Realizing belatedly that I could have called my "leaving Twitter" post "Qwitter". A friend also suggested "Tweep No More". I suppose this feeling is ex-tweet de l'escalier.

(Also realizing that I might have accidentally sacrificed a portion of this list to the Website Maintenance deities. Whoops!)

Fiction
Frog and Toad are Friends by Arnold Lobel
The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher by Beatrix Potter
Bread and Jam for Frances by Russell Hoban, ill. Lillian Hoban
[you get the idea: a bunch more children's picture books, out loud, to children of my acquaintance]
"The Stars We Raised"/"逃跑星辰" by Xiu Xinyu/修新羽, translated by Judy Yi Zhou/周易, in The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, eds. Yu Chen and Regina Kanyu Wang (Tordotcom Publishing)
"The Tale of Wude’s Heavenly Tribulation"/"五德渡劫记" by Count E/E 伯爵, translated by Mel “etvolare” Lee (ibid.)
"What Does the Fox Say?"/"狐狸说什么?" by Xia Jia/夏笳 (ibid.)
"Blackbird"/"黑鸟" by Shen Dacheng/沈大成, translated by Cara Healey/贺可嘉 (ibid.)
[redacted — novelette, client work, 15k words]
[redacted — novel, client work, 115k words]

Poetry
"Finally, Some Career Advice" by Natalie Shapero
"Bless My Nameless Hour" by Matthew Rohrer (via Pome)
"Meditations in an Emergency" by Frank O'Hara
"Message Clear" by Edwin Morgan (via @scotlit on Twitter)
"Eranna to Sappho" by Rainer Maria Rilke (tr. Edward Snow)
"Goodtime Jesus" by James Tate (via Christopher DeWeese on Twitter)

Culture
"Sorkin's Women" by Madeline Lane-McKinley (Blindfield Journal)
"A Cosmos Indoors: My Kingdom for a Mint Cracknel" by Andrew O'Hagan (London Review of Books)
"Phương Tâm, Sixties Star of Vietnam Surf Rock, Reclaims Her Legacy at 77" by Christine Nguyen (KQED)
"Who are the swaying Kiwi Brothers?" by Dan Taipua (The Spinoff)
"Shouts & Murmurs: What If Someone From 1850 Had a Phone" by Dan Brooks (Gawker) (worth it for the line "a frustrating parody of what I am looking for, the way tennis players are mad at pickleball", though that is a BOLD choice of stone to launch from New Gawker's glass house)
"Celebrating 4/20 When You Hate Being High" by Lizzie Plaugic and Kaitlyn Tiffany (The Atlantic)

Politics
"Disney’s special district tells investors state can’t dissolve it without paying debt" by Mary Ellen Klas (Miami Herald)

I'm back from a trip that was thrown into disarray before it even started by the federal ruling voiding the mask mandate for airplanes the day before I was supposed to fly out. The week was further disrupted by my brother-in-law's jagoff coworker — who didn't test before they went on a business trip together, although he was symptomatic, because he "didn't think he had COVID" — infecting my brother-in-law with COVID.

I truly have nothing to say about this except that if Jagoff Coworker sees me on the street he better cross. I've gotten over my initial impulse to send him a fruit basket passive-aggressively thanking him for ensuring that I didn't spend TOO much time enjoying the company of my loved ones. Now I simply wish for him to turn on his location.

Bless his heart.

A few other stressful things happened (including witnessing a hit-and-run) but that is not why I am writing this post today.

tl;dr: I am embracing my true calling as an Offline Girlfriend.

Every time I've succumbed to the impulse to doomscroll over the past couple of months, I've ended up with weary, stale, flat, unprofitable cycling through my head like a mantra. This mostly-offline trip brought home to me that Twitter doesn't do much for me these days, and that I feel more alive the less I pay attention to it.

I've actually been thinking this for quite some time, to the point that I recently came up with an elaborate exit strategy involving Shamir's Secret Sharing, mailing envelopes to five members of my inner circle, setting up automatic mirroring of my blog posts to Twitter so I would never have to log in at all, etc.

