Writing update (7.2.23)
Living in the wreckage of a functional society.
Welcome to July. This time last year I was trying to keep a small bed of pink coneflowers alive during a vicious drought. My efforts didn’t matter much. They died. I got a high water bill. I saved the dried seed heads in a little bag with plans to plant again in the spring, then I lost the bag. So it goes.
This year I’m trying to cultivate my writing. It’s doing better than last summer’s flowers but my work doesn’t always bloom when I want it to. Sometimes I can blame the environment: Some pitches I send to editors take root; some fall on barren earth.
More often I blame myself. Writing, like gardening, takes discipline, and it can be hard to stay focused on seeding good words and pruning bad ones while living in the wreckage of a functional society. The news offers plenty of material for a newsletter that calls itself the Journal of Post American studies but there’s only so much despair I can transform into readable prose.
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If you’re a new subscriber, welcome. This “Writing Update” is a semi-regular letter that rounds up all the writing I’ve managed to finish in the past week or two.
Everything I've published recently:
AI wants to suck the life out of fan fiction (Journal of Post American Studies)
The future is an unending summer (Journal of Post American Studies)
A piece from the archives:
Waste Not. A plastic composting gadget exemplifies tech’s desire — and failure — to smooth away the imperfections of life and death. (Real Life Magazine)
Two reads from June:
I’m also including links to a few pieces of others’ writing that have struck me recently. (I don’t want to turn these updates into “what i’ve been reading” posts; the newsletter market is already clogged with far too many curation projects that all link to the same buzzy New York Mag story of the week. But I’ve included a few odds and ends that you won’t find elsewhere hopefully maybe.)
What To Do With Communist Decay (Noema Magazine)
In a Tipster’s Note, a View of Science Publishing’s Achilles Heel (Undark Magazine)