Nobody Can Do This

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MTWTFS

So huh. It's been an interesting week. This is not a very professional blog post, but I think it's mostly friends who subscribe to this blog anyway. 

On Monday I had a hell of a day: some bad news, some weird omens, and big, big feelings. The situations that initiated these feelings weren't new - they'd just come to a head on Monday, for whatever reason. Big messy terrible situations. I took a long hike, tried to make sense of what to do next, and felt my feelings, something I rarely do with success. 

On Tuesday I felt better: recovering. I also made a decision about something that had been paining me, and although I'm not sure if it's the right one - and it's very rare that I make decisions about this thing without consulting everyone around me - it felt so good to have made it, and especially on my own. 

On Wednesday I did a pile of work I've been putting off for many weeks, and that night I felt happier and more satisfied than I have in some time. I needed the feelings to rise and crest in order to break. To make way. To give me the space to get to work. 

On Thursday I told my therapist about all of this; she was happy for me. I think she was surprised that I made the Tuesday decision before I asked her about it, but she was supportive nevertheless. 

On Friday, I continued the work with great enthusiasm. The situation is far from ideal, but I'm going to make the best of it. I'm not going to give up. I owe it to the people who've decided to go in on this work with me. 

Yesterday I socialized even though I didn't want to, and I cleaned the gutters (a little), and I made Matt go out on a hike. It was raining, or trying to rain, poorly. 

The point is, this has been a medium-transformative week. I think the reason is partly the new vitamins I'm taking (r u depressed or r u just mineral-deficient? bodies are fun!), partly that my time on social media has dropped by roughly 90%, and partly that circumstances which were making me feel bad crested and broke. 

by Sid the Visual Kid, whose work I reservedly love

Weaning off socials has been going well (you're reading this because I haven't been tweeting any of it), but I've gotten a little (re)addicted to doing NYT crosswords on my phone. I've also been reading books - a biography of Garbo, a deeply weird mid-20th c novel called Jamie Is My Heart's Desire, and Betty Gilpin's book All the Women in My Brain. The latter is stunning. Highly recommended for feminists and fans of hers - basically anyone who loved GLOW. 

As for writing, tbd. I'm cooking a story, for fun, part of a cycle of fun stories I started and then abandoned sometime last year. I'm still researching for the Bern book, and although I desperately want to be writing it, my experience tells me it's not time yet. (Starting it now would be like putting semolina dough in the water before it's been flattened and cut.) Might actually return to the Tom Paris essays while I'm still subscribed to Paramount+, which I'm going to cancel after Lower Decks ends. 

I'm still not sure how to solve the problems presented to me on Monday. But it's better to have problems and not hate yourself than the alternative. That's an advertising slogan for Prozac, I think. 

Blessings Inside My House

I made this, and you can buy it here

I'm working on weaning off socials and deleting the majority of my tweets. I don't know what my long-term strategy is - possibly Canada - but for the next however long I don't want my words being farmed and scraped by that emerald miner. I'm going to try to put them here, on Medium, and in my notebook instead. 

A bunch of stuff just came in for me to read and evaluate, which is pretty unusual these days. It'll keep me busy for a couple of weeks. I'm also trying to get rid of stuff in my house, which is hard for me: a constant process of swallowing terror about impermanence and departure. 

First weekend of November I went to the Portland Book Festival, which was fun. Not much like what I expected. I saw everything I really wanted to see in the first half-hour, spent another couple hours hanging out at the Autofocus/Split Lip booth, and then I went home. Or back to my hotel, actually, which was an absurd, hipper-than-thou establishment, where I had an uncarpeted room with no extra blanket and no fan in the bathroom. Don't stay at the Moxy unless you are 23. 

wet and cold, the PNW way

We're having a stupid problem at our house that is turning out to be expensive, stressful, and lengthy to try and solve. It could be a lot worse, but it could also not be happening, that would be okay. 

Some of what I'm reading is books by Richard Dyer, one of the only people who cares about star studies to the extent that I think most film studies people should. I'm also still slogging through biographies of powerful men from the 1930s. On the plane to PDX I started taking some real notes about how to write this thing, the different ways I want to set up the stories of each narrator and the interpretive problems I'll have to get past. 

On the plane back, however, I reread The Godfather, because I was prepping to record a podcast episode about it and the film version (pretty obscure, you might not have heard of it) with my friend Emma. That happened on Wednesday, November 6. We agreed to just pretend it was not Wednesday, November 6, which meant we had a wonderful time. That episode should be out in a few days. 

There are a lot of blessings inside my house. So many books to read, things I made with my hands or things that were made for me. What I know is so small. 

