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. 

Untethering from the Doom Box

The other day I was in a bad mood and I dragged myself outside for a walk with Matt. I told him all about the book I'm reading (a biography of a producer in early Hollywood), and the sunshine and fresh air plus my interest in the stuff I told Matt improved my mood extraordinarily. When I got home I picked up my phone and looked at Twitter, and I felt my good mood drain away. I felt it, the way you can feel your bladder deflate when you pee. 

I looked at the phone in my hand and I went: oh. 

Later, I told Matt about this, calling my phone the Doom Box. Now, every time I pick it up, I think about that phrase. I keep opening Twitter and feeling that draining sensation. It used to make me happy to interact there, but not so much now. I know I'm not getting the best of it, for obvious reasons, and I'm sick of fighting the algorithm to see and be seen. I had been thinking about taking a long break from it once Wire Mothers was out, and now that I've had this insight, and I'm near the end of the initial promo cycle for the book, I'm closer to doing so. (As for the other monsters in the Doom Box, Facebook is scrapple to Twitter's steak for me, and for whatever reason, IG offers almost no dopamine hits compared to the others.) 

My main question about this is no longer "how do I promote myself?" - because the Wire Mothers launch has not gone smoothly, and I seem to have sold copies nonetheless - but "what do I do with my time instead?" I think the answer has to do with the Star Trek: Voyager project I've semi-begun and am going to start in earnest when Jami Attenberg's yearly 1000 Words of Summer project begins on June 1. But I also hope to write some more about film on my Medium page and some more about myself here. And I want to read some damn books; my writing/reading balance has been way off lately. 

I've said this before, but: as a writer, I didn't really make career progress until I engaged on Twitter. I got most of my cornerstone opportunities there, whether by chance or by effort. I don't know if I have enough career momentum to slack off on it and still find success, but I want to try it and see. I'm in a phase now where writing is its own reward, and finding people to read my work isn't like selling encyclopedias door to door. That won't be true forever, but it is for now, so it might be a good time to untether. 

It's spring here, which means the exact weather that people think happens all year round in LA: sunny, mild, pleasant breeze. The weather is nicer and more consistent than any May I can remember in LA. It was over 100F in May 2017, the month I got my MA from CSUN; it was an annoyingly hot weekend to celebrate. 

Tomorrow Matt and I are going to the Academy Museum to look at a Casablanca exhibit, as well as the Dykstraflex and whatever else is on at the moment. We got a flyer in the mail that shows some of the Casa objects on display, and one of them is the model globe from the opening, which is grayscale in color. It hadn't occurred to me that they'd use a black and white model of Earth, because it's Earth, why wouldn't it be in color, but it appears they did. I eternally love movie stuff/secrets like this. 

Speaking of which, I just finished a biography of Jean Harlow's husband Paul Bern, who died under mysterious circumstances in 1932. Even though the likely cause of his death has filtered through to the public after 90 years of MGM coverups, the circumstances are still swathed in questions that no one can answer because everyone is dead. Death surrounds this story: Paul, Jean, their close associate Irving Thalberg, Paul's previous wife, they all died unexpectedly, all prior to 1938. One of the few major players involved who lived a long life was LB Mayer, of whom this book has given me an appalling impression. Jack Warner may have been a cartoonish supervillain (with unerring instincts), but Mayer was the kind of to-the-bone horrible that doesn't make for good stories after the fact. He was just bad, just mean, just selfish. Perhaps this book was wrong in casting him as such a perpetrator - it's wrong about a bunch of other things - but I tend not to think so. 

As Conrad Nagel's eulogy of Paul put it: 

Hollywood is cruel and brutalizing to those seeking success. In no other place is the struggle for success so cruel. It is difficult not to bow down to one of Hollywood's false idols -- the keenest and most dangerous being insincerity. 

But I still fall to my knees. I can't help it. The fact that I'm considering another novel set in the 1930s and intricately entangled with film, despite how the Casa novel exhausted me, demonstrates how helpless I am, how strong is Hollywood's power over me. 

Done and Undone

The only way this post will make sense is if I outline it: 

1. Collection soon 

2. Book finished 

3. New project 

1. My mini-collection of short stories, Wire Mothers, releases in just about a week. Confetti emoji! I am long overdue on making the announcement that I'll be appearing in Brooklyn in late June to promote it, but I haven't gotten my ass to Canva to make a graphic for that event, because April was messy (see 2). 

Art by Bri Chapman. Order here.

