〰️〰️ 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.

OUT ON THE TOWN

I mentioned a few newsletters ago that I'm trying to go out and do more things, in part as research for the COYOTE Calendar and in part just because I live in a place with lots of cool stuff going on and I should take advantage of it! In June I had some travel for weddings so I didn't go to as much as I would like but I did attend:

〰️ The opening for OMCA's Mildred Howard exhibit, which you should definitely check out if you're in the Bay Area.
〰️ A novel writing event at Local Economy featuring several writers from The Grotto. For me, the most useful piece of this event was June Martin talking about revisions. "Different drafts require different forms and approaches because they represent different forms of work," she said. "A novel is an artifact of a process of thought, and it goes through multiple processes of thinking." She noted that even the word "revision" boils down to "see again," or, "think again," and described how for her most recent book she approached each revision as an entirely different way of thinking about the book. "What process will give you the book you want?" she asked. All very juicy ideas! (And I'll say more about them later on when I talk about my own revisions this past month.)

WORLD CUP

Listen, FIFA is one of the most corrupt organizations in the world. The United States should absolutely not be allowed to host the World Cup (or the Olympics) given our endless warmongering, destruction, and inhumanity both abroad and domestically. (If you want to read more about that I'd recommend this list, this podcast, and this resource.)

And also, I love football. I love the World Cup. I'm sure some of you think less of me for this, and see this as some kind of excuse to continue supporting the worst shit because it's fun for me, personally and that's not entirely wrong. But also, I do believe that the joys of the World Cup are real, and that actual true good comes from the kinds of exchanges and interactions that only the World Cup provides.

I've watched nearly every game (and this year it's SO many games) and this World Cup has been incredibly exciting — full of upsets and incredible storylines and unexpected heroics. If I owe you an email, I'm sorry, I'm probably watching a World Cup game. If there's a typo in this newsletter, I'm sorry, I'm absolutely watching a World Cup game while I write it. I will return to being a normal, ethical human soon, I promise.

READING

〰️ "When the officers pulled back Tracey’s hood, they discovered a near-skeletal corpse. She had been dead for over a year." 〰️ An absolutely tragic and harrowing story of two women being failed, over and over again, by the state.
〰️ "Sometimes you must stand athwart history, yelling Are you fucking serious? Is it only that you get used to that stench of American life after a while? Is it worth it?" 〰️ I've been thinking about this one a LOT since reading it — a meditation on political violence and what kinds of immorality are "worth it" and to whom. Pairs well with this piece I shared a while back.
〰️ "Green traffic lights not only aren’t green, but they’re also exquisitely beautiful. My commute home the afternoon I learned about this was transcendent. I felt like my life suddenly had an entirely new sensation. How could I never have noticed? Green traffic lights are anti-memetic because you only stare at a traffic light when it’s red." 〰️ If you liked Ed Yong's book An Immense World this is a really interesting addition to that canon, specifically about why our screens can't show us the colors our eyes can see out in the world.
〰️ "There is an Ethiopian proverb: you think of water when the well is empty. This essay is about who is draining the well, and what it would take to fill it back up." A really interesting essay that argues that you can talk all you want about the importance of human rights, but nothing will change until people's financial realities do too.
〰️ "It’s impolite to see another person’s ugliness. It’s unmooring when your own ugliness is seen." 〰️ I am, for better or worse, not a "people pleaser." But John Paul Brammer is, and writes about the dark side of that kind of behavior.
〰️ "A tool demands that you learn what it does, and what it might be capable of, and when all is mastered it is only ever an extension of the body. You are, in fact, learning what you can do. The tool is only there to assist with what work you are able to perform." 〰️ I confess that I've grown a bit tired of debates about metaphors related to AI (is it like a pencil? a camera? a collage?) but this piece was actually clarifying on the topic.
〰️ "Within each one of us there is some piece of humanness that knows we are not being served by the machine which orchestrates crisis after crisis and is grinding all our futures into dust." 〰️ From a speech by Audre Lorde, via stacy-marie ishmael's newsletter.

STEEP RAVINE

We went back to Steep Ravine for a night, a place that I've written about here before and I love deeply. It's incredibly hard to get reservations, so we usually wind up just picking up random cancellations. This trip was windy and cool and, as always, beautiful.

GIBSON HOUSE

Remember when I wrote about how I don't really read or like purely historical fiction? And yet I find myself... writing a novel that is absolutely historical fiction? (With a speculative horror core, which is the part that's more interesting to me.) Well I'm in the phase of editing (see below) where I'm starting to really have to worry about more particular historical details and their accuracy.

The novel is set in 1908 in a wealthy house in Boston's Back Bay. And, lucky for me, there is in fact a house in Boston's Back Bay from exactly this time period that has been turned into a museum that you can go tour. So last month I did just that (I was in the area for a wedding already) and slightly terrified the poor college student docent with my extremely specific questions and oddly detailed knowledge about the furniture of the house and where it probably all came from. (For research for the book, I've gone deep on antique dealer websites and learned a LOT about the different kinds of chairs, tables, candlesticks and decorations that this particular demographic would have had.)

The trip was super useful, in part because I got a couple of questions answered that I hadn't managed to figure out yet and in part because it confirmed that, for the most part, the book gets it right already.

As a side note, in looking at antique shops online, I came across this incredible object that I must show to you all. Behold! Mr. Toad!

He is for sale for $4900 and that is way too much money for me to spend on a wooden frog (it might be what he's worth! I have no idea), but oh do I desire him so. He reminds me, actually, of a ceramic toad I saw at the Alameda Flea Market last year that I still regret not buying.

SCIENCE JOURNALS

Another piece of research I've been doing for this book is reading scientific journals from the late 1800s and early 1900s. You can find loads of those online these days, and they're full of articles with delightful titles. (They are also full of awful sexism and racism, which is unsurprising but still unpleasant to sift through.) Here are some of my favorites from Popular Science Monthly:

• A Dog's Laugh
• Spiders and Their Ways
• Affections and Jealousies of Lizards
• Obituary Notice of a Lung-Fish
• The Armadillo and its Oddities
• Pleasures of the Telescope VII
• The Story of a Monkey
• The Self and its Derangements
• The Symbolism of Salt

〰️ OUT 〰️〰️

This is stuff I wrote, created, or published.

PROJECT CUBENSIS

My big project in June was to finish a v5 revision of my novel, which I'm now calling What Extraordinary Potential but which will probably wind up with some other title in the end. Titles are strange and hard and if I sell the book the publisher will certainly have thoughts about it and I'm trying to just be chill (I have never been chill for a moment in my life) about that and not fixate on trying to come up with the perfect title right now.

This pass through was guided by the notes I got from Kat Howard (which were super useful, highly recommend hiring her if you can!) which helped me make some decisions about core pieces of the book, character arcs, and emotional moments. With those decisions made I went through the book and really tried to tighten and home in on things. I have a tendency, when writing, to circle an idea several times and so some of this was picking the strongest way of executing on whatever it is I'm trying to do, and going with that.

June's thoughts about revision were really interesting to me because I haven't really been doing what she's described exactly. For her recent book, June described three rounds:

1. Write everything she can possibly think of that interests her and put it all in the story. Every joke, every character, every thread and scene.
2. Go through it all and ask "why did I like all this stuff? What threads resonate across those elements? How can I hone the material around those threads?"
3. Approach the book this time with a reader in mind for the first time, and think about their experience of the book (what might be confusing, what might need spelling out, etc).

June said she hoped that v3 would be her final edit on the book before it goes out. I'm on v5, and I think in part because I haven't always had this kind of frame for revisions. If I had to summarize PROJECT CUBENSIS's edits so far I'd say:

1. Write the book incredibly slowly and in stutterstep chunks over several years, in between other projects.
2. Read the whole thing and try to reconcile the writing style and ideas as they shifted over those years into something coherent.
3. Gently attempt to inject a teeny, tiny bit of speculative/genre into the book.
4. Really lean into the speculative horror elements that I had been so afraid to add for the first few rounds.
5. Tighten and really firm up as much as possible based on all those changes from earlier rounds.

I'm not sure each of these represents a new mode, or way of thinking about the book. But I really like that idea and framing, and I'm hoping to think that way moving forward

More practically, I have a method for working through revisions, to try and stay on track and focused. This might be more in the weeds on my process than any of you actually care to know, but oh well!

For each edit, I create and "edit map" which is the master document I work from while trying to get through an edit. This compiles all the stuff I need to know and be thinking about in one place, and is where I map out and log the work I need to do, and how it went each day. The document always begins with a list of links to relevant documents (I work in Obsidian so linking between docs is easy) and a big picture order of operations in terms of what I need to do, and in what order.

