Notes from Ash Huang

Every book I read in 2022

Fri, 23 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT

I’m so busy I am basically always running on fumes, so I was pleasantly surprised I read 32 books this year. When I do have time to read on paper, I’m usually reading crit-partners’ work or workshopping things, so I’ll take any novel done as a win.

Here’s the complete list, some trends pulled out, and a few top picks from the year.

Some trends for the year:

I read a lot of backlist!

…including very old sensational books like The Night Circus and The Midnight Library. It’s sometimes fun to read these books, but I’ll be honest. It also feels a little…like I might have enjoyed them more if I’d read them when they were popular. I’m not sure if this is because I would have been a different person, or that everything was a little different back then. I don’t believe in immutability in a person, or universality of texts. Morals, tastes, all of it changes over time. These books are inevitably snapshots of a moment (even though a novel is some attempt to create something lasting).

I embraced the audiobook—for memoir and essay!

I don’t have the aural ability to listen to fiction for long without getting distracted (dat ADHD life) and I get overly upset with myself if I didn’t pay good attention and missed a character intro. I have tried it over and over, I have wanted to listen to fiction so badly, but I just don’t like it. I also don’t listen to craft or knowledge books because I like to take copious notes. However! The pacing of memoirs works great for me, and I’m able to ‘read’ bits and pieces while I do chores or walk doggo, or otherwise need to rest my eyes.

It’s getting so much easier to find and read BIPoC work!

There’s so much more BIPoC work being traditionally published and centered. Still such a long way to go, but it’s so refreshing to be able to just grab stuff off the shelf and have choices. Like…there are too many Asian American fantasy books for me to read in one year! Imagine!

Some picks

This is just a subset of the books I really enjoyed, a thin slice of the year, but in the interest of time and sanity, I’ve pulled out some notable ones.

Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen

This was a frequent recommendation, a Chinese American classic. It centers around the lives and relatives of two Chinese American sisters and the family restaurant. Structurally, the book is in a somewhat outwardly chaotic order and jumps from narrator to narrator, from time period to time period, from mythic form to intimate tell-all. It really shows how a strong theme can tie a book together, and it felt like a life feels in retrospect.

The Chosen and the Beautiful

Can I just admit right off the bat? I swerved so hard from this book when I first heard it was a Great Gatsby retelling. But everyone kept telling me how amazing it was, and I was intrigued by the excerpts I read. I fell in love with this book, and every few pages I was tilting my head, thinking, H O W? How on the great green Earth is Nghi Vo making this work? I love a beautiful sentence, this book certainly delivers on that. But it improves and modernizes The Great Gatsby in a way that goes beyond a gender swap or making the hubbahubbahunk anything but able and white—which, representation is important! But this book goes so much deeper than that.

What My Bones Know

Stephanie Foo was a This American Life producer and it shows. Combining the personal account of her childhood abuse, treatment, and science journalism, Foo puts together a harrowing and healing examination of C-PTSD (PTSD that a person gets over a sustained period of time rather than from one singular event). Major content warnings of graphic child abuse and intergenerational trauma, and as someone with some historical similarities, and I personally found some sections very distressing because of it. Ultimately I’m so happy I read it, I learned a lot and felt very seen. Foo is doing the Work for all of us out here.

The Map of Salt and Stars

This was a beautiful, hearbreaking book braiding together a young girl’s attempt to leave a modern-day Syria under siege with her loved ones, and the legend of a medieval mapmaker—complete with giant monsters, monarchs, and ancient road trips (my fave subgenre lol). I was legit…sobbing by page 40, just an amazing piece of literature. Also please no one tell Zeyn Joukhadar how big a lit-crush I have on his brain, every time I have seen him speak I have enjoyed every bit of wisdom.

Four Thousand Weeks

A philosophy book masquerading as a time management book. As a to-do list lover with poor executive function and great existential anxiety, I enjoyed this intimate, human examination of making the most of our lives, and what to do when you realize that time management is often self-fulfilling hell—the better you do at it, the more you have to manage. This was a great listen that I’ll probably go back to more than once. There are a few actionable questions at the end, but it’s mostly a treatise on the fact that we’re all given about four thousand weeks of life (hence the title) and that we should try to make the most of it, whatever that means.

Know My Name

This memoir is by Chanel Miller, the woman who was assaulted by Brock Turner. Major content warnings for sexual assault, but this is one of the most important books of our time, particularly for those who never have to walk down the street worrying if some man is going to touch, grab, or kidnap you. Interspersed with so many light moments of love with her family (and puppers), this book is epic-long, and rightfully so. You begin to understand the exact price victims must pay to extract justice from the justice system against their attackers—and how one man in black robes can snatch it away like nothing. I cried multiple times in awe of Miller’s perseverance, with absolute heartbreak that she has had to.

Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century

I adore this collection and felt extremely seen by it. Kim Fu’s more horror oriented stories literally scooped out every weird phobia and fear I have in my brain and just…tossed it on the page, like, here ya go. The doll arm one cries quietly. In this speculative and far-ranging collection, you’ll see everything from time-stopping toy cubes, someone crashing a famous influencer’s funeral, girls with wings on their ankles, to everything in between. This is one of those collections that sit comfortable in both SFF and lit, woohoo!

Did you love any of these (or are you actually going to get one bc I was like ahhhhh)? Would love to know!! Also, in the spirit of disclosure, if you’re interested in any of these and click through, I do get a little bit of a referral bonus from bookshop.org if you order anything. So thank you if you do!!

2022 Writing and Submission Year-in-Review

Mon, 26 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT

In the spirit of finding…new places for the content I would have threaded on Twitter, I want this to feel informal.

Come on the journey out of curiosity, or push up those glasses and nerd out about writing with me. Let’s start with the cold hard facts, and then wade into the squishy stuff.

Note: I originally wrote this in November, but so much happened in December that I sort of had to re-write the whole thing!

Submissions

This year, I aimed for 100 subs again. That includes short fiction for publication, mentorships, juried conferences, grants, and any other writing related opportunities.

The reason I do 100 subs is because I am a self-rejector. I’ve gotten a lot better but there’s certainly still times I look at a place and I’m like hmm, do they even read their slush, why bother, or, but is this piece 100% what they’re looking for?

I didn’t get to 100, I rarely do, but I’m pleased with my results:

55 submissions:

7 accepts
2 pending/active (sorry Editors!)
3 waiting
4 withdrawn
39 rejects
- 9 personal
- 11 higher tier form
- 20 form

When I look at this and see 7 accepts (and 2 pending) I am very happy. When I see all the other stats, I am still happy, but I can appreciate, wow, that was a lot of work. I am also very appreciative of the kind and personal rejections I got this year. Some were differences in vision, others were great food for thought.

Here’s the accepts I can talk about publicly from this year!

Some Pretentious Experience

My tag-along Instagrammer in Hell short story in Alien Magazine.

You stand under the awning and eye the unlabeled doorbell, an s inked in beside the worn bronze button. You would never have a reason to be in this small alleyway, lined with shining boutiques that house nine or so purses, each the price of a car, with glass doors that shiver when the doorman opens them…There is no like the Styx, based on the Styx, inspired by the Styx on any of The Styx Experience’s marketing or website. Only, The Styx, The Styx, The Styx. What are you fundamentally lacking, that you can’t enjoy the playful make-believe pretension of it? You won’t enjoy this, you can’t. You are fine here on Earth. There is plenty left to see on the outer crust, you aren’t bored enough to need to tour the underworld, too.

Pickles Taught Me the Art of Self-Preservation

What I learned from my pandemic pickling habit, ADHD, and motherhood in Catapult Magazine.

I was not suspended in a timeless brine like my pickles. I was not a stoic javelin of cellulose waiting to strike a bored palette. My answers would not be in rigidity, in control.

2022 Diverse Worlds Grant

I’m so pleased to have won the Diverse Worlds Grant from the Speculative Literature Foundation for my novel-in-progress! Hopefully I will get to share this book someday soon…of course in book-time that means in like…2025 lmao

Roots. Wounds. Words. 2023 Retreat

I’m going to the Roots. Wounds. Words. Retreat in January for Speculative Fiction! Currently reading my cohort’s manuscripts and I just LOVE! Being in workshop, nerdvibes hello, so I’m very excited to have a writing only week soon.

