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.

Chocolate Broccoli

I came to the blog because I wanted to write freely.  - HDT, paraphrased

This week probably evens out to neutral if I weigh it all together. Totally rotten stuff happened, annoying stuff happened, strong accomplishments happened, connecting with others happened. I didn't leave the house much, but when I did, I went to a reading and met someone cool.

I'm nervous about August 15, because a bunch of bills are due and a handful of deadlines are happening. I've got work due for the Washington Post and the Women's Review of Books and the books have not arrived at my house yet. I was supposed to have been working on a website recently, but I feel in over my head about it, and I need to put together the materials for a class I'm going to teach in September, but I've just been trying to meet review deadlines. Really I need to go back to using my Excel spreadsheet, with all the books & their release dates & deadlines, but it grew so tiresome to update that I am relying on post-it notes, which isn't working. Organization shall set me free, I know it. But staring at the pile of ARCs in terror is quicker.

My schedule for the year included writing a hybrid essay in July, and I didn't. It's about Last Tango in Paris, which I rewatched early in the month (or in June maybe?), and which, as I said on Facebook, I found very different than when I first watched it, when I was, oh, twenty. Part of this is life experience, but another part is watching so many movies in between and finding that Bertolucci, while he knows better where to put the camera than plenty of other directors, is not the all-time genius I thought he was. Others have done better, even if they didn't get Brando.

It's misogynistic, natch, but I found the misogyny the least interesting thing about the film, and certainly the least curious. Poor characterization, a sort of exuberant attempt at metatext, and unexpected inconsistencies leaped out at me a lot more than the fact that the woman of the pair is usually naked and the man is usually clothed, that he's a weird obsessive creep and she's I think actually a teenager?, and of course The Butter Scene. It's all so run-of-the-mill. Men are trash. I am Jill's utter lack of surprise.

Anyway, the essay is about the uses of the body, and in that way it only glances at Last Tango, so it shouldn't have been such a chore to write that I failed to sit down to it for thirty-one days. But I did. And now it's August and I've got to gear up to write about Mildred Pierce, which I've been looking forward to since last year. Can't decide whether to try and squeeze out two essays in the next six weeks or leave Last Tango for later. Scarf down the broccoli with my eyes shut so I can enjoy the mousse? Or just eat the dang mousse and put the broccoli in the fridge?

Or both at once, if you're an UTTER WEIRDO

My bylines are getting better and better, and my emails are getting answered more often, and I'm proud of that. But - and this is something I learned in high school, and continue to relearn every freaking year - the better one does, the more in demand one becomes, until one's responsibilities crush one like a steamroller crushes a cartoon character. I feel flat. I'm tired enough from assignments and successful pitches that I don't have the energy to pitch books I haven't placed. The backlog grows, and my deadlines loom, and I feel proud but also very tired. I want to get off. I want to stop. I want a week where I'm not exhausted either by work or by guilt for not doing work. Which, truly, are equivalent burdens.

Part of the problem with this profession is the timeline of it all. My non-review work has been rejected a bunch lately, which means it's time to find more markets to send it out to. If I don't do that now, then my lag time, while I wait for responses, will be much longer later, and I won't have anything useful to do with that time. It's like missing a round when you're round singing (eg "Row Row Row Your Boat"): it messes up the pattern down the line.

[This is part of why I haven't found it easy to slow down reviewing, because I worry that if I say no now, I won't have anything at all to write about later. Plus, the timeline for press publicity varies wildly from one book to the next. Sometimes I get info for a book next month that looks amazing, so I don't want to turn it down; sometimes I get info for a book in six months that just looks okay, but my schedule is open for then, so I don't want to turn it down. This is how I end up with two dozen books on my desk.]

The timing issues at the moment are a) researching more markets for the hybrid stuff that keeps getting rejected and b) the sense that I need to query agents. I did some research recently on who might want to see my essay collection. It'd probably be wise to query them now, so when they get back to me in a few months I'll have more completed essays to send them, and hopefully the essays I sent out on submission a few months ago will have gotten accepted.

