Branching Out — mnchrm vol. lviii
Hello, friends. Welcome once again to Monochromatic Aberration, a newsletter by me, Ian J. Battaglia, where I write about writing, photography, & more.
Some exciting news! (I think I can announce this? It's on the website...) I've been named the first-ever Contributing Resident for the Chicago Review of Books. I was a contributing writer before, but the residency is a four-month program where I'll work closer with the editorial staff, & get their help achieving some of my writing goals. It's just starting now, but I'm really excited. Hopefully it means more insight into the editorial & pitching process, & helps me become the better writer I want to be.
This year I'm already off to a good start in branching out & working towards my goals, but I have a handful of pitches I need to send off, ideally this week. It's a difficult balancing act, because I know what's most important to me, & that's finishing my novel, followed closely by writing good short fiction for publication, but I don't want to falter in any of my goals. It's about having good priorities, knowing what's most important, & making the best use of your time.
In not-so-ready announcement news, I'm really making progress in a podcast I'm spinning up with a buddy. I've never made a podcast before, & am skeptical of the medium (which maybe doesn't bode well?) but I certainly think there's some things it does best. I definitely don't want to get the podcaster label attached to me (second in undesirability only to YouTuber, imo), but maybe that's jumping the gun!
So far we've got a plan, I got some podcasting gear, & are working on a logo / website right now. We're just far enough along in the process that it feels like a "real thing". It's a key stage in any personal project; just beyond the point of no return. By now, something will be made, even if it's not exactly what was intended.
Thanks to those who've signed up for my Patreon so far! I'm slowly starting to figure out what I want to use it for, & what sort of things I want to release on it. Mostly, I want to use that space to talk about / write critically about the things I'm working through in my regular life. Practice writing about anime critically, as well as release the projects I want to work on this year ahead of time, as a place to get feedback & just to share early stuff.
Right now, I've got a set of desktop & mobile wallpapers, parts 1+2 of my Photography Masterclass, & the first weekly roundup, wherein I talk about McPhee's 'Draft No. 4' & Lamott's 'Bird by Bird'. I read a lot of books on writing, especially when I feel stuck, which is all the time. I haven't yet found the book on novel writing that I want, but a handful of the books I've read have been interesting. I think in general the ones that know their scope is limited do best, as compared to the books that are wide-ranging, "this is all I know about writing" style books.
Honestly, the thing that baffled me most about 'Draft No. 4' were all of McPhee's anecdotes about how the industry used to work. Granted, by then he was already a well-known writer & professor, but his stories are wild. By how he tells it, he'd go up to the New Yorker offices to talk to the head honcho, & say "I want to go write about this National Parks employee, so I'm going white-water rafting & camping for the next three months." & they'd say, "sounds great, enjoy your trip!" Now, the idea of getting a publication to pay for travel is almost unheard of. I'm just at the start of my writing journey (hesitate to call it a career, yet) but all the rates I've been paid have been shockingly low. I'm trying to pitch bigger & better outlets, but it's clear this isn't how the world works for almost any writer. (Though if Knausgård tells the NYer he wants to go write about brain surgery across the globe, they let him.)
Only one answer: just keep writing.
I really enjoyed this talk from Braid & The Witness creator Jonathan Blow. Blow makes some slightly dubious claims about history here, but I think his intent is clear & well-reasoned: that software is becoming too complex, unnecessarily obfuscated, & as a result we're moving in a strange direction. I've long wondered about this. I've heard that it'd be very difficult to recreate the work we've done with computers from scratch now, even though everything was within the last hundred years. But say we needed to make a CPU for the first time, or construct a brand new Operating System. Could we?
Interesting ideas here, & interesting to think about how this applies to other mediums.
My sister got me a sourdough starter for Christmas. At first I was like, “Oh great, this is a burden.” Not really, but I was nervous! I’m a pretty decent home cook, if I do say so. I’m not daunted by many recipes. But I’m not a baker. Don’t bake much. Don’t want to weight bunch of stuff out in grams & get flour everywhere. I mean, I can appreciate it; I can eat a danish so fast it’ll make your head spin. But I wasn’t exactly enthused to become a bread guy.
But bread guy I’ve become.
Like many things, once you get into the swing of it, it’s not so hard to keep up with. Once a week I feed my starter (mix it with fresh flour & water), & then usually during that process I’ll make bread after, letting it rise twice, then baking it. It takes less time than it sounds like it does, & allows me to work on stuff around the house, which I almost always do one day a weekend anyways. But still, it takes time. You’ve got to be there for it. Of course, the soothing abilities of cooking something for hours is well-known, but it really does work. Making fresh soup, baking bread, cooking short ribs: not only is the process therapeutic, but at the end of it, you get to enjoy a fresh meal, which really puts me over the top.
Okay, that’s all I’ve got! If you liked this email, please consider forwarding it to a friend, or sharing it online. You can find the whole archive, unsubscribe, or subscribe if you’re new, right here. Please consider signing up for my Patreon for $3, to support the work I do & to see what’s next.
Thanks everyone! I appreciate all of you.
Stay strong, fight on.
Your faithful commander,
— I