Writing Things Out
Hi all,
Whenever I miss a week or two of writing this newsletter I start to feel like I need to catch up, I need to finish and compile every half-drafted paragraph and half-considered thought before I'm allowed to write about anything new. And then of course I get further and further behind and all of a sudden two months have passed. So, today I'm declaring newsletter amnesty on the following points of interest:
The day I spent sprinkling various internet-advised spice mixes over the ground near the bird feeder to see if it would stop ten pigeons from hanging out there and squashing all my daisies
Christian Marclay's Doors, which is GREAT
The many, many autumnal Campari spritzes I've had because "this is probably the last sunlight we'll see all year, might as well", which by now must massively outnumber the spritzes I drank during actual summer
The visiting cat who likes to climb up on our pergola and gaze out into the cemetery
The other cat who is going to live in our house with us from mid-November, ridiculous, I keep remembering that soon there's going to be a cat in the house and who invented that as a practice, an animal who cohabits and breaks things?
Ignoring all these topics, then, let's just jump instead to THIS WEEK...
BOOK REPORT
If you'd told me in advance how many times I would read my book, trying to very slightly improve the sentences and spot another of the ever-decreasing number of typos, I would have not believed it was possible.
Normally, I kinda like reading my own writing. Even old blog posts or big emails: I stumble across them and fall into the rhythm of the sentences and it feels good, comfortable. It's slightly embarrassing to admit that, like I'm saying "oh I really enjoy the smell of my own farts" or something, it feels it would be more dignified to say I never go back to an essay after I finish writing it or when I read my old work it feels like a stranger wrote it. But for me, reading old work can be like finding a pair of shoes sitting at the back of the cupboard. Way back in the past I moulded them to my own peculiarities and now here they are again, ready to accommodate me.
Rereading The Husbands for the nine millionth time, though: god. Just for the moment I am so sick of it, especially the first five chapters, which feel dead to me, limp empty things, worked and reworked to nothingness. I've talked to other writers and apparently this is normal - in fact I'm lucky; for some people this feeling comes sooner or encompasses the whole book.
In time, apparently, it'll subside. But at the moment, the desperate familiarity of each sentence is too much. In my previous round of edits, looking at the typeset manuscript, I made a bunch of little changes to sentences, "improving" them, making them land a little better - and then, a week later, the day before it was all due back to the publisher, I went through and changed almost everything back. I hadn't made anything better: I'd just made it slightly different.
Anyway, I have one more read all the way through to finish off over the next few days. Cross your fingers that I don't make any deeply ill-advised changes just to feel a little fleeting breath of novelty.
(HAND)WRITING REPORT
The other book thing I've been doing this week is practicing a new signature, which I am finding extremely funny to do.
Apparently it's a good idea to have a "writer signature" for signing books that's not your actual signature (which you still might occasionally use to verify your identity, even in 2023, and therefore probably shouldn't distribute far and wide). Plus: my actual signature is kind-of ugly, because I figured it out when I was twelve, which is the last time I sat down and wrote my name out all fancy over and over again, in a bunch of different styles, and squinted at it and tried to make it look good.
Inventing a signature feels like such a made-up task, a ridiculous thing to do, like if I suddenly needed to look up a selection of facts about butterflies in the big encyclopedia and then write them up on an A2 sheet of coloured cardboard. For work. But I've done it! A nice big looping signature, medium legible, medium fast to write. Let's see if I ever really do need to use it.
READING REPORT
Here's a couple of books I particularly enjoyed the last couple of months:
Brontez Purnell's 100 Boyfriends. I avoided reading this for ages because - well, I was writing a book about a large number of husbands, it seemed like it might be a bad idea to read a book about a large number of boyfriends. Of course, it turns out I needn't have worried. This is great, a collection of fragments and stories and poems and moments looking at different men, different often-fleeting relationships. Some incredible work in how distinct every encounter feels, little shifts of style and tone and point of view and pacing.
Gabrielle de la Puente's very charming Chaotic Nightclub Photos: the Review, a booklet-length essay reviewing a twitter account that posted photos of strange and terrible things happening in nightclubs. It touches on art and money and criticism and the purpose of documentation and is also just a really good time.
Okay, I think that's everything for now, speak soon,
Holly