could drive and I'd never been there before. (For other people, this practice is known as "vacation," but I never learned how to take vacations in my family of origin, so my version is workshops.) Minor adventures. I can't imagine how difficult this has been for people who thirst after major adventures, as giving up my minor ones is challenging enough. 

The days are all the same. When I lived in danger, I thought that sounded great. It is, for a while. Until it isn't anymore. 

I'm listening to two audiobooks right now: We Were Witches by Ariel Gore and The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. Both long overdue. The way each deals with witches and women directly contradicts the other, which is fun, because I know which side I'm on. 

Maybe I'll finally write that blog post with all the good news next week, or the week after. The days are all the same, so writing another blog post can pass for a big change in my routine. In the meantime, I'm running out of documentaries on cults to watch, especially since so many of them are padded and contain less information than the corresponding Wikipedia pages. But I'm getting so much cross-stitching done. I partially designed this piece and I'm disproportionately proud of it. 

The Smaller the Pond

Matt and I have been playing The Last of Us Part II for a few weeks. There's a lot going on in our experience. The first game was devastating, as any scenario which purports to be about the apocalypse but is actually about the people who survive the apocalypse generally is. This one is almost unbearable. The two main groups of characters struggle against each other bloodily, murdering each other until almost no one is left. 

I haven't been able to get the title out of my head. 

The game recounts stories of the last of us - the remaining members of the human race after a zombie-making virus has wiped out most of us. The title chills me more the longer I meditate on it. Last indicates a dwindling, a winding-down. Us indicates the community of species we all share, no matter our values. The end of humans. The closing chapter of our long, long story. 

Yet in this game, the characters are driven by revenge and tribalism to murder other humans, rather than just the zombies that threaten their lives. It would make sense for the last of us to band together against the common threat, to make more people, to perpetuate our existence rather than closing down more and more lives. But the drive to be correct about the values by which we live is apparently stronger than the drive to survive at any cost. 

That sentence demonstrates the hardest part about playing this game at this moment in the lifespan of the human race. We are murdering each other, softly or the hard way, every damn day, out there in the real world. We're not taking the coronavirus seriously enough to do whatever's necessary to survive, and for months I've thought it was because: the virus takes a long time to curdle and kill; it's not a sure thing (in the game, one bite and you're definitely dead); and there are enough of us that it doesn't seem like a species-wide existential threat, not really. 

But playing The Last of Us II has made me think differently. It has made me believe that tribalism and cursed American individualism are stronger than our survival instincts. In observing the past month or so of national behavior, I have begun to understand just how many people think that rules do not apply to them. Even in my little universe: the rich people at the barn don't wear their masks, they leave them around their chins. Maybe they think the risk is minimal, outdoors and with only a small handful of other people around. Or maybe they just...don't think the rules apply to them. 

In my early 30s, I started to think that greed was the worst human quality, the drive that caused the most suffering. Whatever single word expresses the trait of "surely they don't mean I have to follow the rules" is causing far more chaos in our world right now, although greed surely isn't helping. And the tribalism underlying the (supposed) ideological implications of who wears a mask...ugh, it's so horrible, causing such excessive needless suffering. But that's not what's going on in The Last of Us II. It's something more primal, and a tiny bit less petty (although not much). 

Years ago I wrote a novel about a secret race of people, Viking descendants, living in a massive cavern under Greenland's ice sheet. (I know it sounds awesome, but it was a failed novel; one day I'll rewrite it to be better.) I imagined a struggle for the throne of this kingdom on the level of the old English monarchy: poisonings, conspiracies, betrayal. Matt asked me whether I thought it was realistic that people would struggle so hard for a throne that meant so little, in the scheme of things. The power that anyone can hold in a closed community is naturally limited. 

This was a rare moment in which Matt was wrong. He is never wrong about human nature, or almost never - in this instance, as the years pass, I grow surer that he was. People struggle most bitterly for the smallest fiefdoms, I have found. English departments at colleges and universities are the primary example I'm aware of, but there are many others. The smaller the pond, the more fish get eaten, so the biggest one can grow fat. I don't know why humans are so dogged about what they control, and so much more so when what they control is minor, but they are. 

The Last of Us II is a beautiful, harrowing exhibit of this behavior. In light of the sunset of the entire species, you'd think that matters of revenge would fall by the wayside in favor of survival. Alas, no. The two main characters cut through dozens, hundreds of human beings in order to try and kill each other. (I think it's possible that the player kills fewer zombies than healthy people in this game.) Their strength, their will, could bolster entire communities, help them thrive; instead, they expend their resources on ending each other. 

They are compelling characters. Their choices are organic and agonized, and they make terrible mistakes, which always jump-starts a narrative. But I cannot stop thinking about what it means that they are the last of us. The very qualities that make them so good at surviving the apocalypse have also buried vengeance and bloodlust deep down in their natures. How does one dig those qualities out to cooperate with the others who have lasted, instead of killing them? 

Some version of this behavior exists within each of the two parties in our political system right now, and between them. Here I started writing some examples, but realized midway that you are likely to get mad at me for some of them, because that is how deep tribalism goes: it's impossible to read criticism of one's values without feeling personally insulted. We cannot even unite against the common enemy of the virus, a phenomenon that could swipe away a major chunk of our population, because we can't agree on the deeper meaning of wearing cloth on our faces. What the fuck. 

So the revenge and murder in The Last of Us II is striking deeper than it might at any other moment in American history. Five years ago it might have seemed like pure fantasy - the only way revenge stories feel good to me is if they are fantasies, because revenge is always going to harm more than help - but now it seems extremely realistic, that the last of us are killing each other rather than the common enemy. And God, how that aches. How it stings. How I wish it were not so relevant, so true to life. How I wish we were not in so desperate a fix. 

In the Scheme of Things

In the scheme of things, it doesn't matter, but my cactus is dying. 

I could have written this the opposite way: "My cactus is dying. In the scheme of things, it doesn't matter." But I felt the need to write it the first way, so as to make it clear that I know it doesn't broadly matter before I tell you this thing that matters, to me, in a way I can't defend. 

I think I've written before here about how I kill plants, how I have a brown thumb. It's been a joke in my life for a long time, but there are times when it's not funny. I can do lots of other things, so I try to focus on that instead of dwelling on this thing I can't do: keep plants alive. I've kept this cactus alive for two years. I bought it as one of three matching ones, the other colors were pink and red, this one is yellow, and the other two died but this one lived. I repotted it recently and gave it new soil and some liquid food, but one of those elements has made it very sick, sagging and thin and leaking fluid out its top, and I am fixated on it, my poor cactus, to the point where I had an argument with Matt this week because we misunderstood each other about the roses I needed to prune back, and I couldn't bring myself to prune them back because I didn't want to kill them like I'm killing my cactus, and Matt didn't understand where this was coming from at all and why I didn't just prune the roses like I said I would, and he tried to do it himself and that made me even more upset and I couldn't explain why. 

Keeping a plant alive for two years is nothing in the scheme of things. It is a record-breaker for me. I can't touch my cactus, because it is full of tiny prickles; I can't do anything but look at it lovingly, not like a pet you can bring into your lap. But it is the only nonhuman living thing I am not paid to give love to. It is the only thing in my life I have nurtured that belongs to me (the roses are the landlord's). And it's really sick. And it's my fault. And I cannot stop feeling anguish about this. 

It's stupid. It's just a cactus. I can buy another one for $3.99 at Lowe's. It has not grown significantly in the time I've had it. But it has not died in that time, and it is dying now, and that matters to me. 

--

This week I wrote a roundup of books by Black authors that I enjoy and recommend. Not all of them are directly applicable to the current situation, which was on purpose. Reading underrepresented voices is an end in itself, and it can be a diversion even as it's innately looped in to what's happening. I also edited a review of a book by a poet and felon, Felon, by Reginald Dwayne Betts, and put it up at Barrelhouse. These things I can do, even if I can't do much else. 

--

Jami Attenberg's yearly 1000 Words of Summer event is going on right now and I'm using it as an opportunity to start the next project. I got a little sidetracked yesterday by a frightening episode of heat exhaustion, but I've well and truly begun the work, and I feel good about how it's shaping up. For community and for accountability, I'm posting about it on Twitter once a day - and I forwent posting about it on Tuesday, for the ill-fated "blackout" - but then today I read a well-reasoned thread from people of color about it being insensitive to post about it at all. That made me feel guilty, but also a little annoyed. They suggested we move those updates to a private community/writing group, and I don't have one; my writing group is Twitter, for better or worse. 

In the same hour I read a comment on Facebook in a private group by a white woman feeling as if she's done enough activism (she gave examples), and doesn't deserve criticism for not speaking out in every single platform she has, even apolitical ones. 

I really do not know how to hold both of these views in the same hand. I'm trying to make my feeds mostly about other voices and issues and lives, and a little bit about me, but maybe that is wrong, too? Do my feeds reflect my life? Does my life always or mostly need to be about me? Does the balance I've attempted to strike look as ugly as that white woman's defensiveness, or are we all looking at each other cockeyed anyway, and no one can possibly do it right all the time? Do I reckon with myself, my past/future self, or with what others are doing/not doing? What is my example, my standard? Should it be at-least-I'm-not, or should it be I-could-never-be-but-I'll-try? 

This blog post is about me because this is my blog, not a shared space like a social media feed or a book club or a coffee shop. Or...is the entire internet a shared space? No, that's too far. This is my blog. 

I'm trying to explore and question, not defend. White defensiveness has no utility at all. 

I don't know. 

--

There's something else happening in my life right now that has to be secret for now but is causing me heavy stress. It may come to nothing. We'll see. 

--

At the barn, there's a horse named Mia whom I didn't like at all when I first started working there. She was wary and impenetrable, hard to catch in her stall and evidently uninterested in whether I lived or died. It's exasperating to work with horses like this, because you feel bad asking them to obey you when they clearly do not enjoy even being near you. 

Over time, she started to be nicer to be around. I finally realized she wasn't a jerk, she was just slow to trust, and she had no reason to trust me when she met me. If she were a human she'd be "hard to know." So I hung back until she was ready to know me, and treated her like a co-worker instead of pressing her for affection and obedience. When I hand-walked her I let her walk to the left instead of the right, because she clearly preferred that, even though it isn't how you're supposed to walk horses. Now she's recovered from an injury and is being ridden, which means I tack her up and down instead of just walking her. I've found out that she loves having her face brushed. She stretches out her neck and closes her eyes, and if I stand in front of her she nuzzles my chest and rests her chin on the edge of my sports bra while I brush and brush. 

Since we figured this out, she trusts me more than ever; she now whinnies and trots over to me when I come to her stall, as if I'm her friend instead of her keeper. She gives me all kinds of affection I don't get from the other, more skittish horses. She obeys me readily, which means it doesn't feel so bad giving her commands. We're developing a deeper and more loving relationship because I was patient and listened to her. I judged too quickly, but when I figured out she was just slow to trust, I gave her every reason to trust me instead of insisting that she do so right off. 

Yesterday I had to put a yucky-smelling salve on her nose. Three months ago she would have wriggled and jerked and made it impossible to do this, but I talked to her and petted her and she stood still and let me. I took the time, and was rewarded with trust and more love than I know what to do with. She's a wonderful horse. I never would have known that if I'd stuck with my first judgment. 

I hope I can write about Mia someday as a metaphor, but I don't quite know what my experience with her means yet. For now I just wanted to share it as a story. Working with her is some of the nicest time I spend at the barn, when she used to be a horse I dreaded a little. 

--

I just moved my cactus into the sun. Light will help it, right? Maybe it's leaking because it's purging something bad that came in through its roots. I hope, if that's the case, it gets better. I do not want it to die. 

Twitched and Stuck

Last night, while my husband and I watched a movie, a muscle twitched in my neck. I had been cross-stitching for hours that day, and had reviewed a bunch of residency submissions too, and in any case my neck is, let us say, not of the spring chicken variety. But because I couldn't easily identify whatever the phenomenon was that caused my neck to feel weird, I began to worry, and then feel certain, that I had a blood clot traveling slowly northward and it would lead to a stroke.

Soon, my neck twitched and stuck for longer than a moment, such that I could put my fingers on the area. It was definitely a muscle spasm (a weird one), not at all a blood clot. Much more like an eye twitch, although I've never had a spasm in any muscle that wasn't on my face, and I've never known a muscle spasm to stick that way, briefly, like the old wives warn us about our faces.

But I had already put in the worry about the stroke. My blood pressure had already inched that iota higher. My stability about waking up alive the next morning had been shaken. I felt relief, but things were not the same as they had been.

**

Resolute, Final Edition

Every year, I post last year's New Year's resolutions with a short analysis of how well I think I succeeded at them, and then I post this year's. However, I've decided not to make New Year's resolutions for 2020.

In the last few years, I've started to find the calendar too arbitrary to shape my life around - buying gifts for people on holidays instead of when I find good gifts for them, spending time with family during the worst season instead of the nicer ones, choosing self-improvement only when the turn of the month tells me to. My mind and heart move to a different rhythm; sometimes it's seasonal, but sometimes those moves take a longer or shorter time than a month or a weather pattern or even an entire year can encompass.

This yearly blog post has been helpful in organizing internal self-improvement, and in looking back on whatever happened to me across twelve months. But, in all honesty, I'm pretty tired of retrospective thinking. And I've found that either I'm trying to learn the same lessons over and over (fight self-doubt, avoid the distractions of the internet) or I'm trying small things that don't take an entire year to alter.

2020 seems like a good stopping point for this tradition. I may change my mind for 2021, but we'll see when we get there. In the meantime, I still want to analyze last year's (in greater detail here).

1. Rethink productive. If there was a single theme for my 2019, it was this. Whether I succeeded or failed, I don't know; I still don't have a good sense of how much work is enough for me not to feel lazy. There were weeks when I read five books and turned out five reviews, along with editing other people's work, promoting my own, and pitching still more; and there were weeks when I did nothing but watch Rifftrax, play phone games, and nap. I certainly learned, once and for all, that binging on work and then binging on relaxation is my natural pattern, and it takes so much effort to reverse that pattern that it's almost not worth it.

I'm still internally convinced that I'm lazy. Loved ones have tried to tell me that I'm not. My therapist asked me to define lazy, which set me back a pace or two. By the end of the year, I'd accepted that sometimes I must rest, but I hadn't stopped feeling guilty about it.

2. Lean into a hobby or two. Fail. Or that hobby was horses, which became a job. When I started volunteering at RideOn, I had to actively fight down the urge to be the best volunteer at the stable, to be the most useful person on any shift, to make special friends with the instructors, etc. It took real effort to be one among the group of people who helped instead of striving to be The Best One. I needed that experience, badly - but then I took it and turned it into a job instead of letting it be what it was, a hobby.

Cross-stitching would be better.

3. Bring collage and horses into my life. Success with horses, failure with collage, but I think the extraordinary success of the one (now I spend time with them almost every day!) nixes the failure of the other.

4. Be smart about yes and no. Success. I don't know if I did this very strategically at first, but I did finally figure out, during autumn, that reviewing as I was doing it had to stop. I started saying no and I kept saying it, continually asking whether X or Y opportunity would a) bring me money, b) bring me pleasure, or c) help with Ceremonials. If it didn't do any of those things, I said no. That's how it'll be for the next six months, too. Booya.

5. Be aware of the networking vs. friendship, promotion vs. information percentage. Success, only inasmuch as this turned out not to be difficult to navigate. Some friendships started professional and wound up better than that, while others ended up mixed, and still others stayed professional. I didn't have any trouble separating the wish to be personally liked from working well, which surprises me, as - see above with RideOn - I so constantly want to be specially liked. Not with the desperation of a people-pleaser, but with the internal conviction that I'm unusually cool and should be recognized as such by everybody. That sounds egocentric but I'm leaving it.

6. Teach. Failish. I did teach an online class, but I was imagining teaching in a classroom and that didn't come to pass. It's starting to be a running joke, my inability to get a classroom gig.

7. Travel. Success. I didn't go on one of the big trips I wanted to, and it might have been better if I'd gone to a book con in NYC I thought about attending. But I did go to Iceland and Chautauqua and benefited both my career and my soul in those places. Next year will involve a lot more travel, and I feel prepared to do it, with a passel of useful gadgets in my suitcase.


In 2020 I'm planning to listen to my instincts, hug friends, smile a lot, try hard. I'm going to write and think and breathe. I'm going to live, and I hope that living will be healthy and joyful, but I will reach deep down and far out for strength if it isn't always. Happy New Year, friends. Live well. 

Irrevocable and Important, Yet So Petty and Dumb

I've now put out all the most worrying fires that got started while I took the month of October off from reviewing. There are plenty of emails that need answering, and a whole chain of labor to do related to a relatively minimal chore (must print shipping label and proofs of freelancer pay, must move printer to desk in order to print, must organize desk in order to move printer, must organize rest of office in order to organize desk, must figure out bookshelf situation in rest of apartment in order to organize office), and o, the pile of books to read. But I feel okay about the future for now.

I do have lots of thoughts and ideas flying around in my head, which is usually evidence that I need to write a blog post. So here I am.

Falling, Falling

I have mixed feelings about fall.

I'm happy for everyone who enjoys it, whether the source of that enjoyment is Halloween or pumpkin spice or sweater weather, but I am not in that camp. When I lived in New England, fall was an arbiter of The Bad Time, when cold and snow would dominate my experience of the world. The crisp air spelled approaching doom.

I don't know how to explain my emotional experience of winter in a way that will convince you, especially if you're a winter-lover. I hated and hate cold, I hated and hate snow unless it's firmly outside a cozy window (and someone else is responsible for clearing off my car), I hated and hate having to bundle myself in garments before going outside and then having to shed them all again once I get where I'm going. I don't just find these things annoying or a little upsetting. I hate them with my whole body, with my whole heart, with my whole pineal gland. There's a reason I never want to leave California again; the climate is a matter of emotional survival for me.

And it's not because I have no experience with snow

October is my birth month, and I always like my birthday. However, the accompaniment to my birthday is always an extended eye-roll about Halloween. Whatever the gene is that gives people Halloween joy, I don't have it. So I coo dutifully at dressed-up little kids and shrug about Sexy Gene Roddenberry costumes and wait for November.

In California it's better, because the weather doesn't portend anything in particular (it was 96F this week). Bad feelings about fall have started to loosen in me, especially because here, months greater than 9 mean the rainy season is on the way, and rain in LA has a strange, supernatural, holidayish feel to it. I no longer feel like fall is an ending, and instead I feel more like it's a spot in a cycle.

All that said: I don't remember living through any prior October in which I felt so overloaded and so wildly incompetent to the task of my life. On Monday movers came and carried the stuff that we couldn't carry ourselves, but for the prior two weeks I'd been moving stuff from one apartment to the other, filling and emptying box after box, a slow, steady, muscle-aching bucket brigade of books and clothes and Stuff. It took me another three days to finish clearing out the old apartment of kitchen, closet, and garage stuff. I am very tired but my delts are ripped, bro.

I took the month off from reviewing, which seemed before I did it as if it couldn't be done, but was the right choice. Not that I could've kept up my regular traffic anyway, because along with the move, I have been working on a copy editing job that has been...just...terrific. The work is fairly easy and quick, the content is silly enough to amuse me, and I'm getting paid. It's a real bright spot in the grinding work that has been my freelance life this year. But I'd hoped to at least do my regular Locus reviews along with a few books from my favorite presses. Instead I made my apologies and did no reviewing at all, and almost no reading.

Because there was plenty more this month. For most of the month I was teaching my first online class, which finished up around when the movers did. I was selected to participate in a thing that I can't reveal, but which makes me very happy and proud. The film series I've been co-curating for a few years at CSUN has suddenly, inexplicably taken off, with much bigger audiences, more attention, and actual funding. I got an acceptance that I don't want to jinx by saying what it was, but which surprised me enormously, as I wrote the piece at the very last minute before deadline, which usually leads to terrible work for me. And it's a long time coming - I've submitted to this place a lot, with pieces I really care about.

In between all that, I watched almost 100 episodes of Parks and Recreation for the first time, as well as more than a dozen movies. I needed something to sit on the couch and do while resting between carrying loads of our stuff from one apartment to the other. I've rewatched old pals (Black Christmas) and tried some new stuff (Millennium Actress). It's been nice.

When October is over, I'm looking forward to enjoying reading again. That's the curse of this job: the traffic of it, and the nature of reviewing only new books, means the bulk of my reading isn't for pleasure. Someday it might be again, but not this season.

One's Gotta Go

September, uh:

Just updated my website and discovered I set a record last month: in September, fourteen (14) reviews, covering sixteen (16) books, were published on the internet with my name on them. pic.twitter.com/yEbAVEmmYm

— Katharine Coldiron 🌟 (@ferrifrigida) October 1, 2019

Fourteen reviews is a lot for one month. I didn't file all of them at the same time or even within a few weeks of each other, so it's a little disingenuous about the nature of my productivity. A little. But not a lot.

Now that September is over, I'm looking forward to doing fewer things. October has, oh, six or eight books to read, and November has even fewer than that, largely because I've been saying no to things and keeping well away from Nectar Literary's delectable newsletter.

Idly, I've been wondering what to do next. I'm trying to slow down the reviews because they're not leading to steady income (yet), and that's starting to become a priority. Freelancing is exhausting, and while I'm better suited to it than to a regular job, I'm so worried and keyed up all the time that I'd like to have something else in place by mid-2020.

I'm applying for various opportunities and putting my intentions out there. Irons in the fire include a podcast a friend is launching with me as a rotating guest, a one-time editing job that's going to be helpful on my resume, and of course the book I'm 9/10 of the way done with. The film series I co-run at CSUN has suddenly taken off in popularity, based on our newsletter numbers and an invitation we got for a Halloween event. I'm trying to teach off- and online. But underlying all this is a question mark about making the Venn diagram work for me.

I don't know whether to lean into stuff that I'm good at and makes money (legal work, detail management), or to keep limping along at what I like. I've lived both ways now, and I like this way better, but I sleep better the other way.

In April and then from August until yesterday, I watched the five seasons of The Wire, which I knew was some kind of phenomenon, but which I didn't comprehend as the monumental work of art it is until I was a few episodes in. I started tweeting it, and couldn't stop, and now I have this huge thread of tweets across several months that covers my emotional & critical reactions to the show. People who have seen the show have really enjoyed the thread, they tell me. I've decided to collect the tweets into a little paper zine, because making an internet-based text into a physical text always tickles me. Don't know when, but hopefully sometime in the next couple of months.

Now that I have one essay left, I'm balking at writing it. Even though I get great satisfaction from finishing things generally (TV shows, boxes of tea, leftover dinners), I don't like finishing creative stuff. I went over this in therapy last week and I think it's tied up with fear of success, and/or disappointment that the best part of the endeavor (the making part) is over, and the part I like least (the fixing part) has to begin. Luckily, I found a contest that it'll suit, and its deadline is October 15. So that's a good prod to make me do the work.

Along with that, I'm planning to reread Highbinder this week. An agent event happened on Twitter recently, so I pitched three folks, and got a full request from one yesterday. I haven't read it all the way through in...gosh, over a year? More than two years? Don't remember. It's time to give it another read. I was thinking about it the other week because I know I named a character Malcolm, and I have to change that because the only male character in Ceremonials is named Malcolm. They both look like Malcolms in my head, just of different kinds. But one's gotta go.

The Additional-Fire Effect

Just now I opened up edits on a review and I had one of those moments where it all crashed on my head, the whole and entire weight of what I've gotten myself tangled up in for the last two years, all at once, CRASH. The edits were asking me to do the exact opposite of what I've trained myself to do because editors generally prefer it (reiterate the same point in the intro and conclusion, don't be too colloquial, don't go on weird tangents). So I thought about putting myself in the mindset of this editor's wishes, when I had just spent the whole morning in the mindset of editing my own non-review-related work, and had only an hour or so before I had to put myself in a teaching mindset, after spending a few minutes first thing this morning in self-promotion mindset...[pop]

All summer, the tarot has been telling me to be patient and things will improve. Things are improving exactly at the time and in the ways the tarot said they would. This is spooky, but also great, but also, even as things improve, my responsibilities are not decreasing. CRASH.

