Is There a Chance the Track Could Bend?

Migraine is bad today, and I'm feeling vulnerable and foggy but also have the desire to create. 

--

I've been thinking a lot about how my "career" as a writer has developed in the last three years, since Ceremonials was published. Part of this thought was inspired by the Cait Corrain fiasco, which I feel really sad about but have no useful opinions on. Well, no, my sole opinion is that Goodreads has too much influence on major publishing and editors need to stop using it to make decisions, but that leads me back to the main thing I've been thinking for the past eight months: I'm really glad I haven't landed a deal with a major publisher. 

It was all I wanted for a dozen years, all I was writing toward. I perceived a book deal with a real advance and lawyers and a publicity team and all that as a bunch of things at once: a stamp of approval from people who know what they're doing; access to a whole solar system of opportunities that I could never get on my own; and an invitation onto a specific monorail car. That car would take me up the same track as a jillion other writers and all I'd have to do would be to ride, rather than - as indie authors must - be the train conductor, the architect, the security officer, the repairman, the ticket-taker, and the rider, all at once. I wanted to be at ease on the journey rather than be Vishnu. 

Yes, Vishnu on a monorail, just work with me here

I want to emphasize that I wanted this, a Big Five book deal, very badly. I cried about it. I screamed about it. I felt jealousy so hot it left ash in my mouth. Then I hung around the edges of the book world for a few years, with the intent of learning more about how to get what I wanted, and what I observed changed my mind almost completely. 

Watching (from distances ranging from very close up to very far away) dozens of other people take this ride, I am so glad I'm on a different train. By riding passively, they have learned a lot less about where they're going and how the monorail works. They are locked into one experience; changing trains is almost impossible. Whoever is conducting the train takes riders into whatever neighborhoods the conductor needs to go, rather than what the rider wants to see. Sometimes you're riding in comfort and you get booted off the monorail for no discernable reason, and you have to walk all the way home. 

I didn't know any of this when I was yearning for that agent-contract-advance cha-cha. I learned a lot about the publishing industry and how it grinds up debut authors while I was a freelance critic, but I also watched a number of colleagues from my debut year go from hopeful and lucky to stuck and lost. Or just disappear. Because the rewards of publishing are great, but the disappointments can be greater, especially if you aren't emotionally prepared. 

Putting something into the world that you have created, but not healthily disconnected from, can be wrenching rather than joyful. (Ask any parent.) It can make you never want to do it again. If you can't maintain reasonable expectations, if you don't have someone telling you to calm down it's just a book there are hundreds every year, the process can turn you into a monster. I watched it happen in slow motion over Facebook with an acquaintance a couple of years ago. She forgot that it was about the writing. It's gotta always be about the writing. She hasn't published anything since. 

All that said, I wouldn't mind getting a big advance and a splashy marketing campaign for which I only have to show up, rather than create my own graphics, print my own postcards, arrange my own interviews, etc. One of my books that's out on submission, I'd like a large deal, please and thanks. But the cost of such money and idyll is significant, and I can never lose sight of that. 

--

On the book I've been researching and working on for about two years (not counting when I actually started it, which was 6+ years ago), I've now written 60,000 words, most of them in the past six weeks. I think I'm about 2/3 through the draft, but it might be closer to 5/8. The book uses Casablanca as a jumping-off point (forgive me if you're hearing this for the 80th time). That movie takes place in December 1941 and I started the story in 1935. Now it's 1939, and although I've seeded in many aspects of the movie, I've finally gotten to a place where I need to weave the movie's story more directly into the book's story. That's exciting, but it's also briefly stalled me out with how. 

I keep thinking about Wide Sargasso Sea and how angled and obscure it is, and how little I liked that quality when I read the book. (One of my secrets is how confusing I find Jean Rhys, because she's a writer's writer that a lot of folks speak of in reverent tones. I read two of her books and floundered through both.) I keep thinking about Alexandra Ripley's Scarlett and how much I enjoyed it despite it being critically trounced. I keep thinking about all the Pride & Prejudice Universe books (Mr. Darcy's Daughters et al) and how yes I like them, but stylistically they stick to the script. 