See how it all fits together? It's obnoxious, having to plan like this, especially when the people you're planning for and around are often bad planners, or at the very least unpredictable.

Oh and: I'm now the sole reviews editor at Barrelhouse. That's great, for a variety of reasons, but it's...more. More work, more prestige, more worry.

In just two weeks I'm going on a kind of vacation, but freelancers out there know that vacation is a trap and a lie, even more so than in a reliably scheduled profession. I'm going to try and schedule out my time this month so as to treat the week like a vacation (I'm planning to write the Mildred Pierce essay that week, so it won't really be a break, but it will be a break from reviews & pitches & editing).

Before I leave, there's a lot to do. I placed a portfolio of eight reviews for September books, so I don't have to worry about pitching them all, but I should probably read at least half of them this month. That placement leaves me with two August books I still have to place and...four? reviews I've placed that I have to write (let's see: Steinberg, Skibsrud, Earley...okay, three), plus three books for Locus. I've settled in to reviewing three books per month for Locus, and I LOVE it, it's some of my most unpredictable and thus wonderful monthly reading, but it's a thing semi-permanently on the list.

Damn. Writing all that out. I guess I do do a lot. Maybe that's why I stopped using the Excel spreadsheet: it's horrible to see the traffic and not know what to do to thin it out.

Weekly To-Do, 3/10/19-3/16/19

I'm running out of time to get work done before AWP + the trip I'm taking the week after AWP. So I feel pressured as heck to bang out reviews and get them in. Pressure does not amount to motivation; in fact, it sort of opposes it, in my personality. Also, the correspondence was completely out of control this week.

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

Writing:
"After Gardens" edits
Ceremonials edits
Eerkens review
Cora Burns review
Notes for Banshee, Naked reviews

Reading:
Banshee
Gather the Fortunes
Moon of the Crusted Snow
Naked

Pitching/Queries:
Rolling Stone
ASAP (responded)
Film Comment
Heavy Feather (responded)
Stoloff
Birth Movies Death
Nylon
London Magazine
Masters Review

Followups:
Erika / George / Kate

Correspondence:
Jesi
Blake
Barrelhouse
Neal
Eric
WSJ
Robert
Kathleen
Diane
Kate
Ben
Megan
Bethany
Noelle

Other:
Lots of Barrelhouse work

Literary submissions x3
Promote Bird King review
Attend/present at writers' meeting

Weekly To-Do, 1/20/19 - 1/26/19

This week I felt utterly overwhelmed. The amount of work I've taken on is unreasonable, and a few things that are genuinely important have fallen by the wayside (applying for a residency, [secret thing]). I sat down with my book pile, my spreadsheet, and my husband on Saturday to figure out what to do, and although it felt a lot like me rambling and Matt sitting there with a listening-but-feeling-slightly-superfluous look on his face, it helped a bit. I have a short list of what to do next, I eliminated a couple of items from the pile, and I feel okay about February.

Then, later in the day, I secured a gig that is still secret, but is goddamn amazing, and calls for significant additional work and time. It would have been the wrong move not to leap at it, but the bare fact of leaping at it when I'm already overloaded is frankly illogical.

I really had no idea that going freelance and leaning into book criticism would turn out like this, and it's so hard to describe what I mean by "like this." I've had more/faster success (by my own metrics) than I imagined, but the path has been so chaotic that "path" doesn't really apply to the experience. Even Wonderland had a visible, followable trail through the weird woods.

If I consciously thought about what lay ahead, I believed I'd teach workshops once every two months or so, write a book review every now and then, find an agent or a press for one of the two saleable books, and publish hybrid film essays regularly, like every few months. Instead I wrote for horoscope.com, published 10 book reviews in one month, wrote twice for the most prestigious book criticism outlet in Britain, and [secret thing] [it's really weird, something I never even considered I'd do]. I have taught no workshops, gotten no nibbles from agents, and published no hybrid essays, though not for lack of trying. And I somehow made friends with the head of Dzanc, a publicist from the University of Texas, and Neal Pollack.

