This month was dominated by output, rather than input. I did a lot. Too much, perhaps!
Last month, paying subscribers got a look at everything I'm working on right now. Pretty much all my work is funded by members, and so if you like the idea of being a Medici-style patron of the arts, you can do that here.
〰️〰️ 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.
returning to life
As you all know, I spent February in Southern Africa and then at a self-organized writing retreat. Which means that this month I had to truly return to my life and other work. Having a month truly away from it all was helpful in a lot of ways — a nice reset, an offer of clarity, a break for my brain and over-screened eyeballs. I returned with new perspective on what I want to be spending my time doing, and I don't want to be spending my time doing, and some ideas for how to draw new lines and create new structure in my working life to make that happen.
Of course, I didn't fully succeed. It's easy to make a plan for how you are going to partition your time, and it's quite hard to actually follow through with it when demands on your that don't match that plan arrive. But I did spend a lot of this month doing a lot of thinking about what I want my working days to look like and what is getting in the way for me.
reading
〰️ "The relationship between what we see and what we know—the art of noticing— is a sophisticated act of interpretation, not just passive observation." Latria Graham at Scratch writes about the ways in which so many jobs in media have simply gone away.
〰️ "As AI models corrupt more and more of the open web, realistic images and authoritative-sounding bullshit are only going to multiply. First interrupting the truth, then competing with the truth, and then, finally, through sheer volume, dominating and fully eradicating the truth." I'm late to this Colin Dickey piece but I loved it — an incredible meditation on AI, truth, and haunting.
〰️ “There’s something about making something from ourselves which is beautiful and otherworldly as well. And we need all of those things right now to remind us that we can be good-spirited, that we don’t have to make corruption, we don’t have to make greed, we don’t have to make power,” she says. “Making a beautiful painting isn’t about making power. It’s empowering yourself to feel something, and then if you’ve done it correctly, other people look at it and feel something, too.” Charlotte Higgins interviews Tracey Emin.
〰️ "A story might have a lot of things happening, but do they matter? If the answer is no, then the pacing will feel lethargic because we're waiting for something to happen that actually affects the characters or feels significant." Charlie Jane Anders has one of the best newsletters in the game, and this one was really useful to me as I revise my novel (see below for more on that).
〰️ "You are wrecking the environment so that terrible people who make bad decisions can be enriched. You are destroying entire fields of creativity so that unsuspecting people can get bad information and “advice” from inaccurate, dumbly predictive slop machines. You are degrading the human condition. You are making the world a worse place." Maureen Ryan with an excellent rant about the recent Grammarly nonsense.
〰️ "Officers drilled small holes through the wall of a neighboring apartment and inserted a camera attached to a pole. On the screen, they saw the impossible: a massive tiger pacing across the floor of Apartment 5E." There is absolutely a short story in this.
〰️ "But the giddy freedom of operating outside of mainstream constraints also comes with a downside. “The problem is, if you're from a culture that was not supposed to last from the jump, you're not thinking about archiving it or preserving it,” Gates said." A great piece about memory, archiving, and outsider culture.
listening
〰️ Escape Pod 1038: Meet the Mets I was lucky enough to get to read an early draft of this short story and I still think about it all the time.
looking at
My friend Ed took me to see some burrowing owls, and they were very cute. I was also very taken by the little owl sculptures that people have created along the fence nearby.
As you all probably know by now, I love poking around museum archives. Some recent delights:
〰️ Terracotta mask in the shape of the head of a fox, dog, or bat
〰️ Inlay for Nilotic scene, fish
〰️ Mace
〰️ Netsuke of Octopus Holding Clam
〰️ OUT 〰️〰️
This is stuff I wrote, created, or published.
CUBENSIS
In January, I tried to finish a draft of PROJECT CUBENSIS so that I could leave February with something complete to come back to. I failed, and had to stop about 2/3 of the way through (more on that here if you missed it). Before I left for Namibia, I wrote myself a long series of notes about where I left off, what I think needed to be done, and what to keep in mind when I returned. Those notes were extremely helpful (shocker, I know) and I was able to finish a v3 draft of the novel. Unfortunately, by the end of the draft I came to a realization.