Among these choices, I'm not sure what kind of book I'm writing. I had a big dramatic conversation with Matt about this a few weeks ago, because I'm afraid I'm writing a commercial novel with transparent prose (Scarlett) rather than a literary novel with lyrical sentences (Sargasso). The former wouldn't be bad (and I've written work like it that I'm proud of), but it doesn't last beyond a few years. Then I get to thinking about whether I care if I have a legacy as a writer, whether it matters to me to be read after I'm gone or whether I want to be a perfectly fine contemporary writer who's suitably forgotten, and I don't know the answer to that. Not that I can really control it, who can control their legacy?, but I can decide what kind of book I want to write now, and that choice will ripple into the future. 

Ultimately the answer to this dramatic conversation was predictable: write the book the way the book comes out of your head and don't worry about your future. That's the advice I give to everybody and I'm usually able to give it to myself. This book has been so immersive and so challenging, and I've been so full of anxiety about whether I'm writing a book that belongs to me or not, that I forgot it temporarily. 

Anyway, now that Ilsa has moved to Paris and she's about to meet Rick, after I established so much about who she is and how she acts and what she wants, do I go impressionistic on the parts that were already laid down by Warner Bros in 1942? Or do I tell it from her POV as meticulously as I've told the story up to now? I started with the latter, but I'm pretty sure that day's work is bad for other reasons so I want to throw it out and start over anyway. 

--

We announced officially that I'm leaving XRAY in February. I learned a lot there, but it's time for me to go. Among a bunch of reasons, it was too much to promote Junk Film, write steadily, and also keep up with XRAY responsibilities. In fact it's still too much, right now, to do everything on my plate as a writer and still do XRAY, and I'm behind on stuff for it and Barrelhouse and my regular fucking life. Next year I've got at least one book coming out and possibly two (the Poltergeist anthology is the other) and I had to give myself more room. 

I know it's the migraine talking, but I really hope 2024 is better than 2023. I had a good year in a number of visible ways, blessings I do definitely count, but emotionally, internally, it was an extraordinarily difficult period. I'd like to spend less money and be in less pain, all around. And I didn't do a lot to uplift other writers this year compared to previous years, so I'd like to do better at that. 

On Lars von Trier and Leviathan

In grad school, I elected to write a literature paper about Paul Auster's Leviathan. I came to class ready to discuss the novel, certain I'd understood what Auster was getting at, only to learn of the existence of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan and to hear how Auster was reflecting that pivotal work. I sat there for a while, listening, and then raised my hand and explained that I'd believed the leviathan of the title was a sea monster, i.e. the whale that swallowed Jonah, and that allegorically that monster was a national fear and despair lurking under the scrim of American life in the late 20th century. No matter how wrong the class lecture told me I was, I still thought this was a valid theory of the novel. The professor, bless her heart, encouraged me to write my final paper on this theory. And I did. 

In my reading, the leviathan is a societal force. It resembles a beast of the deep, in that it is invisible, massive, and dangerous. It is large enough to gulp its victims without even stretching its jaws. The leviathan, this societal force, is the loss of identity suffered by the Baby Boomers when they discovered their failure to make lasting change, and it’s their dawning realization of mortality.

(me, 2014) 

I was embarrassed that I'd missed the point Auster had built into the book, but as I researched and wrote the paper, I came to believe that my point of view - although informed by contemporary ideas and influences rather than those of a classical Western education - was valid, too. I wrote about Vietnam, the atomic bomb, and President Carter's "crisis of confidence" speech. I got an A, as I recall. 

*

Lars von Trier first caught my eye in the early aughts with Dancer in the Dark. Good God did I hate that movie. I was young, and obsessed with Björk, and utterly infuriated that the bad guy won and the good girl lost. And while I understood what von Trier was getting at by shooting lush, stationary musical numbers vs. stark, wobbly handheld real life, it didn't keep me from being annoyed by the handheld sections. 

Some years later, everyone went on and on about Melancholia, so I saw it. My favorite part was the tableaux that open the film: slomo textures and painterly colors, in weird scenarios, flawlessly composed. The whole wedding section, shot in handheld not-great DV, I could not make head or tail of; why would he shoot something so ugly and annoying and dragged-out when he could provably make such beautiful pictures? The third section was more comprehensible, but still puzzlingly long and odd. 

More years passed. In 2021, I noticed while browsing Kanopy that both volumes of Nymphomaniac were available, and I had a strong guess that they wouldn't be for long, so I watched them. Snap. Everything fell into place. I don't know if it's because I'd watched Funny Games (2007) and absolutely loved it, reframing my sense of what extremity in film does and how it works, or because I'd simply gotten older, but I found Nymphomaniac a profound work, and a necessary one. One of those films that stretches cinema beyond entertainment, that makes itself a text to pore over. And that it was an extreme film, a blasphemous film, was part of its intellectual intentions! Oh, this trolling Dane, how I suddenly admired him. 

