Reading, Writing, Ranting, Recommending: Oversharing, Ahoy!

September 18, 2024

A tiny announcement: I’ve been considering adding a few essays every month, or at minimum, longer posts that go beyond the RWRR format, and I’m planning to launch my first one this weekend. I will make some of them accessible to all readers, but I plan to put longer, more personal work behind the paywall.

My “regular” RWRR posts, as well as one longer post, will remain free — thanks for reading at any tier. I’m glad to have you here.

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It’s still warm here in California, but it’s looking more like fall, and it’s slightly cooler in the morning and evening, so we are getting closer to it being a pleasant temperature. It was 71 degrees one day this week, and I busted out A CARDIGAN. My English teacher powers feel strongest when enveloped in Target’s most luxurious swath of fabric, so I am ready for it!

By the way, the accuracy of these videos — with that cardigan working overtime — is staggering for me. Like, excuse me, please get out of my classroom?!

@austin_maguireThe cardigan is back on the clock

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I don’t think there’s a great way to say this, but I feel like I’ve been slowly descending into a bog of struggle since June, and over the past two weeks, I’ve made it fully into the muck. We are bogging, baby!

I’m going to be okay, but it’s a season: my beloved mother-in-law is dealing with terminal cancer which is awful, but also, I’ve been fairly unscathed by Big Loss in my life, so I am kind of a newbie. No one told me that one of the hardest parts of marriage is watching the person you love suffer and be sad and anticipating a major loss of someone they love. I am absolutely powerless to fix it or help in any meaningful way besides providing dumb memes and sharing in the grief however possible, but watching my spouse be so sad and deal with this without being able to jump into Problem Solving Mode is heartbreaking.

This is The Big Thing, but there are also several Pretty Big Things that are not for the internet, as well as some things that should be little but are messing with my brain that have me feeling sad. I’m grateful to be well-resourced: therapy, meds, two dogs, a job that I like and that is extremely good at distracting me — middle schoolers do not give one iota of a shit about how anyone else is feeling, so for six hours a day, I get to fake it and talk about dependent clauses and pretend I know who Pedro Pluma is tend to kiddo drama, and honestly, THANK GOD.

The thing I hate most about feeling crappy is trying — and failing — to hide it. I am an easy cry, and I’ve cried in front of sooooo many people recently. It’s so embarrassing to be perceived, and also I have that specific personality issue where if someone is nice to me, I want to cry more and totally lose it! But if they’re mean to me, I also want to cry! Apparently, I just love to cry!

Anyway, that’s about me (I’m gonna go hide in a hole after sharing this) but let’s get on to the normal programming.

Reading

I finished God of the Woods, and it was good. I don’t know if I felt as passionately about it as some other folks did/do, but it kept me interested and felt binge-able, and I’m glad I read it.

I’ve moved on to reading Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar and I keep needing to stop to write down brilliant lines or think about things or laugh. I have been annotating my books these days (so rebellious for me, someone who does not ever write in books!) and next to the first line, I wrote: “Has there ever been a better first line?!” and the whole book feels like that.

Writing

Well, I guess this newsletter is the one where I’m gonna dump all my TRUTHS, and several have you have asked for a memoir update and what’s happening with my book. I feel embarrassed (?) sharing this, but I also want to be more transparent about my process. I give a lot of background in this post, but basically, I wrote a memoir in 2020-2021, queried and didn’t get representation, and then re-worked it, wrote a proposal, and re-queried this year.

There were two points this summer when I felt like I was close to being agented: I had a call with an agent I really loved and I thought it was going to be The Call where I’d be offered representation. That was not the call, though it was extremely helpful and she gave me some ideas on what she’d want to be before offering representation. I re-wrote my proposal and sent it back to her, feeling hopeful, and then…crickets. Nothing. Another agent expressed interest, and I sent my revised proposal to her and then again…silence.

I recently submitted my “journey” to Courtney Maum’s excellent Substack on a post about memoir trouble. Courtney looked at my work and considered using it for the workshop she’s teaching, and then wrote me an email with the kindest, most thoughtful feedback (she posted her comment publicly with my permission):

She also declined to use it for her class because, as she put it, “After looking and relooking at your material, I don't feel comfortable workshopping simply because I like it! I like the messy colorfulness and the scope of the book.” I loved her feedback, and plan to work on what she suggested. She closed her email by saying that there are a number of memoirists who have great books that aren’t cracking through for frustrating and opaque reasons.

So, here I remain, in the in-between. I plan to keep building my platform and tightening up the proposal, but also, I’m considering that this may not be the book or the time. It’s so weird to get incredible feedback from so many writers I love and respect who have generously looked at my work, and then to see it not connecting with agents. I know that publishing is a hot mess right now and summer is slow for agents and all kinds of other things, but this, coupled with what feels like endless rejections on essays and applications over the past few years has me feeling a bit stuck.

Because I am me, I am planning on building myself a little syllabus of things to read and work on, and trying to figure out what exactly isn’t working in the things I’m writing, in both fiction and nonfiction. I feel like I need to close the gap between my ability and my ambition.

It’s challenging not to beat myself up over this stuff, or want to quit, or generally feel as if I’m not a good writer or creative because things aren’t connecting. I’m actively trying not to go down that road, but it’s so hard!!! I just want to make everyone laugh with my traumatic little stories about being gay and raised in an evangelical setting at the height of purity culture and what it’s like to be a massage therapist and going on an 11-day silent retreat and all the other weird things I’ve done! SOMEONE PAY ME FOR MY SILLY LITTLE TRAUMA STORIES, PLEASE!

Anyway, I keep reading this piece by David Yoon about cultivating creative endurance, and working on my novel.

Ranting

I am 41 and firmly in my ~perimenopause era~ and I feel like with every passing day, my skin gets drier and drier. As an oily-faced teenager who constantly blotted her t-zone, I never thought this day would come, but alas, here we are with me turning into a literal lizard.

There’s so much to be said about women’s health and how we know literally nothing about the female body and hormones and the fact that if men had even one period with bad cramps and clots, we would have a solution immediately (or if men had to experience the staggering pain of getting an IUD inserted, something I did twice with ZERO PAIN MEDICATION) but I do wish someone would give us a little warning about how everything you ever knew about your body will change! Anyway, aging is a privilege. A very dry privilege.

Recommending

After weeks of being fed reel after reel of “fall in Edinburgh” videos, Amy and I decided to continue our Thanksgiving Abroad tradition and booked a week in Scotland! I am excited to be in the dark cold fog and slink about the city and buy books and go to castles and haunted underground lairs. Absolutely my shit! Sadly, Amy was not on board for the Terror Tour of The Vaults, but we are going after dark and if a ghost kidnaps me, I will be STOKED.

I don’t know if there’s a better version of me than the one that eagerly plans a trip I love the whole process of prepping for a trip: the shopping for items I’ll need! The figuring out potential things to do! Booking excursions! Color-coding all my information in a super detailed spreadsheet!

My recommendation? BOOK A TRIP. DO IT. Especially when life feels rough, there’s nothing better than a sweet little distraction.

Please send me all of your Edinburgh recommendations, as well as just how cold I should prepare to be. Although, returning to my perimenopause comments above, when we were in London last year, people told us we’d freeze and I wore a long-sleeved t-shirt most of the trip because despite everyone being bundled up, I WAS SWEATING. Again, what a delight.

Also, I’ll save you time: I will never eat haggis, but thank you!