Good Intentions

it's the New Year: stop looking back at 2023

I gasped when I opened my Substack dashboard this morning.

My last newsletter was more than a month ago.

I catch myself wondering what happened in December that drove me so far off course?

There were money worries, of course. The old Japanese name for December is 師走 (shiwasu), and it’s a perfect image for the frazzled nature of the month gone by: priests and scholars (師) scurrying around (走) to get everything done, including bills and receipts, before the year ends.

Hiro and I prepped all the information for our year-end/New Year cards and then the post office held off on delivering the stamps until December 28. We’re still planning to send at least a few of them.

But there were highlights too.

My friend Benny posed me for this glorious photograph at our company holiday party. Purple is truly my color.

I spent a lot of (energizing) time working on new designs for t-shirts and greeting cards.

But the greatest focus (outside of work) occurred when I sent (what I thought were) the first forty pages of the planned revisions to my memoir to Greg Mania.

In October, I had had two separate people offer oddly similar feedback: start in Japan; rework earlier events in as flashbacks.

I read through the manuscript, identifying the scenes and the themes they spoke to.

I then drafted a rough outline in a different spreadsheet, again keeping track of themes but adding a timestamp reference.

To me, the chapters seemed to cohere better, and this method of rethinking the memoir had been inspiring. I spent most of November moving things around, writing and rewriting, and happy about the manuscript.

But I hadn’t shared anything new out to beta-readers and as happy as I was with the revisions, I knew enough not to trust the vacuum of my own thoughts.

“Is this working?” was the question I posed to Greg.

Before he looked at my pages, we talked through my objectives in FaceTime—I had first met Greg at the Hippocamp writing conference in Lancaster back in 2021 and have subsequently fangirled every chance I had to interact, including when I read his substack—and then agreed to a timeline. He also recommended that I read Cleanness by Garth Greenwell as I wait.

In keeping with that, Greg sent me an editorial letter and then we had another FaceTime the next day to review it together.

But here’s the thing.

I was too excited.

When Greg mentioned in the first paragraph that “Your voice practically somersaults from the page, and is imbued with the kind of connective tissue that makes a writer beloved,” my eyes lost all focus and then I started to lightly skip through the rest of his detailed (and ultimately helpful) feedback. To paraphrase some of the criticism I glanced at: “Pacing is uneven.” “The vignettes are like flipping through Polaroids.” “Outlines are your friends.” “Think about structure and consider using sections so your in-chapter vignettes can exist as chapters instead.” I mentally shrugged, even as I compiled some (in hindsight very petulant) questions for our review:

• What is an outline in the context of a memoir?

• How long is this going to take me?

• Tell me more about sections and chapters.

• Why did you recommend Greenwell? Our writing styles are very different.

The review was productive, in some ways, but I was still too excited.

That was on December 18.

I kept working on the revisions, more or less as I had been before I talked to Greg, for about five days.

And then his advice finally began to sink in.

My first realization?

I didn’t understand pacing enough.

And when I looked back at where Greg suggested I slow down, I had a Eureka moment.

Of course those sections read too cursorily.

When it came to emotions, to planning, to reflection, that Brian, up to age 25, was a very cursory individual. Ignorant of how to process them, feelings like grief, sorrow, and regret frightened me.

Which is why the memoir’s working title is Crying in a Foreign Language. I didn’t even begin to have the mental tools for working with feelings until I was in Japan. Until I was enmeshed in a bad relationship and not understanding any of the reasons how or why I had allowed that.

And some of my neuroses—why don’t readers like Greg understand that?!—exploded (apologies!) and, as had been true in Japan, once the outburst passed, there was clarity.

If the Brian who arrives in Tōkyō at age 22 isn’t mentally ready to deal with feelings, I DO NOT HAVE TO fictionalize his feelings and responses.

What I can do, however, is describe, through my actions and my then-shallow thoughts, the ways in which I backed away from those feelings.

I also realized that using a spreadsheet to outline was not working. It was too rigid and I needed a tool that let me play more. I know many other writers tape index cards on their walls but I do not have wall real estate. I asked my friends on Twitter for suggestions and got some good advice.

The writing tool I already use, Scrivener, happens to have a corkboard feature for outlining. I started working on that last week and it has really captured my attention.

The memoir will be braided, or a hybrid, or a patchwork, or a collage (there are so many ways to describe it). I’m about to start reading another of Greg’s suggestions, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, by Maggie Smith, and I think that’s going to bolster my new understanding of how interwoven chapters of my life in Japan, flashbacks, and bits of social and historical context, can work together.

(The colors of my virtual index cards are for the different threads, and then little colored tags on the cards are for different themes or ideas.)

So…

I have set no deadlines.

The outlining work will be done when it is done.

The revisions (including new material the outline is prompting me to write) will be done when they are done.

The revisions to my book proposal will happen too, once the manuscript revisions are done.

I am not querying literary agents again until then (although I am still sending out essays to literary mags).

And I will talk more about Japan in my next newsletter issue.

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I’ve also done a lot of reading in December and January, and want to recommend a few things.

• World of Wonders, by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, gave me a cool understanding for ways to weave the natural world into memoir.

• My friend Dendron recommended One Last Stop, by Casey McQuiston, and it’s the glorious queer supernatural romance I didn’t know I needed.

• Gay Bar, by Jeremy Atherton Lin, is another hybrid memoir I am learning a lot from.

• The audio book I’m listening to whenever I drive somewhere alone is Creativity, by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly. It’s very dry and academic but learning about ways to amplify my own creativity has been interesting.

• My friend Charlotte Wilkins had an essay published in Dorothy Parker’s Ashes: No U Turns. It’s a great read.

On to pile to be read next?

• Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style, by Paul Rudnick. I howled my way through the first chapter before I needed to check it back into the library, but I have it again.

• Leading Lady, by Charles Busch. Yes, that Charles Busch. Of Vampire Lesbians of Sodom fame. Delicious.

• And inspired by our anniversary trip to Hawai’i in November, recommended by a friend from Williams, Unfamiliar Fishes, by Sarah Vowell.

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Thank you for indulging a little writerly omphaloskepsis.