Hat Tip Via Joy
A miscellany of things with a side of just do the fun thing
Dear Readers,
I made notes about a few things I was mulling that I wanted to write about here this week and they are wildly disparate. Welcome to my brain.
The storm last week materialized, but it turned out to be a thick layer of ice and several inches of snow. That, coupled with sub-freezing and sometimes sub-zero temps, are not things that our city is prepared to deal with. The roads are mostly still awful. Josh had to muscle my car out of the snow (it was very impressive). Everywhere people are cautioning about flying sheets of ice from the tops of vehicles or dropping icicles on buildings when the sun makes its brief appearances. We were supposed to go to Detroit this weekend to see my SubPress family and attend ConFusion. Alas, we had to cancel.
But. We never lost power. The dogs have been more or less sanguine about it, with the exception of one Sally infraction that led to a morning clean-up of what can only be called Sally’s Cat Litter Vomitorium (it wasn’t that bad, because clumping!). They’ve been getting special treats. I’m probably as stir crazy as they are.
We’ve managed a couple of expeditions to the Writer’s Room so we could write and Woofie and Ruby could play, but that’s it. Still, sanity restoring-ish. I’ve made some serious progress on my book, which is flowing as I want it to and I’m racing along typing and trying not to even worry about the moment if it’s good just if it continues to feel right.
(Writer’s Room mascots/greeting committee — isn’t Ruby pretty in her coat?)
The news, obviously, continues to be infuriating and depressing in equal measure. Rest in peace, Alex Pretti. Minnesota friends, I’m thinking about you all the time.
I think a lot these days about how much I miss the old internet and how I’m kind of returning in what small measure I can to how I experienced it lo many years ago. I’m searching out people with things to say. Of course, lots of us were writing on Blogger or Typepad back then, just as we are on Substack or Patreon and wherever now. The microblogging platforms and the death of Google Reader scattered us further and made us and outrage lucrative, made shared reality less likely than the view from whatever algorithm you believe or don’t know you’ve opted into.
Remember when I found the hoodie Blogger sent last year?
Anyway, I’m old school. And glad that I’ve also worked on building real-world connections. But one of the things I hang onto that I wish, wish was still the shared value is SOURCING WHERE STUFF COMES FROM. Not just the information itself, though that should be a given, but also where you first saw it. Those bread crumb trails used to lead me to new voices I was interested in. Now, everything is quickly divorced from context. Images and art stolen. The lack of attribution for sure plays a part in a lot of non-creatives’ embrace of AI. They’ve been conditioned away from even thinking about ownership in the digital sphere.
(Recent photo of me at the Writer’s Room, taken by Josh)
Which means against individual voices, the idiosyncratic things that create and speak to moments. Memes hate context. Misinformation hates context too. Big corps? Especially the Silicon Valley ones? Ditto.
So, it may not matter, but I’ll continue to source where I got things with h/t (hat tip, not hash tag) and the like and try my best to stop sharing things just because I like them if I don’t know WHERE THEY CAME FROM. This also means I won’t — hopefully — end up sharing AI slop by accident.
Okay, this is getting long already and there’s still two things to go. But I’m mixing it up and will throw in something else and save those for another newsletter.
Speaking of sourcing and connections, at the beginning of the pandemic, when everyone was discovering Zoom, I started a Friday noon call with a group of old friends who I met in the SFF world who’re scattered all over. For some of us it’s lunch, for some of us it’s breakfast. Sometimes someone is far away and it’t night. I’ve missed a handful of weeks, so have others. But I don’t think there’s ever been an entirely missed weekly call. Even on holidays!
It’s always fun and always interesting to see where the week’s convos take us. This week, one of the number was talking about having recorded their voice and then playing it back and finding it, well, awful. This was a “life-changing revelation” as he’d recently joined a chorus and now felt as if he should never ever be singing. After we all laughed about it and talked about it, I did circle back to two things I firmly believe….
“Have you been having fun doing the singing?”
Yes, unqualified, yes. I also wondered whether he’d have thought the singing was so bad if it was someone else’s, not his.
My own hard-won wisdom here, though I’m younger, goes back to when I tried aerial silks. Sometimes it’s good to do things at which you will never be great! If something is fun, it can just be pleasurable. He’s not going to be solo-ing. I’m not going to run away and join the circus (more’s the pity).
Even in something like yoga, part of what I enjoy about it is that I’ll never be an expert even though I’m experienced. It’s an ever-moving bar.
I feel like for a lot of writers—and other people—we have things that we pride ourselves on working to be the best we can be at. Which is good! But we can’t do that with everything and we shouldn’t even try to.
So if you find something you’re having fun at, please keep doing it. Putting joy into the world by way of your heart or your voice or your self is never wasted time, and its value doesn’t always come from skill level.
This is, of course, unless the thing you find you just enjoy doing is working for ICE. Then, no. Stop it. ABOLISH ICE.
Had to end there.
Some things at the end…
I’m so freaking impressed and proud of Josh and his new press and how exciting it’s been to watch him be excited at the stories and giving editorial feedback and working with other writers. He’s great at it, and it’s going to be great as a result. And by the next time I send one of these, the first story will be out! Go sign up at Brown Hound Press and you’ll get it in your inbox, free. He has great taste, which is, honestly, what makes me pay attention to any fiction outlet. The first story happens to be from a PEN/Bingham longlisted writer, which is pretty damn cool. But it’s going to be a fun mix with lots of new voices too.
Howard Hawks’ theory of three to five scenes making a good movie. (Via my pal Richard.)
TV Critic Judy Berman’s remembrance of Catherine O’Hara. I’m just devastated at how quickly we lost her. She is definitely someone I hold and will hold in my personal pantheon of women who inspire me. I want to age as vibrantly and who' cares-ly. I want to be remembered by the people I worked with in such glowing terms. I want to continue doing my best work right up to the end. I want to make people laugh and bring some joy into the world. One of the all-time funniest people and greats. She will be so missed.
Hang in there, lovelies.
Type at you next week,
Gwenda