I've gone on record lots of times that I don't consider myself a great writer of short stories. I have gathered this from the world rather than believing it in my heart. I've tried (a lot) to write New Yorker-style minimalist short fiction, and I just can't do it. My stories, thus, got rejected constantly for the better part of a decade. And yes that is a very normal thing for a writer to report, stories getting rejected constantly for the better part of a decade, but whatever mold I was supposed to be reshaping to pour my short-form fiction into over all that time, so as to make it suitable for magazines - I never managed to find that mold's schematics. My acceptance rate didn't improve post-grad school, post-having a firmer grip on my craft. I write what I write, and magazines rarely like it, and I've accepted that (even if they won't, ha HA). 

So these five stories are the result of that process, of figuring out what kind of writer I am and accepting that I'm unacceptable. I like them a lot. I like how they turned out. I hope you will, too, but I long ago stopped believing that people who like regular American short fiction will like my stories, so it's OK if you don't. 

I'm moaning about lack of publication but the fact is, three of five of the stories in Wire Mothers were previously published. (This is not the average ratio for the stories sitting in my hard drive.) Fun fact: the editor who published "To-Do" in 2015 wanted to remove the bullet points. If/when you read that story, enjoy thinking of it without them. Editors can be idiots. 

2. For the first 12 days of April, I was at a residency, my first ever. It was at Yefe Nof, which is located at Lake Arrowhead, California, which is 5,000 feet above sea level. I did not think this would be a problem, because I've visited Denver multiple times, did a long weekend in Colorado Springs, etc., and never noticed the altitude. But I was increasingly ill the entire time I was there: digestive problems, anxiety, poor sleep, shortness of breath, et al. I pushed through and wrote a staggering number of words, successfully finishing a draft of my novel, Men from Other Countries. Then I went home early and hugged my husband. 

For the following couple of weeks of April, I stayed more or less in the zone, revising and rewriting and working through the draft, until I had something I was ready to give Matt. He read it, and gave me useful feedback, and now it's with my second reader. The door isn't completely open to more reader-friends yet, because I need one more line edit plus more feedback re: Matt's points before I can consider it really a finished draft, but it's functionally finished, and I'm so relieved. 

I started this book in 2017, but then I got sidetracked by Ceremonials and Junk Film. Gun to my head, I'd say I've been working on it for about two years, especially considering research, but the majority of the word count was written in two huge bursts in November 2023 (30k) and April 2024 (40k). I'm explaining this for transparency, and because when the book gets published, people are going to ask how long I worked on it and I want to have an answer to hand. It's not an answer that lines up with the historical record of me working on this book, but it's spiritually close to say two years, on and off, with inconsistent work and gaps in between for other priorities. 

It's a good book, and I'm proud of it, but it was rarely fun to write the way Highbinder was (and nowhere near as fun as Junk Film was). I remembered the fun I had with that book as I was reskimming it the other day, and the comparison was stark. Other Countries was serious business, and I only enjoyed myself on a handful of occasions (eg I came up with a reason for my gay character to hide in a closet). So, for my next trick... 

3. ...I'm going to write something that I hope is a lot more fun: a series of essays to form a character study of Tom Paris from Star Trek: Voyager and explore my stupid crush on him. 

just look at this idiot. God I love him so much

The project is also intended to reflect some more light on Voyager as a metaphor for family relationships and a much better Trek show than it's given credit for. But mostly it's about Tom. 

I'm a little concerned that it's my rebound project after working on Other Countries so intensely, and that it won't amount to anything. This concern is amplified because I'm telling people about it, instead of waiting to see if private work on it comes to something. That tends to be a jinx. But my list of undone projects includes this Tom Paris thing, a really dark hybrid essay I'm not ready to write yet, a very annoying revision of my grad school thesis that I have to read philosophy to do, and a huge undertaking about Jean Harlow's husband, which is likely some years away from being ready to write, if I even decide to do it. So I thought I'd start rewatching Voyager and taking notes and going from there instead of just waiting for my second reader to get back to me (hellish), or getting a real job (equally hellish). Very casual work for a possible fun-writing reward, no pressure. 

4. Misc: I've been wishing I had something good to write about re: movies, like the essay I wrote about The Zone of Interest here, but I haven't happened upon anything just yet. I gulped the entirety of the Hannibal TV show in less than a week, but most of what's generally useful criticism about that show has been said already, whether in words or in fan art. Pretty sure I'll be making this x-stitch pattern, though. 

found here

My Peculiar Monstrosities

Something I learned in 2023, like really seriously learned it, was to slow down. My father said to me so many times when he was teaching me to drive, "Don't get in a hurry." This phrasing stuck in my head and repeated itself to me again and again when I was in Norway and Sweden in September. Writer/editor me would revise him to "don't hurry" or "don't rush it", but "don't get in a hurry" expresses the heart of the advice in a way the revisions don't. Get in a hurry. In a hurry as a state of being, rather than hurry as a verb. Don't get there. Stay out of a hurry. 

I kept trying to rush to and from places, rush experiences, in Sweden and Norway, and the experiences kept going wrong. When I slowed down it was fine. Where I live, I sometimes try to take driving shortcuts when I'm behind, and I wind up being later than I would've been if I'd just gone the normal way. The more I get in a hurry, the worse things go.  

I don't know what this has to do with the rest of the post, but it came up as I was writing about Twitter, and doesn't feel like it belongs somewhere else, so in it goes. 

Lately the films I've been watching are often extreme. I know why - it's self-flagellation, and it doesn't speak well of my mental health, even if it's a better coping strategy than others I'm aware of - but that's not keeping it from happening. 

One direction I considered for this post was writing about Night and Fog, Alain Resnais's half-hour exploration of the concentration camps, blending footage from the 1950s with archival footage that you know exactly what it looks like. (That fucking bulldozer shot.) Having researched WWII on and off for the past...two years? something like that? I knew that some of what was said in voiceover was embellished, if not flat-out untrue. I don't know why, because who the hell needs to embellish what happened at Auschwitz, but I'm sure of it. And I realized as I was listening to the VO and comparing it to what I knew to be true that Resnais had made a propaganda film. In this case the propaganda is for the right side, so it's not objectionable per se, but that's still what it is. 

Another direction is to write about All Quiet on the Western Front, the 2022 version, which I adored even if it was challenging to watch. (If that's a propaganda film, it pushes for full historical contextualizing and to stop shoving children in front of cannons, which are political messages I can get behind.) The main thing I thought about while watching was how world cinema of the 21st century keeps proving that Hollywood has totally lost its way. Not only do we actively discourage the avant-garde in American filmmaking - as we always have - we keep making worse, longer films and elevating filmmakers who focus on narrative/characterization and totally drop the ball on visuals. 

A third direction is to talk about how my book is going. I'm in a strange place. I've written over half of it, and have gotten stuck in a spot where I have to 1) romanticize a character I don't like 2) retcon and fit events into an existing narrative framework, which I thought would be fun, but currently isn't 3) figure out my main character's reactions after she does bad or iffy things 4) write the setting of Paris, which I've only visited once, twenty years ago. A few scenes have been emerging from my pen, but it's a little like gaining ground in a car stuck in the snow - a few inches here, rock back, a few inches there, rock forward. So I went back to the beginning and reread the first 80 pages to start working on the major changes I'm going to have to make (redoing a bunch of conversations, changing the writing style altogether in some parts, altering the main character's age from high school to college). That process was demoralizing enough that after taking notes, I got stuck again on the point of actually doing the revisions. 

I wrote a paragraph on each of these directions rather than going on at greater length on any one of them because I'm considering trying to write something like my peers are writing, a Substackish thing. I think the field is much too crowded for me to enter it the same way my peers are, and I'd have to force myself to write on a regular basis rather than here and there when something comes up. But not being on Twitter means I'm not recording my thoughts on film and the writing process as often as I used to. (Which is good? Fewer opinions on Twitter = a better world?) I was not a wholly unpopular tweeter, so maybe I could grow the audience for my books if I expanded in another place on what I might have tweeted. I'd likely choose Medium if I was doing this. And I opened up a window there this morning with the intention of writing a full post about Night and Fog and propaganda. But again, the field is crowded, and the truth about me as a writer is that I don't want to sharpen my elbows. I just want to do my thing. 

I gained a lot of confidence from staying off Twitter for the past six weeks. I gained a lot of peace. I missed my online friends - I missed their wit, and I missed the reinforcement that I am not alone in my peculiar monstrosities. I missed all the opportunity that grows in that place. It's - this word truly is not an exaggeration - wrenching having to decide between on and off Twitter, and the middle ground of "sometimes" has always been a hard space for me. (And "sometimes" does nothing for literary promotion.) 

I don't know where I'm going. I know I'm not going there in a hurry, or that if I am, I shouldn't be. Twitter is nothing if not fast, so perhaps it's better out of my life, promo be damned. 

