A quick note before we get into the in and out that I'm going to be in NYC doing a reading on September 26th with some really amazing fellow weirdo writers! Come through and say hi!

〰️〰️ 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.

rip moro

We said goodbye to Moro on August 21st. You can read the little obituary I wrote for her here.

Lots of much smarter and more beautiful writers have talked about grief (hell, s.e. smith has a whole recent book about it) so I'm not going to try and make any new or interesting points about that in this space. For now, I'm just trying to remind myself that in some ways got the best case scenario: Moro had a long, good life and we got to decide when it was her time to go before she was suffering too badly. In her final 24 hours she got to eat both a hamburger and horse shit (hot salad, as we call it), get filthy in the creek, and decide to bust through a barbed wire fence for fun. She died easily and without pain or fear, with her big heavy head in my lap.

Moro was loved by so many people, and it's been both touching and terrible for the news to spread among our family and friends. Every text asking how we're doing, sharing a photo, reminding us of a funny thing she did, is simultaneously beautiful and heart breaking all over again. How are you doing? they always ask. And I never know how to answer. Terrible! Miserable! But there is really nothing to be done aside from carry on and let this awful feeling fade.

It's weird, the things that set me off. Other people's dogs don't get to me, but standing up to go to the bathroom does. I can't eat a strawberry without crying, because Moro always got to eat the tops. Someone set a firework off near our house — a big, loud boom — and my partner and I both started sobbing because Moro would have fucking hated that.

I carry a towel around so I can cry whenever I happen to need to. We're getting a big portrait painted of Moro by an artist at the studio I'm a part of. The only real instruction I've given her is that the painting must feature her gigantic tongue. I'm going to make some pottery with her ashes. She'll always be a part of us.

Moro forever.

out and about

In part because I run the COYOTE Calendar (please subscribe or share with any Bay Area folks you know! it's free!) and in part because I desperately needed to get the hell out of my suddenly dogless house, I did a lot of stuff this month! Below please find little recaps of various shows and excursions.

Der Goylem: People sometimes use the phrase "community theatre" derogatorily, but there is something genuinely beautiful about watching a community come together and put a show on. Nestled into an incredible redwood grove, this performance careened between raunchy madness, home-made puppets, queer joy, ruminations on grief, and calls for radical resistance. Chanting "Fuck the police" to klezmer music was an absolute blast. But perhaps the most beautiful part was the many elders in the audience who knew the songs and sang along as they were reimagined into something new. (You can read a fuller review of the show here, and if you're in the Bay Area you can see Der Goylem again at KlezCalYidFest in October.)

West Division Ultimate Frisbee Championships: I am of the opinion that getting into a niche sport with a local league/team is one of the best things you can do to get out of the house. There is a set schedule, there are rivalries, you'll make friends with the people you see over and over again, and tickets are generally cheap. In this case, seeing the Oakland Spiders win their West Division Championship game and punch a ticket to the Championships was an absolute blast. The MC explained some of the rules on the mic, and our neighbors in the stands filled in the rest when I had questions. Plus, the Oakland team has the best motto that you get to yell at them: eight legs, one heart. After this game, the Spiders went on to win the national championship!

Welwitschia in bloom: The UC Berkeley Botanical Garden's Welwitschia mirabilis (an extremely cool plant native to the the ancient Namib Desert, and one of the longest living plants on Earth) is coning for the first time since they got the sample in 1989, so naturally I had to go see it. These plants grow incredibly slowly, and often the edges of their oldest leaves get a little raggety looking. Rumor has it that a very kind and well meaning UCB Botanical Garden volunteer once trimmed off fifty years of growth. When we were in Namibia in February, I spotted some Welwitschia on the side of the road and screamed "STOP THE CAR!" They're so cool!

Phil Tippett studio sale: Late on Thursday night my friend Rahawa texted me "o shit o shit o shit" and this link to a story about how the legedary animator and special effects madman Phil Tippett (of Star Wars, Robocop, and Starship Troopers fame, among other things) was liquidating his Berkeley studio in a sale that started the next morning. We arrived at 9:30am, to learn that some people had gotten there at midnight and slept in their car to be first in line. After some admission chaos, we got in, and while most of the really iconic stuff was gone (we watched someone walk out with a Jabba the Hutt model) it was still incredible to peruse a working studio full of gems. I grabbed a few tools (a vacuum chamber, welding jacket and goggles) and some goodies (including a cardboard model of a bug and a planet dome). But perhaps the most fun was chatting with the other people at the sale about their love of movies, and Tippett, and all things creative.