Deciding to start fresh, I watched Breaking the Waves, von Trier's breakthrough and still probably his most well-regarded film. It opened up my understanding of his reputation, and confirmed what I thought he was up to, but I didn't connect to it as much. 

Yesterday I watched The House that Jack Built. This review warned me away from it, but that review is wrong, I believe, and falls exactly into the trap that von Trier has set for the viewer. 

VERGE: 
No. No, no, no! You're constantly trying to manipulate me. 
And with children, the most sensitive subject of all.

Don't let him manipulate you! I want to shout at Richard Brody. See past your emotional reflex and turn on your brain. 

The central juxtaposition of House is violent death as an art form. Jack says this himself, repeatedly, trying to convince Verge that his project is to make art from murder. Verge insists that art springs from love. (Verge is Virgil, the greatest poet of antiquity, and Jack is a serial killer. Who would seriously believe von Trier positions Jack to win the argument?) 

I recognized that the sacred (art) is the profane (violent death) in this film. I had previously hypothesized that Nymphomaniac intended to make a saint out of the title character: a saint of sex, someone for whom sex is an all-encompassing, glorified pursuit. (She even has a wound that refuses to heal!) The conversation between Joe and Seligman is a religious debate, about fishing and sex and God and love and life itself; it's a debate between extremes - the debauched and the pure - but what's pure and what's debauched shifts over the course of the film. In Dancer in the Dark, an absolute innocent commits a brutal murder (and the most luscious visuals exist in the mind of the blind woman). In Melancholia, Justine's depression debilitates her, but she is also voluntarily in thrall to it - in love with her own sorrow. In Breaking the Waves, God gives Bess a mandate to commit sin. 

I started to see von Trier's project as crashing together two abstract ideas that it would be blasphemous (literally or culturally) to consider in the same breath. Sex and death is an old, easy collision for film, but sex and saintliness? Innocence and violence? He's doing extreme cinema, but the characters' behavior - the sex and violence, in graphic detail - is a ruse. The extremity is in putting together ideas that have traditionally remained far apart, in considering them as reflections of each other. It's sort of Hegelian, and sort of deconstructionist, but (impishly and) productively so, in a way that doesn't leave the deconstructor with a vacant lot. 

Yet. 

As ever when I have ideas like this, where I think I've figured out what makes challenging art hang together, I remember Leviathan. Someone else has probably figured out the metronome of this art, and it's probably a more classical rhythm than I could recognize. Not knowing Hobbes, that day, will haunt me forever. 

Then again, I found support in the text and in other scholarly articles for my theory of Auster's novel. I argued that theory successfully, in my own small context. 

Lars von Trier in a promo photo for The House that Jack Built. Knuckle tattoo is not pshopped

At the end of all this thinking and developing, I don't want to look up the prevailing theory of von Trier's cinema. I don't want to learn that I'm either parroting an established idea or that I'm dead wrong. I'd rather hang out here, where I semi-privately think I have a good idea that helps me understand a challenging group of artworks. I don't want to be Pauline Kael, so idiosyncratic that she can't really be trusted. As a critic I try never to lead with my ego or my unique reactions - otherwise I'd gush about Gothic literature and melodramas, insist that Shutter Island is better than Goodfellas. I know better than to confuse those preferences with informed criticism. 

On whose authority am I right or wrong about Lars von Trier, anyway? Yours? His? Richard Brody's? Please. A consensus about art is fragile and temporary. I'd like to know about that consensus, and perhaps be informed by it, but being part of it doesn't sound appealing. 

So I shall declare that I loved The House that Jack Built, and that I think von Trier is much less of a troll than he is creating art via unusual variants on thesis/antithesis. There's some trolling, sure, but not the malignant kind. Around 2005, he said a film should be like a stone in your shoe, and no matter how hard I squint, I can't find a way to disagree with that sentiment. 

Desire Paths

Recently, I spent about a week writing a short story set in the imagined West. It integrated Lovecraft mythos (or, so as not to invoke the name of a hilariously antisemitic and inadequate prose stylist, cosmic horror). This mix of genres is known as "weird West." 

