July Newsletter: Fyren means “made of fire”

Hello, and welcome to the July newsletter! It won’t be too long. July is kind of a terrible month, anyway. Too long, too hot, too bright.

This month I came across the phrase “in olden times” in a story. This is a fairly common phrase that I had never given much thought to, but what the heck is “olden”? Immediately I assumed it was some kind of back formation to make the word “old” seem…well, older. But it isn’t! The -en suffix turns out to be common in Old, Middle, and early Modern English, where it is used to create adjectives meaning “made of, of the nature of,” and we actually use it in other familiar terms, for example in words like “golden”’ or “wooden,” although it’s common to just use the non-suffixed form of those adjectives (we usually say “wool sweater,” rather than “woolen sweater”). Etymonline.com also notes the obsolete words “beanen” (made of beans), “hunden” (of dogs), “wreathen” (entwined), and “fyren,” meaning “on fire, made of fire.” I feel like I have been made of fire lately, so perhaps we need to bring fyren back.

Writing Updates

I have finished writing the first draft of a novella that is currently titled Blood Magic! At the Beach that chronicles Sam and Ulysses’s attempt to take a honeymoon in a place that isn’t Madison. This completes the last promised piece of Wisconsin Gothic ephemera. I will have to think about distribution methods at some point; at about 25k words, it’s too short to print on its own. Ideally, I could release it as an ebook, and hold onto it to print until I have a few of the other short things (including “Dous”). But I know some people have a strong enough preference for print that they won’t read it until it comes out like that. So I guess I’m still thinking it through. If you have any ideas or preferences, feel free to shoot me an email.

I am starting revisions on book 5.

Appearances and Book Sales

My ebooks will be 75% off at Smashwords for the month of July. Here’s a link to the series.

I will be at Middleton Book Fair on August 2nd, joined by Rowan with their tarot decks after noon. Last year we sold out, so come by early. Also, it’s Mustard Days I think? So if you like mustard a lot…Middleton’s got you covered. (The National Mustard Museum is in Middleton.) The sale will be on Hubbard Ave. on both sides of the Stone Horse Green.

In September, I’ll be at Booked Eau Claire (in Eau Claire, WI) on the 12th and 13th. I’ll be selling books both days, and also appearing on two panels—one on writing sex scenes (open vs closed door) and one on indie publishing. If you’re going and interested in preordering a copy of one or more of my books, the form is here.

There’s more stuff happening in October, but we won’t go into that right now, since it’s really far away.

An acrylic painting of a green tea latte with colorful latte art on top that looks like a floweer. — I went mad and painted about ten lattes this month.

What I’ve Been Reading

The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, by Alexander McCall Smith. An episodic detective novel set in Botswana with a sort of meandering plot connecting all the episodes. I could not tell if all the little bits were completely in chronological order or not, and I didn’t care. McCall Smith obviously loves Botswana a lot, and the way he described the Kalahari made me want to visit it.

Bombshell, by Sarah McClean. (Cis M/F) I stumbled into reading a bunch of novels set during the reign of William IV into the early Victorian years, and this was the best of the group. McClean doesn’t really care about historical specifics (case in point, a character refers to the ugly duckling story about five years before it was published), but she writes exciting, sweeping feminist fantasies in which women find ways to circumvent societal strictures in order to take revenge on those who wronged them and fall in love along the way. I find I generally don’t like the way gender is handled in these types of books—all the men are the most manly men ever, all the women fall in love because the men are big and strong and make them feel safe and protected. In this one, the heroine gets to kick butt and take names (she has a special leather-lined pocket in her skirts for her knife). And what’s not to like about that?

Sailor’s Delight, by Rose Lerner. (Cis M/M) I’ve read only a few romances where one main character was Jewish, but in two of them, that character was named Eleazar, which is weird. I genuinely hadn’t read this one before I selected that name for Dr. Eli Sobel, and although I probably wouldn’t have changed it (the Eleazar/Lazarus thing was too tempting), I feel odd. Luckily, this Elie (note the extra “e”) is a great dude. It’s 1813, and he’s kind of an accountant for sailors in the Royal Navy. And he’s in love with one of his clients. Who happens to be engaged. No spoilers, but everyone gets a fair shake, the Judaism is approached with care and deliberation by both the main characters and the author, there’s a lot of period atmosphere, and in general I wished this was longer.

A Gentleman’s Gentleman, by TJ Alexander. (Trans M/M) A slightly improbable but gentle and loving regency romance that spends a lot of time meditating on the different ways to be a man, and more broadly, a human. Includes a very exciting carriage chase and many other hijinks. Alexander was up for a Lammy the same year I was and lost, and I hope they get back there for this.

Wow, that’s more than I thought. (NB I deleted two book reviews from this, so it was even longer in the first draft.)

Podcasts

In June we put out two podcasts, both on the pope. Episode 93: Take Me Down to Vatican City and episode 94: Popes and Antipopes. More pope-related episodes soon.

On the blog

As threatened, I got this post about the bibliography for Lazarus, Home from the War up. Yesterday. I got it up yesterday. Still counts.

Lazarus, Home from the War Bibliography

I don’t always cite my sources for novels–in fact, they’re novels, and I think in general I’d prefer not to make it clear where I’ve hewn close to the truth and where I’ve wandered. But I did so much reading for Lazarus, Home from the War, and it touches on so many topics I think people might be somewhat interested in, I thought I might as well give a few options for further reading.

On Buddhism

I spent what felt like half of my academic career studying Buddhism, from the very first semester of my undergraduate life (thank you, Professor Hallisey) to the final moments of my second MA. Some good non-academic introductions to the ideas of Buddhism might be:

Siddhartha, by Hermann Hesse (1922). An imagining of the life of the Buddha. I think this was probably the first thing I read (when I was in my teens!) about Buddhism.

The Empty Mirror: Experiences in a Japanese Zen Monastery, by Janwillem van de Wetering (1971). When it’s the 1950s and you’re in postwar Japan studying Zen and also Gary Snyder is there.

The Snow Leopard, by Peter Matthiessen (1978). When your wife just died and you are a Zen Buddhist and you decide to go to the Himalayas with George Schaller to look for the snow leopard for two months. (Side note: Matthiessen had kids with his wife, the youngest of whom was 8 at the time of their mother’s death. It’s not clear why he gets to go traipsing around Nepal, and they go…where? This has nothing to do with the book, which is wonderful. It’s just always bothered me. Also, Matthiessen was a spy, and later became a monk, making him I think the only monk/spy I’m going to mention in this list.)

But those are all about Buddhism generally or Zen Buddhism, which is Mahayana Buddhism. Laz is a Theravada Buddhist, because he converted in Thailand. These are different sports, although they are played on the same field. (Sorry, I’m not a sports person. Does that…make sense?)

For slightly more academic looks at Buddhism (note that none of these texts is exactly introductory)

World Conqueror and World Renouncer : A Study of Buddhism and Polity in Thailand against a Historical Background, by Stanley J. Tambiah (1976). He’s an anthropologist, so you know it’s gonna be a bad old time. There’s survey data. There’s tables. But there’s also info about how one becomes a monk (in Buddhism, unlike in the West, it can be a temporary commitment, rather than something you sign up to do for the rest of your life.)

