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Personal News and/or Shoutouts for Pals
Hey CNFers, The Front Runner is officially out. I like to think I don’t ask for much, but now is the time buy a copy or three and, if you read it, you know the drill, need ratings and reviews. I won’t read them because I don’t want to be driven insane, but that’s the world we live in: ratings and reviews. Your call to action to support the book, me, and ye ol’ CNF Pod. If you’re still on the fence, and why would you be, there’s an excerpt of the book over at Lit Hub. Dig it.
I also started what’s proving to be a pretty popular venture called Pitch Club. It’s at welcometopitchclub.substack.com and I have a writer audio annotate a pitch. It’s tactical and it’s practical. It’s going to help you get where you want to go.
“There is this myth that you are a writer only if you are butt in chair, banging away your keyboard for eight hours and then the rest of the time on a fainting couch somewhere, noodling over your ideas. And that kind of imagery does a lot of damage to young writers today.” — Yi Shun Lai
Link to a mostly accurate transcript of Ep. 474.1
This was a fun one. Yi Shun Lai (@yishunlai) is here. Now, it’s funny. I had an old issue of what I believe is the now defunct Writer Magazine. I know my Pete Croatto, who’s been on this show a bunch of times, wrote From Hang Time to Prime Time about the NBA, had a freelance essay in the magazine. This issue was from 2019 and I was getting rid of some clutter. Decluttering is my happy place. And in that issue was an essay from Yi Shun about arrival fallacy, this notion that if we simply achieve THIS, we will have made it. So I was like DAMN, I gotta reach out to her and talk about that and being a working writer and all the things.
Yi Shun is one of those multi-hypenate writers. She writes across genres, like her YA novel A Suffragist’s Guide to the Arctic, the A(?) novel Not a Self-Help Book: The Misadventures of Marty Wu, and the micro-memoir Pin Ups about her love affair with the outdoors and how she reconciles her place in it as a woman of color in a mostly white, mostly male world. You can learn more about her at thegooddirt.org and follow her on the gram @yishunlai and on TikTok by the same name.
Lots of great threads pulled on here, CNFers. Enjoy!
Some of the greatest hits
“I also have monkey brain, okay? And I know we talk about monkey brain as being a bad thing, but I’ve chosen to embrace that because I don’t feel guilty about not sinking my teeth into one type of writing or another, right? They all kind of fulfill different parts of me.”
“I wish I knew that when the book was published, it was not going to make me feel better about myself or feel great about myself, right?”
“The fireworks for me now are getting to have this thing off my desk so I get to work on something new. That’s the firework.”
“It’s fantastic to lie on the floor and feel miserable and just be like sad for a little bit. I mean, I’m not talking about days, okay, or even hours, right? But like, it can be incredibly satisfying to just wallow and eat a bag of potato chips while you’re watching reruns of The Good Place. That’s totally fine, you know? It’s great.”
“Community, dude, everybody’s lonely. Everybody’s lonely. I don’t think a lot of writers know how to admit that. There’s maybe community, and maybe also letting go of the fear of having your idea poached, right? So, okay, so that’s, that’s the, the nice, squishy answer. But I still think that people crave that big publishing contract. I still think they crave that dream. I think it would be disingenuous of me to not admit that.”
“We need to be a little bit more generous with ourselves when it comes to what it means to, quote-unquote, be a working writer, right? If you’re writing marketing copy that counts. If you’re teaching in this field, that counts. I mean, if you’re teaching period, that counts, right? Yeah, if you’re working on a literary magazine for peanuts, that might not count in the bank, but it counts, right? All of those energies that we put forward that all that all counts.”
Yi Shun’s Rec
Learn angler fishes and spiders and the book Eight-Legged Wonders by James O’Hanlon
Parting Shot: Hank the Murderer
Thanks to Yi Shun, she was one of the rare guests who engaged more in a back and forth with me, which, I won’t lie, always makes me mildly uncomfortable. I’m very aware of what I consider my golden ratio of hosting this podcast where I only take up 15% of the conversation air time to the guest’s 85%. This ratio will skew when I’ve had someone on the show multiple times and we both might be working through some shit, but Yi Shun threw it back at me a few times. That was fun. That was, according my otter transcript, 70-30. A little bit high.
