When the cold of winter comes.
What I've been reading and thinking about lately.
This is my favorite season, the time when I feel the most alive and awake. The fog of heat has lifted, and the crisp, uncompromising air gives me new life again. The darkness comes early and the evening hours feel like a promising secret, inviting me to dance in the ringing night.
This has been the most beautiful autumn I can remember. Each day the trees changed, little by little. The leaves are mostly down now. My office is how I want it. If I rush, I could get to a milestone number on my “Read Books” spreadsheet before the end of the year, but why rush? (Because I like numbers, that’s why. Maybe this will be what inspires me to read the thinnest books on my shelves. I’m not proud. Motivated, but not proud.)
I’m writing again. An idea that follows on from The Spare, in a way. Related concepts, sitting at the same table. I love the bubbles in my chest, I love the way it feels like I’m a shaken-up bottle of soda.
Thinking a lot about censoring the self. My entire internet life has been bounded by the knowledge that what I write will be read. In the LiveJournal days my friends would complain that I never said anything, I never really wrote about my feelings publicly. It was hard to explain how unsafe it made me feel. (When I was fourteen, a boy I messed around with—it was not exactly a banner experience—wrote about it on his LJ, posting fairly graphic details of what happened. I didn’t know he did it. He wrote it in a friends-locked post, and irony of ironies, he didn’t have me on that filter. I didn’t know he named me. I only learned when I was at some school show or other and a couple of girls I had been vaguely friendly with gave me the cut direct. And then my best friend said, “Didn’t you know…?” She had to tell me the whole thing. I have rarely been so upset in my life. I don’t remember what show we were at. I just know I sat there, vibrating with misery, for two hours.
They find Harriet’s notebook in Harriet the Spy. What she’s written down—it hurts people. It gets her in trouble. I have never wanted to hurt people with what I write down. I have never wanted to get into that kind of trouble.
The other side of that is—there are things I have always wanted to write about. Stories that are mine to tell because I was there and my views of things matter as much as anyone else’s. It feels like the cliché of letting the chips fall, except I’ve been gripping them so tightly that the indentations on their edges have bitten into my palms.
It’s an exhale. It’s a sigh. I want to delete the last few paragraphs, and I don’t. It takes practice, writing about feelings. Staring at the shrill voice of the internal censor who wants me to be as quiet and small as possible. Like the speaker in Charlie’s Angels, but mean. It does have a volume control and an off switch, that speaker. I just have to practice finding it. I hope you’ll come along for the ride.
Books I have read lately, an Incomplete Accounting:
The Decade in Tory by Russell Jones. Very good. Very enraging. A Dave Barry for our age and particular circumstances.
The Chaos Agents by F. Fox North. Fox and I are friends, and it’s always quite an adventure to read a book by a friend when you’ve never read a book by that friend before. Slightly fraught. You’re walking on uneven, slippery ground when you start out. Luckily—skillfully, rather, skillful on Fox’s part—the path was clear and paved with heartbreak and turned pages. Go read it if you like books about bands, books about queers, if you want to be delighted and shaken up.
Assembly by Natasha Brown. I finished this book about a Black woman in modern Britain and couldn’t say anything but “Wow.” I repeated it several times. I’m glad I read The Decade in Tory first, actually. I needed the historical context for some of what the narrator mentions in passing.
The Rewind Files by Claire Willett. Time travel adventure about Watergate and family legacy and how to be a hero. If you like Seanan McGuire/Mira Grant, please give this a try. It made me remember I like reading. And writing.
Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher. Good epistolary novel. The writer is a professor in his forties at some liberal arts college or university, and it’s also a little bit funny and a little bit heartbreaking.
Sailor’s Delight by Rose Lerner. Rose and I are friends, and the lovely thing about Rose’s books is that they’re very much worth the time you spend with them. If you’re looking for historical romance that actually understands how the time and place in which you live matter to your choices—read Rose’s books! They’re also bantery and hot. And have happy endings which are also exciting.
I’m really, really looking forward to Cat Sebastian’s next book, Daniel Cabot Puts Down Roots. And I have Lavender House by Lev AC Rosen and A Restless Truth by Freya Marske waiting on my nightstand.
Wish me luck reading twenty-two books before the end of the year. Do you have recommendations for what some of those should be?
Oh, and the obligatory Twitter thoughts: I haven’t deactivated my account, I’m feeling strangely sentimental about it. I got a lot of good things from the people I met on Twitter over the years, and I hope I gave a lot of good back to them. The friendships, the flirting, the support we gave each other. The joking. The sense that we were really concerned for each other. So much of that fell away, but some of it—probably all that we were ever going to take with us, really—has fallen into text threads and Discord chats, and occasional emails and being subscribed to so many newsletters. My first-ever tweet was about how I didn’t know what I was doing there, and I’m not sure that changed very much over the last eleven years. But I’m grateful for so many of the people I have known and loved in 280 characters or less.
I’m sticking around here for now, and who knows where we’ll go next.