These discussions rapidly got out of hand, to the point that I had to look up what "airgapped machine" meant.

I regret that I'm no longer planning to do this, because I think it would have made an entertaining final Twitter thread.

It turns out, though, that merely thinking ugh my presence might make Elon Musk some tiny fraction of a cent richer is enough to make the whole website unpalatable to me.

I will also not miss

• the relentlessly infantilizing tone and the presumption that everything must be an opportunity for "education" (Twitter is fatally attractive to the kind of person who delights in repeating received wisdom as if they'd personally invented it)
• the general overfamiliarity, including people I've never met or spoken to and don't know from a hole in the ground dumping their personal problems onto me at the drop of a hat
• replies to my jokes that are just worse versions of the same joke
• getting dragged into an unending 15-person thread that sends me too many notifications because someone decided that one of my shitposts was a Conversation Starter
• the same few Book/Writing/Publishing Discourse topics getting recycled over and over
• getting @-ed with crypto/NFT spam multiple times a week (sometimes multiple times a day)

I will miss a handful of friends and people with a real gift for the medium, but luckily they all know how to reach me. (And if they don't, my work email is very easy to find.)

In the end, nothing that's happened on Twitter in months — possibly years — has made me as happy as driving to a park with an old friend to release the mouse we'd just caught in her kitchen. We'd been sitting in the living room talking in low voices and keeping our ears peeled for the snap of the humane trap going off. Perhaps it would be poetic to end this by saying that I looked into the eyes of little Fitzwilliam (the mouse (to whom I grew surprisingly attached in our fifteen-minute acquaintance)) and thought, I'm as trapped as you are, lured into this tiny private hell by the peanut-butter scent of random dopamine spikes.

It would be poetic but it would also be a lie. My immaculate happiness — the frisson of heading to the woods in the dead of night to dispose of our illicit cargo, the rustle of Fitzwilliam fleeing into the grass by the creek — came from not thinking about the internet at all.

Temperatures now regularly above 50° in New York, restoring my will to live!!!

This was a fun conversation between two smart people:

What is Genre, Anyway? | A Conversation with Isaac Fellman and Kate McKean

In this conversation, author Isaac Fellman and literary agent Kate McKean discuss how writers and the publishing industry define genre.

CatapultKate McKean

and this part also seems relevant to the ongoing hellish situation of "parents' rights" bills / Follett developing tools to make it easier for parents to surveil their children's library usage:

If anyone is surveilling my own library usage: please accept my apology. It is definitely my personal fault that you have not yet gotten off the hold list for The Books of Jacob.

News/Opinion/Analysis/what have you
"Russia's Finances are Closing Up" by Matt Levine (Bloomberg; website is paywalled, but I get the column sent to me as an email newsletter, which as of this writing is free)
"A Curious Facebook Mystery" by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day, his newsletter)
"Why John Mearsheimer Blames the U.S. for the Crisis in Ukraine", interview of Mearsheimer by Isaac Chotiner (The New Yorker)
"Chess Has A Russia Problem" by Patrick Redford (Defector)

Culture
"A Decade of Sore Winners" by B. D. McClay (The Outline)

"Meet the security guards moonlighting as curators at the Baltimore Museum of Art" by Susan Stamberg (NPR)
"How Angry Should Other Writers Be About Brandon Sanderson’s $22 Million Kickstarter?" by Laura Miller (Slate)
"How tf was I privileged?" by Christian Lorentzen (LRB)
"Diary: Putting on Kafka's Tux" by Patricia Lockwood (LRB) (they should let me earmark my subscription money for the Letting Lockwood Do Whatever Weird Thing She Wants Fund)
"A gripping yarn: inside the Knitting.com drama" by Chris Stokel-Walker (Input)
"miranda??? texting me?????" by Samantha Irby (bitches gotta eat!, her Substack)
"How It Felt to Have My Novel Stolen" by Peter C. Baker (The New Yorker)

