Category Archives: Background Checks

Rebranding this blog. Not moving to substack. Still hate transphobes

I started my personal journal in 2008, when the format was already dying. Now after fifteen years it's come back again--Twitter is done, newsletters rule the roost. I subscribe to like ten paid newsletters! And I've thought, you know, I probably shouldn't ignore this phenomenon entirely.

At the same time, the only reason I am still here is that I'm on an open platform, accessible from the web at large, and one where I have free access to the data. If I'd had a lot invested in my Twitter account, that would be gone now, for instance. Same if I'd gotten big on, I dunno, Medium or TinyLetter, which both seem like wastelands.

It makes a lot of financial sense to get in early on a platform and try to make a lot of subscribers quick. Early in the life of a platform, they tend to incentivize and promote discovery of new accounts. Eventually, platforms begin to monetize potential discovery though, by introducing advertising, so if you want to grow you have to pay to acquire subscribers (Twitter is one of the few that even ten years into its life cycle allowed some kind of organic discovery even for non-paid accounts).

Which is just to say, it's more sensible than not to chase the new platform and hope to grow quick enough that you can leap across platforms when the time comes. The moment of the open, freely-accessible internet will never come again. There's never gonna be a time again when mere search engine discovery will get you new users. You will always need a platform that incentivizes user discovery, as Substack currently does.

Nonetheless I'm not moving to substack. Just would hurt my heart to give up my little piece of the Internet that I built on my own, for fifteen years, and to give it over to a platform that seems like a bit of a haven for transphobes, quite frankly. So...no. On WordPress I remain. I thought about mirroring to substack, but that's not something either substack or wordpress wants you to do, so I thought fuck it, I'll just stay here.

That being said, there'll be a few changes around here! The first thing is a rebranding. I started to feel like the old layout was a bit stale, so I went with this new minimalist theme, it's called Seedlet. It allows me to just focus on the content. Secondly, I'm renaming the site again. It used to be called Blotter-Paper. Then in like 2013 I changed it to The War On Loneliness. And now I'm changing it to Woman of Letters.

Why? Well, just to keep things fresh. But that's also basically what I am.

As readers might know, I've gotten a bit heartsick over all the transphobia in the old-books-loving community. If Edmund Wilson or Lionel Trilling were alive right now, they'd most assuredly be transphobes. Most of the people online who are seriously interested in literature also seem to think the existence of trans people is somehow inexplicable or bizarre and go out of their way to invalidate us. As in the amusing case where an author decided to use they/them pronouns to describe people who had _only_ defined themselves as men. They argued that we can't know how they identified. But can't we? They identified as men! The use of they/them in this case was a middle-ground to allow some ambiguity in how they might've seen themselves and to avoid ahistorically 'claiming' them as trans people. But to not use male pronouns, especially for some of these people who lived and died as men, is a far greater anachronism! It's literally forcing our own notions of biological essentialism upon them (Here's the book, by the way).

I mean, yeah, but isn't it ahistorical in a MUCH BIGGER way to call them women? And yet most people think this way. They've got blinders on. They're like, oh, trans people are the crazy ones, projecting our notions onto the past, if we say a person who lived and died as a man, and often was regarded by their community as a man, was actually...a man. No, the litterateurs ay, they're a woman. To say otherwise is to be ahistorical.

People literally can't see the irony of this statement.

Part of me wants to go to war over this tendency, because it's so smarmy. The, JK Rowling style "I love trans people, I just care that some MEN are MENACING WOMEN in WOMENS PRISONS AND JAILS." Like, yeah, you love all trans people, except that "you" get to decide who's really trans and who isn't, and everyone who isn't, you get to dismiss as 'really' a man. Rape is illegal, whether you're a man or a woman. Men and women can rape. There is zero evidence that trans women are more likely than cis women to rape (though much more likely TO BE RAPED). So to dwell incessantly on the peculiar threat posed by trans women is the essence of transphobia.

And if people were just like, yeah I think trans women are gross and invalid, that would be one thing. But that very smarminess, that very pretense at caring, makes you think they could be reached. But they can't.

My response has been to treat all dispatches from the outside world as mere textual documents. I imagine myself at the top of a very tall tower, equipped with a pneumatic tube, and I open the messages, read through them, chortle about the affairs of the fallen world, and then look through the books in my library to find that one obscure quote that I need for my article. Hence, woman of letters.

Okay, to get off the whole transphobes in the literary world thing, I also have to say, my career is weird.

This month, my YA novel went to copy edits, I wrote and had accepted a YA short story for an anthology, I saw a short story come out in Analog of all places, and I think that I had a poem come out somewhere too (The Tampa Review?) and I had the piece come out in Tablet too. Who the hell has something come out in Analog and the Tampa Review in the same month. Weird! The fact that I have amongst the most high-brow interests and tastes of anyone I know is consistently amusing to me, especially when I get slammed as an elitist or something.

Like, gurl, I write young adult novels! Some chick whose novel is coming out from Knopf and who went to the Iowa Writer's Workshop is gonna be like, wow, this YA novelist and sci-fi writer is an elitist. Silly! Utterly silly! It's consistently amusing the way that literary writers pretend to some kind of mass tastes. Whereas I don't pretend to be of the people in any way, shape or form (in particular, I lack that mystical communion with the 'average American' that intellectuals love to channel in order to shout each other down), but out of all of us who write about literary stuff, I'm the only person selling books to average people!

Not a lot of average people, it's true, and even if it was a lot, it would be meaningless, since popularity of any sort is mostly a fluke, but it's still amusing!

No weekly links this week and maybe no more blog posts this week either. I'm getting over a bout of facial feminization surgery that I had last Monday. Was under the knife for twelve hours! Definitely quite fatigued for a week, and even today I'm not the tippy-toppiest, and my face is looking pretty rough. Will tell you about it later. Oh, and in the meantime, my new URL is woman-of-letters.com. The old ones will keep working indefinitely too of course! And of course here's the subscription link, if you want to start getting my newsletter as emails.

A short description of how I came to write for Tablet

This week, I had two pieces published. One was in Tablet. The first is my review of Matthew Salesses's Craft In The Real World. I read the book a year ago and was profoundly unimpressed. I simply didn't believe most of the things the author said about how fiction in other cultures works, and it was surprising to me that the author didn't seem to have read a lot of books that weren't by American authors. This is a book that people are constantly citing and gushing over, and it just seemed like a very "Emperor's New Clothes" situation. You don't want to shit on something that's promoting diversity and tolerance, so you say nothing. The world is full of nonsense, and sometimes it's simply rude to call it out, especially when so many poor and marginalized people seem to find comfort in this specific nonsense.