The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk: Practicing Buddhism in Thailand, by Justin Thomas McDaniel (2011). It’s about how modern-day Thai Buddhists practice their religion.

“Buddhism and Conscience: An Exploratory Essay,” by Gananath Obeyesekere. Daedalus, vol. 120, no. 3 Religion and Politics (Summer, 1991), pp. 219–239. Mostly about Col. Henry Steel Olcott, who I find fascinating. I don’t know. This is my bibliography, let me alone. (Olcott: born 1832, became a spiritualist, served in the Civil War, helped investigate Lincoln’s assassination, became a lawyer, helped found the religion of Theosophy, converted to Buddhism along with Madame Blavatsky, moved to Bombay, wound up in Sri Lanka, and developed what is now known as the Buddhist catechism, which was his attempt to educate Westerners in the precepts of Buddhism. He also designed a Buddhist flag, which is still in use today.)

“Attack of the Widow Ghosts: Gender, Death, and Modernity in Northeast Thailand,” by Mary Beth Mills. In Bewitching Women, Pious Men: Gender and Body Politics in Southeast Asia, edited by Aihwa Ong and Michael G Peletz, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995, pp. 244–273. I don’t know if this is actually helpful, it’s just about using wooden penis votives (among other methods of gender performance) to ward off evil ghosts, and I think that’s kind of neat.

On Judaism

Okay, I actually am Jewish, so I don’t have a lot of elementary texts on this. It’s just my life. Like: Why does Eli not know when Hanukkah is? Because when I didn’t have kids, I always had to look it up, because I didn’t care. (I still don’t care. But now I have to look it up.) But I do have some stuff on dybbuks.

“Appropriating the Golem, Possessing the Dybbuk: Female Retellings of Jewish Tales,” by Ruth Bienstock Anolik. Modern Language Studies, vol. 31, no. 2 (Autumn 2001): pp. 39–55. https://doi.org/10.2307/3195336

“The Dybbuk: The Origins and History of a Concept,” by Morris M. Faierstein. In olam he-zeh v’olam ha-ba: The World and the World to Come in Jewish Belief and Practice, ed. Leonard J. Greenspoon. Purdue University Press, 2017, pp. 135–150. This is an excellent paper.

Jewish Magic and Superstition, by Joshuah Trachtenberg (1939, updated 2023 edition published by Global Grey referenced). Beware: it’s a bummer.

A Dybbuk: and Other Tales of the Supernatural, by Tony Kushner and Joachim Neugroschel (1997). Although the idea of dybbuks is relatively old, the play The Dybbuk by S. Ansky (1914) is really what popularized the idea; it was later made into a movie (in Yiddish) in 1937. Here, Kushner works with Neugroschel’s translation to produce a new English version.

On the Air Force

People who fly airplanes are insane, as far as I can tell. No one has ever looked at an airplane and thought, yes, it would be totally cool to fly that and also been 100% all right. This goes double for fighter jets.

Alone, Unarmed, and Unafraid: Tales of Unarmed Reconnaissance During Vietnam, by Taylor Eubank (2014). There was something weird with my copy, which came from Barnes and Noble’s website. So maybe try Amazon? He has a website, too, with many photos and supplementary information.

Voodoo Warriors, by Group Captain Nigel Walpole (2007). How do you get from someone designing an airplane in their sketchbook through to flying it in a war?

The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War, by Malcolm Gladwell (2022). Is it accurate? I don’t know. People had some specific complaints in their Goodreads reviews that I didn’t really understand. But it does really enforce the point about how crazy the guys who founded the Air Force were. Also, it’s not every day I learn a new fact about WWII that makes me blanch, and this had several.

On the Vietnam War

There’s so much out there. These are things I happened upon, mostly because my library happened to have them.

Boots on the Ground: America’s War in Vietnam, by Elizabeth Partridge (2018). TW: Look, most books on the Vietnam War contain graphic descriptions of what it feels like to watch your friends get killed in a violent and arbitrary way, and this is no different. Good context for the war though. Weird that Kennedy comes out looking like a bad guy and Nixon comes out…well, I don’t have anything good to say about him one way or the other, and this book didn’t help.

The Boys of ‘67: Charlie Company’s War in Vietnam, by Andrew Wiest. My biggest reaction to this was I was surpriseed that Wiest hadn’t heard of PTSD by the late 1990s (I think that’s when this book begins). The descriptions of marching through the Vietnamese jungle took me back…not in a great way. Also it’s a collection of oral histories and it made me cry, so.

Voices from the Vietnam War: Stories from American, Asian, and Russian Veterans, by Xiaobing Li (2012). I only read a few of the stories in here. It’s of particular interest because Li managed to interview veterans from South and North Vietnam and China, among others (as it says in the subtitle, I guess). Not a lot of other books do that.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong (2019). I feel like it’s hard to talk about the impact of the Vietnam War without at least touching on some of the effects on the people most impacted by it—arguably the South Vietnamese. I don’t think that I can write with the necessary honesty about the most complicated parts of these experiences, but I do like to be conscious of them when I’m working. TW: this contains one of the most stomach-turning scenes I’ve encountered in a book, and it involves animal harm.

And of course, if you’re interested in the protest movement in Madison, the seminal book is They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, by David Maraniss (2003). (Or at least the seminal book I’ve heard about. I know there are local historians working on this period right now, and probably other stuff I haven’t stumbled across.)

On Neurology

The best-known neurologist in the world is probably Oliver Sacks. Which is good, because he was both one of the world’s great weirdos and a total delight. He also happens to have been a British Jewish queer man who was born in 1933, meaning he was in his prime during the craziness of the middle of the twentieth century. (He moved to San Francisco in the ’60s. He knew a ton of queer writers and artists, like Auden and Gunn. He had a fairly cavalier attitude toward drug use. He rode a motorcycle and was like 6’4″. He could squat 500 lbs. He was also surprisingly shy.) His memoir, On the Move: A Life (2015) is a great resource for finding out about any of the above, plus how neurologists think about cases. His other books are great too; I’ll recommend The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985) and An Anthropologist on Mars (1995) not just for the clinical insight but for the empathy on display. He was also on Radiolab quite a bit: here’s a good episode.

The less well-known but still pretty cool Harold Klawans also had a few books of clinical cases, of which Toscanini’s Fumble: And Other Tales of Clinical Neurology (1988) is the one I remember the best.

Finally, Cook County ICU: 30 Years of Unforgettable Patients and Odd Cases, by Cory Franklin (2015) isn’t about neurology, but has interesting things to say about how physicians think. Also it contains the interesting fact that chemists who commit suicide often do so by ingesting cyanide. (Is this true? There was a 1969 paper on the topic, “Suicide Among Chemists,” by Frederick P. Li MD. Archives of Environmental Health: An International Journal, 19(4), 518–520. https://doi.org/10.1080/00039896.1969.10666878 But it only looked at female chemists. As I try to find later data, the computer is mostly offering me suicide prevention hotlines, which is unfortunate.)