The best thing to do when I'm feeling overwhelmed is to accomplish a pile of small, overdue things. Getting the oil changed in my car, calling my website vendor, doing some chores for an authors' group I'm involved with. But instead I'm just making list after list of things to do and worrying about email replies I haven't received. Rearranging rather than doing.

There's good news. The last couple of weeks have been emotionally unnerving, but I channeled that energy into writing the Last Tango in Paris essay I'd 3/4 given up on. I couldn't stop working on it for the past two days, not even to go volunteer with the horses. Now, it's essentially done. That means I've written nine of the ten essays for Weird New Shit, which means I'm on track, and not behind. I will finish it by the end of 2019. That feels so good that it throws a blanket on some of the fires elsewhere burning in my freelance life. The blanket is semi-flammable. I elect to feel good about the smothering effect today and worry about the additional-fire effect tomorrow.

via GIPHY

In the past couple of months I've stopped drinking almost entirely. I tried this out early in the year as a Decision, but it didn't stick, and so instead I'm trying it as a habit with occasional exceptions. My relationship with alcohol has never been addictive, so my motivations for the teetotaling habit are about feeling good, changing the physical cycles my body goes through daily and weekly, and sitting with psychological discomfort instead of blotting it out. I'm using vaped cannabis a little bit here and there, but it's so different from booze. I can't really get used to it or predict how it will affect me, so I like it less. Also, I have only been marginally successful at rewiring my brain to believe that cannabis is OK. Drugs were very, very not okay in my family, and that training has lasted despite the increasing legality of weed and, you know, being an adult with my own judgment.

Next week an interview that's been in the works for two years is actually being published. I think. I won't believe it until I see it. This week, a review is going up at a publication I labored to break into. Ask me about it sometime.

All right, enough, I need to spend the afternoon accomplishing small, overdue things. Oh fu--CRASH

Squintable Qualities

In case you're part of a different mailing/social media list than the other stuff I propagate, you should know that I'm teaching an online course in book reviewing at Barrelhouse in just under two weeks. We've got a few spots left, and I'd like to fill it to capacity. Asynchronous (the deadlines are weekly, so whether you're in Missouri or Timbuktu, it's of no moment), and $135 including the cost of a book from Nouvella.

boooooooooooooooks

Also, my website now features a press kit for Ceremonials, including a one-sheet (press release) and other info. I'm starting to put together tour dates, and those'll be up there too when I have them.

My vacation a couple of weeks ago gave me some real breathing room, and some time to work on two of the three remaining essays for the collection I'm determined to finish before the end of 2019. At first I worked on the Last Tango in Paris essay, but it was sloggy. Imagine a child who doesn't want to leave the house or car or Target toy aisle kind of whiningly dragging her limbs and fingers to do what her parent has urged her to do, and that's kind of how it was.

After getting permission from Marissa to set it down and try something else, I wrote pages and pages on Mildred Pierce instead. This essay has exploded into something way bigger than I expected. I might have to cut some entire threads away, or write something longer than I've written before in this mode. It's a big mess. I love it, and mentally, it's both all I want to do and a terrifying spectre of work to come.

Just now wrote several hundred messy words about the way vacation dragged up my conflicted feelings about book reviewing and the position I've found myself in here in September of 2019, five months away from my first book publication and so piled up with work for minimal/no pay that I can't see over the top of it. The conflict is about being good at something that has only helped me to be the kind of writer I want to be in this sidewinding, indirect way, and that may not be helping me do that at all anymore. About editors liking the thing I do as a kickstand more than they like the thing that is the bicycle. None of those words drew meaningful conclusions, so I hid them somewhere else.

Worry is so heavy.

I took a writing workshop on vacation, a very low-key one, and one of the discussions got involved enough that I sent my Singin' in the Rain essay to the rest of the group as "this is what I meant about The Lifespan of a Fact." The instructor, whom I really liked and who I think liked me, said she enjoyed the essay a lot. I told her it had collected nineteen rejections. She said "Wow. Really? That's a surprise." That soothed me, as I'm close to despairing of that one. I know it's good. No one wants it.

It's so strange how blessings have come to me in the last few years. I put out wishes and gratitude and work into the universe, and what I get back is always just to the left of what I thought I was seeking. And it turns out fine. I can't put most of the examples in writing, but here's one: I'm friends with a bunch of head editors at small presses at this point, and they've all helped me enormously, but their help hasn't been specific to getting any of my books published. Like, I thought that'd be the favor I'd want from a small press editor, to accept my manuscript, but no, they grant me other favors instead. It's terrific, but also why are we doing it this way, life?! I'm grateful for the blessings but unable to unravel what their squintable qualities mean, nor how to plan around and beyond them.

Or my editorship at Barrelhouse, which has evolved into a hefty bullet point on my CV, and it was utterly random how that happened and how it progressed into teaching an online course for them. But this I can say: none of it would have happened if I hadn't pushed. If I hadn't said I want this, may I have it? to the people who could give it to me.

So if there is a lesson from this extremely confusing period of my life, it's "ask for what you want." You may not get it, but you are far less likely to get it if you don't ask.

Also, here's a truth: I am so grateful that I heard a thousand times no about book publication for as long as I did. All around me, I'm seeing authors fah-reeeeeeking ouuuuut about their first book, from pre-pub terror to post-pub obsessing about reviews and sales hiccups. I still have plenty of time to participate in these behaviors, of course, and I'm not saying I'm so far above it all that I'll never melt down about a mean review. But the deeper I've dug into literature and publishing and magazines and rejection, the cooler a head I've been able to keep about it all, and the more I've been able to strategize about what I want out of book publication (in short: legs, not blitz). The dozens of reviews I've promoted over the last couple of years have taught me how to promote stuff, when to start and stop, how much is too much, and not to cringe when tooting my own horn.

Often I'm frustrated that X measure of success couldn't have happened two or five years ago, instead of now. But two or five years ago, I did not have the emotional stability about my work to cope with a book coming into the world. I can see exactly how I would have behaved from observing the people who, I can tell, were not ready. I never thought I'd be glad that my first book waited so long before arriving - sometimes I have been carved from a single block of impatience about this - but I'm telling you, it's so much better for my soul that it's happening now.

Speaking of good for my soul, today's a horse barn volunteer day. I missed the horses on vacation. I missed the smells of them, the happy weariness of my body after four hours with them. I'm trying to learn their body language from this book, but it's so complicated, and conflicts with human body language so much, that it's slow going. I don't know where this current involvement with horses is headed, but if all it remains is mucking stalls and currying twice a week, I'm on board.

A Surprise in Gray

O, Gentle Reader, hello. I'm feeling a smidge vulnerable right now. There's a stomach bug in my house and I'm helpless against it; when I lose sleep I turn into a slow, uncertain version of myself; I have multiple drafts of blog posts that I can't decide the time is right to write, and the clogginess of them makes me anxious; the remote control in my bedroom has been cosmetically damaged with wintergreen essential oil, which I don't even know what to do about; the pile of books I have to read in January is not getting any smaller, but it's because editors are saying yes to my pitches, so I can't complain.

I cried this week. (I cry about once a year.) I'm having a medical procedure I don't want next week, with anesthesia, and I'm dreading the helpless feeling I'll have afterward. On Tuesday I was able to run longer than ten minutes without wheezing and giving up. I wrote a version of an article I've worked an inordinate number of hours on since early December, and per my editor I have to rewrite it, and although I think he's right, I'm balking, despite the ticking clock, because of despair at having to redo. I am strongly motivated by not having to redo things. Part of why I don't play video games.

SIX things I wrote were published this week. As I said elsewhere, I'm grateful for the riches, but risking overexposure is a problem I never thought I'd have and don't know what to do with.

Also, I feel overwhelmed at the spring books I have yet to place. Lots of cool titles in March and April that I have pitched, had no response, and haven't managed to pitch again. I'll probably end up scrambling to place them less than a month out, which I hate, but that pile of books I have to finish in the next fourteen days...! Pitching takes a short time but lots of energy; reading takes lots of time but little energy (and is much nicer). I'm overly insistent on landing this one book in this one specific place, and it's stupid of me because I could just write it up for a different place and be done, but the editor asked for phone calls, and I've left him two voice mails and he hasn't called me back, and why would you do contact that way? Unless you want freelancers to be mad at you?

