Readercon 2024, the Aftermath

Wed 17 Jul 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

We arrived at the Quincy Marriott for Readercon a little after 1 p.m. on Saturday. I was relieved and delighted to immediately get into our room and take a break as there was a panel I wanted to see at 3 p.m., The Works of Naomi Mitchison, with Amal El-Mohtar, Kate Nepveu (moderator), Lila Garrott, Max Gladstone, and Rebecca Fraimow.

Outside our room Kelly, our kid, and I were all masked and we all use a nasal spray: used to be Enovid, now we use ePothex.

I took a break then took the lift down (no more stairs for me, meh) and slipped into a seat at the back of the room while Kelly took some last minute books and T-shirts to the dealer’s room where Kate and Jonathan had set up next to friends at the Ninepin and Reckoning tables.

The panel was great. Everyone knowledgeably discussed three of Mitchison’s novels with thoughtful and sometimes amusing diversions into discussions of some of her other books. Her UK publisher does her few favors with the terrible covers they’ve slapped on all the books. Oh well, better in print than not? I’d have been happy if the panel had been twice as long. Well, maybe not all at once. I visited the dealer’s room to say hi to a few people, many fewer than I’d like to, returned to our room and went to bed.

Later on Kelly sat with three friends having dinner and now two of them have tested positive for Covid. I woke up when she came back from that and we ordered dinner delivered. I hoped to make it to more convention programming but I couldn’t really make it out of bed, so that was Saturday.

On Sunday morning after breakfast in our room we went to the dealer’s room at 10 a.m. and I was lucky enough to see some friends and chat while sitting down. By eleven I was done in and we set out for home.

I just checked Bluesky again — good break for when I get so tired every word or two has a typo — and someone reports there are now 20 Covid cases “out of a (rough) total of 700 attendees.”

So now we’re waiting to see if — at my first convention/bookfair/conference in four years — any of us have picked up Covid, too.

That said, I’m delighted that Readercon takes safety so seriously. They require masking in panels and added Corsi-Rosenthal boxes to rooms so as not to just rely on the hotel’s air filtration system. But they can’t control people outside of that. People travel, eat, wander around outside without masks and since the coronavirus is an aerosol that stays in the air (especially if a place gets stuffy), the virus gets passed around.

We’ve missed so many events, concerts, movies, let’s not even get into travel, and so on because 1) I am disabled, and 2) masking is not required. I don’t know what would would happen if I get Covid. Would I, lying on this couch as sitting up wears me out, shrug it off? Hmm.

We went to Readercon knowing and planning on it being a test for our household of The Way We Live Now (ahem). How will I do? Can we as a family go to conferences? (Our kid is 15 and would love to go to more of them.)

The answer is that we’re still assessing the risks — as ever these days. I understand the want for the pandemic to go away as it was so lovely to sit with friends, even if briefly. We’ll just cross our fingers and keep replying on nasal sprays, vaccinations, N95 masks, Corsi-Rosenthal boxes at Book Moon, and asking visitors to either stay outside or test before coming in. I don’t have the energy or ability to return to my pre-pandemic life so I really need to do what I can to not get Covid again.*

 

* I am in the long Covid cohort who never tested positive for Covid, woohoo, etc.


Mass MoCA & Me

Mon 6 May 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

me wearing my mask sitting in a wheelchair in a room with a rainbow painted around the door.

This past weekend Kelly and I and our kid (cropped out of photo above) went to Mass MoCA. I think this might be the first museum I’ve been to since the start of the Covid pandemic and the first time I’ve been to a museum since I came down with Long Covid.

Mass MoCA opened 25 years ago and it is a fabulous place to visit. It sprawls out over a series of old warehouses, there are weird and great permanent exhibitions, and always intriguing new ones. There are many floors with long hallways to get between them and stairways and, thankfully, elevators. They have two bookshops — Storey Publishing is in the same complex — and some great restaurants. And all the usual good things of a destination museum. I love it and was both anxious and delighted about going back.

I got an Apple watch a couple of years ago so that I could believe what I was being told by doctors: no, I wasn’t having a heart attack, something else was going inside my chest. It’s also been useful to show me how many steps I can take per day without wiping myself out: ~4,000 is my max. Sounds great! Except the stepcounter doesn’t quantify the part when I lie down for an hour+ after each meal or any tiny bit of doing anything. My body has calmed down somewhat (if my anger hasn’t), but I can’t walk around a museum all day, or half the day, or, really, for much at all. I go to Book Moon once a week or so and the big thing there is for me to remember to sit down and not spend all my energy at once.

Mass MoCA has free wheelchairs available so Kelly (and occasionally our kid) pushed me around so I was able to visit the museum and see two James Turrells again (and miss another) as well as some by Laurie Anderson and a fascinating exhibit, Like Magic, which I strongly recommend to any readers here who can see it.

I have not used a wheelchair since I first came down with this, but, I have also been incredibly limited in what I can do. I don’t know that I’ll get one (mobility scooter, here I come), but even though it was tiring (to be pushed around, ha), it was a relief to actually be able to go out and do something. My thanks to Mass MoCA for the wheelchair and to everyone who has ever fought for accessibility. I recommend currently able bodied try it (I say that because you never know how long that will last) wholeheartedly for a couple of hours: don’t stand up, see what it’s like to be wheeled around.

