[september 2024] introducing my writing log
or: get ready to learn more about Van Gogh (and me) than you ever wanted to
in my last newsletter i wrote about how i’ve been trying to make some healthy changes in my life to cut through my lifelong fog of depression. i was doing really well with that, and i am still well! so well, in fact, that i’m starting to get used to it, which makes me wary.
i’ll be honest: i’ve really been struggling to put out newsletters this year. i’ve only published 3, when my goal was to get better about posting monthly. i’m extremely grateful for the steady growth of my subscribership for a publication that was only meant to update my clients on my upcoming coaching availability. i’ve gotten nothing but extremely positive reception for this newsletter, which continues to blow my mind, but i struggle month to month writing a coherent craft essay. every month, sometimes twice a month, i manage to get down a few thoughts about whatever craft thing is on my mind, but it’s hard to make it all come together, and it’s even harder to send it out. a newsletter is unique in that there’s no going back. i can edit the original post, but what you receive in your inbox doesn’t change. in a world of cancelation, it’s kind of terrifying to post content that, once released, i have no control over and which will exist in perpetuity. but that’s the nature of publishing.
august of last year was the 20th anniversary of my journal. to commemorate it, i wanted to write about what it’s like to journal consistently for two decades, but i couldn’t seem to narrow down my thoughts. i watched all these YouTube videos like “journaling can make you a better person!” and i just kept thinking, journaling has definitely made me a worse person. to me, a journal is a place to acknowledge the monstrous. for people with self-destructive tendencies who haven’t yet begun their recovery, a journal can be the worst enabler you’ve ever known. just because you can see the bad stuff inside of you doesn’t mean you do anything about it. sometimes it only makes hurting yourself easier and more intentional.
at 14 years old, i started out the way anyone does: here are the things i did today. and back then, every day was so exciting, and everything seemed like a big deal, and all of it felt so worthy to be written. by my late teens, i’d dropped the impulse to render events and moved onto thoughts and feelings only. by my 20s, i gave up coherence. especially before i started writing fiction, i blasted total nonsense onto the page. if you were to read my early diaries, you’d say, “this is a kid who needs a lot of therapy.” if you were to read my more recent diaries, you would go, “what the fuck is wrong with this person.” in my 30s now, i write in my journal every month or so, and it makes more sense but it also has a very specific function in my life: it’s where i put my darkest, saddest thoughts. if you were to read my current journal, you might think, “i don’t know how this person is still alive.” all but the past few entries, anyway, which start the way this newsletter has—an acknowledgement of how terrifying it is to be doing well in a lifetime of being unwell.
with 20 years of practice under my belt, i’m probably better at journaling than maybe any other mode of writing, which feels silly to say because it is fundamentally a kind of worthless skill. valueless, i should say. i think it has a lot of worth. i’m honestly pretty glad to have devoted so much of my life to staring down the ugliest parts of myself. as i mentioned already, that’s never made me a better person. but it has made me a braver one.
around this time last year, i attended the Millay Arts residency. i decided i would keep a writing log of my time there and share it as a newsletter when i got back. i didn’t, because mentally i fell off the deep end and also it ended up being 30k. i started logging again last month to document my process and rationale for the current novel i’m writing, mostly for my future revision-focused self to remember why i made the decisions i made while drafting.
so i’m just going to start sharing my writing logs in my newsletter. they’re really just a messier version of my craft essays anyway. when people send me asks, there are two subjects that come up more than any other: process and feelings. the how and the why. it’s really hard to answer those questions, because ultimately the answer to both is to keep going. a writing log is a long explanation of how and why i keep going. it’s probably not inspirational, informative, or even interesting, but it’s something i can point to and say, “here’s how i do it. it’s not pretty.”
i’ll still share craft essays when i have them, but this way it’s much more likely i’ll be able to post consistently. to get started, below i’ve pared down my Millay log. it is still very long though, and deeply personal.
but before that, we have news and announcements.
news & announcements
application deadline for FAW Fall 2024 extended to the 18th
art by emi!
there are still a few more days to apply to the Fall 2024 session of the Fanauthor Workshop!
Group A: Wednesdays from Oct. 9 - Nov. 20, 12-2pm EST
Group B: Mondays from Oct. 7 - Nov. 18, 6-8pm EST
you can read more about this session on the FAW blog.
the OFIC Mag Doubles Issue is here!
So much work and love has been put into Issue #9, our special Doubles Issue which features two beautiful novellas on polar ends of the same fantastical aesthetic spectrum. These stories speak to each other in interesting ways, playing on themes of love and devotion, and how those feelings become distorted by the nature of time. For this issue, we took inspiration from a French bookbinding method called tête-bêche ("head to tail") binding. Whichever way you hold it, you'll be looking at the front of one of the novellas, upside down to the other and eventually meeting in the middle. So fun!
In "Missing Ange" by Erica Cheng, ambitious engineering student Wes is kidnapped and taken to the future by Lyra, a time traveler desperate to solve the mystery of her brother Ange’s disappearance, having supposedly died in a lab accident related to the invention of time travel. A mystery unfolds, with Ange at the center of everything.
In "Adelina and the Bug Parties" by Allison Stalberg, Lu the luna moth and Adelina the faery seamstress fall in love at a praying mantis wedding. They attend all kinds of bug parties, from termite birthdays to spider funerals. During and between the parties, Adelina learns how to cherish the most fleeting of moments as her low-stakes life meets the high stakes of the insect kingdom in this absurdist but poignant fairytale.
call for submissions for OFIC Issues #11 (short form) and #12 (novellas)
Issue #11 | General Submissions
Subs are open until 11:59pm EST on December 31, 2024. Issue #11 will be published on April 1, 2025.
We are currently looking for:
Short fiction (only 1 piece at a time, max 12k words; if flash [under 1k], you may submit up to 5 pieces in one document)
Nonfiction (personal essays, articles, or meta, max 12k words)
Check out our MSWL!
Issue #12 | Novella Submissions
Subs are open until 11:59pm EST on December 31, 2024. Issue #12, the Doubles Issue, will be published on July 1, 2025.