At the end of March I go to AWP and then immediately to Iceland, which is very exciting but it keeps getting closer and I have no coherent plan and haven't lost any weight or gotten my chipped tooth fixed, and last AWP it was fine because I had no one to impress and mostly loved ones to meet, but this time the stakes are much higher based on the "let's meet up!" emails and messages I've been exchanging for the past six months, and I don't know what to do, and I dreamed about Iceland last night, and it was scary and clean and efficient and everyone was bundled in attractive cold-weather gear and speaking in lovely textured consonants and I felt very American.

The bugged of stomach is tossing a bit in bed and I should really go ask if he needs anything. The pile of books isn't shortening and I should really go read. January is running out and I should really arrange an interview and rewrite that article and write another review.

DESPITE ALL THIS, I feel happy. It's been raining for four days here, which sounds awful, but it's actually lovely, like a surprise in gray. When you have months on end of stalwart sunshine, not a cloud in sight from one season to another, rain can be a delight. And I'm hugely blessed by all the publication, and a particular pitch-yes I received this week, which hasn't really sunk in yet because it's so meaningful. Can't wait to tell you about it.


Out in the world:

Resolute, 2018 Edition

Every year, I post last year's New Year's resolutions with a short analysis of how well I think I succeeded at them, and then I post this year's. So, here are last year's (in greater detail here):

1. Hustle. Success, possibly too much. I got really damn busy as a writer, and I'm proud of it. I wouldn't have traded my overwhelm for being underworked, but I wish I could have figured out how to feel less stressed about all the work I took on. I did get it all done, and almost all of it was on time, so the stress...did me no good? Or was it the prod at my back? I don't know. The hustle worked, is the point; I think it's the main reason I am where I am as a writer at the beginning of 2019.

2. Keep to my own rhythms. Success. I slept more in the past eight months than I think I did in the prior three years. I'm still trying to sort out acceptance of this, feeling no shame about napping most days. It took years to accept that I need eight to nine hours of sleep per night instead of less, so I'm not expecting that acceptance of my own rhythms will be easy.

3. Fight fear. This resolution was a mistake. I don't need to fight fear; I need to let fear in, feel it, and move on. At that I did pretty well, but no better or worse than last year. I'm calling it a no-foul draw.

4. Plan better on a small scale. Success. I worked out a daily schedule for myself, and it kept me afloat when the looseness of freelancing threatened to drown me with excess time.

5. Give myself credit for hard work. Success. Matt helped me with this, telling me over and over how much I deserved credit for hard work. But something else that helped me was making to-do lists, but not throwing them away, and instead reviewing the finished items later. This had the effect of showing me, with hard evidence, the plentiful work that I'd done, instead of my mean ol' memory saying I didn't really do much.

6. Let go, let go, let go. Success, on balance, although I failed a lot. A very difficult, very necessary resolution for this year, much more so than I had imagined. I let go of my day job painfully, over a long period of time, but at present I have some peace about it - even if I still have bad dreams sometimes. I let go of expectations a bunch, and it made certain disappointments much easier. This resolution came to pass in exactly the right year, but it's a lesson I'll carry with me.

7. Take better care of my body and my home. Fail. I did better with flossing, but I am still the poorest housekeeper on this earth, and I exercised way less than in prior years.

8. Avoid travel. A draw. I didn't travel much, but a couple of trips were necessary, and I didn't die. This was sort of a dumb resolution, because I always want to avoid travel if possible. I think it came out of the unfortunate travels I had in the fall of '16 rather than anything real I needed to shift in my life.

This year I had a hard time thinking of resolutions. Not because I didn't feel there was anything about me that needed changing (we all need tune-ups), but because I'm deeply content. In such a state of mind, it's hard to think of what I want to change. Also, a lot of the stuff that ties me up in knots internally has been resolved by prior resolutions. Which is the point of resolutions, so it's nice that they're working, but it also leaves me with less to do in the future.

Anyway, I did come up with a few.

1. Rethink productive. There's always a little voice in my head that nags at me to be productive in a given day. Do laundry. Clear the coffee table. Organize your calendar. Marinate that pork roast. Read a book. Write something. It's hard to ignore this voice even if I've spent days on end being productive and want/need to spend a day resting. And it's part of how I failed to take a day off for multiple weeks at a clip this fall and winter. High productivity is nice, but burnout is not, and I'm quite nearsighted about the latter so I need to build in rest time.

I think there's got to be a way to redefine "be productive" for myself so that the voice stays quiet but I don't descend into sloth. I don't know what it is, but that's why it's a "rethink" resolution.

2. Lean into a hobby or two. When I did finally find the time to take a day off, I didn't know what to do with myself. Many of the things I would normally have done (hiking, museums) were not practicable, but some of the other things I might have done on past days off (reading, writing) had evolved into the stuff I needed time off from doing. An unexpected consequence of making avocation into vocation. That means I need to work out at least one hobby that I can do on my days off. Right now that hobby is phone games, which is a trashy hobby. I'd prefer to cross-stitch or do a puzzle.

3. Bring collage and horses into my life. Maybe collage is one of the hobbies I should pursue. I need to do it! I need to make it a regular part of my creative life. I've been thinking about it since September, and still haven't done it. I also need to bring horses more distinctly into my life in 2019. Being around them during Labor Day showed me how much happier and calmer I am when I spend time with them. I don't know how I'm going to do this, because incorporating horses into one's life is not necessarily an easy thing, but I must not keep putting it off.

4. Be smart about yes and no. I said yes to too many reviews in the spring and summer, but I didn't think I was in a position to say no to any of them. Now I'm starting to worry I said no too much in the winter, because my workload beyond March is so light I might have time to get back to writing my book (GASP). The timing of yes and no when it comes to reviewing is complicated because of lead times and editorial ghosting, but I can still try to be savvy about yes and no, rather than blundering into too much or too little work.

This is a hard thing to get right. Only trial and error will get me there, so I have to practice self-forgiveness if I mess it up. Which is also a good thing to work on in 2019.

5. Be aware of the networking vs. friendship, promotion vs. information percentage. Particularly in a year when I'm going to AWP, I'd like to be more cognizant about how loudly I'm self-promoting, and how much that sounds like annoying kazoo sounds as opposed to useful information offered to people who want to know how my writing is faring out in the world.

Similarly, I've made a lot of wonderful connections in the writing world this year. I'd like to call some of these people friends, but I'd be happy to slot others in the category of "networking contacts," meaning I don't have to comment on all their tweets. Some of these connections are about half and half, I think, friendship vs. networking (like, I'd probably hug them at AWP, but wouldn't be offended if I didn't get a birthday note from them). I think it's best not to be naive about these connections, though, and comprehend that even if I do like X Publicist as a human being, she probably likes me as a reviewer.

This resolution is advising general awareness, rather than naivete, of what I'm up to as a networker and self-promoter. I don't want to be slide into the mode of hustling all the time, but I also don't want to invest the softest parts of myself into what turn out to be professional relationships.

6. Teach. This might be more of a goal than a resolution, but I'd really like this to be the year I get a classroom full of minds to play with. It might come as a surprise to those of you I've told that I don't plan to teach, but I still don't plan to make teaching my primary job. One class per semester is about all I want.

7. Travel. Ha! Surprise reversal! I'm making this a resolution so that I will ENJOY the travel I do this year. Portland, Iceland, and possibly New York and Australia (!) are all on my list for next year. Plus a family trip with no destination in mind yet. So I damn well better change my attitude about hating travel, even if just for one year.


I don't know how we got to 2019, but here we are. Happy New Year, friends. I hope you stay here with me; I'd miss you if you decided to find another year to inhabit. 

Weekly To-Do, 12/02/18 - 12/08/18

This week I did a theoretically dumb thing: I complained publicly about rejections. The Twitter thread begins -

Let it be known that today, December 7, 2018, is the day I lost patience with presses rejecting my manuscript CEREMONIALS. This is a horrible arrogant thing to make public but it's true.

The readers who've had a look at the MS have loved it. 1/

— Katharine Coldiron (@ferrifrigida) December 7, 2018

- and goes on to explain why these rejections are so frustrating. I'm usually able not to take them personally, but this thread explains why I can't seem to this time.