But when the author took a job at Columbia University's famously exploitative MFA program, I thought, well, if people are going to spend 150k a year to learn from this person, then their ideas should be held up to more scrutiny. I don't mind if people talk some nonsense just to sell books--we all have to make a living, and god knows I play the diversity game the same as every other queer or non-white writer--but ideally the aim is to just con a few dollars out of thousands of people. When you're a professor at Columbia, some of your students are literally ruining their lives with debt in order to study there. And that's fine, too--they're adults and it's their choice. But still, if you're going to make a living by ruining peoples' lives, then your work needs to be really good. The benefit to society has to be worth the cost to these specific people. And in this case, I didn't think the calculus held up.

The essay sat with an editor from LitHub for three months, who said it wasn't right for them. Then it was accepted by the LA Review of Books, by the old editor in chief, Boris. It was edited and ready to go on Jan 21, which happened to be the same week Salesses went viral for an absurd Columbia University syllabus (attracting the ire of Fox News and the like). The article didn't post. Boris had left the journal, but the managing editor said it had been bumped to next week. Next week it didn't post either.

I got a call from the new editor in chief of LARB, who essentially said she didn't agree with the piece politically--she believes that the advice given in Master of the Fine Arts programs was systematically racist and harmful to non-white writers. That may very well be true! It wasn't my experience as a non-white person in an MFA program--my experience was that the advice in MFA programs is systematically nonsense and if slavishly followed will be harmful to writers of any color, but that most people involved know the advice is nonsense, and you just need to pay attention and listen to what people have to teach and discard the rest. But my review wasn't a defense of the MFA, it was a critique of the specific claims made in this specific book.

The call didn't go well. She wanted edits. I was hesitant. We argued, and she pulled the piece. It's odd in the extreme to have a phone call with an editor, but I assume the reason was so there wouldn't be a written record of her objections that I could've then quoted in this blog post. I would have done exactly the same things! I don't fault her for pulling the piece--no editor will publish a potentially controversial article that they disagree with politically. Moreover, she's a new editor, and the LA Review of Books recently had a controversy where the last person they hired to fill her job loudly fell out with them, calling them racist. So it's understandable that she didn't want controversy. If I fault her at all, I fault her for having 'political commitments' that made her unable to see the truth of my arguments.

Feeling somewhat burned by this experience, I pitched Tablet, which is a Jewish journal that's rebranded itself as an anti-woke publication. It's not precisely conservative, but especially in the last year its coverage has taken a transphobic turn. They published a truly bizarre article last summer, for instance, about how the billionaire Pritzker siblings are brainwashing kids into accepting "Synthetic Sexual Identities" (the author of the article refuses to even use the term 'transgender'). The anti-trans stuff is disgusting, but the truth of the matter is that in 2023 it would be very difficult for me to find a journal that agrees with me on aesthetic matters but which isn't anti-trans. I actually have another essay circulating which is about that exact conundrum, but it hasn't found a home yet. The LA Review of Books would've been a fine place for it, but I doubt my work is welcome there anymore.

Well, c'est la vie. The piece is out, and I'm quite pleased with it.

Oh yeah, the second thing that came out was my story in Analog: "Citizen Science", Looking back, it's mostly about my experience as a literary critic who works outside the academy, and how the terms I use are often so different that people in the Academy don't even understand what I'm talking about. But that doesn't necessarily mean I'm wrong or confused (although it sometimes does)! Like in the case of this Salesses article, it's precisely because I am not an academic that I am familiar with both contemporary American MFA-derived fiction and with Classical Chinese literature--to find that combination in a typical English department would be rare in the extreme. But that's neither here nor there.

Other stuff that happened this year

Normally at the end of the year I write about what's happened in my personal life this year. I suppose it's been a good year. I've signed contracts for two books, and I've delivered my third YA novel. If we count my cynical guide to publishing, I've got six books out or under contract.

Transition has continued apace. I've been looking into my surgical options lately, and my hormone regime has (I hope) stabilized. I still experience significant dysphoria, but that's life.

I got COVID, like most people, but it thankfully wasn't very severe. I've kept up significant COVID precautions: I don't go unmasked indoors, even to eat, and we only have a few visitors in our house, and we usually make those visitors test. To some people that seems excessive, but my wife is an infectious disease doctor, and that's what makes her feel the most comfortable, which is mostly okay for me.

Oddly enough, one of the stories that resonated the most with me this year was Bambi (by Felix Salten), which is about Bambi's growth and maturity, until in the end he comes to replace his father, the Old Stag. Part of this growth is that he retreats further and further from the world of the other deer, until eventually he starts to live on the other side of the stream, and only return to their part of the forest when they're in trouble. It's a powerful portrait of traditional masculinity.

I've certainly felt that urge to withdraw more from society, particularly online society. Twitter has gotten more and more boring. There've been some appalling online controversies this year that've just made me feel exhausted. And I've realized that very few people in my part of Twitter are even marginally interested in the things I care about (like, for instance, a new translation of Bambi).

It's been interesting that so many people are able to create their own community on Substack, and I suppose that's something I could consider doing, but for now I prefer to write here, where I've always written.

Lately I've been thinking more and more about what's eternal. I think reading Schopenhauer and Husserl has really helped. The phenomenological turn in philosophy is really exciting to me (as, I'm sure, it was to many people in the 19th century). Instead of looking for objective truth in the world of ideas, we can look for it in the more concrete, sensory world. The key insight of Husserl, so far as I can tell, was that all ideas have their roots in the 'life-world'--the concrete, physical world of human beings, seeing and experiencing in a simple way. And that in returning to that physical world, it's possible to see how this idea arose and what its connection to reality might be. In that way it's similar to William James's Pragmatism (which assesses ideas in terms of how they're useful to human beings). In another way, it's similar to Marxist critique, which analyzes ideas in relation to their concrete relationship to the means of production and to the replication of capital.

The point is that instead of trying to order the world through reason, one might instead order reason through our experience of the world.

The problem of course breaks down when we attempt to communicate this truth, which one must inevitably do using abstract ideas, to people who then only understand these ideas in the context of other ideas, and never allow the real world to animate those ideas. As a writer, that's frustrating, and it's an ever-present technical problem (how to communicate a concept in its fullness). But as a human being, that problem is immaterial, since the point of finding truth is to find it for oneself.

The online world is useful, but only as a gloss for the real world. Too often in the online world, concepts aren't allowed to live in their full complexity. Instead someone takes a complex idea. Like, for instance, they take the idea that "Nationalism was invented in the 19th century" and try to suggest that nationalism is artificial or unnatural or is entirely a social construct. And then someone else is like, "If that's true, why did Greek-speaking people regard non-Greek-speaking people as barbarians". And then there's a lot of tussling and arguing about nothing.1 It's just tiresome.

