I stole the idea for this post from Roxane Gay, who has a lot more going on than I do.  Regardless, I like it so here it is again.

Submissions

11 submissions this year: acceptances, 8 rejections, and 1 no news is bad news. 

It was exactly half of last year’s total submissions, and strangely the same number of acceptances. I’m pleased I sent any out at all given that the focus for the year was working on the novel. 

The two acceptances were both local (ABQ Zine Fest and the Keshet Maker’s Space Experience). Feels good!

Writing

I finished the first draft* of the novel at the end of February. In May, between jobs, I disappeared to Pojoaque to read the book and plan for editing. I’m now about 48000 words into the second draft of this novel. 

I’m working on a collaborative project and we’re about 30,000 words into that one.

I wrote a few new zines for zine fest, and I have the scraps of two short stories that I want to work on either when the book is finished or when I’m in need of something fun to work on. I also wrote five blog posts.

Favorite reading

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman

It was the kind of audiobook that left me standing in the living room, broom in hand, staring at the wall as I listened.  As a (recovering) productivity junkie, this was the book I needed this year.  I’ve tried to share the lessons I learned from it with a half dozen people and they all say it sounds depressing.  But essentially it talks about the way that we can never, literally never, recover time that is gone, and that we need to just a) accept that we’re going to spend a bunch of our time doing stuff we don’t necessarily want to do, but also that b) we should stop doing stupid garbage like trying to perfect our filing systems and actually live our lives. 

A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.

I really like books about space monks, and this is one of the best. 

I Kissed Shara Wheeler, Casey McQuiston

This was such a good companion read to my general work of unburying old bad things in my life and then throwing them away. Our protagonist is a shady goth kid who thinks she’s better than everybody around her and comes to realize that she’s not the only one suffering under a fucked up system. It’s a fun silly high school story, but it stuck in my head more than I expected.

It, Stephen King

Speaking of old bad things….I had not read this one yet. For some reason this was the year I decided my clownphobia was no longer a barrier to this 40 lb book about a scary clown.  It was great, and also deeply messed up, and problematic pretty often, and I don’t really feel like I can recommend it in general. But it was a powerful read.

Black Unicorn, Tanith Lee

This was also the year I undertook to find a lost book of my childhood. It was YA, the unicorn was named Infinity, and Infinity carried the hero(es) of the book through space off to the planet of the unicorns.  There were multiple kids, maybe cousins. 

I purchased all the YA unicorn books my partner’s super librarian sleuthing skills could uncover.  Probably I could stand to write a bit about this process and why it mattered to me to find the book, but until that time, let me just say: This is not The Book. 

But it’s quite enjoyable. I don’t know Tanith Lee, but the writing is crisp, and she’s funny. The world she’s created is extreme and bizarre and yet the characters are very relatable.  And it’s just…it’s about a girl coming in to her power, fighting with her mom about it, and it feels like a story I wish I’d read back when I was a “young adult”.

I read 63 books this year. Details if you want ’em. 

Reading about writing

• George Saunders on placeholders: I haven’t read any of George Saunders’ actual fiction yet, but gosh, I too have joined the train of thinking he’s the nicest writing teacher out there. I loved this piece about revision and placeholders. 
• Ursula Le Guin on carrier bag theory: It feels even more egregious to admit that I haven’t read any of Ursula Le Guin’s fiction, given my tastes and current work-in-progress, but here we are. 
  “I would go so far as to say that the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.”
• Refuse to be Done, Matt Bell: Nice mixture of “You can do it!” cheerleading and actual suggestions for things to try when your brain and your heart have been wrung dry by the process of writing a book. After a brush with death the urge to start a new book, I’ve now got energy for my current manuscript.

Events

AWP virtual 

I went to AWP virtually — between covid and work time off, I didn’t feel great about going IRL. It was great! Lots of good sessions.  I think it was a little big and it was definitely a situation where I was sort of attending the sideshow and the “real stuff” was happening in person.  

ABQ Zine Fest

I LOVE ZINE FESTS SO MUCH. It’s glorious to walk around a lil room full of artists making their work and selling it directly to their readers. 

Thank you for being here. Here’s to another good year of writing.