I've been wanting to write a Western for some years now. I'm (increasingly) in love with the genre, particularly with how its environment is quite precise but its manifestations are nigh infinite. That is, the imagined West is a desert place, usually but not always in America in the late 19th century, with saloons and fast guns and horses and leather. Within that, you have certain character types: villain, antihero, innocent, Othered enemy. You have big, vague forces: the Law, modernity, temptation, Mother Nature, money, grief, the shadowy past. But you can mix and match any number of other elements. Gender and race can be whatever. Technology can be anachronistic, if you want. (Neo-Westerns have an even more flexible set of characteristics!) Because no one really believes the imagined West is factual, it can be molded to the story you want to tell. That's why the weird West is such a fertile blend: Cthulhu slides into the setting with ease. 

While trying to overcome anxiety about the Casablanca novel (I have added a decent number of words to it over the past month, but I might have bitten off more than I'd like to chew with the historicity), I wrote this story, based on an idea of Matt's about two opposing characters who both accept supernatural favors on one particular night in a silver mining town. I had so much fun writing it, and I broke a bunch of my own rules of revision, including reading today's words today (you gotta let 'em sit!) and submitting the day after I finished a draft (YOU GOTTA LET IT SIT!). 

The submission was rejected almost immediately. This was part of the feedback, edited to keep from spoiling the story: 

"...the opening scenes lacked a bit of tension. I think if I had more insight earlier on into the narrative stakes (such as what [x] in first scene could mean, or what [y] could signal), there would have been a bit more of the urgency I needed." 

Let's be clear. I'm quoting and unpacking this NOT because I'm wounded about a rejection. It was such fun to write this story that I felt rewarded as soon as I finished the draft, and I submitted it with a higher proportion than usual of I-want-someone-else-to-love-reading-this and less than usual of I-want-to-be-published. And, by now, I virtually never care about story rejections, because that's a numbers/persistence game, not personal or meaningful. 

I'm unpacking this feedback because I find it remarkably self-contradictory. In writing this story, I surrounded x and y with enigma so as to keep the reader reading, which, as Donald Maass taught me, is what tension is. How can a scene lack tension when it has enigma? If I'd explained what x and y meant on the first two pages, why on earth would you keep reading? 

It's possible that the first few pages didn't move quickly enough. It's possible that the rejecter misspoke, and meant "lacked a bit of clarity," not tension. But, based on my experience of rejections over the past five years, I think it's more likely that the rejecter didn't know what they meant. I think it's likely that the rejecter didn't like or even notice the sentences (which is part of what I enjoyed most about the first two pages: polishing the sentences until they rambled and rolled like a bowlegged sheriff), and wanted the story to move faster, to jam plot in immediately. 

Sentences matter more than plot to me, but that's exactly why I haven't done very well with my genre fiction. It might not be the root of this rejection - I am not stupid enough to think this story is perfect, nor single-minded enough to think it's perfect for this market - but I suspect it is. 

This rejection is the latest in a whole catalog of occurrences that are making me rethink, altogether, what I want out of a writing career. It bookends the first item in the catalog: an agent rejection for my bad-film book, which I got sometime in 2021. The agent didn't think the book had major-press possibilities. The way she explained this to me, I got the message: she is an agent who makes big deals, not little deals, and she didn't think she could sell the book as a big enough package to make it worth her time. I respected this, but it also surprised me, because I know how many copies make a bestseller and I know the size of the bad film/cult film audience. But I'm not a major critic, I'm not cruel, and the book doesn't have little bite-sized essays, so you'd have to market it pretty carefully. 

Hmm. Okay. So, I used this feedback to rejigger my expectations and I queried smaller or specialty presses for the book. A year & many rejections later, I've finally contracted the book to a terrific indie press, Castle Bridge Media, and I'm thrilled to be working with them. But I really did think this book was going to go to a big press. The result isn't a disappointment, but it's a different path, an alteration in the trajectory I thought I was creating with my first two books. 

I thought the idea was to step up and step up until I had an agent and a comfortable contract/series of contracts. I thought I'd edit and write reviews until I had a book or film column. I never thought I'd make a living wage by writing alone, but I did think I'd be able to stop hustling, stop hanging my own slate and instead have people or objects (publicists, agents, my own recognizable name) to do that work for me. 

These are the ideas I'm rethinking altogether: the ladder, the progression, the comfort, the reliance on others. None of them have come to pass, even though I've jumped through many of the necessary hoops. 