Bounce Back Strong

Half-jokingly, I've been calling 2022 my year of rest and relaxation. I spent a lot of days last year unable to get out of bed until after 9, even when I woke hours earlier. I spent a lot of afternoons dozing on the couch to reruns of a show I know by heart. My inbox had somewhat fallen asleep, too; I submitted things now and then, got solicited for things occasionally, but for most days of most weeks, nothing came in or went out.

this blog post is not to be construed as an endorsement of this book or its author

Most of the big stuff I do as a writer is early in the year. A book prize I read for is mostly active in January; AWP is in March; and the time-consuming work I do for a residency committee is largely in April. Everyone will tell you that publishing is least active during the summer, and fall is so frantic that I have no interest in ever publishing a book then, or really in doing anything else notable as a writer. 

Last year, once AWP and the mini-tour I did for the Plan 9 book were over, I found myself idle, and I couldn't rustle up any motivation to break the inertia. In late summer I researched for the novel I'm trying to write. That occupied me for a little while, but it wasn't a reason to get out of bed. Nor did I/do I yet have a significant schedule or deadline for anything related to that book, so there was no rush. 

In all, I'd say that I did very little of significance for about seven months of 2022, nonconsecutively. 

I can't complain about this, per se. What most Americans wouldn't give for that kind of leisure - to have nothing pressing to do for half the year. My therapist wasn't worried. But I was. It seemed unnatural not to produce anything for such a long period of time, to find myself with no logical argument for spending the day upright instead of horizontal. And I felt vaguely, minimally unhappy. Not much, not to a clinical point, but like a narrow vein of obsidian in an otherwise buff-colored stone. Something was wrong. 

There's more for me to think and say about all this looking back than there was as it happened. I kept checking and couldn't find mental illness at the root of all this, but I'm still a bit suspicious, because the behavior ticks a few boxes for depression. A thing that occurred in late 2021 harmed and affected me a lot more than I realized at the time, and those effects reverberated in my disposition for most of the next year. (Curious, in fact, how it took exactly a year for the effects to start to fall away, one by one, in succession.) Some of how I justified my inactivity was rebellion against the capitalistic work structure, and some was that I was intensely resting after a period of intense physical activity (while I worked at the barn). Still more was that I watched movies almost every day, which counted as work for a film critic, even if the movies weren't attached to a particular project. 

My year of rest and relaxation was probably sustained by all these reasons in different quantities. It didn't feel good while it was going on, but like any not-so-good experience, now I know what that feels like, and can recognize it if it ever shows up again. Plus, the rest fueled me to bounce back strong. 

Which I think I can safely say is what's happening now. February has been bonkers, full of opportunities and heartbreak and frustration and celebration, but particularly the past week has given me the feeling that I've come back to life. My inbox is hopping. My list of responsibilities is extensive enough to be written out instead of remaining in my head. The interactions I'm having with fellow writers sparkle and hum. I have ideas for books again. The feeling of dark dormancy, the heavy nadir of motivation, has lifted. 

Not gonna lie, I'm pretty sure my work with X-R-A-Y is the biggest part of the change. My book publicity machine having to start churning has helped, too, because it's forced me to take some action instead of staring at the wall, but X-R-A-Y has given me a purpose, a set of daily activities, I simply didn't have for most of last year. In joining the team there, it feels like I reached up very slowly and weakly for a handhold, and what I seized conveyed me out into the sun from a room I didn't even realize was dark. 

Which brings me to the carnival-barking portion of this post. I'm teaching the very first class X-R-A-Y is offering, ever, and you can sign up for it right now, if you'd like. It's on a Sunday afternoon next month. Payment slides from $75 down to $25, and if you as a writer are stuck in the mud (kinda the way I was last year, in fact), this is a great way to get unstuck. Hence the name of the workshop. 

Also, if you are headed to AWP, I hope to see you kind of generally, but I also hope to see you at one of the two readings I'll be attending. The first one, on Wednesday, I'll be a reader; the second one, I'll be handing out promo stuff for X-R-A-Y and probably myself too. 

reading at this one

attending this one

See you there. XOXO

Water and Waiting

Of late I've been trying to get rid of clutter. I am bad at this. Usually I feel the need to purchase more things in order to get rid of the things I already have: I want containers to organize stuff that should just get thrown out, for instance. In this case I bought a fancy scanner so I could scan in all my old files, stretching back before college, and I took up a lot of space in the living room setting up the scanner along with a shredder to dispose of what gets scanned. It's worked, though; I've gotten rid of a lot of paper, and in its place have a half-dozen bags of shredded stories, poems, notes, and articles. 

