Some housekeeping first as we’re rather behind on that.
Breakable Things, my debut short story collection, is a Bram Stoker nominee. I can’t explain how delighted I am about the whole situation given how reclusive I am. I used to tell people that my bucket list included getting a Bram Stoker nomination and now I have two. Thank you to everyone who voted for my little book, and thank you to my publishers for, er, publishing the book.
I’m told that newsletters need exclusive content otherwise what’s the point. In honor of this, I’m pleased to inform you at least one of my upcoming book launches (one day, I’ll stop having two releases a year) will be celebrated with a teeny physical book tour. More when everything is properly confirmed.
You can pre-order The Salt Grows Heavy and The Dead Take the A Train. There are signed editions of the former up on Barnes & Noble. (Do please pre-order if you’re inclined. You can absolutely buy those books later, but every pre-order is a drop of water in what an author hopes will be a tsunami come publication time. Tsunamis sometimes float books to the top of bestseller lists and well, that’s every author’s dream.)
Speaking of which, have you seen the cover for The Dead Take the A Train? It’s absolutely sumptuous.
I had a few other thoughts to share, including but not limited to meditations on loneliness and our relationship with the sensation. So often, desolation is branded as negative, a thing to avoid: singlehood is condemned; eating alone is looked upon with bewilderment. (And every AFAB person knows that age dooms one to eventual invisibility, and how terrifying is that.) But that mindset is not true for everyone. Certainly, not for me. However, those thoughts are for another entry.
Today, I want you to look at this.
(She isn’t actually one hundred apparently. Only a youthful 83. Harumph. False advertising*.)
I’m utterly mesmerized by Suzelle Poole, by this video of her, by her story, by the grace she exudes, by the way she wears time like so much fine embroidery. This photo of her makes me want to weep a little, as a penitent might before the numinous.
How beautiful she is in her haghood. How vivid the light of her person, radiating through paper-mache skin and thin skeins of white hair. I can see the girl that she was, the ghost of whom gleams along her bones. I can see as well the selves she became. She looks like a prayer — or at least she looks like my prayer.
I want this more than anything else. I want to still be writing books when I am in my eighties. I want to teach; I want to design games. I want to be more myself than I ever was. I want time to distill me into passion barely contained by the weathered silk of my skin. I want the years to blanch me of distractions, of fear. In the denouement of my life, I want to be drunk on creation. I want to be still be finding new ways to move, new food to eat. I want to still travel, to still be voracious for the world and everything it carries. I want to die with poetry still in my teeth, with wonder still in my chest.
When I think of my ideal old age, I think of this.
How I want this, my gods.
Anyway.
As always, a cat photo:
Ah, Cass. Thank you for your prayer. My gods.
it's a good cat! i shall hie me to the bookseller, thanks for the reminder.