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

Plan Vaguely

Last week I worked intensively on my next hybrid essay, a study of the 1975 film Jeanne Dielman. I'm nearly finished. It's less hybrid than the pattern has been so far, as I didn't have any ideas for a thread of fiction to weave in. Instead, I integrated quotes from Cixous, repetitive thoughts, and, if I'm lucky enough to find a graphic designer to help me, a few diagrams. The only titles I've come up with are either lame or obvious, so I'm hoping a good one comes along soon. I wanted to submit it to True Story, because I thought it might wind up long enough (>5,000 wds), but it did not. So who knows.

It's good to be almost finished with this one. Dielman is the most sophisticated film I've written about for this collection so far, the least mainstream. I worried about how that would impact my writing about it, but it seems to have come out okay. Also, the more of these I write, the less it seems like a fluke that I'm writing them, and the more it feels like a collection. That's a big relief.

Three more to write this year. Next is Last Tango in Paris, which I'm not really looking forward to seeing again, but which makes a point I've never seen another film make. I hope to finish that one before the end of July. In August I've arranged to spend a week away, in a nurturing creative environment, and I want to draft the one about Mildred Pierce there. (I was also thinking about starting on a bigger project involving Plan 9 from Outer Space during that week, but I applied for a couple of residencies with the Plan 9 project so maybe I should leave it alone for now.) The final hybrid essay will be on The Misfits, and my calendar says "fall" for that.

I didn't want to give myself really tough deadlines in case some other project or job became a huge, unexpected time-suck. There's nothing worse, for me, than setting a goal and not meeting it. Doing that makes me feel worthless - a whole different thing than just reworking a calendar. I can make writing plans a few months in advance, but beyond that I try to plan vaguely, then sharpen up my intentions when the time comes. If the next two essays go really well, I might end up finishing the Misfits essay in September, but I'm not ruling out being in-progress on it by the time December comes.

I also wrote a handful of other things, articles I didn't expect to write and a couple of reviews. And I read a bunch of books and sent a bunch of pitches and shot my mouth off on Twitter, resulting in more opportunities, for some reason. I'll never understand this. It's like how, in Mass Effect, rude-ass Shepard is treated exactly the same as kind-hearted Shepard. Why. People should be nicer to nicer people, shouldn't they?

I continue to count down the days until my little women's fiction story, "After Gardens," releases from the Wild Rose Press. You can preorder it on Amazon here. Eight more days!

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.

Interacting with the Material World

You might have seen it on social media, but KERNPUNKT revealed the cover art for my book. It looks like this:

Art by Mariana Magaña

It's so much prettier even than I imagined. I love it.

Managing the book release in early stages has reminded me a lot of wedding planning. A great deal can be done a long time in advance, but a lot of what must happen has to wait for the right moment to be planned. Calendaring and lists are essential. I was born to do that kind of work.

There's a bunch of other stuff going on, too. A long story I wrote, "After Gardens," known on this blog as "the hot springs story," is going up for sale at the Wild Rose Press as a standalone ebook in mid-June. This press has been supportive and helpful all throughout the process of turning "After Gardens" into a commercial ebook, and I'm very happy it found a home there. However, the way this ebook requires promotion is completely different than the way Ceremonials does. Different audience, different kind of press, different goals, different approach. It's like switching alphabets. For this reason, I've been dragging my feet on promoting "After Gardens," but I need to get going on it.

Less striking, but just right for the content 

It's being sold as women's fiction, which is about right. (For the record, it's hard to find markets for short stories that qualify as women's fiction. Both readers & publishers prefer that genre in book length.) I hope it does well for the press, of course, but I feel weirdly indifferent to this project. Submitting to TWRP was my last shot with this story before I trunked it permanently, so I'd nearly severed my investment in it when it was accepted. Of course I'm very happy they accepted it and are selling it, and I'll do my best to promote it, but it feels like someone else's work, and that makes it more of a chore and less of a pleasure to promote.

A few weeks ago I put together a schedule for writing the remaining hybrid film essays I have to write for the collection I'm assembling. I gave myself ample time to write them in order to be finished by the end of 2019. At the time, April still had some days left in it, so I set a goal to finish something else nagging at me that isn't part of this project, a partially written essay about abandoned places, before May began. I succeeded (and the process of writing it was fraught, so hooray, go me, I did something hard), sort of. I thought I had a three-strand braided essay, but what I actually had was one lyric two-strand essay and a separate, much more straightforward single essay. When I was finished with both, I knew the lyric one was missing something, but I submitted it to an urgent opportunity before figuring out the missing bit. (This is a rookie mistake and I'm ashamed of making it. Oh, well; I'll fix it and send it out elsewhere, when it's actually ready.) Mostly I'm pleased that I met the goal of finishing those two pieces, which have been dormant for over a year, waiting for me to put butt in chair and finish them.

There are three main threads in my creative work right now: a) books, b) hybrid film essays, and c) everything else. What I wrote at the end of April falls under c), but now that it's done, I have to return to b). The one I scheduled myself to write in May is a little obnoxious, as it relates to Jeanne Dielman, a static three-hour film mostly about a woman doing domestic chores, but I knew I needed to get it out of the way before I went wild writing about Mildred Pierce.

Earlier this spring, I bought a handmade creativity candle. I wanted, on the first day of May, to burn it and do a tarot reading to restart/redirect my creativity. I've written easily 100,000 words of book reviews in the past 18 months. That's great, but considering that volume of work, I think I need a genuine ritual to direct energy into the collection I want to finish, which requires more intuition and less brain than reviews.

I didn't succeed in that goal. May has come in strange. I feel like I need more time to think, and then I get bored and anxious inside my own head. I'm sleeping thickly, with upsetting, disruptive dreams. My emotions are labile, slippery. [private circumstance], in a way I haven't been since my early 20s, and I have no idea what that's about. Literally all of this could be stress, the unbearable stress of freelancing, built up over time, refusing to come to an actual head but bubbling ceaselessly under a thin and all-too-permeable layer of self-control.

I'm writing this here instead of somewhere private because it's all of a piece, the emotions and the creativity and the stress and the book(s) coming out and what I'm accomplishing and failing to accomplish. For me there's no separation between succeeding at writing that lyric essay - which I think is one of the more meaningful things I've written, if not really one of the best - and failing to do the laundry today. At the end of a given day, the measure of it is how much I have interacted with the material world instead of shutting it out. That's the only mark of success or failure I have to go on right now.

I worry that this sounds too bleak. I'm sorry. I feel weird right now. There's a big deadline coming up in about two weeks, so I could use that as an excuse, but of course there'll be more coming after that and after that; if it's an excuse, it's a permanent one. Seeing Avengers: Endgame yesterday overclocked my emotional state in a way I can't explain at all, since I don't have a lot invested in the MCU, and I'm still recovering from that, which is embarrassing to admit but absolutely true. Ceremonials being a real thing that's coming, all five of my desired blurbers agreeing to review the MS, people jumping in to offer their influence to help me and the book, is exhilarating, but also a brand-new experience that I don't seem to be integrating easily. I landed a fascinating opportunity this summer, but it'll drain my financial resources instead of adding to them, which is a very unkind cut at the moment. Etc. All the great stuff is as overwhelming and stressful as the less-great stuff, and often they seem to be entwined.

At least I cleaned the apartment over the weekend. Looking at the clutter was getting to me, and now it's a lot better.

Week On

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

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

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

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

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

As for the hard-work reviews:

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

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

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

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

Otherwise out in the world:

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

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

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

Mostly About Stuff I Wrote

Well, this has not been an especially fun week. Which is a shame, because some really good stuff of mine got published.

For BUST (yay!), I wrote about Mara Altman's well-meaning and intellectually diligent but fundamentally problematic essay collection, Gross Anatomy. In fairness: although her collection veered away from feminism in some critical ways, she seemed to veer back toward it in the short interview with her that was tucked into the galley. Part of me wishes I'd given her more credit for what was in that interview, but a) space did not permit and b) what's in the book is in the book, and I'm reviewing the book. It failed to break the link between women's value and their physical attractiveness, and I'm not letting it off the hook for that.

An article I wrote months ago, about the tandem video game practices of my husband and me, finally appeared on Crixeo. Editorially, it was great to work with them, and they paid me well and rapidly, but the accompanying picture and layout of the article were sort of disappointing (as was the lag time - although I've finally figured out that weeks or months of lag time is par for the course, it's still irritating). Nevertheless, I'm grateful for the chance to write publicly about how Matt and I play together. I've heard that other friends of ours with the same configuration (husband works in video games, wife doesn't but is familiar with nerd culture) do the same thing.

Only one book review this week, and it's a good one: of an anthology about 1990s culture, Come as You Are. It's up at Barrelhouse, where I've been submitting my work since the mid-2000s. If I weren't so distracted by my un-fun week, I'd be over the moon.

Finally, I wrote my first piece for Popscure, a listicle + analysis of five 1970s movies. I stole the "hijinks ensue" bit from a blog post I read years ago somewhere on the internet. If I could remember where I found it, I'd either credit the post's author or remove the bit, but I can't remember. If I stole it from you, please contact me and I'll make it right. The actual article observes something I noticed after I watched Rollerball for the first time (having previously seen Logan's Run approximately 267 times and the other films in varying quantities). I'm looking forward to a similar article being written in 30 years or so about Arrival, The Martian, et al. Not that I think 1970s fashion will ever be bested.

It wasn't a good week because I suspect that a pitch of mine got...let's say repurposed, after an editor I've pitched many, many times rejected it months ago, and then published a curiously similar article by a staff writer this week. My own article appeared at a different outlet, back in June, so there's a paper trail. And it could be a coincidence. But I doubt it, which makes the world feel cold and petty.

Plus, my concentration has been really unreliable lately, which has given all my work a slapdash feel to me, even if it doesn't seem that way to others. There's roofing work happening at my place, which is a terrible, scary thing if you work at home and are sensitive to noise. And the gods overseeing weather, the mail, and the very practice of sleep have all deserted me recently.

The good news is that I planned August unusually well. I did okay with deadlines, and I don't have any other books to read or review urgently this month, just edits and check-ups on stuff I've already filed and pitches to push through. I have a practical task which should take me the rest of August to complete, but I'm not very stressed about it. Hence, I have these last two weeks of the month, this and next, to laze around and worry about what comes next.

Oh, well, okay then

What comes next is a bunch of cool stuff in September. Interesting reviews and good essays. But also volunteer work at CSUN, which will get me out of the apartment, which is good for me like flossing is good for me. And a handful of books for October and November that look pretty good, even though many of them are short stories.

I've determined for good and all across this year that I just don't like reading short stories. I just don't! I have tried hard to enjoy them but I do not enjoy them and that's all there is to it. So many books seeking reviewers (instead of books that are already assigned) are story collections, so I wind up reading them a lot, and I'm as fair to them as I can be in terms of craft and characterization and whatnot. But the truth is, I do not enjoy them. I do not, Sam-I-Am. But hey, maybe they're like flossing, too.

From Me to You: Hard Truths

In the same week, I gave a presentation at CSUN about how to submit your work, and I got into a conversation about what to expect when you're submitting your work. Both of these situations made me realize that I've left something important out of the From Me to You series: hard truths. That is, the parts of the writing life that just suck and are painful to internalize, and that you can either learn about on your own over many annoying years, or that you can listen to crusty old me about today.

Elmore Leonard 

Ingratitude and Other Successes

The Thursday thing from the prior post still hasn't happened yet. Nnnghh.

A lot is going on for me. I'm stravaging along in freelancing, but I badly need a new website if I want to make a real go at that. I got turned down for a writing residency in the oddest and most encouraging way, such that I don't really know what to make of it. I spent several hours on Sunday writing a long political piece that I don't expect to be received well, but which I think will be read a lot. Lots of fear there. Also on Sunday, I got two acceptances, which were nice, but which - I can't believe I'm saying this - didn't mean a whole lot to me.

Lemme talk about that a little more. Five years ago, any acceptance would've been cause for me to buy champagne and dance about, but at this stage, some acceptances mean more than others. There's a hell of a lot more traffic going through my inbox, for one thing (pitches by the dozen, several regular submissions every month), and that means that instead of a lot of rejections and one or two acceptances, I get a metric ton of rejections and a handful of acceptances.

Plus, I'm aiming at very different targets than I used to. I've been keeping this conclusion to myself for a while, but I'm just going to say it now: trying to get literary short stories published is a horrible way to spend your time on this earth. I'll grant you that my short stories are not, on average, as good as my book reviews, which is probably part of why I've had more success with the latter than the former. But there are a few stories that I'm still trying to get out there, and the process is just so savage compared to reviewing and writing nonfiction essays. You spend months on a story, you submit it, and then you wait for six to twelve months for a publication no one aside from writers has heard of to say no. Or, if they say yes, you wait another several months to get your contributor's copy and no pay. This is normal. It could be worse.

Tom Gauld

With a review, you pitch them, and if you haven't heard from them in two weeks, the answer is probably no. You might hear from them in a couple of days, or even same-day. If they say yes, working with them to make your review better is, more often than not, fun and interesting.

The two acceptances on Sunday were for a piece of lovely smut that I wrote years ago, which has racked up so many rejections that I long ago detached from any emotional investment in it, and for a nonfiction piece, a list, written in Santa Fe last fall. I knew it was good, so I felt no surprise that it was accepted by a litmag that posts weekly lists. It'll be great to see these things in print, and for one of them I'll get a little money. But I'm waiting to hear on essays, stories, and pitches that matter a hell of a lot more to me than either of these pieces. That hierarchy has always existed, but until recently, the stuff that matters has always been a no. Now that there have been yeses for some of the stuff that matters, yeses for less important stuff don't feel as good as they used to. (Like taking ecstasy too often, I suppose.)

Which is extremely ungrateful, right? I should be happier than this for people liking my work enough to say yes. But it's kind of like when your teacher pins up your least favorite drawing and doesn't look at the other ones. Yay! (...?)

So much changes in this journeyman part of the journey. I wish I'd known. But I suspect there's no good way to tell people that they are going to feel and think differently a few years into doing something. If it could be communicated, it wouldn't be learned.

Out in the world:

My Columbine post from this blog was reprinted last week in the Big Smoke. I'm really pleased about this.

I reviewed Silver Girl for the Millions. It was a phenomenal book. At the time I read it, I'd read three or four debut novels in a row, and the different feeling of this one, which is not a debut, was a bit of a balm. Debuts seem to buzz a little bit with their own newness, and this was surer, slower.

I interviewed Natalie Singer for TRUE. I adored her book, California Calling.

A story I've been trying to place for five years or more, "C-a-l-l-a-s", came out in Luna Station Quarterly. I have many, many thoughts about this, but I think they'll have to wait for another time.

Byline Extravaganza!

Newsy/statusy post. Deep-thinking post probably soon.

This has been an extremely difficult month, for emotional reasons that are inappropriate to describe here. As well as the flu. As well as all the deadlines and bylines and accompanying promotion. As well as missing friends because I'm too frenzied to see them or answer their texts, but being in the awful position to consider them irritations because too much on my plate. I'm excited to say so-long to February and hello to March, in which I will be exchanging good criticism for good pay at least once, and in which my heart won't be cleft so bloodily in twain.

Depicted: Beatles fans and a security guard who forgot his earplugs.
Their noise = my brain. 

In the meantime, I opened a Ko-fi. This is a small-change donation site where you can chip in $3 for my Fund To Not Get Thrown In Debtor's Prison. The idea is that you're buying me a coffee. I appreciate any generosity you toss my way, but you're certainly not obligated to contribute. I've been blogging for free since, oh God, 2006? and don't plan to stop anytime soon.

I'm hoping to assemble a long-distance writing workshop for mid-March over Google Hangouts. I don't know how I'll do this, but so many people in places other than Los Angeles have told me they want to work with me that I don't want to put off any longer trying to make that happen. If anyone has insights on how to assemble a multi-person Google Hangout, or if you want to be part of a beta test team to see if it even works, PLEASE get in touch. I'm ready for any advice/help at all.

I believe I'll do How to Get Unstuck. I have plans to teach The Unwritten Scene and The Heroine's Journey, but because the tech will be new, I thought teaching something I've taught previously would be wiser.

Out in the world (it's a lot this time, but there'll be even more in a week, which is why this post isn't deep-thinking, because I didn't want to wait any longer to have time to think deeply in fear of overloading this section even more) (wow, parenthetical much?):

My review of Kingdom of Women by Rosalie Morales Kearns. Probably the best book I read in 2017, and I am pleased beyond measure to have placed my review in VIDA. It's still a bit surreal; even though I've had a lot of bylines in the past six months, the ones that have meant something to my nerves and bones have been rarer, and this one is like that.

My review of The House of Erzulie by Kirsten Imani Kasai in the Adroit Journal. I loved this book as a reader more than I loved it as a reviewer (it was right up my personal alley, but that's not a wide alley). I tried to communicate that by not being as rapturous as I felt about it but still indicating what the intense pleasures of the novel were. If you like Gothic lit and/or melodrama, this is your book, but if you don't, you won't like this.

