Post-its and progress, summer into fall
Hello, friend.
It’s a fine season to have multiple projects in different phases. Of course, it always is, but it’s especially true for me right now. I’m a few weeks into a new job, I’m contemplating a bunch of life changes, and it’s getting darker earlier. All of these things are somewhere between neutral and good, but they eat up energy, which means having projects that work well for different modes lets me work more consistently, even when the brain ends up in wildly different places from day to day.
I have a deliberately fun first draft, a light-hearted scifi thing that I like to think about when I take walks, which I write on in an unhurried way. It’s gradually taking on a more defined shape, but it’s taking its time doing it, and so am I. I also have a marked-up first draft in printed form on my living room table, barely contained in a hanging folder, post-its sticking out of it in every direction. It’s scary, but it’s the thing I think about the most right now.
I took three very different classes on revision a few months ago, and I’m now following the process that best matched how my brain works. Revision processes, like the books they produce, are intensely personal, it turns out. My project for the London Writers’ Salon 100 Days of Writing is processing all of the scribbles you see contained above and doing the higher-level, broader edits too. I’m about 160 pages into processing the handwritten edits on this 380-odd-page printed manuscript, and the harder stuff is starting to feel more in reach. I also need to figure out things like “where do these eight flashbacks go” and “how would a bisexual man who came of age in the 90s on the coasts talk and think about himself and his sexuality” and “what are men anyway,” any one of which is a lot.
Then there’s the endless revision of the first book-length story I wrote last year, the one that sustained me through the early, terrible darkness of the pandemic and lockdown. And the handful of short stories I’m writing in the same universe. And and and.
The one consistent thing is that I want to be writing. I write or edit every day right now. (This string of 500-odd writerly days will break at some point, for reasons of health or emergency or just more general need; it works for me to keep this up for right now, but it’s not something I’d suggest casually to anyone else. When this streak does break, I’ll celebrate it with champagne or cake so that it feels like a joyful thing and not a letdown.) But I don’t always have it in me to do the careful thinking that editing work requires, so I need something else more straightforward to work on sometimes. To have this many things in play feels like a miracle. I’m still pushing as hard as I can to learn to complete a revision, but in the meantime, seeing that my imagination can support all these things while still having new ideas is pretty damned satisfying. My brain and I haven’t always been friends, so this symbiotic truce of ours pleases me.
It’s a good era for therapy lessons too: in no single day do I pursue perfection or doneness. Instead, I try to push something a little closer to being a little better. And right now, in this later-pandemic phase, when I’m really just tired a lot of the time, when I have so few answers in other parts of my life that have so many questions, it’s a useful little marvel to sit down for writing times and ask myself where I am today. Does my brain feel nimble enough to find the little
Those phone notes, by the way, take a lot of different forms. They can be complex enough to include multiple paragraphs and dialogue snippets, or they can just indicate which story it’s from and say something like “detachable tentacle dick.” (Yes, that’s a real example.) They can be notes about a person’s affect or a thumb-typed version of a whole-ass scene, these shiny stones that lead me further into something that didn’t exist before, another door to open in a room I’d been hanging out in for a while.
Now that I’m working again and at a job where half my energy isn’t spent finding my way out (a job unto itself, I tell you), I’m working out the ways writing works for me now. I’m trying for one London Writers’ Hour a week and usually trying to do it on Sunday, because I like getting the important thing done first. I’ve been working on adding an additional one, taking time to write instead of a normal lunch break during work, which makes me feel very Tennessee Williams when I manage it. Mostly, though, it’s me in the evenings, as ever. I get the dishes done and the cats fed, clean up a little, and with the slate cleared for the next day, I dive into other worlds. I look forward to a time in my life where it’s a more straightforward pleasure and not a whole-ass respite, but that’s a goal for the future. Writing is enough; later, I can draw the rest of the fucking owl.
I resent the diminishing daylight but otherwise adore fall; it is by far my favorite season, even though the California version leaves a lot to be desired. Even so, I’ve gotten my now-annual box of spooky clothes from Modcloth, I found a paper bag marked “hilarious cockroach costume” and thus have my Halloween ensemble sorted, and I keep thinking about baking again. I’m making do. Properly falling leaves and gusting cool winds are just a couple of the many things I long for at the moment, along with certainty, calm, and learning to have at a revision with confidence that I’ll come out the other side with something evolved and improved. For now, I content myself with deliberately changed.
I saw something on Twitter that I wish I’d saved, about how writing means creating one truth that lives wholly and alive in your head, and revising is convincing yourself that something else entirely happened but believing it just as hard. It is very weird. A scene in draft one becomes a flight of fancy in version two. A one-off character grows into someone full and beautiful, ready to be adored, and now they get a subplot instead of a single memorable scene. The lovers reconciled one way, but now it happens very differently. And I have to make myself believe all these new and different evolutions as much as I believed what came out last summer, when things were, in ways, even harder than they are now. I fear my own death due to other people’s carelessness less than I did last year, but I fear the sum of that carelessness from a broad swath of the population more. Both are true; one evolved out of the other, a revision across time.
I hope you’re doing not too badly in this uncertain moment. That’s the best I hope for everyone, I think: not too badly. Because I think no one’s really doing great. The psychic debt, the understanding of what our species is at this point in time, the hope and hopelessness, the price of separation and the different price that can come with reunion and risk: it’s all so much. So I hope you’re doing not too badly. What I’ve told myself lately is to go toward joy, which can mean trying to go to bed earlier, making sure I have brownies in the house, or getting that delightful romance from the library that a couple years ago I might’ve shittily considered beneath me. (They are not.)
Recently I went to the Church of 8 Wheels for the first time with a new friend. I’m a terrible skater and hadn’t even tried it in more than 20 years, but I felt alive for doing something new and daring again, wheeling my ungainly ass around the rink once, then twice, then a couple of dozen times, ungraceful and slow, but doing it. Doing anything! The deprivation is awful, but we can reap a tiny benefit from it by doing something new and feeling little explosions in the brain as we remember we’re made for more than fear. For thinking and learning, for doing, for laughing as you fall on your ass (or, in my case, my knee) and relishing your resilience.
Anyway, I think you’re great and hope you’ve done something grand recently. Let’s get to the linkage and pictures.
Here are some things I’ve written or liked.
For the last month, all my words have been in drafts, so no bloggery to share with you right now. Reading, however, has been pretty great.
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The Queer Principles of Kit Webb by Cat Sebastian, which was delightful. Cat’s website header reads, “Fall in Love / Eat the Rich.” Well, you had me at hello.
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Forget This Ever Happened by Cassandra Rose Clarke. She’s a favorite of mine - I loved Magic of Blood and Sea and its sequel and adored the quiet, beautifully composed sadness of Star’s End and The Mad Scientist’s Daughter. I got this one via interlibrary loan recently and devoured it within about a day and a half.
- Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, which was beautifully weird and weirdly beautiful in exactly the way I hoped for a book compared to Crimson Peak.
And finally, a little snippet I’ve written recently that I liked: “Anyway, I don’t find that misleading people to get them out of their clothes is wise.” He tugged the length of rope tight and ran his fingers along it to ensure it laid flat. “Or necessary.”
This is me on BART last month after a night out. Yes, that sweater is from the Modcloth order I mentioned. I was on the last train back to the East Bay, and the car was otherwise empty. It feels like living to be a harmless doofus on an empty BART car right now. I’m chasing that feeling wherever I can.