〰️〰️ IN 〰️
These are things I read, saw, ingested, ate, listened to, or just generally thought about in the last month that I want to share with you. It's an incomplete list (obviously) but it's the stuff I'm still thinking about.

Baskets

I took a basket weaving class! I don't actually want to make baskets per se, but I'm really interested in incorporating some weaving elements into a series I'm working on. The class was taught by Peeta Tinay, who makes amazing, huge, and intricate baskets.

In these sorts of classes I am often a slightly annoying student because I come in with my own ideas about what I want to be doing with the skill at hand. In this case, for example, I didn't actually care about making a functional basket. Instead, I wanted to learn the baseline techniques so I can make some more abstract shapes to use in my sculpture work. Some teachers of classes like this are flexible, and some are not. Peeta was, which was really great, and she let me noodle and make something a little weird while the rest of the class made (beautiful!) functional and finished pieces.

I'm now taking these skills and trying to apply them to some prototype sculptures that I will eventually make much larger.

Sentences

I also am signed up for this year's One Story Lecture Series, and the first one was taught by Chelsey Johnson and was focused on "The Inner Life of the Sentence." It was a delightful little class, where we looked at amazing sentences and then did some exercises where we wrote and rewrote sentences with different things in mind: tension, contrast, abstraction, information.

Johnson argued at the top that "the blueprint for a story can live in a sentence." Sentences can bring in the contradictions, the tensions, the context, the life of a story.

She also said something I really loved which was that "sentences are bodies in a way, they have their own internal desires and lives and needs."

Shows

I saw a bunch of live shows and music this month:

• Gender Ordeal came to town and I got to see Tuck, Mattie and Calvin be funny and delightful at El Rio.
• My lifting coach Haley and her band Silver Shores.
• Alash, a band of Tuvan throat singers at Ashkenaz in Berkeley.
• Lucy Dacus at the Legion of Honor, where she played acoustic versions of songs, including unreleased music off her upcoming album. Dacus is probably my favorite living songwriter? I love her so much. I actually have a document that maps my writing projects onto Dacus lyrics because there is always one that fits. Two of her songs are on my PROJECT TEONANACTL playlist. Seeing her perform at this weird, intimate venue was such a treat.

Books

I started reading some books, and finished a few of them:

• Oribtal – I didn't finish this one. It's beautifully written, but nothing happens. I can do a short story that's all vibes but I need a novel to have a tiny bit of plot.
• Beautyland – I loved this so much that I bought a hardcover copy to have in the house.
• Glass Houses – I just began this one and it has a true banger of a first line: "It feels good to wash the blood off her hands." Okay! This is also the BOOK CLUB BOOK this month! Join us on the members only Discord to talk about it. I'm really excited to finally be reading the book with folks, after a long time of not being able to find time to keep up.
• The Other – I only read this during the day because it's scary and I'm a wimp!
• The Lathe of Heaven – For whatever reason, I never managed to read this when I was reading a ton of Ursula K. Le Guin (including her more obscure books like Orsinian Tales). And I want to write a little more about this one:

Reading it this past month, I couldn't stop thinking about AI hype. The premise of The Lathe of Heaven is that a man named George Orr can influence the real world with his dreams. Orr doesn't have control over this — he dreams, and then those things happen. When he confesses this to a psychiatrist, the man attempts to control the world using his dreams. The book explores ideas of control, unintended consequences, of self and self determination.

It's also about the ways in which you put vague terms into a system (in the case of the book, via general suggestions made to Orr right before he has one of these dreams) and you can't really necessarily control or predict how those inputs will actually be processed and acted upon. It's about attempting to control the future with no regard for the cost that control has on the person whose body/mind is generating the outcome. It's about thinking you can simply say a few things and imagine a future. It's about not sweating the details, or caring much about collateral damage.

It's not a perfect analogy, but all of these things feel of a piece with how technologists talk about and use AI. They plug their little ideas into a model built on the back of underpaid writers and artists, and assign great meaning to the outcomes even if they can't actually control them. They want to rewrite the world, however it happens. Regardless of how many people might die along the way.

