Hi friends. It’s 10 pm on Monday as I write this—and it’s been a minute since we spoke. For a week and change there I was at Viable Paradise, and had a great time working with writers who will soon be (or already are) heating up your shelves and short fiction sites. Add to that my overlapping secret projects and a few minor family issues (nothing serious or medical), and, well, it’s been a bit of a road. But the writing proceeds, and I’m excited by the how of it. I’ve also found a few new tricks, some of them exceedingly basic, that have helped get my head on right when it comes to breaking open the manuscript in the morning, and I’m hoping that will lead to faster smoother progress. (Remember: slow is smooth and smooth is fast.)

And, of course, there’s this election.

One of many points parenting has in its favor: it will accept all the attention, energy, care, love you can give, and just when you think you’re spent, some slight trace more will be coaxed out from you. That’s been a great boon; without it, I would have spent even more time trying to scroll to the bottom of the internet in foolish hope that doing so would provide me with a shred of certainty. But the internet is not a certainty machine. Think about it: if you became certain, really certain, you would stop scrolling. I slipped up and lost an hour and a half to Bluesky this afternoon. Bluesky!

I voted for Kamala Harris, early. It was a wonderful feeling. I hadn’t realized until I walked out of the polling place just how many impacted emotions were gathering, unfelt, until I took that basic step. But now of course, we wait. That’s when the anxieties creep in.

One of the few real finds from my afternoon Bluesky excursion was to see Kevin Kulp quoting a friend of his, that for the rest of the week we’re basically on Airport Lounge Rules: calories don’t count, money is free, work is eh, give your body the pleasures it needs. This is a true and useful point.

Pleasure, of course, isn’t always enough. In the wake of 2016 (which lives in my mind as “the last election” even though, well, here we are) I stumbled onto an extremely helpful little book / pamphlet called “A Guide to the Perplexed” by a philosopher who goes by the handle FuckTheory. I think about it often—moving from breath, to the experience of being in bodies, to the role of philosophy in confronting the experience of anxiety. This book really helped me out of a hole in 2016. It’s free, for the next few days, on his website. If you’re interested in reading, it’s more than worth your time.

Sarah Gailey has some great resources in their recent newsletter, about how to vote, about what to do if you have issues, how to care for yourself. It’s worth reading.

I really should have Kay Ryan’s poem Doubt written up in block letters on my office wall. It’s built around the metaphor of a chick breaking out of its shell, and it’s about writing mostly but these lines are relevant always:

“Doubt uses albumen

at twice the rate of work.”

I started writing this within moments of finishing a digital phonebank. Doubt uses albumen at twice the rate of work. If you want to grab a shift, here’s the signup link I used.

Take care of yourselves. Work for the liberation of all sentient beings.

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