TRAVERSING Z

Process

end of the year 2020

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First of all this is long, so happy holidays to you and yours, and feel free to skip the rest!

After I type this I’m unplugging this computer and moving it to the living room, where it will be set up for family Zoom calls all day tomorrow. I’ll shift to writing on paper for a day or two, which is a new joy thanks to discovering fountain pens – my handwriting is still atrocious, but the pens have alleviated some of my wrist issues. (I had a bad bout of RSI years ago.)

I used to do a roundup twice a year, but writing less short fiction and an ever-shifting work situation has meant less to report. This year had begun no differently, with a work crisis that put me on temporary leave … and then just as I came back to work the city shut down, and we began hospice care for our beloved cat, and stimulus ran out … looking back now it’s all an unhappy haze. On top of it all I felt like I had finally gotten something I had longed for—time to write—and I’d done nothing with it.

But brains lie. They lie like rugs. Behold:

Published

The Painter’s Widow
Apple special edition chapbook
“An Elegy for Landings” in Truancy

Finished

Seeds of Truer Natures
Prima Materia revision
“Open All Night”
“In the Field”
“The O’Brien and Palmer Show”
“All This Could Be Yours”
“What the City Wants”
“In Her Mind a Darkness”
several microfictions

Started

A Shining Path
All Things in All Things
The Glorious and the Vile

Writing all this out has been kind of a big deal for me. To have done this much in spite of 2020 feels impressive to me; it’s also encouraging for the future, because it tells me that if I ever hit a point where book sales cover my portion of the bills, I can write at a pace to sustain that income. Which has been a nagging concern as I plan and re-plan the next five years (and will be re-planning again with unemployment running out next week).

I wish there was more talk among creatives, and for creatives, about this kind of strategizing, when you’re working around day jobs and financial uncertainty. Add that to the 2021 list? In the meantime, though, it’s taken the edge off the pain of the stalled stimulus bill, and given me a glimmer of hope for the year to come. I’ve got a number of seeds on that list. Let’s see what kind of harvest they bring.

And if you’ve read through all of this, thank you for listening, for reading, for just being out there. Happy holidays, again! See you in the new calendar.

some further thoughts on changing the narrative

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Earlier this week in my newsletter I wrote about this moment in history and the potential for writers and readers to change the narrative. I had more thoughts than what I included, but it was already long (“a moralizing screed” as one irate reader informed me, and damn right it was), so I compressed it to what felt urgent—to push for justice, to take care of ourselves and each other, to create habits of solidarity rather than short-term reactions—and put the rest aside.

I haven’t been sleeping much, lately. Even before the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing protests, I found myself waking in the darkness before dawn each morning, full of dread. I’ve taken to keeping something to read at my bedside just for these times, preferably nonfiction so my brain can chew on that instead of my overwhelming anxiety. Which is how I’ve been reading Warren Ellis: The Captured Ghosts Interviews. There’s plenty to chew on there.

I posted this quote on Instagram earlier today, without really knowing why it leapt out at me—I have no plans on writing superhero comics and if I did I would not write them this way, though it does explain more than a few I’ve read—but then I realized I was still thinking about narratives. Because I read a lot of comics as a kid, and I watched a lot of Very Bad cop shows, and much of the violence I’ve seen in the past ten days feels like a nasty echo of that childhood exposure. How many shows did I watch, how many storylines did I read, valorizing cops who didn’t play by the rules, who shot first and asked questions later, who sneered at due process ? How often was I presented with vigilantism as some kind of moral high ground?

And then I read this quote, this model of superhero stories. It may have been tongue in cheek, but just imagine taking the sex out of a story and replacing it with violence. “Hitting” those emotional beats, literally. Another thing Ellis mentions is how closed Americans are to sex, but I’m not sure if it’s that we’re closed to it or we’re just bad at it, we’re bad at vulnerability. We are, however, aces at violence. I can’t shake the image from my mind: of generations of children reading BAM and KAPOW when there should have been lovemaking or heartbreak. I’m imagining these children, and who they might grow up to be.

virus/updates part 4

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Milestones: today, for the first time in my life, I filed for unemployment.

But good news—! Tomorrow “Little Men with Knives” goes live at Tales to Terrify. I am stoked to hear it.

I’ve had this song running and running in my head, even when I meditate it’s an unshakeable background noise. Perhaps because Beirut is part of the soundtrack for the story I’m working on, but this song and my world right now feel like they dovetail too neatly.

Beirut – Cliquot | ‘Cheap Magic Inside’ edition from La Blogotheque on Vimeo.

A plague in the workhouse, a plague on the poor
Now I’ll beat on my drum ’til I’m dead
Yesterday, a fever, tomorrow, St. Peter
I’ll beat on my drum until then …

I’m also knee-deep in final tweaks to The Painter’s Widow and starting to squint hard at the calendar for release dates. Thinking late June. Look for the cover sometime in May …

This one is, in a sense, the Empire Strikes Back book … there’s little resolution and a great deal of setup for the last book. But what is resolved, oof. It took me a year to write that resolution. You have been warned. I have warned you.