038: A prodigal return, and other unsexy metaphors
Is there a non-creepy way to say "I'm back"?
This is a free post from Collected Rejections. Get these emails directly into your inbox by subscribing right here:
Hi friends,
I wanted to start off by saying, “I’m back!” but I think those two words have been a bit ruined by Jack Nicholson in The Shining, you know? I suppose Janice in Friends said it too, but that doesn’t really make it better.
But, here I am, back again. I’m showing up on a different day--Wednesday, for the first time ever. I think I’ll usually be here on Tuesdays again, but to be perfectly frank with you all, I’m still working things out.
I want to say a quick thanks to everyone who reached out during my vacation/hiatus. I really appreciated hearing from you all and it was encouraging to know that people would be waiting when I came back!
For the first ten days of my vacation in August, I mostly just slept. I hadn’t realized how weary was to my very bones until I couldn’t even conceptualize making plans.
But my vacation became really lovely after that. I went to museums, I saw my family, I read a ton of books. I have been participating in Substack Grow, an accelerator for growing writers here on Substack (more on this later). And I finally disembarked from the hamster wheel my brain was running on and was able to get a little perspective on… *gestures widely* everything.
In practice, I’ve been back on the internet for 15 days now. After our own professional hiatus, Go Fund Bean hit the ground running with disaster relief for people impacted by Hurricane Ida. Getting back into that on top of working a part-time job has finally forced me to reconcile my huge aspirations with the reality of the limited amount of stuff I can do in my time off.
I want to be back here, so I will be, but it’ll be different going forward. For a while, I wasn’t quite sure what Collected Rejections was. It had started as a place to house all the articles and essays I couldn’t seem to place at other publications. Pieces like this one on Fleabag, this one on Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, this one on our credential-heavy culture, and this one on the bloody origins of Labor Day all began as pieces that I pitched to a bunch of editors but were rejected for various reasons. But I always had trouble explaining this publication, because it also became so much more than that idea.
Finally, through an important combination of conversations with friends and time away, I started to realize what Collected Rejections was becoming.
Here’s an unsexy metaphor: It’s a compost heap.
A lot of people think that to be a writer, you have to write. Which is true. But writers don’t only write. They can’t. Henry Miller said it best in his Eleven Commandments: “Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.”
Writers write, but they also go to the movies and read about psychology and do drugs and travel. Those experiences become the fertilizer for the stories they tell.
So, going forward, this is for all the ingredients in the compost. I’ll be focusing most of my energy on a different project (more on that in a second), but I’ll keep writing here when I have something that I want to say. I’m hoping to publish some fiction here at some point as well, but I’m not sure how possible that’s going to be.
The actual content I publish here won’t change much. It’ll come less frequently, and it might be a little more ponderously about writing, but I firmly believe it will be better. Without the pressure to publish something really thoughtful every two weeks, I think I’ll ironically publish better content more often. I hope you’ll stick around and see!
I’m launching a podcast
I was going to do a funny/punny headline, but, really, why bother? A lot of you knew this was coming, and even the people who didn’t know I was actively planning a podcast have asked me before why I don’t have one. Apparently, I have a great voice for radio, and I’m choosing to be annoyed that everyone waited until I was 31-years-old to reveal that to me. (I’m kidding… mostly.)
That said, I’m finally trying something that I’ve been secretly thinking about for years: I’m launching a podcast about historical figures.
Unruly Figures is a celebration of history’s biggest rule-breakers. Twice a month, I dive into the life and times of the greatest rebels the world has known. I talk about their lives, the society they lived in, the decisions they made, and how their refusal to play by the rules changed their communities. I’ll be talking about people like Joe Carstairs, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Anne Bonney, Rosa Parks, and more.
You can listen to the trailer now, it’s about a minute long:
I love Substack, and have learned to love Substack even more through Substack Grow, which is where I’ve been workshopping a lot of this. So I’m going to be keeping the bulk of Unruly Figures right here on Substack! I’ll post profiles, photos, discussion threads, bibliographies, and so much more on the Unruly Figures substack, which you can subscribe to now. The first episode is coming on September 21, and subscribers will be the first to know about it!
The podcast will be available to listen to anywhere (in fact, you can check it out on Spotify now). But if you want to listen ad-free and support a broke academic doing in-depth research, I’m offering a 20% discount for Collected Rejections readers through the end of this month.
In case that link doesn’t work, copy and paste this URL into your browser: https://unrulyfigures.substack.com/collectedrejectionsdiscount
I hope you’ll consider subscribing! If you have questions (or want to refute the claim that I have a good voice for radio), just hit reply.
Currently Reading
Last month, I devoured the first book in Philippa Gregory’s Fairmile series, Tidelands, and I was really excited to pick up the sequel, Dark Tides. Gregory is known for engrossing historical fiction that makes historical figures seem alive again--her most famous work is probably The Other Boleyn Girl ((in)famously adapted into a movie with Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman each playing the wrong role, and also Eric Bana was there).
While Tidelands was atmospheric and a really successful return for Gregory to “normal people” historical fiction after writing about Tudor and Plantagenet Queens for more than a decade, the sequel is so blah. One character moves to the New England colonies, where he seems to exist only to condemn other colonists for the way they treat the Indigenous people whose land they’re all stealing. It feels preachy in a way that Gregory’s work never did before. Another character falls in lust/love with her brother’s widow, but the queer romance feels shoehorned in, maybe because Gregory has caught some flack for not really including LGBTQIA characters in her historical fiction before. It doesn’t feel real, is my point. I told someone that this sequel reads like it was farmed out to a mediocre ghostwriter, and I stand by that.
I normally hate to write bad reviews--I’d rather just pretend I never read a bad book than have to talk about it--but I decided to largely just so I can say this: If you like historical fiction, read Tidelands and just pretend there’s no sequel. Pretend! Honestly, the way Tidelands ends, there’s no real need for a sequel. (Maybe this is the biggest crime of all?) Don’t waste time and money on Dark Tides.
This is the free edition of Collected Rejections. If you liked it, click that little heart at the bottom to tell me so! Go ahead share it with your friends too.
Was this email forwarded to you? Cool! Subscribe for more right here: