Comes and goes like a vagabond kitty.

So I've been gone a minute.


I've started going back to that writer's workshop, and I think I'm doing really good work there, some stuff I'm really proud of. Of course, I've started going back just as they're wrapping up; after four years of hosting a workshop there, the group leader is leaving, and I'll have to find another place to sit and fill my Fancy Pretty Notebook, one of many I've decided I'm actually going to use*, with spur of the moment words to be read aloud to strangers. We're going to have a formal reading on the 11th as a farewell to the workshop; I'm gonna read, but since all of my friends have moved out of New York there's only one person to go with me, and he doesn't seem particularly interested in it. I'm sure he would, because it's important to me, but it would be easier if he was at least a little invested in it. I'm tempted to be like I go to all your shit but he's also better at communicating when things are important to him, and I'm usually generally invested in his shit.

He has a policy, especially with me, of not faking excitement or enthusiasm; he wants me to be better able to trust when he does like something rather than fret and fuss that he's trying to make me feel better and really thinks I'm stupid and my work is terrible and my meals taste bad. But it sometimes comes across as I'm not going to do anything I don't really want to, even if it's important; of course I can't tell how much of that is actually his intention and how much is mood-dependent interpretation.

I'm also working on a submission for the last issue of Glimmer Train. Funny how, after the last rejection, I said to myself "well I guess I'll just keep throwing stuff at them, something has to stick" and then got the email that they're closing up shop soon. This is my last chance, and I think my best effort, assuming I can end the fuckin thing.

Possibly, there's something to read into the fact that this whole life update is just about my writing, but frankly I don't think any of us want me sorting through that on the fly. Let's put that back in my pocket until therapy tomorrow.



*if only so I won't feel quite so bad when I inevitably procure more

--having never forgotten that I have committed to a charity livestream on the 22nd, but just now remembering that the 22nd is, in fact, tomorrow, and feeling the pressure of post-New Years agent hunting with a YA genre book, which I will have no excuse not to do after this last GT deadline, I paraphrase Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949):

While I never admired literary fiction as much as when I was writing genre, I never longed for genre as much as when I was working with literary fiction.

yes this is an extremely niche reference and I'd like to say I regret nothing, I have some sense of embarrassment but not enough to spare the joke.

I did not think I would be this emotional, closing out the BCM tumblr.

It's still up, until whenever they get around to deleting it; there's a link in the post I reblogged to my main, which I still haven't quite decided what to do with.

I didn't think it would hurt like this. Some of it I thought was the loss of audience; even if I haven't updated it in forever, there were still people who had once read it, had once cared about it, art neatly sorted by the friend who created it. The first post went up in October of 2015. Yesterday, I reformatted that to post on the DW community, which I feel like no one will ever look at but Olli and I. Wrapped in newspaper, put in shoeboxes, carefully stacked in a closet.

The writing is rough--three year old prose always is--but it represents a lot to me. A level of creative success, validation, proof that I could do original work. I made friends, real friends, who I'd never have met if I hadn't created it. I was so proud of it, once.