〰️〰️ IN 〰️

Before we get into things today, a quick update about the Flash Forward Book Club! Core book club organizers have decided to move the conversation from Discord to Signal. If you're a book clubber who missed the memo and wants to join us there, reply to this email and I can get you connected. Huge thank you to Libby, Rachel, and Randall for continuing to help organizing this!

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.

high desert

I went on a week long trip recently to Denver, Taos, and Santa Fe with my partner's family. I love these landscapes! I'm a desert guy at heart, really. The dry air, the weird creatures, the way you can see everything in the dirt.

One of the places we went was the Georgia O'Keeffe museum, in Santa Fe. O'Keeffe is one of my favorite artists of all time, and I was excited to finally go. The museum is fairly small, and doesn't actually have all that much of her work on display. I was hoping to see some of her sculpture, which she started doing later in life, but they didn't have any in the space. They did have a (free!) audio tour though, which I recommend if you go!

But what was really neat, was that a good chunk of the museum was dedicated to Indigenous artists responding to O'Keeffe.

I consider O'Keeffe one of my problematic favs (along with Italian Futurist art, Dune, and probably others). She once said of Cerro Pedernal — a flat topped mountain near her studio in Abiquiu — "It's my private mountain. It belongs to me. God told me if I painted it enough, I could have it." Santa Fe has all kinds of merch and marketing calling the region "O'Keeffe Country."

It's not hers, of course. The Tewa people consider Pedernal sacred, and have lived on the land since time immemorial. O'Keeffe gathered pottery shards on her property that belonged to the local native people, and rather than returning it to them kept the work, and in some cases painted it in ways that contradict the tribe's practices.

The museum's current exhibit, then, offers local native artists a change to show their own work in response to O'Keeffe's. Some of them chose to respond to that Pedernal quote in particular. Others to her legacy more generally and the concept of "O'Keeffe Country." Others to the land itself, offering their own depictions of the space. It was really neat, and I really appreciated seeing the work they created.

reading

• "It is inconvenient to be a person, floating through the grand and impossible world, significant in your own resplendent garden of hours but insignificant as a fleck of dust in the greater arc of the universe." 〰️ Hanif Abdurraqib on technology, convenience, and longing.
• "Without curiosity, the challenge of going against your instincts is too great to sustain for very long." 〰️ Charlotte Shane on the limits of language.
• My friend Justine has a book coming out that I am excited to read, and hope you'll consider pre-odering. It's called Unreasonable Women: Three Stories of Violence, Imprisonment, and Extraordinary Survival.

I finally finished The Work of Art by Adam Moss which I had been very slowly chipping away at — not because it's bad but because it's easy to pick up and put down at random intervals in a way that fiction isn't (for me). The book is a series of interviews with creative people about how they actually make the work and there were a lot of lovely bits and pieces in it. Here are some of my favorites:

You really do just have to fuck up. 〰️ Nico Muhly

The contract I make with the universe every day is that I’m going to do the best that I can, and in return I would like the fucking web editors to do the same. 〰️ Nico Muhly

The picture is the vaguest analogy. The real thing is the dream. It’s a condensation, a puff of smoke from inside you. 〰️ Amy Sillman

Anything good comes from a place of unknowing. 〰️ Tony Kushner

All art fails, because all art is essentially Orpheus. All art is meant to resurrect the dead, and it will not succeed in doing that 〰️ Tony Kushner

An artist is a thief. So is a journalist. Like for all the subjects of this book, I had come here to steal something from him for my purposes, so it was only right that he stole something back. And I was interested in what he saw in me. I grew to like the idea that this image might someday live on a stranger’s walls. 〰️ Gerald Lovell

The one thing I’m pretty good at is being really honest with myself about my moment-to-moment excitement. And with both these projects, what happened is I got to a certain point and the big narrative ball wasn’t rolling anymore. You know, it starts feeling just like typing. I always picture it like a river that’s really tight and fast and then it gets wide and slow. And at some point it gets so wide and slow that it’s a pond, and then a marsh. And then bleh. 〰️ George Saunders

I've also been reading a lot more short stories recently. I finished Black Glass by Karen Joy Fowler, and a Shirley Jackson collection (my favorite, aside from "The Lottery" of course, was "The Witch"). I also read a handful of recent speculative fiction magazines, some of which I loved (the most recent Uncanny Magazine, for example) and a lot of which I really did not.

I won't name specific stories or magazines here but I am going to try and pin down what I found frustrating about a lot of the work I read in the last month. I don't have this fully figured out, but it's something that I can only describe as the Dungeons and Dragons-ification of science fiction.

Dungeons and Dragons is a wonderful and very fun game to play with your friends. Most of the time, telling other people about your DnD things is a bit like telling your friends about your dreams. Which is to say: simply not that interesting. Most of the jokes require a whole lot of setup. And, really, they're funny because they're you're friends. Most people are not professional comedians who can make Dungeons and Dragons compelling to watch or listen to for those who are not playing the game.

