two kinds of ego-death

Today I looked at the weather forecast and thought, A week of high 80s? So early in the summer?? but it's not early in the summer, it's the middle of July, time is doing very weird things. 

I'm trying to figure out how and what to write now that the writing work of my book is behind me. (Still lots of things to come before it publishes, next April.) I'm knocking around ideas for big features, wondering if I'm letting myself be too intimidated to chase them, or if that's just not what I'm in the mood for right now. I'm taking a four-week fiction class on plot, even though I haven't written fiction for almost twenty years, and wasn't good and making made-up things happen even then, just to try to push my brain, see what happens if I stretch. But then sometimes things come up that need to be written, and I've gotten to publish two of them recently:

For Catapult, The Beautiful Ego-Death of Having My Book Fact-Checked: "I started to find my own place . . . with plenty of my own authority, somewhere in the alchemy of science and words."

And for Slate, on another kind of ego death, Surely There Must Be Someone Out There In All That Space: "The places in JWST’s first images are not places for us. But instead of seeking to speckle them with familiar, Earthly worlds, we can give in to the alienation and embrace the loneliness, let it transmute into a new kind of awe."

Stay cool, more soon.

xxo
Jaime