Residual Don't-Wanna

August was bad. Not for any specific external reasons aside from the oppressive heat, but because I could not get my head out of an existential mole-hole. Everything was vague and far away and meaningless; nothing got through to the internal chamber where I have willpower and feelings, nothing sounded appealing. Yes, this is a description of depression. I slept a lot, missed reasonable benchmarks for taking action, couldn't write much, probably gave bad advice and did a bad job as a friend. I likely missed an email or two, as well, so if you're waiting to hear from me, drop me a line. 

pretty sure I'm going to buy this?

Feeling better now that it's September, but I do have some residual don't-wanna hanging around. Mostly having to do with my next project, which will either be the Tom Paris book (have written >7K, didn't enjoy much of it) or the Paul Bern novel (have researched a good deal and taken notes). 

As I said back in June, the only writing-related thing that sounded good all summer was lying on my back and thinking about the Bern book, taking no action on it, just thinking, agonized dreaming, like a lady on a chaise longue. I pushed into the Tom essays, mostly via self-nagging rather than the pleasure of writing. It did me good to complete some work, but it felt like writing instruction manuals, not essays. Finally, I asked Matt about this (not for the first time) (it's fun to be married to me) during a road trip we took over Labor Day, and he told me to write the project I wanted to write rather than the one I thought I should write. 

There are so many reasons I shouldn't write the Bern book now, but all of them are practical, and the inspiration and passion I feel about it are not part of a practical calculus. So he's probably right. But my practical side keeps sowing doubt. 

After my last post, I went on and did the revisions to the last section of the Casablanca book, which were agonizing but took less time than I thought. I gave it to new readers, they got back to me, and yesterday I did the final pass. Now I have to do all the surrounding stuff - synopsis, query letter, agent research, yadda yadda. I feel more ready to do all this than I did during August, but I don't even want to know who actually likes doing such annoying work. Not me. 

I closed Barrelhouse reviews submissions for the month of August, the first time I've done this in the five years (!) I've been running the section. The submissions traffic I get there isn't too burdensome, but I was ready for a break anyway. It was the right move. Of course once I reopened them they started trickling in again immediately, like barely a few hours later. I don't want to express public annoyance about that, because it's not polite and also not completely correct (I feel good about doing the work, overall). But I have to say no so fucking often in that space, and the karma of that wears on me. It's never gotten nicer or easier to say no to subs that mean well but aren't suitable. 

In about 10 days I'm going to the Midwest for a quick three-city tour: St. Louis, Oklahoma City, and Lawrence, Kansas, all in five days. If you live in any of these cities and want to say hi, let me know. I don't have any events planned - my planning for this trip mostly happened in dreaded August, and hence I messed up a lot of it - but I'm hoping to have some fun and see two cities I've never visited. 

I'll be putting out a newsletter with some recent publications as soon as I get around to it, but otherwise that's the news. I'm so grateful August is over. I'm really looking forward to temperatures in the 80s. I keep putting words down, one after another. 

Free-Floating Stuff

Barrelhouse Writer Camp was really wonderful. I didn't do much, except socialize and probably gossip too much, but I relaxed and spent a lot of time outside, which it's becoming impossible to do here for the next six weeks or so. 

I am doing everything possible not to revise the last section of the Casablanca book. It's becoming more urgent, but I reeeeeally don't want to and I'm acting like a huge baby about it. 

Watched The Revenant, which I'd heard was a sort of contest rather than a film, and that assessment was wrong. It took my breath away. The idea pinged into my head while watching to write an essay about DiCaprio, which is an idea I should've had long ago but now that I finally have, it's another great thing to do rather than revise the last section of my book. 

Still on a wild, woolly, expensive perfume journey. Have ordered a bunch of perfumes both vintage and not, and none of them has even come close to the first one I tried: Mitsouko. It's truly like nothing I've ever smelled. 

Actual writing isn't going well, but reading is going OK and thinking/churning/editorial is going OK too. 

I still haven't unpacked my duffel bag or my backpack (got home seven days ago). I remember there was like one trip in my whole life where I unpacked the next day like a good girl, and every other time I unpack whenever I can't avoid it any longer like a chaos muppet. 

While away, I went to the Sleeping Beauties fashion exhibit at the Met, and I gotta tell the truth, it was incredibly disappointing. So much an exhibit meant to make people talk rather than making them think. I know a thimble's worth about fashion and perhaps a little less about about museum curation, but I know enough to know the way this was set up and curated was about flash, not meaning. It was a pain in the ass to get there and get through the exhibit, plus I dragged Matt along with me, which made the disappointment all the more frustrating. 

I keep thinking I need some kind of strategy to cut down on my phone use and social media use (different categories that overlap a lot), but probably what I need is to just stop. Hacking my brain has never, ever worked; tricks or strategies are generally wasted on me. The I stopped smoking was to stop buying cigarettes and putting them in my mouth and lighting them. Quitting a habit or an addiction is more complicated than that, but it's also not, and I feel like the "also not" is the place I need to get to for my phone/socials use. 

