Getting Cozy
Chilly ghosts and Writing Goals, twinkling stars and Volleyball, NaNoWriMo, a Writing Retreat (of sorts), Werewolf by Night, and some book recommendations
What have we been making?
Anna
This month I’ve been making a lot of stuff. I’ve been playing around with illustration styles, specifically vector illustrations with small animated components. Here’s a cold little ghost to cap off the Spooky season:
And here’s a cute camping illustration to kick off the cozy season:
I’m also helping color the last few chapters of that graphic novel I mentioned (Evil Eye by Ozge Samnci, coming 2023). I’m so excited to find out how it ends! Unfortunately, you’ll have to wait until it comes out to know more about (sorry - no spoilers). All I can say is it has kept my attention the whole way through, even though I’ve been slowly reading it chapter by chapter for almost a year now!
Rachel
Hi all! A short post for this month:
I have had a few acceptances this last month that I can’t fully announce yet, but I am really looking forward to sharing and celebrating these with you soon, so stay tuned!
As many of my fellow writers know, November is somewhat famous in the writing community. Just as some celebrate No-shave November as a time to focus on growing luscious flowing beards and mustaches, many writers celebrate NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). They use the month of November to write their novel. The goal is to finish a whole novel in just one month. If you have not guessed, any writer will tell you this is no easy task. You need to average about 1,600 words a day to end up with a draft about the length of The Great Gatsby. While I am strictly observing NaNoWriMo this year, I am trying to write something, ANYTHING, towards my novel every day this month.
In service of this, I have booked a cozy Airbnb in Vermont for myself for the first two weeks of November. I am hoping this will help me form a more consistent writing habit that I will be able to translate somewhat into my regular life. But even if not, I hope to learn something about, myself, my process, or the writing life in general. So far, this last week, I have been successful in putting some words on paper every day, and am looking forward to this next week in Vermont and for the rest of November as well (and of course the delicious dishes this holiday season!). I am wishing all my fellow writers, artists, and humans well this month in whatever endeavor you are pursuing this November!
What Have We Been Enjoying?
Anna
This month I started a short-term intramural volleyball league. We have only played one game so far, but we won! I haven’t played since intramurals in college, and it was a lot of fun, but I made my fair share of whiffs ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I know we’re past Spooky season now, but I have to recommend the one-hour Halloween special put out by Marvel this past month called Werewolf by Night. As someone who doesn’t like horror films, this was the perfect amount of Spooky for me. It’s a black and white homage to old horror films, and there’s a little bit of gore, but all in good fun.
Rachel
This month my attention span has been pretty shot, so have been jumping around between lots of different books: a variety of fiction, non-fiction, essays, and craft. But somehow, I have really been enjoying it, and I feel like all the disparate forms, styles, and ideas are coming together somehow and revealing interesting patterns in language and thought that I otherwise would not have noticed or even considered. Some of the books on this list are:
The Parable Series by Octavia E. Butler - In this two-part series, Butler offers a disturbing view of a not-so-distant future. Set between the mid-2020s and the 2030s, this dystopian series seems to run in a parallel universe to our modern-day America, with VR headsets, extreme poverty, religious fanatics, drug epidemics, racial violence, and a cultish president whose slogan is “make America great again” (I am not even joking. And this is written in 1998). Not for the faint of heart, but captivating and prophetic, it’s worth the nightmares.
Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann - This book is unhinged and I’m eating it up. This book takes stream-of-consciousness to an extreme. With virtually no punctuation (seriously, not a period in sight), and a refrain of “the fact that” repeated more than 19,000 times, Ducks, Newburyport brings you directly inside the mind of an Ohio wife and mother who it seems is really just doing her best. In some ways reading it is like viewing my own thoughts in slow-motion: the randomness of the connections, the sound associations, the anxieties, intrusions, and songs that pop into our heads all day long are laid bare in this long almost feverish text.
How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee - I have read some of the essays in this book before and loved them, but have thoroughly enjoyed putting them within the context of this touching collection. Each essay is poignant and does not shy away from painful truths. Of truth, Chee writes both that, “To write is to sell a ticket to escape, not from the truth, but into it,” and that in America “you are allowed to speak the truth as long as nothing changes.”
The Art of Intimacy: The Space Between by Stacey D’Erasmo - A dense little book that takes a more practical approach to Anne Carson’s theory of Eros. This one I have just started, but I am already enthralled. I discovered this book via Stacey D’Erasmo’s recent essay for Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing, which you can read HERE.
I love all the recommendations for things to watch and read!