Wonderful Blunderful Me
MAY ROUND-UP
May flew by for me! Most of it was spent in a glorious, mindless routine: getting Finley off to school Monday through Thursday, setting Clementine up with crafts or projects while her sister was gone, walking or running in the mornings, writing in the early afternoons, reading in the evenings. We’re still very lucky to have my husband at home while I work here—two parents at home is really ideal. I don’t know if I can ever go back!
Something exciting happened in May—it starts with a C and rhymes with HOVER. That’s right, I saw the preliminary sketches for my next book’s cover, and you guys, I fell over. This is the first time I’ve had a specially commissioned illustration for a book I wrote, and it’s wild to see a story I made up come to life in this way. (Is this a taste of what it’s like to have a book optioned for television or a movie???) I’ll be able to share it with you soon, as well as the jacket copy.
The artist we hired is Beidi Guo, and oh, my stars, she is so talented! Look at her stuff!
Do you want me to give you at least a crumb? How about the title?
The Patron Thief of Bread
That’s it! This is the proverbial Gargoyle Book, which went without a proper title for so many years, but I cannot even describe how perfect this name is for this story.
Things are happening! It’s been so long since I was cruising the onramp for book’s publication, but here I am, revving the engine. I’ll have a release date for you soon, too. It feels sweeter this time than for any other book I’ve written. I’ve been derailed (and derailed myself) so many times in the last few years. To know that another one of my weird stories is going out into the world after trying so hard to get something finished and turned in and polished… I’m very proud of myself. And I am pretty excited to do it all again very soon.
Other highlights from May:
-lots of time with my family (my siblings and Mom are all vaccinated!)
-buying my first ever Kindle, which was an Experience (I didn’t realize they displayed only black and white, which meant my big plans to let my kids use them to read graphic novels was daunted, but actually it turns out we all like reading on the Kindle, even me, which is a shock, so it’s a keeper!)
-Finley’s last months, last weeks, and last days of fifth grade—a bizarre year to be sure, since it started with at-home homeschooling and ended with plopping her back into full-time in-person learning, but she’s been so happy to be around her peers and she’s hitting all her benchmarks or above them
-Clementine’s OBSESSION (cannot be understated) with Dog Man books (update; the obsession has now switched to Raina Telgemeier books, particularly SISTERS)
-getting my beloved hand-me-down spinet piano tuned and cleaned for the first time since my family has owned it (some forty years). I’ve always put off doing this because I didn’t want it to lose its sweet, mellow sound (I hate a really bright upright piano), but now it sounds crisp AND all the tones are no longer out of whack. The technician said he was surprised that it wasn’t more out of tune, and said this piano was built like a tank, which is an incredible compliment for her (no, I’m not anthropomorphizing my piano, I swear).
REALLY DEEP THOUGHTS
A couple weeks ago, I said something that I thought was brilliant (at the time): “I want my whole life to be like a writing retreat!”
At the time, I was speaking aloud to my husband. I was honing in on my summer goals. I was reacting emotionally to the decision I’d made to taper off from my writing classes so I could get back to my true calling: finishing stories and books.
“Do it,” my husband responded with the reliable enthusiasm he gives to all my schemes.
I actually wrote this section of my newsletter already, and explained exactly how I was going to do it—how I was going to take the elements of a good writing retreat (I explain below) and apply them to my life this summer. I got very technical and said I would be doing lots of charts and timed writing sessions and organized meal plans and structured time for unstructured thinking.
Here's some of what I wrote originally:
We’re about to enter the two hardest months of the year for me. I know lots of people can’t stand the doldrums of late winter and early spring, but for me, the long hot months of June and July are hard to endure.
No structure for my kids, the sun doesn’t go down until eight or nine, the temperatures in Utah are ridiculously hot with little cloud cover or rainstorms for mercy…
In order to combat the kind of irrational flashes of impatient anger that these summer months can trigger for me, I’m making some plans.
This is also influenced by a pretty sharp change I’m implementing in my life (forgive me if I already spoke about this; my ADHD brain can’t remember what stories I’ve told). I’ve been teaching my writing classes for a year and a half, and I’m fully ready to ease up on that part of my life and be just a writer. I’m incredibly lucky to be able to do this, since we’re in a dual-income household and my husband is ready to take on the bills for a while. And stretches of time where my only job is to write stories and keep my children alive? That’s my favorite. That’s what I dream of.
