Sometimes you gotta ride a giant axolotl around the desert

Hello friend,

I rolled the dice in August and managed to come through safely. First, I went to Las Vegas to speak at the Diana Initiative and go to DEF CON. With few exceptions, I only go to conferences with, at the very least, a mask mandate, so the dice were a little weighted on that bet. After, I was reminded how one unfortunate effect of my vivid imagination is a whole host of psychosomatic symptoms as I incubate at home, waiting to see what went wrong. I imagined myself into sore throats, questionable aches, and phantom itching as I waited. But I was fine! The PCR gods freed me, and I walked among people again.

Well, sort of.

Two weeks later, I went to Burning Man for the first time.

Yes, I know.

I didn’t go with the intention of hitting up desert sex parties or other high-touch environments, which reduced my risk a bit. Nothing against them, but among other concerns, I felt so gross the entire time I was there that I couldn’t imagine seducing anyone, though it has been pointed out to me (and I was aware before) that drugs help with this hurdle. I was there to see art and talk to people and experience a brain shift after the in-a-rut, in-the-shit state of the last two-plus years. Perhaps, though, you heard it was a hot one? And not just “no shit, it’s August in the desert, what did you expect” but “no really, extra special, extra awful, extremely hot, white-out dusty oppressive.” With nothing to compare it to, I didn’t really know that until I got home, when I heard about it again and again.

Like my most recent PCR test last Monday. “Do you have a known exposure?” the doctor asked before wielding the brain swab.

“Well, um,” I said, feeling embarrassed, “I went to Burning Man.”

“Ahhhh,” she said, managing not to sound judgy. “It was especially hot and dusty there this year, wasn’t it?”

In the Bay Area, even if you don’t go to the thing in the desert, you end up at least somewhat conversant in it.

I didn’t write fiction while I was there because I value my laptop and didn’t want to bring it to the alkaline dust bowl. Instead, my daily writing goal was journaling every day. “Describe one thing you experienced” became the specific daily task in words. I didn’t really need to declare it so; the whole experience was a lot for a hard introvert, easily the most extroverted space I’ve ever existed in, so hiding in my tent and writing about the different kinds of discomfort and joy I experienced that day were necessary just to process and survive.

Within a couple of days, I actively missed writing my ongoing project. I’m nearing the end of the third draft of the first novel I wrote in the pandemic, my life raft from May to August 2020. It’s still too long. One of the main character’s motivations isn’t right yet. And even so, it’ll be a cohesive draft by the end, with certain secondary and tertiary characters combined or removed, some better motivations in place, and a clearer throughline. There’s still plenty to do, but it’s better, and the improvement pleases me but doesn’t surprise me. I’m learning how to do this. It’s good, actually.

Especially because whatever I do next will be a revision too. In the past year, as I’ve made myself figure out how I move forward with pieces of writing, I tried to alternate: the stick of a revision, the carrot of a first draft. Instead, I’m daydreaming about digging into the novella I wrote by accident (when I was supposed to be working on the revision I’m wrapping up now) back in July at the start of the Clarion West Write-a-thon. I reread it earlier this week (reading it out loud to myself, as I do sometimes when I’m feeling self indulgent in the nicest way) and got excited again about making it more: filling in the blanks in the system and education of magic, certain characterization stuff that can be sharpened, digging further into how very Bay Area the story is. I’m actually excited for it. Who am I anymore?

I guess sometimes we go into the desert and find new parts of ourselves.

And now I’m home, and we’re on the cusp of my favorite time of year. Call it fall, call it spooky season, call it PSL times, but the opportunity to wear a sweater and drink warm things without sweating myself to death brings me to the best part of the year. In 2022, it finds me contemplative and on the edge of a lot of change: where do I want my career to go, when will I send writing into the world to be considered and likely (at first, anyway) rejected, where shall I live, what do I want the next decade of my life to look like?

