Unsubscriptions and Dramatic Situations
Hi all,
Hope you're well! This is a risky thing to say at the start of a newsletter, but: today I've been unsubscribing from emails that I don't want to receive any more. This is a great way of feeling like you've done something useful, though arguably not quite as great as actually doing something useful.
I try to do an unsubscribe-from-emails sweep a couple of times a year, so I've long since picked off all the low-hanging fruit, and this time round I'm coming up against emails that definitely aren't relevant to me but that I still kinda want to receive:
A perspex company informing me about their new colours of perspex
An email from a restaurant in Melbourne who wanted to apologise for how bad their food had been recently, and who assured me that they had hired a new chef and were going to try really hard, and they hoped I'd give them another chance
Extremely regular messages from nj.com, a New Jersey news site I made a (free) account on recently so I could read this excellent piece on an "elite squad known as the Legalized Games of Chance Control Commission". The Commission's employees investigate eg claw machines and other arcade games and try to make sure there's no more than the permitted amount of chicanery going on. What a job! And now I receive NJ.com's newsletter, which is almost always just the right amount of perplexing. Like, what's this? What does it mean? I intend to never find out.
Three or four years ago I went through a stage where I ordered a lot of custom-printed jigsaw puzzles of various friends' faces, because I thought it was funny (it was). So now I get constant offers for custom printed mugs, placemats etc. These all have subject lines like "Time to stock up on sequin cushions!" and "Only This Weekend: The Night You Became Daddy Canvas" (as you might expect, this is a personalised canvas print you can buy to commemorate the night you became daddy)Special summer offers from various Italian courses I've tried out at some point (these are usually run by one person trying frantically to do everything and the newsletters therefore almost invariably open "Ciao %FIRSTNAME%!")
Couldn't bring myself to unsubscribe from any of 'em this time through; so much for a sense of achievement.
DRAMATIC SITUATIONS
Why was I desperately casting around for something that feels productive in the first place? Well, I've sent off the line edits for my book. This is one of several editing rounds, and there's at least one more to come, but it means that there's nothing for me to do on the manuscript right now, so I'm just sitting around going "oh uhh okay, now what... I guess I will... start writing... another? book? which is my job! great! okay then!"
Ways I could approach this:
Start on one of the ideas I've got vaguely floating around and see how it goes
Write up one-page summaries of all the ideas I've got vaguely floating around and see what they look like when they're a little more clearly articulated
Give myself a week or two to just do a lot of reading and see how that feels and where it leads
Dig into all the bits of client work and admin that I've need to work through and leave thinking about another book until after the copyediting stage (which should be later this month)
Spend hours aimlessly reading through weird historical attempts to classify all possible stories, basically the 1900s equivalent of all the "An AI can write a novel for you! It will be: bad!"
I imagine you can guess which option I've been going for. Do you know about The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, for example? It's a book from 1895 that tries to classify... well, the name gives it away: all possible dramatic situations. There are, according to Georges Polti, exactly thirty-six of them. I don't recommend his book but I do recommend the wikipedia article about his book, partly for the rundown of situations but also just for the extremely varied respectability of the examples the editors have settled on for each situation:
Dramatic Situation 28: Obstacles to love
two Lovers; an Obstacle
Two Lovers face an Obstacle together. Example: Romeo and Juliet
Dramatic Situation 24: Rivalry of superior vs. inferior
a Superior Rival; an Inferior Rival; the Object of Rivalry
An Inferior Rival bests a Superior Rival and wins the Object of Rivalry. Example: Godzilla vs. Kong (2021)
I picked a random number 1-36 to see if that would help me decide what to work on next, and got 17. Fatal imprudence. No thank you!
GARDEN REPORT
Sorry to report that the garden gets enough sunlight for tomatoes to turn red but not enough for them to taste good.
READING REPORT
Recently read E. Saxey's book Unquiet, which I was a bit nervous about because I'm a big coward and don't deal well with horror, but it turns out it's delicate and precise and wintry rather than spooky or bloody. Also very nice on the physical mechanics of drawing (the main character is an aspiring artist in 1893 London). If you'd like something careful and strange and ominous, then this is perfect. Probably especially good to read in late autumn or in winter? Lots of bonfires, ice, leaves, cold houses, strange noises, guests who return.
(Saxey is a friend and maybe it's bad friending to say "read their book BUT NOT RIGHT NOW THE WEATHER'S TOO GOOD" but, y'know, perhaps you're in the southern hemisphere.)
GAMES REPORT
I've been enjoying Daniel Linssen's Wordward Draw, which is a gentle little word game that you can play for five minutes whenever you feel like it: exploring the map of four-letter words and their similarities, changing one letter at a time to move between words. Occasionally you uncover a little illustration or an unexpected anagram as a reward. Free, play it in the browser; if you close the tab and open it up a few days later it'll remember what word you were on and which drawings you've discovered.
Right, speak soon,
Holly