Awards

TESTED won a couple of awards and was shortlisted for others! We won Gold in the Sports Podcast Awards in the Best Equality and Social Impact Podcast category. And we won Silver for Best Olympics and Paralympics Podcast and the Diverse Voices Award. Thank you to everybody who voted for the show for this one!

Tested was also nominated for an Ambie award in the Best Documentary Podcast and Best History podcast categories. It is, as they say, an honor to be nominated!

Tattoo(s)

Perhaps the most literal "in" this month was the tattoos I got! Ink, literally in my body. One was just finishing up the big siphonophore I have on my leg, that was started during another session. The other is a bit more... dramatic.

It is a well documented phenomenon that after a tattoo — particularly a big one, or one in a particularly painful or visible place — people experience anxiety, panic, or depression. Your brain chemicals are all out of wack, because you've just experienced what is essentially an extended injury. I've had this before with big tattoos, and I know it's a thing, and I know that it always passes. I've had this tattoo idea sketched out and on my wishlist for five years now. It wasn't impulsive, and I'm very aware of what hand tattoos can mean for a person (no lectures on this, thank you in advance!).

And yet! When I got home from this tattoo, I completely freaked out. What in the world was I thinking?! It's right there! ON YOUR HAND! I spent the evening spiraling, and even the next day woke up and thought to myself "what have you done!?"

It has passed, as it always does. I'm really happy with it, and I'm pleased with how it's healing. Funny how these things work, isn't it? Even when you can explain, logically, all the reasons that everything is fine. Even when you know that this might happen and you know that you always get over it. You still can't quite stop the panic from showing up.

Fix it Friday

A few dear friends and comrades of mine have started doing something we're calling "Fix It Friday" (credit to Liz Neeley for this idea and name). Every other Friday we're getting together to work on something: a project, a repair, a workshop, a training, a research project. These can be personal, like learning how to fix something that's broken in our houses. Or they can be aimed at activism or community support.

Here are some of the things we'll be doing together:

• Going over some personal digital security practices and figuring out how to divest from certain tech companies.
• Learning how to identify an overdose and administer NARCAN.
• Doing a Stop the Bleed training.
• Learning ASL Emergency Signs together.
• Learning how to wheat paste protest signs.
• Learning how to sew, solder, and fix things.

I'm building our list of ideas from a couple of resources and other lists including:

• Some Actions That Are Not Protesting or Voting
• Action Items
• Thirty lonely but beautiful actions you can take right now which probably won't magically catalyze a mass movement against Trump but that are still wildly important
• Pillars – principled collective action & loving defiance

Glass brain!?

My friend Ed showed me this paper called "Heat-Induced Brain Vitrification from the Vesuvius Eruption."

In other words: a person's brain was turned into glass during the eruption of Mr. Vesuvius. (!!!!!)

From the Smithsonian Magazine writeup: "Pierpaolo Petrone, a forensic anthropologist from the University of Naples Federico II, was examining the man’s remains in October 2018 when he noticed “something was shimmery in the shattered skull,” as he tells Alexandria Sage and Franck Iovene of Agence France-Presse. Petrone immediately suspected the material was brain tissue that had undergone vitrification, a process that occurs when tissue is burned at a high heat and transformed into a glass or glaze."

Here's what the glassified (yassified?) brain looks like:

This made me curious if there were other examples of this kind of thing – a person's organs being turned to glass due to extreme sudden heat. If you search "vitrification organ" on google scholar most of what you get is studies on cryopreservation. "Vitrification currently appears to be the most likely pathway to successful cryopreservation of organs," claims one paper from 2004 published in Cyrobiology. I have my doubts about that. And certainly the kind of vitrification they're talking about here is not the same as the glass brain from Vesuvius.

