activate/deactivate
Welcome to Mommy’s El Camino.
For a gofundme directory of displaced Black families affected by the Eaton Fire, click here. On the same page you’ll also find links to Displaced Latine and Filipino Mutual Aid directories. Support Capoerista and Artist Lateef After Eaton Fire and Support Karen and Ingin’s Recovery from the Eaton Fire. Help Jersey Rebuild After Eaton Fire.
There was no way to concentrate for so many days and then something broke. David Lynch’s passing made me pause and much of the anxieties of the past week centering on fire also paused, briefly. I wrote in my notebook about how he impacted me. Then, an unusual feeling: wanting to return to my “weird” novel. I’ve written in my life one novel (that I wrote between the ages of 13 and 15) and one novella (written in my late twenties). This new novel feels like a detour in some ways from the writing of the tv show, which I began long ago, but felt like I had to come at the story from a different direction. So I began writing it as a novel.
No sooner had I opened the latest draft in MS Word than I saw this little icon waving at me in the text. It was AI, a feature that I learned over the next hour can be impossible to turn off. At least a layperson can’t do it easily, which is probably most users. I vented on Bluesky as I also looked for affirmation that other people were also experiencing this. They were. One person described how grateful she would be if I figured it out and posted about it. As I write this someone else I know on Bluesky just asked if anyone knew how to fix this.
In the next week my MS Word subscription is set to renew. I’m going to figure out an alternative and try to rid myself of Microsoft anything for the future.
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Once I had welcomed back my ability to concentrate, I committed to reading a couple of books I’ve been slow-reading. I set my timer for 25 minutes, reading from one. After a five minute break, I read from the other. The books, pictured above, have many correspondences, as you might imagine, so reading them in tandem in a structured way has helped me feel a bit more grounded.
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I have so far: booked a spot at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, where I haven’t been in several years; scheduled to appear as a guest on a live radio show/podcast about dreams; and committed to a week facilitating a writing workshop at a location, where again, I haven’t been in several years. With the hard turn to the right that meta has taken, I’m thinking my days on Instagram might be numbered. If you follow me there and view my Stories, you might have seen me jokingly post about “helping me get off Instagram faster by pre-ordering all three of my books.” I haven’t had Facebook for several years now; I deactivated Threads. I use Bluesky somewhat sparingly. Instagram as well. But Instagram has been extremely useful when it comes to responding to calls for mutual aid around the fires.
The bookings feel related to the pulling away from social media for me. I recognize that I need to be more “present” (haha) on social media, what little I maintain, to help support the reprints of my books. Reprints in and of themselves are a bit tougher to sell, I’m finding. So, in my mind, I’m giving myself until at least October 2025 to be on Instagram before I delete that account. We’ll see.
That’s the other thing: can anyone even imagine, really, what things will look, be, feel like in October 2025? Only 9 months from now? I’m so icked out by the present, on so many levels…
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But: I wrote more of my novel.
Pre-order the reissues of my books, coming in April 2025 from Northwestern University Press