Books I Hate (and Also Some I Like) with SAMANTHA FUCKING IRBY. I wish this byline indicated that we had met in real life, but as the title of her book promises, that will probably never happen.

"The First Snow" was published in Storm Cellar. As my work goes, this is pretty straightforward short fiction. In my dotage I grow increasingly grumpy about short stories, whether reading or writing, and I shouldn't make predictions that are unlikely to come true, but it feels like I won't be writing another short story for a damn long time. I wrote this two+ years ago, and I haven't felt called to short fiction since. So I hope you like this one. There's a paywall, but for the PDF it's pretty low.

My review of Anca L. Szilágyi's Daughters of the Air. Locus published it in their paper magazine last month and in their online arm this month.

A personal essay on Medium in the form of a letter to my teenage self, who was anorexic. I believe in this essay, even though certain parts of it are sentimental and other parts are controversial. Over the years it's been rejected by every single place I thought would want it, including a few once-prominent mags that have since folded or lost their good reputations. That's how long I've been sitting on this thing. So up it has gone, at long last, on Medium, on the first day of 2018's National Eating Disorders Awareness Week. Share it, please, with #NEDAwareness. You never know who will need to hear it.

Cue the Berets and the Wine

A few weeks ago, I submitted the Kathy Ireland story to a market, and almost immediately I got an email back from one of the editors asking me whether I considered it fiction or nonfiction. I had no idea how to answer this question. The real answer is for us to sit around with wine, in our berets, and talk until someone has to go pay the babysitter. But that's stupid and pretentious and inefficient to tell an editor, someone who probably just wants to forward my submission to the appropriate slusher.

By wordcount, the Kathy Ireland story (let's shorten it to KIS) is nonfiction. Most of its 1,600 words consist of me narrating about film and my experience at an opera, and all of those parts are either true or my true opinions. Then there's about 500 words of fiction: two sections of me imagining the interior thoughts of Kathy and of Meryl Streep.

After I finished writing, I wasn't sure myself whether it was fiction or nonfiction. My tendency is to think that a shred of fiction, of the intentionally invented, paints the entire work with that hue of literary endeavor. You apply Photoshop to a picture, bang, it's Photoshopped; you can't be a little bit pregnant. On the other hand, the KIS is, really is, nonfiction, for the most part, in a way that's important to me. I strained to tell as much of the truth as I could in the KIS, in a way that was new to me when I wrote it last spring but which has become closer to a default mode as I've written more stories like it.

I still call it a story in my mind, because calling it an essay would be disingenuous and calling it "this weird thing I wrote" is not very professional. When I describe and/or submit it and similar stories, I've been calling them "hybrid essays", a pretty and approximate term that doesn't mean all that much outside of academia and a small cadre of writers like Maggie Nelson.

A growing part of me is simply uninterested in how work like this is categorized. I'm interested in what other people will say about it, but in an intellectual rather than a personal way (like, cue the berets and the wine, I got no babysitter to pay). I don't have much invested in the labels that gatekeepers will put on the KIS and work like it. I get the need for that kind of labeling, because I know firsthand that it's impossible to figure out where to find Maggie Nelson in a given bookstore. Such labels, failing all else, are a practical necessity. I'm fine with that, I comprehend that, I haven't a whisper of anarchy in my personality and you couldn't convince me that there should just be a single label of BOOKS under which everything is tossed alphabetically. Definitely not.

But how I think of myself as a writer just isn't involved in such a calculation. I always try to tell the truth, and whether that's a literal truth which has a set of, let's say, journalistic standards to which I need to hold myself, or a life-truth that is best communicated using situations and characters and ideas that I made up - more and more, now, it's all the same to me.

What I have to say seems to demand that I cross the streams. So be it. I read Nelson's Jane: A Murder last week, and it felt so much richer for combining poetry and nonfiction, much more so than a normal prose book about the same material would have been. That's something I could stand to hear about my work.

But it won't be said about the KIS anytime soon. It got rejected by the market that wanted to know what I considered it.

My reply said that by word count it was nonfiction, but it did have a little fiction in it. And I apologized for not being able to answer the question properly. The real answer is that I want the reader to consider the work herself and tell me what she thinks. What I think of my work is unsurprising; I live inside my head full-time and am reasonably aware of my opinions. What others think of my work is much more interesting to me.

In fact, I'm extremely curious to know where other writers and readers draw the line between fiction and nonfiction. Do you, too, have this idea that one stitch of fiction makes the whole hem fake? Do you think that essays which stretch the truth, like John D'Agata's famously do, should be named fiction instead?

Bedlam Is Dreaming of Rain

This past weekend, I wrote the polyphonic story, and off it goes to workshop today. Eh. I kind of hate it, a little, though I like parts of it very much; I have no idea what my classmates are going to make of it; and I'm glad as hell that it's off my mind. That is, I'm glad it's outside my head, because the idea has been teasing me for months, and I'm equally glad my major assignment for that class is officially handed in.

If I weren't restrained by deadlines, I might have tried to do something a lot more difficult with this story: create a narrative solely through [pages and pages of] disconnected sentences that represent the thoughts of a half-dozen or so characters. Instead I did a little of that in between three longer fragments (less than 1K apiece), and ran out of time/patience/other intangibles to go deeper and further with a truly shattered narrative. If I don't run out of time again, this true polyphony may be how I revise the story before the end of the semester. Dunno. Depends.

This morning on my run I listened to Lydia Davis read a story of her father's on the New Yorker fiction podcast. I continue to learn all kinds of useful what-I-am-definitely-not-as-writer-and-reader from listening to this podcast, and today was no exception. But the combination of Lydia Davis and the above paragraph makes me think I should read some of her work and try again on the true polyphony. She knows a shattered narrative better than anyone I can think of.