June Newsletter

Thank you all for the support for Lazarus, Home from the War. Many people posted lovely reviews on social media and shared my posts, and in general made release day very delightful for me. I donated the first day’s profits from Amazon to Doctors without Borders and Amazon Conservation, two organizations I’ve supported for a long time.

June is Pride Month! (Except in Madison, where Pride happens in August because all the serious Pride-goers go to Milwaukee and/or Chicago first, I guess.) Happy Pride to everyone! Last year I had a short story for you all. This month, well…I wrote you a novel. Actually, I’ve been working on some shorter things, but nothing is done yet. Sorry! I did write you a novel.

Speaking of which, I’m pleased to announce that last week, I finished work on the first draft of book 8. This means that all nine books in the Wisconsin Gothic series have first drafts written! All of them clock in between 63 to 80k words; the fastest any of them was written was about eight weeks, and the slowest was about 55 weeks. (Length doesn’t correlate with writing speed, surprisingly.) And, if you’re curious, the order in which they were written, as far as I can remember, was: Dionysus in Wisconsin, Old Time Religion, Lazarus, Troth, book 6 started, book 7, book 6 completed, book 9, book 5, book 8.

Thanks to artist S. S. Genesee, I have a new Wisconsin Gothic sticker! I will be sending them to various bookstores as freebies and will also have them at events. And maybe send them out with direct orders. If you find yourself jonesing for a T-shirt or a tote bag with this logo, let me know.

Which reminds me: I am now fully stocked with paperbacks of all the books! If you want one, you can email me, slide into my DMs on a social media site, or head on over to itch.io. I charge $17 if I have to ship and $15 if you’re local and want to pick it up. If you want multiple books, definitely message me and I can give you a small discount. I know a few bookstores also have Lazarus in stock, notably Tropes and Trifles in Minneapolis (I saw a photo).

Upcoming Appearances

I will be at the Author Fair at the Hedberg Public Library in Janesville, WI on June 21st. It runs from 2:30-4:30pm. In addition to copies of all four novels, we’ll have tarot decks available, and Rowan will be doing tarot readings for $5 (space permitting).

I will be at the Middleton Book Fair on August 2nd from 10am–4pm (or whenever we sell out). It’s being held on Stone Horse Green this year, which is at the corner of Elmwood and Parmenter.

I’ll be at Tropes and Trifles in Minneapolis, MN the first week of August to sign some stock and say hi. This is a very unofficial visit. Specific date/time TBD.

And in September, I’ll be at Booked Eau Claire! It’s a big event taking place from 12–13 September. I will be speaking on two panels (one on closed vs open door romance and one on indie publishing). If you’re planning to attend and would like a signed book, you can pre-order here. (Note that this is a very manual process, so if you try to pre-order and don’t hear from me with a bill, send me an email!)

Other Announcements

New Milwaukee-area romance bookstore The Well-Red Damsel will be carrying Dionysus in Wisconsin when they open, so make sure you drop by and pick up a copy so they know it is a good idea! I’m going to send them some stickers too, although I may not have them for their opening, which I believe is June 21st.

In May we did zero podcasts. Whomp whomp.

I’ve written a blog post with a bibliography of sources I looked through while writing Lazarus. It’s not up yet, but look for it later this week.

That’s it. Have a good month!

Lazarus, Home from the War is out!

So first off, today is the day that Lazarus, Home from the War comes out! I’m very excited. You can find the book on all the main sites here, on itch.io here, or on my website here. It’s on Goodreads here. For those looking to order the paperback through your local stores, that should be available to order now or very shortly using the ISBN, which is 979-8988394433.

Second off, today is Hmong-Lao Veterans Day in Wisconsin. I just found this out yesterday! The Hmong were deeply involved in the Vietnam War and came here as refugees afterward, so I wanted to commemorate this, given the topic of the book.

Now, for those with longer attention spans or nothing better to do, a little essay.

LHftW is a very personal book in a lot of ways. I lived in Vietnam for a year and I have a master’s degree in Southeast Asian studies, so I have a weird and probably outsized attachment to the whole region. But my connection to VN goes farther back than an impulsive decision I made in college.

(What, you didn’t decide on impulse to move to Ho Chi Minh City?)

When I was in college as an undergrad, I lived for several years at the corner of Bassett Street and Dayton, a block from the Mifflin Street Co-op. Mifflin Street was the originating location, in 1969, of the Mifflin Street Block Party, a political protest cum bacchanal that was where former three-time Madison mayor Paul Soglin got beaten by the cops and arrested. Or a place. These things as facts are all very well and good—and living in the area, I was relatively aware of them—but why choose Mifflin Street for the party?

Basically, this area was the heart of the hippie student neighborhood during the 60s/70s, and thus the heart of the antiwar movement in Madison. At some point, and I can’t quite work out the timing (except that it was before 1975), Bassett was nicknamed Ho Chi Minh Trail. I have no idea if this was a self-given title, or a bit of anti-anti war-movement vitriol; nevertheless, the locals embraced it, and put up a street sign.

Before I knew this was a real, actual street sign, my editor and I discussed whether the nickname was a dog whistle, and I removed a reference to it from the final version of Dionysus in Wisconsin because it was too difficult to explain all of this in passing. But I’ve since had it confirmed, not just by the photographs, but by long-time Madisonians as well.

In June 1975, following the fall of Saigon, the city council rejected an attempt to rename the street permanently “in a spirit of reconciliation,” and the sign came down.

(Click here to view a photo of the street sign and a newspaper article on Facebook.)

I still find the whole thing fascinating. But it’s also emblematic of how the US’s relationship with Vietnam has for many years been mediated by the war. I went to HCMC more than a decade after Clinton normalized relations with the country, and it was still such a part of the collective memory in the US that this fact—”Bassett used to be called Ho Chi Minh Trail”—was the main thing I heard from my peers when I announced I was going. (Maybe that says something about who I was hanging out with, too.)

Interestingly, learning about the war for the first time mostly from the Vietnamese side of things, where it’s often referred to as the Resistance War Against America, gave me a view that I now often see echoed in online discourse about it–that it was really a war fought between the United States and Vietnam. This was not, on the whole, a common view at the time–if anything, it was perceived to be not a war between South and North Vietnam that was not the US’s war to fight. It was also not the view of the South Vietnamese who came to the US as refugees. It’s interesting how the rhetoric has shifted.

That said, Vietnam is an amazing country. And so is Thailand, my other love, where Laz has also spent time. A few years later, after I’d been back in Madison for a while, I went back to school for library science and wound up also getting an MA from what was then called the Department of Languages and Cultures of Asia, wherein I mostly studied Thai.

So because of my own, uh, checkered past, Laz spent some time hanging around at Than Son Nhut (a base on the edge of Saigon, actually not far from where I used to live) flying Jolly Green Giants (search and rescue helicopters) before getting sent to a base in Northern Thailand, where he flew other things (the RF-4C Phantom, mostly) and also ~~did some light espionage~~ hung out with a monk he met.

And then he comes home, which is really where the novel begins. I can’t say anymore, because of spoilers. But I hope you’ll enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

I’ll catch you at the beginning of June with my normal newsletter!

