on silence

the thing about ideas is that i don't have very many of them.

people don't believe me when i say that. they laugh, the way you do when someone is pretending to be modest and you aren't buying it. but it's the truth: the number of ideas i've had is exactly equal to the number of stories i've published. there are no trunks full of drafts, no notes apps overflowing with inspiration, no unwritten books rustling in the wings. there's just whatever i'm working on right now, followed by a blindingly blank page.

this is--in an industry where ideas can be converted into contracts, where most successful writers are drafting their next book while editing their last and pitching the one after that--somewhat unfortunate. i've been able to coast on pure luck and privilege, but i still have to take a second to stare vacantly into space every time i see a tweet like "i was going to take the day off after turning in this trilogy but whoops, i wrote the first chapter of the gothic boarding school murder mystery i've been planning since 2015"

now, okay, sure: that's mostly the anxiety talking. i've always hated the feeling of time running through my hands, unspent, unaccounted, wasted. not in the classic capitalist sense, where efficiency=productivity=profit, but in the overwrought, morbid "what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life" sense. i mean, i used to set alarms at sleepovers so we would all wake up early and not waste our remaining hours of potential fun. (a strategy that mostly found me sitting at the kitchen table at dawn, watching my friends' moms drink coffee with a grim urgency i only fully understand now, at 32, when my five year old wakes me up at 5:30 to sing a dirge he wrote about forgetting to save his pokemon game (he also, i suspect, has concerns about his one wild and precious life)).

but even aside from the anxiety, i just don't feel like a particularly imaginative person. that's another line that makes people laugh, but recall that “many good liars have no imagination at all; it's that which gives their lies such wide-eyed conviction.” i don't plot new books in the shower. i don't go on a long walk and come back with a title and a pitch. i just sort of sweat and drink a lot of coffee and make dramatic statements at my husband about the incipient decline of my career. i make lists and sketch characters and inter-library loan some nonfiction. in the end my ideas aren't a product of inspiration so much as accretion, or maybe attrition.

all it takes, really, is time. some quiet hours. a certain amount of faith--a willingness to wait and work in the surety that at some point all your bullet points and bad drawings and quotes from better writers will coalesce, alchemically, into a book. it’s just that i'm not very good at waiting--in the week since i turned in my edits i've done my taxes, drawn up plans for a backyard office, and finished two embroidery projects--or at faith, really.

i was raised godless in the bible belt, which is sort of like growing up next to a stadium, close enough to hear the roar of the crowd but not quite close enough to make out the words. i've always been a little jealous, i think. i love fervor and ritual, mysticism and high emotion, the promise of time spent purposefully, according to grand design. i remember watching a girl flip through her bible, stopping at random and reading wherever her finger landed like a divine horoscope. if she didn’t know what it meant right away she said she had to “sit with it.” i laughed at her, meanly, but on what grounds? aren’t my favorite books are full of the same cryptic, prayerful shit? change is god. one flesh, one end. only in silence the word, only in dark the light.

like if i were to flip through earthsea right now, and my finger happened to land on that line from the creation of ea, i would receive it as a letter addressed specifically to me. i would think: okay, miss leguin, so this is the dark. this is the silence.

the words must be on their way.

news

• i have a new short story out! the long way up, in the deadlands magazine. it’s a sad contemporary orpheus retelling about ~depression~ (mind the content warnings)

• “mr. death,” my one short story published last year, won the Stabby Award! and appeared on the locus recommended reading list, along with A Spindle Splintered.

• a mirror mended is available for request on netgalley! (for booksellers, reviewers, industry people, you know the drill)

further reading

• i sort of expected saunders's A Swim in a Pond in the Rain to be, uh, a little pretentious—a literary star dissecting 19th century Russian short fiction??—but it's warm, welcoming, funny, smart, nerdy, already dear to me

• everybody said the locked tomb audiobooks were incredible, but my god! my god! they’re incredible

• i’m never not reading historical romances now, and can wholly recommend alexis hall's something fabulous. it’s high comedy in low places, it’s a sendup of every regency, it’s something….fabulous

• there’s this little-known author—holly black? have you heard of her?—anyway she has her first adult book coming out this year and GUESS WHAT IT SLAPS