My friend Dave Housley has been running Barrelhouse for many years, and he has published seven books. I don't think he has an agent at the moment, and he's never brought a book out with a major press (although he has with big indies). Writers of many types and sizes know and respect him as a community-builder and a good dude. He's held a day job unrelated to writing all this time, and I doubt anything about his life or work is going to change. I don't even know if he wants it to. He keeps writing and making what he wants, and plunging himself up to his elbows into writerly community and working, and he doesn't have to be a hotshot to do those things. 

I'm wondering if this is a preferable model for my writing. Should I stop thinking about remuneration more completely than I already have? Should I make things and trust that readers will show up somewhere along the line? Should I stop trying to build this thing like a city planner, and instead let my interests make desire paths wherever they want to go? 

I'm considering making my weird West story into a Kindle single type thing for 99 cents. That's where I'm at. I tried self-publishing in my 20s, with a (deliberate) ripoff of VC Andrews that I couldn't figure out how else to sell, and I failed at it and swore never to do it again. Now that I've got 15 years of experience on that writer, I'm thinking about breaking her oath. I don't want to submit this story for two years only to hear feedback that doesn't make sense, I don't want to trunk it until I finally have enough genre stories for a collection (...it'll be a while), I don't want to rely on others who don't understand my work to promote a story I can damn well promote myself. 

I want to put stuff into the world that I love, and help people discover it who will love it too. Doing that has been the goal all along, but it's always been complicated and ritualized and tediously reliant on gatekeepers. Now, it seems possible that I'm at a stage where for some parts of my work, I don't need or want to trade gatekeeping for greater prominence. I've watched a handful of acquaintances go through this and never thought it would be me. And, let's be clear, I could not have published Ceremonials or Plan 9 on my own, nor can I publish Junk Film or most of the manuscripts I'm shopping on my own. But this little weird West story? I think I can. And I think I might. 

I just need to let it sit a little longer. 

Slightly Popular

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--

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

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

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

Fixes

Here is a true story. 

Hummingbirds are fascinating to watch. Up close they're a lot more like big bugs than like birds; they're a bit louder than you expect and they hover unsettlingly, changing direction unpredictably. But through a window, there is nothing better to watch. They have weird tongues and their bodies change shape to a surprising degree when they're perching or flying and they're fast, fast, fast. 

Over the summer I started taking the trouble to hang a feeder outside my office, after years of not bothering (you end up needing to refill the feeders all the time and it can be messy and irritating to do so). In late summer, a goldfinch began visiting the hummingbird feeder, every day, mid-morning. Because hummingbirds are so tiny, it looked huge on the perching area, and I worried that it was scaring the little guys off. 

I went to the bird store and asked what I should do. The bird guy said he'd never heard of that, a goldfinch drinking sugar water. I shrugged and said well, it's happening. He sold me an inexpensive sock feeder full of nyjer (a tiny black seed), in the hope of moving the bird's interest to that instead. He asked me to follow up with him, because he was curious what would happen. 

The sock feeder didn't work, at first. I hung it outside my husband's office window, a ways down from the hummingbird feeder. Still that big ol' finch would visit to sip sugar water every day, setting the feeder swinging with its giant tail and bright yellow breast. So I went back to the bird store, where I talked to a different guy, and he, too, had never heard of a goldfinch drinking from a hummingbird feeder. I bought a much more serious feeder, a part-metal contraption with a yellow top and a huge cylinder to fill with nyjer. Which I did, fill it with nyjer. I hammered in a new nail to hang the sock feeder outside my window, two feet or so from the little red hummingbird feeder, and hung the serious feeder outside Matt's office. I hoped to graduate to only having the serious feeder, far enough away from the hummingbirds so as not to scare them off, and not to have to use the sock feeder (much messier and harder to fill) at all. 

A few weeks went by. Nothing happened at first, and then everything happened at once. Dozens of finches and other assorted little birds started visiting my patio, first in the morning and then all day long. Eight of them at a time would cling to the sock feeder, pecking out nyjer and chirping at each other. A pair of them sometimes sat on different sides of the feeder with their tails crossed companionably. They found the serious feeder, too. I bought bigger bags of nyjer and took video. 

Now, months in, my patio is stippled with poop and covered with expended nyjer seeds. Every time we go out there, a flurry of wings and panicked twittering greets us as we (accidentally) scare off the birds that sit and feast all day. Hummingbirds still hang around my patio, some, but the finches and sparrows are the stars of the show. 