Does that get across how chaotic and contra expectations it's been? I mean, horoscope.com??

So. I spent a lot of time this week feeling overwhelmed rather than working, but I also had a small medical procedure and some unrelated emotional turmoil. Coping mechanisms (rewatching Rifftrax and playing very stupid phone games) intervened. I did pitch a lot, but I didn't meet reading or writing goals. The above might've been good as a separate blog post, I guess, but only after yesterday's flail session with Matt did I feel coherent about it, so in it goes with the to-do list.

Never Yell Help Unless You Really Need Help

The past handful of days has been kind of bonkers and I am not handling it well. I'm behind on almost everything: reviews, interviews, reading, pitching, volunteering, editing, applications, my personal life. The only thing I'm up-to-date on is publicity via social media. Which probably isn't a good thing.

Here is the news:

• sinkhole, in their generosity, has put me on their masthead as contributing books editor. I wrote a special bio just for them.
  
• I found out that my name and review are quoted in the paperback for Red Clocks.
  
• My piece on Medium has racked up 20,000 views.
  
• I wrote an op-ed of sorts about the Stephen Elliott situation, and it got me a flurry of messages and shares and conversation. This is the first time I've been in the vanguard of thinkpieces about a cultural issue instead of tagging along behind.
  
• My friend Ryan mentioned me in his podcast, the Coolness Chronicles.
  
• A close family member has been impacted by Hurricane Michael and I am worried. 

Here is the further explication of that news:

53% New Footage

Here's a few things I want to tell you.

1) Next week I am going to have a different byline every single day. A couple of them are pretty big deals to me. But it's going to be a lot of promotion all at once, so if you follow me on social media, gird your loins.

1A) I realized in writing the above that byline = the line where you say who it's by. That pop you heard was my mind being blown.

2) I posted the below on Facebook the other day, and it was popular + about my writing life, so I'm reprinting it here.

On Saturday, my husband spent two hours sitting with me in front of my Excel spreadsheets, website, and "book reviews" document folder, calculating how much work I've done since December as a book reviewer. The point of this exercise was to help me figure out, using DATA and MATH, how to keep myself from transforming into a little ball of stress and split ends.

This came out of a conversation we had last night when he admitted he was a bit worried about me and the stress I've been demonstrating re: my freelance work. I realized in the course of our conversation that he was asking me to put together a budget - not for money, but for time. I knelt next to his chair with epiphanic glee, telling him that of COURSE I can't manage my stress about freelancing, because I can't budget worth a damn! So he agreed to help me figure it out.

The results of our data-gathering were shocking. I've written 49 reviews in the past eight months. Forty-nine. That is so many. I knew it was a lot, but I could not have put a number that high to my idea of "a lot." In that same timeframe, I've published 14 non-book-review essays. Also a lot. (I begin to understand why I've made only middling progress on my book.) I assigned a difficulty number to every review I've written and have yet to write, and averaged out how much difficulty each month held for me. For example, even though I wrote half as many reviews in April as in May, April was a more stressful month, because the difficulty number was higher. SO helpful, and something I never would have considered doing, because my mind just doesn't work that way.

We discovered that, as of August 4, I am full up for the month in terms of work assignments. If someone asks me to write something else in August I will have to say no. I have eight reviews to write, plus two articles, plus placement of an interview, plus a 140,000-word book to copy-edit, plus pitches for October books, plus (probably) edits on the reviews I've filed that haven't been looked at by editors yet. Plus other things too fiddly and tentative to put in this summary.

In sum, I married an amazing dude, my stress is not imaginary, and numbers can be helpful instead of not.