Even so, it’s hard for me to fully let go of the earn-paychecks, get-cash, must-do-side-business part of my brain. I don’t come from money and there’s almost always an anxious whisper telling me to squeeze in some sort of freelance work or side hustle in order to keep the cash flowing.
But right now, I need to give myself completely over to my stories. My writing. The best part of myself.
So I’m going to try to make these two summer months into a writing retreat.
I’m not going anywhere, I’m not booking hotel rooms, I’m certainly not sending my children away to some eight-week long summer camp (though if anyone knows of one…). I’m going to make my LIFE a writing retreat. I want to live and work like I’m at a writing retreat every day this summer. Here’s what I’m thinking.
There’s some elements to a writing retreat that instantly pop into my head.
First, a retreat is time set apart to do a specific work—to write. It’s separate from your ordinary life, it’s usually carried out in some remote location, it’s scheduled so ideally there are not interruptions or distractions.
On a retreat, your physical needs are met in a very compartmentalized and organized fashion. Some retreats, you pay to have your meals taken care of. You have bottomless coffee. You book a room with a huge garden tub and a fireplace. Everything is cozy and scrumptious and, most importantly, provided FOR you.
There’s usually some sort of built-in community for a writing retreat, if you choose to go with other people. Whether it’s friends all renting a house together, whether it’s a place like MacDowell’s or Yaddo or Highlights, where you’re there alone, working alongside other artists who have their own projects—there’s some sort of social, communal atmosphere which also provides accountability.
On a retreat, there’s a chance to do higher, deeper thinking. Hopefully there’s long periods of quiet, of solitude, so you can follow trains of thought or winding suppositions to their conclusions. Think about Thoreau, his retreat to Walden Pond becoming in some ways the blueprint for all future retreats—he went to think. You can scratch words on paper at home or in the chaos of your ordinary life, but away from your daily reality, you can pop the top off your head and really THINK.
So how the hell do I make this happen every day while I’m here, in my suburban townhouse with my husband and daughters still in the same room while I’m writing?
I mean, cute, yes? Adorable, and both ambitious and vague in a way that’s become my specialty. But today, I’m thinking about the summer in different terms.
Yes, I’d love for my whole life to operate like a writing retreat—I mean, the question would then be exactly what are you retreating from?
But it dawned on me today, as I was assembling a schedule for the summer and berating myself for already being “behind” on the very work that was supposed to be a delight to accomplish—I know exactly the feeling I’m chasing, and I know how to get it.
Many other writers besides myself have talked about the “almost there” phase of our careers, the weeks or even days before we signed with an agent, sold our first books, or had some other major breakthrough. There’s an energy in those days, a hope that buoys you and generates its own momentum. For me, it was the summer of 2013. I’d finished BEES. It was immediately and noticeably different than anything else I’d written; I recognized that it was a publishable book.
This would be the project, I knew instinctively, that would get me through the door that I was dying to stroll through. I just knew it.
I sent out queries and while responses pinged my inbox, mostly positive ones, I felt like I was electric—I was buzzing with potential, unable to stop thinking about books and revisions and new projects and future editors and imagined six-figure deals.
Sure, you could argue I was less than grounded during those weeks. I was absolutely living for the future, for the possibilities.
But I also felt so connected to my work, so assured in my calling as a storyteller.
It’s a time in my life that I think about constantly, partly because there was a naivety and a Pollyanna-ness to the future I was envisioning, but also because I wish I could harness some of that excitement.
That confidence. That assuredness. I was so certain that things would unfold to me—I didn’t know details, sure, but I lived every day as if I had tipped over the proverbial first domino, and now all I had to do was grin while the whole line toppled over in a neat trail.
My writing career has been anything BUT a neat trail. There’s too many gaps between my dominos. I have to regularly re-topple dominos all the time. I will always have to re-topple dominos. I’m not even going to wish that I didn’t.
