〰️〰️ 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.
The big thing I did in September was a two week sci-fi writing residency at the Banff Centre.
I'll be honest: I had no idea what to expect from this residency. I've never done a residency before, and the information we were outlined a fairly sparse schedule. This was a sci-fi writing residency and I am, primarily, a journalist. Would I fit in? Was there some secret knowledge about how to prepare and succeed at residencies that everybody else already had? Would I be laughed out of the room immediately? Or, worse, quietly ignored because I was not really a fellow writer.
I'm a reporter, a job that incentivizes a form of lowkey stalking, so I looked up every single person in the program before hand. This did not assuage my fears in any way. These writers had published extensively, had written books, had won all kinds of awards and other fellowships. I was, in fact, an interloper here. They would not necessarily be wrong to ignore anything I might have to say.
But for some mysterious reason, they didn't! And in fact, I had an amazing time. Everybody in the program was kind, welcoming and incredibly generous with their time. The mentors (absolute legends Amal El-Mohtar, Premee Mohamed, and Ai Jiang) were just as sweet. I was given an office (which I tried to decorate to look a bit less like a place where taxes are prepared) and a wide open schedule use however I might like.
Each day, my schedule looked like this:
6:00-11:00 — WRITE/EDIT
11:00-12:00 — Go for a walk down to the river
12:00-1:00 — Lunch
1:00-2:30 — Gym/Run
2:30-5:00 — Reading, hanging about, chatting with people
5:00-6:00 — Hide in my room to recharge from all the social things
6:00-7:00 — Dinner
7:00-9:00 — post dinner socializing
I arrived with the goal of revising a novella I'm working on. In this month's supporters email I'll share the summary of that project and a bit more about it (you can become a supporter here). And I succeeded at that! And in fact, I finished that a little early, and wound up writing two new short stories as well. One of them will appear in COYOTE for our Halloween Week. The other I'll revise and perhaps submit places.
But perhaps more importantly, I feel like I really did make some new friends! I want to direct you all to these folks because their work is really great:
Serena Lukas Bhandar // Ben Ghan // Michelle Milton // Nara Monteiro // Kelly Robson // T'anchay Redvers // Jo Berry // Kirk Bueckert // Kerry C. Byrne // Chinelo Onwualu // Lisa Brideau // Blue Gludal // Cynthia Liu // Naomi Okabe // Rebecca Peng // Sasha Ravitch // Champ Wongsatayanont // Cara Loverock (who doesn't have a web presence which I respect the hell out of but I also didn't want to leave her off the list!)
The Banff Centre has a bunch of writers residencies coming up, themed around different genres, and I definitely recommend applying. Plus, you get to be in Banff, one of the most beautiful places there is.
horror
If you know me, you know I'm a complete weenie. I am very easily scared and I dislike the feeling! I once had nightmares after watching Jumanji (the original). Someone told me the plot of The Ring and I couldn't sleep for a week. And so it was quite distressing to be told repeatedly at this residency that "hey, you know this thing you're writing is horror right?"
At first I resisted. "No no!" I said, "I am a weenie, I cannot possibly be writing horror." To which my lovely readers gently pointed out that the two comps I had included in my pitch for this project are both horror novels, and that my favorite short story in the world ("Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been") is absolutely horror. And that the book I was recently raving about, The Changeling by Joy Williams, is certainly horror.
This is a very distressing development! And yet, sadly, I think they are right. I am not interested in supernatural horror, or serial killers, or that sort of thing. But I am interested in the horrible things that people do to one another. The horror of real life. People are terrifying! Even (or I might even argue especially) when they're not trying to be.
And so, dear readers, I must sadly admit that I'm writing horror. Which means that I'm now trying to read more horror because I think that you cannot really write in a genre you don't read. Pray for me.
A few horror things I have read recently and liked:
- Open House on Haunted Hill
- Autogas Ferryman
- The Need by Helen Phillips
- The Other by Thomas Tryon
Any suggestions? No Stephen King please, I'm quite aware of his books :)
for the queen
If you've paid any attention to podcasting, or really the internet generally, in the last five years you know that D&D is having a moment. But some people (me) find the thousand-pound rule book of D&D far too intimidating to even attempt. I simply will not learn that many rules, I'm sorry. And so I had made peace with the fact that I would never play one of these games.
But in Banff, Amal introduced us to a game that has some of the same elements of D&D, without requiring a PhD in dice rolling. It's called For the Queen, and the premise is very simple: each player has been selected by the queen to accompany her on a journey. As you go around the circle, you pull cards that have questions on them — things like "the queen allows you, and only you, to do something for her - what is it?" and "when was the last time the queen hurt you?" As you go around, you collaboratively build both your own character, and the story line together.
Then, at some point, you will pull a card that says "the queen is under attack, do you defend her?" And the group goes around voting yes or no, and the game ends.
If you're a big D&D head this will probably feel unsatisfying and shallow. The game only takes an hour or so. There isn't a long epic journey or backstory or the dice rolling or any of that. But if you're someone who's long felt totally alienated and intimidated by the weight and intensity of D&D, but curious about the collaborative storytelling part of it, I'd recommend trying this game! You can find cheap copies of it on ebay.
wood fire results
Last month I talked about the first firing of the wood kiln that I helped build at Laney College. But I didn't tell you how things turned out! We unloaded in September, and it was really cool to see how everybody's pieces turned out. There were some disasters, some duds, and some amazing stuff. I didn't go in with big dreams for my own pieces — I've never wood fired before so I really didn't know what to expect. But I'm really pleased. A bunch of mine came out looking a bit like they'd been excavated from a shipwreck at the bottom of the ocean, which is exactly what I like.
