Enough with the Interesting Times, TYVM

Moving off Substack, PDX Ice Storm, Writing as Sewing, etc.

Yes, we will be moving off Substack.

When, and to where? I don’t yet know.

(For those of you who aren’t aware of the controversy, you can catch up here.)

As anyone receiving this knows, we don’t send out newsletters with any degree of regularity and the content varies wildly. As such, we don’t feel comfortable using a paid subscription model. And since we don’t pay anything to use Substack, that works just fine.

Or it did, anyway. Even though we don’t monetize and therefore don’t provide Substack with any income (any cut of zero is zero), we are theoretically driving engagement just by being here and thereby passively endorsing Silicon Valley’s convenient and misguided interpretation of “free speech.”

We’re just not comfortable with that.

With 8k+ subscribers, I’m not yet aware of another newsletter platform we could use for free, and as we already pay a pretty penny for our Community.com service, our public-facing budget is maxed out. Maybe we leave Community.com and go over to Buttondown? Maybe we just go back to something like blogging? I don’t know. Some thinking and some research needs to be done.

If you have thoughts, ideas or recommendations, we’d love to hear them. If you want to avoid posting on Substack, you can use the contact form on Milkfed.us, text me via Community at (503) 738-1029 or find me on Bluesky.

• If you are not on Bluesky and would like to be, I have five more invite codes. Hit me up. First five get them.

• We have multiple “lists” on Community.

  • Text BGSD to (503) 738-1029 to sign up for Bitches Get Shit Done messages.

  • Text MILKFED to (503) 738-1029 to sign up for Milkfed (Matt Fraction and Kelly Sue DeConnick production company for books and shows) messages.

  • Text VISIBLE to (503) 738-1029 to sign up for #VisibleWomen messages.

It’s a shame, really. Substack is a terrific platform in its structure and flexibility and I’d been looking forward to exploring more of what it is able to do. Oh well.

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How’s the Weather??

Not great, thanks for asking!

A snowstorm hit Portland on January 13th, followed by an ice storm on I think the 16th? Whatever, it was bad. We were without power and heat for more than three days in sub-freezing temperatures, one of our giant Doug Firs fell on our neighbor’s car, a furnace crapped out and didn’t come back on when the power did finally return and even given all that, we were pretty lucky all things considered. That said, I’m always behind and that’s compounded at the moment.

Today’s my first day properly back at my desk (no heat in this room but the space heater is doing the job) and I’ve got 419 unread emails — AFTER Sanebox did its thing — as well as a couple of calls to prep for this week, the kids’ finals to help them study for and a couple of scripts on fire, so if you’re waiting for something from me, I beg your indulgence. I’ll get out from under, but it’s gonna take me more than a minute.

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The Suit-making Metaphor

The cold eventually got bad enough that the Grandma, the kids and I all fled to a hotel while Matt stayed at the house with the dogs. We were fortunate to be able to that of course, and sharing a room in a nice warm hotel is not suffering by any stretch of the imagination, but even so, it was stressful. We brought ipads, paints, books and needlework to keep the kids entertained and alleviate some of their anxiety, but time also had to be made for school work—especially as they would be going back to class just in time for final exams. We made lists of their classes and they evaluated what all they had to do, what they needed help on and what questions they had for their teachers.

Henry’s 16 now (!!) and his Humanities final is a personal essay, rather than an exam. We chatted a bit about his writing process, what he liked about what he had done so far and what was frustrating for him. Though he had a terrific idea for a topic, he’d written and rewritten his opening paragraph several times and wasn’t making any real progress.

Been there, buddy.

As we talked, I stumbled on a metaphor that I found helpful, and so I’m going to try and share with you roughly what I said to him.

I get it—I do, it’s exactly my inclination as well—but writing like this, where you try to perfect it as you go, effectively writing the third draft before you finish the first, it’s like trying to make a suit from the top to the bottom.

You can’t really make a suit like that. You can’t start with the collar and get that perfect and then move to the shoulder. You can’t topstitch the upper part of the button placket before the bottom even exists. And even if you can figure out a way to do it, a suit constructed like that is going to fit terribly. Because that’s just not the best way to make a suit.

Finishing the thing from top to bottom is not the best way to write, either.

You start by choosing your fabric—your topic of this essay. What material are you going to craft the suit out of? What’s the material of the essay? You want to write about your relationship to various monsters. That’s terrific. That’s like a nice wool; there’s heft there—memories and feelings and personal details that resonate as truths; it should make a rich and interesting suit.

Now, instead of starting on the collar immediately, let’s choose a pattern. We need a pattern to help us cut the wool into pieces. The pattern is the very basic structure. How might you organize your thoughts and feelings about monsters? The order isn’t as important as the categories. For the suit jacket, we’ll need right front, left front, sleeves, collar, lining etc. For the essay, what monsters do you want to write about? King Kong, the Rancor, the Minotaur and Bernard the Bull. Perfect.

Cutting the suit pieces out is equivalent to gathering your thoughts on each monster. Write freely about each one, taking the time to remember in as much detail as possible where you encountered each monster first, how old you were—go through your senses to help you recall the moment. What did you see? Smell? Taste? Feel? Who was with you? How did you feel in your body? How did you feel in your heart? Include everything that jumps out at you, you can always edit later. Connecting this part to the suit is not just cutting out the large pieces but also taking the time to transfer all the pattern marks. You might not need them all, but your suit will fit better if you have them available.

Once you have the pieces cut out, the next step is to see how they fit together. Read through each monster and look for connections. Is there an order that suggests itself? Rearrange and then edit and expand to highlight the connections. The first pass of this is basting stitches—loose connections just to check the fit—once you’re happy with the shape you can go ahead and lay in seams.

The last bits are where the suit and the essay diverge.

For the suit, you’ll want to do all the finishing touches—the handstitching, buttons, pressing, etc.—and then style it.

But the steps those are analogous to in the essay are reversed—styling is crafting the last paragraph, the place where you bring the essay to a close. It doesn’t have to wrap up neatly, in fact, you don’t want it to be too matchy-matchy. An outfit’s style is improved by personal idiosyncrasies and a piece of writing is diminished when it doesn’t allow for human complexity, ambiguity.

Finally, go back with needle and thread and do that handstitching: tighten the prose where you can, polish rhythms, word choice, grammar and voice. With the whole of the thing in front of you, you now have what you need to do the kind of “third draft” finishing work that was impossible to begin with.

This might be the very definition of beating a metaphor to death, but I surprised myself with it and I think it was as much if not more revelatory for me as it was for Henry. I know these things to be true about the writing process, but somehow articulating it like this hit me on a visceral plane.

And with that, I need to get back to those now-422 emails.

Cheers,

Kelly Sue

PS New creator-owned book coming out late this year, so I do need to figure out this whole newsletter conundrum sooner rather than later. Advice and opinions welcome.