Writing

The thing that’s really suffered is the reading! I wish I had more time to read fiction, I’ve mostly been reading memoir and essay since that’s what I can manage on audio (I posted every book I read in 2022 in a separate post!) It’s so much easier to write when I’m actively reading.

I was able to write a lot before rejoining fulltime work, and I need to reassure myself that I’m still doing decently. I can get a little too dialed in on fixing or optimizing, but I genuinely love writing. It’s one of the few places I feel comfortable and myself, my safe little blanket fort. So no matter what happens, cheesy as f as it is, I am ‘winning’ if I have the maximal time and ease to write. It’s nice to just enjoy it.

Next year I’m going to mostly be focused on getting my current novel in shape and sending it out (eek), but I have a pretty extensive list of subsequent novels (including a huge overhaul of the manuscript I was querying last year), stories, games, and other more mixed media type experiences. It will happen as it happens, I’m settled in here to kick some stuff off. I have a lot of short stories in my ‘to submit’ folder, so while I will happily write some, I’m now comfortable enough in the medium and what it means to me that I won’t need to do any specific challenges or anything—just what feels good and amuses me.

I would like to pull together a few essay pitches, though! I have a few ideas that I need to just sit down and write the pitch for.

Brain

It feels a bit weird to add this section, but to say I’ve been busy is an understatement. Between my fulltime daywork, parttime mamawork, writing, and the other things I’m trying to do, I’m just grateful I have what my fitbit calls, ‘giraffe’ sleep patterns. Apparently I’ve adapted to being extremely efficient with my sleep, falling asleep faster and getting more quality sleep in less time. Yay…I guess? cries in caffiene I definitely feel the hit this year to my executive function and managing my impulsive chaos energy.

But this is the reality of a creative life with my lovely kids (and I have it very good! Many many privileges including reliable, high quality childcare, a job where I’m home much of the week, decent health, access to lots of things). My life is awesome, but I never want to sugarcoat what ‘creativity while parenting’ is really like.

Because of the brain stuff, my body also just does not know what to do with good news, either. Every ‘hey we didn’t hate this, in fact we want to publish it’ has me running to the kitchen to down a full glass of ice water so my heart stops trying to come out of my ears. And then after I can actually get super excited lmao. I’m so much better at managing myself these days, but I have to spend a lot of time managing myself with everything I have going on. Basking in SAD lamps, going on 4 walks a day, chugging beverages at extreme temperatures. I’m doing the work! It’s just a lot.

I consider myself very barely in ‘perfectionist recovery’ and I have to just be like ‘it’s enough, it’s enough, it’s enough’ in so many parts of my life. I’m just hoping in the new year I can have a more relaxed energy around this, and that this management becomes more automated.

But! 2023 goals I’ll probably keep private this year, though I might detail some process stuff, like how I’m doing that goal setting, and any tools I’m using to do so. Ya girl loves a good process.

Happy 2022!! Hope 2023 brings you everything you need.

It happens all at once

Mon, 20 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT

There’s a lot of reasons advice can be annoying, and one of those reasons is when it’s just…true.

I am just another data point, but the writing tropes are right. Blahblahblah you go from form rejections, to higher tier, to personals, to accepts. You write four books before someone signs you.

…Nobody’s signed me yet. But if u also wanna see my new book, agents, lol 😎 lmk

Anywayyy-yuh, I’ve been thinking a lot about the advice I heard that annoyed me the most. That is, if you persevere for long enough and work work work, not much happens, until it does—and then it happens all at once.

I’ve been writing seriously since 2012. The bulk of my creative publications, awards, and fellowships are from the past ~18mo, with at least one more this year in one of my dream pubs ✨ if all goes well. But you know, the six months before that, I only had one real win with Periplus, and then a super demoralizing high-request query round that did not pan out for me.

I love writing immensely and I’ll do it no matter what. Still. In that period, I often found myself thinking, so when do I accept this is never going to happen for me? That no one will publish any of my real heart’s writing and it’s time to just put a pipe straight from my word processor to a dusty lil trunk?

Phew but iykyk. I share with hesitance because I don’t want someone to read this before they even really begin and think, what’s the point, who has like eleven fn years and the stability to slowly slowly grind, grain by grain, like this lady.

Of course there’s the twenty three year olds who seemingly bring their first badass manuscripts to a parade of auctions and accolades, but mostly everyone else I know seems to quietly grind away at a career in community, writing their words, telling their stories. You absolutely hear no, then no but send more, then almost but no, then yes, yes, yes.

You find all the strangely shaped alcoves your stories fit in. You learn how to tell them with the honor they deserve in your own special way. You achieve that joyous painful fugue state where all the good art comes from.

Maybe you’ve been thinking, maybe this is the end of my writing career. I have been there. I’m not ur mama so you do what you need to do. If writing is not your joy, if it doesn’t nourish you, that’s one thing. But if it is, you just need to stay in it a little longer.

Something will eventually happen, and it probably will happen all at once.

Podcasts!

Fri, 03 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

I always ask everyone what podcasts they’re listening to, and…it’s time for me to pay up 😅🫡.

These are 9 of the podcasts that have recently captured my attention. Some of them are on a long hiatus, or are no longer updating (marked with a ✧), but I found great inspiration from their archives.

Good Moms on Paper

This is a great parent-writer podcast, a combination of interviews with parents who write (as well as a random recent book club where the hosts read Spare). It skews literary, but it’s fun to pick up the little bits of commiseration (like, the challenges of keeping a big project in your brain postpartum, even as you can write a fine damn scene).

Shipping and Handling ✧

I learned a ton about the publishing industry from these episodes, though it seems to not be updating much since one of the hosts left agenting. Contracts, foreign rights, and other insider knowledge that isn’t openly discussed.

88 Cups of Tea ✧

Another writer podcast. The host Yin Chang has a very warm and uplifting energy (she’s an actor and it shows). I’m still working my way through the extensive archives, but guests include so many of my favorites! Madeline Miller, Tochi Onyebuchi, Naomi Novik, R.F. Kuang, and more.

Between the Covers

I would listen to David Naimon read the dictionary, but hooray, instead I can listen to him interview some of the best writers of our age (and beyond!) I particularly adore the Ursula Le Guin series (Crafting with Ursula); each episode is so lovely and deep, and each guest has such an interesting point of view on the consequences and importance of Le Guin’s work.

Invisibilia

I tried this podcast years ago and it was perfectly fine—very RadioLab/This American Life of a vibe. However, since 2021, the new hosts create gorgeous and cohesive seasons that leave me waiting anxiously for more! The season about friendship was so well produced, and the most recent one about control has such a wonderful range of stories.

Life Kit

These are snackable little episodes that contain all kinds of life tips—from learning a heritage language to planning when to quit your job. The hosts are so delightful, and I always find the content so calming and progressive.

Voyage into Genre

Interviews with all your SFF favs. This is Tor/Lithub’s podcast, and each episode features interviews with two authors or editors. Simple concept, always interesting.

Hacking your ADHD

Teach me how to live, William Curb! Each episode features a different topic, and usually involves achievable, compassionate advice on how to work with ADHD to make life a little smoother.

Levar Burton Reads

Levar Burton picks THE BEST stories to read, and of course does a wonderful job dramatizing each of them. I don’t think I can add much more to this recommendation, it speaks for itself.

Chaos with a Spreadsheet

Sun, 28 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Or, how I draft a book.

The sensationalist way to describe my drafting process is:

I don’t complete a first draft
I never draft in order
I never draft from outline
My work constantly surprises me
…And, yet, I never get writer’s block

Now that you’re solidly not on my side, here’s what this actually means.

Draft 1

Joyous chaos

If you define a first draft as a manuscript you can read front to back without bumping into [tktktktk tense confrontation scene], it just takes me a while to get there, and I get there with a relatively clean set of scenes. They may not be in quite the right order, but the energy is generally high.

What I consider my first draft is far from readable. I typically have a beginning, an end, and roughly only 25–30k words in between. The lines between draft 1–3 are malleable. They are more a set of milestones than a readable, ‘finished’ manuscript someone could actually get through end to end. Stuff is still congealing, sections are missing all the way until I’m done with draft 3 or 4.