If anyone thought the thread made me look like a jerk, they didn't say so. I got a bunch of support from friends, and interest in reading the MS from newish friends and even from a press. Bitching and whining about rejections is a boring rookie move, but I am beyond frustrated about the gap between the feedback I've gotten about this MS and the interest shown in it.

Anyway. Aside from that, it was a busy week; four reviews appeared, I wrote four more, and I had a variety of applications and administrative stuff to assemble. Plus all the good news, which is maybe even more stressful than bad news.

As before (I didn't think it would hurt to include this disclaimer in every post): I'm including selected names of pubs and books because making this list would be ten times harder, and therefore not worth the effort, to anonymize them entirely. Any of the acceptances could fall through at any time. By naming them, I am not badmouthing the publications who rejected or didn't reply. This is data, not trash-talk or promotion.

Writing:
Review of Schwartz
Nervously edit freelance article
Blog post
Revisions on Five Plots review (minimal)
Revisions on Harun review
Review of Moskovich
Review of Gaar
Review of Narrator

Reading:
World Domination
Something Like Breathing 
Thirty-Seven

Pitching/Queries:
Multiple to B&FG (mostly accepted)
GAITR to Pitchfork

Followups:
Guardian (accepted)
BOMB (accepted!!!!!!!)
Chronicle (rejected)
Tor
Rain Taxi (responded)

Correspondence:
Emails w/ Aly
Messages w/ Ron
Emails w/ Neal
Emails w/ Locus
Emails w/ Geoff

Other:
Promote Asim review
CALYX acceptance & corresp

Promote Boyer review
Update website
Invoices
Apply for Balakian award
Promote Schwartz review
Promote Scribe review
Locus year-end business
Submit finished review to KR 

Submit to KERNPUNKT

From Noon Until Noon Again

Yesterday I was feeling very blue. It was the kind of blue I knew would pass, but that didn't make me feel less worthless in the moment. This sensation was the result of a variety of things.

I got a handful of rejections all together that were more hurtful than the norm. One was one of those where they don't even send you an email, you just find out when they send the list of winners in the newsletter. I understand that organizations can't be all things to all people, but ugh, what a sucky way to learn that I didn't get picked. I also got two rejections from agents, one of whom I'm pretty sure didn't read my query all the way through based on their reply. My pitches and follow-ups for the past week have mostly not been answered. I didn't get a side job I hoped I'd get. The reading & reviewing - in reality, I've been very productive lately, but it feels like digging at the side of a sand pile. It doesn't look like there's actual progress, or that there ever will be.

Personally: Two friendship-related disappointments hit me in the course of a couple of days. I'm doing a whirlwind east-coast trip this weekend and don't have anything to wear. I signed Matt and myself up for both PreCheck and Global Entry without realizing that we don't need both, and Global Entry is useless for the reason I wanted it, which makes me feel like the management skills on which I pride myself have failed me. The end of the semester is coming and it feels like I fucked up, mostly, instead of helping, at CSUN. I can't manage money at all, not one little bit. Really truly. Can't.

Over the weekend, I went to a few junk shops in Ventura and bought some materials for collaging. I found the most amazing things! Vintage catalogs, magazines, paper doll sets, curious books, even a couple of woodcuts. Back in September, I resolved to make a visual collage at least once every six weeks. I love to collage, even if it's not an art form that I know how to do (like I know how to write). It's a sincere and powerful artistic release for me. But my resolution involved using real materials to collage rather than just catalogs and junk mail, which is how I've been doing it up till now. I expressed it to myself as "put some skin in the game," which means cutting and pasting things that have objective value, materials that once meant something to someone, rather than items that are worthless or easy to reproduce.

I was thinking about Anne Carson's book Nox, which includes collages of family photographs and letters, materials that surely were precious but that she cut up and pasted over and re-made as materials for her art. I couldn't decide if it was...wasteful? a loss? something she'd regret?, but I also found it daring. As I looked at more collage artists' work, I began to wonder if collaging was worthwhile at all unless you collaged something of value. Maybe it depends on what you're trying to do as a collagist.

In any event, I felt sure that I wasn't going to do satisfying work as a collagist, whether I want to make work that others see or not, unless I used materials that intrigued me instead of trash. So I bought some in Ventura over the weekend.

Problem was, when I got home and spread all the materials on the floor to show Matt, they were all so interesting that I was overwhelmed. I didn't know where to start. What if I fucked up, and wasted the materials that I'd spent money on? What if I was wrong about the book I wanted to chop up and use as background? What if I had to throw out real photos from the 1960s? It upset me, because my creativity wanted to be brave, but my heart did not.

All of this was swirling around in me yesterday, Monday. Why couldn't I do anything right? Why was everything so wrong? All my best plans led to flinching and fucking up at the last minute, or to gatekeepers reminding me that, nope, my work isn't that interesting.

At therapy, the plot thickened, in a way that I really can't talk about here.

--

This morning, I woke up and felt better, mostly because, as I said at the top of this post, my blues were a passing thing. Why-am-I-so-worthless is a refrain that comes and goes in me all the time, but only occasionally can I not just wave it away like a mosquito. Most of the stuff above, this morning's light reminded me, is either not important or it's fixable. The rejections are what they are; being a writer is learning to see rejection as neutral instead of negative. Sometimes they hurt and it takes time to get over them. That's okay, too.

Then, today, a couple of downright exciting acceptances came through, some of them from places I'd despaired over re: their lack of response just 24 hours earlier. (Also some rejections, which felt neutral instead of painful.) My Asim review got some good feedback and mentions. I heard from a friend I've missed for a week or two.

Most importantly, I went for a walk. I wanted to think about the review I need to write before I go to bed tonight, and what I was going to say in it, but instead I found this song banging along with the rhythm of my steps. For some reason, it reminded me of the picture I liked most out of the material I bought in Ventura. I imagined the song title typed in Courier below the picture, all caps, with a period.

The two hands laced together and I had it: a series of collages about songs that get stuck in my head. That was what I needed: a theme! I needed something to collage around. And now I have it.

I'm not saying that all you need to feel better is for things to start going your way. That'd be too easy, and also wrong. It's fortunate that I got a handful of good news on a day when I needed it, but that's just business, just freelancing. What made me feel solidly better was figuring out a direction for my collages. Doing that made me feel like my future as a creative person was not hopeless, which was a much bigger, more amorphous, more deadly feeling than a bunch of disappointing "no"s.

And that figuring-out was just a matter of waiting until my brain made a connection between one thing and another. Not panicking when the answer didn't come right away. Not forcing myself to sit down with scissors and glue. Having patience with the trawler teeth of my mind, feeling sure that they'd dig up answers for me. And...yep, they did.

Sit through your blues and see what's on the other side. You are not worthless. Be patient and true. I'm telling you, but I'm also telling myself.

Out in the world:

This piece about Mystery Science Theater 3000's reboot. I could have written a piece twice this length. I have so much to say about the show. But for now I said this. Got both fantastic, sparkly private feedback and bad public feedback about it.

I interviewed Daisy Johnson, who was nominated for the Booker Prize this year. She was separated from me by a wall of publicists, in terms of our contact with each other, but through it, she seemed lovely. Her book, Everything Under, was surprising. For those who are curious about how I got to interview a Booker Prize nominee: the Rumpus asked me to. I have no helpful secrets for how to make something like that happen.

I reviewed Jabari Asim's terrific book We Can't Breathe for Brevity. I really, really recommend this book. It's short, it's beautifully written, and it's a supremely helpful primer for entrenched racial problems in America.

I reviewed a book I really did not like for the Arts Fuse. The author's international reputation tends to indicate I am wrong about it, but I challenge you to read the book and then get back to me about how. I even have a copy, if you want it.

Pleiades published a three-minute review I wrote of Maya Sonenberg's chapbook for PANK. I wrote another one for another PANK chapbook that's forthcoming.

Weekly To-Do, 11/25/18 - 12/01/18

I discovered something interesting this week. For whatever reason, I had a hard time concentrating on reading or writing, and I thought that meant I was working an inadequate amount. In fact, no; this list shows that I just did a lot of other work than the obvious kind. Lots of correspondence, pitching, and miscellaneous upkeep. My question then becomes a chicken-and-egg one: whether I did the other work first, such that I had no mental room for the reading/review work, or whether, when I realized I wasn't concentrating properly, I compensated.

