First Saturday Report: March 2nd

Writing and Submitting
I’m still sending out The Poisoned Moon, but not at the same pace I was sending it out last year. Honestly, it’s getting harder to locate small presses where I believe it might fit in. After my trip to Kansas City to attend the AWP Conference, I do feel a bit of an urge to rework my older manuscripts and try sending them out again. Maybe my project for 2024 will be to get all four manuscripts I’ve finished since The Evolution of Shadows into some version of the pipeline again. They’ve all been out before, with little success. There are also a few new ideas bubbling under the surface, so maybe I’ll get started writing one of those as well. Of course, I could always go back and finish Crazy Unconscious Days. I’ll just have to dump a chunk of pages after the clown warehouse bubble-gun fight.

Reading
The pace of book purchases hasn’t slowed, and there were, obviously, some excessive book purchases while at AWP. I battled through my usual maze of self-inflicted distractions (i.e. the goddamn fucking cellphone of endless doomscrolling, and the self-soothing anxiety medication that is Star Trek, Californication, and a run at Band of Brothers and The Pacific), and I actually got something read. Just before I went to AWP, I started reading Keiran Goddard’s new novel I See Buildings Fall Like Lighting, and finally finished it before the end of February. No one should take that slow pace, which is entirely my fault, as a sign there’s anything wrong with the book. In fact, if you’ve been following my posts here over the last few years, you know I struggle to get any fiction read. My persistent state of meh (my therapist calls it dysthymia), coupled with generic middle-aged man isolation and some physical problems that are making exercise a challenge, means I often abandon things out of a kind of bored panic. Then when the panic fades, I pick up something else to read. That hasn’t been the case with Goddard’s books, and I’m intensely grateful for that. I kept wanting to come back to I See Buildings Fall Like Lighting. Few books have had that power lately. It is wonderful, and it’s exactly the kind of thing I’m constantly looking for: exquisite and unsentimental emotional detail, a simple, quiet plot, and moments of buried poetry. Goddard has had my attention since I stumbled across his first novel Hourglass, and my anticipation for this novel was not wasted.

Watching
Watching television is a way of shutting oneself off from the anxiety of the world. This, I think, explains why after years of living in houses with televisions and being able to ignore them, I’m suddenly unable to separate myself from it now. Have I seen anything particularly good or interesting? Yes, a few times, but no more or less frequently than when I ignored the TV. In fact, my ratio of interesting views to repeated comfort re-watching was more heavily skewed to the new and interesting side.

Listening
I’ve been altering my music acquisition habits lately, and taking advantage of the Apple One subscription I switched to a while back. I simply don’t have the money to buy all the albums I want, especially all those albums I didn’t buy back in the day because I didn’t have money back then either. Music is very important to me. In the past, it always helped soothe the nagging depressions, the anxiety, and the loneliness. Music also helps my writing. I’ve been adding some Matthew Sweet, U2, The Cure, Guided By Voices, Lili Haydn, Lenny Kravitz, Ed Sheeran, Willie Nelson, Primus, and some new stuff like Carsie Blanton’s “Rich People” single that I think we should buy and listen to so much that it charts on the Billboard Hot 100.
Recently, I got a new record player and speakers for the living room with the hope that it would encourage me to turn off the TV. It’s helped a little, but of course, habits are hard to break. The new record player has got me visiting one of the local record stores (I need to hit the other one this weekend), and I’ve picked up some actual vinyl: Carole King’s Tapestry, New Order’s Substance 1987 (I have now owned all media formats of that album. My cassette tapes were stolen in college so maybe I’ll get new ones), Hum’s You’d Prefer and Astronaut and Inlet, and The Fugs’ Tenderness Junction. My mother has also gifted me three of her old records by The Fifth Dimension (I seem to have had Marilyn McCoo’s voice in my head since I was born) that she kept after my father divorced her. Mom also reunited me with my old Kiss Alive II LP that, I’m sure, everyone my age had when we were kids.