Wire Mothers seems to be well-received. I'm surprised about this, but pleased. Some external stuff reportedly coming in the next couple of months (review, interview). 

A writer I admire bottomlessly has reached out about her next book and we've had a kind of shy, gentle meeting of the minds. I am so happy about this I want to cup it in my hands like a firefly. 

I hate deadlines, and I need them. 

I hate routines, and I need them. 

I wish it was September. 

Slightly Popular

Somehow I've become a slightly popular movie podcast guest. The biggest shock was Dana Gould inviting me back a second time, and genuinely seeming to enjoy talking to me. We talked right up until we had to stop because he had another appointment. I will blame him forever for (indirectly) making me watch Carny, but I will also thank him forever for bumping up my Plan 9 sales significantly. 

Start around 1:23:00 if you want to hear only me. 

I was also on Monster Movie Happy Hour, which was loads of fun. We meant to talk for 45 minutes and instead talked for over an hour recorded and another hour after that unrecorded. Very occasionally I wish I had a place in the Midwest to live in during the three weeks a year the weather is nice, and folks like them are the reason why. 

If you missed it, I was also on Movies from Hell re: Death Bed and Ruby and on Castle of Horror re: Valley of the Dolls.

This week I'm recording twice more, for a local arts podcast in central Virginia (see below) and for Your Stupid Minds, which I just had to pitch, given that the name is a quote from Plan 9. We're discussing perhaps my favorite bad movie of all, so I'm looking forward to it. 

If you're reading this and you have a podcast you want me to be on, let me know! I have a fancy microphone, a good voice, and a reasonably quick wit. 

In March, I'm doing a miniature East Coast tour. On Sunday, March 20, I'll be in Richmond, Virginia, at Plan 9 Records. I'll be screening Plan 9 from Outer Space, selling the book, and talking with a local podcast host (see above). I'm not sure of the time for this event yet, but I'm hoping it'll be late afternoon, because who wants to go to a Sunday night anything? 

The following week I go to AWP in Philadelphia. I don't have any events planned, but I'll have copies of my books to sell - probably at the Barrelhouse table - and I'll be happy to step in and help in any situation where it's needed. I did this at the 2020 AWP, running an event and moderating a panel to replace absentees, and it was great. I've learned from prior AWPs that holding to a planned schedule gives me a rotten experience, while walking around with no particular plan makes me happy. I decided to go this year because I wanted to, after all, not because I needed to or had something specific to flog. 

After that I go on to New York City, where I'll be signing at Forbidden Planet on Sunday, March 27. That's in the late afternoon, and in the evening there's a TBD screening event hosted by a Forbidden Planet employee who loves Plan 9. 

And then that's it, I go home. I haven't been to New York in some years, which is funky because I have strong memories of it being easily accessible during my college years. In my freshman year I was involved with a guy at Columbia and drove there every other weekend. Now it feels as unreachable and cosmopolitan as it probably does for most citizens of this country. 

Anyway, none of this stuff is going to be livestreamed as far as I know. Sorry. I'm still trying to make plans to do a virtual watch-along of Plan 9, so we can all watch it together on our laptops. I haven't done this because the time hasn't seemed right, for various internal reasons that haven't borne the fruit I hoped they would. At this point I don't know what I'm waiting for. April, I think, is a good month to do it. 

In other news, I'm consulting on the launch of a new film quarterly run by an awesome, scrappy film community here in LA. There's a lot about that still up in the air, but I hope it will be as good as the work we're putting into it. Stay tuned - I'll be promoting it a lot if it works out as I hope. 

In other other news, I'm still trying very damn hard to sell three of my books, and/or get an agent to help me sell them, and to place finished essays about movies that I think are good. That isn't going very well, on the whole. It's a discouraging time for my submissions, even as the podcasting gains me some traction. Later in the year I'm gonna dive to writing depth, starting the next project, and I'm massively looking forward to doing that instead of promoting and pitching, which is several fathoms up, high visibility, lots of sun. Even if the current depth is less work, in an hours-per-day sense, it's not work I was cut out to do, so it wears me out pretty easily. 

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Lately I've been wondering a little more about the future of this blog. I didn't think I'd ever be the type of person who watched her words in public, but I had no idea it would be so practically difficult to write about writing while telling the whole truth. Enemies who are friends with friends, people who don't know what they don't know, deeply unpopular opinions held for an unairable reason, etc. Also, blogging is firmly out of fashion at this point. (I'm a bit tickled that writing outflow keeps finding different places to go. It's currently in Substack-ish newsletters, which I believe is unsustainable.) 

