Dead Letter Department #61

weather report

There’s a baby spider spinning a web between two of my jade plants this morning. It’s definitely the season for them, I found a jumbled little huddle of them above the ferns when I was watering, one of those sights that is sort of viscerally disgusting & then fascinating once the initial startle reflex is gone: so many tiny legs. I’ve been awake a lot at night lately, not exactly full-throated insomnia, just a little dip into that pool, & it’s not pleasant. I know the things I’m meant to do to whip anxiety back down & give myself a better shot at sleep, but this just might not be the week that any of that happens. Getting off devices earlier in the evening, drinking less coffee, all extremely sensible practices but also all feeling completely out of reach at the moment. If I don’t have the small pleasures, I may completely fly apart.

I’m reading Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga, & Shirley Jackson’s letters, & a collection of Anne Patchett’s essays. Reading hour is after dinner in the backyard, now that the light stays so long. There’s a short break for weeding on my to do list every day this week, which will hopefully get some of the tall grass & buttercups under control without overexerting my healing chest muscles. All I’ve been listening to is the National’s new album, big divorce energy, & thinking about what it must have been like to make something so good after such an intense creative block.

My friend & I went down to their cabin in Skagit over the weekend, walked around in the those very peaceful woods & then set camp chairs up on the gully with the view down into the creek, drank beer & ate Combos & jalapeño chips. There were butterflies everywhere, and a red headed woodpecker kept trying to come inspect the tree right in front of us but getting spooked before it could start pecking. We found empty robin’s eggs & dragonflies & odd little mushrooms, & she told me all about their plans for the property, which sound dope as hell. I hope we go again soon, it felt good to get out of town & away from road noise & traffic & really everything except for trees. We drove around the graveyard, too, trying to find the mass grave for the State Hospital patients that’s there, but of course it was Memorial Day & it felt a little too weird to be doing historical exploration when families were picnicking graveside & laying down wreaths, so we’re going to try again when it’s not a holiday.

It’s a nice drive down, too, out of the increasingly sprawlish Bellingham, through the bright green mountains, past Lake Samish (which I have finally added to my mental map, after driving around it twice), and into the valleys & foothills of Skagit County. It’s just far enough away that I feel like I’ve really gone somewhere when I get back.

I’m re-reading one of my big partial manuscripts this week. I say that confidently to you so I’ll actually do it, because I’ve been working a fair amount, but mostly on smaller projects & the side job that actually pays money, and it doesn’t feel like real progress anymore. The manuscript re-read, with note taking & rewrite plans, has been on my list for a couple of weeks now, which means I’ve been staring at it scrawled there every day & very much not doing it, to the point where I haven’t even had the document open.

In the Anne Patchett book, there’s an essay where she talks about her step father sending her these incredibly long, extremely badly written novels for her to critique for basically her entire life, and how one of the things it taught her was that she needed to get her writing as far along as possible, make it as good as she possibly could, before she involved other people in it, & asked them to use their time on her work. His secretary typed the novels up for him, which I think is a very important detail. Sometimes he hadn’t even read them himself before sending them along to Patchett.

Anyway, read the essay if you haven’t used up your New Yorker article limit this month, but I think I have trouble telling when that point is. When do I need someone else’s eyes on the project, usually first beta readers, and afterwards my agent? When do I need to admit that I can’t really get any farther with it on my own? I mean, certainly not before re-reading it myself, but maybe it’s closer than I think this time? It’s not exactly a block, yet, but I don’t want it to become one either. Ideally, I’ll report back next Dead Letter, meaning I’ve at least succeeded in getting it read again.

one good thing

The old GP plant down by the water is getting slowly transformed. It started off as a weird sort of sub-industrial parkland, with a skate park under the bridge, but now there’s a huge bike track, and the old crumbling granary building is redone & full of fancy coffee shops & yoga studios & real estate agents. The container village has beer & rotating food trucks, & in the summer it’s packed with families. I went for ice cream the other day & had maple cinnamon in a waffle cone, which was delicious, and it was good to sit in the sun & watch all the little kids with widely varying coordination attempt the tall dirt hills on the track. I’m bad with crowds, but life these days is so isolated, for all the usual reasons, that sometimes it’s nice to be on the edge of a crowd even if I can’t be inside it.

Thank you for being here. If you like the newsletter, please share it with a friend or consider subscribing to the secret edition, where I’m writing my way through transition. Write to me anytime at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com.
I hope to see you here at the Dead Letter Department again soon, & in the meantime, may the first step towards that big project be suddenly somehow within your reach.