four: the mid-March metatextual mixtape

Hi, everyone. The vote was very much for Normal Times newsletter, so this was what I had drafted up in bits and pieces, with a few updates and adjustments. Obviously some of it no longer applies (baseball, sob) but--you know.

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The titles for these are starting to read more and more like Middleman episodes. This is a feature. The intermittent information imbroglio! The no-holds-barred newsletter nefarity!

Baseball!

It gets its own heading: We have reattained baseball. We have shed the baseball-less season. I still have no trouble writing real estate copy or residency applications while listening to spring training baseball. I have no trouble writing fiction while listening to spring training baseball. Ah ha ha ha ha.

I don't want to crib Stacey May Fowles's gig (and even though it's less frequent these days, her Baseball Life Advice newsletter is one of the calmest, clearest, kindest things in my inbox and if you are a person who works in inconsistent-reward spaces or likes the less competition-focused sides of sports or both, it's a joy) but 100% agree with her that baseball, as well as providing quality beard action, is a reliable source of wisdom on success, failure, and being persistent.

Sometimes it's the question of taking career-ending injuries season after season (Toronto Blue Jays starting pitcher Matt Shoemaker, who, as I write this, just pitched two and two thirds flawless innings) and slowly, through the application of small, diligent effort, getting back up. Baseball is a game not of aggression but structure, the weight of your small adjustments, and resilience. There's another game coming tomorrow; sleep well, figure out that new stance until it feels more natural in your body, and pick up your bat.

The other good baseball news this particular morning is that Jose Bautista is not just playing again, he's cross-training as a pitcher, because:


--because he shows up to work the problem. And he knows he's good. And he enjoys being good, and he is visibly proud of himself when he's good. I love him for it unspeakably. Tall Poppy the fuck out of things. Revel in the absolute wonder of the way your arm moves, your bat, your brain. Be like Jose. <3

Things realized, small

On the excellently segued topic of small adjustments:

One of my longtime monthly gigs is being the OWW's Resident Short Fiction Editor: a very fancy way to say I read all the posted workshop stories each month, pick what I think might be the strongest, and write it a teaching critique. It's a thing I'm still doing because it's a positive way to give back to the workshop where I started out, and has the excellent habit of teaching me little things about writing when I'm forced to explain to someone else in approximately 800 words why I think that thing's working, or why not, and how they might work the problem to get a different result.

This month's piece was a story that really strenuously downplayed all its most interesting elements: had wide, wild, life-changing things happen and both the character and the narrative just not treat them as such--as routine, with utter incuriosity. Marvels and terrors, both handled flat. I found myself writing 800 words about what happens when we put interesting things in a story and tell people with every signal we've got that no, actually, they're not interesting. It's self-defeating, as a person whose goal is to hold the reader's attention, because--readers will believe you about that uninteresting thing. And I'm not sure a story wants that, not really.

Of course, this metaphor (like all of them, because life is a Slinky that keeps uncurling) is nicely extendable: I kept repeating, as I was writing it, a line from Hannah Gadsby's Nanette: "I need to tell my story properly because you learn from the part of the story you focus on."

(See above: be like Jose.)

Things upon the town

Which, speaking of: at the end of February, a small crew of local activist folks saw Hannah Gadsby's new show, Douglas, live at Roy Thomson Hall.

Hannah Gadsby is, as well as a serious innovator in standup, one hell of a narrative theorist. Her last show, Nanette, is on Netflix, and it's not at all light viewing, especially if honest stories about violence hit your nerves badly, but it's a masterclass in how the structure of a comedy show works (see above: this metaphor, like all of them, is nicely extendable). I've been feasting off what she had to say about narrative tension for probably a year.

Douglas is also doing interestingly metatextual things with narrative, expectations, and structure--thematic things, especially considering it's a standup show coming on the heels of a massive international breakout hit, and it is about gender and autism. So, erm. Expectations. At the time, it felt unsatisfyingly loose to me--it's possible I'm also just through my catharsis phase on certain topics, and at the point where I go yes, I know it's wrong, but call me when we're doing something about it, which might be the technical definition of "crone"?--but...even in writing this I'm seeing how loopingly thematic that question was to the entire set, and how it's absolutely baked into the structure. Expectations. What we expect, and how it shapes everything we see.

(See above: learning little things when I'm forced to explain to someone else what they were about.)

I think that tour is wound up now--Toronto was the last city on it--but given the terrifying dystopian security they subjected us to (did you know there's a company that makes little sealed pouches for your phones so you can't film live shows on the down low? I learned that just then too. They were like tiny soft Faraday cages), it's probably coming to Netflix or cable in the near future, and if so, worth a watch with your structural brain turned up all the way.
 

With the wordcount ticking up and the words-to-write ticking down, I'm in a different phase of research for the last bits of the novella, namely some of the space technicals, which were obviously so important to me on this project that they came last. (No, really, though I'd like to get things right, the engineering's mostly not the point of that piece.) So while I've owned it for a while, that's how I came to actually be reading Julian Guthrie's How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight.

It's a decently broad history of the XPRIZE and the people involved, and I got my five useful things out of it (ie, where the technicals of spaceflight are now and therefore what I can project for twenty or thirty years down the line), but also, it gave me a little bit of access to a perspective that's probably a lot more prevalent out there, but is definitely not mine: written in very declarative, accessible language, firmly centred in capitalist-man-as-hero, deeply libertarian, and...worshipful. A Lives of the Saints for white men with money playing with machines and resenting things like society or rules.

