I have, in the past, been accused of "burying the lede" by putting good news at the bottom of this newsletter and so I am going to start by saying: I sold a book!

If you've been around for a while, you know that this book has been on my mind for a long time. I struggled for years to figure out what, exactly, I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it. And then I struggled more with the actual work of writing a book proposal without simply... writing the whole book. But finally, this year, I had a big breakthrough and I got the proposal done and my lovely and very patient agent Caroline helped me sell it!

The book won't come out until 2029. With non-fiction, you write the proposal first and that is what someone buys and then you have to go actually... write the whole book. (Unlike in fiction, where you write the whole novel first and that's what a publisher buys.) Next month I'll write about how I'm tackling the project plan and thinking about getting this beast of a thing done.

Okay, now on to the usual format of the newsletter.

〰️〰️ 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.

looking

My partner and I went on a big road trip this month to see some superlatives including: biggest bird in the US (California condor; Pinnacles National Park), biggest tree in the world (General Sherman; Sequoia National Park), oldest tree in the world (Methuselah; Inyo National Forest), and lowest place in the US (Badwater Basin; Death Valley National Park). It was glorious and beautiful!

My favorite, perhaps unsurprisingly if you know that I'm a desert guy, was Death Valley. While we were there met an amazing guide who gave us a very cool personal itinerary — if you're ever in that area, I highly recommend staying at Stovepipe Wells and asking for Christopher! One of the hikes we did on his recommendation was up an old (closed) road through a slot canyon called Titus Canyon. It took us longer to do this walk than projected because I kept stopping and taking 239898 photos of the rock walls. Look at this texture!?!?!

On this trip, we also made a stop at Hearst Castle. I confess that I didn't really know anything about Hearst Castle. If I'm completely honest, I thought it was the same thing as The Winchester Mystery House? But my partner had fond memories of it from childhood so we went, and now I can't stop thinking about it!

If you're not familiar, Hearst Castle is a giant complex on top of a hill in San Simeon, California. William Randolph Hearst (newspaper magnate, attempted politician, absurdly rich dude) built it over two decades, constantly adding and demolishing and adding again. Hearst was obsessed with art, and spent a lot of his considerable wealth acquiring beautiful pieces from across the world (mostly Europe, but also China and Japan) and filling this house with those treasures. It's an absurd place, with two huge swimming pools, one whose tiles have actual gold in them.

I came away from Hearst Castle with two thoughts:

1. Why don't our current rich people do shit like this, rather than spending all their money trying to destroy the world?
2. I must learn more about Julia Morgan.

Julia Morgan is often described as "the architect of Hearst Castle" but she was so much more than that. At Hearst Castle, she was also the interior decorator, the landscape architect, the foreman, and the banker. She wrangled Hearst (who she called W.R.) and his insane ideas that she was, somehow, totally game to try out (with her own improvements).

For example, in 1927, seven years into the building of the complex, Hearst wrote to Morgan:

I have an idea for a winter pool. We could put a big hot-house down where we were going to build the Persian Garden, and in the middle of this hot-house we could have a big pool. In the hot-house, we would have palms, ferns, and a whole lot of orchids. The temperature of the hot-house, and of the pool too, would be warm on the coldest, bleakest winter day. We would have the South Sea Islands on the Hill. Here we could serve tea, or poi, or whatever the situation called for. The pool, of course, would be the main attraction, and we might put a turtle and a couple of sharks in to lend verisimilitude. This, except for the sharks, is not as impractical a proposition as it might seem. It is merely making a hot-house useful, and making a pool beautiful.

Morgan wrote back:

I like your idea for the combination indoor pool and orchid green house. There could be a plate glass partition in the pool and the alligators, sharks, etc., could disport on one side of it and visitors could unsuspectingly dive toward it. This [is] the other architect's contribution to your idea.

They never did build this particular swimming pool, but for over two decades, Morgan led this absurd project in ways that are truly incredible. Hearst often acquired pieces that he wanted included in the home, but that didn't obviously or easily fit: an ornate Spanish ceiling, a set of delicately carved columns, a beautiful door. Julia would take these objects and make them work. One of the Spanish ceilings was not big enough to fill the room, and so she designed segments and had them cast out of plaster and painted to look exactly like the real ones. If a room needed four columns, but Hearst only had two, she would design an additional pair — not simply copying them, but creating new designs to match the style and aesthetic of the ones he had. She personally designed stained glass windows, wrought iron gates, mosaics, wood carvings, marble composites and more to make Hearst's vast and chaotic collection actually fit into the house.

While she was alive, Morgan was fairly famous. She was the first woman to graduate with a B.S. from UC Berkeley with a civil engineering degree with honors, and the first woman first woman to ever be admitted to the extremely exclusive architecture program at l'École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, despite the administrators' many attempts to keep her from getting in. Along with Hearst Castle, she designed nearly 600 buildings, mostly in California — from homes, to recreational centers, to churches — and helped define an era of architecture in the state.

But in the decades after hear death, Morgan largely faded out of architectural history. Unlike the men of her generation of architecture, Morgan did not establish or demand a specific style. She fitted her work to the needs of the client and the location of the building, and as such there is no specific way to see a building and know "that's a Julia Morgan" the way you might with other architects. And, of course, she was a woman, and so despite having achieved huge success and being brilliant, there were plenty of men who still simply would never see her as a truely important architect.