Now, it’s the parting shot where you get your full dose of my medicine. I’m always mildly apprehensive or tentative to talk about my untenable dog situation because my grouchy and bitter disposition already has led to flattering comparisons to Marc Maron, who I love. He has long had his cat situation, and I’ve had my dog situation, so if I talk about my dogs, people are likely more apt to think I’m copying him. Fact is, my crank disposition developed on its own, but when someone famous acts a certain way and then a scrub like me acts similarly, people will think I’m the one plaigarizing a personality. Or a form. That’s why, long ago, I moved these rants of mine to the end of the show more as an after-dinner mint than an appetizer.
A week ago, I let the elders out for their final bathroom break. It was dark out and Hank, who has a pretty insane prey drive, locked into a scent in the toilet area. I turned away to look at Kevin and then I saw Hank pounce on something, taking an entire animal in his mouth and he began shaking violently and clamping down. I started screaming at him. I was banging on a recycling bin to snap him out of his fixation. I was in my socks and being the courageous hero I am, didn’t want to potential step in dog shit to try and break Hank away from whatever he was mauling. My poor neighbors. They already hear me yell enough at Lachlan, not as much as in the past. Listen, it’s been a rough two years with these three dogs.
From about 15 feet away, it looked like Hank had a rat in his mouth. He finally dropped it at my urging, drool pouring out of his face like a faucet. He finally slunked away from me, cowered away. I walked over to the crime scene, and it was a young possum. He was bloodied up. He was laying on his back and his tail gave a few slow wags and went still. His mouth was open, his eyes were closed. His paws were tucked up on his chest. I thought maybe he was playing dead. His entire body was in Hank’s mouth as Hank unleashed the fury on this poor little critter who was just trying to get away from him. I figured I’ll check int he morning and maybe the little guy will have gotten up and moved to safety.
In the meantime, Melanie and I berated Hank. Maybe that’s not cool to scold a dog whose instinct, clearly, is to fucking kill things. I don’t know if that’s a catahoula thing or what but it might be. Hank had a little cut on his gums, but was otherwise unharmed by whatever meager self-defense this possum put up.
Hank usually sleeps in our bed with us. Kevin on the floor. Lachlan in another room because he and Hank can’t be near each other because, surprise, Hank wants to kill him. Lachlan has moved way up my power rankings, BTW. Anyway …
In the morning, there was the little possum, clearly dead, with his mouth agape and the pinkish hue of blood on his chest. It was really fuckin sad. This little guy was just living his little possum life posing no threat to anyone.
I got a shovel and scooped him up and placed him under our giant Douglas fir to let nature take its course, give him back to the earth, to the crows, to a passing turkey vulture. It really ripped my heart out. Against the odds, this critter made it to independence and he met his end by a domesticated dog of all things that has no dietary need to kill such a thing. We named the little possum Fairway Frank, after the possum featured in Season 2 of Parks and Rec.
I look at Hank and want him to feel some remorse, but come the next morning, all he was doing was wagging his tail as if he had no memory. But he had a memory. He went straight to the scene of the crime for his morning bathroom break.
We’ve slowly come back around to being cordial to Hank, as if that does anything, as if that message sinks in. Now he’s not allowed to be unleashed for bathroom breaks at night because we don’t want him killing other nocturnal animals. Except the cats that piss on our shit. Have at it Hank.
Stay wild, CNFers, and if you can’t do, interview, see ya!
Many Moons Ago
400 Episodes Ago
Madeleine Blais says Reality is Compelling Enough
300 Episodes Ago
Bob Batchelor — Humble Beginnings, Breaking from Google, and ‘The Bourbon King’
200 Episodes Ago
Ruby McConnell on Stalling Out and Finding Hope Through Writing
100 Episodes Ago
- Should you use this, please check against the original audio and cite me and the show. ↩︎