3) I wrote something about James Gunn that, so far, has brought me a lot of heartache and not a lot of happiness. Oh, well. Here's the piece, but because it was a hot take, I missed something a few people have brought up to me: I could/should have added that no one ought to get fired unfairly, but for now, equal opportunity unfairness is better than the alternative. I'm not comfortable with anyone at all getting unfair treatment, but philosophically, I don't think that life will ever be fair. People asking for Gunn's reinstatement seem to think it can be, and I simply don't. What I was trying to draw out is that instead of living charmed lives, maybe white men are closer to living normal, sometimes-unfair lives.

A friend pointed out the uncomfortable political dimension of Disney kowtowing to a right-wing nut, which is important commentary, but which is not where I belong as a writer.

4) Other stuff out in the world:

I reviewed Hunting Party, a book written in French by Agnés Desarthe and translated by Christiana Hills, for the Kenyon Review. This is one of the most prestigious publications I've landed in as of yet. I never, ever could've placed a short story with the KR; I know my limits and I'm simply not that good a writer. Placing a review there has plopped me back into a circular line of questioning I've been running around a lot in the past six months: am I an unusually good critic, or is there a dearth of people willing/able to write book reviews? The mean side of my brain says it's the latter, that a smaller pool means that even a little fish will get noticed. But I can't pin all of the (middling) success I've had this year on that assumption. There's just been too much. Anyway, this book is really lovely, worth putting on a syllabus, and I'm proud and pleased to have placed the review at the KR.

That's actually it for this week. But next week, hoo boy. My tracker says six articles, reviews, or interviews. Might end up being seven or eight.

In My Wildest Dreams

Over the weekend, my goal was to write three book reviews. I'm staring down a May 20 deadline for four separate reviews, one of which I've already filed, plus two soft deadlines for today (Monday). I really hate working close to deadline; I know it motivates some people, but it just makes me crazy, and I produce poor work. I wanted to get more than half of the five remaining reviews out of the way this weekend, rather than sweating next week. And I did: I wrote three reviews, meeting the soft deadlines and a second May 20 deadline, and I finished reading the third May 20 book. Which leaves me with six days to review that book and read and review the last one. Doable.

I was feeling good about blamming through these responsibilities--even though filing one review got me an assignment for another one, on a fairly short timeline--and I went into the living room to re-sort the book piles everywhere. There's a pile for no-deadline books, a pile for read-but-not-reviewed books, a pile for reviewed-and-waiting-for-edits books, and a few small piles of send-to-friends books. I neatened these, and an epiphany hit me like a train.

That first paragraph? With the six deadlines and the process of meeting them? That's my life now. It's what I do every day: read, review, pitch, write. I have a spreadsheet with all the ARCs I've requested, received, or been assigned, with slots for whether I've read it, pitched it, etc. When I file the review, I gray out the title, and when the review gets published, I delete the row and enter the book on the next sheet, where I have slots for social media promotion and informing the publisher and etc. This is how I stay sane, this spreadsheet, its tidiness keeping me from terror.

self-portrait with two left hands

The epiphany: this is the life I dreamed of when I was a little girl. Other kids dreamed of being astronauts or ballerinas, but I wanted to be a librarian. I wanted to be around books all day long, every day, forever. As an adult, I learned, to my enormous disappointment, that being a librarian is less about books than it is about customer service (thank you, Withdrawn). I decided to be a writer instead, making my life about books I create instead of books created by others.

At the moment, most of what I write about is books. When I look around my apartment, all I see is books. Yeah, it stresses me out and makes me sad that so many of them are going unread while I read assigned books I'm less excited about, but still: being surrounded by books, and thinking about books all day long, was my fantasy life as a child, and now it is my actual life.

(This life has come about through a series of unlikely and wholly unplanned events. I feel the need to point out and emphasize this, because more and more people are talking to me about my publications IRL and I'm flattered and pleased, but I don't know what to say to them. I feel like a hapless cheater: it just...happened.)

