I should start with something controversial, so as to draw new readers to my newsletter who cannot resist the harsh iconoclasm of a practiced firebrand. But it can be hard to embrace controversy when there’s a genocide on, so instead I’ll direct you to an interview in which Shayla Malone, of The Missouri Review, asked some questions about my short story that the magazine published recently. I love to answer a well-asked question, and Shayla asked five of them. Thank you, Shayla, and the whole Missouri Review team!The rest of this newsletter rambles and digresses in a self-indulgent fashion, which means it’s just like everything else I’ve ever written. But the reason I gave it the title I did is that everyone should listen to the Harry Nilsson album Knnillssonn. I know people will call me a dreamer, when I say this. They’ll accuse me of not thinking realistically. But it’s my true and firm belief that if, on this day, everyone who read or heard this newsletter listened to the album Knnillssonn by Harry Nilsson, all wars around the whole world would stop, and none would ever start again. I should also mention, before I go any further, that there is an audio version of this newsletter you can listen to. I got some pretty good feedback on the first one I recorded and sent out, with people telling me my voice “is not bad enough, I mean, probably not bad enough, to make people want to drive headfirst into walls and buildings, so they never have to hear anything like it again; I mean, I guess it could be worse, is what I’m saying.” Also, I published a short story a couple years ago in a little magazine somewhere, but I never actually saw it in print and the magazine has no online presence, so as far as I can tell no one has ever read it. On the website, the issue is listed as “Coming Soon,” but it’s been that way since, I think, 2022. And I like that story, so maybe I’ll record myself reading it and release it as a “podcast episode.” Sometimes I don’t know what I’ll do until I’ve done it already. Something I will do for sure is read the first five or so pages of the novel I’ve been revising, at the end of the audio version of this newsletter. Because people can’t get enough of the sound of my voice.This Is Where the Real Threat Is Emanating from for You, Part OneI was reading an essay by the psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster, and came across the line, “this is where the real threat is emanating from for you, signalled by these letters.”I don’t have any idea what she’s talking about there, so I’ll provide no context. I don’t even know I could do it if I tried. Sometimes I read things I don’t understand. All I will say about it is that a real threat to me is emanating, and it’s signaled by some letters. I wrote the letters down, some time ago, and I have to deal with them now. Or, I don’t have to, but I am. And that’s just as bad.What I’m trying to say is, I have been revising two novels. I spent the last year ignoring them. I wrote short stories instead, and said I was done with book-length things. There was no point. I’m not sure there is a point now. But I am working on the two novels I wrote prior to just one year ago. I am getting back to it. I trade off. One day I’ll work on one novel; a couple days later I’ll work on the other. In between, I do the work I have to do to stay alive. The novel I’ve been working on today and yesterday is called We Eat the Rich. I thought it was finished already. I read it again recently and found that, 100 pages in, its momentum flagged. Some books’ momentums can flag. They’re allowed to do that. This one’s momentum, though, cannot. Its premise is too absurd for the reader to have even the slightest opportunity to say, Wait a minute. This is ridiculous. I have to keep throwing more weird s**t at them, so they don’t question anything I’ve already hit them in the face with. It’s a good strategy! There is no way this will not work out. To be honest, I’m uncertain about the novel as a whole, and I think it may have been a terrible mistake to write it in the first place. I’m sure I’ve explained it more than once in this newsletter already, but here we go again: it’s about four young women who roam America in a van and kill and eat rich people. They go to a house that looks nice, have a feast, burn the place down, and move on. They never get caught, because their van once belonged to a sorceress who cast a spell on it, or because they’re lucky, it’s not clear which. There’s not much actual bloodshed in the novel. I mean, there is some. There has to be some. But I’m more interested in the way these four characters talk to one another, and the world they generate inside their van, in which the things they do make sense and everything is inside out. The two novels I’m working on, and another one that’s finished that I’m querying agents with, form an unintended trilogy, in which ...