I can't tell if it's the fingerprints of what space--and space technology development--used to mean in the American national identity, or the way Guthrie makes a point of mentioning how many of the principals, funders, constructors, or engineers, read Heinlein, Clarke, and Ayn Rand at formative ages.

(See above: what we expect and how it shapes everything we see.)

But I find myself wanting a space-related history written more like Erik Larson's Thunderstruck, which did a decent job of taking its main subject, Marconi (a disruptive-innovation techbro if you ever saw one) on significantly less mythologized terms--the good and bad of that personality held in as much balance as possible. Positive and negative impact; help and harm.

So it was a nice thing that the second major thing I read for the novella that same week was the first Toronto Resilience Strategy, which was developed as part of the Rockefeller Foundation's 100 Resilient Cities initiative and debuted last summer.

It's an 160-page report, but there are well-designed, punchy summary pages, and in the summaries, the Resilience Actions section is worth taking a look at. It's talking about green infrastructure, poverty reduction, food security, and things like Enhance the capacity of neighbourhoods to prepare for and recover from shocks through grassroots action and network building feel like a kind of heart-lifting, lung-expanding repair. A little breath into the sparks of my basic faith in the possibility of working problems to the point where something catches, and all our options expand.

It's weird, to feel like all the little projects one's been putting in time on for the last eight or nine years--improving access to City Hall and casual citizenship; picking urban fruit trees; city gardening (I've found a new vector for that one, by the by); local history, short sharp streets-to-homes initiatives; informal barter networks for coffee, jam, kombucha, jeans repair--

--everything I've been doing piecemeal does in fact add up to something, and there is a word for it. Resilience. Building the survivable-thrivable world. That shock of recognition felt a little like my ribcage expanding to take more breath; all the chambers of my heart clicking to awake.

Which dovetailed neatly with--

Things (to be) made

It warmed up so fast, the second weekend of March, that I broke the jam barrier even though there's no local fruit yet and turned out about a dozen jars: a bit of pear and lavender and a lot of cranberry-blueberry, and then a small batch of spiced cranberry-apple that is sort of like, according to P.'s review, "a cranberry traveled back in time from the Machine Wars specifically to punch you in the face." I think lemon marmalade is next.

(See above: Building the survivable-thrivable world.)

This past few weeks, we've also been putting one of this year's primary maxims--If something is broken don't work around it, fix it--into play on some little home repairs, including a broken shower part. Which, after we were assured it was fixable with the right wrench, netted us a membership to the Toronto Tool Library, and the glorious discovery of their makerspace and machine holdings, including woodworking classes. There is a studio and they will let me play with wood.

I am desperate to go make wood things. Which wood things? I don't care. All of them. Wood.

It's interesting to realize they also have a full bank of 3D printers, and yet I'm not interested in them at all because I can't think of one solitary thing I'd like to print in plastic. Plastic, right now, mostly exists in my life to be reduced whenever possible and replaced with stronger, or less porous, or more biodegradable things. Certain habits of living--waste-reduction, reusability--have taken hold in the past decade.

But woodworking. Mmph. More to come when I eventually get my hands on.

Things to read

My first 2020 short fiction publication, "La Bête", is live at Strange Horizons as of March 9th. It contains a girl, a house, some issues we were having with Beauty and the Beast and its subtextual messages, the crap purgatory that is renovations, and the Chant des Partisans. A few correspondents on this newsletter were extremely valued beta-readers for its early drafts: thank you, guys. (Jon, I fixed the French legal system stuff.)

My second--abruptly, and after a bit of hectic action--"One Hundred Tasks for Bones", is live on The New Decameron Project today. This was organized by author, poet, organizer, and former Ideomancer crew member Maya Chhabra with Lauren Schiller and Jo Walton, and is a collection of daily free short fiction to get us through a plague year. Tip jar proceeds go partially to the authors, mostly to Cittadini del Mondo, a library and refugee clinic project in Rome which needs extra support in the current crisis.

The novelette itself is about communities and the complex ties of families and old gods and tiny action and love, and all the little things that hold us together. I wrote it because the 2011 Conan the Barbarian movie was very silly, and also to think some things about caregiving, fantasy, mothers, and what it actually means to be getting the work done.

I've also got contracts signed already for the third: "The Bear Wife" will appear in Apparition Lit's April issue, themed around Transfiguration. It is a story started in 2012, when I had the question, and finished in 2019, when I found the answer: about what fairytales and cultures and mythologies say we need to love each other, how hard it is to bend that arc, and how worthwhile. It will be coming out in April.

(It is profoundly fucking weird, excuse my French, to have all this nice professional news while so many things are falling. Holding that feeling in my hand until I figure out what to do with it.)

Things coming up

I'm thinking of shortening the time to the next installment: two weeks or a week and a half instead of three, just because so many of us will be home. (Please: be home.)

Thank you to the people who did write back and weigh in on the content question for this one: it was deeply good to see letters back, and know that if you feel like it, you can send 'em anytime. Including to weigh in on this.

(See above: Enhance the capacity of neighbourhoods to prepare for and recover from shocks through grassroots action and network building.)

I know there was no knitting here, even though promised--no knitting has happened--but can already guarantee a few things in the next letter: a lot of gathered and applicable meditation on astronaut ethics courtesy the novella technical research; the question of narrative transitions; some definite kitchen reports; actual knitting that will happen I swear to god. I might start seeds; that feels like the right thing to do.

But we are both home, and P. making bread as I finish this off--knead, knead, pat pat pat over in the kitchen--and...see above. Expectations. Updates and adjustments, and resilience. See above. <3