Summertime Sadness (Remix)

I'm sadder about the death of Twitter than I'd like to admit. It's brought me some of the most precious relationships in my life and strengthened others. It's been the place where I share my work and get gigs and make plans and receive fan mail and sometimes miraculous DMs. It's also been the place where I get death threats and heinous DMs and absorb people's projections about me. It's mixed and beat-up baggage, and I should feel ok about the airline losing it due to gross executive incompetence.

But I don't. 

I joined BlueSky. I post on TikTok. I'm branching out, but every tree in this orchard is twisted and you can smell the fruit fermenting in high summer. I'm out here anyway, and maybe you are, too. 

Recent publications include my ode to a grocery store sandwich, in which I write about childhood poverty and being fed. Chew on that and then bite into my essay about how much I hate Hell House, a classic of the horror genre that isn't scary and makes the weirdest choices about sex and death and a moat full of abortions. Speaking of sex and death, I wrote about one of my favorite old school Pagan movies, Eye of the Devil (1966) for the Wild Hunt. It's a creepy one, with an appearance by the ill-fated Sharon Tate. 

I got a box of Romanian/English bilingual translations of Find Layla in the mail the other day. It is astonishing to se a book of which I am the sole author translated into a language I can't read, for people in a country I've never seen. Cooler still to see it line by line translated from my mother tongue, that some kid might learn a little English by reading my book in their home country. Being an author is one of the smallest, most petty kinds of fame one can achieve. And moments like this sitll make it feel like godhood. 

I'll be in and out of DC and NY all summer. I'll be day job hunting and selling my next book. I've got that summertime sadness, but it's the remix and I know how to dance to it. 

I just read "Lone Women" by Victor LaValle and loved the intimate kindesses between homesteaders, loved the way he makes a monster a person. 

I've been watching Silo, a sci-fi drama on Apple TV and loving the tension and strangeness of it. 

Rewatching old movies like Double Indemnity and finding them delicious in their rapid-fire dialog, their cigarette-smoky nonchalance, their sweeping headlights in the noir of the night.

I hope you're finding comfort in the familiar, the foreign country of the past, the outer space of the future. 

Kiss me hard before you go, 

Meg