How I ruined Thanksgiving (Monthly update #3)

Also: FDR, sea lions, Lynda E. Rucker

My work-in-progress novel ruined Thanksgiving.

It all started when I woke up at two in the morning—I know some people get up early on Thanksgiving to get a jump-start on cooking, but that wasn’t what I was up to; I just randomly woke up and couldn’t go back to sleep. I’ve been killing myself lately trying to get this novel written, and I’ve got a standing policy of never wasting an early morning or taking a weekday off without a really good reason: I get up, and I start writing, no matter the day or the time—after all, you never know when the ol’ muse is gonna show up.

And on Thanksgiving, she showed up. Like, really showed up. By the time my wife got out of bed and stuck her head in my office door to announce how excited she was to eat some mashed potatoes (more about that in a sec), I had cranked out three pretty-decent pages—not bad for a few hours of work—and I kept writing all morning. At some point, I left my office to sit by the fire with the fam (switching from desktop to laptop,¹ obvs), but I kept working on my book, and miraculously, they all just sort of let me do it. All told, I managed to get something in the neighborhood of half a dozen pages written—a pretty decent day’s work, even if it hadn’t been a holiday—before I had to stand up and start cooking.

And anyway, when I stood up, that was when I realized what a horrible mistake I’d made.

Obviously, if you’re going to get up four hours before dawn, the bill is going to come due sooner or later—you expect to be pretty beat by mid-afternoon. What I wasn’t counting on, though, were the sudden, simultaneous realizations that (1) I hadn’t eaten anything all morning and was running on empty, (2) I had suddenly come down with a nasty cold, and (3) I had badly injured myself lifting weights. (I had been in denial about those last two for a couple days, but they had both suddenly become, y’know, undeniable.)

The upshot was that I was cooking Thanksgiving dinner feeling like I’d been dosed with a mountain of quaaludes and then hit by a truck. This is never a great way to feel, and it’s even worse when you’re standing over half a dozen small fires and attempting not to burn your house down with any of them—but somehow, I managed to get everything on the table on time (-ish), and it was all warm (-ish), and all tasted pretty good (-ish).

Except I’d forgotten the mashed potatoes.

The one dish that my wife had told me she was desperate to eat, and somehow it hadn’t even entered my mind since she’d mentioned it. I hadn’t even started them—hadn’t thought to peel or slice or boil potatoes or anything. They were all still sitting, safely unpeeled, in a bag on the floor of the pantry.

And anyway, that’s the story of how I ruined Thanksgiving. How did you ruin Thanksgiving? Let me know in the comments! 🕹🌙🧸

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Poll of the moment

A year ago, I published a piece here called “Every book I read in 2022, ranked (definitively),” and a (surprisingly!) large number of people read it. I’m curious: If you read it, did you pick up any of the books I recommended?

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⬅️ In case you missed it: Dead Silence is a masterclass in how not to write a horror novel

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Two years ago: From sea lions to FDR, here are some really dumb best-of-2021 awards

Back in December of 2021, I was thinking about how a lot of writers were putting together “best of” lists for the year—the best movies of 2021, the best albums, the best books, etc.—and I realized I had zero interest in doing that. Instead, I just gave out the dumbest awards I could think of, including “most unexpected compliment I received while shopping for a secondhand hoodie” and “award I won that I am least certain is an actual award”:

It’s the end of the year. That time when we step back, take stock of our lives, and (for some reason) put together lists of whatever we thought were the best movies, or albums, or whatever. (Was Licorice Pizza better or worse than The Green Knight? You may not care, but you can bet the A.V. Club is going to tell you.) I’m guessing you don’t particularly care what the best movies I watched this year were, so here are ten dumb awards for everything else that happened to me this year… (Read more here!) 🕹🌙🧸

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🎄Reminder: Here’s how to order a signed copy of one of my books

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Stuff I’ve been enjoying lately

A year or so ago, my mom asked me why I didn’t write more short stories. “Pssh, who reads short stories?” I responded. “The only people who read short stories are people who write short stories.”

I don’t think I was wrong about that—I feel like the golden age of the short story is at least fifty years in the rearview at this point—but I guess I also have to eat my words a little bit, because it turns out my favorite living author is someone who works exclusively in the medium of the short story.

Longtime readers of this blog will (probably) recognize the name Lynda E. Rucker—I recommended her previous collection, You’ll Know When You Get There, almost exactly a year ago, and it made #2 on my “best books I read this year” list—but do you want to know something spooky about her? I cannot, for the life of me, remember how I first learned about her work.

You’ll Know When You Get There popped up on my to-read list somehow (presumably I put it there, but I don’t remember when or why!), and while I couldn’t remember adding it, I found myself obsessed with it. I actually ended up bending my usual reading “rules” a bit so I could add it to my stack, and then, once it was in my hands, I couldn’t put it down. I found myself staying up late every night over Thanksgiving weekend to finish it.

In other words, I’m starting to think I’m one of the characters in her stories, which are almost exclusively about people overcome by dark obsessions. The good news is that I haven’t ended up dead or spirited away like her characters tend to, but I am sort of hooked on her work, which is why as soon as I realized she had a new book, Now It’s Dark, out (okay, sort-of new—I think it came out back in January or February?), I had to have it.

Rucker’s books can be tricky to get your hands on—she only publishes limited-edition signed hardcovers through a small Irish publisher²—but importing a copy was easy enough, and then I got to spend another Thanksgiving weekend enraptured by her spooky tales all over again.

Rucker is the sort of writer who can make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck with a single sentence—even her word choice and the rhythm of her prose is spooky—but the stories also consistently deliver the goods, leaving you more and more on the edge of your seat with each page until you fall into the abyss. I’d love to see her attempt a novel, but I can sort of understand why she hasn’t—how can you maintain this level of unrelenting tension for hundreds of pages?

(Seriously, if you know how to do that, please let me know. Help meeee) 🕹🌙🧸

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Favorite comment of the month

Another book by a screenwriter which I recently read talked about how you don't want the reader/viewer to have an out, eg escape route out of the story.

I have not read this. I read all kinds of genres, and I love horror films, but horror fiction haunts me. It's been 27 years since I read Pet Sematary. Not over it. All the filmed versions of Let the Right One In were chilling and fun, but the book ...OMG...anyway...

When you said luxury cruise spaceship, I thought HELL YES sign me up, then boom, no, you'll only be seeing the bridge and adjoining cabins WHAT, NO. Now I want to read it to see why other people think it is good. —ThinkPieceOfPie 🕹🌙🧸

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1. Yes, okay, fine, you caught me: it’s actually an iPad with a Magic Keyboard, not a laptop. Did you really need to know that? Does it really enhance your experience of this anecdote? Why are you even reading the footnotes? You frigging weirdo.

2. K, relevant clarification: Rucker’s first book, The Moon Will Look Strange, is actually out in paperback and ebook, while You’ll Know When You Get There was republished in paperback five years after the limited-edition hardback.