The point is, I haven't really looked around at my book-stuffed life with WhatDoesThisMean-O-Vision until yesterday. And I feel grateful, positively awash in gratitude. Yet I also feel overwhelmed. I don't want to stop writing about books, but I do want to slow down. A little insistent voice is telling me that this pace isn't sustainable. And of course I'm getting paid for less than half of what I'm writing. It's a better average than before, but I'd like to convert the work I'm doing with books into work that will pay well, and that will lead somewhere.

Because over the weekend, I got news that a meaningful boost I hoped I'd get as a reviewer is not coming to me. That boost had a trajectory that made sense, that looked like a natural next step. But no. At least for the next year, that boost isn't mine. So I'm floundering a little bit on my trajectory, unsure whether I'm actually sitting in a catapult or just a swingset, swooping back and forth in the same non-progressive arcs over the sand.

more positive self-portrait, except for the cat, because I'm allergic
(books and cats always seem to go together in culture, but I REMAIN ALLERGIC)

Out in the world:

I wrote about the new National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama for the Big Smoke. I wrote this, revised it a few times, and then held on to it, trying to sort out whether it wouldn't be better if I shut up and let non-white voices say everything possible about this museum. I also didn't really want to call out my family; there's complexity there. I talked it over with a few friends and my editor, and ultimately it went forward, and I've gotten some compliments on it (from white people, admittedly). No one has showed up at my literal or digital door to punch me and call me a racist, so I guess that means it wasn't a terrible move to publish it.

I reviewed a pile of interesting books recently.

• So Lucky, Nicola Griffith, for The Arts Fuse. I've never read a book this streamlined, this angry--a book that feels like a pistol shot between the eyes, no more, no less. Nevertheless, it's not white-heat writing; it's multilayered and meticulous. Get into it. Particularly if you have chronic illness, or have a loved one with same. 
• Trail of Lightning, Rebecca Roanhorse, and Deer Woman, an anthology, for ANMLY. I loved both of these books, but I particularly loved Trail of Lightning. It was so well-assembled, so full of heart and wit, and I fell stupidly in love with the main character. She reminded me of my own Berra Thorntree, so much so that I queried Roanhorse's agent. Didn't even get a request for a partial. Oh, well. 
• Belly Up, Rita Bullwinkel, for LARB. I greatly admired this book but didn't like it. (You might; I suspect it's going to be acclaimed elsewhere.) I will watch this writer with eagerness and interest, in the hope that I can write her an unalloyed positive review someday. 
• Stormwarning, Kristín Svava Tómasdóttir, for the Women's Review of Books. This is actually a profile more than a review, and I am owed approximately half of the credit for the final product. My editor was amazing. The book is amazing, too (say it with me: feminist Icelandic poetry); buy it here. Alas, this profile only appears in the magazine, but you can buy a PDF of the magazine at this link. 

The Mule Philosophy

It's May! It's May! No more April! The stress of April is over! *ssssnnnniiffff* Ahhh, fresh clean May stress. Like warm laundry. Or pollen. *sneezes*

The pile of books for reading/reviewing continues to menace me. It's a good pile, with splendid talent and great variation in it. It's just real, real tall.

I finished an emotionally difficult essay the other week. It was one of my tripartite essays, like "The Girl on the Bike," and this one dealt with my father and Apocalypse Now. I sent it to my mentor and she showed me spots where I could expand it, and I kinda said nah, and she said, well, I'm just looking for stuff to critique about it because it seems finished. So I sent it out. I've had this essay on my back for a really long time; the idea's been around for at least two years, and I started the draft in mid-2017, but the emotional prod has been there since high school. Really, really glad to have it out of my cells.

