There are days when the internet feeds you an interesting series of posts, comments, and articles that all seem to weave together in interesting ways. For example, this quartet of things have all showed up on my radar within a twenty-four hour period: Charlotte Nash’a comments about the limits of time on Tuesday’s post about bad systems and newsletters, which I read a few hours before… Kameron Hurley’s Locus essay about burnout, the expectation of productivity, and the reluctance to say “do less” in our culture at the moment. This post by Daphne Huff about writing a novel when you have zero time due to running a family, a full-time job, and a podcast (which seems like madness when read alongside everything else, but the final section about focusing on one aspect of craft/publishing at a time in the final section orients it with in this list). And this highly interesting twitter rant by @GravisLizard about the way we react to the phrase $100 shoes as if it’s a Gold Plated Toilet, rather than a sign that our understanding of money, value, and cost is fucked up and set to the standards of an 1980s economy, and the implications of

Peeps, we need to talk about Facebook. Specifically, this trend that I’ve noticed with this year’s GenreCon where people have eschewed email and started sending me important queries about the conference via the Facebook PM system. Don’t do this. For the love of all the Gods in all the Heavens, don’t do this. Carve these words into your heart and cleave to them for the rest of your writing career: Facebook is not the place for any kind of one-to-one professional communication.  I’m not talking about the quick, easy stuff – it’s not like the messenger/chat system on Facebook is entirely broken. I use it for all sorts of things: asking the important questions about whether we’re good for write club and whether we need donuts; asking quick questions of friends that have an easy response; the occasional chat with old friends who moved away. It’s great for that, it really is. But it’s pants for anything important. I get the impulse to try it, I really do. About twenty years ago we moved away from a dominant form of communication that happened on your terms – you’d make a call on the phone, someone would answer, and they’d have to deal with

’m sufficiently old that I feel like the window for talking about We Are Lady Parts is over, what with the series coming out in May of 2021 and our engagement with it taking place in early September. I’m old because I’m trapped in a cultural paradigm where immediacy is a primary virtue when recommending narratives—the same paradigm where books have a shelf-life of three to four weeks, television shows get consumed in scheduled blocks and paid for by advertising, and films exist to be shown on the big screen or pulled off the limited shelf-space of your local blockbuster. Talk about a film, a book, or a television show four months down the line in that kind of environment, and the moment is already over. You wait for re-runs or the DVD release that might never happen, scour second-hand bookstores or badger your library to order in a copy. But this is the streaming age; the binge watch age; the ebook age. Online stores don’t have the limitations of physical shelf space, and they’re free to stock vast back lists if you’re eager to engage. A penchant for addressing things while they’re new is an atavism of an earlier