It’s coming together. I decided to go to Burning Man this year because I spent the worst of lockdown furious at the things I’d wanted to do for years and had left undone. It’s why I go dancing so much right now and why I recently went to five concerts in seven days (in order: Less Than Jake, Pink Turns Blue, Peter Hook and the Light, Nine Inch Nails, Mustard Plug). I no longer feel I have the luxury of, “Oh, I’ll catch it next time.” It feels similar with writing: if not now, then when? It doesn’t mean I shove myself ruthlessly through difficult projects, but it means that if I don’t get to work on the thing I want to, I feel it more keenly. I might just be like that from now on. It’s uncomfortable sometimes, but it’s brought me to the things I want so much faster than the way I used to be, so I suppose it’s a net gain.

Painful gain, but gain nonetheless.

Here are some things I’ve written or liked.

• I wrote for my job’s engineering blog for the first time, which was a thrill. Finding the Less-Risky Path Together: Security Partnership at Gusto is the written counterpart to a talk I did in August in Las Vegas. I’m not sure when Covid precautions will allow me to go to a conference again, so this may be the last in-person talk for a while.
• I kept a Write-a-thon journal for my participation in Clarion West’s summer event. It’s not too late to donate, if you have a little extra money available to support one of the great organizations in speculative fiction.
• Finding Warmth and Welcome as an Immigrant in Iceland looks at swimming pool culture in Iceland and what it means to be on the outside in a particular way, in a particular place.
• Ijeoma Oluo has posted a lot of lovely stuff on her Substack recently about learning to be social again, getting married when you have some stuff around marriage, and craft things too. I especially liked We’ve Got To Stop Lying To Kids About Their Future, which looks at the damage caused by telling kids high school is the best years of their lives. I was told this over and over, and if I hadn’t been stubborn as shit and already aware that sometimes adults just fucking lie to you, it would’ve been really damaging to me.
• I’ve come to really like some of the compound words emerging in recent years to describe subgenres of fiction: hopepunk and solarpunk, for instance, and now, from Charlie Jane Anders, sweetweird, which nicely describes a whole lot of storytelling I really love, and a type of writing she’s very good at.
• I dove into reading romance in the early depths of the pandemic because I needed something to punch that dopamine button hard, and KJ Charles has remained a favorite of mine. Even better, she writes these essays sometimes about writerly conundrums and craft concerns, and we all get to benefit. Know Your Place takes a look at how locations and describing them are excellent opportunities for characterization. I read this and took the idea straight to my current draft and made some internal monologue bits stronger.
• NPR published a comic about being an earthbound Mars scientist and the parallel life you shift into with the sliding time offset, and it’s beautifully mindbending.
• A couple years ago, my brain decided that I, despite having never worked in a bar, should definitely have a recurring main character who owns and runs a bar, and I thus became a student of bar narratives. I especially liked Always Check the Bathrooms, which blended humanity, compassion, and specific details of a specific job really well.
• And finally, Tinder Hearted mixes first-person experience and what’s essentially a look at the realities of product design for apps that are sometimes less about people finding a permanent relationship with a person and more about giving you one more way to move through the world, whether you want it or not.

This is the cake ATM in Las Vegas. There are several. They serve slices from Carlo’s Bakery, based in Hoboken but expanded so that you can get their stuff in all sorts of places. I had it once before in December 2019, when I asked for a rainbow cake for my farewell party at a job. Since it wasn’t Pride month, we got cake that traveled across the country.

Now that, of course, is plenty delightful. But having visited the Las Vegas Cake ATM several times, I can tell you that it captures people’s imaginations to a surprising extent in a place that’s meant to slam the Delight and Overwhelm button as hard as it can. You pay $9, a little shelf rises to the level of your selected cake, and a wide, shallow conveyor turns on to fetch your cake, which it then moves to the slot on the front. Forks are on the side.

In a city full of showgirls and contortionists and big-budget magic and kinda anything you could pay to do with your flesh and that of some others, I loved that invariably the Cake ATM made passersby drift over to go, “Whoa, wait, what is this.” And I got to tell them.

I’ll never be Cirque du Soleil, but in certain parts of my life? I can probably manage Cake ATM.