But I do want to retreat back into that energy, that momentum. That feeling of possibility. Yes, the innocence is lost a little—it’s 2021 as I write this, and 2013 was a lifetime ago. Since then, I’ve sold six books, found myself a husband, had a second baby, survived a pandemic, survived a whole host of things, actually—and I applaud past Lindsay for believing it would go so smoothly.
It’s not always going to go smoothly. No matter how much I try to sneak writing retreat conventions into my real life, no matter how much I plan beforehand or create charts and graphs, no matter how special I try to make this summer, the dominos won’t line up perfectly.
But one thing I can do—one thing I will do—is chase that feeling again, the wild dreams, the indefinable expanse of potential. It’ll require me to be less cynical, less judgmental of my output, more forgiving of my wanderings, and more accepting of my boundaries. It has nothing to do with meal plans or required reading.
So instead of making my life like a writing retreat, I’ll retreat into the writing, into that possibility. That’s where the magic is, and that’s where the dominos are taking me, anyway.
COMING UP FOR ME
I’ve got a deadline for this Circus Book revision, so that’s the main thing on the docket now. (Circus Book is supposed to come out either fall 2022 or spring 2023-ish! Really! For real this time!)
After that, I’ll be turning to a few other projects that need finishing—a non-fiction, an adult fantasy, a middle grade. Writing is always up next. Always, always.
But I also have some other things on the schedule!
First, my summer session of The Creative Revisionist started June 1st! If you’ll recall, this is the last session of this course I’ll be offering until at least 2022.
I’ll be teaching the Fast Draft Method one more time this fall, and if you’re interested in that one, sign up here and you’ll be alerted when enrollment opens.
I am also excited to be teaching a workshop for young writers with Changing Hands, an independent bookstore in Arizona! If you know a teen in your life who is interested, send them the link or sign them up as a surprise! At twenty bucks, I can tell you this is a STEAL. Here’s the link!
TIDBITS
WHAT I’M WORKING ON
Yes, still Circus Book. I know. Story of the decade. But guess what? I’m working on the first big round of developmental edits, and it’s due to go into copyedits this fall, which means this book will soon be FINISHED. For REAL.
And then I’ll be able to work on other things! If you know me at all, it might be surprising to hear that I’m being so monogamous with my work—usually I jump from project to project, making progress in inches and leaps, because this is the only way I can keep up with my brain. But part of treating my ADHD and my anxiety means constraining my projects to just one at a time. It’s hard. It’s against my instincts. It's also better for me right now. I have been known to juggle five or more writing projects in a single week—and right now, with my bandwidth still stretched due to pandemic and kids and new ADHD adjustments and writing courses and deadlines, I just am striving to be a one-project lady. (Did I mention it’s hard?)
Other than my one writing project, I’m reading and running. That’s about it. Summer’s coming up (my least favorite time of year) and I’m hoping to look at the season as a time to get to know my girls and make up new stories and fall into books instead of a too-bright prison of heat and sweat.
WHAT I’M READING
So many good things! I read a good two or three books a week (PSA: this is not meant to give anyone something to measure themselves against; I have always been a hungry reader and consider it the fuel to my day not just as a writer, but as a person) and here are some of the stand-outs from this last month:
Miranda and Caliban by Jacqueline Carey, which is a reimagining of The Tempest from Miranda’s and Caliban’s point of view. Such gorgeous language! Such a good and sad romance! I loved it. I’ve always been a Shakespeare nerd and I’ve always loved The Tempest, and if you enjoy that play, too, I’d recommend this as a companion read. Prospero really is an ass.
The Last True Poets of the Sea by Julia Drake—yes, another Shakespeare retelling! This time it’s Twelfth Night, set in contemporary Maine and featuring a boisterous bisexual main character, an underfunded aquarium, and passages that cram in poignant thoughts about being a shipwreck of a person and fish puns in the same paragraph. This is technically a reread for me, my third time in eighteen months. I really love this book. It feels like a restorative story for me.
Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman, which is another reread for me. I picked up this little tiny book at a used book sale years ago, not expecting to find such a clever and subtle narrative weaving philosophies of time and alternate universes together with Einstein’s early days in Austria as he develops his theory of relativity. It holds up. Reading it again after my ADHD diagnosis (time blindness is one of my biggest struggles) was illuminating. There’s so many ways we could view the passage of time—sometimes it helps to remember our current method is arbitrary, chosen for us. Highly recommend. It could be read in an hour.