Nonfiction
[redacted — a long, weird book that I don't feel like discussing except with the two friends with whom I am already discussing it]
Japanese Knitting Stitch Bible: 260 Exquisite Patterns by Hitomi Shida, translation and introduction by Gayle Roehm (Tuttle)

Poetry
"bye" by Charles Rybak (The Drift)
this Twitter thread
"Short Talk on Walking Backwards" by Anne Carson (via Tara Skurtu on Twitter)
"Log" by James Merrill (via Kamran Javadizadeh on Twitter)

Short Fiction
[redacted — a whole passel of short stories, client work]
"The Stars We Raised"/"逃跑星辰" by Xiu Xinyu/修新羽, translated by Judy Yi Zhou/周易, in The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories (Tordotcom Publishing)

Fiction
[redacted — partial ms., client work]
[redacted — partial ms., client work]

Februaries always feel at best like my head is a half-drunk can of seltzer that someone left out overnight to go flat, and at worst like flinging myself against a wall over and over. They've been a particular mindfuck during the pandemic: February 2020 was the last time I got on a plane (to be workshop faculty at Futurescapes in Utah) before New York shut down a few weeks later. In February 2021 I thought, it's been a year since I flew. Now it's been over two years, possibly a record for me.

February 2022 was a month of contracts, admin work, and trying to reorganize the apartment where I've spent almost all my time since mid-March of 2020. I started reading about thirty separate things and finished almost none of them, but hey, I turned this lectern into a halfway functional standing desk arrangement. Congratulations to me.

Right up front, I'm going to sneak in the latest installment of my colleague Kate McKean's newsletter, Agents and Books, even though it was just published this afternoon (March 1st! not February!! scandalous!!!). Kate's take on book publishing is always clear-sighted and grounded in compassion; I felt the first two paragraphs of this one in my gut as I was reading it on one of my own stupid little walks today. ("This Ain't No Party, This Ain't No Disco: Book Promotion in Times Like These")

I'm also linking to a couple of Twitter threads about workloads and burnout in publishing because this is my blog and I can do that. A client mentioned Nicole Brinkley's newsletter Misshelved to me on the phone and issue #9, "It must be exhausting to be an author", hit a "laughing in the key of depression" sweet spot for me.

On a less bleak note, this is a cool idea that I hope some publisher tries out.

Novels/Novellas
[redacted — considering for rep, novel]

Grouping a bunch of things under the loose heading "Culture"
"Patricia Lockwood Has Always Sounded This Way" by Deborah Treisman (The New Yorker)
"A look at the long prime of novelist Muriel Spark on the centenary of her birth" by Leo Robson (The New Statesman)
"The Bizarre, Unsolved Mystery of Filippo Bernardini and the Stolen Book Manuscripts" by Alex Shephard (The New Republic)
"The Sex Scene is Dead. Long Live the Sex Scene." — conversation between Doreen St. Félix, Naomi Fry, Vinson Cunningham, and Alexandra Schwartz in The New Yorker; a lot of this did not particularly make sense to me, but what are you going to do
"Kenneth Branagh: My Poirot Must Ache" by B. D. McClay (Gawker)
"In the Beginning Was the Blurb" by Mike Jakeman (The Fence)
"'She Was Committed to the Dark Side': How My Best Friend’s Wedding messed with Julia Roberts’s image and changed rom-coms for good" by Scott Meslow, excerpted in Vulture from his book From Hollywood with Love: The Rise and Fall (and Rise Again) of the Romantic Comedy (god this is too great a volume of subtitle for one entry. anyway, Dey Street/William Morrow/HarperCollins)

Poetry
a few poems from Dear Boy by Emily Berry, the first book I opened in February (Faber Poetry) (reread)
"Une femme qui était belle/A woman once lovely" by Alice Paalen Rahon (in Shapeshifter, NYRB Poets)
"The Lost Pilot" by James Tate
"The Chaste Stranger" by James Tate
"Manna" by James Tate
"Poem to Some of My Recent Poems" by James Tate
"OK Fern" by Maureen N. McLane (via 陳琛 / Chen Chen on Twitter)
"Poem for the Depression" by Ruth Krauss (via Pome)
"Celibacy at Twenty" by Sharon Olds
"Housecleaning" by Nikki Giovanni

Essay
"Six Sentences I Can't Forget" by John Paul Brammer — this essay is an old friend from February 2020 (¡Hola Papi!, his Substack) (reread)

The Locus report on Worldcon 2021 (Discon III) prompted me to go back through my pictures from that weekend. Here are a few of my favorites — I wish I'd thought to take more.

