thirteen: head down, the race is long
We ran out of baseball, so these days, the habit is races. After all the archival races I've watched in the past few months (hey, if you charge me $30 a year for a Formula 1 digital package but give me all the races in the subscription I am going to watch all the races. In order, like some sort of motorsport historian beating back ceaselessly into the past.)
Racing at that level is made of microseconds and precisions and resilience, and what race engineers say to drivers having setbacks sticks in your head after a while. Head down, is a popular one, when a driver is stressed and complaining. The race is long. You can get past that guy next lap. Just don't blow the long-term over your short-term.
One door opens
October has been a month of closed doors: quite literally. (I swear I did not start this newsletter in January to become a plague journal, and yet, just like one turns into a war poet if people keep insisting on wars, there you go.)
The week before Thanksgiving, we went back into functional lockdown as numbers in the city spiked higher than the peak of our first wave. It's something that was always probable, considering how Ontario handled certain factors; it's not been great to see it happen. There's adjustment, settling back into a lockdown routine: changing the scope of what I should expect from myself and everyone else, and shifting my energy into the world that we've been building indoors.
This month, I've largely closed the door on Reckoning's 2020 issue: the poetry's almost completely chosen (final-round rejection choices are straight-up agony), the contracts are out, and we've got a gorgeous cover in the works from a British Columbia artist after a Skype meeting that left us excited. There's a bit of mop-up left to do--helping out with non-fiction and putting heads together to arrange the table of contents order, but it's a project I can largely consider wrapped up and look forward, now, to seeing on the shelf.
It leaves me some time to make a smooth transition to the next medium-term project: This winter and spring, I'm going to be doing some writing for the ExoTerra Imagination Lab at the University of Chicago -- in short, providing materials and background for 500 undergrad space colonists as they build a better, brighter world and hopefully find ways to slip some of the assumptions we carry around with us like ballast. It was an incredible offer, and one I'm terribly excited about seeing unfold. Sometimes this career is an absolute goddamned privilege. :)
Things written (some process neepery)
I'm also (see: the world indoors) spending time with the doors that have opened more slowly, and the ones I feel like I'm building with a chisel and pixels into the proverbial wall. There have been a lot of things it's easier to notice, with so much of the external world effectively cut out of my daily signal for so many months.
One is how every piece or project that's been stuck for a length of time -- example, the short story I've been revising off and on for almost a year, trying to get to the root of what is never quite working in it -- has been part of a puzzle of something wider I'm figuring out: practice for the kind of long, continuous seventeen-minute opening shot (thank you Alfonso Cuarón for putting ideas in my head) that I've wanted to use in the novella project. It's turned into a site for everything I've been picking at in terms of density, concision, and how to submerge plot at just the right depth to be accessible, for tension and release, for the shift between expressive drafts and communicative. The reason I haven't been able to nail it is, apparently, because it's been the single lab I'm using for a whole lot of experiments. Everything I cut, everything I frame in is so visibly having learned something. I am reformatting my entire process in the space of 5,000 words.
There have also been, this month, those beautiful flashes when everything you've thought about over the two or three years of a project starts coming together and instead of feeling like impossible choices, it feels good: one door starts finally closing and closing, and you can be satisfied for now that the size of the frame is right, the hinges, that it's balanced well, and everything that needs to be is well-situated in the room.
And then, one door opens: right on cue, I have the beginning of the next big thing--which is to say, I was drinking coffee and binging Peter Murphy songs on a sunny morning a week into a semi-enforced vacation that I desperately needed, and a thought about history and societal cognition and a few other things clicked and burst onto me like a wave, and I lost the whole afternoon to frantically taking it down. I feel like I've caught the shadow of the hem of a Colossus in my mouth as it was passing by, and god knows how I'm going to hold the whole thing in my teeth. I'm stuffed full with just its trailing edge.
But: there is no practicable way I can even chase this until three novels down the line -- those ideas need finishing too -- and that's time to think about it, to digest and metabolize, to figure out how to even begin to hold it and what kind of structural tabernacle best contains, does it the due respect (craft is the construction of tabernacles for things that deserve them).
I think this would have frustrated me, younger -- not chasing. I would have entirely chased it and ruined it. Now: head down, ears open, listen for signal. The race is long. The door will open wider when it's time to open, and enough others have closed, and I have enough mouth and hands to hold it. It'll be there at the finish line.