Early drafting is entirely to figure out what I am writing and why. I’m always exploring something that cuts me deep. I can’t help it. I tried to write a jaunty book about a spy and got a treatise on intergenerational, matrilineal trauma shaped by war. I tried to write about the Chosen One and got a story about her 30-something anonymous granddaughter, and the fractious society she lives in.

Forget the ‘planner or pantser’ dichotomy. Do you tense up like a fish in a net when someone says, ‘my characters are always surprising me’? Mine sure do. They appear in corners or leave scenes before I plan for them to. They delete themselves, take on extra meaning, fight about nothing. This is probably because I live in a state of persistent surprise. I am startled by morning sunshine. Human cruelty continues to stun me. I am undone by a perfectly runny yolk. Why shouldn’t people in my head do the same?

I rely on inspiration and life insists on coming to the page. Once I saw a man pouring a bottle of Perrier onto his windshield while I was walking home. I’m sure he was just using it as a bottle for plain water, but the wanton luxury of it struck me. I ran inside and didn’t even take off my coat, wrote an entire scene around this image, standing hunched over my desk. The stranger became an affluent bully. The Perrier became precious champagne, poured like water to remove bird shit from a window. It has survived many rounds of revisions. Maybe it’ll get cut someday, but if it does, it won’t be due to a lack of electricity.

Draft 2

A wild outline appears

This Swiss cheese document is my first draft because it gets me to what I consider an outline, and into the second draft. I sum up each scene as a sentence, then write in red what’s missing. It reads like more like a bad synopsis or a very boring short story. Every time I sit down to write, something’s either bouncing around my skull already like the Perrier scene, or I pick a red scene that calls to me, and work inside that section for a bit.

(Blurred bc I’m not ready to let you in this house yet.)

This is one way I outrun writer’s block and keep my energy high. But since I’m following where the work wants to go, it takes a long time to feel boxed in. By the time that happens, I know my characters and world so well I typically just need a journaling session to figure it out.

There’s absolutely benefits to outlining first then muscling through scenes in order if your goal is a readable, complete draft. I just don’t find them personally compelling for a work no one asked me for, where I’m the only one living there for 12+ months.

From here, my second draft has me fill in about 75% of scenes. The outline’s still full of red. This is the ‘find out’ section of the adventure and where my crit group has to hear my most ardent complaining. I have to delete and rework large sections. Some of my ‘cut scenes’ documents are 30k words or more. I print the manuscript several times, marking and massaging what’s not reading to my satisfaction.

I’m focused on developmental level edits only at this point. It’s often advised that you must never go back and fiddle with the text til you’re done with a draft, or you’ll never finish. You’ll be too busy fiddling. For me, I’m zooming out and looking at the work as a whole on literal paper with a pen. I can’t change it in the moment. Also, I trust my initial energy has made the prose at least good enough to avoid ratholes.

Sorry trees! I always recycle!!

Draft 3+

Spreadsheet marm

Once I have gone through a few rounds of massaging, about 85% of the book is written. I inevitably start to lose steam. This is when the third/real first draft begins, and when I run to my shadow side, the spreadsheet marm. Oh, yes, she’s been there all along, biding her time. Up to now I’ve maintained a very chaotic and warm energy. And I love that for me. But the next step is a few weeks of space.

I think it was Shruti Swamy in this amazing panel who said, “Future you is your best editor.” I love this idea of co-creating with yourself, so I always try to forget the manuscript exists at this juncture. There are short stories to write, kid pants to mend, fiber to spin. Sometimes, if the vibes are just right, a new book to start.

Once the time has passed, I print and read again with a fresh eye. I follow the same process, reading with a pen in hand. I try to read in as condensed a period as time allows. Ideally, I take a day off dayjob work and devote the entire workday to reading the thing cover to cover.

After this, I transfer my edits into a revisions punch list. This format is based on this article, “Revision Sensitive Dysphoria”, which will either give you literal shivers, or you’ll be like, this makes perfect sense for my brain. The TL;DR is: tag each edit with all of the rough description you’d expect. Add a column for time/size, and a column for agony. The agony column is important, because if you use the right tool, you can hide all the particularly agonizing edits when you’re feeling fragile.

When I’m confronting those last scenes I haven’t wanted to write, I ask myself, what would make this fun for me? How can I do the work of making this scene function, while also making it easy to write? I’m convinced readers can tell when you’re not having fun, when you’re not fully invested in the scene.

So then I have a complete third/fourth/first ?? draft. I’ll repeat this last process a couple of times, and then it’s ready for beta reads.

But, why

I fully expect people to read this, shake their heads and think ‘wow, this lady chooses violence every damn day’. Chaos with a spreadsheet. The worst of both worlds. Listen!! You are not wrong. I respect you and your own process. Remember this is all subjective and my personal hot take on how to draft a book. Your process will probably never look like this (unless it does? Where you been?? Please email me????). It took me a while to figure it out because I’ve always frankly been turned off by much of the draft process canon.

I love this quote from Isabel Cañas:

In real life, anyone in my family will tell you that I have all the physical presence of a pocket-sized marsupial, wide-eyed and spindly-fingered. But as a writer, I am an ox. I am muscular and I know it and I trust it.

Even though we have fairly different processes, this captures exactly how I feel when drafting.

Many people advise setting up severe, punishing routines to counter the blank white page. The underlying promise of strict systems is that anyone can set up braces and brackets, pour in a premise, and spit out a work of art. A lot of draft advice is well-meaning, aimed at removing fear. That’s vital, depending where someone is at.

But when you try to remove all fear, you also remove all spark.

A writer needs structure, discipline, and well-laid plans. But none of these things make a good writer. The writer does. The experience, the special verve a person brings into the studio in their heads is the vital piece. The rest can be wrestled and honed.

I’ve seen Carmen Maria Machado lecture a few times, and she always ends up saying some variant of, How do you know it’s good? How do you know it’s working? After a while, you just do. It’s vibes. I know that’s frustrating, but that’s it. The big underlying support under my drafting process is that I have grown to trust myself entirely. Will I get it right on first blush? Likely not, but all problems are tractable. When will my book grow its fangs, its balms, its charms? I’ll know it when I see it.

No matter what method you use, you must learn to trust yourself. You are the necessary sieve that all the work runs through. Use tools to unstick, to gain new perspective, but this is one of the few places in life where you’re unequivocally the star of the show. You’re the one who makes this happen. Your instincts are paramount. Hone them with the things you love. Surround yourself with what inspires you and you will make your way. It’s developing that little whisper that nudges you and says, ‘This is important to me, I don’t know why. Choose chaos, see what happens.’

On Impact

Wed, 06 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT

I have a sign above my desk, and it has three words on it:

Ecosystems
1:1
Dignity

I posted this up in July with the intention of adding more words every month. Honestly though, these three words have proved an absolute handful. I’m still grappling with what they mean in context of my life, as I ask pretty foundational questions about my existence and my duties to this world.

When I left my dayjob this July, I was haggard. I stayed as long as I could. Health wise, I was fraying at the edges from stress: persistent rashes all over my legs, prediabetic, and with neck and back issues I’ve never ever had—including, I kid you not, a random fleshy stress hump that was forming over the base of my neck. I’m fine now, by the way. I was able to fight off the rashes and the hump, and the diabetes is partially genetic, so I’ll find out next year if reducing my stress and living more healthily did the trick.

I hesitate to talk about this because while I hope to never have a job like that again, I recognize especially with what’s on the horizon, I might someday have to go back to working like this—that’s if the industry will even have my grizzled ass back lol. I’ll guess I’ll just archive this if that happens and we can pretend I’m thrilled to shill.

Anyway! the haggardness. The unexpected part of it:

The short of it is, after working dayjobs like this, I felt jaded regarding what impact actually means. And it’s a bit ironic—building ‘products used by millions’ is what helped fuck up my perception. Part of this is of course the context we are living through. With interest rates and a less freewheeling investment environment, the companies who run the digital infrastructure of our lives now mostly classify user wellness and equality as a fringey nice-to-have.

There used to be more of a moral duty not to hurt our fellow human beings, or the fact that making something appealing to underserved audiences is literally the definition of creating a good business. This isn’t the mainstream vibe anymore. Try to fight me on whether this is really happening. You’ll never convince me after what I’ve seen and heard firsthand.

It’s a corpo not a family. I know. But things felt absolutely different ten years ago. I consider 2012–2016 the period in which I really became an “adult”. It was in no way a perfect time, but I think a lot about it. Sometimes with a romance and nostalgia that’s overly rosy.

I don’t know. It felt like we had a shot. There were pockets that felt like they were safe and expanding for people like me, and for people who aren’t like me. Impact felt so real. It felt mainstream. Like you could actually shift the world with lines of code, a pithy piece of prose, a clearer interface. You could serve with your work—start a movement, change people’s minds, make a difficult thing easier. Enough people wanted to help, to see diverse boards, diverse teams, diverse bookshelves. The fascists were afraid of us.

In 2016 we used to talk about impact, like, let’s do the best we can for millions. Let’s help millions of people. In 2024, it feels like we talk about ‘millions’ like it is nothing. And I mean, nothing. No talk about visceral impact on lives. It’s all cold and clinical, a statement of fact. ‘Millions of people will use this,’ ‘Millions of people will read this,’ and the goal is to keep them doing so.

I don’t want to make impact for the sake of making impact. I think that’s dehumanizing as hell for everyone involved, and incredibly easy to turn evil. I want to contribute, I want to heal. I want to reduce suffering, pave the way for people to thrive. I know there are millions of other people, billions maybe, who feel this way. I know we were never really in power, and we certainly aren’t in power now.

So this July I charged myself with learning what impact really means. With recovering that fire in me, the optimism. If I want to heal others, I have to heal myself. There’s this concept that I don’t remember the source for, which I’m absolutely going to butcher, and I’m so sorry for that. Please correct me if you know what I’m talking about. But the idea is that to develop selfless compassion for the world, for your enemy, you start with yourself. Then you expand to your family, then your community, then people you don’t know who but who you like, and then people you might consider your enemy.

What I’ve come to understand in the last year is that it’s not a unidirectional line. You don’t ‘finish’ developing each ring of compassion and move to the next. To have any of them, you must have all of them, so you must constantly practice your compassion at every level. Meaningful impact is the same. If you don’t understand the impact of 1:1 actions and how you might change one life once, how can you possibly understand the impact you have on millions? How can you hold that in your heart and act with confidence when you do not fully know the flutter in someone’s heart, the turning of one person’s stomach when they run their eyes over your work?

It feels a little weird after I have achieved so many outward markers of ‘impact’—working on digital products millions of people have seen, keynoting an 11k person auditorium, fighting to have an impressive resume. But I’m learning how to have impact this way right now to fix my mind, one person at a time. Creating ecosystems, restoring dignity.

Sometimes I don’t know if it’s working. At least I rest assured I’m definitely not harming millions if I’m not being seen by them either.

In September, one of my stories was published in a dream market. I think it’s a bit difficult and quietly subversive, so I’m really pleased the editor understood what I was trying to do and published it. It was definitely not seen by millions and probably will never be.

But for the first time in a long time, someone I didn’t know personally read it and reached out to me unprompted. My ideal reader. Someone who got exactly what I was doing, who felt comfort from the work, who felt seen, who saw all the little breadcrumbs I’d included.

I wrote it for me, but I also wrote it for them, even if I didn’t know it at the time. I understood that suddenly. I screenshotted, I bookmarked, I responded, I cried, and for the first time in many years I thought something elusive: I have to fight much harder, and I can. Because I can remember these days all the 1:1 moments that mattered to me, what has kept me alive, what has kept me from lying down in resigned silence.

When I read the election results this morning, I was incandescently angry. Of course. So pissed, crying in the streets. But you know—I have a meeting to discuss awarding scholarships this afternoon. And then a few writers will get good news. These writers (who this coming administration is actively hostile towards) will get the news their voice matters, and that we want to support it. Monetary confirmation we want them here. We want to see them thrive.

So this is what we do. We have the impact we can and keep in mind exactly what it means. We don’t lose that thread. We keep it alive for ourselves and others again and again, day after day. That’s the bruised place we’ll make our home.

My Keep Calm: Consumerism

Tue, 12 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT

So I don’t know if this is the start of a series, or whatever, but on the heels of my last post, I want to catalog a few things I’m trying in my own life. They’re experiments. They’re not large. None of these are going to suddenly cure anything. If only I had that power. I share this because maybe it will give you some ideas as well.

This will be a living post—as I go through this specific pursuit, I’ll add more detail and any learnings I have.

The focus.

This week I’m focusing on tidying up my consumerism. I live in one of the bluest neighborhoods in one of the bluest states in America. I understand that my vote doesn’t go far outside of local issues. In fact, I’d say my dollar goes farther than my vote in this capitalistic hellscape. And unlike my vote, my dollar is fractional.

Billionaires are more powerful than ever in this country, and their capital influence helped this happen. Musk alone spent $120m to get Trump elected. If the billionaire class didn’t literally fund this rise to power, they stayed silent and forced others to stay silent, too.

They are powerful and I find myself struggling to admit how powerless we are in comparison. You can’t fight that money with money. However, perhaps we can dilute their power. A lot of my efforts will probably be around collectively diluting power, rather than gaining it. I don’t want to make this a ‘stop using plastic’ sort of thing while Exxon burns the ocean. I want to go into this realistically.

I can’t vote away billionaires who have no connection to common people and are obsessed with going to space instead of paying workers. But I can alter how much of my day-to-day cash goes to their war chest. I can reduce how much money I’m giving to dangerous people, and punish companies focused on algorithmic blood sucking and extractive practices. Even if they’re not billionaires yet.

And I don’t know about you, but I’m sorely in the mood to punish. Huo gai. And unlike last time, ya girl’s got the brainspace to do it with some actual planning.

Here’s what I’m doing re: consumerism.

Audit.

I’m looking over all the services I use day-to-day and targeting any company that’s already proven to personally fund evil individual action. It also includes companies that engage in overly extractive practices, particularly towards artists—paying artists as little as possible, playing games with costs to make life as miserable as possible to artists while locking them in. You know. Beating down on culture makers and then profiting from their work. Slotting in folks as they expire, sometimes literally, to keep the engine running. That’s my personal focus. My list will probably look different from yours.

I am then calculating how much money or worth I give to these companies. For some, it’s a literal subscription cost. For others, it’s how much advertisers pay the platform to serve me an ad. In these cases, this will be a bit loosey goosey. I’m doing my best to estimate ad views, and the cost of my impressions.

Find realistic replacements.

Can I amp down how much I make for these companies? I’m aiming to reduce my contribution and de-corpo down from this slice of the economy by at least $1500 next year.

It’s maybe not much in the face of $120m. But if 1/3 of Harris voters alone reduced their yearly spend by $1000 in 2025, that would mean nearly $24b ($24,000,000,000) removed from these extractive industries. That’s NASA’s entire budget in 2022. That’s 10% of Bezos’ total net worth. I mean…wait what…just need to pause and think about that equivalency for a second lmao…

It’s not going to be enough to ruin anybody, but it’s a dent for sure. A dent we can make with a couple of chores and spreadsheet math.

Again: remember again that your dollar is fractional, unlike your vote. If you can realistically reduce $1 to $.20, that’s 80 cents gone. And I mean do truly mean, realistically. You live in this society, so some of your money unfortunately goes to sustaining the system. I had some quibbles with Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing, but I loved Odell’s perspective on ‘resisting in place’, and becoming a difficult shape. There is no escaping the system we live in. As she details with her accounts of communes, people have tried. No one can truly escape. Reduction is meaningful. And trying to do your part will always make you feel calmer.

Fill my Things dopamine bank another way.

One thing I’m evaluating is if I can get my little treats in a way that’s more community minded. I plan to take a hard look at bartering with other people. Either way, with things becoming more expensive, luxury items like candles, flowers, and sweaters will be way less justifiable. I am pretty handy with a pair of knitting needles, among other things. I’m hoping I can start to trade my friends for fun items and get that special rush of ripping open a package that way. And it will feel more like meaningful care, rather than empty consumerism.

