not what you look at, but what you see

oops it's been six months, what else is new.

( Doctor’s Orders – Diane Duane )

( The Founders Trilogy: Foundryside, Shorefall, & Locklands – Robert Jackson Bennett )

( Horrorstor – Grady Hendrix )

( Underland – Robert Macfarlane )

( Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams )

( Orange World and Other Stories – Karen Russell )

( It Chooses You – Miranda July )

plus The Murder of Mr. Wickham, by Claudia Gray, which I won’t comment on because I’m extremely not the audience – it was a gift and it went to the library donation bin shortly after. these were not good book months.

they were, however, really good manga months, because I finally asked myself why I hadn't read Hiromu Arakawa's other work and picked up Silver Spoon and Yomi no Tsugai (sorry, just a better title than Daemons of the Shadow Realm). I can't sum up my thoughts on those without making this post a mile long, but: highly recommended.

( Raven Stratagem, Revenant Gun, & Hexarchate Stories – Yoon Ha Lee (full series and anthology spoilers below the cut!) )

( The Only Good Indians – Stephen Graham Jones )

( System Collapse – Martha Wells )

( The Sentence – Louise Erdrich )

plus a handful of kids’ books and a reread of Braiding Sweetgrass for my book club. honorable mention, also, to Where’s Joon? by Julie Kim, a kids’ graphic novel that caught me totally unaware with its visual magic and casually folkloric world. for extra magic I read it without knowing that it’s the sequel to Where’s Halmoni? - starting it backwards gave me a flash of that reading mystique from childhood, when you have no idea what you’re getting into when you start a book, but you can tell how fully-formed and intentional it is.

[ LISTEN ON SPOTIFY ]

there was a lot of americana playing in the background of my childhood - while I'm not gonna claim I'm Good At Fanmixes I feel like trigun is the moment I've been waiting for. so here, have a trigun maximum playlist that's a little alt country, a little country-country, a little...other stuff. it loosely follows the arc of the series, from the cowboyism to the weird cosmic shit.

it's been a really long time since I've done a fan thing that wasn't a fic and this was a really fun change of pace!

( tracklist )

what I read in May and June! with this I should be more or less caught up.

( The Cartographers – Peng Shepherd )

( No Land In Sight, The World Doesn’t End, & Hotel Insomnia - Charles Simic )

( Bright Dead Things – Ada Limón )

( The Way Home – Peter S. Beagle )

( The Eyes and the Impossible – Dave Eggers )

( City of Last Chances – Adrian Tchaikovsky )

( Witch King – Martha Wells )

my inclination to do these writeups comes and goes in looong waves, apparently. late last year I slid into a phase where I was reading a lot of easy stuff because it was close to hand, mainly middle grade novels and graphic novels that aren’t much to talk about. I dug through my journals (the other reason I have a hard time getting my thoughts out here. I’ve done it already on paper) to see what I had written about already that might be worth sharing:

( Bleeding Edge – Thomas Pynchon )

( The Address Book – Deirdre Mask )

( The Poetry of Solitude: A Tribute to Edward Hopper – ed. Gail Levin )

( If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler – Italo Calvino )

when I hit a fic-writing dry spell I try not to dwell on it, but there's still that vague little voice in the back of my head going 2022's almost over and you've got nothing, seriously? I spent a lot of last year bashing away at a fic where everything I was trying to do was new to me, and when I was done with it I didn't write anything for months. but that's not the point of this post, the point is that now I have 80% of a new story going, and it's a relief.

Signal Decay, the fic that ate my 2021, is a machine I decided to bang together while thinking "yeah I've seen someone use a welding torch, I'll figure it out." and like, pardon my bias, but it sure does walk! and fire the occasional laser! if it also happens to creak like a motherfucker that is okay, what I learned is showing. but getting it there turned to be a much crunchier process than I'm used to, and at this point I can admit I chipped a tooth on it. I have 10 drafts of this fic (a 16k fic! that's too many!!). at some point I was just creating new docs and copying and pasting and saving as, and I didn't do barely anything by hand. after I posted the last chapter the writing switch flicked off. I know that's how it works, can't pour from an empty vessel et cetera, but it gets to be a jittery bottled-up feeling.

then, at the beginning of the summer, a friend gave me a little bottle of the bluest fountain pen ink I have ever had the pleasure of getting on my hands and desk and cat, and the part of me that is not immune to pretty colors got REAL thirsty to see that ink on paper. making my words, not copying articles and lyrics. and not journaling about mundane shit, but the tremendous hit of creating something, word by word, that does not exist.

that hit, unsurprisingly, is way more potent when you're watching the ink of each letter flow and dry and shade on good, smooth paper. tl;dr by the power of "ooh pretty color" I suckered myself into writing the companion fic to seen and not seen that I have wanted to write for two years. I'm not an analog fetishist, I don't like the speed at which talking about old tools tends to veer into magical thinking. but that supernatural AU demanded a specific atmosphere that sits well on paper. it needed its time, and so many moody rain scenes, and if I fucked up the cadence of one sentence or phrase I just had to skip down the page and go again, writing slowly enough to live in it. (so okay, yeah, if you talk too much about writing maybe you can't escape a little magical thinking.) the last of many things I learned from Signal Decay, probably, is that it's possible to give yourself LibreOffice poisoning, the cure for which is paper and pen that just - feel like they're demanding less. not the ceremony and commitment of a new doc, just enough room to put down a sentence, which is a world. feels like I'm laughably late to this realization! but this is me putting it down for my future self, who will absolutely forget it again.

May books! I didn't get too far with my reading list (I say, as if I'll ever make a real dent in it) but some good food for thought this month.

( The Bone Orchard - Sara Mueller )

( Strange Harvests - Edward Posnett )