no more deadlines until it’s time to have a deadline and even then

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I suppose that it's a good sign that getting to work on The Main Thing this morning felt like being able to breathe again, a creative tracheotomy freeing me from the suffocation of the last several weeks and/or months and finally letting me ride the wave as it were of whatever waters I'm navigating and while I'm uncertain of what, exactly, changed (or maybe it's nothing more than the happy pill dose readjustment finally started to work), I'll – no, wait, I'm actually fairly certain of what changed: two weeks ago I made the announcement to subscribers that I didn't know when or if the second issue of PRESS(A) would come out and followed that up yesterday morning in a note to myself written in pencil on a "note to god" while not spontaneously combusting during my annual (grand)father's day endurance test of fire and brimstone horseshit (seriously, these people have gotten even nuttier than last year – it was more than moderately terrifying, whatwith the addition of "more jesus in america" callouts from the usually taciturn and silent crowd of 20) that I wouldn't make any further announcement about PRESS(A) until I had at least two more main features, for 03 and 04, in a state of forward motion as I've found, on a visceral level, that adding a window of release / self-inflicted deadline is, at this point, the most sure-fire way to fall off the wave, get hit in the head with the board, and become narrative fish food. Guess that's that then – end of story, as that one guy said in FARGO.

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Spent much of the morning answering interview questions about animation and transmedia and I remain shocked – and grateful – that, 11 years after it came out, I'm still answering questions (and capable of answering questions) about a 300-page book I wrote in five months (distilling a lifetime of experience, of course) in my grandparents' basement with much of my research material (comics and big sheets of paper) spread across a pool table while dealing with the foreclosure of my first house, quitting smoking, and the general upending of my life and identity up to that point. Back to it.

RED MARS (Robinson, 1992)

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Robinson hooked me (and many others, it seems) with MINISTRY OF THE FUTURE's near-future (and getting nearer every day) climate apocalypse bureaucracy and doom and solidified it here: RED MARS is sci-fi and worldbuilding at its most intriguing – and prescient.

The closest analogue to MARS I can conjure is Mervyn Peake's GORMENGHAST series, that rare fantasy series which captured my heart and mind (and reminds me I need to procure the other two) with limited characters – as well-drawn and real as flesh and blood – and excruciatingly detailed worlds not my own (indeed, much of my own frustration in my current WIP is that I'm not seeing the world well enough yet, small and tiny though it may be); Robinson made me feel, with each page turn, as though I was there with that first hundred, uncertain of my allegiances, celebrating and mourning and building and destroying with them. Unflinchingly human, all:

"Here they were eating their dinner, talking over the low boom from the north, in a perfect illusion of dining room conviviality; it might have been anywhere anytime, and their tired faces bright with some collective success, or merely with the pleasure of eating together – while just outside their chamber the broken world roared, and rockfall could annihilate them at any instant. And it came to her that the pleasure and stability of dining rooms has always occurred against such a backdrop, against the catastrophic background of universe chaos; such moments of calm were things as fragile and transitory as soap bubbles, destined to burst almost as soon as they blew into existence."

Robinson once said in a City Arts Lecture that you don't write novels as a tool for self-expression but as a way to inhabit the lives of others: RED MARS takes you not just into the minds of deeply drawn and deeply flawed people, but into what feels like each and every dust particle on the red planet; this is a towering achievement. BLUE and GREEN on the docket, but I need to catch my breath first.

My complete reading list, from 2013 to the present, lives here.