Hiiii. Right now, I’m eating the final piece of this CRAZY chocolate-pistachio baklava my sister made….imagine the butteriest baklava remixed with a pain au chocolat vibe. Unbelievable. I’m a little overcaffeinated and hastily typing this little missive while stealing time from a Book #2 sprint and a handful of cascading deadlines. Trying to remember that I don’t only need to write Serious Things in this here newsletter…it is literally called thot pudding. But before I go further,
What stands out to me in hindsight about book publication is the perhaps-obvious truth that books and writers, for all the valorization of solitude that the vocation entails, need other people. To a wild and embarrassing degree. Staring at all of it in ye olde rear-view mirror, I feel powerfully indebted to so many…my closest circle, who cared for me during what, behind-the-scenes, was one of my life’s harder years. ATCBD’s amazing publishing team, each member of which earned their place in the book’s acknowledgments. Bill Clegg and Lindsey Schwoeri. Many readers who posted about ATCBD early on, in ways that helped get the attention of reviewers (one of my great stresses was that the book seemed for a while like it was not going to be reviewed by any of the usual suspects, and few people will read a book if they’ve not heard a single thing about it.)
An especial thank you is owed to critics like Rafael Frumkin, Sarah Sukardi, Natalia Holtzman, Emma Specter and Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya, who wrote beautiful, considered writeups of ATCBD during the first six weeks of the book’s publication that 1. meant the world to me 2. truly, I believe, helped it get its fledgling wings. And OF COURSE, gays who put the book on their dating profiles. LOVE U THANK U.
But what was less clear to me during the first few months or even year of ATCBD was how it was part of a cohort, and in fact part of a cascading series of cohorts—of influence, of support, of works making conversation with each other across time and place. I look back at ATCBD the book and see a denser map of influences than I realized at the time. Contemporary fiction is a thicket of branching, forking trees. Contemporary publishing involves a series of labors of love and camaraderie and support that we are, on the whole, richer for. This took me time, a return of cognitive function, much reading, (and blurbing like 40-plus books) to see.
Becoming a writer is hard. Writing a book is hard. Publishing a book can be very hard, and it’s also such a terribly lucky position to be in. The luck can make it hard to acknowledge that there could be a single emotionally difficult thing about the process. I’ve talked to so many writers in the past two years about how to best care for themselves during book launch season, and I think part of that is accepting that person-time is fast and that book-time is slow and vining and deeply unpredictable. Many of the books that brought me comfort, meaning, delight, and more during my adolescence did not get their real flowers until years after they were published. I took comfort in this. I still do.
I think of making my art as scattering seeds, really. You let a book go and you trust that someone out there reads it, sees it, might love it enough to talk about it to another person, some day.
Finally, I still stand by this, my attempt to describe the Meaning Of The Thing, which is ultimately individuated, and un-Public, and barely ever quantifiable:
The writer gives over the work of years. The reader surrenders time, attention, sometimes money—any of which can be withdrawn if the writer fails, and also, let’s be real, if the reader fails. It’s a fraught process. But at its best, it is the deepest, most intimate conversation. One that can comfort, or delight, or stir to anger or humor, or change the mind of, another human being, across time and space. To make something that can go out into the world and speak to other people, to succeed at quieting the noise in their lives for a moment so that they can pay better attention to themselves, to the world, to other worlds, to what it means to be alive at all.
n.b.
A smattering of books that came out in the past two years that I think you should check out, if you haven’t yet: This Is Salvaged. Between Two Moons. The Lookback Window. A Map for the Missing. Dykette. Couplets. The Future Was Color. Roses In The Mouth of A Lion. I’m A Fan. The Sea Elephants. If An Egyptian Cannot Speak English.
p.s. some behind-the-scenes content Debut Book Launch season
Minus evidence of crying, hustling, and some of the more crushing anxiety and and bad news—life, after all, is rarely ever one-note, but an infernal Cobb salad of stimulus and event. I will say that my DMs got so much more funny (and lovely, and intense, and sometimes overwhelming, but here’s mostly the funny).
Have a nice weekend, bye for now,
STM
This tux is beyond. Subscribing immediately.
Loved this note. ATCBD was my first read of 2023 and it was such a great way to start off the year. The last blurb of what you would tell your younger self is excellent. Thank you for your writing.