Being Grumpy and Grateful All At Once

And a new project you're welcome to follow along on, if you'd like...

I feel like I’ve been very quiet here lately. In the midst of so many good things and hard things and wonderful things and grievous things, it seems to be taking my words longer and longer to catch up to my heart and my mind. Writing in this space can feel inadequate.

I have also found myself feeling very grumpy towards the writing world, including many other writers, publishers, and myself. Can you be grumpy with yourself? Turns out you can. This is not to say that there aren’t good writers writing good words and there aren’t good publishers publishing good things, but everything, no matter how well-situated, rubs me the wrong way. I’m not used to feeling this way. I’m a 9 and have lived my life trying to keep the peace. But now I’m mostly grumpy.

In the midst of all of this, I find myself being pulled towards fiction—writing it, reading it (but only if it takes my breath away), and talking with other people about it. So it’s good my college kids are now home because most of the time we sit up late talking about books that have knocked our socks off lately (The Passage, The Bee Sting, Tell Me Everything, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, North Woods, My Friends, Everything is Tuberculosis ((not fiction but still)), We Do Not Part). We keep only the lamp on in the front corner of the house and sit on the two large, old sofas that face each other and Winnie curls up at one end and the rest of us talk about books. And laugh at old family videos we find on our phones.

In the midst of this grumpiness and just sort of general disregard for what other people think, and also in the midst of our family’s passion for stories, I decided I’m going to start publishing a serial novel here on Substack, an old idea that I mostly wrote the first draft of about SP. It’s about her when she’s old and grumpy (sort of like me) and doesn’t care anymore. Of course I don’t mention her by name in the story in order to avoid copyright anger from whoever owns Narnia these days, and I’ll probably have to come back and delete this post to have some sort of plausible deniability.

If you want to sign up for that in order to know when I start pushing publish, you can find it here. I think I’m going to call it Funny Games We Used to Play, but that could change.

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Ever since I turned 48 in December, yes, I’ve been a bit grumpy, but I’ve also felt a profoundly deep gratefulness for the truly meaningful things in my life (a list that’s shrinking as I get older, being winnowed down).

One thing that’s remained in my gratefulness bucket is all of you. The incredible encouragement I get from those of you who keep reading me after all of these years is a real thing. We’ve even had people come by the book shop to see us and say how much they appreciate what Maile and I are doing. That means a lot.