Things read
It's been another heavy review month, but I've worked my way, between, through a few more centre-of-genre novels.
The standout was June Hur's The Silence of Bones (thank you for the rec, Maya!), a murder mystery set among anti-Catholic purges, class politics, and family secrets in 1800s Korea. This was a thoroughly magnetic read: the historical content's new enough to me to feel very fresh and interesting, and it's really a perfect period and situation to put a procedural into. There's also an advantage to reading the way YA balances grim content lately: it's not muted or pulled back, but a little more grounded, pre-processed, less geared to shock. It's kinder in a way that I think we might all benefit from being to each other.
Right now, I'm in the middle of Emily St. John Mandel's The Glass Hotel, which I started one night before bed and had to forcibly stop, because if I didn't, I would sit up and read all night. It's got the incredible compassion that characterized Station Eleven -- that ability to hold messy, messed-up people not in judgment or indulgence, but a sort of grace (Rainbow Rowell also does this, I aspire to it) -- but it's also a novel that starts in downtown Toronto in 1999, with an awkward, lonely undergrad going to live shows at Queen and Spadina at basement bars under the goth clothing shop, and I know where that space was, and it was home. It is radiant with the understanding of home.
The farther I get from that space and the parts of this city that first made it home to me, the more I find myself valuing the people who saw it, who were there too. Those little scraps of a consensus reality that we can meet eyes over distance and go yes, we all saw that, that was there. As a reader, it's going to be hard to be objective about this one -- I think part of why I love her work is wherever those novels go, they all start me so firmly at home -- but: recommended.
I got the chance to watch a Toronto International Festival of Authors interview with her this past weekend (I'd link, but they're on a 72-hour stopwatch and it's sadly gone now; it's weird to think of online events as something with a rate of decay, like their little atoms disperse along the tubes when they're unobserved and get bored). It was really interesting to hear her talking about the liminality of hotels and questions of maintenance. Maintenance is, I think, one of the core skills of the long-term. Keeping things from falling apart without you falling apart. Or, to put it into racing terms: it is important to know how to manage your tire life, so you can keep going. So your race doesn't end.
Racing at that level is made of microseconds and precisions and resilience, and what race engineers say to drivers having setbacks sticks in your head after a while. Head down, is a popular one, when a driver is stressed and complaining. The race is long. You can get past that guy next lap. Just don't blow the long-term over your short-term.
One door opens
October has been a month of closed doors: quite literally. (I swear I did not start this newsletter in January to become a plague journal, and yet, just like one turns into a war poet if people keep insisting on wars, there you go.)
The week before Thanksgiving, we went back into functional lockdown as numbers in the city spiked higher than the peak of our first wave. It's something that was always probable, considering how Ontario handled certain factors; it's not been great to see it happen. There's adjustment, settling back into a lockdown routine: changing the scope of what I should expect from myself and everyone else, and shifting my energy into the world that we've been building indoors.
This month, I've largely closed the door on Reckoning's 2020 issue: the poetry's almost completely chosen (final-round rejection choices are straight-up agony), the contracts are out, and we've got a gorgeous cover in the works from a British Columbia artist after a Skype meeting that left us excited. There's a bit of mop-up left to do--helping out with non-fiction and putting heads together to arrange the table of contents order, but it's a project I can largely consider wrapped up and look forward, now, to seeing on the shelf.
It leaves me some time to make a smooth transition to the next medium-term project: This winter and spring, I'm going to be doing some writing for the ExoTerra Imagination Lab at the University of Chicago -- in short, providing materials and background for 500 undergrad space colonists as they build a better, brighter world and hopefully find ways to slip some of the assumptions we carry around with us like ballast. It was an incredible offer, and one I'm terribly excited about seeing unfold. Sometimes this career is an absolute goddamned privilege. :)
Things written (some process neepery)
I'm also (see: the world indoors) spending time with the doors that have opened more slowly, and the ones I feel like I'm building with a chisel and pixels into the proverbial wall. There have been a lot of things it's easier to notice, with so much of the external world effectively cut out of my daily signal for so many months.
