As someone who grew up more than 10,000 miles from Australia, I spent a surprising amount of my childhood watching a guy play the didgeridoo. A white Australian entertainer who was on TV a lot whipped one out with tiresome regularity. (Like a shockingly high number of TV entertainers of his generation, he turned out to be a very bad guy, so I’m not going to use his name here, because I don’t want Google sending people to this newsletter!)

I’ve been thinking of the didgeridoo a lot recently because it requires circular breathing—that is, the player has to blow air out of their mouth as they take more in through their nose. Circular breathing was one of my biggest challenges as an editor and now, in a slightly different way, as a writer of books.

I’m not suggesting that magazine offices hum to the sound of the didgeridoo, but editors have to pay attention to what’s happening in the world even as they’re focused on editing the stories that have already been filed. I could edit, and I could commission, but I found it really hard to combine the two things. Unfortunately, you have to do both at the same time. You can’t keep starting over as soon as you’ve signed off on a piece. While you’re focused on editing, you need to keep an eye on breaking news to make sure you don’t miss the next big story. You need to keep the conveyer belt moving.

Book editors have the same problem. Their conveyer belt moves slower—but that makes it all the more important to breathe in and out at the same time. They have to deal with submissions from agents, read and consider manuscripts, meet with writers, and negotiate offers alongside the concentration-demanding work of editing books. I truly have no idea how they do it, because the time-blocking techniques the productivity gurus spout don’t work when the clock is ticking on both submissions and editing projects.

These days, my work life is much simpler than it’s ever been. For the most part, I only have to worry about one task: writing a book. It’s dreamy! At the same time, there is a bit of circular breathing involved. A few months ago, I realized that I needed to start writing. My plan to do all the research, and then after X months, all the writing, fell apart when I realized I’d have to spend so much time reacquainting myself with all the information I discovered months ago that it would be better if I wrote as I researched.

Of course, in those early chapters, I’d done most of the research already, so I was living a version of my “research then write” Plan A. Now that I’ve got to Chapter 5, I need to schedule some more interviews, but now I’m in writing mode, and I hate to put it aside for research! I love research—I just not keen on circular breathing.

READ ME: Along with Krista Burton (author of the hilarious book Moby Dyke), Mairead Sullivan (author of the fabulous book Lesbian Death), and academic Ashley Green, I took part in one of the “Short Takes: Provocations on Public Feminism” series organized by the journal Signs. We all shared our thoughts on Rachel Karp’s new book The Lesbian Bar Chronicles, and then Karp got to respond to our responses. Check it out!

RECOMMENDATIONS: I really enjoyed James Bailey’s Like a Cat Loves a Bird: The Nine Lives of Muriel Spark, which is one of the most literary biographies I’ve read in a while. He’s a beautiful writer, but I mostly mean that his takes on Spark’s books, which wouldn’t be out of place in the ever-shrinking Literary Criticism section of the bookstore, are both illuminating and somehow very convincing.