goth book club resumes

and some thoughts about diaries

second notice by heather lewis was incredible on multiple levels. highly rec. it’s been hard the last few months to actually finish anything i’ve picked up but i’m feeling more determined this year to stop reading four books at a time and stick with one thing all the way through. however, i am currently reading vivienne by emmalea russo and julia by sandra newman, about halfway thru both.

i remember summers in high school i would spend days in bed reading books from the library, beginning to end in a single or span of a few days. though at the time i was deeply lonely and vaguely remember crying all the time about feeling unloved, i really miss the feeling of having nowhere to be and no one to talk to. i miss the feeling of typing my feelings daily into a place like livejournal or tumblr, not knowing whether or not someone would be there on the other end to read what had to say. though i stopped journaling primarily because i knew my partner at the time would read my diary (and i felt if my private thoughts were found it would cause a kind of conflict i was not then equipped to handle), i also feel that it’s been harder to maintain a journal as an adult because im always talking to my friends. this sounds ridiculous, but it’s true — i think i record my life and feelings in emails and whatsapp more often now, but i wonder if that began when the nature of my relationship changed. my phone then became the place i could have safety and privacy. i wonder if journaling has become that way for any of you?

i do still journal sometimes. right now, i have a textedit document titled “journal_2023” that i’ve been typing into for two years now without any set dates and only em-dashes separating the entries, but it’s not very long. and a lot of times, it’s something i’ve copied and pasted from somewhere — sometimes even my long-winded, half-thought replies to things just go in there and nobody ever sees them. you have to have at least something that’s just for you, i think.

i also write into my notes app which is really just a junk drawer for thoughts and phrases and sometimes even just lists of words. this morning i was in bed and threw my phone halfway across the room so i could focus on reading my book, but then got struck with inspiration and regretfully had to get up out of bed. i needed to write down a word i wanted to remember: swollen.

i’m starting to feel more like myself again, after taking a few months away to focus on ‘doing less.’ though did i do less? i wrote a lot into my next project. when i say a lot, i mean more in one go than i have written over the entirety of last year, which i think has been my lowest word count year in regards to fiction writing since 2018, probably. i started a couple other new projects, which are exciting, but i can’t talk about them yet. i spent a lot of time doing serious resting. i love to put the word serious in front of something, as though i can pretend the rest was intentional, measured, and disciplined in its own way. frankly, i didn’t have any other choice. it felt impossible at times to push through my work and keep going. i needed too much sleep, or i found it impossible to hyperfocus the way i know that i have done in the past. it was like my ability to out-think my physical state had suddenly given up, and it did. the last two and a half weeks, because my sleep has been worse, i honestly can’t remember if i did feel rested at all over my break from substack.

what i did enjoy: forcing myself to learn about medieval texts and persian epics and discussing how heroism is constructed in literature with students who ended up teaching me way more than i could have anticipated. i’m finding that i’m learning so much about the psychology of societies’ need for hero stories, i’m thinking more deeply about how people construct these ideals and become blinded to the darker side of triumph. (this is a relevant book that is on my reading list). more gratitude: a week-long residency at cove park which i made some headway back into writing — almost the only writing i did last semester — trying to get back into the headspace of writing every day. meditated a little bit more. got back into magic. cooked a lot of really good food. did a ton of research on not just health, or accutane, but about creativity, neuroscience, and the brain, in a desperate attempt to recover something i thought i lost (more on how i recovered that in later weeks). fell deeper in love. felt happy. looked at the sky. cried at classical music. met new people and spent time with good friends.

i have a couple of announcements to make, a flurry of new activity.

first, goth book club is back on which means paid subs will resume this week. if you choose to stay paid or not, i’m just grateful you are here.

the next meet-up will be 23 feb, sunday, 8pm UK time.

we’ll be reading and discussing Aileen Wuornos’ Dear Dawn: In her own words 1992-2002. You can find hard copies from Amazon in the UK, or Soft Skull Press in the US. You can also find an electronic version on the internet archive.

it’s about 80 pages to read per week or 11 pages a day if you want to get it all done by the meet up.

i designed this sweater. should i sell them y/n

second, i made KNIFE PARTY, my self-editing class available as an online course on my site. it’s got four different exercises and includes my original one-hour talk on how to get precise with your editing, become more objective about your work, and make your sentences do more. it’s £29 right now, but only for a few more weeks. if you buy it now, you’ll have lifetime access to it and any updates or re-releases of the class.

more soon from me. missed you all.