As for what's next, well. I experienced a minor implosion about two weeks ago trying to sort out what's going on with my potential projects. Thank God my friend Lucas (who's going to win all the poetry prizes one day; get in on him now) agreed to listen to me while I raved for a while about what was in my head. He helped me sort through the ideas and figure out a strategy for knocking them down. Part of that strategy was making a list of everything on my plate, and when I recited it to a couple of friends later they just stood there with their mouths open. More than a dozen essays of varying complexity; more than a dozen book reviews. Two books in progress; four books shopping.

Having new ideas is not the problem. Having the time to write and read is no longer the problem. Having the focus and wherewithal to do justice to the ideas on paper is the problem.

Also, I learned that it's not just that I'm a delicate, whiny flower when it comes to writing every day. If I write every day (if it's on different projects, not a binge on one project), the quality goes down sharply by the middle of the second week. I banged out a bunch of reviews and a few short essays in mid-April to meet some deadlines, but on one essay I had to break for two and a half days before I could write it well. My sentences turned to mush. So it's not just preference. People who insist that daily pages are the only way to write are flat wrong. 

The only thing that's working for me right now is imagining myself a mule: plod, plod, plod, one hoof at a time. This book in the morning, that review in the afternoon. This research in the morning, those pitches in the afternoon. Don't think about next week, just think about the next hoof on the ground. I am a natural long-term planner, but in grad school I learned how to live one day at a time, one item on the to-do list at a time, one bite of whale at a time, in order not to lose my damn mind from the stress of everything I had to do by the end of the semester. It was a major adjustment. And one of the best lessons of my adult life, so far.

At this time, though, the inundation of review work and the occasional picked-up pitch for normal nonfiction essays means that the lyric essays and the novel are falling by the wayside. Immediate deadlines aren't abating at all; in fact, they're increasing. Which is bad. The big drawback of the mule philosophy: long-term projects wither.

I think this will resolve as I get further away from my day job, and as my reviewing settles down and stops depending so heavily on pitching. (The latter, for the record, works like this: the more I land pitches, the more editors want to work with me again, which means that I have to work less hard to land the next book pitch--or I just get books assigned to me. Researching and pitching is enough work that taking it out of the equation lessens my workload greatly.) I realized not long ago that April was a month of recovery for me--from the unfortunate way the day job ended, from the major transition I coordinated at the day job before I left (which caused me such stress that I dreamed about work constantly), from the continued forcing of my square self into the round hole of an office job for three and a half years.

It sounds ridiculous that I'd have to recover from a perfectly normal job that I once loved, but once I applied the idea of recovery, a bunch of my behavior and limitations made sense, so I can't really deny it. Toward the end of April I started being able to spend most of the day working instead of about half of it resting, and I started being able to do normal chores without world-shaking dread. It hasn't been that way since last fall. I don't feel all the way healed, but I feel better.

It helps that I am happy every day. 

Out in the world: 

I reviewed Allison Coffelt's tiny book about Haiti, Maps Are Lines We Draw, for Brevity. It was terrific. I always love working with Brevity, too.

I couldn't make this article work in a longer form for any publications I had in mind, so I put it on Medium. It's about a scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, but it's also really deep, about life and stuff like that.

I'm in this issue of Beacon Quarterly, but I don't know what my contribution looks like because I haven't gotten a copy yet.

I interviewed Neil Snowdon, who is totally wonderful, for Books I Hate. He gave it an enormous amount of time and thought; his insights there about horror are beyond the beyond.

After I read Ty Burr's fantastic book about the history of celebrity, Gods Like Us, I wrote a sort of review/endorsement of it essentially for fun, because I wanted the topic of his book (star studies) to be more widely known. This was years ago. It was too formal to post here and too short/casual to turn into something scholarly. I kind of desultorily looked for a place for it, and this week, it found a home: PopMatters. Burr himself retweeted it, generously.

Oh, that reminds me: I'm on Twitter now. I'd love for you to follow me, but just so you know, for now I'm using it for promotion rather than as a personal outlet. The latter is what Facebook is for.