We are currently looking for:
Novellas between 15,000 and 35,000 words
writing log excerpts
the following is excerpted from the writing log i kept at Millay last fall. i had a mini-breakdown near the end of it and ended up leaving early. maybe in twenty years or whatever i’ll publish the log in full, but for this newsletter i cut out as many references to individual residents as i could and also the bigger things going on that were the main sources of stress for me. i go from “i heard a loud sound and it made me cry” to “i need to leave NOW” pretty quickly in this and it probably makes me look totally unhinged, but i swear there’s like 10k words of context i took out just because i’m not ready to share that stuff yet.
a couple notes from one-year-later!me:
Skinless remains in revision hell. i stopped working on it after Millay and every time i pick it up i only make it worse
Rabbit’s Blood and Best Kept have merged and there’s no real cohesion anymore, but then again there never has been; currently in first draft hell. i’m not too upset about that because it just feels like a story i won’t be able to really dig into until i’m older
i continued a handwritten writing log from November to March. maybe at some point i’ll transcribe the decent parts of it and share them. i was going to do that for this post but it’s already way too long
i’m working on a new novel right now called Heavy for Hire which i’ll get into in next month’s newsletter, but spoiler: it is going very well. it’s an action thriller rom com—no thought, vibes only. so if this super depresses you, know that the next one feels like way more of a victory
this year’s “iconic person known for mental instability who died tragically in their mid-30s” deep dive is Marilyn Monroe
content warning for abuse, death by cancer, and suicidal ideation. although i did try to cut the worst of it out.
October 1, 2023
9:30pm
I’m at a Comfort Inn in Albany. The annoying thing about residencies is that many of them don’t help with travel at all and they tell you to arrive by [insert ungodly narrow window of time], so yesterday I drove from Dayton to Cleveland, crashed on a friend’s couch, then drove from Cleveland to here. And tomorrow morning I’ll have some time to kill before I show up at Millay. There was no reason to take two whole days to get here but I love long drives, visiting friends, and staying in hotels. And I hate being in a rush.
I spent the drive thinking about Rabbit’s Blood while listening to the playlist I made by thinking of every ‘70s rock anthem I could remember. I figured out a few things but I’m mostly feeling gunshy about it because I can’t tell if it’s a bad idea or not. The premise is that identical twin brothers both get drafted in 1970. One gets stationed in Saigon and one flees to Canada, and they hate each other for their respective choices, and refuse to speak to each other ever again. The story follows their diverging lives—the one who returns from Vietnam becomes a racecar driver; the one who dodged the draft returns after amnesty and becomes a bank robber.
I kept having to get off at service stations in order to write down the ideas as they built up. At one point I got turned around somewhere in rural New York and found a little diner, where I ate a big greasy breakfast at 2pm and worked out plot beats. It was one of those moments that made me hope my past self doesn’t hate me so much for the person I’ve become. Yes, loud noises make me cry like a startled infant nowadays and I crumble under the slightest pressure, but I also get to drive across the country to attend one of the most prestigious writing residencies on my application list.
I’m nervous about tomorrow. There’s always the anticipation of meeting the other artists and seeing what the accommodations are like. And there will be an orientation and a welcome dinner. And I’ll try very hard not to say weird shit.
October 2, 2023
10:15am
I don’t know why I’m so anxious. I’ve done residencies before. You show up, you go to orientation, you eat dinner and meet everybody, and then get to work.
Anyway, I woke up, got some continental breakfast, and have spent the past few hours waiting for checkout and working on my PYB revision plan for Skinless. PYB means “pick your battles.” In my first draft I picked too many of them. I have to put a few back.
I have the big changes mapped out but some of the finer threads are still dangling. With these changes I think I’ll be able to get it down to 100k, maybe less. I realized I skipped chapter 22 in my chapter numbering. Above all things, this is why second drafts are necessary. I don’t know how I missed that.
Okay, it’s 10:30 and time for me to go. Hopefully I chill out a little on the drive.
1:00pm
The drive was fine. I’m in the Steepletop barn; my room is very nice and my studio is huge, with a couch and skylights and for some reason two desks and a ladder to nowhere. Artist residency décor is truly its own genre. The furniture is always second- or more likely thirdhand. Nothing matches. At least one chair is always broken. It’s perfect. I love residencies.
Millay is one of the oldest and most prestigious artist residencies in the world, and I keep thinking about how Van Gogh’s real work wasn’t painting, but building a community of artists. He never achieved that because he was a profoundly unpleasant and off-putting person. He just wanted to be less lonely. He wanted to be supported and support others, and be able to feel closeness and intimacy in a world that denied him those things. He never managed to fulfill that dream or any others. He roped Paul Gaugin into living with him in Arles, which was a terrible idea and led to him cutting part of his ear off. But otherwise he spent his life desperately clinging to people and asking them to love him. No one but Theo did, even though Theo never fully reciprocated Vincent’s intense adoration.
Anyway, orientation is in three hours and until then I can get some work done.
9:00pm
A truly wild day. We received a copy of each other’s bios and unsurprisingly I’m the least qualified to be here. Everyone else has books published and tenure and whatnot. Surprisingly I have no impostor syndrome. It’s a good group and we all clicked really well over dinner and wine.
On our tour, we saw Edna St. Vincent Millay’s house and the grounds around it. It was a really beautiful day but it got cold after dark and I realize now I haven’t brought particularly warm clothes. It’s a half hour to the nearest Walmart so a trip there may be inevitable.
My brain is fried. I’m going to bed.
October 3, 2023
10:00am
I woke up at seven in the morning. My mattress has the general shape of a salad bowl so I predict I’ll be having back problems. It’s possible that the director will give me a space heater and maybe be able to do something about the mattress. Surely I’m not the only resident whose spine can’t bend that way.
My daily routine will be something like:
8-10am—wake up, take meds, get coffee, make daily agenda, read
10am-12pm—write (down drafting Rabbit’s Blood), eat something
12-3pm—write (revising Skinless), snack time
3-6:30pm—research, work on FAW or OFIC, write newsletter, whatever else
6:30-8pm—dinner, hanging out with residents
8-10pm—relax in my room, take meds, go to bed
This is also my daily routine at home, except I usually have other work to do among all the things.
This morning I started reading The Things They Carried which I know I should’ve read a million years ago but whatever. I bought my copy used and there are these notes in it from a girl who was probably reading it for an undergrad lit class, and her notes are kind of adorable. Why do they keep mentioning the dead guy? And, of a severed thumb, Ew.
These notes are very useful for me because they’re summative and will make it easier for me to find information to research later. So thanks, previous owner, for your helpful marginal insights.
Anyway I’ve written 650 words this morning, but it’s the first scene of Rabbit’s Blood and beginnings always take forever. We open with Skip and Birdie, ten years old, finding two kittens beneath a shed. Omniscient third POV, which I hate writing, but admittedly it keeps the prose contained.
3:30pm
I am having a rough time. I ended up down drafting the first chapter of Rabbit’s Blood, then started in on Skinless revisions. And by “revisions” I mean I’m going through a PDF of it and annotating it. It’s making me so depressed. I keep putting giant Xs on so many pages. I start to fall into this spiral of “well I could cut this” and then “if I cut that, then I’ll have to cut this and this too because it’s threaded in” and it eventually leads to cutting the whole book. And I think, maybe that’s what I should do.