Podcast
We’ll be taking a break in March. We’ll return in April. It’s an opportunity for Jenn to take care of some family things, and for me to get caught up on some projects. I’m also tinkering, finally, with some new ideas.

Thoughts
I went to my first AWP conference in February. I’d been wanting to go for years, but had not been able to afford it. Next year, the conference is in Los Angeles, and I intend to go. This time I’ll have more of an idea what it’s about, and, I hope, I’ll be more prepared to take advantage of it. The vastness of it left me kind of awestruck and more interested in catching up with people I’ve not seen in person for twenty years or so instead of really digging into all the panels.

But that’s not really what’s on my mind. I met someone at AWP, and I’ve not been able to stop thinking about her. Ok, well, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration. Life does tend to crowd things out from time to time. So, the truth is that I mostly think of her in the quiet moments, and in those moments when life’s buzz and whoosh fade, and I’m left in the quiet dark of the house. Yes, sure, ok, it’s a bit of an infatuation. We met at an Authors Guild event the first night of the conference, and I almost didn’t go. Earlier, I’d attended the Rock and Roll reading hosted by Dan Hoyt and the K-State English Department. It let out at eight, and the Guild event ended at nine. I didn’t know anyone at the Guild event. There aren’t many Guild members in Wichita—I suspect I might be the only one, so the chance to meet fellow Guild members was a priority—and she was one of the two people I met right off the bat. No, I’m not going to use her name here. That would be rude. Anyway. We traded phone numbers, she gave me a ride back to my hotel. We attended a few panels together, and a number of the off-site events. Yes, we’ve been keeping in touch since then. It turns out we were both there for the same reason: we were losing hope with our writing. Being a writer is lonely, and isolating. It’s even more isolating for writers like me who write as a way of trying to understand the mystery and confusion that is other people. Anyway, I’d confessed early on that I was there to say goodbye to a dream I once had. Right away, she told me it was possible the opposite could happen. It made me feel maudlin and melodramatic for having said it, and I was grateful she set me straight. Maybe in that moment, it set her straight, too. She has admitted since that her interest in writing has been reignited after the conference. I like to think I helped a little there, and that I made a new friend.

But the imagination does tend to wander, and I was mesmerized by her. I would look for her in the crowd just for the pleasure of watching her exist in the world. I’ve been single for a decade now. For a good portion of that, I’ve been in therapy wrestling with the idea that single-hood might be all that’s available to me. You see, I’ve never been able to master being a writer and being someone’s partner. It’s always felt like I had a choice to make: be a writer and be single, or be in a relationship and not write. I tried to have both, thought I had both, with my last relationship, but it turned out to be an illusion. So, my therapist and I have been exploring my expectations and desires around both writing and relationships, and trying to find out what I really want and how to get it. There’s the shared goals and values that need to be clearly stated, there’s the physical attraction that needs to be there, and all the vague, amorphous, alchemical mystery, too. Then, there has to be an awareness of when to stop, take a breath, and tell yourself this’ll do, and not have it feel like a resignation, or like giving up, but have it be a celebration instead. Until I can better articulate it, I’ve adopted a description from Star Trek TNG’s season 5 episode “The Perfect Mate” as my own: I want someone who is “independent, forceful, brilliant, and adventurous,” and somehow thinks I’m desirable. It feels impossible, and at my age, hopeless most of the time. When I was younger, I used to tell myself that I couldn’t be in a romantic relationship with another writer: there would be too much competition. Now, after years of experience, I think the only person I could be in a romantic relationship with is a writer. No one else would be able to understand the need for occasional isolation, for ritual, for the revivifying nature of reunion after those isolations. So, yeah, the imagination tends to wander.

And a three hour drive sometimes feels like a trek around the world, then, in the space of a breath, it feels no longer than a walk around the corner.

A pair of videos

Protest

for me