Bonus things

If you are fortunate enough to have investments, you can adjust those, too. Move your money to grind out that high interest rate while we have it, or back literally greener pastures. Smarter people than me have thought more about this at length (honestly true for this entire post lol) so do some thinking there.

Now’s as good a time as any to give money to relief (Palestine’s Children Relief Fund, etc) and legal 501c3’s (Earth Justice, etc) who will be doing their best to slow the gears.

With the holidays coming up, kindly request family members not use Prime or other big box stores, and to focus on local shops, indie sellers, and places like bookshop.org instead. Especially if you have kids and doting grandparents who resort to the false convenience of Amazon to buy loud plastic clackies.

Besides How to Do Nothing, I also loved Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture. It details a history on how we arrived at algo driven products, and the chilling effects on culture. A beige-ification if you will. I also appreciated the ideas for living a less algorithmically influenced life.

Keeping House with ADHD

Tue, 30 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

I’m a little self-conscious someone might read this headline and think I’m trying to be authoritative. Especially after many people have chased me at work to return my forgotten jacket or notebook, or sat in a chair only recently vacated by a stack of thirty books. Let’s get it out of the way. My spaces are neither tidy nor organized, but you know what is tidy and organized? My shame about the subject. I don’t feel angst about the mess!

Some thoughts about tidying and organizing with ADHD:

Surrender

I suppose I could just end the post here. But read on if you wish.

You must accept that it might be difficult to maintain a pristine home and also do all of the things you want. Something has to give, and likely if your brain is anything like mine, it is chock full.

Some seasons are not for neatness. Particularly if you have big things going on (raising kids, launching a company, preparing for a big art show, dealing with a chronic illness flare, etc etc). You can say “I am in maintenance mode for six months. I’m not going to be a neat person for this time, because…” This doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. You can clean when things settle down. It’s less important than that other Thing, and do you really want to not do the Thing because your clothes weren’t folded like a Madewell store?

Tidying does not equal organizing

I believe I heard this first on William Curb’s ADHD podcast. For someone with executive function to spare, it’s natural to pair tidying and organizing together. Often when tidying, we’re up close enough to our mess to troubleshoot better ways to keep the mess from coming back.

Never, ever, ever fall into this crater-sized hole. If you’re cleaning crumbs off the counter and you find you’re cleaning around a big pile of mail, it’s not the time to deal with the mail pile. Yes—I’m suggesting you lift the pile of mail, clean under it, and put it back down. If you try to organize the mail pile you will not tidy the rest of your kitchen. You will get tired and have a half organized mail pile, and a dirty kitchen. If you’re feeling ambitious, put ‘design solution to mail pile on counter’ on a to-do list somewhere. Speaking of…

Use time blocks, not to-do lists

Yagirl loves a checklist, but I stopped trying to ‘complete’ an organization project. Instead, I set a 15 minute timer, put on an audiobook or podcast, and just work on a space. If you’re able to do this just twice a week, that’s half an hour spent tidying. It’s a lot less punishing, and there’s less friction. Less, ‘I told I to do this, so I am going to rebel’ energy.

Let less stuff in

I don’t know if this counts as reverse-Konmari, but I’m sure our joy-idol would approve. Do not let anything into your house that doesn’t spark joy. Do not buy anything you’re lukewarm about, because it will be Kirby-d up into your feast of a space. You will have to wade through that thing to find the other things. Others may have an easy time sorting and letting go of things—I’m still trying to remember it exists, or exactly where I put it down three weeks ago.

A nice side effect of this is more sustainable living, and more mindful consumption. Win-win.

Could this be the case?

Sun, 04 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT

I have come to love form rejections. I bounce between craving bloody manuscripts drenched in red ink, and hating that I’m so willing to entertain another person’s opinions about my writing or vision, and ergo, their opinions about me.

Trying my best these days to give proper weight to the positive comments on personal rejections and accepts. Instead of focusing solely on what to cut in my manuscripts, I’m trying to highlight what I must not delete, what I must not change. Advice isn’t monolithic, and the whole kIlL yOuR dArLiNgs thing (which is honestly such a gross way of putting it) is probably great for some folks—but it lights up something unhealthy in me. Plus it’s often made my work get worse over time, the more people touch it. That’s equally on me, but it’s also just a demonstration that you have to know what works for you.

What I was trying to say here before I launched into an overarching metaphysical treatise on the personal nature of advice was that I’m living off of the positive snippets I recieved this year. One or two lines, literally like 35 words at a time, but I’m treating the positive like I’ve treated the negative. Sitting with it and being like, could this be the case? Getting excited when someone understands what I’m trying to do without me having to explain it.

For example, I’ve always been insecure about worldbuilding, because I’m frankly easily confused and I don’t personally enjoy the Tolkein-esque pursuit of inventing another whole language and maintaining a 300 page wiki. I love research and falling down knowledge holes, but there’s nothing formal about my process, nothing replicable book to book. Do I still worldbuild? Of course! Constantly! Even the most realist literary fiction worldbuilds. But my methods are rather ruthless and vibes/theme centric. So it was a huge huge honor to get the Diverse Worlds Grant, an enormous validation for doing things the way I feel called to do them.

Things I’m thinking about

A few months ago we were watching Ponyo and my oldest said, unprompted, “this is what it was like before I was born.”

I’m never not thinking about Murakami’s answer to the classic dinner party question.

I’m probably going to rebuild my blog into a more self-hosted thing with some visuals, and I’m thinking of integrating comments ?? when I do so. Is the Internet still crawling and spamming blogs? I guess I can always turn them off.

iydkydk and gut feelings

Sun, 11 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been thinking about gut feeling in both design and writing—just the immediate sense that ‘something’ is or isn’t working (or even, that it won’t work), being able to explain it, and what could fix it. I hear this referred to as ‘instinct’, but I don’t like how immutable the term is.

This is poorly paraphrased from a panel I saw with Carmen Maria Machado, but I really appreciated the frank advice, after you write for a while, at some point you just know whether it’s good yet. It’s hard to get to iykyk, because iyDkyDk. Also a lot of people work with false confidence: using gut feelings, but taking no time or care to develop that gut. Like…I’ve found throwing out uninformed hot takes is quite encouraged in tech, though these days it’s easier to find space away from this burndown energy.

I don’t know about you, but I run around with ultimate librarian-nerd energy. Armful of books and texts, notes flying after me like fallen leaves. It’s stressful to think of everything I don’t have access to, all the things I need to learn. The last few years I’ve been focusing more on honing rather than gathering. Interrogating what excellence would mean to me, what sharpness is, what it feels like to slice through cleanly through a sheet of copy paper in the unflattering lights of an infomercial…?

Experience is just as important as knowledge—ideally you have the two together when creating, editing, critiquing. That’s what gut feeling really is, it’s a shortcut you get after showing up year after year, making mistake after mistake. I’m starting to feel the ‘elder’ in elder milennial lately, but it’s nice to feel a little less ageist energy and see the benefits of experience. As long as there is open mindedness in the mix, experience is truly priceless.

I have 7 total (!) edits left before I am finished with this draft of my novel. If I managed to average 1 each working day, that means I’d be done in less than two weeks. Some of them are full-on scenes, others are ‘finish the last line of the song you left for later.’ This is the first full draft of this project that I’m going to let a few folks read. Exciting, but also a bit scary—not at all because I’m afraid of feedback, but because it means I’ll have to let the manuscript/project go to another place, where I’m not there all the time with it. I can only do my best, but setting a manuscript free is always hard.

Also just finished a draft of a short story that’s been cooking on the back burner of my brain for months, just in time to send it in for the Roots. Wounds. Words. Worskhop. Excited to polish up that weird little yarn (it involves extinct trout and angel investors haha).

Top of mind

I’m reading Alex Elle’s How We Heal, and in that spirit, I’m trying to forgive two things every day: 1) someone who has hurt me in the past, and 2) myself! for a dumb mistake/mean thing I did while bent past snapping. I’m not in a sturdy enough place to write this down or delight in it, but just doing it in my head is actually really helpful. Sometimes I forgive the same thing/person multiple times, and accepting that feels good.

I have had the urge to paint something for a few months (and get to my neglected jewelry bench), but something’s got to give with everything I’ve got going on. I made this tiny, tiny painting. I tried to use my rustiness to my advantage. It feels like I’ve forgotten how to draw completely, but that gives me some space to approach painting idealistically instead of by habit. Honestly…not bad for a reintroduction. It’s a bummer that I won’t get that satisfying stacking that comes with practice, but this is all I can manage this season. I have to just be proud I painted at all.

I’ve been playing Townscaper and it’s the most soothing thing. It’s more of a toy than an app, but the little surprises that come up when you put just the right elements together is very satisyfing!

And just for fun, I basically only visit Instagram to look at Adrienne Maree Brown’s meme piles.

Absolutely not

Sat, 17 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Uhhh so I finished my second draft of my new novel this week.

I was surprised how emotional I was after finishing my read through. It isn’t done, and I’m in a place where I need some eyes on it before I start indiscriminately deleting stuff because I’m bored lol. But I think? I’ve said what I set out to say, what I wanted to work out, and now I’m mostly just worried that I’ve talked on too long.

It’s been almost two years since I’ve really finished a novel draft. My first draft of this book came and went as it usually does, hazily with no certain milestone, with big chunks I didn’t want to write yet but knew what might happen. I was in an incubating mentorship to make like 40k of those words happen, and even then I was like [stuff happens I’m not interested in writing this part yet]. I do not like writing in order, I find it limiting and disruptive, but I learned some things about myself in the process of trying it.

Mostly that I could write 40k words in a few months and it might burn a bit, and maybe people should smirk a little less on the page.

I have no idea what’s going to happen with this book, but I have left everything I had on the page. I am full drama, wailing inside, kicking facedown on the floor about this book. It’s already given me so much, its creation sustained me. It has already also won me some real life things. I have high hopes but how can I ask it for more? It has taken me out of my comfort zone in vastly different ways and I hope it gets out into the world someday.

It’s good I have manuscripts to read for the Roots. Wounds. Words. Retreat!! I’m stoked to be in workshop again and just bask in everyone’s stories. Without something concrete to work on with my book I keep fixating on the eventual query process and querying agents is rough rough business.

I should probably pick another long project to work on while I let the book simmer. It’s not healthy for my mind to be idle eek and I have a lot of other planned projects to rework or start. My job work is also about to get bananas and has been stressy, and we’re adjusting to a new household schedule.

Writing this out I’m like… or maybe you need to stop everything for three days or something. Will I? Absolutely not.

Unappealing

Wed, 04 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

I am a lot. For me this is usually useful and fun—ideas everywhere! Respond instantly with a long pep talk in the group chat! Conceive of and build an entire project including a full functioning static site! Write an entire 5000-word short story in a day! Make a new project for myself at work!

But in the context of other people, it causes me great distress, and there’s no project like the project of meeee~~~

The people who know and love me appreciate my energy, but like any other person, I have received plenty of negative feedback on my personality. I’ve been literally shushed by superiors in large public forums, told I’m ‘overwhelming’, or that I ‘suck all the air out of a room’. I am not capable of being cool or collected, I’m only capable of masking into that by being silent. So, ironically, my rapid-fire enthusiasm makes me very shy, even with folks who have known me for years.

I know being appealing is a losing project, that it’s an old map of surviving that I could afford to drop now that I am safer. I don’t need it to escape physical punishment, and I need it less to make a living for me and my family. I still struggle to give it up.

Self-compassion and self-care help, and I kind of feel bitter that they do. I’m not talking about self-compassion like, a cute affirming phrase! or self-care like, let’s do a sheet mask! If you also need to consciously think about self-compassion and self-care you know it’s literally, I deserve to eat today because I am a human being, I don’t have to earn this bagel.

But you know…I feel like I woke up suddenly sometime last year and realized that enough people deeply know me and have known me for years, and genuinely appreciate me for what I am. I’ve worked really hard to be the best me I can be—less afraid of being generous, forgiving more, living less defensively, taking things less personally while also accepting when I am hurt.

I don’t know, maybe I’ll delete this post eventually. But as I start to think more about community and connecting with folks this year, I think I just need the reminder that it’s important to take breaks from self-improvement and understand that it’s a lifelong quest, one you can take a month off from without restarting some “days without incident” clock.

Even as I write this, I’m like, is this overwhelming? Am I laying too much bare? Should I be embarrassed to post this? But I know someone out there is struggling with the same thing. I guess this is an attempt to connect over time and space for maybe even just the one person who has actually gotten to the bottom of this uncomfortable post and doesn’t have the emotional support structure I do these days.

Take a break. All the little work you do to be better adds up, even if you miss a week, a month, a year.

Somewhere more solar

Mon, 17 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

My art-brain continues to surprise me. This is my best attempt to capture this feeling I’m having, this beginning of some wheel.

I feel like finishing this ‘final’ draft of my novel (and sending it out) ties a bow on a phase of my art practice—a messy, traumatized bow, a knot of inner struggles I’ve been resistant to accept. A catalog of some person I fought to be, a package of knick knacks I’ve arranged into some meaningful order on the shelf of my…I hesitate to say heart, because it’s colloquial, simplistic, too easy to misunderstand—so, on the shelf of my wherever-courage-or-conviction-comes-from-in-a-person.

I see a new terrain, which will take me quite some time to satisfactarily put in words. It is somewhere more…solar. That’s the best word I have right now, and honestly, it feels accurate, complete, and descriptive to me.

Maybe that carries little meaning for ~ everyone else ~ …especially because this isn’t a disavowment of dark places, or struggle. If anything, it’s an accomplishment for knowing myself in such an intimate way. That’s an entire life’s work in some way, and I feel some sense of reaching satisfaction with that. Something’s been processed these past ten years, and I have a clear vision of where I want to go next.

An afterlife of some kind—one I get to experience here on Earth.

On 'madness' and genius

Tue, 08 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT

When I was 17, I did my final AP Psychology paper on the cultural fascination with genius and ‘madness’, and whether there was a substantiated correlation.

Yes. I have always been Like This.

Of course I had the research skills of a teenager, so who knows what conclusion I’d come up with if I did the same investigation today (Research Pikachu has evolved, y’all).

But I think about that paper often and stand by a few of its points.

‘madness’ is actually maybe inversely correlated with genius? Jackson Pollock, for instance, did not make his most famous works until he had his bipolar disorder properly medicated.
while detrimental personally (many of the ‘mad’ artists were burned at the stake or locked away), the myth can be culturally useful to get people to leave artists be. This is obviously not a universal across marginalizations, but a marginalized person is still given more room to just be and muse and speak and exist if it can be argued as an ‘enriching little art project’ relative to the normal grind of the boot of supremacy coming atcha.

I’m thinking about this correlation a lot lately because of this app Retro. It feels the most like old Instagram and in its private permissions, I find myself uploading more real moments of my day. A thousand pictures of my kids, my ok looking meals, my rose bush, my daily dog walks in my neighborhood. It’s a beautiful life, it’s the best, even when I’m stressed out of my mind.

And I think there’s a large set of the population who would find my existence excruciatingly boring.

When I was 17, I think I was terrified that someday far in the future I might heal from my wounds and become excruciatingly boring. Not because my days would feel sloggy, or I would stop having new ideas. I was afraid it would take art away from me. I was afraid that drama, anxiety, and being yelled at by hypercritical people was what kept me close to the muse, and that it was the cost.

I already knew I needed art. It kept me alive. But that was a strange conundrum: to maintain a sense of sanity through creation, I would have to let myself be constantly destroyed. I took this to mean I should seek out the destruction to feed the creation.

I didn’t know this consciously when I wrote the paper, but I think I was beginning to understand that this would be a central conflict in my young adulthood. All my life I have wanted a certain kind of boredom, and that boredom isn’t monotony. It is room. Room to expand, to unpack, to make a mess without constantly grappling, hissing, fighting back.

For years it was easy to join in the gaslighting that I was picky, stubborn, unreasonable, and silly for wanting what I wanted. I think because what I want is boring and simple and harder to capitalize on—as I don’t actually need a constant, expensive sense of novelty. I have all of the room I need right now, and I just work to maintain and float in it.

The creation is always there for me, no matter how much I ignore it, belittle it by belittling myself. I am not the kindest person. As much as I am trying to learn, there is a hardened core inside of me that resists dismantling, that fears community and distrusts others. And yet creation is always there for me, with no strings, no sense of vengeance. I can always return to myself, no matter how I’ve been.

When your cute little experiment grows legs

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Hi. So…when Ryan and I created Bring Back Blogging, we wanted to encourage folks to get back to making longform creative content on their own spaces. We envisioned 15, maybe 20 people we knew personally, all doing a month-long blogging challenge together publicly.

What happened?

He bought the domain, I threw together a hard coded html site and we stuck it onto the Internet. We spent December casually asking our folks in direct messages if they’d be interested, and otherwise going about our normal business.

I logged in to troubleshoot a friend’s entry and realized we’d gotten 50 new submissions overnight.

I had a tiny panic attack—who are all of you beautiful people signing up for some stranger’s random challenge??—and asked if Ryan had posted publicly. He had not. We realized a few of our friends had shared the project (like we’d asked them to!), and we’d hit on a snowball rolling down a mountain. Lots of people were likewise frustrated they had invested so much time and energy in platforms they didn’t control, and wanted a guaranteed safe place to store their stuff.

(If you signed up for Bring Back Blogging and shared the project, omg thank you, seriously, you are amazing and I hope it has helped you get back into the groove! Also, though, I want to publicly say extra thank yous for having some grace for us. We are two people doing this for free.99 in our spare time, on top of busy work and family lives. We could not spend the time we would have liked on sifting through submissions and asking for clarification, or community work!)

I won’t speak for Ryan, but like every maker I’m sure he’ll give a knowing chuckle to the situation I’m about to describe. I’ve made a number of projects over the years to varying success, so I’m experienced enough to know that often you just launch a thing, and it is a little farkle on the vast face of the Internet moon—you might get some encouragement, and then it lives as long as you’re interested in it.

Or, ya know. Dev celebrities might write posts about it and then you get 30x the engagement you expected.

Partnership

This isn’t the first time I’ve worked on something with Ryan, so I want to speak a little bit on project partners. He and I are very philosophically aligned, but we have very different core competencies. A small example: he’s much more auditorily-inclined than me, I’m more comfortable taptapping words onto a page.

That’s the key with collaborators. You and your compatriots have to match in philosophy and energy, and then be different enough to pick up each others’ slack.

The philosophy thing is kinda no-brainer, but the energy piece is very important. If you want things to ride more chill, you’re going to get frazzled working with someone who’s like, hey, check out my 200 line spreadsheet (hi). Likewise, if you’ve got that hrrrnghghghg let’s gooooo vibe, it can feel like you’re bothering/stressing someone who wants to keep things more low key.

Being genuine

We didn’t go into this project testing out some market vibe or anything. We just genuinely want more cool content, and to get back in the habit of reflecting on our work in a way that’s healthily public. Buuuut, this definitely verifies that we are not alone in our frustrations, and that people want to talk about them! That feels pretty good.

Personally, being genuine and following your interests has always worked out the best for me. That’s often hard because this world doesn’t always encourage such vulnerability. I reconnected with a lot of folks and Internet buddies reaching out about this project, and it was really heartening looking through all y’all’s passions and thoughts. We got a lot of cool makers, including one of my favorite subgenres, expert quilters making WILD stuff.

And that’s the intended heart of this project, having your own comfortable space to just enjoy creating things, to be a little less commerce/metrics focused, a little less ‘better get that snappy one-liner right in a way that won’t be misconstrued into some harm I didn’t intend but also causes juuuust enough drama to get shared’.

What now?

I realize now that this project probably on its face looked much more ‘serious’ than we thought it would because we did have a landing page with a custom domain and everything. Not that that’s bad, but would this project have gained traction if it were chilling on one of our sites, or a google doc? idk idk

The enormous directory is up on the site, she is big and beautiful, but we won’t be creating a unified feed like we initially imagined. A 500+ person RSS feed would be an absolute mess! I encourage you to poke around there and search for terms you’re interested in. Ryan and I are going to put together a couple of themed lists with our personal favorites sometime in February, and if you feel so called, put together your own list as well! (that would honestly be a great blog post, no?)

Bring Back Blogging is not the only project about taking back your data and well-being and making your own little Internet garden. Hopefully many more initiatives like it will flourish. It’s given us more than a little food for thought about other projects that we might put together with the experience we gained on this one. We’re already thinking about (better scoped) next steps that take what we loved from this project to another plane. So more soon!

The Case Against Harsh Critique

Mon, 09 May 2022 00:00:00 GMT

My design school critiques have blended together into a greatest hits collection, boiled off to form a condensed bouillon brick of moments. B slammed his metal clipboard to the floor after half the class fell asleep in lecture. H swung my peer’s labored-over project back and forth, cackling at its phallic shape. M idly sketched some dinosaur heads from memory while recounting his own college days, and the sheet was so adept we seriously considered framing it.

One critique stands out, a stutter in time, a Spring semester communication design project. I painstakingly visualized a journey through Pittsburgh with dots of varying sizes and set them into a pie-like arrangement. It seemed clever, clever enough that when my professor paused to consider it, I got excited. I prepared for praise, rising up on my tailbone so I might properly bask in its warmth.

She grimaced, unpinned my piece and turned it so it faced the wall, calling it a mess, saying it hurt her eyes.

I don’t remember the rest of the critique. I was so livid I was shaking, holding back tears. This professor was infamous for her harsh critiques, and had made three-quarters of my class cry by graduation.

I was surprised to find out later that she was actually a kind person. She was involved in the local community and cared about sustainability long before it was cool. When my childhood dog died senior year, she sat and squeezed my shoulder in the hallway.

She later explained that it was her job to help us form a tough skin. She wanted to teach us that critique was not personal. The wider creative world would have harsher things to say, and she didn’t want them breaking our spirits.

Well. I’ve been berated by art directors, famous venture capitalists and CEOs, Goodreads and Amazon reviewers—none of them matched her ‘candor’. Whenever I receive harsh critique, I always think of her, visions of my classmates fleeing the classroom after her verdict, already sobbing.

By the time I was fourteen, I craved harsh critique. It was the path to improvement, and tough love was the greatest sign of respect. Disdain was better than silence, because if something was bad enough to piss a viewer off, it at least had a point of view.

I sprinted towards arguments and perfection long into my professional design career. My vocabulary expanded, I became accustomed to making changes based on crit takedowns as well as parrying it, justifying my creative decisions.

As the years passed, I began to think of my other professor, soft-spoken, the one who left behind perfect dino drawings as detritus, like crumbs from a snack, who could draw literally anything with an inch of blunt crayon.

“I used to tear work off the walls in critique. I would throw drawings on the floor and walk on them, the paper would be covered in dusty footprints,” he told us. “Now that I’m older, I just don’t think that’s the way to get good work out of people.”

We considered this kindheartedness an endearing eccentricity, like K’s pre-Jobs-ian wardrobe of exclusively black turtlenecks, or V’s inability to leave a pen top unchewed.

Fifteen years later, I have the experience to deliver truly crushing takedowns of all sorts of creative projects, strategies, portfolios, and stories. I try to never do so. Harsh delivery now strikes me as a hallmark of inexperience, insecurity, or PTSD. Besides being borderline abusive, harsh critique chips at the one thing a creative really needs to succeed in their career: perseverance.

Everyone warns writers that the path is filled with rejections. I was surprised to learn most of my hallowed faves are still receiving them, it’s a reality of publishing.

I thought my experience as a designer had honed my defenses, had formed that perfect shell my critical professor had hoped I’d grow. So, I wasn’t worried about rejection. What is a copy-pasted form rejection but another flavor of harsh critique?

Surprise! Navigating life as an artist, a writer, I find rejection to be an et-tu-Brute-surprising blade that pricks my undefended belly more often than I’d like to admit.

I’ve already fielded hundreds of no’s, and some of them sting. Nearly everyone is kind or even encouraging as they reject me, but I’m putting myself out on a platter in a way I do not with design work. It’s me Burt Reynolds-ing on the cold tarnished silver, not some series of buttons I’ve drawn based on user feedback.