6:00pm
I took a nap and feel a little better. I also did my fun stuff portion of the day, which was to take the chapters from Best Kept that I liked and put them in Rabbit’s Blood so that it feels like I’m already knee-deep in it instead of just starting. And that way also, I have something to edit when I don’t feel like drafting. Although it’s hard to draft and plot and structure while at the same time gutting my other book of so many of the things I love about it; I’m going into new material with an editor’s mind and I shouldn’t do that. Drafting is all about the “yes, and” mentality. Yes, Skip’s a retired IndyCar driver. And yes, Birdie’s spent the past decade driving around the country robbing banks with his daughter. And yes, this is inherently interesting and wonderful and I am the greatest most genius writer ever who is absolutely not writing a total cringefail story. But, you know, I wrote 200k of Best Kept and now that’s not going to be anything, at least not for a while, so it’s not like I have much to lose by taking out 25k and putting it into something new.
My brain has reached its stopping point for the day. Work completed:
Rabbit’s Blood: drafted 1800 new words, transferred over 15k words, worked on plot/structure
Skinless: marked up 163 pages
October 4, 2023
10:30am
There’s nothing better than being an English teacher and buying a used book with a student’s notes in it. Today’s fun commentary from the prior owner of TTTC is What is going on? beneath a paragraph about going mad. And at the end of the title story, when Lt. Cross decides he doesn’t love Martha, he hates her, he needs to step up and focus to fight the war and whatnot, there’s a cheerful note that says, Lt. Cross is moving on. Lt. Cross is definitely not moving on, dear reader. Lt. Cross is being forced to commit unwitting atrocities.
October 5, 2023
9:45am
I’ve named the previous owner of TTTC Monica. Monica is from Minnesota (confirmed by her revelatory enthusiasm about the many references to Minnesota). She is 18 or 19 years old and she’s taking an intro lit or composition course (speculated). Every new chapter, she changes her pen color. There has not yet been a repeated pen color. Around the story titled “Love,” Monica has drawn a heart. Monica has the bubbly yet uniform handwriting of every high school bully I ever had.
In a story titled “Enemies,” Dave Jensen beats the shit out of Lee Strunk for stealing his jackknife. Jensen proceeds to spiral into paranoia about Strunk, until eventually pistol whipping himself to the same degree he’d beaten Strunk. He then goes to Strunk and asks if everything is square between them now. Monica’s note was, Dave Jensen felt guilty.
5:45pm
I’m on track to cut 32k words from Skinless. I’ve just finished replotting the whole thing to try to tighten up the plot, and even though it’s certainly cleaner I can’t help but think I’m breaking something very fragile, and when I’ve put it back together, it’ll function but it won’t be right.
The book is sectioned into five parts. Each part contains a story arc that escalates and builds on the one before it. Each part is sectioned into chapters of about 5k. I can’t tackle a big project without breaking it into discrete parts. I have to be able to draw a line somewhere and say, everything before this point is good enough for me to move forward. It’s a lot easier to work on five 15-25k sections than one big thing.
I’ve spent most of today assessing where each part begins and ends, and figuring out what absolutely needs to go between those two points. In other words, what does the reader need to know to feel the emotional impact of the end of each part? Since the task of this revision is paring out and toning down, it’s easier for me to do addition rather than subtraction. What pieces of the content that already exists belong? Then when I’ve put together each part, I can see what didn’t make the cut and more reasonably assess if it belongs in the story or if I’m just holding onto it because I convinced myself earlier on that I needed it.
Another task of this revision is to find redundancies and remove them. In the current draft, there are five scenes depicting Layla being violent and unhinged. My agent cut three of them. Right now I’ve accepted those edits, but I’m considering cutting a fourth and only sticking with the one that really matters.
Part I was fairly straight-forward cutting. Part II is where the exposition ends and the plot begins, and so I ran into several plot knots. A plot knot is a paradox that’s created when you change the sequence of cause and effect. Which character knows what, when, and why. When does the reader know a piece of information versus when is it revealed? What I did to work through it was draw a line down a page, and on the left side I wrote out each plot point in its existing order. Then I went through and marked each point with an X if I didn’t like it or need it. On the right side, I grouped the remaining plot points together and each time I moved one from the left to the right, I put a checkmark beside it.
After that, I took the list on the right and started drafting out my color-coded revision plan. Once I had that in place for Part II, I started cutting and pasting existing scenes and chapters where they belonged, and putting anything I cut into a trash document or my “put backsies” document—stuff I take out that I eventually want to find a place for.
October 6, 2023
10:00am
Monica continues to slay. I never want to read a book that hasn’t already been thoroughly annotated by an undergraduate. Today’s highlights:
After a repetition of the word “cooze,” a slur for women akin to “bitch,” which to me is fairly clear from context clues—the meaning of a slur, when used as a slur, is generally pretty apparent—Monica has written, What’s a cooze?
Despite her deadpan summative annotations, I continue to be impressed by her curiosity toward the text and also the sentences she’s underlined—she’s really reading closely. I wonder what kind of paper she ended up writing about this book.
During a long anecdote about a soldier torturing a baby water buffalo, Monica has underlined “baby water buffalo,” with the word “baby” underlined twice. This is so far the only evidence of a real emotional reaction. Ironic, considering O’Brien goes on to criticize female readers for referencing this anecdote as being particularly sad.
Beside the sentence, Rat [the medic] had a reputation for exaggeration and overstatement, Monica has written, AKA Ali Moore. Monica, wherever you are, I am desperate to hear your stories of Ali Moore.
There are many references to culottes. Monica has drawn a question mark by this word. I feel ancient. I mean, people still wear culottes, right? They are still a thing!
The wearer of the culottes, a character named Mary Anne Bell, comes to visit her boyfriend who is stationed in a medical detachment west of Chu Lai. Mary Anne begins the story with innocent curiosity about the war, remarking on the quaintness of the thatched huts, and so on. The men remark on her naivety and dim-wittedness. When the first group of casualties arrive, she pushes up the sleeves of her pink sweater and gets to work. Over time, she learns how to use an M-16 and eventually ends up on ambush with the Green Berets. Her boyfriend discovers her chanting with the Green Berets and wearing a necklace of tongues. Here Monica has written, Mary Anne has changed. She sure has, Monica. She sure has.
The story of Mary Anne, a chapter called “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” captured me in a way that has become increasingly difficult to find. I read at least twenty pages a day—and annotate/index them—but today I read nearly fifty in a single sitting. The “I have other things to do but I need to keep reading” feeling of a good, un-put-downable story that I used to be able to find in fanfiction and the occasional well-composed novel. I think making reading my job has rid me of the ability to become engrossed in things. Even things I enjoy and deeply admire are still stories that are easy for me to set down and hard to pick back up.