If you're in the Bay Area and you want to learn how to wood fire, Laney is offering a fee-based class (so you don't get credit for it) that you can learn more about here.
reading
- "We are succeeding at stopping an infinite amount of suffering, even if we aren’t succeeding at stopping all suffering." 〰️ Revolutions Are Built on Failure
- "Some were actual objects, such as Robert Cribb finding “17 tubes of processed opium, ready for smoking, in the Dutch archives from 1946 Indonesia”, Daniel McKay coming across “negatives of an early Australian prime minister naked on holiday”, and “300 love letters from woman to woman around 1760, partly written in blood”, located by Susanne Wosnitzka." 〰️ I Asked Historians What Find Made Them Go ‘Wait, Wut?’ Here’s a Taste of the Hundreds of Replies
- "I justified this to myself by saying that the war machine would not be halted by any linguistic alteration I might make in a magazine mostly skimmed over by American suburbanites while they pooped." 〰️ House Arab
- "We must create patterns that cycle upwards. We are microsystems." 〰️ Behold the Spectrum
- "It’s all animals, all the way down, clear to the bottom." 〰️ Creatures of the Abyss: An Exercise in Science-Fictional Thinking
- So, while artists worried that drum machines were destroying jobs, Lewis’s interest in drum machines grew out of necessity to do his job. 〰️ Stick to the Beat
- "Anything narrated by a dog is upmarket fiction." 〰️ My Literary Fiction Is More Literary Than Yours
- "The last meal offers an irresistible blend of food, death, and crime that drives a commercial and voyeuristic cottage industry." 〰️ Last Meals
- "personally, i want inefficient books, full of indulgence and excess and complication. i want immoderate, slatternly sentences, which flaunt themselves, rather than striving at all times toward modest invisibility. i want lilac prose, shading toward violet, flirting with mauve. i want prose that is not at all useful–save in its own joyous fantasy." 〰️ On Purple Prose
- "The meaning of my name is shapeshifting, diverse, maybe even righteous. And possibly connected to wood, the summer solstice, or both." 〰️ Indian Names
- "All manner and all sorts of things—what’s behind them?" 〰️ Plants, Stones, Dirt, and Sky
〰️ OUT 〰️〰️
This is stuff I wrote, created, or published.
awoooooooo
After much anticipation and hype, COYOTE is now live! We launched on the 15th of September, and I'm really proud of the work we've put up so far. We've got pieces on everything from neighbors protecting one another from ICE, a legendary punk venue reopening, how SF policy changes are failing unhoused people, why Weird Al somehow still gets it, and what Downtown San Jose is doing right.
I wrote a feature that, to me, really exemplifies the kind of story that no other publication would ever take: a deep dive on what happened to a sculpture that used to stand outside Children's Fairyland. It includes a pie recipe. To understand why, you have to read the piece!
I'm also in charge of wrangling our COYOTE Calendar each week — putting together a curated list of events around the region that we think are worth checking out. You can find all the calendar posts here.
If you've been paying any attention to media news you probably know how important it is right now to have a publication that isn't beholden to fascists and making decisions based on how to stay on the right side of the worst people in the world.
COYOTE is a member supported publication, and while we've raised some money for a runway to begin, we're still trying to build a sustainable publication. If you like what we're doing, please consider becoming a member. And if you have any tips on grants or funders who might want to help make independent, worker owned media in the Bay Area possible, please hi t me up!
teonanancatl
With the time and support from the Banff program I was able to complete a big revision of PROJECT TEONANACATL my (ugh) horror novella. I wound up completely reworking a character, and cutting a big chunk off the back of the piece. I still need to take a pass through to make the actual sentence by sentence writing sing, but I'm happy with where it's at. I've shared the draft with a few trusted readers for their thoughts, and then I'm hoping to revise one more time before I share it with my agent and see what she thinks.
Paying members are going to get a much longer post about this novella later this month, along with my pitch for the project and a rumination on how to talk about something that happens in the piece when it's a bit of a minefield right now.
(actually short) short stories
I wound up finishing my novella draft a little early, and so with the few days I had extra in Banff I wrote two short stories. Actually short! Normally I sit down and say to myslf "I will now write a short story!" And then, about 10,000 words later, I am done. This has happened over and over, for some reason my natural length is right around 10,000 words.
This is not great for the prospect of actually selling and placing these stories. These stories are too long for most short story magazines, and too short to be considered a novella or even a novelette (both of which I am told are quite hard to sell anyway).
And so it was nice to write some genuinely short pieces. One of them I'm excited about, and will appear in COYOTE during our Halloween week. The other is not quite as good, and I might just shelve it, but it was really fun to write and I think was good as a way to stretch and use certain muscles.
Until May
My book agent is out of the office until May. And so my goal is to have three things to deliver to her when she returns:
- A novel draft of PROJECT CUBENSIS
- A novella draft of PROJECT TEONANACATL
- A non-fiction book proposal draft for PROJECT OSTOYAE
To hit this goal, I've mapped out my work from now until May. Which months I'm revising, which months I'm researching, which months I'm writing, and everything in between. The non-fiction book proposal remains the most elusive to me. Every time I think I've cracked something, I wind up stuck again. Or, I realize that I've actually made the project even more difficult than it was before. But I'm plugging along, and trying to trust the process of reading, writing notes to myself, and muddling along, waiting for something to click.
Wish me luck!
one last question
I saw this sign every day on the Banff campus and I'm still thinking about it. WHAT IS THIS. What is happening to this bird? Backwards hat? Bloody head injury? This bird is haunting me.