May Newsletter: The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Fall of Saigon

When I noticed the date, I decided to send out the newsletter early. Probably I’ve been thinking about Viet Nam too much. (April 27th was also the 50th anniversary of the release of the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, so…take your pick what to commemorate this week.)

In eleven days, I am running Ice Age 50k, which is held in Kettle Moraine State Park (the southern unit) outside of La Grange, Wisconsin. I registered for the race in December. In the time since then, I have run somewhere in the neighborhood of seven hundred miles, had a brief bout of COVID that left me with a chronic cough, and got hit by a car once (non-fatally; don’t worry about it). There were days when the temperature was about 10°F. There were days when it was lower. There were mysterious aches and pains in calves and hamstrings that I worried would blossom into injuries. And there were times when the days were very dark and I thought perhaps I should pack it in altogether.

Nevertheless, here we are.

Running is a lot like writing. (Haruki Murakami wrote a whole book about this—What I Talk About When I Talk About Running—so I won’t belabor the comparison.) Both because when it’s going badly, you can always crawl into a nearby bush and wait for the end…or because it doesn’t help to get ahead of yourself. Standing on the starting line with 31 miles to go is intimidating. Staring at a blank page with eighty thousand words in front of you is terrifying. But I can run one mile (some days, I can run to the next mailbox). And then I can run another one. I can write a word, or a page, or a couple hundred words.

All of which is to say, we’re fifteen days away from the release of Lazarus, Home from the War, and I’m very excited. I’ve spent so long doing research and tightening the screws and buffing out the dents, that I’ve hardly let myself look up and see that this day was coming. I’ve spent many weeks dragging myself through edits by saying I could do one chapter, or one page, or one sentence, and then repeat and repeat and repeat.

And somehow, we’ve made it.

A watercolor sketch of a mountain in Tasmania with some pink and purple clouds behind it. — Original photo by @antongorlin@mastodon.art

Publicity and Appearances

Rebecca Crunden, who runs the Indie Book Spotlight blog/account on Bluesky, interviewed me for her blog here.

I’ll be at WisCon the weekend of May 23–26. It’s being held online, and you can get tickets here. Disappointingly, they don’t seem to be doing readings this year, but I’ll be participating in a panel on writing about religion in sci-fi and fantasy at 4pm CT on Friday, May 23rd.

For those in Janesville, Wisconsin, I’ll be at the Hedberg Public Library’s Book Fest on June 21, selling books and tarot decks from 2:30-4:30pm. Their website is here. Fun fact: the Hedberg Public Library was originally a Carnegie Library, and it cost $35,000 in 1902 dollars.

Podcast News

We put out two episodes on medieval memes: “Ask a Memevalist” and “The Field Where I Grow My [D]ucks” (thanks to autocorrect for inspiring the episode title). Both episodes examine some medieval memes we collected from across the web, all of which can be found in the episode notes (we also describe them in the episode). We also put out “An Emergency Popecast” on Pope Francis and the upcoming conclave. (Has it started yet? Hmm.)

Things I’ve Been Reading

I read We Bombed in New Haven, a play by Joseph Heller. Was it Catch-22: The Play? No. Did it send me down a rabbit hole during which I read some guy’s PhD thesis on performances of masculinity in WWII novels? Yes. (Playing a Terrible Game of Pretend: Masculine Performance and Gender Humor in the WWII Novels of Heller, Vonnegut, Pynchon, and Weaver, by Tomas Glover Pollard.)

I listened to an (abridged) audiobook of Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), by Jerome K. Jerome. It was short, funny, and narrated by Hugh Laurie, which made it even better. If you enjoyed Jeeves and Wooster, this is just the ticket. Honestly, my only complaint is how far abridged it was.

I listened to the audiobook of The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson. I read it years ago (it’s referenced in “Dous,” at least partly because it is where the word/concept of “planchette” entered my vocabulary, which later became a central component of a delightful set piece in Dionysus in Wisconsin), but the narrator’s performance really brings out some of the humor I’d either missed when I read it with my eyeballs or forgotten about. The work as a whole is so well-written. It’s taut with tension and spare, but the details that are there really sing. As a story, it knows exactly where it is going from the very first moments. What an impressive achievement.

Further Administratrivia

Starting with this edition, all newsletters will be publicly archived on my blog, so if you delete this and then want to refer to the information contained herein, you can find them at https://ehlupton.com/blog/.

If you signed up to be an ARC reader and did not receive a copy of the book, let me know! I sent everything out fifteen days ago, but fear some may have been caught in spam filters.

That’s all for now. I’ll send out another message when the book’s out, so talk to you all in two weeks.

Em oi! #454: Sad Not SAD

Here are all the books I read in 2024. I’m not going to rank them, but I’ll give brief reviews. I usually try to read the abbreviation of the year in books, so my goal for 2024 was 24 books. I read slightly more than that across many genres, although romance was the plurality.

Children’s/YA books

The Dark is Rising, by Susan Cooper. Read aloud; I don’t think I have to convince anyone that this is an amazing book.
The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, by Terry Pratchett. Read aloud; at times we were laughing too hard to go on, and really, what other endorsement is needed?
Camp Damascus, by Chuck Tingle. Some excellent moments but ultimately too much Jesus for my tastes. Already lived all that shit by proxy growing up.
Belle of the Ball, by Mari Costa. A pretty graphic novel with a big heart. Full disclosure: I met Mari Costa at the Lammys!
The Golden Thread: A Song for Pete Seeger, by Colin Meloy. I may be biased because I’m a fan of both Colin Meloy and Pete Seeger, but this was delightful. (I never read it to the kids, though. Just saw it at back to school night.)
The Boy Who Loved Math: The Improbable Life of Paul Erdos, by Deborah Heiligman. Too many words for a bedtime story, but my 3yo inexplicably loved it. The story is very cute, and Erdos was a loveable weirdo.

Romance (pairings and settings as noted)