My personal life is pretty happy, and my successes and failures in my writing life are either boring and continual (rejections, rejections, rejections) or not suitable for the public (non-scandalous ill treatment by folks with whom I'd like to stay congenial). I don't want to make this a writing craft blog, because, in brief, I am weary of writing craft on the internet. So what do I write about here? Maybe I announce things, maybe I pursue ideas that don't fit anywhere else, maybe I keep up with my reading and viewing habits. Maybe I stop. 

I'm not fussed about this choice, because my investment in this space is low. I used to feel genuine pain over its low readership but have long since detached from that. I'm staying here on my terms, and my terms are not to worry too much about consistency or content here. Plenty of other spaces for me to worry about that. 

Congestion

Yesterday I slept most of the day, on and off, dozing and then getting up to eat or watch a movie and then dozing again. It felt really good. Not much in my life at the moment is urgent, like, with a deadline or consequences, so I'm drifting a little. Spending whole days sleeping is good once in a while, like yesterday, but today, drifting does not feel good. I want to want to do things - writing or chores or editorial. But I don't really want to do any of them, or at least not one more than the other. In trying to decide what to tackle and how, I'm a little frozen, so instead here I am writing a blog post. 

One thing did get done today: my husband and I bought a cemetery plot. The timing may seem weird, but: plots always go up in cost, we have a little money to spare right now, and we're sure about where we want to go. I feel so good about this decision - having a big, final, expensive choice all settled and in order, getting something done as rare and useful as this - that I want to tell everyone, but it's also an odd, macabre thing to talk about or announce. I feel like we bought a house (a very small, very inexpensive, very specific kind of house), but with virtually none of the hassle and responsibility of being a homeowner, so I want to rejoice. Given what we actually did buy, that's weird, right? 

The weather is changing. It's overcast in the mornings now, cool and a little humid, until the sun breaks through and it becomes SoCal again. It's giving me congestion that is definitely not COVID but of course, fear, anxiety, etc. 

I've watched a pile of movies lately, from In a Lonely Place to Repo! The Genetic Opera, including a couple of docs, one about giallo (thumbs-down) and one about cult film (thumbs-up-ish). In general I am tired of the conversation about film mostly being among men. I am tired of that. Watching Magic Mike for the first time I thought about the male gaze, and how that film goes with its flow while kind of stumbling into the female gaze now and then, which doesn't make much sense because the premise depends upon the female gaze, thus the ultimate gender philosophy of Magic Mike is really kind of a mess, which of course has been true for Soderbergh since sex, lies, and I considered the wildly different attitudes of women at male strip clubs and men at female strip clubs, and how wherever you go the phallus is the point, and how deeply goddamn annoying that is, which led me to "W.A.P.", and then I just stopped thinking about it altogether because I really needed another feminist to bounce all this off of, but it didn't stop me from feeling sure that more women need to talk and more men need to shut up in film discourse. In general. Across allllllllll the genres and pockets of participation, from buffs who don't really know what they're talking about to talking heads on Hitchcock DVDs. There were guys in the cult film doc who were barely coherent. It pissed me off to have to listen to them. 

For quite a lot of years now I have wanted to own a full-size replica of Tom Servo. It took six weeks, but the one I bought on Etsy finally arrived. Here is a picture of me with him, and I promise you, I really was this excited. 

After taking the pic, I put him on a chair and just looked at him for a minute, smiling like a goober. I don't know why this puppet brings me so much joy, why I'm such a fan of this inanimate channel for comedy, really I do not know - but I am, and it does, and now he sits next to the TV so whenever what's on the screen is uninteresting I can just look at him and grin. 

Are we all as deadened and drifting as I am? I think I'm okay - there is happiness in my life (clearly), I can do what I need to do in order to live without dragging through it, I don't care much about missing dinners out or parties or concerts, I still feel love and sorrow and all the emotions in between. But all my days are the same, one upon the other, and it means I have a condition that's sibling to boredom but not quite it. Foreshortened motivation, based on having nothing at all to look forward to, no consequences for failure or sloth. I like my quiet life, and even though the days stretch out, I can always find something either practically or artistically useful to do for my brain. Yet I feel like two-thirds of myself. Whatever's missing is not fatally missing, but I do notice its absence. Is this familiar to anyone out there? 

Anyway, come see me read (virtually) at Vroman's on Monday. Deets here. 

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. 

How You Get Into the Pool

For the first time in a couple of years, I've hung a hummingbird feeder outside my office window. They've started to find it, the little birds, and they come visit me now with fair frequency. It's nice.

Most of my body hurts, and I'm moving pretty slowly. It's because I got a job a few weeks ago as a groom at a horse stable. I adore the job, and I'm so happy to be doing even the crummy chores required of me at the barn, but I won't romanticize what it's doing to my joints and muscles and spine. Going from 500-5,000 steps per day to 18,000-30,000 steps per day is a big change. I've Googled and Googled and yes, this kind of painful adjustment to a job full of physical labor is normal and in a few weeks I will be feeling better. But I'm a little worried. I'm almost 40, after all, and I can't bounce back from major exertion like I did in my 20s.

