Welcome to my toad induced meltdown
Well. Every day in February went by like a decade—what, with all the horrors (…you ok bud? Me neither. I'm sending you strength). The horrors do not persist, they escalate ! ! ! and yet, April has gone by in a blink.
Contents
- Reviews (and a preorder discount, sick)
- Pep talk: Pep sourced from a toad induced meltdown
- What’s in my reading queue
First, some nice reviews:
Ratika Desphpande highlighted a few SFF stories featuring plants and gardens in Reactor Magazine, and I'm honored to have Blood, Bone, and Water included. Here's what she had to say.
Huang’s wonderful little story starts off like a fairy tale, with knights conspiring together to defeat a large rose bush that covers a castle said to be filled with riches—but then takes the reader through time to a new place and perspective. Huang experiments with chronology, causing the reader to reconsider how we perceive and think about the natural world around us.
Check out the other stories, because who doesn't love a good botany tinged tale?
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Additionally, Library Journal gave Amplitudes a starred review, calling it “a rare anthology in which every story shines. A must have for anyone who loves speculative fiction.”
If you've been interested in trying it out, did you know B&N is throwing down a big old discount on preorders til Friday? If you've been thinking about preordering (which helps a LOT!! tyty) B&N Rewards Members 25% off all preorders with PREORDER25. Premium members get 35%! So maybe throw a few extra preorders in your cart while you're at it.
Link here!
And now, on to the pep talk.
My toad induced meltdown
Every night after reading each of my kids a book, I climb into my toddler’s converted crib and cram my spine against the bars so we can listen to a bedtime podcast together. I’ve tried to negotiate the outside spot, so I can touch air instead of bars, and roll out of the bed gracefully when we’re done. No. Inside! Only! The experience is somehow nicer for him if mommy is twitching bc she is curled up against rails like a touched pillbug.
As we have established in the last newsletter, I am only 5’1”. Despite this discomfort, I enjoy this. It’s a sweet and limited time offer.
Anyway, we listen to all sorts of mainstream IP, toddlers love IP, but I’m always very excited when he agrees to listen to Arnold Lobel’s very excellent audiobook readings of Frog and Toad. The other night we were listening to one of his favorites, “Shivers.” Frog details a horror-folk story he was told as a young lad. He recounts, When I was a tadpole…
I have listened to hours and hours and hours of Frog and Toad. I pretty much watched only nature documentaries from age 4–9. I did in fact go to elementary school. But in that moment all I could think is, holy shit, holyshitholyshitholyshit frogs are tadpoles. FROGS COME FROM TADPOLES.
I had totally forgotten. Most of us learn it very young: frog eggs hatch into these goopy little fish looking things, which somehow sprout legs when it’s time, and then hop out of the water. It’s absolutely chaotic. In what world is this reality? How would this be a thing that is like, yeah, cool, uh huh, just another Thursday. And we all just learn about it so young that we take the absolute mayhem for granted.
A tadpole grows up into a frog. A fake fish becomes a creature that hops around land, in the grass, in the woods.
What????
Of course I had to be still and restful. I’m not staying up til 11pm because I jostled the bed time routine. I’m no rookie. My duties are patting and soothing and calming, not interrupting the process to say to my young child oh my fkn god do you know anything about frog biology??? It’s absolutely unhinged!!!!!.
So yeah I had to lay there spinning out across space and time, listening to Frog and Toad screeching about some ‘Dark Frog’, some amphibious Joe-Biden-meme monster who was snatching frog babies in the night.
Maybe this doesn’t happen to you. Must be nice. This happens to me a lot because I am a very forgetful person with very reactive nerves. I used to be incredibly insecure about this, and it gets me into trouble. And yet I want to be this type of person almost all of the time: a person so good at forgetting how this all works, that I’m constantly surprised, delighted, furious. That’s perspective. That’s reality.
There’s a reason craft books hammer home this idea of ‘defamiliarizing the familiar’. In our work, we make the mundane something special, something worthy of capture. Conversely we make the outlandish believable as an act of community, act as witness, lay bare.
But beyond issues of craft on the page, I find writers are terribly prone to resisting forgetfulness. An acceptance one year means you need three the next, and five the year after that. I don’t mean to dismiss the momentum necessary to sustain a fragile career. Not at all. But it’s a p good way to drive yourself boo-nanas.
Imagine if every acceptance felt as good as the first one. Imagine if every reader felt like your first.
I guess this is kind of what people are getting at with all the gratitude stuff, because wins can be spaced out reallllll far. Gratitude journaling is a long straight road to mental illness with my OCD, but it turns out being very forgetful and very reactive stands in pretty well. I enjoy being able to look at my actual website some days, one I coded every pixel of, built from scratch, and think…what?? seriously????? oh my fkn god that’s right!?! I kind of forgot??????
I think we all forget. It’s what we do with that forgetting that matters. It can either be an excuse to discount everything we’ve done, a convenient blank. If we don’t remember all the progress we’ve made in retrospect: there’s no evidence we’re externally successful. And when we’re not externally successful in a world that wants to forget us, with a brain intent on flagellation, we cannot defend our own worth.
A very excellent meme from tumblr
Or, we can absolutely lose our cool, and try to revel in the novelty that is our own actual lives. We can forget a line we wrote and read it back, have that rare experience of, did I write that?
Just—maybe after the kids are asleep.
Books, books, books
or, watch me valiantly try to read the books I keep endlessly (and joyously) buying
I just finished There There by Tommy Orange and I reckon I'll never recover. All the praise is warranted. Go pick it up. It's an interlinked collection of stories that reads with urgency, power, and humor, with all of the characters spiraling towards the Big Oakland Powwow. I left the book absolutely buzzing with all of the interconnectedness and heart inside.
I just started Siren Queen, finally. I trust Nghi Vo w my life (as a reader—i don't even know if i trust -me- w my life physically), and the opening is a banger! Already loving the magic tinged vintage Hollywood Vo is summoning, and her trademark luscious prose.
I just picked up two books! First is friendo Vicky Tan's Ask This Book a Question, an interactive CYA-ish book that uses what we know about cognitive bias to help you make life decisions.
The second is Urvashi Bahuguna's No Straight Thing Was Ever Made. Urvashi is a fearsome poet; I can't wait to dig into these essays centering around mental illness and the effect navigating her mood disorder had on her relationships.
A random question if you made it to the bottom: do you like listening to creative process stuff on podcasts? Or, do you do most of that in longform/shortform video format? I am thinking about documenting some of the MANY random projects and creative ventures I've been cooking up, but I fear if I choose a video format I will never update. Let me know~ and if you have favorites, send them my way!
Wishing you well, as always. xoxo