I’m So (Not) Over You, by Kosoko Jackson (M/M, contemporary). I hope Berkeley feels embarrassed by how dirty they did this poor book. Could have been good, but it was an entirely unedited mess.
Take a Hint, Dani Brown, by Talia Hibbert (M/bi F, contemporary). For what it was, it was fine.
Bisclavret, by KL Noone (M/M but one of them is a werewolf, middle ages?). A novella retelling the werewolf story “Bisclavret” by Marie de France. I usually think novella is not the best format for a romance, but this was charming. Full disclosure: I’ve been on panels with KL Noone a few times now at Rainbow Space Magic Con. (I don’t think she remembers me though.)
A Marvellous Light, by Freya Marske (M/M, late Edwardian). Book 1 in the Last Binding series. The plot was fine and the writing was good.
A Restless Truth, by Freya Marske (F/bi F, late Edwardian). Book 2 in the Last Binding series. The supporting characters were good.
You Should Be So Lucky, by Cat Sebastian (M/M, 1960s America just pre-Kennedy). I am not interested in baseball, but this was a delight start to finish and a standout. The second in the Mid-Century New York series (I lost the Lammy to the first one).
A Minor Inconvenience, by Sarah Granger (M/M, Regency). Don’t think too hard about the plot. Or the sex scenes. The setting was nice.
Letters to Half Moon Street, by Sarah Wallace (M/M, Regency). A gentle epistolary novel with almost no plot and an interesting queernorm regency setting that nevertheless left me with a lot of questions.
An Appreciation of Cats, by Des DeVivo (M/M, contemporary?). Another novella that I read. I got this one as an ARC.
Oak King Holly King, by Sebastian Nothwell (M/M but one of them is an elf, early Victorian). A standout–set in 1844, with strong medieval undertones and a delightful episodic plot that draws on the story of The Green Knight. Full disclosure: I was on Sebastian Nothwell’s podcast (Right Here, Write Queer) and he was recently on mine.
A Power Unbound, by Freya Marske (M/M, late Edwardian). Book 3 in the Last Binding series. I didn’t hate it. Also I liked the characters from A Marvellous Light a lot better here.
The Nobleman’s Guide to Seducing a Scoundrel, by KJ Charles (M/M, Regency). This was a delight. I have to go read book one now.
Scandal in Spring, by Lisa Kleypas (M/F, early Victorian). This was the third book in a row that I read where one character had a BIG TERRIBLE SECRET that got revealed at or after the 50% mark in the book and turned out to be eminently overcomeable, and I am so over it.
Cutting It Close by Reese Knightley (M/M, contemporary). I kind of lost track of the number of (war) crimes committed by the ostensible heroes. This book is a reminder that I need to stop picking audiobooks by just grabbing whatever is listed under “available now.”
Dead Egyptians by Del Blackwater (M/M but one of them is a ghost, Edwardian). More of a character study, but a really lush and intriguing one. TW for an assault that happens around the 75% mark. Full disclosure: I have met Del Blackwater a few times (she lives in the area).
My Last Duchess, by Eloisa James (M/F, Georgian). I want to say that it doesn’t make sense to try to body-shame someone when the fashion is to wear panniers, but that really diminishes the amount of fun that this book was.

Literature and Scifi/Fantasy

Matrix, by Lauren Groff. If you’re the oldest daughter, and you sometimes get given distasteful tasks, and you maybe feel the need to do a really, really superior job at everything, you will see your experience reflected here. This had so many good lines–the writing was really an amazing achievement.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong. It was very good and also sad. Contained the single most stomach-turning scene I read (heard, I guess–I had this as an audiobook) this year, maybe ever.
Interior Chinatown, by Charles Yu. This was amazing and everyone should read it. And give Charles Yu more money to write more books. A real standout (and I got B to read it too).
No One Is Talking About This, by Patricia Lockwood. Part I was like having tw*tter slow-dripped into my ear. Part II made me cry.
Space Opera, by Catherynne M. Valente. So amazing I immediately made B read it. Also a standout.
Translation State, by Ann Leckie. A tricky book; not enough connection to the earlier Imperial Raadch novels and too much. Good but unsatisfying; I think it tried a lot of interesting things and I love it for that.
Legends and Lattes, by Travis Baldree. The real magic rock was the friends we made along the way, I guess. This book managed to be very boring and also keep my interest, which feels like an achievement.

Nonfiction, Biography, and Memoir

The Bomber Mafia, by Malcolm Gladwell. It’s all fun and games until Curtis LeMay firebombs Tokyo. (Of note, LeMay also introduced judo into the US and later was the VP candidate under George Wallace in 1968. Gladwell doesn’t mention either of these facts. I had to find them out by myself.)
Cook County ICU: 30 Years of Unforgettable Patients and Odd Cases, by Cory Franklin. Franklin is honest to a fault and I find I like him a lot for it.
A Molecule Away from Madness: Tales of a Hijacked Brain, by Sara Manning Peskin. Unfortunately this was reported stories focusing on the neurochemical underpinnings of various neurological issues rather than Oliver Sacks-esque first-hand case studies.
On the Move: A Life, by Oliver Sacks. This was so delightful, and I’m glad he published it while he was still alive so no family members could stop him. (Would they? I don’t know. It was kinda scandalous. But also very good.) Key quote (not of the scandalous parts):
As soon as I could get away from work on Friday, I saddled my horse–I sometimes thought of my bike as a horse–and would set out for the Grand Canyon, five hundred miles away but a straight ride on Route 66. I would ride through the night, lying flat on the tank; the bike had only 30 horsepower, but if I lay flat, I could get it to a little over a hundred miles per hour, and crouched like this, I would hold the bike flat out for hour after hour. Illuminated by the headlight–or, if there was one, by a full moon–the silvery road was sucked under my front wheel, and sometimes I had strange perceptual reversals and illusions. Sometimes I felt that I was inscribing a line on the surface of the earth, at other times that I was poised motionless above the ground, the whole planet rotating silently beneath me.
Cultish, by Amanda Montell. I don’t know that her thesis (that cults use in-group language to promote belonging and a sense of community) is all that surprising, but I learned some interesting stuff.
The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family, by Dan Savage. I don’t know if I should say, “Wow, the early 2000s were genuinely as bad as I remember thinking they were at the time,” or “Dan Savage is the most Gen X writer.” Now I’ve said both.
The Boys of ’67: Charlie Company’s War in Vietnam*, by Andrew Wiest. A group memoir (biography? collection of oral histories?). This made me fucking cry. While driving.
Boots on the Ground: America’s War in Vietnam, by Elizabeth Partridge. (Technically maybe YA nonfiction? oral histories woven together with bits of the larger historical record of the era, from the early ’60s through to the early ’90s.) I didn’t cry but only because I was running on the dreadmill at the time.

* Note–the company that committed war crimes in the village of Son My known as the My Lai massacre was also called Charlie Company, but that’s a different company. Because Army companies are named A, B, C, etc., and then referred to using the NATO Phonetic Alphabet, there’s lots of Charlie Companies.

Other Things I Read

“Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation,” by AK Ramanujan. In The Collected Essays of A. K. Ramanujan, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 131-160. I love this essay so much I wrote my MA thesis about it. I love this essay so much we did a podcast on it.
“The Dybbuk: The Origins and History of a Concept,” by Leonard J. Greenspoon. In olam he-zeh v’olam ha-ba: The World and the World to Come in Jewish Belief and Practice, Perdue University Press, 2017, pp. 135-150. This was really informational, and well-written to boot. I learned so much.
“The Etymology of Condom,” by Zacharias P. Thundy. In American Speech, vol. 60, no 2 (summer 1985): pp. 177-179. This started as a joke about the etymology of “condiment” that got way out of hand.