I bought some little nests in the hope of slowing the damage they're doing to my flowering bushes via occupancy. I'm in the market for a large birdhouse for the same reason. And I bought a hook to hang the sock feeder over a planter so I don't have to sweep up so much. More stuff to try and coax the patio into looking how I want it to look, to keep it from being presided over by the damn birds. 

All this started with a single goldfinch who liked sugar water. In trying to solve that problem, I created a whole constellation of problems, and trying to solve those means repeatedly adding things to my life - buying solutions. 

Weeks ago I started believing this was a metaphor. 

I don't want to stop feeding the birds. That would be the simplest solution, to just stop, let the finches find another hookup for their nyjer, go back to having just the one hummingbird feeder. But I like them; they're distracting when I'm lonely and worried about my writing. Yet they trouble me: am I making them too fat? am I somehow attracting rats to the patio (I see them crawling along the wall in the evenings, and I found one dead, half-under our grill, earlier this week)? am I lowering the property value with a plethora of tiny poops? will my star jasmine ever recover? 

The Sopranos begins with Tony obsessed with the ducks in his pool. As a metaphor, it's neat; the ducks act independently of him, and he takes few actions to change his relationship with the ducks or the way he lives alongside them. No contradictory elements or uninterpretable events. I remember my husband telling me that his family would always scare off ducks that hung out in their pool, because they were messy, and there was a river literally on the other side of the house that was better for their needs. That's less a metaphor than it is a story about wildlife colliding with suburbia. Like seagulls that mistake empty parking lots for ocean: I used to see that as sad, paving paradise to put up etc., but now I think gulls just have bad eyesight and it doesn't mean much. 

What's going on with me and these finches is something else altogether, something to do with cascades or fractals or sheer stubbornness. Unintended consequences. Soured generosity. Capitalism and the nesting instinct. 

Coincidentally or not, at present a mental health crisis is slowly unfolding inside my head, doubling in size with every unfurled edge. With that lens I see this whole situation as a seminar in failure. At each stage, I guessed about what would help, or fix, and implemented those ideas. In helping or fixing one aspect, I opened the door to other challenges, none of which is more or less tolerable than the initial one but which require new and different fixes. Each new round, through my current lens, contains failure, and failure, and more failure. 

Maybe what I've done is cause dependency in wild animals, which is always a mistake. Maybe I've made my patio a haven for exactly the wrong kinds of animals (today rats, tomorrow coyotes?!) Maybe, in not just giving up and leaving the feeders empty, in continually trying to "solve" this, I've given myself a distraction, both when I sit in my office and when I make a shopping list for the home & garden section at Lowe's, from what I really need to be doing, which is producing new work. It's what I've needed to be doing for five months. Instead, I'm mucking around with finches and pruning my bushes until they start to die. 

That might be too harsh an analysis of what's happening here. In nimbler hands, this story would be a minor plot line in a comedy, like Bridget Jones's disastrously remodeled apartment (in the books) or the adventures of Maris Crane. Everything looks like Stalag 17 to me right now, not like The Apartment. But this metaphor, if it is one, doesn't feel tidy enough to be comic. It's sloppy and strange, as wild animal encounters so often are (or should be), and I don't know what to learn from it. 

Maybe nothing. Maybe we learn less often from true stories. 

Anthropomorphosis

today's mood

Today I sent six queries for Plan 9 publicity and a few followups to agents as well. I've done as little of this work as I possibly can over the past year, but today, suddenly, I had the energy to do it. I also slept well two nights in a row after not sleeping well for several weeks on end. 

I'm not going to say that all of this was because I spent time with horses on three of the last five days, but that certainly made a difference. 

It's very strange to learn something fundamental about yourself well into adulthood. In my case, it's that I like animals. I didn't spend any time with animals when I was young (other than small pets like hamsters - I do not like rodents, I've learned), and only in the last few years have I discovered how much I love being with horses and dogs and, when I have access to immediate hand-washing and laundry, cats too. Time with animals has the capacity to turn my mental health around, which is a genuine surprise. 

The time with horses was spent at a ranch about an hour north of me. I'm going to try to go there once a week until I can't anymore. The difference in horsemanship between this (western/endurance riding, starting wild horses under saddle) and the stable I worked at for 18 months (dressage) is so profound that the only similarity is the existence of horses. The disparity, the feeling of starting over, led me into a bunch of panicky questions about what I'm even doing with myself and my time, what the years past 40 are going to look like for me, what this is all for. How do I do this? How do I continue it? 

