a bunch of grapes
toward actually hitting 'publish'
Sometimes the thing with Substack is that wow, so many things happen everyday, both in my brain (ideas! anxieties! daydreams! a litany of tasks! more ideas!) and my home (teenagers! cats are hungry! where are my shoes! kids are hungry! google calendars! who dropped blueberries/pomegranate seeds/chocolate/etc on the floor and then stepped on them and didn’t clean them up!) and my work (deadlines! money! emails! actually writing!) and my life (dude, did you know I turned 47 two weeks ago?! see, didn’t even remember to write about it!) and in this relentless rapid world that keeps insisting on one day occurring after the other, jam-packed with horror upon horror but also interspersed with precious tender beauties. DUE TO ALL OF THIS, the thing with Substack, and being a writer, and having an audience, and also having low-key perfectionist tendencies coupled with a high level of distractibility, is I end up with a whole library of half-done/barely-started draft posts. Each of which I tend to envision as Significant Essays That Will Resonate and—uh, poof, something else happens and it’s the next day and then the next and, as Catherine Newman perfectly recently wrote:
“Every month goes like this: it’s the first, it’s the fifteenth, I am old and then dead. How? Why?”
On that note, I’m going to just tell you some things (grapes! together they’ll make a bunch! get it?!) and then actually press send.
It’s October 1, Spooky Season is upon us and wow there’s truly NOTHING more spooky than the state of this country. Ghoul upon ghoul upon idiotic face-meltingly stupid ghoul. One of my primary coping strategies is radical disengagement, which doesn’t mean I don’t care, and doesn’t mean I don’t know what’s happening—because fuuuuuuuuuuuck, I 100% know what’s happening—but I am very limited w/ my social media and news consumption and I manage my input so I’m not taking in any more rage than my body is naturally, constantly producing. I REALLY respect and appreciate the writers who are grappling, moment by moment, day by day, with what is happening—it does NOT feel like the approach for me right now, and I have worked hard to understand that putting my time and creative energies toward my books and more long-term creative projects is *my* most impactful form of activism and resistance. That said, I LOVE what my friend Kamau continues to do on Substack. Please stop reading my words and go and read his. Come back if you feel like it, but please—read Kamau, and subscribe.
I just dropped my son off at volleyball practice before heading back home to get some more writing done, and as I’m sitting here writing this, the texts he’s sending me from volleyball practice are popping up on my screen because I haven’t taken the time to figure out how to disable this only-sometimes-helpful feature. It would seem that he is…thirsty! And wants me to bring him a water bottle! Which is fun because as I dropped him off I handed him my precious water bottle that I am quite literally never without, and he said “Nah I’m good” which, cool, fine, I headed home. And now he’s clearly not “good”, and is texting me that he’s very thirsty, but cannot use the drinking fountain in the gym because it’s “warm” and also, I’ve just been informed, “it broke.” Reader, I’m not going to get in the car and drive back to give my kid a water bottle. That’s my level of commitment to finishing this damn thing!
Before rushing home to transport the aforementioned thirsty child to practice I was paying a mid-day visit to the home of my dear friend Caro, because I needed to borrow a copy of their book Cantoras, as we’ll be in conversation about the book on Sunday at the San Francisco Public Library (come!).
I’ve read the book, duh, I love the book, but I realized last night that I don’t have my copy because—like pretty much all books I love—I loaned it to someone. In this case, I gave it to my mom, the most voracious reader I know (on a regular basis this woman will get a novel from the library, start it at 9pm, and stay up until 3 or 4am to finish it. HOW DOES SHE DO IT FOLKS?! I fall asleep if I read one page before bed!) I called her to confirm that she does in fact have my copy, and she had actually just started reading it (after finishing Detransition, Baby, which she really liked, and from which she says she “learned a lot.”) She told me how much she is loving Cantoras, and said the following: “It’s incredibly lyrical, the language is so incredible and rhythmic, like you can just hear the book humming its melody…I don’t know how to describe it!” I replied “You just described it incredibly well!” She went on: “And even though I don’t know anything about Uruguay, I really connected with the story. It’s universal—the desire to find a safe place, the need to be seen.” OK MOM! GO IN! Then she adds: “And as a 78 year old cis woman—is that correct? Am I getting it right?” YES MY BELOVED 78 YEAR OLD CIS MOTHER! YES! “I connected with the characters, even though I don’t have the same experiences.” UGH. PERFECTION. BOOKS FOR PRESIDENT!
Caro and I also got super deep about the bizarre complicated nuances of being writers and all the big feelings that come with perceptions of success vs reality and how we take in praise and positive feedback and how hard but important it is to be PROUD of ourselves for the incredible hustle and commitment it takes to figure out how to make a living as an artist under capitalism in general, and especially now under a government that actively hates what we do (and, in the case of Caro, a gender non-conforming queer person of color, very actively hates their existence. They not crazy about my gay-lady-bigmouth-self either, but whiteness is a helluva smokescreen). I am so grateful for our friendship and the conversations we have (and the dinner party we hastily put together last week for other writers who are trying to figure out how to navigate this moment). Community really is more critical than ever right now.
Speaking of writers and their books, here’s a little Writer BTS (that means behind the scenes. Did you already know that? I did not, until recently, when a very smart friend who works in film and television used it, and I was like hmmmm…back to school? the boy friend? what does she mean? so i googled it instead of asking because why on earth would i, a certified know-it-all, just fucking ask my friend what she means) Ok! Ever wonder how writers name the characters in their books? Would you like a little insight into my complex, elaborate process? Today I was writing a scene and I remembered that the character (an older woman named Ginny. Why is she named Ginny? I have no ide! I don’t remember! She’s just so obviously a Ginny!) is supposed to have a cat, and I hadn’t yet named the cat, and so I just typed a name and poof! Bada bing bada boom the cat is now Honky Cat, after the cat my aunt had when I was a kid, which was, yes, because of the Elton John song. When I was a kid I thought that was a super reasonable name for a cat, just like how I thought it was normal that my Hells Angel neighbors named their bassett hound Satan. (!!!) So now the book I’m writing has an Elton John reference! And so it goes! That’s literature, folks.
This reminds me of the anecdote about how when I was little I really believed that “Rocky Raccoon” was a song about a family of (violent) raccoons and I had detailed visions of what Rocky (and Dan, and Nancy, and Magill who called himself Lil) looked like. I used to draw them, even!
For accountability purposes, here are some of the topics I keep meaning to write longer dispatches about: the WBNA, in general, but also, why it is so fun and also radically important to be a women’s sports fan; why, exactly, I am so obsessed with KEXP (will include pics of the trip we took to Seattle to visit the station!); the wild world of editing, proofreading, and copyediting your own goddamn book; the fact that I got the ARCs for WHERE THE GIRLS WERE!; and also maybe something about the weird lunches that writers eat when they work from home and no one is watching (hint: so much peanut butter). Oh! Also I did a video interview with Susan Straight and I need to edit and post THAT and rave about Susan who is a FUCKING OG LEGEND.
If you’ve actually read this far do me a favor and vote for your favorite half-done dispatch and I’ll actually finish them and will definitely dedicate it to you.
Ok cool hitting SEND (wait, this isn’t an email, the button you push says PUBLISH because Substack is so writerly) before this becomes another half-finished draft and—
xo
k
I vote for more BTS of your writerly life. 😊