What I worked on this week: It was a survival week, my friends. There was Halloween, bathroom remodeling, writerly support work, and appointments. I still made good progress, which I’m thrilled about! I’m officially halfway through this novel rewrite, and if I can double down on it this month, I think (I think) I can get it finished by December. I’d love to get it done by then, because December really needs to be my chill out/let go month. There’s just always so much to do and so little time to do it and vacation time, and holidays, and, and, and, and-!
So if I can get this third draft done, I can at least ship it off to my beta readers and let it go until February, which would be AH-MAZ-ING. I’ve signed on to do Fright Club this coming January, so I’m looking forward to practicing my horror writing skills and generating some new dark short fiction.
I’ve also been playing around on Substack with an odd-fiction/odd-media focused newsletter about–you guessed it!–odd stuff. While of course I have a general lean towards fiction, I also look at movies, games, art, and the generally absurd. This week, I got up this little beauty: 5 Odd Palate Cleansers for Reading Between Books, which is a collection of novellas that are weird and strange but also great. If you want to know if these kinds of things are for you, I have this useful description:
Odd, you say? How do you mean?
I mean like the kind of story that when you tell someone at work or at a bus stop what the story is about, 9 times out of 10, the listener’s response is, “Huh?”
(The lingering 1 out of 10 who responds, “Hold on, let me add that to my TBR!” is hopefully reading this right now! Hello fellow oddballs!)
So that’s what’s going on there! I’ve been having fun with the artificial limits of focusing only on odd things, and also, I *love* odd things, so that makes it fun, too. I started this up after reading an article by the fabulous Leigh Stein (author of Self Care which is absurd and hilarious if you like satire looking at modern beauty and wellness culture), in which she detailed how she uses different social media platforms to focus on different things. Her statement about performance art was brilliant (and honestly, sold me on buying Self Care). Read the whole article on “writing vs. content” here!
What’s inspiring me this week: This week, I finished reading The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker, which was a freaking DELIGHT. Short but so thoughtful and charming, it’s a lovely novella about nothing and everything, all those little things we notice in our day-to-day lives and how much meaning they have in the long-run. I adored it.
Now, I’m moving on to something classic: Middlemarch by George Eliot. I really love Eliot’s writing style, and I love a good old classic, too. Middlemarch is a book I encountered probably about (UGH) twenty years ago during a literature class. I liked it a lot, but was taking way too many English classes at the time, and didn’t get a chance to finish it. So here I am, picking up the mantle again.
I also finished reading Lessons in Chemistry, which was a lot of fun and also frustrating (not dissimilar to AnnieBot, but funnier and more light-hearted). So, what do I pick up to read while the boys go to bed? THAT’S RIGHT: HOUSE OF MOTHER-FREAKING LEAVES BABY.
We’re doing it! We’re diving in! We’re mad and we’re glad and we’re going for a literary spin. I have been carrying this book around for probably also about twenty years (UGH) since I first heard about it and thought: Now that sounds like something I’d like. It’s survived multiple move book-culls, because “Oooo, but I *do* want to read this someday….* and because it’s so long, I know I won’t be able to finish it in time if I rent it from the library. So I have hauled this huge book around for YEARS, and this is the week we go for it. I’m already kind of half in love with it–just the hallway description, the incorrect/non-matching house measurements–this is the weird as sh*t stuff I love, and I am ALL IN. I got through Dahlgren years ago, so I feel like I’m prepared a bit for the madness, but I guess we’ll see!
In utterly unrelated (well, let’s be honest, not totally unrelated) news, I’ve started playing the game Pools. For those not in the know, this is a walking simulator (you know I love my walking sims!) in which you are utterly alone in a strange, abandoned building filled with, you guessed it, pools. Just…freaking pools. There are water slides sometimes. There are dark holes you can drown in. There might be ghosts? Maybe *you’re* the ghost? It’s atmospheric horror at its best, and I’m enjoying both the relaxing chill of walking through endless halls and pools and half-flooded rooms and also getting WAY more freaked out than I realize as I do so. It’s fun! They say there are no jump-scares, which is kinda true? But sometimes you walk around a corner and find a giant inflatable ducky staring at you, and it sure as heck FEELS like a jump scare. Even though it’s just a duck. It’s fine. Everything’s fine. You’re fine.
Also watched Halloween for the first time (gasp! I know!). It came out when I was too little to see it, and then I missed it for most of my teens because I was a notorious coward (I’m writing a mini-zine about this very subject!), and then it wasn’t zombie fiction or dark SF, so I didn’t really swing back around until NOW. Now I’ve seen it! I’ve railed that Jamie Lee Curtis looks way too old to be a teenage babysitter, but it’s a delightful horror flick and we had a lot of fun.
Halloween was good, too! Thing 1 went as Link from Breath of the Wild, a role for which he is very naturally suited, and Thing 2 decided to switch up his Minecraft armor costume at the last minute in favor of a dark sweatshirt and black gloves and a grey felt hat and went as “a mysterious man”. It was adorable. Can I just laud the delight of a quiet neighborhood trick-or-treat? It was dark but beautiful (about 65 degrees, INSANE), and we just strolled around our neighborhood, enjoying the quiet and the stars and talking just loud enough to hopefully scare off any bears. It was a great night.
Oh! And What We Do in the Shadows is back! We’ve jumped right in and are enjoying ourselves immensely.
Plans for next week: There are a lot of randomly scheduled things during my writing time next week (UGH), but I should have enough time to get my work done anyway. So I’m going to keep chunking along. My goal is to get down 2k/day of either newly written scenes (as they come up) or 2k/day of translated/edited scenes. If I can do that, I’ll be really, really close to done by the end of the month and maybe only need a little push to get there.
Also thought it might be interesting to gets some submissions stats in here, though I don’t know how much they’ll change from week to week:
Submissions Pending: 9 (but several are simultaneous submissions, so it’s not 9 whole works)