Superstitious

because of course I am

This past week, from Wednesday until yesterday, most of my free time was spent working on a new 4,200-word essay.

I think it’s good. But I think most writers complete a piece confident, and then, maybe a day, maybe a week, maybe a month or more later, that selfsame piece rises bile in our throats. How could I have written this? Look at these mistakes?

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Part of the essay had already been drafted, and I borrowed heavily from the 3,000 words I had written for my Lambda Literary, with a very critical eye and cognizant of the feedback from the other flowers (I’m re-entering my Sarah Millican phase) in my cohort. But I started writing completely new material on Wednesday, a 500-word chunk that flew out of me, making me forget what time it was.

Revisions were relentless. Paragraphs reordered or sometimes removed. Verb choices. An ear to the rhythm of the sentences—I let Word read the text back to me. Fun fact: whenever Word ran into Japanese text in my writing, a not uncommon occurrence, the robot voice turned Japanese, but it did not switch back to English after the Japanese parts ended. I had to restart the reading at the head of an English-language paragraph to fix that.

What’s it about? I won’t go into too many details—that’s where I’m superstitious—but I think it’s going to set up my second book well. The one about marriage equality and modems. I will send it a few places this week for potential publication; it works as a standalone essay.

---

Yesterday morning, I finished the last edits to the essay before running some errands. Hiro and I got haircuts, and my barber trimmed my beard, as well. And then I went to the nail salon with a friend for a great pedicure and manicure. I brought my own colors for a five-layer look: base coats, two coats of white, a coat of pearlescent sheen, and a top coat.

And then we headed to the home of some friends for a barbecue. Wonderful people, wonderful food.

Three conversations stayed with me.

The woman who (lovingly) asked who I had come to know myself—in essence, how I came out to myself. I talked about falling in love with Bill Bixby on The Courtship of Eddie’s Father when I was five. About my attempts to draw my cusp-of-puberty fantasies, which prompted me to understand some of the physiological changes my twelve-year-old body was embarking on. About being able to purchase gay porn magazines like Honcho when I was fourteen.

(That particular reminiscence made me wonder if, in addition to confusing me about sex among men, which never happened as easily or as simply as depicted in the one-handed fiction, those magazines left me with the lasting impression that all (gay) men are potential sex partners. And yet I suppose that many straight men conceive of all women as potential partners, too, so maybe it wasn’t the porn. Maybe it was standard to any American male adolescence in the 1970s and early 1980s. More data is needed.)

The second conversation was about GLP-1 medications. I’ll be talking with my PCP next month about them, but someone at the barbecue shared his experiences, good and bad, with me. I’ll have a better range of questions to ask my doc as a result.

And before the barbecue ended, one woman who is rapidly becoming a best friend took me aside. “Your writing,” she said, “reminds me of James Bond.”

Tell me more.

“You know how when Daniel Craig (my favorite Bond!) is on screen, everything he does is deliberate?”

I loved that analogy. Because yes, when I write and revise, I want to be deliberate; I want to be intentional in my word choices. I’m not a fan of Hemingway brevity, but I aspire to write with the beauty of Garth Greenwell, the carnality of Edmund White, and the precision of Chen Chen.

Think The Music Man. Preferably the one with Robert Preston, Shirley Jones, and Hermione Gingold. I want Eulalie MacKechnie-Shinn to walk into a library and confront Marian Paroo. When Marian insists my book is a classic, I want to hear Eulalie say, “It’s a smutty book.”