I also went to:

• Two different Oakland Ballers games.
• Frog Fest at UC Berkeley, which is exactly what it sounds like
• Hella Plants, a very hip plant sale where I got several new hoyas
• The Oakland Review of Books launch party
• A class on bookbinding through the Bathers Library Symposium
• A new (to me) pickup soccer meetup at Longfellow Fields in Oakland
• Steep Ravine for a night of seaside delight
• A lot of hikes, a reminder that we live in a beautiful place full of amazing, easy to access trails

learning to edit

My big goal for this year was to complete close-to-final drafts of three projects: OSTOYAE (the non-fiction book project), CUBENSIS (the novel), and TEONANACTL (the novella). For OSTOYAE that meant actually sitting down and writing the proposal, but for CUBENSIS and TEONANACTL, that was really a goal of editing.

In the world of journalism, I've got a fair amount of experience both editing and being edited. But in fiction it's another story. I wrote here about how much I miss the editorial culture of journalism when I'm working on fiction, and while I think there is a lot that crosses over from journalistic editing to fiction editing, there's also a lot that doesn't.

And so in service of getting these various projects done, I've become a tiny bit obsessed with learning how to edit. I've read several books on the topic recently including:

• Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping
• Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, Second Edition: How to Edit Yourself Into Print
• Revision and Self Editing for Publication: Techniques for Transforming Your First Draft into a Novel That Sells

I also went to a talk in May about editing (recapped here) and this month I attended an NK Jemisin session about editing (hosted by Blue Stoop), and started a workshop course at the Ministry of Words on editing taught by R.O. Kwon.

It's always interesting to see the incredibly vast spread of philosophies and techniques among writers. Jemisin stressed that she writes three drafts of each novel, while Kwon talks about writing 70 (not a typo, that's seventy). Some of the editing books stress a very formulaic and specific way of writing something sellable, while other authors talk about making sure that you're writing something that speaks to you. Some guides focus on efficiency and speed, while others emphasize the non-linear nature of creativity.

And so what this means is that as I am editing as I learn to edit — picking and choosing from this buffet based on what I know about my needs, my style, my habits, and my goals. I've already tweaked some of my systems, but I'm also trusting in the ones that I know work.

〰️ OUT 〰️〰️

This is stuff I wrote, created, or published.

OSTOYAE

Last newsletter I wrote that I had finished the body of the book proposal and turned to the sample chapter. If you're not in the world of nonfiction books, the thing to know is that most proposals come with both the core pitch (what I've been calling the body) which includes an explanation of what the book will be about, why it's a good idea, and a rough outline (or, if you're me, an extremely long and thorough summary) of each chapter, and also a sample chapter where you actually fully write out a chunk of the book.

Sample chapters are meant to show a potential editor how you're going to deliver on the pitch on the page. They're also a way for writers to make sure that they have a clear sense themselves for what they want the book to feel and sound like. Different writers will execute the same idea very differently. Mary Roach and Paul Kalanithi might both have written books about death, but they're very, very different reading experiences.

I picked a sample chapter that was focused on something I had already done some reporting on. But as I worked, I realized that I had in fact picked what might be one of the hardest chapters of the book to actually figure out, structurally. I could have switched to another chapter that was simpler and more focused, but I decided not to. On the one hand, this was very foolish because I am not being paid to write this proposal. On the other hand, it was nice because once I cracked the chapter I felt like I could definitely write this book.

I'm being vague about what the chapter and the book are about (although if you go back through these newsletters you can probably figure it out) because we're now at the stage where the book proposal is basically ready to go out into the world. In the next couple of months I'm going to find out whether anybody in the publishing industry wants to pay me to, you know, actually write this thing. I'm feeling pretty confident in the idea, and in my ability to write it, but the whims of publishing are strange and fickle so who knows.

If you're a person who has some wishes/good luck to spare, send it my way?

PECKII

I sold two more short stories in the last month! One to Kaleidotrope and one to the Monstrously Misguided anthology from Filidh Publishing. I'll be sure to link to things when stories are up and readable online.

I also wrote a few more little shorts, including some truly short (under 1000) word pieces and did some brainstorming for a longer short story that I outlined in the spring after a trip to New Mexico and that I want to pick back up soon.

the rest of the year

Can you believe that it's September? I'm in denial, a little bit. But I did spend some time last month figuring out what I want to get done and how I'm going to do it for the rest of the year. The plan is to finish a v6 draft of CUBENSIS (the novel) in September; a v5 of TEONANACTL (the novella) in October; and a longer PECKII (short story) in November. December is always a bit of a wash, and will be for catching stray threads on those projects as they pop up.

Last year I didn't hit any of the goals I had set for myself. This year I'm on track to hitting most of them. So it goes!

keep the space

In May I put a post-it note on my desk that says "KEEP THE SPACE," a phrase that recurred when I was working with Mandy Brown to figure out some challenging career choices. The note was meant to remind me not to try and fill my newfound "free time" with stuff to do that wasn't serving my actual goals. That sometimes you need the space to be space so you can think into it.

I didn't measure or plan out the gallery wall in my office (gasp, I know) and so I have always had a weird little skinny space in this one spot. I kept it because I figured that at some point I'd find something to go there. Moro's collar fits perfectly.