Beneath that, I make a list of the big decisions and changes that I need to execute on. Which might be "remove this character completely" or "make this big scene more scary" or "add in more of these two characters interacting with one another."

Then, I make myself a detailed schedule that spells out what I want to get done each day in pretty granular detail — which scenes I want to tackle, how far I want to get on something, which pieces I need to go back to, which research questions I want to get into.

As I work, this becomes my log of what I want to do, and is constantly being tweaked based on what I have done and then need to do. Sometimes things go smoothly! Sometimes I have to update the schedule because I realize that I need to go back and rewrite a whole scene because now it doesn't make any sense.

And I mean log quite literally. I write a lot of notes to myself as I work. Slowly this edit map is filled with not only tasks and checkmarks, but a running dialogue with myself on how it's going, what I'm thinking about, what I've realized, what I'm struggling with, what I want to remember for when I return to the document the next day or week. Here's an example (with a lot of stuff pulled out since I don't want to spoil the book for you all, but just know that there is about a paragraph in each section where it says [REDACTED] in which I'm kind of thinking out loud about that option):

Wednesday, June 17th

• GO BACK to chapter 21 and sort out this thing re: the lights being off.
• Chapter 27
• Chapter 28
• Chapter 29
• Epilogue
• NOTES
  • Okay having a struggle brain day, just feeling really sad and sluggish and exhausted. Should I take the day off? Probably? But I will not because that's not IN THE SCHEDULE. (If I finish this pass through I can take tomorrow off.)
  • I had a thought this morning about the logistics of the power going out (something I still actually need to do CUBENSIS-fact checking questions on argh) which is that: if the power is out, how does the phone work!?!?! It wouldn't, so this is a PROBLEM. A few possible solutions:
    • Change what actually happens to have it be [REDACTED for spoilers]
      • This could work because [REDACTED]
    • Have it so that [REDACTED]
      • I think this one is the least viable option.
    • Have it so that [REDACTED]
    • Have it so that [REDACTED]
    • More generally if the lights go out in Chapter 21 they need to remain out for the rest of the time, which means that for the rest of the story they have no electric lights inside the house, they have to open the windows to get light in etc.
  • Well I read this and cried for a while https://www.theplayerstribune.com/yan-diomande-soccer-bundesliga-rb-leipzig-ivory-coast
  • Updated CUBENSIS-v5 plot map.canvas to reflect the changes I made in the last edit re: [REDACTED]. I am mostly stalling on having to make a decision about that and not moving forward because I think I should do that first.
  • Okay I think I've sorted it out -- which is that it's [REDACTED]
  • Need to write some TB brainspace stuff which is not at all the headspace I am in currently, so let's leave that for now and continue on through the rest of the #opentask stuff in the draft.
  • PROBLEM! When [REDACTED]. Has Eliza been back up there? YES need to add in a bit where [REDACTED].
  • OKAY I HAVE MADE IT THROUGH THE END. There are still some #opentask stuff which falls into:
    • research related things re: money and such
    • theodora writing that I'm not in the brain space to do at the moment
    • probably some little things and timeline questions about phases of the moon and historical accuracy stuff like that (boo)

As you can see there's a lot of just blabbing at myself in ways that I'll likely never return to. But for me, and the way my brain works, this kind of running dialogue is really helpful to keep me moving forward, rather than getting stuck. I'm sure some of you reading this are horrified and wondering "can't you just shut up for one second?" and the answer is no. I cannot.

Anyway! I finished this edit! And, as I always do, I printed myself a spiral bound copy so that I have it physically archived and can hold something in my hands.

My agent Caroline has this draft now and I'm excited to see what she has to say about it. I'm hoping that it's close to something we might be able to take out and pitch.

PECKII

I wrote two new short stories last month, and continue to submit them and the six others I've got out and about to the various publications that take such things. It's a bit of a demoralizing process, I won't lie. I'm fairly good at handling rejections (you might remember that I pitched TESTED for five years before getting anybody to bite) but there's something special about getting a form rejection for a story you sent merely a few hours ago. How are they even reading things that fast? But I'll keep trying!

UP NEXT

My July work turns my focus back to non-fiction. I've gotten notes back on my non-fiction book proposal from my agent, and they're really useful and encouraging. So as she reads What Extraordinary Potential, I'll get to work on revising the proposal. My hope is that this year I manage to sell at least one of these bigger projects? Keep your fingers crossed for me!