One is how every piece or project that's been stuck for a length of time -- example, the short story I've been revising off and on for almost a year, trying to get to the root of what is never quite working in it -- has been part of a puzzle of something wider I'm figuring out: practice for the kind of long, continuous seventeen-minute opening shot (thank you Alfonso Cuarón for putting ideas in my head) that I've wanted to use in the novella project. It's turned into a site for everything I've been picking at in terms of density, concision, and how to submerge plot at just the right depth to be accessible, for tension and release, for the shift between expressive drafts and communicative. The reason I haven't been able to nail it is, apparently, because it's been the single lab I'm using for a whole lot of experiments. Everything I cut, everything I frame in is so visibly having learned something. I am reformatting my entire process in the space of 5,000 words.
There have also been, this month, those beautiful flashes when everything you've thought about over the two or three years of a project starts coming together and instead of feeling like impossible choices, it feels good: one door starts finally closing and closing, and you can be satisfied for now that the size of the frame is right, the hinges, that it's balanced well, and everything that needs to be is well-situated in the room.
And then, one door opens: right on cue, I have the beginning of the next big thing--which is to say, I was drinking coffee and binging Peter Murphy songs on a sunny morning a week into a semi-enforced vacation that I desperately needed, and a thought about history and societal cognition and a few other things clicked and burst onto me like a wave, and I lost the whole afternoon to frantically taking it down. I feel like I've caught the shadow of the hem of a Colossus in my mouth as it was passing by, and god knows how I'm going to hold the whole thing in my teeth. I'm stuffed full with just its trailing edge.
But: there is no practicable way I can even chase this until three novels down the line -- those ideas need finishing too -- and that's time to think about it, to digest and metabolize, to figure out how to even begin to hold it and what kind of structural tabernacle best contains, does it the due respect (craft is the construction of tabernacles for things that deserve them).
I think this would have frustrated me, younger -- not chasing. I would have entirely chased it and ruined it. Now: head down, ears open, listen for signal. The race is long. The door will open wider when it's time to open, and enough others have closed, and I have enough mouth and hands to hold it. It'll be there at the finish line.
Things read
It's been another heavy review month, but I've worked my way, between, through a few more centre-of-genre novels.
The standout was June Hur's The Silence of Bones (thank you for the rec, Maya!), a murder mystery set among anti-Catholic purges, class politics, and family secrets in 1800s Korea. This was a thoroughly magnetic read: the historical content's new enough to me to feel very fresh and interesting, and it's really a perfect period and situation to put a procedural into. There's also an advantage to reading the way YA balances grim content lately: it's not muted or pulled back, but a little more grounded, pre-processed, less geared to shock. It's kinder in a way that I think we might all benefit from being to each other.
Right now, I'm in the middle of Emily St. John Mandel's The Glass Hotel, which I started one night before bed and had to forcibly stop, because if I didn't, I would sit up and read all night. It's got the incredible compassion that characterized Station Eleven -- that ability to hold messy, messed-up people not in judgment or indulgence, but a sort of grace (Rainbow Rowell also does this, I aspire to it) -- but it's also a novel that starts in downtown Toronto in 1999, with an awkward, lonely undergrad going to live shows at Queen and Spadina at basement bars under the goth clothing shop, and I know where that space was, and it was home. It is radiant with the understanding of home.
The farther I get from that space and the parts of this city that first made it home to me, the more I find myself valuing the people who saw it, who were there too. Those little scraps of a consensus reality that we can meet eyes over distance and go yes, we all saw that, that was there. As a reader, it's going to be hard to be objective about this one -- I think part of why I love her work is wherever those novels go, they all start me so firmly at home -- but: recommended.
I got the chance to watch a Toronto International Festival of Authors interview with her this past weekend (I'd link, but they're on a 72-hour stopwatch and it's sadly gone now; it's weird to think of online events as something with a rate of decay, like their little atoms disperse along the tubes when they're unobserved and get bored). It was really interesting to hear her talking about the liminality of hotels and questions of maintenance. Maintenance is, I think, one of the core skills of the long-term. Keeping things from falling apart without you falling apart. Or, to put it into racing terms: it is important to know how to manage your tire life, so you can keep going. So your race doesn't end.
*
So: head down. The race is long, mind your braking points and keep driving.
And: see you in November.
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