As I was reading, I was thinking about why I want to write about war, and why I went too far on Henry’s traumatic backstory in Skinless. It seems like I want to write about PTSD but I don’t want to write about my lived experience of it. Even in the personal essays I’ve written, I’ve written around the trauma I’ve experienced. Part of me believes that it’s not trauma at all, everyone had a mean dad and a bad boyfriend and years of untended physical pain. And part of me dismisses these things because there’s no real foundation, no single moment I can point to and be like, “That’s what fucked me up.” I can only tell you that I was screamed at every day for twenty years and I spent most of my childhood in literally blinding pain that I had to pretend didn’t exist, and when I hurt so bad I started vomiting, everyone was annoyed and inconvenienced, and no matter how often I had to leave school because I’d become a vomit fountain, no one took me to the doctor. I remember renting books from the library on stomach aches and migraines to see if I could find a way to cure myself.
So as I was thinking all this, I came across this line in the story of Mary Anne, which is being narrated to O’Brien by Rat the medic:
If Rat told you, for example, that he’d slept with four girls one night, you could figure it was about a girl and a half. It wasn’t a question of deceit. Just the opposite: he wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt. For Rat Kiley, I think, facts were formed by sensation.
I was forced out of my body at a young age and I’ve never managed to climb back inside it. That’s what pain and fear does to you. I think I’m just trying to render that experience in any way I can, not so that other people understand but so that I understand, and maybe if I understand then I can climb back inside myself and actually live my life. But it’s not about understanding, it’s about feeling, and I only let myself do that in the safe space of a blank page. I am telling myself over and over, through millions of words, “It was bad. You can mourn.”
2:00pm
In terms of work I’ve done today, I managed to condense a significant portion of Henry’s backstory from 5k to 800 words. Right now I feel pleased about addressing the feedback I’ve received, but beneath that I’m sad to be cutting some of my favorite writing of the book for the sake of brevity, and the more I cut, the less I like what this thing is becoming, and I’ll feel for it what I feel for Zucchini—a kind of detachment. I made it to do specific work. It does the work it sets out to do. Whether it does that work well is not up to me to decide.
5:30pm
I don’t intentionally update this log at the same time every day. My brain is just so hardwired to routine that it snaps immediately to certain times of the day to do certain tasks. Which I didn’t really notice until scrolling up and seeing that I write at the same time every day.
It’s official: I hate this draft of Skinless. Henry feels so flat to me. I’m woobifying my own OC.
Mostly I implemented my revision plan today. Draft on left side of screen, revision plan on right side. On the left I also have a tab for my Put Backsies stuff and paragraphs I’m rooting out of the enormous trash document. I’ve managed to save a few banger lines and paragraphs I liked, so at least there’s that.
October 7, 2023
10:15am
I’m concerned about Monica. In a chapter titled “The Man I Killed,” which is, as the title indicates, about the man the author killed, Monica has written, O’Brien killed him?
I’m concerned about myself too, for different reasons. A few of the other residents went out for donuts this morning and to some museums. Usually I enjoy going on little trips during residencies, and I love museums, but I can’t fathom expending that much energy right now. Last night I scrolled through my Instagram posts all the way back to 2014, and I was amazed not only by how much living I used to do but that I’ve forgotten so much. I forgot how often I used to hang out with friends. I forgot that I used to share parts of my life with people. Post selfies with pithy or hyperbolic captions. Commemorate family outings. I used to use hashtags. I wasn’t happier then, I’ve never been happy really, but I did things. I was alive. I don’t feel like I’m living anymore. I feel like I’m a mile in the sky, looking down on earth and wishing I could walk on it.
5:15pm
I’ve taken today “off” which means I’ve done mostly administrative work—making my 2024 application calendar, FAW stuff. I read for a while too. I feel a lot better than I have since I got here, although the intrusive suicidal ideation continues to worry me. I’ll be relaxing, doing whatever, and my brain stabs me with, “Well no one will ever love you so you should probably go ahead and kill yourself.” Like jesus christ chill OUT. I’m just trying to READ a BOOK.
11:00pm
I seem to vacillate rapidly between “I am a pretty good writer and I will find success” to staring down my own mediocrity. Going on ten years of writing nonstop and I still can’t write anything pretty—no fancy sentences, no beautiful description. Just my machine gun sentences and the occasional punchline. I can’t even do catnip sentences, really. A catnip sentence is one that makes a good pull quote but everything around it is meh. The best example I can think of is Call Me By Your Name which is a godawful book, but people seem to think it’s good because it’s got so many catnip lines that sound profound but are ultimately meaningless.
Time makes us sentimental. Perhaps, in the end, it is because of time that we suffer.
Like what the fuck does that even mean. You could put any words in for the nouns and it would have the same effect.
Existence makes us sapient. Perhaps, in the end, it is because of existence that we are alive.
I should probably not be updating the log after I’ve taken my sleep meds. I’m grouchy enough in the light of day; I don’t need to be putting my pre-sleep thoughts into the world.
October 8, 2023
9:45am
I told one of the residents I was reading TTTC and they said they’d had to read it in middle school, which makes me wonder if Monica is perhaps much younger than I’ve given her credit for, maybe 13 or 14, and that makes sense considering she underlined the phrase “chasing pussy” which I feel like a 19 year old in college wouldn’t have noted as anything interesting. If Monica is indeed high school age or younger, I find her insight and ability to speak back to the text very impressive. Also, her pen collection.
I am thinking about PTSD again, and how I have not said much at all about my work to the other residents. Someone asked about it but all I said was that it took place at a bank, and that I had worked at a bank, and that is always a big surprise at residencies and other creative spaces, because many artists know they’re artists very young and I didn’t. I had a first career and it wasn’t very successful, and I’m in my second career and it is also not very successful. Although success is certainly subjective. Being at Millay is kind of insane. Being five years out of an MFA and not having a book out is not ideal.
Back to PTSD. In the story “Speaking of Courage” in TTTC, Norman Bowker, after returning from the war, is driving around a lake imagining telling the story of having almost won a Silver Star. It’s not the story itself, it’s not him telling the story, it’s him imagining himself telling the story. And I don’t know war but I know that feeling. Like, here’s what I’d tell you if I thought you would care. Here’s what I’d tell you if I thought it wouldn’t make you uncomfortable. Here’s what I’d tell you if I weren’t afraid you would wonder, “So what?”
I would tell you, maybe, that my dad died the morning I was supposed to start a new job. The only reason I don’t talk about it is because it’s too complicated to explain in polite company, I mean there was so much going on at that time, and I’m always afraid of boring people. But here’s what happened: In college, I juggled three part-time jobs and a full class load. I was both punishing myself and trying to stay as busy as possible to avoid the fact my father was dying. One of the jobs was at a bank as a teller. It was the last half of my senior year of college. I applied for an operations position in business banking. I didn’t actually know what that meant, but it paid $15 an hour compared to my $9.50 on the teller line. I’d wanted to apply for graduate school but I’d reached my limit and decided I would work for a year. Also, when I told the branch manager I wanted to apply to business banking, she laughed at me and said something incredibly mean that I’ve forgotten. But it was something like, You really think you could get a job in business banking?