One of the first things I remember about the weekend: the French and Japanese editions of The Quantum Magician, which Derek Künsken was kind enough to bring to the con and sign for me.

It was a pity not to be able to see Sarah Pinsker in person, but it did lead to one of my favorite moments: Kellan/K.M. Szpara (in his capacity as Excellent Friend) brought Sarah to her signing table in the dealers' room on a tablet.

I already tweeted this one in response to Sarah's request for anything cool/creepy about the hotel, but here's the haunted-looking (and closed-for-the-season) swimming pool at the Omni Shoreham.

Another favorite moment: one client (Derek again) asking another (Jordan Ifueko) to sign copies of her own books for his niece!

And finally, it wouldn't have been an SFF con weekend without a spaceship: specifically, the P-Funk Mothership at the National Museum of African-American History and Culture.

This list is incomplete — I definitely read more poetry, short fiction, and nonfiction that I neglected to write down — but it should include most of what I enjoyed last month. I don't notice any particular themes except that I'm definitely on a Muriel Spark kick and a nun kick, which overlapped at The Abbess of Crewe below. The nun kick also included the films Dark Habits (Almodóvar, 1983), Black Narcissus (Powell & Pressburger, 1947), and Inquiring Nuns (Quinn & Temaner, 1968).

Novels/Novellas
The Comforters by Muriel Spark (New Directions)
[redacted — client work, novella]
[redacted — client work, novel]
[redacted — considering for rep, novel]
Boy Parts by Eliza Clark (Influx Press)
Loitering With Intent by Muriel Spark (New Directions)
Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke by Eric LaRocca (Weirdpunk Books, but this version is now out of print)
[redacted — considering for rep, novel]
Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov, tr. George Bird (Melville House)
The Abbess of Crewe by Muriel Spark (New Directions)

Short Fiction
“Dick Pig” by Ian Muneshwar (Nightmare)
“Four Talks” by Anne Carson (LRB)
“The Other Place” by Mary Gaitskill (The New Yorker) (reread)
“Is This Part of the Love Ritual?” by Jenny Bitner (PANK) (reread)

Poetry
“Lady Lazarus” by Sylvia Plath
“Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form” by Matthea Harvey
“Why I Am Not a Painter” by Frank O’Hara
"ALL THE TV SHOWS ARE ABOUT COPS" by Hanif Abdurraqib
several poems from The Echo Chamber by Michael Bazzett (this was my Subway Book for a week or so)
“Reject Upgrade” by Kyla Jamieson (from Body Count, via Pome)
“Snow” by Mary Ruefle (via 陳琛 / Chen Chen on Twitter)
"Driving with Dominic / in the Southern Province / We See Hints of the Circus" by Michael Ondaatje (via Pome)

Criticism
"On the Alert for Omens: Rereading Charles Portis" by Rosa Lyster (the Paris Review blog)
"The Case Against the Trauma Plot" by Parul Sehgal (The New Yorker)
"emotional support trauma plot" by Brandon Taylor  (his newsletter)
"Hanya's Boys" by Andrea Long Chu (Vulture/NYMag)
"west elm willoughby" by Brandon Taylor (his newsletter)
"What Muriel Spark Saw" by Parul Sehgal (The New Yorker)

Essays
"I’m a Longtime Union Organizer. But I Had Never Seen Anything Like This." by Vanessa Veselka (The New York Times)
"China Brain" by Andrea Long Chu (n+1)

I don't know where to categorize this but it rules; I guess it's an essay
"I Played 'The Boys Are Back in Town' on a Bar Jukebox Until I Got Kicked Out" by Timothy Faust (Noisey/Vice)