It was a pretty white reading month for me, unfortunately. I always like to glance at the titles I’ve been reaching for and notice WHO I’m reaching for, because it’s important to me not to default to only white authors over and over. So this week I’m reading Thick, a collection of essays by Tressie McMillan Cottom and Somebody’s Daughter by Ashley C. Ford.
WHAT I’M LISTENING TO
Lots of Phoebe Bridgers, especially I Know The End which I ironically looped last year when I was trying to find the right ending to my book (it worked!), the soundtrack to A Goofy Movie, which is the unparalleled soundtrack to the last week of school, and a ridiculous retro playlist of tiki songs I built a few years ago. It instantly calms me down and makes everything feel less dire.
WHAT I’M WATCHING
Every Sunday afternoon, I put away my work and snuggle my two girls on the couch while we watch a movie of my choosing. We’ve been on a Robin Williams kick—we watched Mrs. Doubtfire, which understandably had Clem questioning the gender of every character onscreen (“Is that a woman or a man dressed as a woman?”), Jumanji, and Hook, both of which are still just as magical to me as they were when I was a kid. All three of these movies have spawned some great conversations with my girls about emotional vulnerability and role models in masculinity and parenting.
Robin Williams was so, so good, wasn’t he?
WHAT I’M DOING
What am I doing?
Besides the usual things, writing and wiving and momming, I’m… processing. The pandemic is far from over, despite many of my country’s disappointing rollbacks of mandates and safety measures, and yet I also can admit that for our family, there’s absolutely an “after” coming into focus. Post-vaccine life has me anticipating a post-pandemic life, and I’m surprised at how much anxiety that’s brought! After a year and a half of fear, grief, uncertainty, and pinholing my whole world down to just my children’s safety and the emotional wellbeing of my immediate household, you’d think I’d be bounding into the open fields of that sweet, sweet “after” we’ve all been dreaming of.
And, of course, I’m grateful. Grateful to be protected by my vaccine, grateful to have survived the pandemic with minimal sacrifice, grateful to have lived through this time in an isolated bubble—and yet I’m still tangled in knots about the future.
And for me, that mixture of gratitude and panic create such whiplash in my head, and it’s exhausting to feel both so strongly.
I think I know the reasons for this anxiety, and I think they are twofold:
First, as many others with a longterm anxiety disorder have noted, the pandemic was both a time where we sank to an all-new low, seeing some of our greatest, unspoken fears come to fruition, but it was also a time of thriving. As Glennon Doyle pointed out in her new podcast (We Can Do Hard Things), it was like the rest of the world experienced the kind of anxiety we all experience on a daily basis—and so we were able to lead the pack in our panic, so to speak. Does anyone else with anxiety relate to this? I was surprised at how well I coped with quarantine, with trying to read between the lines of the official recommendations and the juxtaposition of the actual behavior of people around me, with coming up with answers to my children’s questions that were both honest and reassuring, because those were the types of answers I’d been telling myself all my life.
And now, the coping ends. The living begins. At least, that’s how I’m expected to feel post-vaccine—and instead I feel thrust into a new box of uncertainty.
What about everything we learned during the pandemic? What about all the ways in which we learned not to trust strangers, leaders, people in our community—people in our own family—because they’d traded long-term well-being for fleeting convenience? What about all the gaps in healthcare coverage in America, about the holes for the poor to fall into, the greed and cruelty and devastating apathy displayed by people in power? Are we just expected to wash that all away and go stand in line at Starbucks like nothing happened?
I think in some ways, yes, that’s what’s expected of us.
Don’t push back. Don’t ask questions. Don’t bring up what happened last year—not on a global level, not on a national or state level, and certainly not on a personal level. Don’t express your burning rage and festering disappointment for the way those around you behaved. Don’t point out that the vaccine distribution still leaves out children and many disabled adults, and those groups are essentially being told “good luck!” as the rest of us buy concert tickets and book flights and pretend that it’s all over.
It’s not over.
And my anxiety knows it.