The whole interview process into business banking was an ordeal, and it didn’t occur to me to say, “Hey, my dad is going to die in the next few weeks,” because all that was happening on a completely different planet. A different plane of existence. In fact, it wasn’t happening at all, and that was why I didn’t mention it.
I got the job, my boss ate her shoe about it, and everything was happening at the same time. I would go to one of my jobs and then to class and then to hospice where I’d do my homework while I watched my dad dying. I can barely remember this time in my life. I remember my dad’s last words to me before his mind left were, “I love you.” I remember sitting at his bedside being afraid of him even as his heart stopped beating, like he would wake up and yell at me for not being sad enough. I wasn’t sad, I was scared. In fact, up to that moment, I don’t think I’d ever felt any emotion other than fear. I remember looking at the clock in his hospice room at four a.m., his body still jerking with the aftershocks of death, wondering if I should go in for my first day of work in business banking and not tell anyone that my father had died just four hours earlier. Or maybe I would tell them and they would go, “So what?”
I ended up calling my new coworker, the woman who would be training me, and telling her my dad had died that morning. I didn’t say I wouldn’t be coming in; I waited for her cue. She was aghast and asked why I hadn’t mentioned it during the interview or any of the other interactions I’d had with her. She told me to take three days of bereavement, and she was sorry for my loss, and how old was he? Fifty-nine, I said. She said, That’s young. I said, He was sick for a long time, as if to say, It’s okay. Throughout that whole era of my life I felt like I was consoling other people—it’s okay, don’t worry about it, it’s fine, no big deal. After I hung up with her, I emailed my professors to say I wouldn’t be coming to class and that I would take whatever point deduction or failure my absence would entail. I remember being shocked that they showed me kindness and offered their condolences. Eventually, all my jobs and classes accounted for, I went back to bed.
Also, it was Valentine’s Day.
October 9, 2023
9:45am
Yesterday I went to Walmart with one of the other writers to buy some warmer clothes. Before that, I worked a little on Rabbit’s Blood, breaking out the story into manageable chunks, closer to a short story collection than a novel, because god help me if I ever try to write a plot again. When you write a plot, you’re tasked with relevance. Not what matters, but what matters to the plot? I want to write what matters to the characters. I want Rabbit’s Blood to be about the characters and the characters only.
Aboutness is a strange thing. Aboutness determines literary merit. What is your subject? Is your subject important enough for public consideration? Does your subject provide insight and nuance into a particular experience not otherwise known? How do you render that experience meaningfully?
The MFA does not teach you how to write. It teaches you your aboutness. Every creative knows their aboutness, but it is not always honed in craftable thoughts. Aboutness is not necessarily discrete. It may come in imagery. It may come in anger. It may come after years of research and thinking and looking.
As always, Mr. O’Brien says it all better than I can:
By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened…and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain.
One of my aboutnesses is working the night shift at a grocery store. I’ve written this into several stories over the years. I’ve never worked the night shift at a grocery store, but I had a boyfriend who did. We lived in an apartment across the street, and in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep, I’d walk over and follow him around while he stocked shelves. I took a lot of pictures of him working because I thought he was so beautiful, and his presence made the hideousness of a Kroger at midnight into something lovely. And when he went on break, we’d eat fast food together in his car. He made that beautiful, too.
I’d written that into so many stories that until recently, I had forgotten the real story. When I write it, it’s always the beginning of a relationship, something flourishing, a meet cute or I guess more accurately a meet strange. But the reality was that he had fallen out of love with me. In fact he was disgusted by me. I remember he would look at me like I was filth and I would take pictures of that too. And I would laugh because it was so outlandish—my father was dying and I was working sixty hours a week bank telling and altering bridal gowns and administrative assisting not to mention all the classes I was taking and the papers I was writing and the tests I was somehow acing. And my boyfriend thought I was vile, and I didn’t think anything of that because it was true. And I found out he was cheating on me a few months after my father died, with a girl who was tall and beautiful and innocent, and I couldn’t bring myself to care. But after that I began walking through life with the certainty that I wasn’t worth loving. Not because he didn’t love me but because I gave him nothing to love. I treated him and myself very poorly. And that is maybe why I write—to carve spaces for a kind of love I don’t know if I am worthy of, or even capable of.
5:30pm
I baked apple crisp for the residents and did my laundry. Both of these things gave me anxiety. I was afraid to be using the kitchen when the chef could have arrived at any minute. But I managed to take it out of the oven just moments before she pulled up. She buys our food and cooks our dinners Monday through Friday, but we’re left to our own devices for dessert. I completed my laundry successfully.
I did some difficult work on Skinless, the ripping apart and sewing back together of the climax. And it’s one of those things that’s just part of the process and always feels shitty—doing the big, obvious stuff first. Highlighting text and hitting backspace. Hitting enter and drafting out the bones of each new scene. It feels a little blasphemous to be writing new material. To me, the story is over. I said what I wanted to say, and everything after has been vandalism.
Here’s what my daily schedule has naturally turned into over the past week:
8-9:45am: wake up, start coffee, take meds, shower, read
9:45-10:30: update writing log and feel guilty about all the depressing shit that comes out of my head
10:30-12: gold writing hours, aka some kind of drafting, anything that requires small-picture thinking (+ breakfast)
12-2: silver writing hours, aka bigger picture thinking like editing, plotting, moving stuff around (+ lunch)
2-5:30: bronze writing hours, aka biggest picture thinking like story breaking and idea generation (+ a snack)
5:30-6:15: update writing log, wash my dishes and coffee cup, prepare coffee for tomorrow, dick around until dinner
6:15-8:30: dinner with residents, clean-up
8:30-10: video game hours, night meds
10-12: queue up some Bob Ross, fall asleep
My routine at home is similar, except I usually have calls and other work to do from 12 to 7:30. I also struggle with figuring out what to eat and when to eat. And I don’t exercise regularly. If I could figure out a way to work those two things into my daily routine the way I’ve fixed my sleep schedule, I think I’d be a lot healthier and happier.
10:15pm
Have just returned from a fun evening with the other residents (who liked my apple crisp!). Let it be known that four of the seven residents at this place of high brow prestige are tumblrinas. In fact, at every residency I’ve ever attended, at every workshop and writing program, there are fanpeople. I have never encountered pretension at these places. Artists, I’ve found, are generally very eager to learn about the work of others and share their work in turn.