For a while this year I wondered "What is the point of this? Why do I do what I do?" And I tested out the idea that I'm doing it for the greater good: to help people. But that just didn't seem correct. I don't think my work helps people, particularly, and that's also just not a goal that motivates me particularly.

But I'm also clearly not doing this for the glory. Although I have as good a chance of success as any mid-career author, that chance of success is still quite low. I haven't 'broken out', in industry parlance, and, moreover, I no longer have the strong belief that I 'deserve' to break out. I mean, of course I deserve it, because breaking out is totally random, and my work is better than most work that breaks out. But is it really the best even out of all the work that doesn't break out?

There is a lot of great unpublished or forgotten work out there. I've seen plenty of manuscripts which ought to have done well, but didn't get agents, or even sell. For a long time, I thought what made me uniquely deserving was that I worked harder and had more grit than anyone else. And that's true to a degree--it was certainly true during my twenties--but nowadays my financial circumstances mean I have many fewer demands on my time than most of my other unsuccessful writer friends have. I have childcare, and I don't have a full-time job. Those things alone make it quite easy to be productive, by the standards of the thirtysomething year old writer. Now, do I work harder than lots of other full-time writers? Definitely! But I still am less sure that I am uniquely deserving.

Lately I've come, reluctantly, to realize that it's the work itself that's motivating. I like reading. I like understanding more. This year, by getting into German philosophy, I've started to expand my limits and fight back against the imposter syndrome that used to attack me whenever I wrote about more cultured topics.

I don't precisely know where my fiction will go. I've got a good idea for another YA novel. I really like the YA, and out of all my work it's certainly the most 'important.' I've started my soon-to-be-announced non-fiction book, and that's going really well. And I'm kicking around some ideas for a new literary book. I don't know whether fiction will continue to be motivating for me. Some days it seems easier to just write in my own voice and to write all the things I know directly.

But who knows! I don't necessarily think my work is uniquely worthy or important, but it's certainly the best possible use of my own time. In terms of what I could be doing on a daily basis for the rest of my life, there's nothing more worthwhile than reading or writing.

My home life is good! My baby bear is healthy and speaking a lot, being a typical toddler. Really sweet one moment, really willful the next. Still, the terrible two's haven't proven nearly as terrible as expected.

My wife is also incredibly successful at her work! Very proud of her! And she got a permanent job in San Francisco, so I'm luxuriating in our continued residence in this city.

We didn't have fires this year, so San Francisco was glorious, with warm weather continuing well into November (something that makes COVID self-restrictions a lot more bearable). After bouncing from the bed to the guest-room and back to the bed, I finally found a permanent office space: Rachel found a really nice narrow desk that fits into our bedroom, and I got a little chair and mounted a monitor on the wall. So now I'm also permanently housed in our bedroom, which is a lot better than having to be office-less whenever we have guests (which is quite often).

Now that I have a permanent home, I've been shuffling around my books. I have a bunch of reference books (mostly on world literature and the history of the novel) that I was keeping downstairs, and I moved them upstairs. Then I put a whole bunch of other books into boxes, but I made little inventories of what's in each box, and the books might live in the boxes for a while, or in storage. And I of course have some books in the living room to make me look smart.

I cracked the DRM on my whole ebook library and started using this fancy chinese e-reader, the Hi Reader and a 3rd-party e-reading app KOreader, which has reinvigorated my text reading practice.

Oh, and I also got really into meditating and mindfulness. I don't have a 'practice' or anything, but I've been getting better at doing just one thing at a time. And if I'm ever feeling hurried or anxious, I just slow down and walk slower or read slower or act slower. Paradoxically, that gives a feeling of abundance and helps me feel the endlessness of time. I realized that boredom is actually kind of a gift. Boredom is what happens when nothing is distracting me from the essence of life. It's fun sometimes to just sit quietly, alone, and watch time pass.

Of course, things can still be difficult when I'm forced to concentrate on a task that I find really dull or unpleasant. For a while my baby bear was obsessed with this board game that had a Where's Waldo element where you try and find things in a picture and put little magnifying glasses around them. I found it SO boring. There was no way to make it not-unpleasant. But I just did it.

Lately I've realized that I'm just always going to have certain thoughts and feelings. I'll always feel anxiety, always feel envy. But I also don't need to always inhabit the mental space where those things matter intensely to me. But it's an ongoing process, and I can't say that I've experienced enlightenment or inner tranquility yet (or that I ever will). Mostly I'm learning to just focus on what's directly in front of me.

I've also learned to not get too stressed out about tasks and objectives. Everything takes time, and it all gets done eventually. Feeling overwhelmed and behind is just part of life, but when I step back and think Is there any chance that this won't get done?, the answer is almost always no.

And that's it, that's my life. See you next year.

  1. In reality, nationalism was a political ideology--it was the notion that the proper way to organize states was as collections of linguistic / ethnic / cultural groups. So, for instance, all the German people would be in one state and all the Italian people would be in another state. Once the peoples were organized into states, there would be no reason for war, because conquering territory would become conceptually meaningless: why would you want to add the people of another 'nation' to your own 'nation'. But of course, nationalism instead for the first time allowed ordinary people to identify themselves strongly with the fortunes of the state, so instead it allowed mobilization of the nation's populace on an unprecedented scale, leading to heretofore unimaginable levels of war. Nationalism was an ideology that came from observing the world, however, and seeing that these proto-nationalist groupings existed already and had some power. The way 'nation' is defined, it's almost impossible for a pre-modern state to be called a 'nation', but that's mostly a matter of definition. That doesn't mean that pre-modern states couldn't also be 'imagined communities' where the populace identified itself with the state. Which is to say, everyone who argues about nationalism is basically correct, if they just took the time to think about it. ↩

Not an awards eligibility post, just some random year-end back-patting

Hello friends. I don't do awards eligibility posts anymore, because I'm a literary author now and all our awards are juried awards. No, I'm just kidding--it was because I was terrible at awards log-rolling, and it never went anywhere for me.1 But I did publish a lot of stuff this year! I published, umm, three essays: two on LARB and one on LitHub. One of my LARB essays, on the dreariness of book club discussions, was one of their top posts this year, according to their year-end wrap-up post. My LitHub essay, about literary fiction and money, was widely shared online and received lots of favorable comment.

When I first started publishing literary criticism last year, with my "The Myth of the Classically Educated Elite", I felt as if I'd really broken through and found a way of reaching a new audience. But this year I've reconsidered a bit. Dealing with LitHub was a prolonged and kind of embittering process. Felt like it created a considerable amount of extra aggravation in my life that I don't need. So where I started the year excited about pitching new publications, I've come to a place where I'm being considerably more selective about what I write and what I pitch. Personally, I continue to really like the LA Review of Books. They're not the fastest, but they're very no-bullshit. You can trust them. Not sure whether my relationship will continue there now that Boris Dralyuk, who's always been my contact, has stepped down as Editor in Chief, but I hope that it does!