Books and Other Works I Published

Old Time Religion. This was a scary book to write. Dionysus in Wisconsin was received well by a small but enthusiastic coterie, and I didn’t want to disappoint them. Luckily the Lammy shortlist hadn’t come out yet when I released it in January, or I would have freaked out even more than I already did. I got fewer preorders for this book than I did for DIW, which was unpleasant, and although I offered ARC copies no one wanted one. On the production side, the book was beset by some last-minute problems with the cover, which were a real learning experience and did nothing for my stress level. Fortunately, it has been well-received and sold steadily! I don’t track earnings by book, but it has earned out at this point, and slightly faster than DIW did (eleven months instead of twelve).
“Dous.” This was so fun to write. I did catch myself trying to decide if I’d unfairly leveraged an argument Spivak makes about the way women are oppressed in India in a context she would object to, and then decided that I was getting a little too serious about the philosophy side of things for a lighthearted short story. As far as I can tell only a few people bothered to read it, probably because I gave it a weird title (it makes sense if you’ve read OTR, I think). But that’s fine. I know a few people really loved it, and that means a lot to me.
Troth. This was a fun book to write, a hard book to revise, and now that it’s done I am extremely happy it’s out in the world. The last few chapters made me very happy to write. I got a lot more preorders for this one than I did for DIW and OTR–as many as both of them combined, actually. I didn’t bother to send out ARC copies. How do you offer ARC copies for the third book in a series without cannibalizing your audience? But despite the lack of hype, it has sold very well, including the best first month sales of any of my books.
“Vivienne.” I sold this to Asimov’s Science Fiction and I have the check stubs to prove it, but although I received galleys, it was not published in 2024. I don’t know exactly what the story is; selling it was quite a coup, perhaps the most high-profile sale I’ve ever made. Maybe it will appear in 2025. Keep an eye out.
Em oi! 452, 453, and 454 (above). I have another comic that I sketched and inked and then set aside because I needed to focus on something else.
Lazarus, Home from the War. I have written two and a half full drafts of this novel this year, I think. I am so excited to show it to people in 2025. It’s got so much cool stuff that I love–a guy trying to put himself back together! A Jewish neurologist! A really scary snake! It will be out in May 2025, so keep an eye out!

How to Publish a Book

This consolidates some posts I originally put up on Tumblr, mainly so I can find them. (Tumblr’s search is a nightmare.) You can find them here, here, and here.

Ebooks

Write the book. This is, believe it or not, the fun part.
Edit the book. Slightly less easy, but you have to do this, no matter what anyone else has told you about “minimum viable product” or what have you. You can force your friends to read it, you can have a program read it aloud to you, you can read it backwards, you can hire someone to line edit your work, you can do some or most of the above, just get it edited. (Additional point: when hiring a professional, if you’re happy with the plot, ask for line or copyediting; if you’re not sure about plot points or need to flesh out some scenes, ask for developmental editing; if you just need guidance, you may want to start with an editorial letter.)
Get a cover. You can make one yourself or pay someone to do it. You’re going to want it to be about 1600×2500 pixels and 72 dpi. It’s good to have a really nice cover, because covers sell books.
Typeset the book. I use Atticus to create an epub file. If you are also doing a print version or you are a mild to medium control freak, I recommend it. Vellum and Reedsy are about the same, I think. If you have a lot of illustrations–big ones, I mean, not just an author photo–or you are a big-time control freak, you should beg, borrow, or steal a copy of InDesign. You can use Calibre to compress your output epub file if you want to make sure you earn every available penny. However, my book is 6mb and it is about 8 cents to download. Also, if you’re trying to do this on the cheap, you really can just do it in Word. The layout won’t be as fancy, but you can do it. (Layout granularity, from least to most granular, is probably Word->Atticus->InDesign.)
If you want to publish under a press name that is not your name, you will need to start a business. Laws around taxes and registration may vary depending on where you are, but in general, you will want to register your name with your state or county registrar (for me, this cost $30 and I had to get a piece of paper notarized). Then you can get a business checking account (for me this part was free–I went through the bank I already have accounts with). In the US, sole proprietorships like this are taxed as pass-through entities, so you will pay personal income taxes on whatever money you make, but you don’t have to pay corporate income taxes. If you are publishing books that could possibly get you sued (e.g., The Big Book of Welding While Juggling or Now You’re Cooking with Napalm) you may want to form an LLC. Talk to a lawyer.
Open a KDP account. If you hate the Zon and want to only publish somewhere else (Apple Books, Kobo, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords, whatever), that’s fine–the process is about the same. If you think you previously had a KDP account and then didn’t use it, search your emails etc. to try to find out, because if they figure that out, they’ll close both accounts and then you won’t get paid.
Add your new title to the catalog (you will need to add metadata, like your name, series name if there is one, and a description of the book) and set the prices. Unless your book is super big, you’ll probably earn more if you select the 70% option. For some reason, I changed a few of the prices. If you’re planning to publish on several platforms, I don’t recommend this–just set your price in one place and then let it convert those. Otherwise, you’ll have to reinput everything over and over, because it’s in the terms of service that you need to price things the same on Kobo as you do on Amazon (and so on).
Set the day of publication and tell people about it. Like your mom. Your aunt who’s always so supportive. Your friend who has been listening to you bitch about how hard writing is for the past six months.
???
Profit.

Q: Hey, I want my book in several online stores, not just Amazon.

A: You have a few options. Draft2Digital/Smashwords and IngramSpark both distribute digitally to various places so you only have to set things up once. But they take a cut of the profit for this service. My impression is that D2D is better for ebooks in this regard, however you should check the rates and make your own determination. You can also set up independent accounts with each store and upload your stuff. This is a PITA if you ever plan to update anything, but you can do it.

Q: What happens in step 9?

A: You know. Meet other indie writers and try to gain their trust. Read a lot. Work on the sequel. Get some sleep, because deadlines are exhausting, even self-imposed ones. Learn about advertising. That sort of thing.

PAPERBACKS

There are a bunch of options for POD publishing now. IngramSpark, KDP, Draft2Digital, Lulu, etc. Other websites like Barnes & Noble will let you set up paperback publishing but outsource the actual printing to IngramSpark (IS). I think a bunch of these services do. IS is also slightly better if you want to have bookstores sell your book, have it in libraries, etc., because most bookstores won’t order from Amazon, for obvious reasons. For Dionysus in Wisconsin, I’ve done both IS and Amazon, letting IS distribute to anywhere that isn’t the Zon. The last time I looked at the rates, IS was the best place that wasn’t Amazon, although that’s not saying much. D2D’s recent survey about AI and subsequent rejection of licensing their authors’ books to LLM companies wins them a lot in book, too.

OH, IS allows preorders for paperbacks while the Zon doesn’t.

First, you’re going to need to write and edit the book. We went over this in pt. 1. Please refer there if you have any questions on this step. Okay, here is the exhaustive list of what to do once you’re ready.

1. Decide what size the physical book should be. Look around your house at books in your genre and select the size that is most pleasing to you. This is called the trim size. Somewhere from 5″x8″ to 6″x9″ are the most popular, thus the cheapest.

2. If you uploaded your text into a typesetting program like Atticus, tell it your trim size, preferred typeface size, line spacing, and margins and have it spit out a pdf. Otherwise, set Word up with those specifications. KDP has a helpful site where you can calculate the correct inner margins for your number of pages, while I think somehow IS just requires a .5″ or .625″ margin for all sizes (this doesn’t make sense; I assume you just have to fix it after seeing a proof?). The book’s gonna be exactly the same, so just do the same thing in both places.

One thing I couldn’t find any guidance on is what size to make the typeface and line spacing. I wound up going with 11 pt typeface and 1.4 spacing. I figured this out by printing out the first page of my book, cutting it out at the correct size (5″x8″) and comparing it to pages in similar books until I found one that looked readable and pretty. Anything from 10-12 is probably fine, also 1.1-1.4 spacing, but keep in mind that small/densely spaced typefaces will make your text look more intimidating. Someone on Mastodon said 1.5 spacing looks like a student paper, which I also agree with.