However! There is a paper from the same team that discovered the vitrified brain that look as the preservation of neurons in that brain, and writes that "The eruptive-induced process of natural vitrification, locking the cellular structure of the CNS, allowed us to study possibly the best known example in archaeology of extraordinarily well-preserved human neuronal tissue from the brain and spinal cord."

But really the main thing here is: BRAIN TURNED TO GLASS!!

Other reading/listening/etc

• Ursula's List → "But just eliminating something that produces fear doesn’t genuinely work toward justice or peace if it ratchets up someone else’s terror."
• Trees with a secret message, which features the idea of a “vivifact,” as in living artifact and the far less poetic "culturally modified trees.”
• That Which Is Unique, Breaks → "Love and effort create magnificent places. Genius inhabits them. People go to them because they know such places and landscapes offer consolation of the soul, and the soul is not fooled by substitutes. We let those places turn our moods, we want them to, they do so easily. Today it is not always hard to find such places, but why is it difficult to make new ones?"
• Make Life Possible → "A basic condition of life is the creative adaptation to changing conditions—and you, my friend, are alive and living."
• The hardest working font in Manhattan, which is a delight even if you're not a font nerd (I'm not).
• It's Safer in the Front → "Even when all really is hopelessly lost, it is generally better to act boldly, sending a signal flare of hope across the generations, the way the Communards and the Kronstadt rebels did. In so doing, you at least preserve the possibility that others will be inspired to continue attempting to build the world you desire, so that one day, your dream might be realized—even if without you, at least due in part to your efforts."
• This new album by Alsarah & the Nubatones which bangs!
• My friend Lazerbeak just put out a new EP of really soothing instrumental stuff. Highly recommend.

〰️ OUT 〰️〰️

This is stuff I wrote, created, or published.

PROJECT CUBENSIS

Big news here! I finished a first full draft of the novel. It's a bit short (currently about 60k words, and I'm told that the sweet spot for a debut novel is around 80k) and there are certainly things that need fixing, clarifying, rearranging, and all that. But it's a full draft! And I went through it twice to at least clean up the obvious, glaring issues that I could find.

I treated myself to a printed copy of the draft, for my archives.

Now it's off to my agent Caroline who will read it and let me know what she thinks. I always include a list of questions at the very end of everything I send to her, so she knows what I'm thinking about (stuff like: is the ending unsatisfying? are [character]'s motivations clear?). But the big question is: is this something? Can she imagine this working as a book that an editor would buy? I hope so, but you never know!

As you can see from that image, the current title of this novel is Theodora. That will almost certainly not stay the title. It's too vague and it's not going to draw someone in who might see the book on a table at a store. Monica Byrne recently had her patrons vote on potential book titles for her latest book draft and I'm considering doing the same at some point! I just have to come up with some good options first.

PROJECT TEONANACTL

It will take Caroline a while to read the full novel draft, so in the meantime I've started working on PROJECT TEONANACTL which is a psychological thriller novella (I think. Length is always a bit mysterious to me until I get going). This one is both similar and quite different from CUBENSIS. They're both dual POV stories about two people who are searching for something. But TEONANACTL is set today, while CUBENSIS is set in the early 1900's, for starters. CUBENSIS is dark but often sort of funny. TEONANACTL is not.

Starting a new project for me means generating my little structure of files and notes in my Obsidian vault (I wrote more about that here and here). The core set of files I have for every fiction project are:

• [PROJECT NAME]-research
• [PROJECT NAME]-detailed plot outline
• [PROJECT NAME]-ongoing notes and tasks
• [PROJECT NAME]-note template (to use for each scene I write)
• [PROJECT NAME]-character sheet
• [PROJECT NAME]-vibes

Most of these are pretty self explanatory, but I'll say a little more about the last two.