Which is all to say, I stood on my soapbox, re: fanfiction, tonight. Be proud of me; it’s taken a week to get here whereas usually it only takes me a few hours to bring up how cool fic is.
October 10, 2023
9:45am
I didn’t read much TTTC today, but what I did read was prescient. Here, O’Brien is talking about the nature of a true story, and why he’s fabricated the details of so much of the book. (This is an ongoing discussion between chapters/stories, this idea of the falseness of a “true war story.”)
I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is sometimes truer than happening-truth.
He goes on to say,
What stories do, I guess, is make things present.
I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again.
For some reason these lines conjured a memory for me. I don’t generally have discrete memories of my childhood, but I remembered once when I was, I don’t know, nine or ten, my father took me to a driving range. For some reason he was adamant that my sister and I learned how to golf. I think he thought it was a status thing. We weren’t wealthy people—in fact, instead of playing nine or eighteen holes in the morning like casual golfers, my dad would break onto golf courses in the middle of the night. We couldn’t afford golf, but when my father wanted something, he took it.
My father forcing me to memorize the rules of every sport and be able to play them all well is another story, but here, I had a driver that was probably too long for me and by that point I’d been playing softball for five or so years and I was used to swinging a bat parallel to the ground. So it was difficult to adjust to hitting a ball standing perfectly still on the astroturf, even though my father insisted it was the same general movement.
I kept missing the ball. I couldn’t keep my eyes on it. I was swinging and looking out at the range, because that’s the direction you look when a softball’s being hurled at you. And the fourth or fifth time I did this, my father took me by the shoulders. He got in my face, his nose just an inch from mine, and said calmly, “If you look away from that ball one more time, I will beat you.”
That is, to my memory, the actual happening-truth of that story. The story-truth was that he squeezed my arms so hard he left bruises in the shape of his fingers. He didn’t, at least not that time. But he did other times when he was angry for different but equally banal reasons. The story-truth is that I was scared and I cried. The happening-truth is that I was scared and I cried and I was angry. I remember the fear so well, and I forget the rage that went with it. And I remember the very last time he yelled at me, I was seventeen and I was doing my homework in my room and he raged in and started screaming about how he found a dollar bill in the cup holder of my car. Someone will break into your car for a dollar, how could I be so stupid, and so on. I remember being tired. I remember saying, “Okay, sure, Dad. Sorry. It won’t happen again,” because he was dying, and what do you say to a dying man? No, that’s the story-truth. The happening-truth was that he was sick but we didn’t know he was dying yet. The happening-truth was that when I went to go get the dollar bill out of my cup holder, I just left, I drove away because I had a car and because I could. I don’t remember where I went.
1:00pm
One of the directors brought us croissants, and they are making me feel slightly better about seemingly destroying a novel that I was once proud of. This is all new territory for me. I’ve developed the same kind of foundational shame and doubt I felt during the PhD. Like my work isn’t allowed to exist but also I can’t stop making it, so what do I do with myself? I used to feel so close to Henry and now he is a stranger to me, just some guy, a facsimile of a body wandering through a story. I keep telling myself that I just have to work through it, that I have to try things and reorganize and thread it all together again, and when I do that maybe I’ll like it. But every change I make just makes me hate it more. It’s like cutting comfort food out of your diet. Sure, boiled chicken and broccoli is good for you, but how long can you deprive yourself of the food that makes you happiest, even if it is not the healthiest?
4:45pm
My brain is powering down earlier than usual. What I did was write out a list I titled IDEAL REVISION and listed everything I took out that I wanted to put back, as well as everything I’d changed that I wanted to keep changed. Ultimately I’m still incorporating a huge portion of the feedback I’ve received. After I finished my list, I made a copy of the gutted version and titled it Skinless v1.5, and started putting back all the things that I hated taking out of v2. I still have a lot of doubts, but at least I feel a little better.
October 11, 2023
3:30pm
A friend messaged me this quote from Melville to Hawthorne:
What I most feel moved to write, that is banned,—it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches.
I’m very much feeling that. We always hear stories about the eventual success of innovators whose work is initially frowned upon, but that’s success bias. Van Gogh died before he could see his work widely lauded, and actually if he had survived it may not have been discovered or uplifted at all. His “suicide” and the mystery around it—his madness and suffering and relationship with Gaugin—is what made people pay attention to his work.
I just got distracted by reading a paper on schizotypy, which defines it as “a set of personality traits thought to reflect the subclinical expression of the signs and symptoms of schizophrenia.” This is a very dense article and sometimes I think I got an undergraduate degree in psychology just to prepare me for being able to understand these papers.
Visual abnormalities in relation to schizotypy are already evident at early stages of processing, beginning with abnormal P1, backward-masking, localization, and depth perception. Schizotypy has also been associated with pervasive problems of perceptual organization.
Admittedly I had to look up “backward-masking” and I’m still not quite sure what it means.
WHOA okay, I’ve just made a connection [insert that one meme of “I’ve made a connection, I’ve made it”]. So one thing I’ve been trying to research is my startle response. A google search for “late onset severe startle response” doesn’t net a lot of helpful information, but it has led me to the phrase “low latent inhibition.” In this article, it says,
An additional paradigm that has been widely used in schizophrenia and schizotypy research is latent inhibition (LI). In LI, exposure to an irrelevant stimulus prevents conditioning with the stimulus being formed at a later time. A well-replicated finding is that unmedicated schizophrenia patients with positive symptoms display reduced LI relative to healthy controls.
And the Wikipedia article for LI says,
It is hypothesized that a low level of latent inhibition can cause psychosis, a high level of creative achievement, or both, which is usually dependent on the individual's intelligence. When they cannot develop the creative ideas, they become frustrated or depressive.
October 12, 2023
10:30am
Just finished TTTC. I think Monica must have given up after Rat Kiley shoots himself in the foot. Her final note, in yellow highlighter, reads, Rat Kiley went crazy. I’m surprised I have nothing to say about it now. I need to let it sit.
My revisions on Skinless are helping me better understand what’s important, and so it’s easier now to see how much of my 200k of Best Kept was just me building the characters. And the, god, 136k I took out of Skinless was the same thing. I have to make the characters from nothing. I have to know their whole lives. And once I’ve built the life, I can begin to carve the story from it. I, personally, am interested in all of it—the day to day minutia, the gradual change over time, the ways people don’t change at all and should. But I recognize that when you walk into a store, you don’t need everything in it, just what you want to buy. But the store still needs to be there. You still have to know all your options.