Spring break is next week, but two of three professors have piled on the work, so I think I may actually be busier than if I had to go to class. Two long books, a presentation, a lot of studying. I'd hoped to get started on the scary story, which will be very hard to write (hence the name), but it may not come to pass.

That's all I have today. I'm looking forward to catching up with my life in late May. In the meantime, this is in my head, even though fire season is at the opposite end of the year.

Lodged

This past weekend I went to Denver and took part in a one-day workshop with Lidia Yuknavitch. I also reunited with some Midwestern friends I met last fall, which was lovely.

The workshop itself was interesting. I was thrilled to sit in a room with Lidia again, to have her tell me what to do on the page again. I was excited and intimidated to meet all the wonderful writers who attended, many of whom have just published a first book or are about to. But my experience did not match up with what seems to have been the preponderance of the experiences of the other attendees.

Sadly, the prompts did not speak to me significantly. I could see and hear from the others that the prompts worked extremely well for them, but I got little of use. Structurally, I got TONS of useful stuff, because the way Lidia teaches revision and self-mining, the way she insists on letting the work lead you instead of the other way around, is utterly refreshing, a potent reminder that writing is not done only in one way. If you are stuck, she will get you to put words on the page, guaranteed. But the prompts themselves brought me material that was distracted or irrelevant or just not up to par. Or even stuff that I've never thought it necessary to write about.

I actually consider this good news. I mentioned last week that I'm in the early stages of two stories, a polyphonic one and a scary one. They're really all I can think about in terms of writing (aside from the secret project, which is in the reader/feedback phase and thus I'm dying a thousand deaths and trying really hard not to think of it every second of every day). My mind is pointed quite specifically at those two stories, so introducing more ideas into that space led me to crappy, distracted work rather than work that had long needed dislodging.

See what I'm saying? It was a great workshop, but I was at the wrong moment for it.

However, I'm crazy glad that it worked for everybody else. There were a lot of writers in liminal spaces in that room, women who were between books, or ready to begin but uncertain as to how; people who were changing their professional ideas of themselves; ideas that did need dislodging. I was one of fifteen and thus it wasn't that important how I, individually, coped with the prompts.

--

Reading has been a weird journey lately. I was reading the second of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels at the same time as all the other reading for my classes, and then I finished it (more on that in a post to come soon), and now I am stuck with schoolwork only, right at the moment when I'm reading one of the hardest and most interesting books I've ever read: Cyclonopedia, by Reza Negarestani. It reads like a book of literary theory composed by a professor who has completely lost his marbles. It's taking me - I did the math - six times longer to read this book than it normally takes me to read books. But it's having an effect I wouldn't trade in for all the Georgette Heyer novels in the world. It's madness, but it's mind-expanding; tedious, but not tiresome. It makes me feel like there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of not just in my, but in any philosophy.

I owe so many emails to so many beloveds. But after a highly social weekend, I basically wanted to forget that other humans existed for a little while. After Matt picked me up at the airport, I crawled in my bed with the iPad and a bag of trail mix and my notebook and Cyclonopedia, and I didn't come out until dark. It was the greatest.

Bits and Bobs

--Read this. It's a lovely shortcut through common/rookie mistakes people make with submissions.

--I want to see Hamilton so badly that I may have half-convinced Matt to buy season tickets at the Pantages. I have virtually no interest in the other six shows of the season.

--I know I said I needed to rewrite a great deal of the secret project, but I had no stamina to do so until someone else read it. I gave it to Matt, and he read it last night. He got slightly misty at the end, and said nicer things about it than about anything else I've written. I think that might matter more to me than whether anyone else likes it.

It topped out at 17,000 words. That is not a book; that is not even really a novella. It's a long short story. But it goes through so much territory that it still feels to me like a book when I think of it. I don't know whether I will rewrite enough to make it longer (I had hoped for 30-40,000 words, novella territory), but the only reason I hope it will get that long is not to be laughed at when I present it as something that should be in its own binding, rather than stuck in with other stories. That's a dumb reason to compromise the project, a mercantile reason. So it might stay where it is. Matt gave me one (very good) suggestion for revision, but otherwise he didn't seem to think it needed radical effort.

Despite my New Year's resolution to present some of the project in a class, it's not going to work out for this semester, just for practical reasons like word count and consistency and whatnot. A professor offered to read it for me when I went to see him in office hours. I was flattered (and a little dizzy), but it's not ready for that yet. I'm not sure I'm ready for that yet.

--And I was pushed by the aforementioned professor into committing to an incredibly frightening story by the end of the spring. Like the Kathy Ireland thing I wrote last winter, it is weird, but unlike the Kathy Ireland thing, it has political dimensions that make me nervous as fuck.

--I started a new polyphonic story that is going in unexpected directions. It's kind of hostile. I hope it works out. And quickly; it needs to be ready by the 15th.

--Going back to "nervous as fuck", I sent out a highly personal story to a goal magazine after my friend Katie gave it (the story) a glowing review. For the first time ever, I'm in this position of half hoping they'll want it and half hoping they'll turn it down. I want to get it in the world, but I'm slightly horrified that it could be in the world.

--My friend Kathleen is involved in a wonderful illustration project (as she always is). Check out this campaign, after which her pictures will go into what looks like a great, fun, needed comics anthology for kids. And here is my favorite thing she's made recently:

I love the way she here communicates dialogue without writing dialogue. Plus, there's a bit of Reepicheep in there, who seems to come up exactly as often as I'd like him to in her work (namely, all the time). I think that's probably Puss in Boots, but I prefer to think it could be Reepicheep, with an odd furry tail. It's the stylishness with which his hat was clearly swept off moments earlier.

Excavation

I'm writing this (on Sunday) after three or four hours of working on this story I've been trying to write all fall.

It's excruciating.