Who knows? My own ability to work or not work is mysterious to me.

As before (I didn't think it would hurt to include this disclaimer in every post): I'm including selected names of pubs and books because making this list would be ten times harder, and therefore not worth the effort, to anonymize them entirely. Any of the acceptances could fall through at any time. By naming them, I am not badmouthing the publications who rejected or didn't reply. This is data, not trash-talk or promotion.

Writing:
Finish MST3K article
Review of Korneliussen
Review of Harun
Revise Nemett review

Reading:
Hollywood vs. the Author
Last Woman Standing

Pitching/Queries:
WD to B&FG, R&RG (semi-accepted)
HvA to B&FG (accepted)
CS to Chron
SLB to Guardian
Dual essay, HL article to sinkhole (semi-accepted)
S to IM

Followups:
Shields publicist (answered)
Outline
Advocate
Pierce College (answered)
Washington Post
Bitch

Correspondence:
Emails w/ Shields
Emails w/ Guardian ed
Emails w/ Futurepoem
Emails w/ Cameron
Emails w/ Madison
Check in with mentee
Texts, emails w/ SH

Email Amy 

Other:
Promote Xue review
Submit "American Smile" x2
Submit "You Must Know"
Update Duotrope with rejections/acceptance
Contracts for LAR, TWRP, B&FG
Compose & send out newsletter
Request UTP books
Submit "Authority"
Submit "Jaws"
Promote MST3K piece
Request Wurth galley
Order business cards
Accept [secret thing]
Submit "Authority"
Twitter stuff for MST piece and Establishment piece

Weekly To-Do, 11/15 - 11/24

Week three of my to-do list. I took the opportunity of the holiday to change the pattern of the days the list covers. The list below starts last Thursday and runs through Saturday evening, and future lists will go from Sundays to Saturdays.

As before (I didn't think it would hurt to include this disclaimer in every post): I'm including selected names of pubs and books because making this list would be ten times harder, and therefore not worth the effort, to anonymize them entirely. Any of the acceptances could fall through at any time. By naming them, I am not badmouthing the publications who rejected or didn't reply. This is data, not trash-talk or promotion.

Writing:
Blog post
Poem
Review of Love in the New Millennium
Review of G
Notes on Korneliussen

Followups:
LAR (answered)
Agent LH
Barrelhouse x2 (answered)

Pitching/Queries:
LWS to NPR
LWS to BUST (accepted)
Sissy to Advocate
Ceremonials to KW
Ceremonials to ST
KD to BOMB
CS to Bitch

Reading:
Love in the New Millennium
Virtuoso
Öræfi 

Correspondence:
Email Graywolf publicist
Email NBCC
Emails w/ LD
Email PANK publicist
Email Futurepoem about G
Emails w/ Locus eds
Email Tor publicity
Emails from GC, WD publicists
Email WRB x2

Other:
Promote Biss review
Promote Lubchansky interview
Promote Johnson interview
Promote Sonenberg review
Website updates
Check Pleiades, Locus for reviews
Edits on Scribe review
Edits on Nemett review
Research on TLM
Edits on Love review
End-of-year Locus business
Read mentee's work, make notes
Update Duotrope with rejections
Submit "What We Left in the Caf" x4

Next week I'm planning to do a little less. December is going to be plenty full, but I worked steadily enough through most of November that this last week of it is shaping up to be calmer than usual. Yay.

Pests

One summer I lived with my mother in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. For a period of that summer, she left town, left me alone in her apartment. I was nineteen years old. I neglected to take the trash out for several days, because the trash can sat in a pantry and didn't noticeably smell, and I wasn't amassing enough garbage to need to take it out. There was food in there. The next time I threw something away, I found that maggots had infested the plastic waste bag. They looked like moving grains of rice. I was disgusted, and then deeply ashamed. The shame burned my face as I took out the trash, hosed out the bin, sprayed Lysol, put the bin back in the pantry. I never told her.

*

That same summer, I worked at a rundown movie theater. I started out in concessions, and then I was trained up to tickets and eventually projection. (Which I loved. Projecting movies was one of the most remarkable collisions of cerebral passion and tactile pleasure I've ever known. I didn't get to splice very often, but sometimes I did. I stole a metal reel that was broken and unusable, and I hung it on my wall, over the TV, for years.) But when I was still downstairs, I learned that the concessions booth was inhabited by mice. We never saw teethmarks on any food containers, and we never found droppings. But at the end of the night, cleaning up, we invariably saw small gray blurs darting from corner to corner. They were unmistakable, even if not fully visible. The leadership of the theater chose not to act on the mice. They didn't do any harm, didn't interfere with the stock. We thought they probably ate the popcorn we dropped and that was it. Plus, it was a rundown theater, one of the least busy in town. I imagine it has since closed.

*

In high school, my bedroom was in the basement of a ranch house in Maryland. The finished part of the basement was separated, by thin walls and thin doors, from an unfinished portion. Boxes occupied it. So did crickets. Dozens or possibly hundreds of shiny black crickets, noisy and quick. Sometimes they made their way into the finished part, a.k.a. my bedroom, and I'd find them, antennae twitching, on the beige carpet, or on the linoleum glued to the cold concrete of the bathroom. Trembling, sneaking up, yelping when they moved, I would trap them under water glasses and leave them there to suffocate. It would take a couple of days. At first I tried to shift them onto pieces of paper or cardboard and release them outside, but they'd just return to the basement, and on more than one occasion, a cricket leapt inside the glass, scaring me, and I dropped it. The unpredictable movement of the crickets was more frightening than I can communicate. They terrified me, to the point where I lost sleep worrying about them. To this day I am afraid of crickets. Not spiders, not beetles, but crickets.

*

Sometime in August of 2016, I found a baby cockroach in my kitchen sink. It was the first of several. I am a poor housekeeper, but not that poor; it was part of a general downward trend in the quality of that kitchen, and generally, the living experience in that apartment. I was less disgusted than I was disappointed: this place, too, was subject to pests. I tried to keep it safe, but I should have known that was impossible. I contacted the management company and they came and sprayed, but the roach incidents increased, coming closer together in time, the roaches bigger and bolder, and about a month later we moved out. It was the last kick out the door we needed from that complex, which was awful, but which gave me a whole lot of writing material. Including this.

*

Part of the reason I hate the holidays - the seven weeks from mid-November to the beginning of January - is the energy in the air whenever I'm outside my home. The general public is emotionally raw, whether they're nervous or angry or joyful or something else. Everyone is excited in some way, like a molecule is excited: quivering under the influence of an energetic force. Their emotions are large and exposed. It's extreme. I hate it.

At the end of last week and the beginning of this week, as you may know, major fires erupted in my area. By the grace of the Santa Anas, we never had to evacuate, but we had a couple of scary days; one of the fires was only a mile or two away. On the third day, the winds died down and our air quality declined, so we went to Lowe's to see if we could get some filtration masks and potentially a purifier, if we could find one of reasonable price and functionality. Within a few minutes of going in the store, I felt mean and angry. I snapped at Matt and got so impatient that I walked away from him when he wanted my help. I was tired and unsettled and just mad. And as soon as we got back in the car, I felt better (and regretful).

It was the people, I realized. The stress of the fires caused people to buzz with such bad energy that it turned me into Mr. Hyde.

We went home. We went out again a couple of days later and the very same thing happened. I felt rude and short-tempered and mad at the whole damn world. "I'm not going out again," I told Matt after we got back in the car. "Not until this is over." He nodded fervently.

I can't hide from the world forever. And I can't perceive human beings as pests. These two sentences are almost perfectly opposed and both true.

I tell people fairly often that part of what I love about working at home is that when I do go out again, the world seems nice. I greet people happily instead of seeing them as obstacles. Slow clerks are worth my sympathy. Bad drivers are cute. The more I'm out and around people, the more they seem like they're in my way, instead of going their own way.

One year, I hope, I'll be monied and isolated enough to stay home for the entire seven-week period of the holidays. At that point, the only thing I'll have to worry about is crickets.

Out in the world:

For sinkhole, I reviewed Eula Biss's Notes from No Man's Land, which was rereleased in a ten-year anniversary edition by Graywolf. In the process of reviewing this book, I wrote about whiteness in America at perhaps unwelcome length. I hope you read it anyway.