October 13, 2023
9:45am
Unfortunately I don’t have names for the stages of revision I’m doing on Skinless, so I’ll try to explain the symbols I’m using. In my drafting process, I use headers to navigate between chapters. In each header is a symbol of the chapter’s status, the chapter number, and the word count. For example, “+ 12. 3400” means that there’s no developmental work left to do in chapter twelve, which is currently 3400 words. My symbols are:
“-” (hyphen): In real bad shape. Entire scenes are either missing or need to be cut, and/or I maybe don’t yet know how to tackle revisions for that chapter. In my drafting method, this is the symbol for the skeleton draft. For revision, the most accurate phrase I can think of is “the oof stage.” As in, oof this is rough.
“x” (the letter x): Everything is where it needs to be, but there may be scene descriptions in brackets still, or significant things to add or cut, but ultimately I know how to move forward.
“+” (plus sign): All scenes have been written and the transitions/connective tissue between them make sense. In drafting, this is the up draft symbol. Writing still needs to be polished and/or punched up.
“🗸” (checkmark): Good to go. Don’t need to look at it again until my final read-through.
I’m really glad I didn’t post Part III of my “how to write a novel” series yet, because I’m learning a lot about revision and incorporating feedback. I think that’s what’s really cheered me up the most—I’m learning stuff! I’m improving! And I’m in completely new territory.
October 17, 2023
4:00pm
I found a coffee table book of Van Gogh’s paintings from Auvers and Saint-Rémy. It was published in 1986, prior to the most recent biography, so I forgive its assertion that Vincent committed suicide. However…
In van Gogh’s case there was what has been seen as a preordained progression from asylum (with the implied assumption of madness) to suicide, which has fueled the myth of the mad genius. But whatever the illness may have been—and some form of epilepsy seems the most probable, whether exacerbated by absinthe, glaucoma, Digitalis poisoning, or syphilis—the fact is that it did not directly affect his work. His paintings are neither graphs of his so-called madness, nor primarily indicators of his mental state. Between his breakdowns at the asylum he had long periods of absolute lucidity, when he was completely master of himself and his art.
…is kind of obnoxious. You know, in the PhD program, I got scolded multiple times for diagnosing historical figures when said diagnoses didn’t exist at the time, but psychiatrists researching Van Gogh’s whole deal have no such reservations. I’ve read many papers discussing in retrospect what he may have had. Anyway, I agree, the absinthe, syphilis, and poisoning from the paint he ate definitely didn’t help, but dude had issues before all that. It wasn’t like he grew up a happy kid with lots of friends and an easy childhood. He was born weird, his parents noticed, and shipped him off to boarding school so they wouldn’t have to deal with him. At the school, he didn’t have friends and eventually just straight-up left. There’s a whole era of his life before the whores and drinking where he exhibits psychotic symptoms. And I haven’t seen a single person assert that maybe he was on the schizo-spectrum? Maybe not full-blown schizophrenia but Diet Coke schizophrenia not unlike yours truly?
I get salty about not only the “myth of the mad genius” but also the fairly recent overturning of said myth. Hear me out—there are many kinds of mental health issues. Some are more conducive to creativity than others. Depression? Not creative. Anxiety? Not creative. Attention problems? Not always creative. But let me tell you, when you’ve got voices in your brain that won’t shut the fuck up and a decently high verbal intellect, you’ve got things to say. Van Gogh wasn’t just a painter, he was a writer. He wrote beautiful letters in which he expressed his inner pain and his external world. He was a renderer. He liked to share the particular, lonely way he saw reality. He wanted people to understand.
October 18, 2023
2:00pm
I intended to work on Skinless today but I ended up making tiny edits to The Group W Bench, which put me in the mood to break out Rabbit’s Blood, so that’s what I’ve been working on all day.
6:30pm
I got distracted from the previous entry by researching the selective service lottery for a story called Ball and Urn, which serves as a kind of prologue to Rabbit’s Blood. I made a ton of progress today. Like, “I know enough about the story that I can finally start writing this” progress. I have the big threads woven through but the smaller things will unveil themselves when I start drafting.
I stopped early to go to Steepletop and wait for the chef to finish cooking so I could bake a cake for dessert tonight. I’m extra jumpy today. Like I screamed when I saw a fly in the corner of my vision. I’ve been shaking a lot too. I am feeling very fragile.
11:15pm
The cake was good! Everyone liked it. I’m also thrilled to say while I was baking the cake I figured out how Rabbit’s Blood should end, and I don’t think it’s cheesy or anything even though it’s happy. It feels earned.
October 19, 2023
10:15am
You know, for years I wondered how my dad didn’t end up going to Vietnam. I thought maybe it was because of his leg—along with missing two toes, he also had knee problems. But no. I looked up his birthday and found out his lotto number wasn’t drawn. And he always used to say he was unlucky. It would’ve been so easy just to ask him. Just to call him and say, “Hey, you were born in 1951. Why weren’t you drafted?” And he would’ve told me some long-winded and probably not true at all story, and I’d be on the phone with him for three hours while he’d be at work not doing work because that’s at least one thing we have in common. I talk about him like he’s the monster of my nightmares but I do think if he were still alive, he’d think what I’m doing with my life is “too cool!” which was one of his favorite phrases, and when you hear it in your head you need to emphasize both words separately. So like “too!” and then “cool!” I don’t know if he’d want to read my work or if he’d give me privacy in that regard like the rest of my family. But one thing I’m pretty sure of is that he’d support my writing career. He wouldn’t hound me about getting a real job because god knows he never had one himself.
But also—if he hadn’t died, I don’t know that I even would’ve become a writer. Sometimes it feels like the moment he died was the moment I was born, and before that I’d been someone else, someone with both feet in reality. Maybe that’s just what growing up is, and I did all mine all at once on February 14, 2011.
2:45pm
I’m in a coffee shop in this tiny hipster town with a few of the other residents. Across the street is a bookstore and I bought a bunch of stuff I probably shouldn’t have, but in my defense I ran out of physical books to read and they’re all relevant to my research interests. And on sale! I found a Van Gogh art book for $25 which is a steal.
October 20, 2023
10:30am
Yesterday at the bookstore there were these two tables out front with books that were on sale, and I thought, the universe will show me what to read next. A moment later, I found a tome of a book called The Vietnam Reader: The Definitive Collection of American Fiction and Nonfiction on the War. It was 50% off and exactly what I was looking for—an expansive text that would give me both a high-level overview and also nuanced detail of that era. I can’t get too caught up in research; this is all only for one chapter/story in Rabbit’s Blood. Half a chapter, even.
After I read the introduction, I went downstairs to get my laptop charger and ended up falling back asleep for an hour. Now I’m groggy and disoriented. It’s raining.