My brother-in-law is a highly strategic person (on the outside - what do I know about his insides?). He planned his life really well, from college on, and now he's living it. That sounds satisfying, and yet seems impossible for me to do. I admire it but am perplexed by it. What if life changes in a way not accounted for by his plan? What if he discovers he badly wants something unstrategic? 

--

Today, my second book finally appeared on Amazon, even though it's not yet available to order on Amazon. Baby steps. 

--

Making plans for a three-city visit back east in March: central Virginia, Philadelphia, NYC. Hope I'll see you there. More details as I know them. 

-- 

EDIT TO SECTION BELOW: holy crap, I already blogged about this, five years ago. I said some of the same things then that I said below, but I was not as nice about it then. Shame on me for not looking more carefully at my own past words. 

-

Recently I had cause to remember and link to this essay. In reading it again, I found that I wasn't just remembering it for the reason I linked to it, which is this passage: "And I will say, too, that he was a man obsessed. While the rest of us were screwing around with our crushes and debating whether or not to use our middle initial when published, he was writing. I mean really writing, all the time, sometimes a rumored fourteen hours a day." 

The "he" is Joshua Ferris, who hit a grand slam with his debut novel, Then We Came to the End. He was lucky, but here is proof that he also worked extraordinarily hard. There is no one way to be a successful writer, especially because "success" bears such a range of meanings. But most assuredly, you are more likely to find whatever kind of success you want if you put your head down and write than if you engage with Writer Drama (which is...significant). 

The passage didn't teach me this lesson, but it did crystallize it: you can talk about writing, you can have sex about writing, you can dramaturge about writing, but the only way you will publish is by actually, literally, provably writing. 

But again, upon reread, this article opened up a bunch more avenues for me to think about. 

• On the way things get magnified in a small, absurd environment like an MFA program: "It would be years before I realized that almost none of it, at least what had happened in workshop, mattered at all." 
  
  
• On room at the table: "We are entirely different writers and, as such, weren’t competing at all. I would tell myself that his success had no bearing on whether or not I would have any, and dwelling on it only amounted to a shitload of wasted time." 
  
  
• On hard truths: "I’ve been forced to come to grips with what all writers must face at some point: No one — and I mean no one — except for you, and maybe your mother, cares if you write." 
  
  
• On what's required of a male writer vs. what's required of a female writer post-MFA: "A few years later his novel came out [...] and he was lauded as the Second Coming of Franzen. What was I doing during this time? [...] Taking care of my sister during her bout with cancer." 
  
  
• On the toxicity of the standard MFA workshop: "It was so terrible, Geoffrey so unnecessarily unkind, that if it had happened to me, I would have been in the fetal position in the corner of the room after the first fifteen minutes." 
  
  
• On why MFAs are a terrible idea for people who haven't developed enough integrity of self to compartmentalize work and relationships, as they're too young, with too little life experience: "...but then you hang out, you drink, you make out, you realize you are competing with one another for the prize of attention and praise and connections and publication, you have inappropriate crushes on people who are not available but act like they are, and yes, hello, all of that taints your views of other people’s work." 

I don't agree with everything Mims says in this piece. But it's an extraordinarily useful essay to dissect and consider, whether you think MFAs are good or bad, whether you think spite is a useful driver of hard work or not, whether you think it's fine to mix sex with writing workshop or not. I think this essay should be required reading for anyone applying to an MFA program. 

--

I'm working my way through BoJack Horseman (which is extraordinary). I do not think it's related that I've found a new horse place to spend time, but it sure is fun that they're happening together. 

Water and Waiting

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

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

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

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

— Katharine Coldiron (@ferrifrigida) June 30, 2021

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

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

In other news. 

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

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

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

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

Sameness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Smaller the Pond

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the Scheme of Things

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

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

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

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

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

--

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

--

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

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

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

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

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

I don't know. 

--

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

--

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

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

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

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

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

--

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

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.

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.

Directing the Fire Hose

The biggest news in books this week is this piece about an editor and author, Dan Mallory. He is not as blatant a grifter as Anna March and not as absurd a plagiarizer as Ailey O'Toole, but he lied his face off for many years about his life and his hardships. In return, he attained bigger and bigger rewards from the ivory tower and the literary world. Eventually, he picked up a seven-figure advance for his novel and a big hunk of money for the screen rights.