Outside the realm of literary criticism, I've lost track of what I've published. I think that I had five stories come out. One in Analog, "Citizen Science". One in American Short Fiction, []"Goodwill"](https://americanshortfiction.org/goodwill/). One in the South Dakota Review, "Endings". And one in Saundra Mitchell's YA sci-fi anthology, Out There, My story for the anthology, "Nick and Bodhi", is kind of a corker. Probably my best story out this year.

I also had poems in North American Review, Cellar Door, Cherry Tree, and Tampa Review. None are available online, but that's probably a good thing because I don't think any of them are something to write home about.

No book-length publication this year. Spent most of the year writing a new draft of my under-contract YA novel, Just Happy To Be Here. It's possible the publication of the book will be delayed by the Harper strike (which my editor, Steph, has taken a leadership role in, for which I am very, very proud of them). But maybe it won't be, who knows! Am aiming for a Jan 2024 release date. Working on line edits now, which should be the last round of edits.

Was on submission for most of the year with a literary novel for adults. It was a miserable experience. Many rejections. Felt really bad about myself. But then it landed on the desk of the new publisher of Feminist Press, Margot Atwell, and she fell in love with it. Still feels kind of strange, Feminist Press is so highbrow. Like, there's a lot of room between them and HarperTeen! But I'm really happy to have a home, and even happier to be so highbrow. Have been doing heavy, heavy revisions on the book, tentatively entitled The Default World for the last two months. Aiming for a June 2024 release date.

So my first book came out in 2016. MY second in 2020. Now I have two books coming out in 2024, so you might expect three in 2028, but I'm breaking the Fibonnacci sequence by releasing a book in 2025! I just signed a contract for an as-yet-unwritten nonfiction book that'll come out in 2025. You'll never guess the publisher. I mean it. I could give you twenty guesses, and you still wouldn't be able to get it.2

So what did I write this year? Well I did a new draft of the YA novel, which took about three months, and I also did a substantial revision, where I rewrote about a third of it. That also took about a month. I spent two months rewriting the literary book. And then I spent at least two months on an adaptation of a count of monte cristo (a trans woman comes back to take revenge on people who screwed her over in her male life) that just never went anywhere. And I spent two months on a sci-fi novel that never went anywhere. And I spent at least a month on a linked collection that at least produced a number of stories I'm excited about, but ultimately I couldn't convince myself that it'd really work as a standalone project. Other than that, I wrote maybe seven stories: three of which are for anthologies and four of which were on-spec and are as-yet-unsold.

I didn't do a lot of submissions this year. I kept meaning to put together a submissions package. I subbed a literary story I really liked, but for the rest of it, nonfiction, sci-fi, poetry, etc, I just felt like it didn't matter much. I'll still improve as a writer, whether the work gets published or not, and it didn't seem all that important to seize the moment.

Being on sub royally sucked, but if I can compartmentalize that, it was a very good year. I got a lot of writing done. Particularly when I was working on my under-contract projects, writing was easy and fun. When I was trying to generate new book ideas, it was pretty painful. I'm working now on a new literary novel idea, but it seems extremely uncommercial. I'm having fun writing it, but really don't know if I'll go the distance with it.

I usually date the start of my writing career to December 2003, when I sent my first short story submission (to Ellen Datlow at SciFiction). That was nineteen years ago. Since then I've accumulated 2009 short story rejections, and a whole mess more rejections for other things. I do feel a bit like a writing professional, even though I don't get paid much, and I'm still really learning. I don't take bullshit anymore, but I also don't produce bullshit. Life is too short to get upset over edits or delays or any of that other stuff. I think knowing that I'm not the source of extraneous drama has made me more confident in pushing back when I genuinely do want something. When it came to putting the literary book on sub, I had a pronounced opinion (it'll never be a better time to sell this book than right now so let's send it to as many people as possible), and my agent was willing to be convinced by me. When I had questions about editors, I asked them. But if the answer was "they're ghosting us", I didn't get too mad. I asked for the truth so I got it. Felt good!

My MFA advisor told me once that it's really hard to sell a second book, and even selling a third book can be quite difficult, but he's found that if people sell a third book, they usually find their niche and manage to keep on publishing and make a career. I thought the idea was ludicrous at the time, but it's proven to be true. I sold my third book last year, and now here I am with books four and five selling in rapid succession. Bizarre!

I don't keep track anymore of how many words I write, so can't provide detaileds stats like I could in my early years. I generally write a few hours a day, I think. I sit down in the morning around 9:30 or 10:00, and if it's coming then it comes. Usually stop by 2 PM and try to do other things for the rest of the day. Recently have gotten better at incorporating reading into my daily schedule, and I now treat reading like an essential part of my career. But my reading news (along with personal stuff) will have to go in a different post

Out There ed. by Saundra Mitchell, cover

  1. All these references to awards eligibility and log-rolling are sci-fi world inside baseball stuff. And yes I spent a half-hour trying to figure out how to enable a more advanced version of markdown inside the WordPress editor just so I could more easily write this footnote, because that's the kind of person I am now. ↩

  2. It's princeton university press! I know, right? What a trip! An editor at PUP reached out to me after reading several of my LARB essays, and we put together a proposal. ↩

My decade in love, friendship, and publishing

It was in late January of 2010 that I quit drinking, which means that the close of this decade also means I've had almost a decade of sobriety. At this point I've been sober twice as long as I was drinking! The number of people in my life who knew me when I was drinking is not a small number, but it's certainly not a majority. My wife and her family and most of my writer friends all have no experience of that side of me.

At this point, when I write about being sober, I think some people suspect I'm making it up or exaggerating it! Once, a friend of mine, who thought she'd discovered some inconsistencies in my sobriety narrative, accused me of ginning up the whole sobriety thing to get attention. To which I say...LOL.

In 2010, when I quit drinking, I was twenty-four years old, still living in Washington, D.C., weighed about 330 pounds, had never really gone on a date or been in any form of romantic or sexual relationship, and my publications were limited to a single short story in Nature. I'd written around a hundred short stories by that point, I'd gone to the Clarion Writer's Workshop four years earlier, and I'd accumulated some four hundred or so short story rejections. I was about to be rejected by all eleven MFA programs to which I'd applied. I'd just come out as gay.

