Slow down, slow down
Hello friends,
I missed newslettering in March. I nearly missed April. It’s been that kind of spring.
At least spring is finally here.
In this newsletter:
show/process update
poetry update
other projects
general grumbling about time
Listen: “Do Not Go Quietly Unto Your Grave”
I’m not going to recap the bad and scary things happening. You know it already. Harness your horrible goose energy and do not comply in advance. But also, be kind to your poor nervous system.
I’ve been irritable, weepy, or both. I’ve been sore. And approximately once a week since late February, something has gone wrong in my home/family that has been very stressful, very expensive, or both, fully independent of everything happening nationally/globally except for how it makes everything more expensive to fix. It’s all been a lot, like, a lot.
At least spring is finally committing to us here in Vermont.
Show
I was overly optimistic about premiering in the first half of 2025, clearly! When will it be time? TBD.
We need to re-shoot a little footage, and getting things lined up with the site and team is complicated. We had a date and time figured out and then got snowed out (mid-April). Trying again in early May. I let myself take a pause on editing in the meantime - giving some bandwidth to other projects - and when I’m not too tired to think at all, I’ll admit to feeling a bit guilty.
I’m trying to remember that things take time. Going slowly is, as a quote I read recently but did not save said, its own resistance, its own revolutionary act. And as Hannah Dennison recently said to me, when my response to being asked about my progress was “slow”: “it’s supposed to be slow.”
It took a long time to get here. Why rush the end? It will take the time it takes. Nobody is holding me to a premiere date yet, except me. I need to let it go until we get there. Development took two years, then there were two years of pure pandemic holding pattern, another two of pivot and preparation. They took the time they took; so will editing, description, and the rest of the finishing-up.
I can see that this is true, and even that is is beneficial, and also I hate it. I like to do things, make things. I want to do more than my body can do. I feel alive when I make things. I crave it. And I was raised to be a goddamn workaholic perfectionist and while I attempt to recover from that conditioning, capitalism and ableism reinforce it at every turn. Make more, faster, shinier, prove yourself. Be worthwhile. Get things done.
Sitting still, resting, thinking, caring for the bodymind is not wasted time. Not really. Not at all. And you have worth because you are alive.
(And yet.)
Poetry
The round-robin of Infinite Branches is well underway! I was nervous about sitting in the middle of its spider-web, wrangling nearly two dozen poets, working from an untested process. But I worried needlessly; it’s great and the poets are great and poetry is great. We are more than a third of the way through poem collection at this point and I feel like I am getting to collect a majestic hoard (but one I’ll then get to give away! I can’t wait for you to read these). I get to see so many gems. Even better, in many ways, are the statements about the poems, getting to hear poets think about poetry, and we’re not even in the discussion phase yet! And sometimes I get to give (requested) feedback, advice, and of course encouragement, and see the work grow even more. The process is new but that means we get to decide how it works, in a way that serves us, and I am taking care with it as best I can.
Again and again I find that if you gear your creative process to support the creators in question as full human people - with transparency, safety for risks, honesty, flexibility - it doesn’t just feel nice to do, and make other people feel nice too (and respected, and safe, and appreciated), it makes the resulting art better. All of it is a win. It’s sometimes slower (ha, there that is again) but it is better, kinder, more accessible, more human.
(It’s still so much easier to apply this to others than to myself.)
Other Stuff
In between the recurring minor catastrophes in March I pushed myself to finish up some unfinished projects as a way to handle my general uncertainty in the world. I wrapped up a sweater I had started over a year ago (and then put on hiatus over last summer) and it’s everything I hoped it would be and even was finished in time for some late winter wear, especially since spring came slowly this year.
I had some sewing projects on my docket as well but did not finish any of those (yet); it’s been harder for me to be upright at the sewing machine. I’ve been in a year-long process trying to get my spinal brace properly refitted and we only just got it feeling supportive again in mid-April, which has meant I couldn’t sit up at my sewing machine, or my desktop computer, for long. I need one more appointment - I currently have some quilt batting taped into the inside as improvised final refinements to the shape and that needs to be turned into a more permanent fix - but it’s a big relief to once again have wearable support that doesn’t hurt me after so long. So, hopefully more desk and table work again soon.
I did write, though; my online queer writing group had a long-form work challenge this winter, for folks working on books, some for the first time some for the many’th. I had started a novella years ago - well, I started it as a short story and quickly realized I was in over my head, it was too much bigger. I worked on it on and off over the years, mostly off, because I was intimidated, and the material was close to the bone for me. This winter I opted into the long-form support group to help me finish it, since I was “so close”. (laughing)
(Aside: I love the creative person’s lie of “so close”. It is necessary self-delusion, for sure. I laugh every time I catch someone at it, though. “We’re so close to finished now, we just need to do A and B,” and thing A has about fifty sub-tasks, and B only has fifteen but they’re all complicated…)
I was “so close” at about 17,000 words in December, and I did finish my draft before the challenge ended in late March, and it’s nearly 34,000. I was halfway. I am glad I did not know that going in. I’m also glad - this newsletter is turning into a self-lecture on slowing the hell down - that I didn’t push through in a frenzy to finish it when I started, nearly ten years ago. I would not have written it so well. I don’t know that I could have written the ending it has now, at all. Our main character not only needed to process a personal trauma and learn how to connect with people again; she, and the people around her, needed to realize that they were all making a lot of assumptions about what the others were thinking, or what they needed. Everyone needed to figure out how to let their outer face slip enough to be really seen, heard, and held, and in that vulnerability, the solutions to their plot problems became possible. I could not have done that a decade ago. I did not have the range, or the therapy.
I made myself cry so many times writing that ending. Good cry but many cry. So weepy, lately. (The fascism, boss.) It’s off to one of my groupmates for a hype read - not a critique, just enthusiasm, telling me what works so that I have a little fire to carry me through learning how to revise something this long.
There are other projects that have been waiting to be written, or edited, while this was happening, but those will also take some time; I need time to be ready. A story about a nonspeaking automaton seeking autonomy; a story about a trio of mutants on a road trip; a longer story about a half-selkie mentoring a glass golem of sentient seawater. There’s an essay I’m nearly ready to write, part 3 on despair, handling the idea hope when it’s not a feeling you have. It’ll come out when it’s ready.
I want to be making. (Everything! All the time!) But apparently, I need to take my time.
I’m best at that in the garden, where I watch things change, bit by tiny bit, hour by hour sometimes, day by day, year by year. It’s easiest there, where everything moves at its own pace and yet is always, as a whole, changing.
Take your time, and take care of each other.
toby