This is a header a propos of nothing, except that tardigrades are great.

I’m starting to lose track of how long it’s been since I was active on social media. Four months? This was originally hard to imagine. I had taken breaks before, but they were built with an end date in mind—let’s see if I can go without for a month, or a week, or this vacation. And usually, I didn’t make it quite to the end before I found it sneaking back in, usually because I felt an obligation to others.

But the algorithms now interfere with reaching fans, friends, and readers anyway. I can’t count on hearing your good or bad news, nor you mine. If I am being kept from people I’m interested in and care about, I feel no obligation to show up for people I’m being told I should value by a product.

And so, this newsletter.

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Tomorrow I leave for a writing retreat. This is ironic timing, since I had decided to give myself two months without thinking about writing at all—a break from feeling I should be writing, so that I could continue to think about how writing/not writing is the 60-Hertz hum that means a room is never silent.

Ah, who knows if that metaphor worked? I mean the hum of our electrical systems—refrigerators, furnaces, light bulbs, and the like—mean we don’t actually know what true silence indoors sounds like, not until the power goes out and it is spookily, eerily silent. I mean I never actually know what “you have nothing to do today” looks like.

Few of us do, of course—there’s always something that should be done. But a writer has the always-bottom-of-the-list clean the basement AND ALSO you should be writing running at the same time. It’s not that we’ll never get to the bottom of the list, it’s that there is no bottom to the list. You should be writing, and if you are writing, you should be writing more. Or better. Or researching how to do a kickstarter, maybe do some videos, really, you should have more audio available.

Being a writer is a bottomless task. This is why I was going to give myself two months off from even thinking about writing and its related tasks.

Except that I already had this wonderful retreat all lined up: three of my favorite people in the world, getting together after missing each other this summer. We will play D&D and go for walks, probably do some shopping, certainly eat a lot of excellent food...and write. In the middle of the two month break. So, obviously, I don’t want to interfere with this vibe, nor do I know how it would feel for me, either, not to write.

So I think I’ll work on the chapbook project. This isn’t new work, but it is me engaging with everything I have ever written: Why did I write that and what did I learn? Who was I back then, and when did I change? It’s absorbing but doesn’t really have any stakes. And I think I will learn some things about this work I do.

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One thing that has showed up is some teaching gigs. I’ll do two sorts of flash fiction workshop for the Clarion West folks next year, and a very exciting workshop in Japan in the fall. More dwetails on all of these as I get them. Of course, we’ll have the Novel Architects workshops in June/July 2027, as well. Perhaps I’ll see you there?

Stay kind, be cool, support artists.

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