The thing I'm doing is excavating, layer by layer, some things that shaped me from middle and elementary school. I'm smashing them all together for the sake of the story, rather than setting them years apart as they happened, but even fictionalizing them is emotionally exhausting.

As I was writing I remembered the construction of the tables at which I sat in the cafeteria of my middle school - how some of the tables didn't unfold right, and that meant the stool-seats wouldn't touch the ground, so we bounced up and down on them and the whole table shook on its casters. I remembered that the caf shared space with the school's stage - the place where I, as a member of the band, performed on concert nights. It was weird to eat with the stage right there, I think now. It was up, like a normal stage, elevated four or five feet from the cafeteria floor. And most of the time the curtains were open and the stage was empty, a black curtain hung over its cinderblock back wall. I don't remember a theater program of any kind existing at that school, so I don't think the stage was used that often.

It was the same room where we had dances. The same room where I got up the courage to gently poke fun at [name changed] before I asked him out. (That, my friends, was a good love, the one I had with [name changed].) The same room where I grew to goddamn hate early-90s soft R&B hits like "I Will Always Love You" and "End of the Road". Because they were so long and it was always so awkward to "dance" to them, such as dancing was in seventh grade.

cringe

Remembering the caf this well is a big deal, because I have forgotten almost all of the day-to-day texture of my childhood. I remember the general shape of things, I remember critical incidents, and I remember people, but, for instance, I don't know at all what the inside of the apartment I lived in from 1992 to 1995 looked like. I'm pretty sure that [name changed 2]'s backyard butted against the hiking trails with trees spray-painted bright fluorescent colors for the old folks' home nearby, but it's possible those hiking trails were next to a neighborhood I lived in during high school.

And there's so much I can't resolve. My friend Delilah lived in a trailer, but she lived on the street I walked across to get to the bus stop, which makes no sense, because it was houses on that road. What kind of bike did I have in those years? I know I had one, but I don't remember it. Was it the gray ten-speed? Could I have been tall enough for that bike when I was 12? I know I was best friends with Jaison, but how was I also best friends with [name changed 3] before she dumped my ass for the popular girls? Jaison and [3] didn't have a thing to do with each other, socially.

It's baffling, memory work, for someone with a terrible memory.

The Mad Scientist at the Podium

By gum, I have SO much to say here. I got workshop news and Yes news and readin' news. I shouldn't've neglected this space for so long.

Let's start with the recent stuff, and maybe go backwards in future posts. Last Friday I gave a reading at CSUN, along with my poet colleague Khiem Nguyen, and I thought it went quite well. You can see video of two of the three stories I read on my YouTube channel, or you can just scroll down a bit.

The first video includes a little of the introduction the GRS leader, Freddy Garcia, wrote about me and then read. (The video cuts in a bit late, doesn't focus right away, and then cuts out the applause and the high-five I gave Freddy when I got to the podium.) He was so thoroughly complimentary that the first thing I could say when I got to the mike was "Holy shit." He said things about me being a mad scientist, Frankensteining genre in exciting ways, finding the wounds of the reader and tracing them without flinching. (I think.) It was amazing to hear those complimentary things about me together with stuff that I knew factually to be true.

Freddy and I are in a fiction class together this semester, and this makes me simultaneously very happy and very sad. I have a big friendcrush and a big writercrush on him, but he is near the end of his M.A. and I'm right at the beginning, so I think this is the first and last time we'll be working together. Also, he's a poet (a good one), and as I've told him, I do not understand poetry and I fail at writing it, so I don't know how much use I will ever be to him as a writer-friend. In any event, that's Freddy, speaking first, and then there's me. The story I read in this first video is "Shade," which you can find in Hobart right here.

By the way, you pronounce my name exactly like it looks, cold-iron, like you wouldn't want to iron your clothes with a cold iron. But it's not Freddy's fault that he didn't know that and I wasn't quick enough to correct him. (I go by Katharine Mason at CSUN because it's my legal name.)

Then I read a second story, "Infinite Space," which you can find nowhere but in this video, because it's racked up 15+ rejections. People kept telling me after I was finished reading that they didn't know why no one liked it, because they thought it was good. I think I see why after reading it and watching this video - it's kind of samey and it ranges without satisfying - but I like it enough as-is that I don't want to pull it to pieces and re-build.

I know these videos are a little hard to watch, with just my face surrounded by a pool of darkness, but the GRS readings always take place that way, the only light at the podium and the reader blind to the 20 or so people in the room. I like seeing people when reading, but it's kinder to do it this way, especially if this is the first public reading the reader has given, which is often the case.

Also, I feel that I look a little like a full-throated bullfrog, but that's all right. I read well, and that's the point. I read a third story, too, the Biff Tannen story, but Matt's phone ran out of juice so it is lost to history.

I really enjoyed doing this reading. I enjoy reading, in general. I get nervous ahead of time, but then it goes well, because I've loved reading aloud since I was a wee girl and have worked hard to be good at it, and then I am happy and can't wait for another opportunity to read to people. Hear that, universe? I'd love to read anytime you'd like me to.

Publishment at Hobart!

Wow and double wow! My fiction is presented today at Hobart online. You can read "Shade", which runs just over 1,000 words, here.

I am so pleased and honored to be featured at Hobart. I love what they do, and it's been a goal of mine to have a piece there since around 2008. So, kids, follow your dreams. You can reach your goals. I am living proof.

I wrote this story as an exercise in the fall of 2014. It was well-received by the class for which I wrote it, so I fiddled with it a bunch to smooth off its rough edges and sent it out. It was rejected, the editors said, because the ending was too abrupt; I consulted with a writer-friend, she told me what was going on there, I fixed it, and voila. It isn't always so easy, but I got lucky this time.