That year, I started my first novel, a science fiction novel for adults (to be finished the next year and promptly abandoned without revision). I also wrote twice as many words as I'd ever written in one year. I made my second significant short story sale, to Clarkesworld magazine. I tried to get a more permanent gig at the World Bank, where I was working, but my boss didn't have the budget to hire me. If I'd gotten that job, my life might be totally different right now! The previous year, I had decided that if I was going to be a real writer, I needed to be a real reader too, so I had embarked upon a campaign of reading the classics. In 2010, I read Anna Karenina, War and Peace, The Bell Jar, Journey to the End of the Night, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, What is Art?, The Charterhouse of Parma, every Sandman comic, and every Dashiell Hammett novel. That was probably the most significant year of reading in my life.

In 2011, I moved to Oakland, CA. I thought I was quitting my job at the World Bank, but I ended up continuing to do consulting work for them, which I do to this day! I quit smoking. I finished that science fiction novel, and I began and finished a second one, a YA dystopian called This Beautiful Fever whose first draft I wrote in eight days! I wrote a lot of short stories. This was probably my best year for short stories, both in terms of production and in terms of the number that would eventually sell. I started hooking up with men in all the usual (oftentimes somewhat sordid) ways, but still wasn't dating. Determined not to repeat the previous year's I applied to 28 MFA programs! I spent five evenings a week hanging out with my former roommate, Brian, and became good friends with many of his friends and coworkers. We went to lots of house shows in Oakland's twee-pop scene, but my fondest memories are just of hanging out in his house, chatting with whoever would come by. Nine years later, although many of those people have had children and/or moved away, I still count them amongst my close friends. I read True Grit, David Copperfield, Grapes of Wrap, Darkness at Noon, and Something Happened. I read every Adrian Tomine comic I could find. I started a life-long love of Emile Zola, going through Nana, Germinal, L'Assommoir, and the Masterpiece. And I read all seven volumes of In Search Of Lost Time, which was something I couldn't quite believe even as I was doing it--this seemed so far from my usual interests (I was still writing mostly science fiction)--but which has shaped my life and my thinking and my writing immensely in the years since. Toward the end of the year, I got very into noir novels, and I got deep into the ouevres of Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford.

In 2012, I was accepted to four MFA programs, and I chose to go to Johns Hopkins essentially because they offered me the most money. I started querying my dystopian novel, This Beautiful Fever. I got a head of steam on a sci-fi novel for adults, only to abandon it after thirty thousand words when I realized the book was no good. This began a pattern of abandoning books at the one-third, one-half, and sometimes even 90% completion mark. I wrote another sci-fi novel for adults, Boom, that I've never shown to anyone. That fall, after moving to Baltimore from Oakland, I started hearing the voice of Reshma, the protagonist of my first book. She sort of popped fully-formed into my head. All through my first semester of grad school, I'd hear fits and snatches of her voice: a sort of angry running commentary on everything in the universe. I put off writing the book, because I wasn't sure I could do it justice. Graduate school was fine. I turned in science fiction and fantasy stories into the workshop, and I didn't suffer at all for it. My cohort and the year above were composed of some very talented and hard-working writers. But almost everyone was married or engaged, and I did feel a little lonely. The whole thing was a bit claustrophobic, just the same thirtyish people hanging out every day and exchanging the same gossip or telling the same stories about teaching our classes. It seemed to lack the vitality I'd experienced in Oakland. Not the fault of Baltimore, by the way! I was charmed by the city; it's an extremely hip place to live, you have no idea how hip. But attending Johns Hopkins is not the way to experience that hipness. Looking at my records, this was the year I read Middlemarch, Pride and Prejudice, The Sportswiter, Things Fall Apart, The Feminine Mystique, The Pillow Book, and Revolutionary Road. I read most of Edith Wharton's major novels this year. She remains a huge influence. I fell in love with and was charmed by Nancy Mitford. I read the collected poems of Larkin and Eliot. I still don't know if I like poetry, but I at least like those two!

In 2013, during winter break, I wrote a first draft of Enter Title Here, which would eventually be my first published novel. Aside from one realist story I wrote for my MFA applications (to prove to application committees that I could do it!) it was the first sustained work of realism I'd ever engaged in. Writing that book was so easy that it was incredible, and that very easyness made it difficult for years after for me to write another novel. Through a complicated series of introductions and events, I got my first agent that year. This Beautiful Fever had been sent out to 95 agents at this point, but I finally got one offer, and that shook loose a second offer from a different agent, and I went with the second one. I spent the remainder of the year doing revisions on the book with this agent. During this time, I wrote my fifth book, another realist novel, which was an interesting idea, but somehow never came together. That fall, I wrote my sixth book, a contemporary YA about a troubled starlet who starts hearing the voice of God, (working title: On My Knees 4 U). And, incredibly, I wrote my seventh book too, a weird crime novel about a sociopathic mom who schemes to get her daughter into a school for talented and gifted kids. My YA dystopian novel, This Beautiful Fever, went on submission. At some point, it's hazy exactly when, I became close with a very talented writer, Courtney---a former graduate of Hopkins--who's become one of my closest friends. This Beautiful Fever was rejected by five editors, who seemed to universally agree that my protagonist was too pathetic (a lifetime problem for my writing!), but I didn't much care because I'd polished up Enter Title Here, and my agent loved it. We decided to put it on submission in the spring. This year I pitched my first article to a publication: a piece to Salon on Eddie Huang's memoir Fresh off the Boat (which would later, though I didn't know this at the time, become the basis for a hit sit-com). When I sent in the article, Salon decided they didn't like it and killed the piece. This mild rejection touched off my first major depression: two months of utter blackness. Although it'd begun with rejection, my depressed thoughts centered primarily on my loneliness, and how I was never going to find love (I still had never really gone on a date. I'd tried online dating, but somehow never connected with someone--I'd just chat and chat and chat and eventually the conversation would peter out). JHU offered free counseling, so I signed up for that. I started antidepressants. And after the depression lifted, I seriously started doing the online dating thing. A roommate told me that he always asked people out within the first ten messages in an exchange, and I was like, "Wait, you can do it that soon?" and he was like "Yeah, there's no point in just chatting endlessly". Armed with this knowledge, I started asking dudes on dates. The third or fourth of these guys was someone who loved movies and graphic novels and science fiction and also was extremely new to the dating thing. We became each other's first milestones for many things! I remember that winter we watched Ellen Page's emotional coming-out speech, and we both cried and held each other. I stopped being able to write science fiction stories, and I began turning in realist stories to workshop. This year I got really into German literature for some reason. It was more playful than French literature, but it was also about more serious subjects. It seemed to combine psychological penetration with a sense of fun! I read Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, Skylark, Beware of Pity, The Man Without Qualities, Radetzky March and Every Man Dies Alone. I also read Mrs Dalloway, A Simple Plan, Gone Girl, Les Miserables, The Interestings, and The Magicians.