November was like how you get into the pool if you're skittish about water temperature. I wrote one thing, and then I read a book, and then I did no reading or writing for days, and then I read a little  more and wrote a little more...by the end of the month I started feeling more like myself, acclimated to the water, ready to read and write with gusto again. But it won't be like it was.

"Burned out" is not what happened to me w/r/t book reviews this year. I just realized, sometime this fall, that I wanted to do more than one thing in a given day, a given week. As I took on more and more books, I watched fewer films, talked to fewer friends, did hasty work with my other responsibilities. If I had a maid, and didn't have a book of my own to finish, I could've kept it up. (Maybe.) Because I am who I am, though - profoundly scattered among interests and desires - it had to stop.

I'm not shutting down my reviewing work completely, but I'm done pitching reviews for a little while except in the rarest circumstances. I'll keep working for my regular folks, Locus and B&FG and a few others. However, I'm more interested in curating, and working on other parts of my creative life, for the immediate future.

More opportunities for curation will be abundant soon; I've been named the new Reviews & Interviews Editor for the VIDA Review. I'm extremely excited about this, and I feel, as objectively as possible, that it's a great fit for everyone concerned. We haven't had an editorial meeting yet with the new staff, so I'm not ready to talk about volume or strategy or pitches, but I hope you'll put a little bookmark on me in your head if you have something you'd like to pitch in the future.

Some Ceremonials news: I got a Kirkus review (no, I didn't pay for it); the first interview with me about the book has gone up; and I finally found a site that had a graphic template I could use to make a tour date postcard. (Soon to be in paper form; thanks, Moo's Cyber Monday sale.)

Many more guests will read than can fit on this postcard 

I will likely come to the east coast in July, and depending on how the book does, I might do a Midwest/Deep South leg in the fall of 2020. Ceremonials releases in two months and a week, or thereabouts, and I will have lots more news and info for you as the time passes.

A couple of publications I want to share here, in case you missed them:

• An essay about Black Widow, a movie I love with absolutely no cult following at all, for Bright Wall/Dark Room. This was the fourth or fifth thing I pitched or submitted to them, and I had some heartbreaking near-misses, so it's gratifying to have something accepted.
  
• This weird short story called "The First Snow," published in a paper volume of Storm Cellar several seasons ago, newly posted on the website this week. My opinion of my own short stories has shifted so much over time that I honestly have no idea anymore if it's a good piece of writing. I'm happy with what I did, so I'm kinda done worrying about it. 

Look for a short essay on Pink Floyd's The Wall coming soon, something I thought about for a lot longer than it took me to write it, and rambled endlessly to Matt about, poor fella. Listen for a podcast with me and my NB sibling from another...nibling, Ilana Masad, coming soon. Get ready for multiple angsty social media posts as December, my least favorite month of all, wears on.

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

Drop, Pull Back

A while ago I attended a group meeting with people I didn't know very well. The dynamics of the group were extremely weird; one person was very dominant (not abusively/obnoxiously so, just...alpha), and the others kind of automatically succumbed. As a versatile, I tend to consciously lean bottom when I'm around dominant people, rather than trying to compete with them. Competing with tops - particularly tops who aren't aware of how domineering they are - doesn't go well in groups. If I put my head down and let them lead, they are happier and more group stuff gets accomplished. If no one in the group is interested in leading, I'll go top. How much I let my inner leader out depends on the dynamic and the context.

Anyhow, when this dominant guy interacted with me directly, I alternated between direct answers and answers that would lead in a circle back to him, rather than to me. I kept a fence between the vulnerable parts of my personality and the questions he asked. Sometimes he needled, and I smiled and misdirected. I usually do this with people I straight-up dislike, rather than people who are harmless but not that easygoing, and I dislike so few people that my skills are rusty. I can't quite explain why I felt the need to protect myself around him, but that's what my instincts told me to do.

One of the favored books of my library is The Secret Language of Birthdays, a reference book that's a unique mix between astrology and big data. The authors have assembled a kind of composite horoscope for every birthday in the year based on the average traits of famous people born on that day. I love this book. It's often right, although not perfect (my husband's horoscope is 100% wrong), and I love reading people their birthday pages and asking them what they think. Mine is bang on.

When I got home from this group meeting, I went straight to the birthday book. I was thinking about a particular passage in my birthday horoscope that I hadn't understood very well:

October 13 people can be very elusive when necessary. Those who wish to use an October 13 person to elicit information or appropriate knowledge may find that after having had their interview or conversation they have learned precious little, if anything at all; what they grasped was but smoke and mirrors. 

Yep. That's exactly how I acted in that group. Deliberately elusive, instead of throwing it all out on the clothesline.