The outlets I care about are at least not openly hostile to my lived experience, but the gates are still gated, especially for marginalized folks. Someone still has to say yes if you desire a traditional publishing path, which I do.

Please don’t take this as some trumpet that my work as universally publishable—like I have the nerve, lol!—but lots of good work is rejected. Quality isn’t enough to ensure success. This is what everyone meant, but it’s more comfortable to believe in cause and effect, in a justice of achievement.

Hearing Ocean Vuong speak on our mainstream obsession with conflict-driven plot was when it clicked for me, both in a craft sense and a critical one.

“[I] wanted to find a form that did not require conflict or orchestrated conflict in order to realize a story or characters…life is conflict…Context is conflict. So I was more interested in seeing how individual conflicted contexts interact when they’re next to each other through proximity, like a chemical reaction.”

Harsh critique is manufactured conflict. It is not even twisted kindness, it does not save. Everyone in publishing is already reading towards no. If that alone isn’t discouraging enough, pile on all the things that make writing logistically difficult: the struggle of making an income, a shitty US social safety net, depression, anxiety, a whole ass pandemic, fear of violence, the list goes on and on.

Not writing is the easiest thing in the world. We don’t need to let the gatekeeping spirit possess us in Zoom workshops or in Google Doc line edits. The pressure is already out there and programmed within us.

Vuong recognizes that orchestrated conflict in work is an illusion of choice, the aggressive response to an out-of-control world. Living that same pattern in life is likewise an illusion, armor against the truth that we can’t control it all.

Perseverance itself is conflict, especially for marginalized folks who have to hear the same things from mainstream critics: no one’s going to Google that, I find it alienating, why aren’t you italicizing, write it less gay, the prose smells of garlic and fish sauce.

Voices are winking out before they have a chance to hone themselves into something true, before society can clear a space for them to thrive. Outlasting doubt, clumsiness, micro-aggressions, and rejection is sharpening enough.

Art does not need additional harshness.

This is where harsh critique lovers will dig in. “But work will get shittier if we are soft on quality! The canon of human beauty will suffer!”

We are already suffering. Cruel feedback keeps writers from persevering long enough to write like themselves, to hold on until their voice is a humming crystal singing their particular magic and horror at being alive.

“Then they weren’t tough enough to make it! They didn’t love it enough. Their ardor for the written word was not pure.”

I…hate this. I would rather they make it, I would rather we all have space to make it. I would rather enjoy that honed voice in five years.

If people feel emboldened to commit shitty “craft” out loud—so what? Does a collective ego found in some cultish measure of quality really trounce collective joy?

If critique isn’t harsh, does that mean we all just compliment each others’ work from now on?

…Yes? A little? Is that so terrible? But this framing is facetious in all the wrong ways.

Critique could do more than model the same gatekeeping that destroys creative practices. It could instead provide a glimpse on how a creative can persevere. It should come from a place of, this is how you keep going. This is how you continue working.

Does that mean pulling some punches? Maybe, but it doesn’t mean being less critical in the definitional sense of the word. Critiquing for perseverance might lean positive, towards holy shit, that passage, give me more of THAT—but it also can include this line gets in the way of what I think you’re trying to say, or contradictions in the work.

Critique should push us towards our voice and truth, towards working as ourselves. It should help give us the confidence to stay in this industry until we are good enough to win, and to keep winning once we get there.

Hot posts in r/meandogpack.

Wed, 23 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Me and my brain, dramatized by me! and numerous half-feral dogs.

I finally close my eyes, ecstatic I’ve gotten in bed on time. The dogs immediately nose me from every direction, climbing on my chest, nudging my arms so hard my elbows flap like a loose marionette’s. I put on Ezra Klein’s podcast, or maybe David Naimon. I toss that butter smooth interviewer voice to the pack like a bag of biscuits. Here! Chew on this! Let me sleep!

I’m a baby, then a child, and each puppy is foisted on me, piled on me, now my responsibility. Someone else might have let them go, rehomed them with someone else, taught them to survive in the wild. I keep every one. Why? I don’t know. Maybe I heard somewhere that people won’t break into your home if you have a lot of unruly dogs in your living room. If I do not raise them gently, they will turn mean and bite everyone, including me, mostly me. I am only thankful I live in a time where I can Google instructions, keep a mean dog tame, dealing with my mean dogs reddit

Absolutely nothing is happening, I am just minding my own business and walking my dogs. I’ve heard exercise is great for taming dogs—but I’m feeling on edge and looking for signs that something is wrong. A plastic bag rustles in the street, and the pack loses its mind. They lunge on the leash in all directions, barking, and nearly pull my arm out of the socket. I try to reason with them and speak gently, but by the end of it I’m screaming at them and they’re still barking. The plastic bag’s handle shifts slightly, as if cheering our argument on.

I feel terrible watching the pack sleeping at my feet because I am visualizing taking the world’s largest push broom and sweeping them into the trash. Of course there is something wrong with me, it takes a mean person to make so many mean dogs. Of course they will bite and bark and shit in the house if I am always so disappointed in them, always trying to tame them. I am supposed to lead them, be the alpha, yell sit in German have them all thump rump to the ground. Or at least let them free. They would be fine without me.

If someone catches a glimpse of bony dog feet in the corner of a photo frame, or the typos from a dog dropping dead birds on my keyboard, I’d rather they say nothing. Spare me the solutioning, the buck up encouragement. Especially if you’ve never seen a dog in your life. I have already seen a pack trainer. I have already read all of r/meandogpack. When you can make a professional pack trainer cry with stories about your dogs, you’ve won some prize, but you’re still somehow a loser.

I am not a good alpha, but I’m not the worst. I still wake up each day and go to work, listen attentively to my family over the chorus of growling. Onlookers want there to be some lesson to this, for this to be some story of grit or success. I am just impressed that I don’t spend my waking hours weeping, running room to room, crushing fingers in slammed doors to keep some distance between me and these damn dogs.

I let their cries wash over me. I recognize them as they are, a pack of dogs, innocent, animalistic things that only seek to keep me safe. It is easy to hate mean things, but harder to hate wild ones. Wild things just are, they don’t need to have a purpose or a story.

What you sell, not what you make

Wed, 08 Dec 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Creative professions have two opposite demands: be an artistic genius! Pull solutions that are effortless and brilliant and otherworldly out of the goddamn air! But also! Sell things like precious little hot cakes! Get clicks! Make rent!

Rejection is soul-killing, but the capitalistic realities of creativity make it worse. In order to get paid as a creative, things have to sell, we have to grind for money, clients and CEOs have to approve the stuff you make them, even if they are making decisions entirely out of random personal preference. Rejection isn’t just a cold little email you don’t want to click. Rejection can mean you don’t get to eat, your debts don’t get paid, and then your kids need to take out expensive loans and repeat the cycle all over again.

In design, I just didn’t truck with artistic voice. Design is creative work, but it’s amplifying someone else’s message, helping users do their own work better. It wasn’t until I started writing books or drawing pictures that I really had to contend with voice and vision, and the capitalistic soul-killing commenced. Not so enriching to share something intimate and vulnerable with the world and have it collect fewer of The Red Hearts than an off-hand snap of someone else’s latte art on a sunny morning, am I right, ha ha ha! 🗡

How does an artist, especially a working artist, ride the line between some kind of creative career and staying true to their vision? Hopefully this mantra will soothe: Let other people determine what you sell, never what you make.

I find it particularly cruel to tell an artist that capitalism is a fortitude problem, that they should be completely unbothered by invisibility or negative feedback. Fact is, even the creative juggernauts we all look up to need encouragement and community, and are buoyed by external validation. You’re gorgeous and amazing, but you just need to hear it sometimes.

But yes, of course, if you listen to everybody, how will you hear yourself, etc etc etc. That’s why I like this middle ground, where all parties are recognized. You owe it to yourself to find your voice and learn how to speak with it, but you exist in a larger system, too. The way I do this personally is to go into a hole and spend time with all my obsessions and hurts, and pop up with an armful of stuff to explicitly submit, share, and gather feedback on.

Then it’s back into the hole, which is really more of a cozy little shelter with too much fascinating crap pinned up all over the walls.