The impetus was a warehouse like the one described in the story that I saw by the side of the highway. I was driving back into Los Angeles from the Santa Clarita area on highway 14, and I saw the lower legs and skateboards of a clutch of teenage boys buzzing around under a corroded roof. The story was not fully formed after I saw the warehouse, but the characters of the boys were, almost. (Who would go way out of town to a dangerous warehouse to skateboard? These boys, that's who.)

The social divide between two of them in particular came later. For Ray I was thinking of a boy I knew in high school whom I desired largely because he wasn't rich and preppy like the other boys. But for the pair of them, Ray and Colin, I was thinking of how young people can misunderstand the differing values of privilege and popularity when they're still in the closed terrarium of high school.

And that long long long sentence when Ray falls off his skateboard? I'd been reading Absalom, Absalom! and wanted to see how long I could make a sentence, whether I could make a single sentence draw the reader into the emotional peak of the story and then pull her back again.

I hope you enjoy "Shade". If you do, c'mon back here tomorrow. The timing of this week means I'm posting again on Wednesday, and there will be fiction then, too.

It's Kinda "Choose Your Own Doom Among Several Bad Choices"

I think I've been a little too noisy about my birthday this year, for no particular reason that I'm aware of, so I'll just say "it's my birthday" once more and then I'm done. Yay! Birthday!

by Roy Marvelous

I had a grueling weekend. I spent about 18 hours of it on schoolwork: a take-home midterm for my theory class (about which the less said, the better) and a short story for my workshop class. I'd spent enough time over the past two weeks thinking about the short story that writing it was less mental effort than usual, but it still kind of sucked to grind out 4,000 words in a single day. I honestly don't know if it's any good, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't suck. And it's finished. Which is what I needed to happen for the sake of the class. So, mission accomplished.

The story apes the format of a choose-your-own-adventure novel. I wrote three separate stories about three supernatural creatures: aliens, werewolves, and zombies. In the first two cases they are a little more metaphorical than they are in the final case. I created a few forks in the road for the characters to cope with and then put "turn to page X" instructions at the bottom of each page. I was so pooped from writing by the time I was formatting it that I wasn't enjoying it anymore, but when Matt read it he said the story was, in fact, fun to read. Which I hoped it would be.

Naturally, bad things happen to women in this story. I had swung away from that theme in 2014 by writing more about men and boys, but I guess I've swung back. Anyway, I'll keep you posted on how the workshoppers deal with it.

I hoped that this story would be a sort of rehearsal for the wikibook. A formal experiment that's not dissimilar to what I mean to do in the bigger project. The story was formally less hard than I thought it would be, which is good news. Of course, all the same writerly endeavors remain, pushing like ground stakes through the unusual format: characterization, tension, use of time, etc. I know not much better what to expect from writing the wikibook now than I did before I wrote this story, except perhaps that I can relax about it formally because that aspect won't be as hard as I thought.

The only other news is that we are finally out of Mercury being in retrograde, which I would have dismissed as hooey a month ago as something that affects me at all, but I do not think that anymore.

The best way I can think to explain the recent shape of my life is "my shit is all fucked up," and/or to direct people to this page. It is about Mercury being in retrograde in 2014 but I nodded along at every single thing. This is how my late September and early October has gone. Goddamn chaos all around me and I. am. not. chill.

On Sunday, though, I started feeling better. Like I feel after the Santa Anas have left town again. Their hot restlessness gets under my skin and I toss and turn, mentally and physically, until they go away. This retrograde business was closer to frenzy, and I am beyond grateful that it's ending.

We are heading into my least favorite time of the year, though - the Holiday Months. Give me strength, O Saint Willy the Shake.

You can get your own Sainted Writers candles here. 

Your Friday Yes: It's Just a Ride

I got pretty frustrated recording Your Friday Yes this week. I did a take I really liked, but it was 7.5 minutes long, was unkind about Jem and too revealing about work, and had weird color problems. I did another take that was ruined because a plant-killing squirrel kept dancing around on my balcony, taunting me, and I was so angry at the thing that I couldn't be appropriately lighthearted in the video. I did more takes that I screwed up for other reasons. I ended up with this one, which I like less than the 7.5-minute one, but which will do, and anyway by the time I was finished with it I was out of time to do any more.

Say yes to imperfect yes videos.

Another story to be workshopped is due in six days. I have about 200 words of it. My mental image of myself is of a Hanna Barbera cartoon character in deep trouble.

This is not to say that I've done no writing in the recent past. I wrote an essay last week that was serious business, something I'm quite proud of, but it's too short and probably way too personal to be workshopped. The story I have in mind shouldn't be a serious trial to write, but, natch, finding the time is going to be a challenge.

But hey, it's just a ride.

Mastery Is Boring

Yesterday morning I had an interesting dream about family, romance, a disturbed peace in the wee hours in a house full of people, a bell tower, a skinned rabbit, a snowy walk, and some other things. I'm hopeful that I can turn this madness into a story that's at least semi-coherent, because my first workshop is three weeks from yesterday and the only idea I had before this dream was too weird for workshop. (Maybe. We'll see after a few stories have come through the class.) Despite anxiety about not having written a standalone short story in over a year (!?!?), and the sense that I may be stuck not striking out into the experimentation I want to try because this idea doesn't suit it, I'm kind of looking forward to this story. It might be something good. I have lots of options for how to approach it, so I'm in the process of narrowing them down.

Yet I don't feel good at all about starting on something new before I've finished the last two stories of the secret project. It saved me, this project, and it was going so intriguingly and well, and I don't want to leave it behind unfinished. Even after the drafts of the last two stories are done, it won't be anywhere near finished, but right now, were the secret project a sculpture of Athena, I'd be leaving a humanish figure shaped out of rough clay with only one leg. It won't do. But I don't think I can write two stories and draft a third this week, in part because it's a short week, because I'm doing something amazing over Labor Day.

