So, first: I ought to acknowledge that, technically, I missed a week of the newsletter—i.e., this was supposed to be sent a week ago; it obviously wasn't. I can make excuses—that there are five Sundays in March and I was adjusting the schedule, that we've been busy with all the little intricacies of life—but I think it's really, mostly that I'm still feeling a bit unmoored.
...
Hey! Future Corbett here. The ellipsis up there represents several hours and a couple thousand words that happened in between typing that first paragraph and this one. I realized, somewhere mid-diatribe, that a short, pithy reflection to introduce today's newsletter and a full-on, multi-source, faux-academic essay that throws around terms like "reflexive impotence" and "depressive hedonia" are not, in fact, the same thing. Assuming any of you would even want to readsomething like that (and I know some of you would, you wonderful nerds), I'm guessing it wouldn't be in the body of an email newsletter that is, ostensibly, about my writing.
Sigh.
You'd be surprised how often this happens. Or maybe not, actually. Regardless: I really ought to get around to making a space to post essays and whatnot. If anyone has experience setting up a tidy, easy to manage WordPress blog or, I don't know, wants to collaborate on a little zine or something, let me know. That would be cool!
For now, I'll leave you with the idea at the heart of that unposted essay: that despite many things feeling outside of our control, especially right now, how we use our time is a choice—and that by making the same choices over and over again, seemingly boundless ventures like writing a novel, or nurturing a relationship, or supporting your community can take a tangible shape, and reach meaningful milestones, if not definitive endings. I'm trying to keep that in focus, right now, and it's helping—even if I have to write meandering personal essays to do it.
☕ Project Curses
I've received feedback from about half of my early readers—which is so exciting, for so many reasons. A lot of the feedback is positive, which is encouraging, and the critiques I've received so far are both fair and actionable. I'm stoked to dig in and starting work on Draft 3!
Before I do that, however, I need to organize all the feedback I'm getting and make a new revision guide for myself—basically, I'm going to prioritize the changes I need to make, starting with the potentially story-altering edits and working my way down to minor issues and tweaks. That'll be the focus for the next week or two—then I'll get back to work in earnest!
Novel Progress Bar
% feedback implemented
♟️ Project Rift
We've been tweaking and refining the first section of Project Rift again—so while the word count hasn't increased much, the project continues to improve. The hope is that doing all of this work up front will help to cut down on later revisions!
Novel Progress Bar
% drafted
📚 Reading
The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit | I loved Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost; many of the essays in that collection have stuck with me, popping into my head when I read or watch other things, forming a dense cobweb of connections. I would say that this collection is no different—and in that narrow sense, it isn't—but it is a very different book overall, dealing with very different ideas and situations through a particular structure and format. The excerpt from the description below will give you a good sense of the book, and the quote used for today's Show & Tell offers an impression of its beautiful, lyrical prose.
Apricots. Her mother's disintegrating memory. An invitation to Iceland. Illness. These are Rebecca Solnit's raw materials, but The Faraway Nearby goes beyond her own life, as she spirals out into the stories she heard and read—from fairy tales to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein—that helped her navigate her difficult passage. Solnit takes us into the lives of others—an arctic cannibal, the young Che Guevara among the leprosy afflicted, a blues musician, an Icelandic artist and her labyrinth—to understand warmth and coldness, kindness and imagination, decay and transformation, making art and making self.
The Mountain by Gorillaz | Twenty-five years after the release of Gorillaz(yeah, that breaks my brain a bit too), the band managed to put out one of my favorite albums yet—and certainly my favorite since Plastic Beach. The Mountain is good. Really good. I've been listening to it on repeat for a while now, and it's still sinking in, settling; frankly, I love that. If nothing else, check out the stunning animated music video that covers the album's first, second, and final tracks.
In the frame: DJ Dancy Pelosi (AKA my incredible wife, Sarah) has been crushing it lately. Listen to her mixes! She's so good! I'm not even biased, I swear!
"Even decay is a form of transformation into other living things, part of the great rampage of becoming that is also unbecoming. It is cruel, it is death, and it is also life, degeneration and regeneration, for nearly all things live by the death of other things. Even a harvest of wheat annihilates mice and insects unless poisons have sterilized the field beforehand; even the large animals we call herbivorous eat the small creatures on the grass as they graze. Even the earth and the very grass that grows out of that earth are carnivorous. The Marquis de Sade spoke with scorn for fear and attachment; the Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki-Roshi was once asked by a sheepish student if he could sum up Zen in a sentence, and gave another version of the same answer: 'Everything changes.' All stories are really fragments of one story, the metamorphoses, a fate sometimes as eagerly embraced as Daphne turning into a laurel tree to escape Apollo’s embrace, sometimes resisted as frantically as the affluent arranging for their remains to be cryogenically frozen, but embracing or resisting are optional, and metamorphosis inevitable. You can rescue someone from danger, but not from change and death; the soldier who survives the battle becomes someone else, something else, somewhere else. His war subsides; his memory fades; his nation ceases to exist; all but the elemental structures decay away; the very atoms that were once warring sides are now soil, trees, lovers, birds; all the medals are playthings for strangers; the cannons have been melted down and turned back into church bells that will become cannons again for another war."
– The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit
Honestly, I have nothing to add to this, so I'm just going to sign off and say: Go read something great! Do something nice for yourself! I hope you're well, and I'm sending love your way.
Until next time.
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