Run Wild
Currently reading:
American Scary by Jeremy Dauber
Coolest American Stories 2025, edited by Mark Wish and Elizabeth Coffey
The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas
I can’t lie, I . . . do not love Dylan Thomas’ poetry. I’m counting the pages until I can move along to a new collection. (If you have any Thomas favorites that might change my mind, please send recs!)
Books finished this week: 1
★★★☆☆
Where this book came from: Ordered from Kew & Willow.
Why this book: Meg——hi, Meg!——recommended it in one of our semi-regular conversations, and it sounded like a great addition to my growing collection of short stories.
Thoughts: I loved the writing in this one, and so many of the details felt so spot-on and lived-in. What I didn’t connect with was the overall theme of the collection. From the title and summary (and, let’s be real, the gorgeous cover), I was expecting more magical realism. When there were more magical/fairy tale elements, I really felt like the stories shone. But otherwise, these were a lot of stories about how fucking awful it can be to grow up as a girl and then live as a woman in society. Which, true and fair. But I guess I was expecting——and hoping for——some more bright spots for the girls and women in these stories. We’re not guaranteed happy endings, of course, in stories or in life, but I would’ve liked to see at least one of these characters thrive.
Library updates:
So, turns out I had strep throat last week. That was fun! And, I mean, the anxiety and negative feelings and such were definitely not caused by that, but just added to the overall gross miasma floating around my day-to-day life.
But I’m doing much better now, thanks for asking, and feeling better about a lot of things overall. I talked to and saw a lot of friends this week, I had therapy——twice!——and I saw a very bad off-Broadway show. I’ve been doing some good writing recently, too, and by that, I just basically mean “writing at all.” So far, I’ve finished two short stories this month——one that just needed an ending and one from scratch——and I’m planning to polish up a third to submit to a magazine. Still aiming for that “write one story and submit one story” monthly goal.
I also started a new long-term project! Amp is still very much in the mix, as I continue to chip away at translating my handwritten notes and ideas into the digital manuscript, and my new goal is to do one more pass on my query letter, review my list of potential agents, and then start querying by early August at the absolute latest. I think the end of this month is going to get a little busy (for reasons I will disclose in future posts *eyes emoji*), so I’m giving myself a little extra time to get things ready to go.
But anyway, the new long project, aka novel I’m not yet thinking of as such. It’s a fantasy story I started working on in 2022, according to Google Drive, and at that time, I put together a decent outline and a good amount of lore and world-building. It’s been really fun to dive into the new project and figure shit out as I go along. I even drew a map. It’s very much not final and half the things on it aren’t named, but there’s plenty of time for that. To be honest, I adore Amp and I’ve been so glad to share the project with some friends for feedback, and I can’t wait to get her out into the world, but it’s also fun to feel like I’m twelve again and letting my imagination run wild——though hopefully with far less cringey writing and cultural appropriation than previous attempts!!
Closing thoughts:
Make maps of places that don’t exist and let them guide you somewhere unexpected.
Total books read from the Moratorium Library: 168
(Total books added to the Moratorium Library: 325)
Coolest American from B&N, and I’m going to confess something to you guys: I wasn’t going to count this (or some other books I bought that should arrive sometime next week) as an addition to the Library. I bought Coolest American as research before potentially submitting a story for consideration for their next anthology, so, really, it shouldn’t count!!
But I’m counting it. Because I’m holding myself accountable. And because I love you all too much to keep anything from you.
