〰️〰️ 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.

doing

• I went to NYC on a combined work/play trip and saw lots of friends and took almost no pictures. Late summer in Brookly is unmatched. I did at one point text a friend saying "I can't believe I'm getting emotional outside the Five Guys at Jay Street Metrotech."
• I took some friends out to Mount Diablo to try and find some tarantulas. It was hot and the spiders do not like that so we only saw one, even though the leader of the spider tour group we passed said that the day before he saw ten. Still a lovely hike though!
• Now that Moro is no longer with us, it's easier for my partner and I to spend the whole day out doing things, so we've been doing more of that — a whole day on Alameda, or just a day full of errands. This is nice, but I'd rather have my dog.
• Went to a friend's lovely birthday gathering up in the North Bay and saw some whales spouting off the coast.
• I got myself a little rolling cart for my office to have yet another surface to put stuff on while I work. I love to have all my various papers and notebooks and reference items out at once!

• We installed a shed in the backyard to serve as my home studio, and I spent a ridiculous amount of time organizing and trawling Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace for new shelves and work benches.

• I finally learned how to work the riso machines at my studio, and now I am unstoppable! I've already got a project planned, and I printed these cute little posters to promote the COYOTE Calendar.

looking

• Coyote vs Acme — a very fun movie! The signs are great, as was this AMA featuring said (limited number of) signs.
• I got a physical tide calendar for 2027, which I'm really excited about. I've already gone through and flagged some enticing low tides in early 2027 that I'm going to drag people to, and it's just a lovely object to have to know when the sun will rise, what the phase of the moon will be, all that.
• I didn't do as much art looking in NYC as I had originally hoped, but I did make a quick trip to the Museum of Modern art to put a penny in the Umberto Boccioni jar (my favorite, deeply problematic Italian Futurist) and saw a few interesting pieces.
• We got a "bad" portrait of Moro done as part of a fundraiser for Friends of Oakland Animal Services and it's not bad at all!

reading

• Everywhere I went in NYC I saw Mónica Ojeda's Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun and so on the fourth sighting I finally bought it.
• "It’s not necessarily that I’m thinking, “Oh, this object has its own will,” but how do we respect previous relationships that this object had that are still relevant today? Because some of them don’t expire. For example, the material relationship between a stone and the mountain it was a part of. Even if that rock goes away from the mountain, they’re still connected, and they live in a different timeline because mountain time is different from human time." 〰️ an interview with Gala Porras-Kim by R.O. Kwon
• "Don’t worry about being original, she said dismissively. Yes, everything’s been written, but also, the thing you want to write, before you wrote it, was impossible to write. Otherwise it would already exist. You writing it makes it possible." 〰️ Alexander Chee on Annie Dillard
• "The cars usually don’t have what’s called a “soul” until an hour before they’re supposed to have a person driving them. I don’t know all the details, but basically you can’t connect to the car, you can’t do anything with it, you can’t adjust its settings at all until it has a soul. And for some reason they don’t get a soul until an hour before a shift starts." 〰️ an interview with a Waymo worker
• "Revise notes constantly—try to develop the ability to read them as though you had never seen them before, to see how well they communicate. Constant revision, whether or not you’re going to “do” anything with what you’ve written, also teaches you to write better in the first place, when you first write something down." 〰️ Lydia Davis on note taking
• "Mother prepared me for the blood, for my stomach to turn, for my body to change, but that isn’t what happened. Not exactly. It started with an itch at my elbow." 〰️ a short story by Skyler Melnik
• "I would 100 percent taste the forbidden fish sauce. I would do it for science. My wife would kill me if I'm not already dead. I will. If there was a way, if I would be able to fly out there, I would do it, and write a whole report about it because I think that would be a pinnacle achievement for me." 〰️ a food scientist on the abandoned Canadian fish sauce factory
• "Love out here isn’t waiting. It’s paying the light bill." 〰️ Sherren Moore on waiting for her partner to come home from prison

listening

〰️ OUT 〰️〰️

This is stuff I wrote, created, or published.

Normally I share most of my work and progress with you all as it happens (whether you like it or not), but a lot of what I did in September has to remain a bit of a secret for now. Once I can talk about it, I will!

As I mentioned above, I went to New York City and read at a very cool literary salon put on by the queen Sasha Ravich featuring Megan Milks, Rebecca Peng, Dave Riser, and Bee Michael. Everybody's work was so cool to hear and I definitely hope you check all those people out. Sasha does these offal literary salons pretty regularly so if you're an NYC person you should definitely keep those on your radar.

I also submitted a few more short stories, some new and some simply newly rejected, hoping to find homes for them.

And, of course, I continued to write the COYOTE Calendar. Please share with all of your Bay Area friends and enemies!

CUBENSIS

I also finished yet another revision on my historical speculative horror novel. I mentioned in a previous newsletter something June Martin said at a talk about revision, in which she described trying to have a point of view for each pass through. If revision is, quite literally, to see again, then what lens are your seeing the piece through? What is the perspective you're taking on each pass?

My v5 revision for this project boiled down to "oh no, this is horror" and so I decided that the perspective for this v6 revision should be: "oh yes this is horror." And so I tried to edit with that in mind, making things sharper, clearer, and darker from top to bottom. I also spent a lot of time thinking about the logic of the horror behind the story — logic that is never actually explained on the page, but that I felt the need to know so that I could write the book.

There is a debate among fantasy writers about whether or not your magical system needs to make sense or have an internal logic to it — some argue that it should, while others say they don't care at all. I think that's probably true for horror too — some people don't need to feel like they understand the mechanism for what is going on, while others do. I fall a bit in between. I don't need it explained on the page, but I do want to feel as though it exists. In other words, I want to feel as though the writer knows what is going on, even if I don't.

looking ahead

This month, I'm turning back to PROJECT TEONANANCTL, my novella (supporters can see the full list of all these projects and what they are in more detail here). My big big goal is that by the end of the year I have both that, and PROJECT CUBENSIS in a state where they could theoretically start to be pitched out in the world for publication. TEONANANCTL is a much harder sell — it's a novella, which are already hard to sell, and some people simply won't touch it (supporters only on that one too). But all I can do is make the project as good as possible, and hope for the best. I'm also hoping to finish one longer PECKII short story that has been nagging at me for months.

It's wild to me that the year is starting to wrap up, and I'm starting to think about writing a 2026 recap, and building 2027 goals. How is that possible? It doesn't help that it's 80 degrees here in the Bay Area.

I hope you're all doing okay out there amidst the terrors.