THE HOVEL--AUGUST NEWSLETTER!

Hello lads (gender neutral),

I’m late this month on my Newsletter. I don’t have a specific date other than vaguely in the first week that I’m meant to be writing it, so ‘late’ is maybe a bit dramatic. I’m not ‘late,’ by any actual measure of time, and I don’t have a real deadline. That being said, this is the latest in the month I’ve managed to write it since starting this venture.

I don’t think I’ll set a deadline for it just yet. I like the flexibility I’m currently working with. This Newsletter was never meant to be so serious. It was always meant as a space to practice being vulnerable, and to catalog a bit of myself and my life.

July was not a terribly eventful month. I’m not having a terribly eventful year, if I’m honest. I read a lot, and I went on a few hikes. I finished a draft and started revisions, and I did a lot of drawing. It isn’t flashy travel, or fun news, or summertime parties. It’s just, for the most part, work, and I’m happy to be doing it.

IN THE LIFE

My last rattie died this month, and it was hard. Ghost was the cuddliest rat I’ve had of the five I kept. He was sweet, blind, a little stupid and unfortunately sick from the day I took him home. Theres a space left in my life where the rats were—the part of me that feels maternal all went to them, and in their absence, I find myself reaching for them—in the apple cores that I throw in the trash instead of giving them to nibble, in the morning ritual of greeting them while they were still warm and sleepy, in the time I had set aside to play with them out of the cage at night. I miss the rats, but I don’t have the heart to keep watching them die. They simply don’t live long enough for me to keep falling in love with their small souls.

Ghost was the last, and I loved him very much. It hurts to say goodbye to this sweet bean.
(He loved to cuddle more than anything. I miss it.)

PROGRESS BAR

Purgatory:

(the final first draft was about 115k words!)

I finished a first draft this month! Which means that I have now written a novel. It’s an incredible feeling to know that I can do it, but I wasn’t prepared for the strange sense of loss it left me with immediately afterwards. I took a week off of working on it, giving myself space to reconcile the perfect story I’d wanted to write, with the broken and flawed mess that I actually wrote. I spent the whole week feeling at the space I’ve set aside for writing like a tongue against a lost tooth—prodding at it to taste the metallic tang of blood left in its wake. I’m surprised how quickly writing became ritualistic, and how much it was missed in the space of a break.

After my week away, I dove into re-reading my draft. I was nervous. I knew that it was going to be flawed and unfinished, raw and unedited. What I found in my pages was so much better than I was expecting. I found that I like the way I write. I like the sound of my own prose. I was expecting something rushed and clunky in the sentence structure—or over-worked and try-hard in the vocabulary. What I found was just myself, and all of my love for prose and writing. I found the years of text based role-play, and the dozens of abandoned stories and characters serving as a foundation for something new, and still growing. In my re-read I found a confidence in my craft that I did not expect. I’m doing my best to cultivate that confidence instead of snuffing it out with the familiar rings of self-doubt.

While the prose is better than I was expecting, the storytelling of my novel landed somewhere much closer to where I had anticipated. I knew it was missing a lot of pieces and as I was reading it, I found the through-lines all broken, and the connective tissue completely absent. I had most of the story pieces, but some of them were cut in the wrong shape, and there were many pieces that were not even on the board yet. It isn’t a finished book yet, so there was bound to be things that needed fixing.

My next step has been to reverse-outline my draft (mark down all of the scenes I already wrote) and re-outline it in detail. I juuuuust finished my second draft outline yesterday, after a massive hyper-focus 12-hour writing day. It’s over 16000 words of story detail that contains every missing piece I could pinpoint. It took me three weeks from the time I started writing it, and I’m itching to get back to drafting. I feel as if I now have something of a complete story, unwritten but whole. It just needs to be put on the page.

Writing a novel has sparked a kind of fulfillment in me that I don’t entirely know how to express in words. Mostly, I hope that I can keep doing it. I hope that my book finds its audience, and that I can write another one. I find it challenging, and stimulating, and rewarding, and I hope for all the world that feeling is making it onto the page.

HEARTACHE

HEARTACHE is the thing I’ve spent my entire adult life trying to do. I have a degree in illustration because while I love making art, I have, more than anything else, always wanted to make stories. A book like this requires time, and focus. If it’s ever going to be finished, I have to dedicate most of my worktime, and a lot of my free time to it.

I am still waiting on story edits from The Professionals (the editors), but in the meantime I am drawing. And drawing. And drawing. As I’m working on it, I’m starting to get a feel for the style I want to work in and slowly forming a shorthand for the characters. My art will always be imperfect, and I want those imperfections to read in the not-quite ruler-straight lines on the page, and the textural feeling of my hand. I want them to feel effortless, when each page is very effortful.