A key hallmark of this trend is the snarky, first person narrator, most of whom are not actually all that funny or clever but who the writer clearly thinks are extremely funny and clever. Often those narrators address the reader directly, and many speak as if the narrator and the reader are in on a shared joke and, more importantly, a shared understanding of the world. They are painfully self aware and quick to engage in a bit of psychoanalytic humor.

Ultimately, all of these characters sound the same, and seem as though they would behave and speak and operate the exact same way in literally any story or situation they were thrown into. They are smart, and spunky, and entirely soulless. Nothing seems to actually matter to them, emotionally. It's all a big joke.

Much like these stories mistake "a character who makes jokes" with "a character whose humor is useful to the story," these stories also almost all mistake "describing an interesting premise" with "executing an interesting premise." So much of the work on the page is filled with this attempted wink wink, nod nod, isn't this all so absurd that there is no space for anything else. The actual settings and ideas of the story never feel real. They are always at arms length, in service to the bit the character is doing.

In reading these stories, I begin to feel, over and over, as if I was listening to someone recount their latest DnD campaign: I didn't really care, and the jokes weren't all that funny, and there was nothing at stake whatsoever.

I think, ultimately, I am very tired of self-aware, snarky characters — even executed well. After reading the 10th story like this recently, I wrote in my notebook:

No more uselessly self aware characters! Give me delusion! Give me confused and self destructive! Stop going to therapy and start being interesting!

listening

〰️ OUT 〰️〰️

This is stuff I wrote, created, or published.

a new season

It's spring, and I'm entering a new season of work — scaling back on my COYOTE engagement to only handle the weekly calendar, and shifting my attention to my personal work projects (the fiction and non-fiction projects you hear about in these newsletters). This was a really challenging decision, but the right one for me. I'm still thinking about something that Mandy Brown told me about choices: "With big decisions like this, we talk about making a decision. It's not something you find or discover, it's a creative act to make a decision." She prompted me to think about what I wanted to make with my choice, what I wanted to bring into the world and create. And with that framing I was able to think about the creation of real space to actually run at these projects that I've been trying to chip away at for, in some cases, many years.

So I'm turning my time and energy to those things now. Between now and Labor Day I'm all in on writing for myself. My big goal is that by then I have real, tangible progress the big projects I catalogued here.

I can do this, in part, because of the support of paying members to this newsletter. Thank you all for your help! If you want to become one of those people, you can do so here.

CUBENSIS

I finished my huge rework of the novel! It was a lot, and it was hard, but I'm happy with the changes. I took the book way further into the speculative horror space than it was before, and I think that's right. There are still some issues of course — pacing, tone, and a really big choice I need to make about what to do about a character (cut her entirely? make her kill someone? something in between?) but it's a solid draft.

I mentioned last newsletter that I was thinking about hiring a professional editor to help me wade through these choices, and I did! Kat Howard sent me notes back earlier this week and I have not yet had a moment (or the courage) to open them. But I'm excited to see what her expert brain has to say to guide my next steps.

PECKII

The big work theme for this month was short stories! I've had this list of ~10 stories in my head for a long time now and I finally found time to sit down and just write a bunch of them. I now have decent working drafts of four stories, and half drafts of two more!

My goal is to finish a bunch of these in the next few weeks and start submitting them places. Last year, I had a big goal of selling at least one short story, and I didn't hit that (in part because I only really had one story to submit, which was long and got rejected everywhere), but this year is going to be different! In the words of Octavia Butler: So Bet It! See To It!

Of course now that means starting to engage with the submission grind — which is its own form of hell. But there's nothing to do but try.

One funny thing I noticed in editing these stories, is that I have a tendency to gravitate towards names that start with M. In the last six stories I've written I've had: Mars, Matt, Maisie, Mallory, Miranda, and Minerva. This isn't a big deal, I can easily change most of these names, but just a kind of funny quirk I noticed.

TEONANACTL

Do you ever have the experience of writing something, and in the moment feeling like "Yes, YES! This is great! This is awesome! I'm killing it!" Only to later read the thing back and realize that... you were wrong? I'm having that a bit now with this novella project.

I wrote this one last spring, and did a big revision in Banff last summer. There are parts of it I really do like, but there are big things about it that simply do not work. And, as I wrote about here, it's might be a really hard thing to sell. So my question for myself now is whether I spend the time trying to make these big changes to make this work or not?

I've shared this story with a couple of friends, and they all have encouraged me to keep at it and that it's got enough there there to be worth trying. So I'm going to make one more whole hearted edit attempt and see how that lands with my agent (who was, very nicely, not that into an earlier draft).

COYOTE

I continue to write the COYOTE Calendar! If you know anybody in the Bay Area please share it with them? I work really hard on it every week and I think it genuinely does have a very cool spread of things to do. And if you know of any awesome events in the region, please send them my way!

I also wrote about a mural in Vallejo with a truly strange origin story — artists were hired, but somehow an entirely AI generated image went up on the wall. How? Why? And will they ever change it? Trust me, this story goes places you are not expecting. This is my last feature for COYOTE for now.