For whatever reason, I didn't like the idea of tossing these shreds in the recycling bin and having the city haul them away. I wanted to personally transmute them into something new. So, naturally, I bought more stuff: the equipment needed to make handmade paper. 

I took to this practice immediately. It uses the hands and the eyes and water and waiting. I have enough shredded paper to make hundreds of pages of handmade paper, and I may yet use it all; I had hoped to use this paper to create hand-bound chapbooks of my own work which I could sell or give away (literal transmutation of old creative work into new creative work), but I'm not sure that will happen. The handmade paper has a lot of alphabetic fragments on it which might make new work printed on it hard to decipher. 

The paper I’m making today is from my old rejection slips. pic.twitter.com/wN1HZYyLZC

— Katharine Coldiron (@ferrifrigida) June 30, 2021

The process of going through all my old documents has been freighted with emotion. My college papers show me that I write almost exactly the same way about film now as I did in 2002, and that I cannot write a decent paper about anything else. My old stories and novellas are terrible, far worse than I remembered, with fun [ed.: not fun] surprises I'd forgotten about altogether. I'm embarrassed for these stories, and for me, because I sent them out to magazines in all seriousness. Horrifying. 

I only vaguely recognize the person I was in college. She wrote comments in the margins of her course readers that were sometimes insightful and sometimes painfully dim. She had relationships with people of whom I do not remember one eyelash. Her opinions were strong, but pretty poorly informed. I can see the writer in her straining to surface. 

In other news. 

This weekend I begin teaching an online course about overcoming perfectionism. I've been flogging it everywhere possible, in as many social media groups as I can. I can't wait for it, in truth; writing and assembling the materials got me excited about sharing anti-perfectionism strategies. (If you somehow missed all my shouting about the course and are interested, you can sign up here, until Friday or Saturday I think.) 

I got to talk to a major inspiration of mine on the phone and I was a big pile of scribbled anxiety in the shape of a person, but I don't think he noticed. 

The Plan 9 book is chugging along toward publication. Still no news on a release date, but you'll hear about it, o readers of blog. The cover is great and I can't wait to share that with you, too. 

My therapist recommended that I put together an actual schedule for my days, now that outside work doesn't shape them. I did: read in the morning, lunch + break for something on TV, write in the afternoon. It's amazing. I'm finally coming back to reading after a series of halting breaks, and my project is to empty out the shelves of unread books I might have mentioned. So far I'm doing a good job. It's all a part of cleaning and culling, trying to have less clutter in my life. Or at least temporary empty space, before I buy more clutter to take the place of the old. 

Reduced to Summary

On February 10, a book blogger wrote a post dissecting some of my reviews at Locus, mostly of books by people of color. She discerned a pattern in my reviews that indicated racial prejudice. I believe that she called me out usefully on some mistakes, and that she otherwise selectively read and quoted me in ways that misrepresent my body of work. 

This was all ignited because I reviewed the second volume of an epic fantasy series without reading the first volume. That choice infuriated readers and book bloggers, whose attitude toward books differs in significant ways from that of book critics. One blogger decided to look closer at my work, and these two issues - my purported racial prejudice and my choice to start with book two of a series - got conflated, when I'm not sure even the blogger intended that. 

There's a great deal to be said about all this. The question of whether it should be a requirement to read books in series from the get-go in order to assess later books is an interesting one, when I stand back from it. Up close, the philosophy dissolves. For a few days I was a useful strawman for a lot of necessary arguments on Twitter about book criticism, even though I don't believe everything that's been said about my work and my critical posture is accurate or even helpful. I'm glad that my work has stirred up conversation about diversity in publishing, even as I'm devastated about being the subject of so much wrath. 

I think I became a target for everyone who is mad about authority imbalances in book criticism. I respect that, but given how little I'm paid and how little I'm known, I find this silly. Hitting me is not really punching up for almost anyone. 

I drafted a very long blog post explaining what I think and feel about this whole incident, how painfully it hits me given my history with race and racism, and some of the personal and professional aftermath. Ultimately, I don't think it's useful to make public. The above is all I want to say for now. 

Also, there's a lot more for me to tell you. 

Electric Dreamhouse Press, a UK publisher headed by my friend Neil Snowdon, is going to publish my second book this year as part of their line of Midnight Movie Monographs. My monograph is about Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space. I wrote this short book in the space of about six weeks in mid-2020, and I haven't had such fun writing a book since Highbinder (which still languishes, alas). I'm really pleased about joining the small but scrappy field of Ed Wood studies. 

