Work it out

reading and writing as muscles, unfortunately

I wrote a few weeks back that I was in a reading slump. Since the new year I had basically only been able to read fanfiction and nonfiction—not that there is anything wrong with either of those. The familiar patterns of fanfic and the facts and figures approach of nonfiction were doing something for my brain, which seemed to look at New Narrative and go “Yikes! Not today.” My brain was taking longer to recover from the flu than I wanted; at the end of the day, I just wanted to sit on my couch and veg out.

A switch flipped midway through February. I finished the first two books of Heather Fawcett’s Emily Wilde trilogy within five days of each other, and since the 24th I’ve read four more books. Well, three and a half—one of them, Tracers in the Dark, was a very slow read and I had do DNF about 60% through because my Libby hold was expiring. Still! Nearly four books in basically a week from two the entire month before. Even though one of the books made me want to throw my phone across the room in a fit of pique at the ending (Divine Rivals, I’m looking at you) I found myself drawing a lot of value from the experience. Both Divine Rivals and the Emily Wilde books deal with magic and a headstrong, intelligent female lead, but where the Emily Wilde books revel in baroque and expansive world-building specificity, Divine Rivals never leaned in hard enough to its premise, which should have been absolutely tailor-made for me: WWI! Female war correspondents! Magic! A You’ve Got Mail element!

Despite that disappointment, my reading brain is hungry right now. I read Hernan Diaz’s Pulitzer-winning novel Trust on train rides to and from work almost immediately after putting Divine Rivals down. I’m bopping around genres, all earlier trepidation about starting something new forgotten. Earlier this week I pulled Liu Cixin’s Hugo Award-winner The Three-Body Problem off the shelf, sure I had read it before and wanting to give it a re-visit before watching the new adaptation. The minute I started, I went full “I have no memory of this place”—I haven’t read it, actually, and the joy of discovery is like a fire.

So now that I’m out of my reading slump, I’m thinking: what other areas of my life have been in similar slumps? My friend Becca Heyman and I were discussing our writing doldrum woes over text the other day, and I realized that writing is like exercise—I’m out of shape because I don’t exercise, and I don’t exercise because I’m out of shape. I’ve been avoiding writing because it’s been so long that I made a proper effort that I am anticipating the pain of the first words on the page to be huge. I didn’t pick up a new-to-me work of fiction for nearly a month because I had the fear that the book wouldn’t be good, or that I’d find it hard to get through. All of these slumps are caused by fear, of anticipating a pain that probably won’t come.

And even if I continue putting it off, the pain of not writing and not being more active is a pain in and of itself! I’m not somehow helping my current or future selves by putting either of these activities off.

All of which is to say: you don’t have to read four book in a week to get out of a reading slump. You don’t have to complete a NaNoWriMo or a marathon to get yourself back into reading or exercising. Do a little at a time; work those muscles. It’ll all come back.

WHAT I’M READING

The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin (translated by Ken Liu) won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2015, and has been on numerous best-of lists ever since. Warring adatpations of the first book in the trilogy are coming out this year, the first by a Chinese production company and the second by Netflix. It will be interesting to see how the two companies approach this mammoth work—the book deals a lot with Chinese politics and history, and there are rumors that the Chinese versions soft-pedals or doesn’t engage at all with some of the bloodier episodes the book covers. It’s a rollicking read, and every so often I have to put the book down and go “What??” (in a good way.) I’m also reading (on my phone) the second of Sarah Caudwell’s legal mysteries, The Shortest Way to Hades. Again, tremendous fun, just like Thus Was Adonis Murdered, which was about a hapless friend inadvertently being accused of murder for attempting to seduce the wrong person on vacation.

HOUSEKEEPING

My first novel, Marrying In, is available for purchase on Kindle, Nook, and Kobo, and is coming soon to iBooks. If you’ve read it, consider leaving a review—that helps me and the book in the long run!

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I’m available to hire for freelance editing services on Reedsy. You can find me on social media on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, the A Faster No Discord, and now TikTok. If you buy any of the books linked in this newsletter I receive a small commission at no cost to you.