There are loads of websites that detail what typefaces to use for what types of books. “Look at your genre and try to match” is reasonable advice here too.

3. You need not just a cover, but a spine and a back cover. Books are three dimensional objects!

If you hire an artist, they should just be able to provide a wrap-around cover that is appropriate dimensions (again, KDP and IS both have templates). It should be a CMYK PDF of at least 300 DPI resolution. If you’re doing it yourself, I suggest laying out the entire cover on one large sheet of paper/canvas and doing your art like that rather than trying to photoshop together various pieces, unless you are really, really good at color leveling etc. Make sure you use open access typefaces or that you have rights to use them, ditto for any images you collage into stuff.

GIMP is a great free photoshop alternative. ImageMagick is a free image manipulation program that is incredibly powerful. I had to use ImageMagick to flip my cover file into CMYK and create a PDF. The command you want is this:

magick "inputfile.png" -colorspace sRGB -colorspace CMYK "outputfile.pdf"

Note that this same command can be used to change between whatever formats you want. You don’t have to specify a colorspace, either.

magick "inputfile.png" "outputfile.jpg"

is a valid command. See the ImageMagick documentation for more.

4. Submitting your file for stuff: copyright here, LCCN (Library of Congress Control Number) here. Neither of these is obligatory, but both are cool in their own way. LCCN is a way for Library of Congress to pre-catalog your data (creating a stub record in OCLC) so that if a library acquires your book, it’s easier for them to get it on the shelf. You need to submit your request for this PRIOR TO THE MONTH OF PUBLICATION. However, you don’t need a final manuscript to submit, just a summary of the book. Also, note that you can only retroactively submit your MS for copyright registration for THREE MONTHS after publication, so decide now if you want it. And yes, everything you write in the US is automatically copyrighted, but having a certificate to prove it is nice in a court battle. Also also, you WILL want a finished copy of the text to submit when you make this request, or else you will have to submit two printed copies. By MAIL. So you have to GO OUT OF YOUR HOUSE TO THE POST OFFICE. UGH. (You are requested to send in a print copy for the LCCN program too, so make sure you order extras. And some for awards.)

5. OKAY, assuming you got everything done, now you need an ISBN.

Do you really? Kind of. If you’re only publishing on KDP, they’ll give you a free one. But you can’t reuse it if you try to also publish on IS. The reverse is also true. Technically, the entity that assigns the ISBN is the publisher, so this makes Amazon/IS the publisher of your book. Also, it makes editions slightly weird if you’re doing paperbacks through more than one p lace (technically, it’s supposed to be one ISBN per edition). ANYWAY, in the US you buy ISBNs through Bowkers. Don’t let them sell you barcodes or any of that garbage. Just buy your ISBN(s).

Sometimes, people report putting in information in KDP and then having the ISBN rejected as “in use” when inputting it into IS, so do this next part all at once. First, assign your ISBN to your book in the Bowkers database. Then assign it to your book at IS and save as draft. Then assign it to your book at KDP and save as draft.

One other note. If you have set up a business to be your press name (mine is Winnowing Fan Press, because the main character’s name is Ulysses and I am a GIANT NERD), that will be set up as your publishing house in Bowkers. You won’t have an imprint unless you specify one. (An imprint is like a special line of books, so Harlequin has a “digital-first” imprint called Carina Press that specializes in LGBT+ romance, because why would you publish LGBT+ romance in paperback first, ugh.) BUT Amazon will ask what the imprint is for your ISBN and it will be THE NAME OF THE PUBLISHING HOUSE. Why is Amazon using the term differently from everyone else? I DON’T KNOW. JUST GO WITH IT.

6. Upload all your files. Look at the previewers/e-proofs to make sure everything looks okay. ~~Panic and reupload them five times with minute changes.~~

7. Set a price.

For real at this point I hope you’re done making changes, because you suddenly have at least three versions across two different sites to update if you suddenly decide to add a credit for your author photo or something. (cough)

How to set a price the easy way: look at other similar books in your genre (your comps) and just set your book to that price (hopefully you aren’t losing money that way).

8. You can order a physical proof at this stage. But if you want author copies, you’re going to have to publish your book, meaning it becomes publicly available. I think that if you get through the KDP screens and hit “publish book,” it goes live. So…save it as a draft; don’t hit the go button until you’re ready. IS meanwhile lets you make it available for preorder.

Deadlines: Try to get everything done and uploaded by five days before your planned publication date.

Addenda to previous parts

Even if you are doing this as a hobby, even if you’re not going to be a working writer, you should make a budget at the beginning and write down what you’re spending. You might want to give the episode on Towards a Poor Podcast from the late, great Start With This a listen. Also, listen to the one about giving feedback while you’re at it–it totally changed my mind about giving and receiving criticism on my writing, even though my podcast is unscripted and I’m not workshopping theater pieces right now.
It’s best if you can figure out everything (cover, finalized text, back cover blurb) and THEN upload it to all the various websites. Otherwise you’ll wind up with mismatches. (My book, for example, has a slightly different cover in the ebook on Amazon compared to the print version, another different cover on Goodreads, and slightly different wording on the back of the book text in some places.) I should emphasize the interior text is all the same. I just messed that up.
There are some errors you may not catch until you see the print version, if you’re doing one. I recommend uploading your files to KDP, ordering a proof copy, making any updates, and THEN uploading the files elsewhere. IngramSpark is much slower to approve files compared to Amazon.
They say that you don’t ever really finish a project, you just give up on it, and this is true. I made the last changes to the text on Monday of the week it was published, and then I forced myself to stop looking at my proof copy because there is a deadline you have to meet to upload your files and I needed to stop. making. changes. in order to meet it.
When creating a cover, note that there is a variance in trimming things, so don’t assume that the area outside of the trim line on the cover is going to be invisible.
They say all you have to do to find a typo is open the freshly printed book. In my case, my husband found it.
Previously, I suggested you could use InDesign for ebook design. Technically, this is correct, but because screens are different sizes, you can’t…nail the text down, I guess? You have to allow reflow or things will look super weird. I don’t know, if you’re using InDesign and/or doing something really graphics-heavy, you need a guide that is more in-depth than this.
Everyone hates marketing.

Em oi! #453: Outsider Art

(copyright EH Lupton 4/14/24) Bryan: Isn't it a little late for that? Em: No. Anyway, it's like a reverse art heist. Bryan: Okay...

Em: They break into the art gallery and do something magical to the painting... And when the rich people take it home, demons come out. Bryan: Oh, like Banksy.

Technically, Banksy is regarded as a street artist or guerilla artist, although I’d argue that’s a subset of outsider artist. Outsider art is art created by people who are largely self-taught and exist outside of the conventions of the art world. That group, as you can imagine, is pretty broad, and includes “naive” artists (self-taught but want to be mainstream) like Henri Rousseau, mentally ill artists like Adolf Wölfli and Robert Gie, folk art, and, well, me, I guess.