In 2014, I sold my book and graduated from my program on the same day! I broke up with my boyfriend! I moved to New Orleans, and, after giving it up as a bad thing, I moved again after six weeks to Berkeley (best decision I ever made! Two months after selling my book, I lost my acquiring editor at Disney. I started having problems with my agent, who disliked both of the novels, the sociopathic mom and the teen starlet books, that I'd written the previous year. I know, the honeymoon period was short. I moved in with Sasha, who'd soon become a very close friend, and spent lots of time with her very off-beat hippy friends. I came out once again, as bisexual, and started going on dates with women, which, let me tell you, is a very different game from dating men! I got extremely depressed and went into therapy (again) and increased my antidepressant dosages (again). I was still writing and sending out short stories and by this time had sold stories to most of the smaller pro sci-fi journals, including several stories each to Nature and to Orson Scott Card's magazine. I also sold a weird realist story (told in the form of a chart) to The Indiana Review. This year I also met another person who'd become a close friend, a fellow YA writer, Erin, though it'd be years before we would truly reconnect. This year I read Doctor Zhivago, The Corrections, Tom Jones, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Sarashina Diary, and Dangerous Liaisons. I got into Yasunari Kawabata, who I still think has written some of the most beautiful books in existence.

In 2015, I suffered incredible writer's block. I can't count how many books I began and abandoned. Nothing seemed worth writing. I had a two-book deal with Disney, but had a terrible time trying to get them to agree to any of my ideas for the second book. My agent finally sent them a copy of This Beautiful Fever, and my editor liked it, but the acquisitions committee shot it down, saying a dystopian novel wouldn't sell. All I heard in my head was the voice of my editor and my agent, shooting down everything I was working on. My middle-grade novel went on submission to a very small round, but got rejected, and my agent sort of lost interest in it after that, and I was mostly focused on trying to write or think of some follow-up to my young adult novel. I would say that at this point, I had real, classic writer's block. I'd sit down and write, and everything would look like total garbage, and I'd delete everything. I just felt so empty of every possible idea. This was the year I stopped trying to write every day: it felt like there was no point. After a hundred rejections from him, I sold my first story to John Joseph Adams, which felt pretty good. I MET MY FUTURE WIFE, RACHEL, AND FELL IN LOVE AND KNEW ON OUR FIRST DATE THAT WE WERE PROBABLY GONNA SPEND OUR LIVES TOGETHER FOREEEEEEEVER! That was pretty cool. I went to Burning Man, which was cool, but not really for me. I read Thucydides, Boswell's Life of Johnson, Crime and Punishment, and a bunch of the less-silly Dialogues of Plato. I also got very into ethnography, and I read some great ethnographic studies of, amongst others, fashion models, working class college students, elite students vying for management consulting jobs, and working-class black men who are burdened with outstanding warrants. I read two excellent Jo Walton novels: My Real Children and The Just City. She is truly a treasure.

In 2016, my writer's block continued apace. I am not kidding when I say this writer's block consumed years of my life! I went from writing four novels in one year (2013) to being able to write basically nothing in 2014, 2015, and 2016. I just felt totally unmoored. I had no idea what I wanted to write. I tried everything, every form, every style. It was all just odious to me. This culminated in a terrible depression in the beginning of the year, which resulted in my antidepressant mix changing once again. However, in April of that year, as I was coming out of the depression, I wrote the first scene of what would eventually become We Are Totally Normal. The difference between the composition process for this book and for Enter Title Here could not have been more different. Where ETH just flowed from my fingers, We Are Totally Normal took a lot of doing. I actually deleted that first fragment, thinking it was a false start, before going back and recovering it and doing some more work. When I sent it to my agent, he was extremely enthusiastic about the book and did one revision with me before forwarding it to Disney. Sasha, my roommate, left for law school. I moved in with my wife and proposed to her a week later, which was about one year after we'd met. I sold a story to the Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy! Huge milestone for me. Oh, and I almost forgot, my book came out! It did okay, I think. It was reviewed in the New York Times. Lots of people hated it and hated my protagonist, but fuck them. It also touched lots of people. I read The Caine Mutiny, The Bostonians, A Little Life, Bonjour Tristesse, and Brideshead Revisited. I got very into superhero comics and, after reading All Star Superman, I developed a surprising fondness for Superman. I re-read the whole Honor Harrington series, a military science fiction series David Weber, and I also reread In Search of Long Time. I read all six books in Trollope's Palliser series. I love Trollope. He's incredible. The perfect mix of romanticism and realism. I got very into late 20th century realism, and I read several works of realism from America (The Rise of Silas Lapham), Poland (The Doll), Britain (four novels by George Gissing, who I now adore), and Spain (Tristana). I started listening to audio books, which nowadays constitute well over half of my reading.

In 2017, after several months of considering it, Disney rejected We Are Totally Normal (then called Tell Em They're Amazing) and, deciding that they didn't see a future with me, they cancelled my book contract. My agent, who'd formerly been enthusiastic about the book, now thought it wasn't salable and urged me to abandon it. When I told him I wanted to send it out anyway, he dropped me as a client. I revised the book (changing the hook, admittedly, to make it significantly more marketable) and sent it out to agents. After just a week of querying, I ended up with my current agent, who sold the book to Harper later that year. I also got married! It was really nice. I liked being married. Living in San Francisco changed my life in a number of ways. One was that I was no longer living with roommates, no longer had that built-in community, and needed to start making friends and finding my own way in the world. Although I had many friends and acquaintances, I felt like I didn't have enough intimates, and during this time I tried to focus on deepening some of the relationships in our life. ALSO RACHEL MANAGED THROUGH SOME CRAZY MIND TRICKS TO PERSUADE OUR LANDLORDS TO GET A LITTLE KITTY AND WE NAMED HIM SCHUBERT AND HE IS JUST SO CUTE, WE PICK HIM UP AND CUDDLE HIM ALL THE TIME. I still was having trouble writing, but not quite as much. I read The Secret Agent, Evicted, The Emperor of All Maladies, Lord Jim, and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I read every novel and most of the short stories in Elizabeth Gaskell's ouevre. I got very into 18th century literature, and I read books by William Godwin, Samuel Richardson, Denis Diderot, and a few others. I got into neoconservative riters, of whom most weren't very good, but I did quite enjoy Norman Podheretz's Making It. I'm a sucker for any book that has the unvarnished truth about literary lives and literary ambition. I got into reading about the Soviet Union and read books about the revolution, about the gulags, and about the Terror. I read a few books about painters and visual artists, of which the best was a biography of Joseph Cornell called Utopia Parkway. Man that dude was a weirdo!