[PROJECT NAME]-character sheet

For every fiction project I work on (including short stories) I fill out a little character sheet that I've created. This is essentially a list of prompts that I've cobbled together from various writing guides and classes, plus a few of my own additions. Here they are:

Core Questions

Who they are:
Core misbelief/flaw:
Where they begin:
What they want:
What they must learn:
Where they end:
Third rail:

Aesthetic

Who you'd cast for a movie version:
Everyday outfit:
What they wish they could dress like:
What do they wear to bed:

Backstory

First time they had sex:
Their job:
How they feel about that job:
The most embarrassing thing that has ever happened to them:
What they wanted to be as a kid:
Allergies:
Music they listen to:
An image they're drawn to and why:
Do they believe in ghosts why/why not:

[PROJECT NAME]-vibes

The ✨vibes✨ document is where I compile all the more nebulous stuff that doesn't go into research but still feels important as far as setting the tone and imagery and visuals of the story. For every project I create at least one playlist (sometimes two) and keep a whole folder of images that I collect as I come across things that feel like the story. (I use Eagle to clip images for this purpose.)

Here, for example, is a subset of the images I have in my vibes folder for PROJECT CUBENSIS.

I have a really clear picture of where TEONANACTL is going, so over the last two weeks I've managed to write about 10k words of plot summary and get through the whole story scene by scene in outline form. This doesn't mean that's exactly how things will go when I write it. Sometimes things change, characters assert themselves, plot holes become evident when you have to actually get from a to b to c. But I'm very much a planner and so it helps me feel ready to write when I have a pretty detailed map of where I'm potentially going.

My goal for next month is to write, write, write on TEONANACTL and hopefully have a finished first, shitty draft by the end of June. (My ultimate goal is that by the end of this year I have at least one book-ish length fiction thing that could be pitched to editors.)

Office Cleanup

The last thing I did (which could count as both an in and an out, really) this month was to go through my office and actually evaluate all the books I've amassed and figure out what stays, what goes, and how to organize the things I'm keeping.

All told I'm donating about 100 books to the San Quentin Library program.

In going through all of this I found some wonderful gems and surprises of things that I didn't realize I had kept. Which include:

• Several zines made by friends like Soleil Ho, Lucian Walcowicz and Ingrid Burrington.
• Maps and information about several botanical gardens.
• Coasters from the early days of Star Wars land at Disneyland (in LA).
• A whole year's worth of In-Fisherman magazine that I ordered on eBay years ago in order to fact check something for this WIRED story.
• Temporary tattoos from Jess Zimmerman's first book launch.
• A VHS of the classic film Homeward Bound.
• Several commemorative pins.
• A whole pile of old business cards and work IDs.
• Several unexpired gift cards! Yay!

Along with all those words I also:

• Wrote you two posts last month, the last 〰️ in 〰️ out 〰️, and a post for subscribers only called "crying over clay."
• Finished and sent off final copy edits for the short story I have appearing in the We Will Rise Again anthology (out later this year).
• Got a few more rejections on my short story PECKII V, and so I sent it out to a few more places.
• Wrote about the latest World Athletics rule suggestions on the TESTED newsletter.
• Drew this little Venn diagram for a friend who was asking about how to prioritize digital divestment. When all these tech companies seem horrible, where do you start?

My pitch to her was to begin with companies and apps that are both morally problematic, and also are not trustworthy functionally — by which I mean you cannot actually trust them to keep your data and personal information safe. So for example, any META entity would fall into that middle of the Venn diagram. Companies that have either had huge safety breaches, or a past track record of working with law enforcement or governments to hand over information (e.g. Amazon). Start there.

• Reclaimed a bunch of clay from my home studio after putting it off for months.
• Created a bunch of small prototype sculptures for this series I'm working on, along with some of the bigger forms that I'll be adding to with mesh, sand, rocks, weaving, slime, and more.
• Made some slime for the aforementioned sculpture (and learned how to make it better next time).
• Applied to the last set of awards for Tested (for now).
• Spoke to some students at the New School about Tested and sports journalism.
• Tested all the new cups for the updated Wirecutter guide to menstrual cups.
• Survived.

Once again this email is quite long. If you're reading these in your inbox, it might be easier to do so on the web? Sorry, I am quite long winded I guess. I'm sure it will happen again!