Once, when I was in Baltimore, MD, before a marathon (I think it must have been the Marine Corps), I went to an exhibit of art created by mentally ill patients. Some of it was like a giant boat made of glued-together matchsticks. Some of it was like this: a self-portrait carved out of a single apple tree log by a man who had never shown any interest in art, then made this, then never made art again. It raises an interesting question of how the art-making process exists within a human. What, indeed, is art? Is art always intentional? Are we unfairly dividing art into two categories whereby one is the product of some sort of delusion or other uncontrolled mental process and the other is the result of specific creative direction? (Yes.) If someone writes novels compulsively to cope with stress, anxiety, or depression, is that essentially the same as building a giant boat out of matchsticks?

Anyway, before I veer off into fruitless discussions of Deleuze and Guattari, the comic. Over the last few books, I’ve developed a process, which includes: 1/ write a first draft. 2/ Revise to fix plot problems. 3/ Another draft to fix remaining plot holes and fancy language. 4/ Send book to editor and accept changes. 5/ Final draft to make the language as good as possible. So the book we’re talking about is currently in stage two. And B did, in his way, fix the plot. He probably doesn’t even know how.

I’m going to file this one under N8354 B3 L86 2024, for Visual Arts–Art as a profession. Artists.–Banksy.

Em oi! #452: An Honor to be Nominated

Em: (out of frame) And it's not like it's a bad thing, so I don't know why I feel this way. Is it that I care too much about--- Mary Oliver: You can head out, Nietzsche. I've got this. Nietzsche: Danke.

Em: Mary Oliver! Mary: Dearheart, you can worry all you want. It's fine. It just inevitably comes to nothing.

Bryan: In the last panel, you should make out. Em: That feels appropriate.

(In case you haven’t read it, Mary Oliver references this poem. Nietzsche dressed as the Overman first debuted here.)

In case you missed it, Dionysus in Wisconsin got shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award in gay romance. The ceremony isn’t until June, so I get to spend the next few months either being anxious or being fêted, depending on who you ask. The other nominated works (you can check them out here) are also tremendous, which is awesome and intimidating all at once. In a very good article on being nominated for things, John Scalzi refers to all the works nominated together as a peer group. It’s hard to conceptualize myself up next to those other writers as peers, because their books are so good.

Awards are weird. On the one hand, they can draw attention to works that otherwise have been overlooked, create critical conversation, and recognize people who do work very, very hard and often receive very little. On the other hand, as an outsider, they can often seem to reinforce mainstream, middle-class values and recognize works that have already received recognition. Not for nothing, the Pulitzer board declined to award a prize for Gravity’s Rainbow the year it was released, because some of the board believed it was obscene and unreadable. (Which it is, but not in a bad way.)

That is to say, in a certain sense, it doesn’t matter if the Barbie movie gets an academy award (or even a nomination); it’s already proved its point by grossing a billion dollars worldwide. It’s already won.

For every book I’ve read that had justifiably won the award it was nominated for, I can name one that wasn’t very good and made me wonder what the judges had been thinking. And of course, there’s the terrible conundrum of the writer who wins a major award early in their career and then never quite achieves that high again.

Anyway, as of this writing, my biggest feeling right now is just…happiness. As someone who was always kind of a weird kid, who wandered for a long time without much acknowledgement that my writing was what anyone wanted to read (remember this comic? yeah, bleak times), it’s nice to feel like, hey, actually, someone did like it after all. More than one someone.

I just want to take this moment to thank everyone who’s read the book already, or who heard the news and is reading it now. You guys are the best. If you ever get to Madison, let me know. I’ll make cookies.

Gonna file this under BF608 L86 2024 for Philosophy, Psychology, Religion–Psychology–Will. Volition. Choice. Control. (Feel a little bad for psychology, which still shares BF with parapsychology and occult sciences. That feels like a statement at this point.)

Em oi! #451: Technically

B: ...she'll become thy bed, I warrant thee, and bring thee forth brave brood.
E: Wow.

B: What?
E: I mean, you do the speech very well. I just don't much like Caliban.

B: Why not?
E: He's, like, sexist as hell. I guess he's not portrayed as a hero, but...

B: He's literally a monster.
E: Oh yeah.

Back before we had many small children, when he had time for community theater, B used to recite the speeches he was working on while we went running together. That was always fine when he was doing something fun (Twelfth Night) and always a little weird when he was doing a villain (Aaron the Moor from Titus Andronicus has a very good one[1]). Now we’re back to doing this because he has a show next Saturday (9/23, here in Madison)–and he’s learning a scene from The Tempest. Which is a great scene, but also interesting to be doing excerpts from in public. (Also, when we actually had this conversation, we were on dreadmills at the gym, so. But it’s a hell of a scene.)

All right, announcements.

I had a poem in the August/September issue of Utopia Science Fiction Magazine. The poem is called “Anxiety #243,” and you can buy a copy of the issue here. If you just want to read the poem, you should sign up for my newsletter and then check out the most recent back issue. I have another poem coming out in the next couple of weeks, and you should definitely sign up for my newsletter if you want to be notified!

I will be reading at Rainbow Space Magic Con at the end of September. I will also be appearing on a panel about writing fantasy and historical accuracy w/r/t the middle ages, a topic about which I have many possibly controversial opinions. Registration is free, so go sign up. I’ll send out a newsletter with the actual schedule once I know it.

I also recently came out with a new T-shirt. It looks like this:

Em wearing a turquoise shirt with a black, red, and white design that says DO NOT SUMMON DEMONS IN THE LIBRARY with a little flame-headed demon.

Click here if you want one. There are a few color and size options (also children’s sizes, because my 6yo wanted one), and also stickers and metal signs, in case you want it in your own library.

Finally, for fans of Dionysus in Wisconsin, book two will be available for preorder in October and out in January.

We’ll file this under PR2833.W5 L86 2023, for English literature–English renaissance (1500-1640)–The Tempest–Criticism. (I’m not 100% sure about that W5–I don’t have access to that table anymore, but I used it last time I did a comic about Shakespeare, so I am guessing it means “Criticism.”)

Footnotes:

[1] From act 5, scene 1:

Lucius:
Art thou not sorry for these heinous deeds?

Aaron:
Ay, that I had not done a thousand more.
Even now I curse the day—and yet, I think,
Few come within the compass of my curse—
Wherein I did not some notorious ill,
As kill a man, or else devise his death;
Ravish a maid or plot the way to do it;
Accuse some innocent and forswear myself;
Set deadly enmity between two friends;
Make poor men’s cattle break their necks;
Set fire on barns and haystalks in the night,
And bid the owners quench them with their tears.
Oft have I digged up dead men from their graves
And set them upright at their dear friends’ door,
Even when their sorrows almost was forgot,
And on their skins, as on the bark of trees,
Have with my knife carvèd in Roman letters
“Let not your sorrow die, though I am dead.”
But I have done a thousand dreadful things
As willingly as one would kill a fly,
And nothing grieves me heartily indeed
But that I cannot do ten thousand more.

It’s an amazing speech! Who doesn’t want to twirl their moustache so heartily? But you can see why we used to quiet down when we passed one of the neighbors…