I could write for a while about how I developed the judgment to elude rather than expose. Mostly it was due to a terrible human being I met soon after college, whom I trusted, and who turned out to be just a little bit of a sociopath. He used a personal mistake of mine to make me homeless, for example, when it was really none of his business. A couple of years later, I took the time to analyze how he wormed his way into my confidence, and the warning signs I could have understood better. Since then, my trust has had layers and subtleties, rather than diffusing out to whoever. I'm not a private person at all - good luck blackmailing me, truly - but letting people understand how I think, what I want? That's a whole different ball game.

After I reread that passage in the birthday book I went on and reread the rest of my horoscope. I read it often, to remind me who I am when I get stuck in surface identities or other people's expectations. Different aspects of the horoscope have become more and less important over time. This time, the "advice" section stuck out so strongly it might as well have been red and blinking:

You must learn to relax. 

Take frequent vacations or at least rest periods where you do absolutely nothing. 

Lately, the shoulder pain that plagued me in early 2017 has returned. I spent hundreds of dollars and loads of time on physical therapy then, before I figured out that the problem was simply my posture. Between my heavy, slippery-strapped purse (right shoulder) and my sleeping posture (left side), I unconsciously jack my left shoulder forward all the time so that the muscles in my back stretch and warp and eventually start to hurt. Dozens (hundreds?) of times a day, I consciously relax those muscles, drop the shoulder and pull it back. Drop, pull back. Drop, pull back. The pain varies every day depending on my activities and how successful I am at remembering to do this, but lately it's been very bad, such that I'm using a silver-bullet pain relief potion I've been hoarding for almost a decade (it's discontinued) just to make sitting up bearable. Matt tapes me some mornings, which helps but isn't a great solution; my muscles just pull harder against the tape.

You must learn to relax. 

I didn't know that relaxing was something I had to learn, rather than something I could just do. Or, perhaps I didn't understand that relaxing was something I had to learn.

This morning I went for a walk. I left behind my phone, which I rarely do anymore when I go out to run or walk. I wanted to feel some fucking peace and quiet. But my mind yammered at me so loudly. I'm going out of town on Saturday and I can't stop worrying about that: about my lodging arrangements there, what I'll miss here in terms of freelance work, the growing pile of books for when I get back, the work that's in limbo right now, the creative work I want to do there, whether I'll have the materials I need, missing friends, seeing friends, flights and timing, what I'll fit into my suitcase, money stuff, a weird job idea, Ceremonials arrangements, ya ya ya ya ya. Woes both practical and existential, so many of them I could barely see.

I felt exhausted. Not physically but mentally. Just from thinking. I'd barely been awake for an hour. I tried both a mantra and a song to clear my head but neither worked.

I stopped at a shady spot and sat down on the curb. Drop, pull back. You must learn to relax. A calm, continuous breeze blew. I felt frail, like a vase so thinly forged you can see light through it. My brain kept motoring, so I tried not to resist it, but instead to observe tiny, obvious things: the shadows of leaves on the pavement, the temperature, the breeze, any birds. Drop, pull back. Distantly, I heard the peacocks that this family a few blocks away keep in their backyard. Their calls carry extremely well, but it's still largely a matter of wind direction whether I can hear them on my walks. I concentrated on nothing else but hearing those peacocks. The call was so far away that straining to hear it blocked out a lot of other mental endeavor.

Suddenly the breeze felt good. Suddenly I was able to close my eyes. Suddenly I could stop worrying, for a second, about half of the things on my mind. It was like putting that potion on my back: the problem wasn't gone, but the pain was, for a little bit.

You must learn to relax. 

How do I relax? How do I learn how to do that? How do I know the difference between relaxing and manically performing leisure activities, which translates in reality to performing coping strategies for stress rather than enjoying actual down time? How does my either/or personality find space for actual relaxation in a given week, instead of long stretches of work hard/sleep hard?

Drop, pull back. Drop, pull back.

The good news is that the place I'm going on Saturday is the only place I've ever been where I feel truly relaxed and yet not lazy. I can sit in one place for hours, pass up opportunities in order to stare out the window without feeling guilty about it, take walks going nowhere for no reason. In the rest of my life I feel the need for a purpose almost every waking moment, but not there. Purpose evaporates easily as soon as I set foot there.

--

I should tell you promotional news about Ceremonials and the other stuff that's been published this month. Preorders are open and good stuff is happening. But I can't bring myself to open up those doors in my head again before I finish this off and publish it.

I must learn to relax.

Splat

In this new normal of full-time freelance, every month is weirder than the last. Some months are triumphant, some are jam-packed, some are slow, some are remarkably painful. June was a strange month, when I should have read more and done less meaningless stuff, and July has been intense and, most recently, very bad. Sunday saw the definite end of a hope I'd been nursing for just about a year, something career and creativity related that I hoped would be meaningful to more people than just me. But it fell totally flat, ptt, like missing a step off your porch and going splat into your front walk.