I’ve been working with one of the residents on a couple jigsaw puzzles while we watch movies at night. Jigsaw puzzles remind me so much of the creative process—you have to do everything piece by tiny piece. Obvious things first: pour the pieces out of the box, turn them right-side up, look for all the edge pieces, begin constructing the border. And once you have that, you look at your table and you still have so much more to go, and you think, how am I ever going to do this? But, oh, there—that piece has half of a signature on it. It goes in the bottom right corner. And there, that one looks like this strange shape near the edge. And you do that over and over and over again, a thousand times, and sometimes you’re on a roll, you’ve gathered up all the pieces for one part of the puzzle and you’re slotting in one piece after the next; and sometimes you’re at it for hours without finding a single one, and it goes back to feeling impossible. There’s no way to cheat. No way to make the process go any faster than it is—searching, trying, no, that doesn’t work, next piece. Piece by piece, word by word.
When people ask me, how do you stay motivated? How do you see a project through? I guess the answer is that I want to see what kind of picture the puzzle makes.
4:45pm
One of the residents told me she couldn’t sleep one night and walked past my room and heard me scream in my sleep. So that’s not great.
Today after the previous entry I went back to bed and slept for an hour, then I worked a little on Ball and Urn and wrote 1560 words. Then I fell asleep for another hour.
9:00pm
I’m utterly mortified. I went to dinner tonight and I was fine, then someone started playing some YouTube videos. One was the sound of someone eating and the volume was very loud. I asked if we could not listen to that. He started playing some other recordings, and one of them started with a sudden noise and I startled—I’ve been startling 20 times a day for the past week. And then I just started crying and had to leave.
I’m just stunned that I’ve been able to hide so well for so long and I can’t anymore. It’s visible. There’s part of me that’s always been skeptical about having PTSD, or severe PTSD anyway, because I really don’t think any of it was that bad. I know the PTSD is related to the schizotypy and vice versa, but when does it end? Will I end up in an institution eating paint like Van Gogh? Will I plateau eventually? Will the hallucinations and delusions get worse?
And what really pisses me off is that there’s not even any payoff, like I’m not some kind of creative genius. I’m not going to become famous or change the world. I think of Van Gogh all the time and I relate to him, his struggles and his loneliness, but I’m not him. I have no beautiful landscapes. I write smutty fanfiction and mediocre realism.
October 21, 2023
11:00am
As you might imagine, I am not doing well. I feel as though I’m reaching the end of something I’ll only be able to see years from now. I’m experiencing mild negative psychotic symptoms—struggling to move in a coordinated fashion and moving slowly. I haven’t tried to talk aloud but I imagine I won’t be able to speak eloquently and I will have to think ahead of every sentence, unless it is something scripted like, “No, thank you,” or, “Yes, please.” I can always remember my manners.
Here’s what I think happened:
From January to June of this year, I read Van Gogh’s 1000-page biography alongside writing Skinless, and both of those things had severe mental and emotional consequences. Van Gogh’s timeline bears an uncanny resemblance to mine, especially in regard to his mental deterioration over time and myriad failed attempts at living a “normal” life and making a family. I, along with most everyone else in the world who has heard of Van Gogh, thought that eventually he succumbed to his illness and killed himself. But that’s not true. He was doing decently well when he died, but he had moved to a new town where the young boys began terrorizing him for how visibly mentally disabled he was. And one of them shot him. Van Gogh didn’t fight to live, though, and told Theo and everyone else that he had tried to kill himself, even though the angle he was shot was physically impossible to have been self-inflicted.
Ableism killed Vincent van Gogh. That brought me a mild amount of solace, because I can mask very well. Or at least, I could.
Meanwhile I was working on Skinless, which as the title implies, destroyed all barriers between myself and my work. I really put everything into that story. It’s the most vulnerable thing I’ve ever written. I feel closer to it than I’ve ever felt toward anything else.
I think trying to revise Skinless has pulled the rug out from under me, that kind of self-invalidation and constant doubt that totally unmoors me. I think that was the pebble that cracked the windshield, and everything else has made that crack splinter.
Van Gogh believed he had a lot of love to give. All he ever wanted was a family that loved him as much as he loved them. But there was something about him that made even those who loved him most, like Theo, stay at arm’s length. Through most of his letters, Theo only seemed to pity him.
I think often, not just of madness, but of the witness thereof. People are drawn to suffering. They gawk at car accidents, indulge in gossip. Pain is interesting as long as it is not being felt.
October 22, 2023
9:30am
I just want to go home.
11:00am
I do residencies because mentally they’re usually a hard reset. I spend so much time alone that an artist residency allows me to meet new people and remember I’m real even though I don’t feel like it. I get a lot of work done, make friends, and return home more stable than when I left.
I don’t think that’s been the case here. This begs the question—should I stop doing residencies? Am I so unwell that I can’t last even 4 weeks away from home?
2:45pm
I decided I’m probably going to leave early, maybe midday tomorrow or early Tuesday. I’ll have to reach out to the director and see how heinous an offense that is, but I’m just done here.
I have to go pick up a cake for a resident’s birthday. Then I don’t know what. A party in the barn I guess.
9:00pm
We had our little surprise party and ate cake. She was very surprised and cried and blew out a million candles that we put across Domino’s cheesy bread. I did very little to help put this together but I’m glad it worked out. It’s hard to have a birthday away from home.
October 23, 2023
12:00pm
Sometimes it feels good to reach a breaking point. It’s freeing to be able to say, “I am unwell, and my highest priority is my health, sorry I can’t pretend to have emotional affect anymore. I’m going to stare into space now, thanks.” Just give zero fucks because you’re all out of them anyway.
I also texted the director to say I’m having health issues and I’ll be leaving soon. She said she’ll send me departure notes, so I’m waiting for those. Depending on how much work there is, I’ll be leaving tomorrow or Wednesday morning. Ideally tomorrow. I found a Microtel for a hundred bucks in PA, so I’ll be driving 6 hours one day and 4.5 hours the next. That sounds fun, honestly. Driving is one of the few things that calms me down.
I want to go home, sleep, and watch a lot of TV. I want to be in complete solitude for at least 3 days. And then next week I want to get back to work.
11:00pm
A good final night. We had some good conversation and then watched a film called Museum Hours. I worked on the puzzle and we made a lot of progress. If nothing else, I feel calm.
Final Thoughts
October 30, 2023
12:00pm
Before I left, I went to a little diner with a few of the other residents and we had a lovely time. I had a very large breakfast and left with a huge soup container of lemonade which I was drinking all day. Then I said goodbye to the residents and left.
I really enjoyed the drive home—it was very beautiful and I wasn’t in a hurry. I took I-84 and avoided tolls, and stayed at a hotel in Pennsylvania. When I got home, I immediately developed a bad cold so I’ve been sleeping a lot, ten to twelve hours a day, and otherwise watching television and eating carbs. I haven’t been writing.
As soon as I got home, I started feeling better mentally (if not physically), although I’m still left wondering what my limitations will become in the next year, two years, ten years. If I can continue supporting myself. If breakdowns will happen more easily and frequently. If I will ever be published. If, if, if.