The book contains my central arguments about why it's worthwhile to study bad film. I've been building on those arguments to write a series of essays that I hope will be a whole book about bad film, eventually. I've written about Ruby (1977) and about a series of 1940s films starring "the Teen-Agers," and up next is Death Bed: The Bed that Eats. Other essays will be on Cop Rock, Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman, and a tricky dual piece about Showgirls and Staying Alive. I'm ahead of the schedule I made for these essays, which feels good. 

However, I keep getting intuitive signals to work on the Casablanca novel, which has been at a bare simmer in the back of my head for years. Last night I attended a reading with Lance Olsen and Lidia Yuknavitch, and something Olsen said temporarily turned up the heat on that burner. I've made a very tentative plan to write that book once I'm finished with the bad film essays - sometime in the fall, ideally - but if this keeps up, I'll have to pause the bad film essays and set to the novel. I simultaneously feel excited about the project (I haven't written a novel in years) and preemptively annoyed. It's going to be so much work. 

Anyway: the Plan 9 book represents pure joy for me, as it was an intellectual problem which I got to solve to my satisfaction. That the result will be a book (and a beautiful book at that, given EDP's past performance) is extra whipped cream on an already-nice sundae. I found out about the Midnight Movie Monographs series around three years ago, and idly wondered what movie I could write about for 100 pages. My mind supplied Plan 9 from Outer Space, and even though it was a weird choice, the more I thought about it, the more I supposed I could do it. How would I write 100 pages about Plan 9? Well, last year, I wrote until I found out. Thankfully, Neil was interested in what I produced. 

Both of my first two books, as it turns out, will be about weirdnesses my mind picked up and played around with, private obsessions I never thought would go public. Of everything I've written, these two books are the most fringely me, and I'm bemused that they are the two going out to bookstores in bound form. I think this means you ought to write what you love, or at least that I ought to write what I love. 

As for the third book, I recently made a (digital) handshake agreement with Blue Arrangements to publish my conceptual novel, Victorian Spam. It's a tee-tiny press, just two people, and all of us are burdened by lives and jobs and other projects, so we are all taking a relaxed attitude to the timeline of this book. I estimate that it'll appear in 2022, and it, too, is super weird. Yay! 

None of these three books has anything to do with any of the others. Ceremonials is lyric fiction, Plan 9 is straight nonfiction, and Victorian Spam is...other. All of them are ekphrastic in some way, and I created all of them, but those are the only two elements I can think of that they have in common. 

As for the fourth book...I finally, finally, finally finished the Misfits essay back in December. A couple of weeks later, I got an important blessing from one of the real-life characters in the essay. Thus, Weird New Shit, my book of hybrid film essays, is really truly completed. It's taken me four or five years to write and assemble these essays, which is four or five times longer than I usually work on a book, so I'm thrilled to be done. I'm shopping it to a few presses I think will like it before I try agents, and have consequently racked up a few rejections. 

I don't think there'll be news on that one for some time yet. My expectations for it are so large and unrealistic that it's probably better to let it settle as a project before it goes into the world, anyway. But I do suspect it'll be the fourth book. Mostly I'm glad to be done. 

Somehow I never put it on the blog that an essay of mine was published online at Conjunctions a few months ago. It's called "All Cities Burn" and when I shared it in November, I said I thought it was the best thing I've ever written. These days, with so many different projects coming to fruition, I don't really know if that assessment has meaning. Read it and let me know what you think. Maybe the most arresting thing I've ever written? Either way, being in Conjunctions is an honor. 

While I was struggling through the emotional aftermath of the February 10 incident, I started cross-stitching tiny portraits of the horses I work with. I've made about a dozen, using various patterns and editing them as needed to communicate what the horses look like (and act like), and have a couple more to go. My plan is to give these to the owners of these horses as parting gifts; I've given my notice at the barn, and will be stopping work there within the next month or so, I hope. I'm sorry to go, but the work is tearing up my body, and I'm turning 40 this year - too old to withstand another summer like 2020's. 

The one portrait I can't seem to settle on how to make is for Quinn, a gorgeous Friesian cross who is smart and eager and generally a lovely horse once he gets out of his anxious head. But he almost never succeeds in doing that. I love him so much and will miss him so much and I don't know how to capture him in cross-stitch without doing a massive, photorealistic portrait, much bigger than 3 inches wide. I don't have time for that. But how can I sum him up in such a small space? 

How can any of us, horse or human, be reduced to summary? 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

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 - -"