In 2018, I wrote the first draft of a novel for adults (current working title The Lonely Years). This would be, I believe, my eleventh novel (I think I've left one book out of this chronology). Rachel and I started trying to have a baby, which made me really anxious and panicky, and led to all kinds of feelings being stirred up, which led me into therapy yet again! Ugh, I hate therapy. Stupid therapy. I got back edits on We Are Totally Normal and when I took a look at the manuscript again, after eight months away from it, I realized that the book wasn't very good! I mean, I still think it was good enough for Disney and my former agent's purposes, but the story was completely all over the place! Nothing fit together very well at all! I set aside the draft that had sold, and I rewrote the entire book from page one. I also sold a story to Asimov's, another long-awaited first, after fifteen years of submitting. This year, I reread the entirety of Robert Caro's ouevre. I think he's the finest living American writer, and he definitely deserved the Nobel more than Bob Dylan. I read, for some reason, a lot of novels by Michael Connelly and Scott Turow. I read the entirety of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which was fabulously written and had some wonderful stories and analysis, although I do wish I retained more of it! I got really into Somerset Maugham, whose work always startles me with its baroque and outlandish elements, which are usually mixed into the most prosaic set of characters and events. I listened to at least twenty Donald Westlake novels, including most of his Parker series. I'm still not sure what the appeal of those books is. They're just straightforward heists, but somehow they're very fun.

Finally, we've landed in 2019. I expect nobody has read this far, so I'll bury my most momentous news here. I rewrote my novel for adults at least four times, top to bottom, and between this and rewriting We Are Totally Normal, I felt my writer's block fade to nothing. I'm not sure what happened. I think I just got a better idea of what stories I want to tell and how to tell them. In the process of pitching We Are Totally Normal to agents, I also realized...you can't just write a good book, you also need to stir up excitement about the book. So I lost some of that feeling of, well, what's the point of writing: it'll never sell anyway. Now, when I write something, I always try to include some hook, some way of selling it. Which is not to say that everything sells, but more things do! I started this year with three or so months of depression, which only lifted once I started exploring the idea that I might be transgender. This is something I had thought about years previously, at the beginning of this chronicle, but had dismissed, because, well, I hadn't dated anyone, I hadn't done anything, I didn't know myself. But now, as I started to revisit those ideas, I felt a growing sense of, well, almost...like...euphoria? It's something I'll struggle to understand for a long time, I think: being trans still feels weird to me, but it has undeniably improved my life and my mood. I've been dressing as a woman and using female pronouns in my private life for six months now (my wife has been very supportive, and we're more in love than ever), and now I'm going to start being more open about it online. I don't feel as blocked anymore. I'm out there, I'm writing. Now that my novel for adults is off with my agent, I'm working on the first book in a fantasy trilogy that'll explore the fucked-up morality, especially re: caste and social heirarchy, in the Indian epic, The Mahabharata. My hero is Karna, obviously. I'm excited about the book! Though who knows what'll happen with it. I've also written a bunch of short stories this year, but none have sold yet. Life is good. But it's also full of ups and downs, and who knows what'll happen next? This year, I read so many domestic thrillers! I love domestic thrillers! If I'm ever trapped on a desert island w/ only one genre of book, I want it to be the domestic thriller. They're just so claustrophobic and twisted. I also got very into true crime: Jon Krakauer's Missoula and Erik Larson's Devil In The White City were the standouts here. I read a ton of self-published legal thrillers: Victor Methos was the best of these writers. I got really into Ibsen! Why did nobody tell me about Ibsen! He's a fantastic writer. His characters speak with so much power, but they always feel quite real. Oh, and I read all five volumes of Cao Xueqin's Story of the Stone. This 18th century Chinese novel is about a thirteen year old boy who loves women and longs to be one...is it any wonder that I adored it?

Oh, and we also got a dog. Lara. She is cute too. And she and Schubert, our cat, tolerate each other surprisingly well.

Wrapping up 2017!!!

Every year, my wrap-up blog posts get shorter, which I suppose is just a part of life. This year is one where I've stopped doing many of the little habits and rituals that were once an inextricable part of my life. I don't track my progress in various spreadsheets with nearly the assiduity I once did. In fact I barely do it at all. Nor do I keep track of my word count or the hours I spend writing.

I still turn off my internet each day and block out the world and work on my writing. I just don't keep records about it. Don't feel the need to.

The best thing that's happened over this year is that I got married. It was a really great wedding, but an even better bride. Rachel and I did it right, and the wedding didn't completely dominate our lives and take up every spare moment of our time. It sort of happened on its own, actually, with relatively little work on our part (lots of money, but relatively little work--I still can't believe how much a wedding can cost).

In my non-wedding news though, the best thing has been my slow and steady work on my second YA novel (now titled It's Probably Just A Phase). My first book, Enter Title Here, was written in thirty-one days of white-hot fury. From the very beginning, the main character's voice was so clear and distinct, and the story she told me is, to a large degree, the one that is on the paper.

This is a great experience to have. I recommend it to everyone. However it sort of doesn't set you up very well for writing subsequent books, because you're always waiting for the magic to happen.

With this second book I also wrote the first draft in a pretty truncated period of time, but...since then it's undergone at least two major rewrites and three more significant revision passes. It's been a process.

In the beginning I was excited about the book, but...cautiously so. I didn't feel like it was gonna win any awards. Nor did I feel like it was my best work. I was writing it because I had to write something, and I didn't know how to write better.

But in the process of working on it, the book has gotten deeper and deeper. Characters have taken shape. Events have gained weight and shading. For instance for most of the drafting protagonist I didn't really love the deuteragonist (yeah I can use fancy words!) I saw him as weak and pathetic, and the other characters shared my view. But this summer something cracked open for me, and I for the first time really felt his quiet bravery.

Now I'm much more sold on this book! I like it way more, and I daresay it even rivals my first. Moreover, it's been really good for me to experience a different writing process. I've learned that good things can come from careful, plodding work. And as a result I feel much better equipped to face the, you know, lifetime of writing that I have coming up.

WRAP UP SEASON 2016: Everything else

All over my Facebook feed, people have been like, "Fuck 2016, this year sucked." I don't get it myself. The election of Donald Trump sucked. And I suppose the whole campaign was an awful experience. But I'm fairly sure no greater a number of celebrities died this year than they did in any other year.

Personally, I cannot say "Fuck 2016." I thought this was a great year. It's true I did get depressed (twice!) and evicted from my apartment in Berkeley. But then in the course of a month I moved in with my girlfriend, proposed to her, and saw the release of my debut novel!

A friend congratulated me on both, and then he said, "Of course, it's not like those two are equivalent."