That has changed in the last decade or so. In 2014, the American Institute of Architects awarded her the Gold Medal posthumously, making her the first woman to ever receive it. It used to be, that when you took tours at Hearst Castle, Julia Morgan was never mentioned. Now, tour guides are sure to point out that this place would not exist without her.

If any of this has interested you, check out her biography, Julia Morgan An Intimate Biography of the Trailblazing Architect which is full of absolutely incredible stories. If you see me in real life in the next few months, there's a good chance I'll want to tell you one of them. And I'm starting to cook up a little bit of a project about Julia Morgan and her Bay Area projects. A walking tour? A map? A zine? All of the above? Anyway, if you go to Hearst Castle, be sure to go on the Julia Morgan themed tour.

reading

• “We are witnessing loss of heritage, place-based language, identity, storytelling, millennia-old sky traditions and our ability to conduct traditional practices grounded in the ecological integrity of what we call home.” The pair proposed a term for “sky grief”: noctalgia." 〰️ A company is trying to put up a satellite that can beam light down from space and they recently conducted a test in Lone Pine, CA. I was actually near Lone Pine right after the experiment, and heard people talking about it. No one knew what it was, or why there was suddenly a huge bright light at night. Some people thought it was aliens. Some teenagers thought it was maybe a car that had crashed and tumbled such that its lights were shining up. They rushed up the hill to try to help, only to discover a tech company's test site. There is something so fascinating to me about the ways in a small town's culture intersects with a tech company's placelessness here. Also, noctalgia is such a compelling term.
• "The editor I spoke to—on the condition of anonymity—shared that, lately, when she and her colleagues bring nonfiction projects to acquisition meetings, she feels a chill in the room, with people “leaning back and looking away or not engaging” with what’s being pitched." 〰️ Pour one out for your friends and favs who are trying to sell non-fiction projects right now because it is BLEAK out there.
• "A writing career is a constantly shifting environment where there is no promised land. There’s only a changing, and hopefully improving, set of problems." 〰️ I've been having a lot of feelings recently about my career and future and this piece is both depressing and reassuring all at once.

listening/watching

I also

• Went to several book events across the Bay Area in my attempt to go to more things out of the house!
• Went to the USCS arboretum to sniff the corpse flower, which, I learned, is actually not one single flower but instead thousands of tiny flowers inside a giant spathe!
• Got tables for the studio and got it fully setup so now I can actually use it!

〰️ OUT 〰️〰️

This is stuff I wrote, created, or published.

I spoke at two events in October, an online event with SJSU about the ethics of sex testing and an in person event for LitCrawl in SF where I gave my "spiciest take."

TEONANACTL

Now that the big revision of CUBENSIS is done and off to my agent and some friends for reads, I spent October dedicated to my "novella" TEONANACTL. Note the scare quotes there. I have, for years now, been referring to this project as a novella. The last draft was 26k words, which is firmly novella territory.

There is one big problem though: novellas are really, really hard to sell. And even harder when you're not an established fiction writer. Which I'm not. People had asked me if I had considered turning it into a novel, but I simply couldn't see any way of making it ~80k words. So I had kind of resigned myself to perhaps finishing this project and maybe selling it for a couple hundred bucks to a very small press. Or even self-publishing it online or something like that. The chances are just so, so slim of getting something of that length, with my profile, out in the world.

Then, I heard R.O. Kwon casually drop the fact that her novel The Incendiaries was short. Around 40k words. And I thought, hold on... could I make my project 40k words?

I already knew that this edit pass was one in which I would focus on adding a little bit of backstory for both main characters back into the draft (after having stripped it almost entirely out in a previous edit). And so I thought why not give it a shot? This pass, then, was basically me trying to novelize the project. I wasn't sure if I could. I also wasn't sure if, in doing so, I would destroy the tension and stakes and interest in the story (since most of what I would be adding was flashbacks and backstory, not action in the present moment of the narrative). But there is, in these sorts of things, really only one way to know and that's to try it.

And I did! I managed to write about 20k new words in October for this project, and got the word count up to just over 40k. Then I re-read it from top to bottom to see whether I had utterly destroyed the thing, and I don't think I have! I think this is, maybe, possibly, going to work? It needs several more edits now, of course, as I take the hastily written half of the book from just write it down to something that someone might want to read. But I'm hopeful!

I shared a section of this new stuff with the class I'm in at The Ministry of Words, and got some really helpful feedback. Now, the work continues. And, now that I've sold OSTOYAE, I have to figure out how to not lose sight of this project while I start another one that is going to take up so much of my brain and time. That's one of my big tasks for November.

secret riso project

Last issue I told you about how I had taken a class on risograph printing, and found it really fun! Well, in classic Reo Eveleth fashion, I then immediately decided to design and take on a very large and complicated riso project. You know, the thing I literally just learned how to do?

I'm printing a 2027 wall calendar for COYOTE! Each month features an adaptation of an illustration, photo, or some other element from one of the stories COYOTE has published. The goal is that people will use this calendar to keep track of the things they go to from the weekly events calendar.

I've learned a lot in the last month about riso printing, calendar design, and what not to do! But I think overall it's turning out pretty well, and I'm excited to share the finished product with folks soon. And, it's taught me enough that I'm ready to start printing my own fun little designs. I doubt I'll ever sell stuff but if you're a paying subscriber you might get things in the mail at some point!

closing

I saw this tree growing around a rock while we were in Sequoia. I can't stop thinking about it.