On twisted ankles and reappearing agents (Monthly update #17)

Also: Nintendo Switch, Star Ocean, my wife's formerly broken leg

“I finally heard from my agent the other day.”

“Oh yeah?”

I was in my friend’s car. She was driving me home from some x-rays. She was tired, I was tired, my ankle was throbbing, my foot was the size of a basketball. I wanted nothing more than to take a bunch of painkillers and go to bed. Outside, the town of Fitchburg, Wisconsin, was dark. Sleepy.

“Yeah, it was a whole thing. I finished my novel and immediately fired off an email asking if she was interested. No response for a week. So I emailed her again, saying, ‘I know you’re alive, because I can see your posts on BlueSky; if you’re no longer interested in working with me, I hope you’ll have the professional courtesy to tell me; if you continue not to respond, I do intend to escalate to the higher-ups at your agency.’ After that, it took her about five minutes to get back to me.”

“And?”

“She said she wanted to read the new book. So.”

“And what about your last book? Is she still on sub with that? Or has she retracted it?”

“I have no idea.”

“Luke! You have to stay on top of these things!”

“…why?”

This is a friend who’s more successful as a novelist than I’ll ever be—sold more than ten thousand books as a self-published author and with independent presses. When she failed to make it in mainstream publishing, she said “screw it” and just started her own publishing house, which is doing okay. She’s also one of my favorite people, but—as with all friendships in your forties—I only get to see her under the strangest of circumstances, like when my wife is in New York on business and I twist my ankle shooting hoops with my daughters, leaving me unable to drive myself to urgent care.

In any case, she understands this industry. I, obviously, do not.

And maybe it was the twisted ankle talking, but I found myself being honest with her, and probably with myself, for the first time in a while: I told her I just didn’t care anymore. That I was getting old, that professional success looked increasingly out of reach, that I couldn’t even remember why I’d wanted it in the first place. That nobody reads books, and that the sort of people who do—judging by Goodreads and BokTok culture, anyway—range from unhinged to out-and-out monsters. That the last decade has left me jaded and cynical and I didn’t think I had anything left to say to anyone. That I literally didn’t know why I was doing anything I’d been doing anymore, and it was probably time to just grow up and get a real job. That at the moment, vague worries about my writing career looked like nothing compared to my immediate worries about how I was going to keep two daughters alive for five days with no spouse and an ankle I couldn’t walk on. That I just didn’t care anymore.

She didn’t have a lot to say. Recommended a book, dropped me off at my house. I put the kids to bed and crashed.

At least I couldn’t work out anymore, which meant I could sleep in tomorrow! Gotta take pleasure in the little things. 🕹🌙🧸

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Two years ago: Twelve stations of visiting your wife in the hospital

Back in 2023, I was publishing here somewhat sporadically, but I tried to hold myself to at least one post a month. This led, occasionally, to a situation where the end of the month would be fast approaching and I would realize I hadn’t written anything and didn’t have any good ideas. February of that year was one such time—it was Friday the twenty-fourth, and I was flailing to get something, anything, written. I started, and gave up on, more than a dozen pieces—pieces about everything from Harvard admissions policies to religious revivals. Nothing was coming together. I even went to a late-night screening of Cocaine Bear, hoping I’d have something interesting to say about it (I didn’t).

Fortunately, on Sunday the twenty-sixth, my wife saved the day by breaking her leg. And then, like a good citizen of the internet, I turned her agony into Content™️.

Maybe that’s cynical (I’m a writer; cynicism is what I do), but I do hope the resulting piece captured a very real feeling that most of us have known: that of watching a loved one suffer and knowing you can’t do anything to help.

When I hit “publish” on this thing, there was an outpouring of concern—which I (stupidly?) hadn’t been expecting—but by then my wife was recovering from surgery with no real complications, which made me feel bad for making everyone worry. And these days, she’s getting around just fine.

And hey—I’m sitting here typing this with a swollen ankle, so that’s karma, right?

1.

I’ve never driven to this hospital before.

Hours ago, I watched my wife pull away in the back of an ambulance, knowing she would go to this place, or possibly the other place, but now I’m in the driver’s seat with a couple of crying kids, knowing I’m going to have to find the place.

My GPS is on the fritz.

I’m watching on the screen as my rented Ford Edge drives over sidewalks and trees and people’s porches, bushwhacking towards the place. It’s probably not real, I’m probably actually on the road, but I’ve gotten in the habit of watching the screen more than the windshield. Maybe everything’s just a videogame for me now.

My kids want to know when we’ll be there. We’ll be there soon.

I just have a few more mailboxes to knock down…(Read more here!) 🕹🌙🧸

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⬅️ In case you missed it: Everything I watched in 2024, ranked (definitively)

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Stuff I’ve been enjoying lately

I’m probably giving you all the impression that the only videogames I ever play are remakes of stuff from the 1990s, which…yeah, that’s not entirely inaccurate. If there’s a single game console I regret missing out on, it’s the original PlayStation; that thing came seemingly out of nowhere and threw open the floodgates of phenomenal software, making videogames accessible and cool to seemingly everyone (kids, twentysomethings, casuals, hardcores, etc.) in a way that’s rarely been accomplished since. In fact, the only modern system that seems to be replicating that sort of deep library and wide appeal is…the Nintendo Switch.

There’s probably a whole essay to be written there (“did u kno the Switch is a reincarnated PS1??”), and maybe I’ll write it eventually. For the moment, though, I’m happy to be playing old PS1 games on my Switch—and the latest to catch my eye is a little JRPG called Star Ocean: The Second Story R.

The original (which I actually did get to play a bit, when I finally got a PS2) first caught my attention with its unique visual style: the characters were 16-bit-looking sprites, but they roamed around against dollhouse-looking pre-rendered backgrounds. The modern remake maintains this jankily beautiful aesthetic while rendering everything in full 3D, which I really dig. I’d play the game for the graphics alone, but the story (a space explorer from an earth of the distant future finds himself stranded on a medieval-ish planet) is charming as well.

I’ve got mixed feelings about RPGs in general: when I was a kid, all the complex battle and crafting systems felt very smart and grown-up; now that I’m an adult, they seem more like wastes of time. But I never finished The Second Story as a kid, so—for the moment at least—it’s the perfect relaxing little game to pop into my Switch at bedtime. 🕹🌙🧸

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Poll of the moment

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Favorite comment of the month

>Nickelback was reliably churning out records and shows that—while far from critically beloved or history-making—reliably connected with the sort of listeners who were just-unsavvy-enough to not know how Napster worked (and therefore still bought a lot of CDs).

A light bulb went off, but I feel dumb for not piecing this together until now.

“Nickelback is so bad. How is this popular?” asked I and my high school friends, as we all drove to school with CD-Rs with album titles written in Sharpie in our CD players.

Incidentally, I knew a girl who worked for a relatively successful Christian label circa 2006–2007 with a job that sounded good, and she majored in “Music Business” and it had been a lifelong dream of hers to work in the music business, but at some point she casually mentioned her salary and it was less money on an hourly basis than I had made a few years before as a part-time dishwasher in college. Tough industry. —

Spouting Thomas

🕹🌙🧸

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