New year, old novel
Purging notifications to make room for more reading and writing
Here we are in the new year! I closed out 2024 with a case of COVID, but now that I’m feeling better I can say that several days of doing nothing and going nowhere was actually kind of nice.
A follow-up on my 2025 intentions: I did my big phone cleanup and it has actually been life-changing. Things that had an immediate impact that I wish I’d done sooner:
Turning off badge notifications for any app that had them
Turning off push notifications for personal email (never had them for work email)
Turning on “downtime” for everything except phone calls, texts, e-readers, and workout apps from 9pm to 9am
My only remaining notifications from 9am to 9pm are phone calls, texts, and Slack messages. (I’m lucky in that my coworkers rarely Slack outside of the hours of 9 to 5, so I felt leaving that on til 9pm in case something truly important comes up was okay.)
It was wild to log into my email on the afternoon of the first day and find 40-something new messages. 2024 me would have been interrupted by every single one of those. 2025 me was able to lie on the couch and read a book for an hour with unbroken concentration. (And then unsubscribe from most of those emails.)
Already these new boundaries are supporting my other intention to read like a kid, and for me reading more almost always leads to writing more. Win/win.
This week in reading
Another part of my big cleanup was closing out open tabs. I read a ton of essays and interviews I meant to read earlier in the year. Some favorites:
This conversation in The Believer between Kate Zambreno and Danielle Dutton in which Zambreno observes, “The way publishers market memoirs suggests that one’s sense of identity is stable and integrated.” I think Zambreno is one of our time’s most interesting thinkers on the subjects of what art is/does, the effects of its commodification, and what it means to be a woman who makes art. Another thing she said in this interview: “I don’t like feeling co-opted, and I increasingly do, especially when I’m brought into these museum spaces to speak. I often feel I’m asked to be the feminist. I mean, feminism is of course important, but it’s most important to me right now as an ethical relational position rather than as an identity.” These quotes are more interesting in the context of the whole conversation and I really recommend it.
“My Face” by Melissa Febos from The Yale Review's Objects of Desire series
“Death of the Party” by Raven Leilani from n+1’s fall issue
One tab I didn’t close: Chelsea Hodson’s “Autoportrait” in Hazlitt. I’ve been reading a little bit of this every couple of days for months and I think I’d rather continue reading it that way.
Recently finished: Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik. I can’t say I liked this book, but it was incredibly interesting, both the subject matter and the unfolding of the author’s argument, which is basically that the two writers operated as shadow selves of each other. She couldn’t make me buy it in the end, but I was along for the ride, despite the many instances of condescending direct address. (“Did you catch that, Reader?”) I am a sucker for a literary biography and I don’t regret the days I spent with this one.
Just picked up: Kevin Maloney’s Horse Girl Fever, which comes out Tuesday and is already in contention for best cover of 2025.
Also reading: In the Freud Archives by Janet Malcolm. Working toward becoming a Malcolm completist.
This week in writing
Oh, it’s been a good week in writing! Friday was the start of a Mini 1000 — a thousand words a day for a week — and that day I wrote 1000 new words of the glass house novel, which is more than I have added to the novel in a single day since I brought it over to a new Scrivener file in March 2023. 😳
It felt AMAZING. The characters are more alive than ever, the story is still totally fascinating to me, and my main feeling coming back to it was how much I missed being on the inside of this project. (Also — how close it is to being done. I couldn’t have finished it back then, wasn’t the person I needed to be, but maybe I am her now. I hope I am her now.)
This week in Leave news
I’ve been doing interviews and it is SO FUN to finally talk to people about the book. It’s also gratifying to me how wildly different each conversation has been. People take different things from the book based on what they bring to it, and it’s neat to be able to see that from this vantage point to which I’ve never before had access.
We’ve also added another date to the book tour — catch me at The Head & The Hand in Philly on March 13, in conversation with none other than
! More details to come.
I hope you’ve been able to ease into this new year. If you’re reading anything good, I’d love to hear about it!
Love,
Shayne
I see a kindred tab-lover! Part of my 2024 was a practice of routinely closing tabs … like, just shaving off a dozen from time to time so as to keep my computer functional … using Pocket to save articles is key to closure without fear! Just saved all three of your reads, for example. For 2025 I’d like to read more of those articles instead of letting them pile up in the app. :)