Ow.

I had a smaller disappointment a few days prior that I can't get out of my head. It's a writing-related struggle, exactly the kind of thing that I want to share here, but can't, because you will all think I'm a jerk, and besides I don't want to turn this particular rejection into Writing Material. It's causing me to feel both blue and panicky, and I don't know quite how to negotiate those in tandem.

But I shall rally. I got an email this morning asking if I consented to one of my reviews being translated into Portuguese and published in Brazil, and I was like ¿¿okay?? because it's the kind of thing that's exciting and terrific but that I never ever would have imagined, neither on the yay or nay scale, in no way would I have imagined it as something someone would ask me about, for any reason, ever. But it's nice. I'm happy the review caught someone's eye. In Brazil.

I worked well last week. Many blurbs are in for Ceremonials, all lovely.

Like this one, which is so generous it makes me dizzy. 

I'm churning out reviews at speed, even ones I should have checked the release calendar before writing, oops. I agreed to set up a website for a writer group I belong to and the Wordpress setup is really different for Bluehost than for GoDaddy, and I feel in over my head, but I'll figure it out. The book pile is not getting shorter despite gentle no-thankses to multiple publicists. I just want to help all of them! All the writers, all the books! They all seem worthwhile.

I've had a blog post in mind for weeks, but haven't put it together, because I have been writing for money or deadline instead. That's part of why I haven't been here in a while. Also, I feel like many of my insights have been milked right out of me at this point. This is my 548th post on this blog, and I've written as much as I can about how I've gotten where I am. I know there's plenty more to say, and that there ever will be, but for a while now this hasn't been the first place I think of to say it.

Still and ever I'm trying to figure out what to say here, when it's no longer a steam valve, when it's no longer a default for work that can't go anyplace else, when the politics of the writing world make me shut my mouth a lot more than I did two years ago. I want to tell you backstories of the work I publish, but some of them are too simple to be useful ("they assigned me to interview her, and I did") or too complicated to be interesting to anyone but me ("in fifth grade I was standing in the lunch line when...").

Part of Sunday being a bad day was making a list of things that made me angry, in the hope that I'd purge them. Instead I walked around with them clanging in me for the next few hours. I haven't tried a lot of the standard methods for managing my emotions (journaling, rituals, screaming into a pillow); it's mostly just analysis, tumbling things around in my head until I figure them out and calm down. And sometimes exercise. Or cleaning. I hate cleaning so when I'm mad is the only time cleaning works out for me. On Sunday I just ran over and over the list (there were 23 items), getting madder and madder and not knowing how to let any of them go.

A few of the things on that list resolved, but others have stuck around and are still making me angry. That's how my to-do lists are, too. I accomplish dozens of things every week (due credit), but the things that stick around are amorphous enough to possibly have no solution.

I'll tell you something that made me mixed-mad: reading Axiomatic, by Maria Tumarkin. I landed a review of that book someplace! exciting! and it pissed me off to read, because it's the barest, most exacting nonfiction I've ever read, shaving down every unnecessary word until it's pure meaning, clipping along at an exhilarating, exhausting pace. It's the kind of writing my tenth-grade English teacher told me to stop doing because I was moving too fast for anyone except myself, skipping from point A to point H and not helping my reader come along to all the letters in between. I trained myself out of writing this way, and I don't know how Tumarkin learned to do it in a way that's acceptable to other people. I hate her, and I want to read every single word she's ever written. She makes all of us who write mixed-form nonfiction look bad, even if we're doing different things than she is.

Anyway. Here's some stuff I wrote recently that I'm proud of.

An essay about David Shields and Erica Garza that I hoped would get more attention than it did. I guess I put it off too long. "This is the burden of women who write: we are constitutionally incapable of assuming that our worldview is general, is the default, because we absorb evidence every day, from all corners of culture, that it isn’t."

A short piece about Nick Drake on the 50th anniversary of his debut album. If I'd told college-age me that someone would pay her to write something adulatory and off the top of her head about Nick Drake, she would've dissolved into joy. I would've tried my best not to say "but there's a lot of baggage that goes along with this awesomeness - -"

My Back Burner

I haven't updated my website since May. Plenty of reviews and articles have appeared, but I've let that aspect of self-promotion slide. I'm a little bit sick of the sound of my own voice (the sight of my own words?), so that's part of the reason, but it's also just a chore entailing minimal reward.

This week I've been writing little stray-thoughts posts on Facebook attached to pictures of flowers I take on my morning walks. Matt has been working 60-80 hours per week recently, so partly I'm releasing the flotsam I'd otherwise tell him over dinner. I also want to publicly reinforce the drilled-down experience of being alive in the world, with flowers and music and food and quirky encounters, at a time when I'm overwhelmed by the world's larger ugliness.