I reviewed a fascinating book, Beyoncé in Formation: Remixing Black Feminism by Omise’eke Tinsley, for the Houston Chronicle. Almost everything I have to say about the book is in the review; almost everything I have to say about placing the review is unsayable. The Chron was great to me. Very sharp, very nice people there.

For Western Humanities Review, which is working to beef up their critical section, I reviewed The Making Sense of Things by George Choundas. This was one of a really small number of books by straight white men I've read or reviewed this year, and so far it's the only one that didn't make me roll my eyes at least once because patriarchy. I'm glad I broke my rule for it, and I give it my highest recommendation.

For Books I Hate, I interviewed Matt Lubchansky. I've been a fan of theirs for a long long time and I was really happy to add them to the roster. They're totally right about The Canon.

Weekly To-Do, 11/8 - 11/14

Week two of my to-do list. This was equally useful this week - some patterns persisted, others didn't. I'm sorry if it bugs you.

As before (I didn't think it would hurt to include this disclaimer in every post): I'm including selected names of pubs and books because making this list would be ten times harder, and therefore not worth the effort, to anonymize them all. This week I anonymized a couple of them. Any of the acceptances could fall through at any time. By naming them, I am not badmouthing the publications who rejected or didn't reply. This is data, not trash-talk or promotion.

Writing:
Articles about freelancing (2)
Review of What Should Be Wild
Review of Empire of Sand
MST article (draft)
Review of We Can't Breathe

Followups:
Books I Hate subject KW
Barrelhouse (answered)
PitchWars reader (answered)
Houston Chronicle (answered)
OL Books

Pitching:
Freelance article 1 to Medium
MST article to BAFG (accepted)
Catch, Release to KR
Books I Hate to KH (answered)
G to A
Pop Feminism piece

Reading:
Last Night in Nuuk
G
Catch, Release

Correspondence:
Scribe rejection
Submit Scribe elsewhere (accepted)
Email to Shields publicist
Emails w/ TWRP
Emails from Locus
Freelance article 2 to FF

Other:
Edits on Choundas review
Edits on Scribe review
Edits on Surge review
Edits on Biss review
Edits on "After Gardens"

Check LAR, Locus, Pleiades daily for filed reviews

Promote Choundas review
Promote Tinsley review
Agent research
Author chatter on Twitter
Website updates

I forgot to note down one item from last week: Write & record snippet for friend's podcast. I wish I'd finished at least one other book, but it was a stressful week with the fires. I did a surprising amount of writing.

Weekly To-Do, 11/1 - 11/8

As promised in my last post, here's the initial round of What I Did This Week As A Freelancer. Feel free to email me questions if you have them. To preempt at least one question, this is one week's stuff: Thursday morning, November 1, to Wednesday night, November 7. The categories aren't in any particular order, except maybe in the clarity of their definitions.

This is only writing-related stuff. During this week I also made plans for a film screening at CSUN, bought flights to AWP and Iceland, voted, took the occasional shower, etc. I had included work I did for the Northridge Review on this list, but I took it off. It's part of my life but not concretely part of my freelance agenda.

Very important: I'm including the names of all the pubs and books because making this list would be ten times harder, and therefore not worth the effort, to anonymize them all. Any of the acceptances could fall through at any time. By naming them, I am not badmouthing the publications who rejected or didn't reply. This is data, not trash-talk or promotion.

This was an extremely helpful exercise. I think I'll keep doing it until I or you get tired of it.

Writing:
Review of Beyonce in Formation
Review of Five Plots
Review of Notes from No Man's Land
Review of We Can Save Us All 
Blog post

Followups:
Guesthouse (answered)
Prairie Schooner (answered)
Houston Chronicle x2 (accepted)
Sinkhole (answered)
Washington Post x2
Sewanee Review (answered)
NPR
VIDA (answered)
io9 (rejected)
SyFy Wire
The Outline
Calyx

Pitching:
Thirty-Seven to 3:AM (accepted)
Five Plots to Rain Taxi (accepted)

Reading:
What Should Be Wild
We Can't Breathe
Empire of Sand 

Correspondence:
Emails w/ mentoring program supervisor, mentee
Email to potential editor-employer
Emails w/ UTP publicist
Email w/ Gatsby's Child publicist

Emails w/ Shields 

Emails w/ TLS re: Virtuoso
Misc networking emails 

Other:
Completed Lubchansky interview
Tax paperwork to Chronicle
Promoted TLS piece
Misc social media (interacting w/ writers, presses, etc.)
Edits on Surge review
Accepted assignment from Arts Fuse
Attended literary event in DTLA
Checked LAR & Locus daily for filed reviews
Updated Duotrope after rejection (through Submittable)

Questions? Comments? Get in touch. :)

Disorganization Is Not Sexy

I have got to get my job under control.

"Job" and "life" feel pretty interchangeable at this point, but of course they're not. I can lean on others for help with my life. Last night I called my husband from an event in Santa Monica and asked him to make dinner, so I and my guest would be able to eat almost as soon as we got home, and although I felt bad because there was the briefest pause and I knew he'd been at work all day and I was asking him to work some more and he was clearly not really up for it, he did it, because we are married and that's what the spouse does, they help, even when they don't really want to. But for my job I'm stuck with me. Matt can't review books for me, he can't follow up on pitches for me, and he can't apply for awards and grants for me (regrettably).

I had a houseguest for the past several days who has been doing full-time creative freelancing for a lot longer than I have. She is also naturally more organized than I am. She gave me a whole lot of ideas and pointers, some of which I'm going to implement right away (divide work into three categories) and some of which won't adapt to me (visual project planning) (she is an artist, and I can't draw a decent freehand rectangle). While she was here, we visited a heavenly stationery store in Highland Park, and I bought a huge, beautiful project planner, with all kinds of room for whatever I need to keep track of. I haven't figured out exactly how I'm going to use it yet, and I don't want to muck it up with false starts.

In the meantime I'm going back to my old Panda Planner, which I loved for several months, but which doesn't have enough room in its monthly calendar for my purposes. My deadlines are based in months rather than weeks or days (something I learned along the way), and I need the space to plot them out, which little monthly squares don't give me. Since my next three weeks are going to be tightly plotted, though, I'm going to use the Panda unconventionally to set things in order.

The first dramatic step I've taken is to archive everything in my email box before January 1 of 2018. I am a keeper, not a thrower-awayer, so I had 4,000 emails in one mailbox and 5,000 in another. Now that's down to under 1,000 each. I'd like to take it down further, archiving & deleting everything unnecessary, so I can do the "inbox zero" practice that thrower-awayers generally do. The follow-ups are too time-consuming at the moment, and could be much better if I could get a system going.

Yes, I did this to myself. No, I'm not complaining. Not really. I told an editor the other day that I'm running around with my hair on fire, and that's true, but complaining? I love my work. I love my life. I wish there were a bit less of it, is all.

In this week's big news, I will have a review in the Times Literary Supplement this week, and I bought this novelty pillow:

I'll leave it to you to decide which is more impressive.

Out in the world (it's been a minute since I did this):

I extracted a piece of my thesis-project memoir, named it "Boundin'", and reworked it (with editorial help) for Nailed. If you haven't known me for long, or if you happen to have a grumpy opinion about my financial privilege or emotional stability, I recommend you read it. My life was not always so.

I interviewed Carlos Lozada of the Washington Post for sinkhole. We talked through an intermediary, so I didn't get a sense of his personality via email like I usually do, but via his answers he seems like a good, smart, friendly guy.

I interviewed Litsa Dremousis for Books I Hate. She, on the other hand, demonstrated a wealth of personality, and I enjoyed every minute of it.

I reviewed a book of short stories from Bolivia, Sleeping Dragons by Magela Baudoin, for Cleaver. I liked the book. Very economic prose.

I reviewed Sybil Baker's novel While You Were Gone for the Heavy Feather Review. Both Sybil's team and HVR were great to work with and I hope to do so again.

I reviewed The Rending and the Nest by Kaethe Schwehn, a beautiful book, for Locus. This came out in print in the...August? issue, I think, and is just now on the website. It's accompanied by a bitchy little take on a book I really disliked, Moon Brow, by Shahriar Mandanipour.

More to come, including Rain Taxi and, oh, did I mention the TLS?