I drafted part of a post about the broad and odd concept of "favorite" in the hope of explaining my Labor Day plans, but it kept coming out dull and I'm too excited about the plans to stick them in something dull, so I'll just tell you: it's a writing and yoga retreat with my favorite living writer, Lidia Yuknavitch, and a yoga instructor named Jennifer Pastiloff. It's in Ojai, which is only about an hour north of where I live. I feel as if someone designed this workshop specifically for me, former yoga teacher and lifelong writer, and I'm still awed that I get to do it. I'll be staying in a yurt for the second time in my life, and this time, crickets of California, I will be bringing earplugs.

So. Although I wish I could spend all weekend with my head in my notebook, finishing this project to which I owe so much and getting going on the next adventure, I will either have to manage those thousands of words on the weeknights (while doing oodles of other homework), or I'll have to set the secret project aside and just work on the story that's attached to a deadline.

From Toothpaste for Dinner by Drew. This doesn't resemble my creative process much, because
I am insufferably well-prepared most of the time, but I love it all the same.

I've been listening to Elizabeth Gilbert's new podcast, Magic Lessons. I suspect the whole endeavor is rigged as an advertisement for the book she's got coming out later in September, but it's also a nice short podcast that fills in the gaps on my commute. She's a thoughtful and big-hearted person, and though I don't love the podcast, each installment has given me at least one little gem, a creative tip or standby that I need to remember or use when I'm writing.

The most recent episode's gem was "Mastery is boring." Yes. True. Once you have attained mastery of a subject, you're not striving anymore, not hungry anymore, and a lot of interest and motivation to keep at the subject goes kaput. I hear this and get it and believe it is true, but there's a but. Non-mastery is a good thing, since there's always more to learn and life's about the journey and yadda yadda, but it's also kind of disheartening for a person who never feels like she moves beyond intermediacy at anything. In creativity, in general, is there ever a moment of arrival? A safe, high plateau where I can look at the view, get a drink of water, breathe, feel content?

I've thought about this with regard to The New Yorker Short Story, and/or The MFA Short Story, which, as I read more and more of them, I realize I have little interest in writing. I have tried to imitate them, and I can do so with okayish results, but I don't enjoy reading them very much and I really don't enjoy writing them. The Joycean epiphanic short story, the Carver minimalist short story - these forms are just not what I like about writing. I know I'm drawn more to the novel, or to the story cycle, than to individual stories (and I know it's part of the reason I don't write stories especially well: that my bent is to novelist rather than storyist), but even when I do want to write stories instead of novels, this overwhelmingly dominant form of story is something that I could feel fine with mastering and then leaving behind for warmer climes.

But do I even want to try to master it? Wouldn't that be boring?

Game designers have already made significant strides to solve this problem by controlling players' mastery in stages. Which is why when I started to talk to Matt about this podcast gem he went "well, yeah" and told me how he and his co-workers build levels.
Oh.  

I guess that brings me back around to where I started this post: the story I need to write for workshop on the 21st. At this point I think I'm going to write it straight, like The MFA Short Story, but (again) that would not be very interesting for me so it might not turn out that way. I admit I don't know what the stories look like that I want to write, but I do know they look nothing like Carver and not a lot like what generally appears in the New Yorker. I don't think I can find an undiscovered country in fiction - few can - but I hope to find a milieu where apprenticing doesn't seem quite so tedious.

That Comfort in the Kitchen

Last Saturday I was in my kitchen, preparing lunch: beet wraps from this cookbook. (A version of the recipe using European measurement standards may be found here; translating it should not be difficult for American cooks and is worthwhile, if you don't want to buy the book. Which is a good and useful book, if, oh, just a little pretentious. Now, back to our story.) I've made the recipe a number of times before. It is not a small amount of trouble, because it has so many elements that must each be prepared individually - cook the quinoa, toast the walnuts, zest the orange, blitz the beets with the goat cheese (measuring all the while), grate the apple, slice the avocado. The resulting flavor combination is so unique, though, that I enjoy making it when I can manage to get all the ingredients together.

The prior week, I'd made a strange chilled borscht from this book, and I bought and boiled too many beets for the recipe. So I had some leftover cooked beets. I also had a whole package of unused herbed goat cheese from yet another recipe; I'd bought the right amount of bell peppers to roast, but twice as much goat cheese as I needed. This is how my kitchen often operates: I get the amounts wrong when I'm shopping, or I find when I'm on the point of making the dish that I should halve the recipe or we'll be eating weird borscht for weeks. This M.O. means that the following week I need to search my cookbooks or the internet for recipes that will use up last week's excesses. Never a dull evening.

I cannot read the caption on this and I badly want to

So I had leftover beets and leftover goat cheese, but they were in different proportions than the recipe called for. I also had herbed goat cheese instead of plain. Also also, I didn't have any walnuts, nor any raisins, so I was using pecans and just going without raisins. My common practice for cooking quinoa is to use half vegetable broth (or chicken broth, whatever's on hand) and half water to cook it in, because it makes the quinoa more flavorful. When the recommended cooking time is over, I turn off the heat, drape a doubled dishtowel over the pot, and put a lid on top. I let it sit for 10 to 15 minutes or until I need to serve. This is a trick I learned from a rice pilaf recipe years ago, and it keeps the quinoa from being either soggy or undercooked. The beet wrap recipe calls for cooking the quinoa in plain water with no after-steaming.

I was considering all these changes with amusement as I was grating the apple (half an apple, I've found, is plenty), and a lightbulb went on over my head so brightly that Matt noticed, from the living room, where he was occupied with something else. I stood perfectly still and let the light penetrate every brain cell it could, and then I noticed Matt noticing me.

"You okay, there?" he said.

"Yeah," I said. "I just figured something out."

"I can see that," he said.