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After doing my only Book 2 event so far back in early May, I called my agent and told her I wanted to start writing on deadline(s), if only to work toward collecting a paycheck this year, ha ha. That’s not the whole truth—Book 3 has been percolating for a while, or rather all the prep is in place, AKA I’ve built out a working playlist and I’ve chosen the epigraphs, which in my experience (three books in lol) don’t really change even if the story and text completely transform.
Some early reviews of Book 2 are out in the world. They’re…about what I expected: some confusion that I can dismiss offhand, some confusion that confirms my own dull regrets, some “the good is good, but.” (Yeah yeah, don’t read them, I’m only human but I’ll do myself a favor and cut myself off here.) I finally got my own ARCs this morning and cracked a copy open for some quality control, then found myself losing two, three, four hours revisiting maybe a third of the book.
Part of what kept my attention was the physical sensation of holding all those words—the hours behind them, not just spent typing in the basement but also painstakingly building out the playlist, jogging while listening to the playlist, diagramming action in my notebooks, looking up plants and flowers and video game terminology endlessly, searching shit like “gigantic” on Thesaurus.com, crying over old entries in my notes app, crying as I wrote and then revisited certain sections—in my hands.
Speaking of the TLC playlist: it’s live :^) or rather it’s been live
Another part was the immediate feeling of: “Would I do all this, in this way, again if I had a clean slate?” Some aspects, sure; others, with the reviews fresh on my mind, maybe not. Again, I peeked into the dead dove bag, I shouldn’t be surprised to see that the dove is indeed there, and dead. But I’ve been having this nagging sensation that the direction I want to take with my writing, the ambition of it all, doesn’t match up with my skill level. I’m getting better at something, that’s for sure, but I’m not sure if it’s the right kind of improvement, in the right way. In moments like this, formal study, or at least some regular practice / feedback outside of my own head, seems more appealing than ever.
I have a point of comparison to the writing practice: I’ve been taking calligraphy and painting (but mostly calligraphy) classes for almost a year and a half now. Once a week, around an hour and a half. Compared to where I started, I can actually feel how my hand, my eye, my thinking have shifted in relation to the words and images I can commit in ink.
One of the reasons I decided to study calligraphy is because Bernice Bing, whom I came to adore after seeing an exhibit of hers at the Asian Art Museum a while back, folded calligraphy into her work. After going to the Ruth Asawa retrospective and realizing that she too practiced calligraphy and also painted a lot of flowers…I don’t know. Something’s clicking. I keep telling myself that the calligraphy is directly related to Book 3 aspirations and while that’s true, I think it speaks to something deeper in me but right now, I can’t quite pinpoint what that deeper is. Perhaps it’s related to my ongoing quest to situate myself in the real: fruit in trees, used books in back rooms, stone ground into ink.
I need, as always, to know that it’s working: a given manuscript or story idea but more broadly, me. My life. The dream I’m clinging onto by my fingernails, despite the creeping sense that I am no longer a golden child in the rapids, no Moses or Jason or Nezha, and have instead been shunted into—by circumstance, but also by choice—a lazy river tributary. That was always one of my parents’ truest criticisms of me, that I’m lazy, that I fall back on a safety net of innate talent or lucky breaks and don’t bother, or simply don’t have the skill to propel myself beyond that initial coasting, to endure the plateau of small improvements and break through from “fine” to “okay” to “good” to “very good” to maybe, some far off day, “great.”
I know enough to know that their old line, that only geniuses can create and leave behind artistic legacies, isn’t true—plenty of really stupid people, having made stupid things, can and do swim in festooned flowers they don’t deserve but nonetheless are bestowed upon them as though flowers weren’t once living things. Yet it does still strike me sometimes, as though I’m a baby just experiencing the world, the thing I didn’t but probably should’ve expected, which is that most of anything sits in flat mediocrity. Internalizing that knowledge in turns terrifies and pacifies me. Oh god, here I am, utterly unremarkable; oh good, here I am, making any mark at all.
What can I want, in our world, in this lifetime, from our world, from this lifetime? Selfishly, only everything, always, forever. But quietly, more truly, I want to feel pride without an immediately equalizing shame. I want to see the ripple and know it came about because of the stone I carved out and then cast. (A stone I could only find and chip away at because someone else’s ripple guided me to its location.) Above all, I want to watch my friends’ children grow and I want every child to grow up and, as we all do, blow away. But not until they’ve made their marks, left real thumbprints in real clay that will survive as fragments, somewhere in the future.
Anyway. What have I been listening to: a lot of Saint Etienne in the car, a lot of Book 3 playlist anytime else as I build it out and outline and draft, digging into my interior world as the exterior one weeps like bad wallpaper and peels back like it too.
One of the songs that I recently slotted onto the Book 3 playlist has, since the moment it dropped, become my song of the summer. A couple of days ago, while cleaning the kitchen and listening to it on loop, I started to tear up. The couplet that does me in the most: “Please, you know I can’t lie / But I’m sober tonight.” I mouth it to myself even when there’s no music playing; my mind carries the melody and my memory carries the tears.
I wrote this newsletter over the span of about an hour and a half. This one fly kept dancing all over my screen (annoying), then kept almost landing on my face (unforgivable)… Just as I was about to press send, it flew in front of me and with one decisive clap, I took it out. Now I feel kinda bad. Rest in pieces…
Thanks for "listening." Stay tuned...!
♬ xoxo Lio
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