gone green again

hi, 

some good things have happened.

i'm in my hometown this weekend and this morning i was saying to my stepmom and one of my sisters that i really needed to send out an installment of this here email newsletter, because for the first time in a long time i have *actual career news* to share in my email newsletter, not just meanderings or ponderings, but for some reason i'm feeling reluctant to do so because a) i'm exhausted from the hustle of the last couple months of making all this good news happen, and b) after a wild day yesterday on Congrats Twitter, i don't want to make a further big deal out of my accomplishments because everyone hates a gloater. and my stepmom and sister were like, duh, just send the newsletter, good news is good news, this is a *news*letter, is it not? 

i sold a book. i'm going to write a memoir (pronounced the French way, of course) and it's called The Last Fire Season and it's going to be published by Pantheon, and i'm infinitely stoked about it all. but wait, regular readers say, wasn't i working on a novel? yes! still am! it turns out i contain multitudes. and what can i say, the Pyrocene comes at you fast... 

here is the official book-deal announcement:

for those unfamiliar with the unique syntax of the book deal announcement, this is the customary way it's listed in the industry's trade rag. also the, uh, customary typeface and palette. oh how i love the run-on sentences and early-internet aesthetics of the Publisher's Lunch deal announcements, such ethos, such poetry!

the other thing that happened (on the same day the book deal was announced, which wasn't planned, and which led to the aforementioned rejoining and then overdosing on social media ego-trip riches) is that I wrote an essay for The New Yorker about what it feels like waiting for the next big wildfire in the particular corner of California where I live. you might consider this a little, years-early preview of some of the issues and experiences the memoir will approach: "A Soundtrack for an Unfolding Climate Disaster." 

i also wrote for Catapult a short piece about my actual workspace, where i've been doing all the above-mentioned work. the piece is nominally about my home office but it's also about home-owning and money and trees and gentrification and fire and fish. [checks list] yup, got all that in there. 

so this morning when i was angsting over my newsletter my stepmom asked if i was going to be all lowkey about my book deal the way i was about my New Yorker piece when i posted it on instagram — "a little blog called the new yorker dot com" — and i said, probably, i don't want to be a dick and be like, I AM AWESOME I WORKED SO HARD FOR THIS IT IS A VERY EXCELLENT BOOK DEAL, and my sister was like, why not? then we all agreed that this is perhaps a thing i have in common with my dad, who is fond of saying things like, "yeah i might know a thing or two about fruit trees" when he literally wrote the book on it, and then he drops like fifty years' worth of expert knowledge on the unsuspecting querent. anyway. i don't know why not; i am proud and confident in my work, and also sometimes shy. people are funny. 

mostly, i think i am still a little bit in shock that this big good thing happened, and that it means i don't have to have a day job while i am writing this book—or rather it means writing this book *is* my job now, and that's honestly not something i ever envisioned happening, especially not after years spent working on the topic of being a writer + making a living. 

so maybe i'm not shy or lowkey; maybe i'm grateful and surprised and calm, and i am taking it seriously.

the last good thing that happened was that it rained in Northern California. it wasn't a significant rain and it's not going to make a difference in the drought or the fire risk—it wasn't enough to measure, even. but for a few oxygenated hours, small bits of water fell from the sky and everything felt cozy and safe. on the hillside above my house, the precipitation wetted the ancient trees and the dusty meadows and the dull skin of boulder outcrops, and when my partner and i walked through the forest we leaned down toward the reopening earth and found minuscule ferns and mosses already gone green again, dew-eyed and resilient, creating their own tiny forests within forests, waking up. 

hope you're discovering your own tiny forests somehow, somewhere,
xo
-m.