I don’t think my art will ever be as good as I want it to be I will always see the edges of my skill and chafe against it. Comics, though, are not a practice in perfection, but a practice in completion. As I finish each page and note all of its flaws, I move onto the next hoping that this one will be the one I draw beautifully.

I’ve started a new page of small squares to tick off as I draw, slowly marking my progress. I love being able to see it in a two-dimensional space like this.

(I'm finally drawing the shop, which means lush backgrounds for you and achy hands for me)



(every good Magic Shop has a Shop Cat. This chunky lad's name is Serif.)

BUTTON JAR

READING:

I went through a lot of books this month, and that is in large because I’m at a stage of HEARTACHE where I can listen to audiobooks while I draw. I spent between 3 and 8 hours drawing every day, which is a TON of time to listen and still make progress on work. Don’t compare yourself to me!

SPEAR CUTS THROUGH WATER by Simon Jimenez- I started this month with an esoteric queer fantasy. I liked this book; it’s beautiful. But I will admit that it took me a long time to understand the world. It’s a difficult narrative style to settle into, but it is worth it! The story follows two young boys and a very flawed god in a broken world.

THE FIFTH SEASON by N.K. Jemisin—I guess I was in a mood for queer epic fantasy at the beginning of the month? I loved this book. The world feels real, and gritty. The storytelling is strange, but approachable. And the characters have such weight to them.

WHAT LIES IN THE WOODS by Kate Alice Marshall— In which I diverge to a thriller? I read this because Purgatory is also very much a woods book, and I want to know what that scene looks like right now. I liked it, especially in the PROSE. It’s gorgeously written. I did find myself longing for there to be magic in these woods, especially considering the promise of the ‘goddess game’ in the blurb—though it was never sold as a fantasy, I wanted those goddesses to come to life. At times, it felt like they might.

SOMEONE YOU CAN BUILD A NEST IN by John Wiswell—I love an unconventional romance. This book is humorous, and sweet and weird. I liked it a lot.

THE KNIGHT AND THE MOTH by Rachel Gillig—I think I’ll read anything Rachel Gillig writes for the rest of her career. I was SO happy to find much more queerness on these pages than there was in her previous books. I’m absolutely on board for the next one.

LONG LIVE EVIL by Sarah Rees Brennan—this book is fun, but I was never in love with it. I think it’s worth reading if you want a humorous fantasy world, but it didn’t ever click for me.

I WHO HAVE NEVER KNOWN MEN by Jaqueline Harpman—I’m so glad this book is getting a renaissance. It’s the kind of scifi I love—the kind that fills you with questions and longing, and leaves you wondering what it means to be human.

TRUE GRIT by Charles Portis—I will be honest, I wanted to like this book, I tried to like this book, I think by all rights I SHOULD like this book, and I… didn’t. I think it’s a good book, but the crass, unemotional narrator doesn’t work for me.

Eight books in a month is a lot for me! I will admit that two of these were books I had already started and just finished, and only one of them was a physical read. It was still a lot of stories to jam into my head in a single month.

WATCHING

-Cloudward, Ho! On Dropout. I have a hard time with actual plays sometimes. My attention span is not built for watching other people play DND, and I find myself wandering and missing critical pieces of story. Cloudward, Ho! Has captured my attention. I love it.

-Dracula(2020) on Netflix—this show incited rage. I have never hated every single character in a show more than this. I regret watching it. It was a massive waste of time.

-Midnight Mass, The Haunting of Hill House, and the Haunting of Bly Manor—these three shows are a yearly re-watch for me. I crave this brand of horror. Horror that feels beautiful, Horror that loves, Horror that fills something of a hole inside of me, and prods at my creative brain. I want to incite this kind of feeling in my books. I don’t know how to do it, but I WANT to.

The Watchers--I liked so much of this movie, but it also made me roll my eyes a lot. It did some things very well, and others completely wrong. Overall it's watchable, but it left me wanting.

Listening

Ah, listening. I don’t have the will to look through what music has been in my ears this month so here are the podcasts:

-Some More News—specifically Even More News. These guys generally have good politics, and it’s a good way to keep up on things without mainstream media. I am pretty well divorced from main stream news these days.

-Trillbilly’s Workers Party—You ever listen to a podcast just because it feels like your friends are in the background and it makes the world feel a little less lonely? That’s why I keep listening to this podcast.

-Eat The Rich—They stopped making episodes a year (two?) ago but I still find myself going back to old episodes when I can’t figure out what to put on in the background.

OUTRO

Summer continues, and I’m trying my best to keep working, to keep writing, to keep drawing. To keep sane. I hope you are too. I’m happy that I was able to take some time outside in July, and hopefully August will bring a few more hikes, and a few more days with friends and family.

It’s still summer; it’s still hot, and while it feels like the world is burning, I’m writing a book, and I’m drawing a lot. I don't know what else to do. I don't know how else to live.

All my love,

Kelsi Jo

I will leave you all with this small collection of wildflowers from my hikes: