crackle after the blazing dies
some thoughts to close out The Year That Was
Happy New Year, friends 🎇🍷
We made it to 2021! I hope you’ve spent the first day of the year tending to your heart a little, whatever way helps: good food, peace and quiet, a videogame playthrough, staying warm (or if you’re in a tropical climate, keeping cool in comfy clothes). I’ve had a good January first. I spent it with family, taking it easy; I even managed to do some research and planning in the afternoon, which balances out holiday lounging in a way that’s good for my brain.
I have a tradition of intense journaling at the end of the year, usually starting with 20xx was the year of… then freewriting whatever comes to mind. The last few years, due to reunions, I’ve tended to write these lengthy entries on airplanes. This year, I’ll be doing it in the quiet of home, sometime this weekend. My year-end recaps make me wistful, but also determined. I find myself wanting to set intentions, to be clear-eyed about what I’d like to do in the year ahead. But I also try to remind myself to be flexible with whatever the year brings. Some years are kinder and some are simply not, and so much of that is outside of my (our) control.
For me, 2020 was going to be a year of massive changes no matter what, but of course I was as blindsided as everyone with how it played out. It was the longest year ever, but I’m also shocked it’s over. The days blurred together, such that with the exception of the long/terrible US election (remember that? feels like it was eons ago and also just yesterday), it’s been hard to distinguish one week from the next. I’ve got this weird, blinking-in-the-sunlight feeling. In some ways I can’t believe I’m no longer in grad school. Like many, I kinda feel like my year froze back in March. At the same time, when I shake myself from this stupor, I know my situation is lucky and I’m grateful to be where I am.
If you’re doing all right at the start of 2021, I’m really happy for you. I hope you’ve been paying it forward where possible; I’ve been trying to.
If you’re not doing so well—this feels so paltry, but have a digital hug. I’m sorry. It seems inadequate to say it’ll get better because, while I genuinely believe that in the long run, I know it’s painful now and I don’t know when things will clear up. Hang in there might work, except I bet you’re already doing that. So instead I’ll say: do what you must, both to care for yourself, and improve things. It might be hard, but you can do it. ❤️
Since this is the first newsletter of 2021, I did want to share some thoughts on writing. I’ll talk about something that’s helped me with drafting, some feelings about debuting (?) in a few weeks, and a few things that gave me joy last (?!) December.
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Some months ago I wrote to you all about being stuck in the mud of a draft. It was bad. I’m happy to report that I’ve moved to a better place words-wise. I am learning a ton by doing, which I’d like to share with you all eventually—at least whatever I can translate, because so much of it is “feel.” Trust me, I am also severely frustrated with how unscientific and difficult to explain/replicate process is. It has genuinely felt like intuition mixed with a big dose of Bumbling Along, and it’s hard to put into actionable steps. 🤷♀️
Truth is, I’m not deep enough into my project yet that I feel I can share things without immediately jinxing my work into oblivion. So you’ll have to be patient with me until my gut says fine, share it.
My gut is letting me share this: writing an anchor scene helped immensely. It’s basically a thesis statement for the heart of the story. The action plot or specifics of the scene don’t have to be explicit or even clear, but the central emotion of the work should be there, as well as a tone or voice that captures the overarching feel of the piece.
Alexander Chee mentions it in this NaNoWriMo pep talk:
If you have a paragraph or two that is just how you want the novel to sound, print it up and put it somewhere you can see it. Read it before you begin writing to put the tone in your head. There’s what Sigrid Nuñez calls “the tone that makes everything possible.” The tone that seems to make the writing come all on its own. When you find that tone, keep it handy. Somewhere you can read it easily to get it back.
I actually wrote my own anchor scene before I encountered his essay, but I felt his description resonate. For my current draft, which I started after throwing out 10k of a bad attempt, I picked a moment that I could kinda see, close to the end of the book, and wrung it out on paper.
I’m not convinced the POV is right—I don’t use that POV in the rest of the story. In classic pantser fashion I don’t even know how that scene happens. But this story, at its core, is about two characters and their feelings towards each other. I dug into that as deeply as I could in my one paragraph, which now sits at the top of my document.
I don’t know if that’ll be my actual opening. I’ll figure it out in revision. For now, though, I’m keeping it. I call it an anchor scene because every time I think I’m losing the thread of the piece—which happens several times a week—I reread it. Then I remember: oh, all right. All I have to do is make it feel like this. Somehow get there, if not in plot-sense, at least in emotional-sense. Ideally in story-sense too, but let’s not worry about that too much now.
If you’re stuck, this might be worth trying! Also: while I don’t think you should really worry about prose in the first draft, if you’re like me, you can’t not worry about prose on a baseline level. So do spend some time making this anchor scene sound the way you want it to. Since you’ll be coming back to those lines, it pays dividends for you to actually kinda enjoy them: their music, the devices you employ, the individual words you chose. You don’t have to love it (though it’s awesome if you do!) but I encourage you to get it to a place where you at least like it.
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Since it’s 2021, that means sometime in the next few weeks (?!) my debut short story collection will be out.
…gah?
Never Have I Ever is not my first published book. That was Hurricane Heels, with Book Smugglers Publishing, back in 2016. To be honest, it’s a little blurry to me whether Hurricane Heels is a collection or a novel—it was classed as the latter, because the total word count added up to a (very short) novel, but I wrote and developed it as a set of short stories.
That experience showed me what it was like to write against deadlines, with an advance, and with only an outline to start. I won’t say I learned how to do these things, exactly…but I did them, and that doing has been and will continue to be useful. Plus I’ll always be deeply grateful to Ana and Thea for believing in my story. I still remember how thrilled I felt, getting their acceptance letter.
Given a second chance, though, I would do things differently—in particular, since I missed my first deadlines, the editing and publishing process was quite rushed, and (I feel all right saying this now) the finished product isn’t what I wish it was. It’s actually hard for me to reread the book, because I wish I had edited it more. None of that was particularly unusual for publishing, but having been through it, I understand the risks and potential consequences better.
The book is no longer available from retailers, though it’s still free to read online. I dream of one day updating and reissuing it, but that’ll have to wait until I can justify the time investment. (I am happy to say Hurricane Heels is part of Never Have I Ever, as the original standalone short story I wrote back in 2014.)
Why am I sharing this? Maybe because I’ve unknowingly been carrying a fear I got from that first book: namely, that it wasn’t read by a lot of people. I’m deeply grateful for the attention it did receive—Rachel Swirsky, one of my prose idols, wrote this very kind review on Strange Horizons; and it won a Sippy Award from Charles Payseur for Excellent Relationships in Short SFF. It also has some positive feedback on various websites (weirdly enough, Amazon has a few). But I remember it went live, and…well, that was it. 2016 was a stressful year for me for lots of other reasons (day job! moving! grad school apps…which resulted in failure!), so I didn’t even have time to pay attention to how the book was doing, but that also means I blame myself for not trying harder to get it out there.
Never Have I Ever is, of course, a completely different project, with a very different set of circumstances—everything from how the stories were written to the resources at my publisher’s disposal. I have a lot of feelings about it coming out so soon—something I’ll tackle in the next newsletter, if I don’t chicken out. There’s apprehension-fear-anxiety-joy-excitement-terror-shyness-determination-gratitude-surprise, all bundled up in a nice cloud of feeling, well, slightly dazed and dissociative about everything.
One emotion that keeps bobbing to the surface is hope. My brain is trying very hard to keep that hope in check. This is both shitty, and maybe a good thing. It’s definitely a balancing act! I don’t want to hope so much that I’ll find myself disappointed. At the same time I don’t want to play it so cool that I can’t even embrace how fucking cool it actually is, to have this book coming out. I’ll allow myself this: I’m incredibly proud of this book, and of the hard work my publishers and I have put into it. Thus, I’d like to believe it’s not a jinx to the word-gods to say: I hope it finds its audience, lands where it needs to, and connects in some meaningful way to readers.
If you haven’t pre-ordered yet, I hope you do consider it! Of course, I’d be happy if you pick it up once it’s live, too. And if you’re excited for the book, I hope you tell a friend or two. The Table of Contents is now on my publisher’s page, as well as some early responses from authors I love to pieces, which are slowly being collated in the thread below. 💖
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To end on a slightly less personal note, here are three things I enjoyed in the last month of last year:
The Nancy Silverton Chef’s Table episode (Season 3, episode 3) had such good reminders about working hard at one’s craft and being true to one’s self.
Poetry Twitter. This by Jean Valentine, this by Marvin Bell, and this by Linda Gregg. Also Devin G. Kelly’s substack, Ordinary Plots, each one of which deep dives into a single poem (TY Sara for the recc!).
Stephen King’s On Writing, a reread. It was amazing to reconnect with it in the midst of a longer drafting project. Some things that were opaque to me two years ago make more sense now.
And here’s a recc to start your 2021: I’m in my third year of filling out the Year Compass to help with reflection and planning. It’s a free, printable booklet that lets you look back on the past year and dream big for what’s next. Worth a look if you’d like some structured guidance on those two things!
I’m trying to figure out what cadence I want for hot yuzu tea next year. Twice a month is doable, but that’s assuming I don’t get busier. Tbh, I started this draft a few days before Christmas, and didn’t get around to it until now. There’s a lot I want to share with y’all, but my brain is also scrambled eggs, so what I can say moving forward is I’ll try my best for every two weeks as usual, but I’ll take it easy if I miss it, and if I feel randomly inspired and want to share something off-schedule I’ll do that too.
Until next time, Chaser and I are wishing you a peaceful end to your holiday season!
The title of this newsletter is from Naomi Shihab Nye’s Burning the Old Year.
It means a lot to me that you’re here, so if you got all this way, thanks for reading! If you liked this post, feel free to share it with others, or sign up if you haven’t yet. And if you have any debut advice—I’m all ears.