I'm writing a horror novel.
I've written here in the past about how I have always thought of myself as too much of a weenie for horror. It's not a genre I think of myself as drawn to or part of. But over and over again when I write and share work with friends they say "you know this is horror, right?" And here, again, I've had that same epiphany. You might say I am being haunted? By horror?
In some ways this is great — some of the things I was struggling with in the last edit are far easier to handle once I let myself think of as a piece of horror. In other ways it's terrifying because I am still not well versed in modern horror. I don't read a lot of it (although I am trying to change that). I feel as though I am an imposter here, wandering into a party that I was not invited to without a gift.
Often, when I talk to other writers about this, they say some variation of: "Stop worrying about it! Genre divisions are fake! Everybody is too caught up in labels! Just write what the book wants to be! Worrying about this is the marketing department's job!"
At the risk of wading into the endless wars about genre — I disagree. Sure, people can certainly get overly caught up in the minutia of what makes something horror vs sci-fi vs fantasy to the point of distraction. But I think it's a little bit absurd to say that a writer should not think about this at all. You should be reading in the genre you're writing, I think! You should know what the conventions and tropes are! You should know if the market is completely saturated by vampire cowboys! That doesn't mean you shouldn't write your vampire cowboys, but you should probably be ready to explain to an editor (and ultimately to a reader) what makes your blood sucking buckaroos different from everybody else's.
Anyway, about halfway through March I finished the v3 of the novel. Then I read the entire thing, top to bottom, and broke the book back down into pieces. Last time I broke the book into scenes. This time, into bigger chunks ("beats" is what I have been calling them, but I'm sure other people have another word for this).
It helps me to do this kind of putting together and taking apart as I figure out what has to be moved or tweaked. It also just makes things feel more manageable. For me "edit 72,000 words" is very different from "edit 3,000 words 24 times." The former seems impossible. The latter is totally doable.
Now I have a v3.5 draft that I'm taking one more pass through. By April 13th, I hope to have v4 that I can evaluate. I know there are still things that need work — the pacing is funky, and I'm seriously considering cutting an entire character. I'm probably going to hire a professional editor to help me with the next draft. Then, when my agent returns in May, I hope to share with her something that (fingers crossed) she feels is worth taking out and shopping around.
I'm also still stuck on a title for this book. A few months ago I attempted to conduct a poll about this, but the embed didn't work in the email and so a lot of you just saw a blank space. Now that the book is shifting towards horror, I'm reconsidering titles once again. Here's the latest list:
- The Other Place
- Under the Ice
- What Extraordinary Potential
- Monstrosities of Force
- We Have Always Been Alone
coyote
At COYOTE, I overdid things. I filed 10 pieces totaling over 20k words. Oops.
〰️ As always I write the weekly calendar, which you can now get as a newsletter for FREE if you sign up for membership at COYOTE.
〰️ I also wrote a little blog post about how I think about the calendar, and what we hope it does for people.
〰️ I made a quiz to help people figure out which spring sport they should get into this year.
〰️ I profiled a fun group of folks trying to make billiards more accessible in the East Bay.
〰️ I wrote an op-ed about how Trans Day of Visibility hits different when being visible is increasingly dangerous.
〰️ I went to a women's football game and wrote about my struggles with rooting for women in a sport I think that maybe nobody should play.
tested
Unfortunately, we got bad news on the sex testing front this year. The IOC announced that they were going to require every single woman to undergo a genetic screening in order to be allowed to compete.
I wrote an explainer on what the new policy actually means and says here, and a longer piece about the ways in which supporters of sex testing manipulate the concept of evidence to advance their aims here.
I was also on a bunch of radio shows and podcasts talking about this including:
A short newsletter this month! Look at me, under 2,000 words for one of these. You're welcome/I'm sorry. In case you were curious, the longest in/out I've ever sent was this one, at 3,494 words.