I was genuinely curious as to which one he thought was much greater, and he said publishing a book was obviously a bigger event than getting engaged. Lots of people get engaged, relatively few publish books.

For me though it was just the opposite. Seeing my book on shelves was a lifelong dream, but almost no event in my life could be as momentous as getting engaged.

I won't say I was particularly emotional during the actual proposal. After all, I'd had months to prepare for it. But I do feel very satisfied at being engaged. I've been single for most of my life. To go from that to having a life partner is an amazing experience.

My fiancé is social media averse, so I don't post much about her here. However I feel so lucky to have found her. We have almost no interests in common. She doesn't and has never watched TV, so she often doesn't understand even basic pop culture references. Like if someone were to say, "Oh, you need to be cool like Spock," I'll turn to her and be like, "Spock was a character on this show, Star Trek."

Nevertheless, we can talk for hours. She's curious and politically engaged. Very silly and funny. I mean she's awesome. Just trust me on this. I knew from the moment we started texting (we met online) that she was something special, and I knew, after a few weeks of dating, that I was eventually going to propose (unless she got to it first, which was definitely a real risk).

Yes, I don't mean to be cheesy, but it was like movie love.

Recently I was telling a friend about this, and she was like, "I despair of ever experiencing that." But the thing is...if you experience an emotion like this, you marry that person. Doesn't matter if they're unemployed or ugly or the wrong race or gender. Unless they're a drug addict or a Neo-Nazi, you marry them.

But I feel very lucky to have found Rachel.

So that was my big thing this year. I also moved to San Francisco. That's been cool. Berkeley is still my favorite city in the world. Once somebody asked me where I'd live if I could live anywhere, and I said, "I can live everywhere, and I chose to live in Berkeley." It's a fantastic place: truly a wonderland.

San Francisco isn't quite as nice. It's a bit too urban. The buildings hem you in, blocking out the sun (at least at evening and morning). The weather is cooler. There aren't as many hippies and slackers.

But it also has a lot going for it. I do enjoy being able to walk everywhere. I live in the Mission, and there's basically nowhere south of Market street that I can't walk to. It's an extremely pleasant place to stroll around in. I'll stop someplace for coffee or peek into a bookstore. I know lots of people in San Francisco (possibly more than I did in the East Bay), because half of my college graduating class has moved up here. Every other day I encounter an acquaintance on the street. I've made some new friends, and I've become closer to others. Hard to say what the future holds for me now that I've bound myself to somebody with a real job, but I'm not unhappy that I'm in the city for the near future.

And that's it, pretty much. See you next year.

I kind of resent it when really talented writers quit writing

I kind of resent it when really talented writers quit writing. It's like, yeah, we get it--the writing life is hard. But you know what? You already won the writing lottery: you got the talent and the vision!

It's like if a whole bunch of us were climbing a glacier, and one guy had, like, icepicks instead of fingers and toes, and he was just clawing his way across the glacier like a spider, and then he hit a crevasse and was, "Oh, fuck these crevasses, right? It isn't worth it, I'm going home!" And like yeah, I get it, crevasses suck. But meanwhile you've got icepicks for fingers, and you're giving up, while over here we've got legless people who're still gamely scrambling upward!

The converse of this is that I'm impressed when bad writers are able to succeed. Some people seem to resent it when bad writing is successful in the marketplace, whereas "I'm like, whoah, good for you! It's so impressive that you made it up this glacier even though your legs were tied together."

After all this time spent writing children’s books, it’s hard not to get nostalgic for childhood (and I count the teen years as childhood too!!!)

After my post on not being nostalgic for college, I feel compelled to say that I do sometimes get nostalgic for my childhood. For years, this was not the case. For years, I never thought about being my childhood, because the trauma and unhappiness of college had, somehow, effaced all of that. But the process of writing all these young adult novels eventually brought it back.

It's weird. It's not that you recover a memory and then go on to write a book. It's that you write a book and the process of writing entails recovering the memory.

And it's not even a memory. To call it memory would be to misrepresent it. What you recover, when you write these books, is the feeling of being a child. And let me tell you, it's a pretty powerful feeling! Things are so important! Emotions are so immediate! You can write about falling in love with zero irony. You can write about becoming a high school valedictorian as if it's a matter of deathly importance. This would not be possible with an adult protagonist! But when you're writing a child, it's not only possible, it's necessary.

Kid's literature is full of precocious and worldly-wise teens who are probably more intelligent and witty than any teen ever was. However, even these kids don't escape from the drama of being young. In many cases, they're more susceptible to it than anyone. It's a trite example, but take John Green's protagonists. They're incredibly intelligent (to the point where it's annoying), but they also feel things so deeply.

And I feel the same way about my books. sad-kidSometimes I write these books that're about these kids, and I actually resent my protagonists. It's an incredibly perverse feeling, and I can't explain it. But I hate them, a little bit, because they're able to feel things so deeply.

When people talk about being nostalgic for childhood, they sometimes talk about how care-free it was. That, to me, is crazy. Childhood is not carefree. It's true that childhood (for most kids in America) lacks adult cares: how to feed yourself, how to stay healthy, the fear of mortality, etc. But just look at kids. They're so emotional. They're always crying. They're always worrying. They're always agitated. They're not faking. Those are real emotions. And their experience of those emotions is, in many ways, much more extreme than an adult's.

I would say that, if anything, adulthood is more carefree than childhood. Because while the things we worry about might be bigger, we worry about them less. Partly that's a result of more knowledge (we have a better idea of the kinds of things that can happen) and partly it's a result of more freedom (true anxiety comes when you don't have much control over your fate) and partly it's just biology (our brains and hormone levels are more settled). But, for whatever reason, I think adults don't feel as deeply as kids do.

For many, that's a good thing. It seems like every book I read contains some reference to the author's miserable childhood. However, to the best of my recollection, my childhood was not miserable. I did get really depressed at the end of my senior year in college (as my mother once reminded me). And I was bullied a bit in middle school. But otherwise, I was pretty happy. My childhood was pretty aimless. I didn't do much. I didn't have boyfriends or girlfriends or go to raging parties or even participate in much in terms of extracurricular activities. I read lots of books, but I also mostly read the same books over and over. I spent an insane amount of time playing video games. But I wasn't unhappy. I had friends. I had hobbies. I had projects (I spent a lot of time working on my D&D campaign). And I had my vague ambitions (I wanted to be involved in space travel!) And that was all pretty satisfying.

Of course, I don't feel nostalgic for those activities. I feel like I've spent a lifetime playing video games and planning D&D campaigns, and I have no need to revisit those activities. But I do feel nostalgic for the sense of aliveness that I felt back then.