I've also been using this week to clear off my back burner. Because I didn't have many firm deadlines from June through late July, I couldn't figure out how to set work-ahead priorities. I got paralyzed by everything due in September and ended up not being able to work at all. Finally, last weekend, I made a list of the things I'd been meaning to do for months or years: a comparison essay between two February books that I pitched but no one wanted; an interview of more than an hour I needed to transcribe; an article I pitched that the editor wanted, but didn't have time for immediately, so "whenever" was the deadline; a phenomenal book about Vertigo I wanted to read but needed to pay real attention to. It seemed like about a week of work, and I had one week left in June that I couldn't settle on a use for. So I put those two hands together, and now it's Thursday and I'm done with 2/3 of that stuff. Much of it is homeless as of yet, but at least it's getting done, making room for more.

Depending on how you look at it, I either started or got into a fight this week in the literary world. It hasn't been a pleasant experience, and it may have burned a bridge or two. (The worst stuff is happening in private groups.) I wish it hadn't gone down the way it did, but differing opinions are inevitable. And I can't make people look into my heart and see my intentions when all I have is words.

I got two really dumb rejections this week. One I actually laughed aloud at, and the other gave me the impulse to write back and say, "You misunderstood my pitch." (Of course I did not.) Onward.

I also got a pair of really heartening acceptances. One will let me write about a phenomenal book for an outlet I always love writing for, and the other will let me make a little money at something I've been wanting to do for a couple of years.

Two well-paying magazines are stringing me along. A handful more aren't writing me back.

And I spent my first few hours volunteering at RideOn, an equine therapy organization just a few blocks from my house. I scooped poop and curried horses and (incorrectly) cleaned saddles. It was a fantastic experience and I hope to do it a couple of times a week from here on. The manual labor was almost enjoyable because horses were nearby. Maybe the secret to cleaning my kitchen is getting a pony to keep near the sink?

The week of promotion for "After Gardens" is over at last; the final gesture was a short guest post about my weird revision process. I learned A LOT. The main thing I learned is that the ecosystem of book blogging is not one I want to be involved in again. Not because it inherently sucks, but because it sucks real, real bad for me. I don't get my first royalty statement until August, but I'll be biting my nails until then to see if all that promo worked.

Ruby & Purple

Last week was challenging and then all right, with great variability, and the best of my attention was spent on productivity. I read and pitched and wrote and read some more. I started a fight on the internet, and it was helpful for plenty of people but quite deleterious for me. Multiple reviews went live after a couple of dry weeks. I had a piece published that took a lot of research and time to assemble, and it kind of vanished without a ripple, which bums me out. A silly Twitter thread I did on Mansfield Park got more attention. Also, I finished up the fourth in Laurie J. Marks's Elemental Logic series, a tetralogy of books that has been one of the purest pleasures of my year. The first draft of my review was 1,300 words, and I could have gone on and on and on after that.

I had a lot to think about and process after the last couple of weeks, and that might be why this week has been snoozy and unproductive. I have a pile of ideas to write about, and no motivation whatsoever to write them. Some of this feels like perfectionism, some of it overwhelm. Luckily, there's always reading to do when I can't seem to write.

Last night my brain gave me yet another idea I don't necessarily have the time for: an essay that breaks down the 1977 film Ruby, which is truly awful, but which I love, and which is a failure that I suspect has an interesting and/or sad story behind it. My guess is that Ruby once had a good screenplay; excavating its layers shows that, most probably, someone came in to "enhance" it with zeitgeist elements and screwed it up. There's cliche, genuinely compelling drama, cheesy Exorcist imitation, unique combinations of genre elements, and deeply stupid horror scenes. It's a very both/and movie, the kind of bad art that fascinates me bottomlessly.

This is bad art idea #3, after essays on Plan 9 and Death Bed, so it's starting to seem more likely that I have a book about bad art in me - less a hope than a likelihood. I wish I could pursue it now, instead of pursuing all the other crap I want to/have to write first, but it's probably better to let it marinate anyway. In the meantime, if you're interested, Ruby is on YouTube, and a less grainy version is available with a Rifftrax track attached, the existence of which I think I'll use in the essay.

Of note, I'm writing this on my tiny purple laptop, which I bought after dragging my too-heavy-for-airport-walking laptop to Iceland, and which in terms of processing power and etc is worth about what I paid for it ($200), but which has the major advantage of being purple. I know I'm not the only person who is suckered by aesthetics when making purchases. Purple and dip-dye are the two most reliable ways to make me buy something.

In a little less than a month, a short story I wrote will go on sale as a standalone ebook at the Wild Rose Press. It's priced at only $0.99, so if you'd like to support me, I hope you'll pick it up. I'll have more news about that, promotional links and whatnot, soon.