Here's what pisses me off most about this article: Mallory got so many things that I myself want, audiences and editorships with people and publishers with whom I salivate to be involved, acceptance into fancy colleges that I never could have touched. He did it dishonestly, and that meant that he took on prestigious editing positions before he was 30. I'm doing it honestly and it's taking me yeeeears even to get a book published. I'm not capable of Mallory's dishonesty, so I must do it the slow way, and that annoys me in a desperate, hollow kind of way.

Talent plays a role, certainly. Mallory surely has talents as a writer and salesman that I do not, and I acknowledge that it's not an equal situation, where I definitely could've had a $2 million advance if I'd only lied once or twice. But I can't help thinking if he could pull off this shit, why can't I? 

I mean, the wages of this kind of dishonesty are eventually ruin and ridicule, and that isn't ideal. And I don't really want to be the person who got a big-deal editorship by lying my way into it. But it seems like he did genuinely good work as an editor (when he could be arsed). He needed a shortcut to get there, and he needed to lie a lot in order to not come into the office for months at a time (what the hell was he doing during all that time, by the way? GTA and cocaine?), but while there, it seems like he did strong work as a book promoter and editor. And he did come through with an actual book that seems like it sold enough to justify its gigantic advance, even if it might've been a tiiiiiiiny bit plagiarized. He needed the boost of lies to get where he wanted to be, but he seemed to succeed, mostly, once he was there.

What might a shortcut like that do for people who've done enough work to earn it but haven't gotten the breaks they needed? What makes Mallory think he deserves success enough to lie to get it? Who deserves easy success and who doesn't? I'm full of questions about this stupid guy, ballasted by irritation at the publishing industry for being this way, for giving monetary success to people who are good at marketing and midlist success to people who are good at writing.

Last night, someone with interested followers retweeted the Horse Latitudes piece, and it got a whole additional boost of attention and reshares and likes. Today, the author of a book I reviewed tweeted the piece to her significant following and hello, reshares and likes. Lately I'm writing about books and in publications that have momentum separate and apart from what I do in relationship to them. That means I have to do a lot less to make my name visible, which is nice, but weird, in terms of what I'm accustomed to.

About a year ago I decided to hustle whether I liked it or not, and that's what I've been doing, just putting my head down and hustling, even though I mostly hate it. Regular newsletters, regular blog posts, checking on pitches once a week, sharing every single review on FB and Twitter, handing out my business card to anyone who asks if I write, asking for advice about everything I don't know how to do, applying for all possible reviewing jobs, asking for masthead placement from editors I write for regularly, saying yes to weird opportunities that I don't know if I'm qualified for, emailing editors who've rejected me to say they might be interested in X piece that just went live, agreeing to review as many books as I can and worrying about time and placement later, hustling hustling hustling hustling hustling hustling hustling hustling hustling hustling hustling hustling hustling hustling hustling hustling hustling hustling hustling hustling hustling hustling.

I need to slow the pace of all this, or at least change the direction of the applied force. I never again want to be as overwhelmed as I was in January, and part of guaranteeing that is saying no instead of yes (more often and more firmly. An editor a couple of weeks ago interpreted my "I really don't think I can" as "yes!"). Part of leveraging the momentum I've given myself, and now, the momentum others are starting to give me, is directing the fire hose at my hybrid essays instead of my criticism. I never want to stop writing criticism, but I'm concerned that if I keep going with it as I have been, I won't be able to pivot toward the writing that matters to my guts. Nor will I have time (thanks, Chris).

As I wrote previously, my momentum has gotten me rewards I didn't foresee, and not (yet) the rewards I hoped for. I could've lied and said that I got an MFA from Columbia even though I got an MA at CSUN, and say that I used to slush for Conjunctions even though I used to slush for a miniature audio-stories outlet. With those lies I might've gotten further faster, with a lot less trouble and disappointment, and I might've been able to point the hose directly at the work that mattered most to me from the beginning. I could've proved myself once I was there.

But would I want something I had to lie to get?


Out in the world: 

I reviewed Esmé Weijun Wang's The Collected Schizophrenias, which I think is going to be a major book, for LARB.

I reviewed Tonic and Balm, a novel in stories by Stephanie Allen, for the Masters Review. It's out on Shade Mountain, one of my favorite presses, and it's about a nearly lost realm of entertainment: the medicine show.


This picture is completely unrelated to this post but it's hilarious and I need an image so. Click to embiggen if you don't see what's funny. In other news: I am an eighth-grade boy.