Anyway, now we’re home and I’m lying on our damned and blasted (and comfortable) couch. I’m still slowly piecing together our limited edition of Kelly’s The Book of Love and I’m wishing I’d been able to do more for the books we published in the last couple of years — I did most of what I’d usually do but there’s always more that can be done — and I’m grateful for the understanding shown by our authors. We’re not taking on new books but we’re supporting those we have, submitting them for awards as per usual (I generally believe, until announcement day, all our books will win all awards), submitting them for ebook sales and lists and so on, keeping them in print, working on international sales. And we recently received an intriguing email that might change the future of Small Beer. We’ll see.

In the meantime, I’m going to work a little on the next LCRW. After much taste testing, I think I have found the chocolate bar to go with the new issue.

 


Halting Subs, But Going On (and On)

Thu 21 Dec 2023 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Thank you, Vanessa Armstrong, for this news story about Small Beer on Tor.com.

The article led to a small flood of men emailing manuscript submissions and queries, showing that no matter how clear a headline is (“Small Beer Press Is Halting New Publications” is very clear), some people don’t think it applies to them.

I’m 2 years into long Covid. I’ve written updates since March 2022. I never tested positive for Covid. I’ve since had another 3 or 4 vaccines/boosters. I only see people unmasked once they’ve done a Covid test.

From my two years on this couch, I beg you to wear a mask in public/when traveling, etc. Insist on better filters at work or school. Build Corsi-Rosenthal boxes for meet-ups or home.

The Covid virus can attack many different parts of the body. This is a mass disabling event I do not want you to be part of.

I’ve added to the statement below. I realize I go on so please skip to here and pick up some books for yourself/someone you know.

We closed Small Beer to submissions in March 2023 and only published four books this year: two novels and two collections of stories. After 20+ years of reading submissions it’s been very strange to know there are good books I am missing but c’est la vie.

In December 2021 I came down with something unknown. I never tested positive for Covid but in 2022 I was diagnosed with Long Covid. I am a very different person now: I can’t carry boxes of books around, I don’t drive, I can’t read as much as I used to, I lie on the couch most of the day because walking or even sitting up for too long wipes me out. I have tried many anecdotally successful supplements and medicines — none of which have done any good. In the last two years I only see people who have are masked or have tested negative. Kelly drives me into our bookshop, Book Moon, once a week or so where people are unmasked but we run 2 Corsi-Rosenthal boxes and I am always masked. I literally would not wish this on my worst enemy — although I don’t really have one except maybe the soul crushing companies that would like to run all the small presses and indie businesses out of town.

We’d contracted our 2023 titles over the past few years. We have one more title under contract but I’m not sure if we can publish it as I think it’s too much work for me. I emailed with our authors about my limitations and occasionally talked on the phone but phone calls or zooms wipe me out and then I can’t do anything else.

In 2022 we only managed to publish two books. This year we published four and here at the end of the year I see how much these books missed the old me. Sarah Pinsker’s second collection Lost Places was selected for Slate’s Best Books of the Year which is something to celebrate. It’s always hard for small or indie presses to get coverage and no one expects to be on Best of the Year lists but I always hope our books will at least be considered for lists and awards. This year that was more difficult as I wasn’t able to send books out as widely or follow up. Publicity is part of my job and following up takes a fair amount of energy which I don’t have. So unless we want to change our habits and start being unfair to authors, we have to stop.

I haven’t even mentioned our September title, Anya Johanna DeNiro’s short, amazing, difficult, transcendent science fiction novel OKPsyche — the review I enjoyed most was Jake Casella Brookins in Locus which started off, “I was completely unprepared for how powerful Anya Johanna DeNiro’s OKPsyche is” — or our final book, Kij Johnson’s long awaited, decade in the making second collection, The Privilege of the Happy Ending. 

Kelly recently took a two-year position at Smith College so now we will get health insurance there — then we’ll have to work out what to do after that. Kelly’s novel, The Book of Love, comes out in February, and at some point next year we’ll publish a limited edition. That’s been fun to work on and if it goes ok maybe we will do more. Or maybe we will just keep our zine, LCRW, going — although even there we only managed one issue this year. I can’t mail it out anymore so it’s harder to do. I love paper zines, so the intention is there. I’ve been very lucky to have support in the past two years. It is pretty crappy to see the ground cut away from under my feet but I know it could be worse.

In 2010 a friend, Michael J. DeLuca, and I started a DRM-free ebook website, WeightlessBooks.com, and my disability meant I had to step away from that last year.

I’d thought that with cutting down on other things (we don’t travel anymore: no more book fairs and conferences; no more Weightless; a lot less Book Moon; fiction is now quite hard to write) there was a chance I could keep Small Beer going but it is too much. As long as the authors are happy, we’ll keep the books in print — or sell them on where possible: Random House just released the cover for their new 2024 edition of Karen Lord’s debut novel Redemption in Indigo. 

My expectations for Small Beer was that Kelly and I would keep publishing books we enjoyed basically until we dropped dead, preferably a long time from now. So now I have the whole anger and grief that besides not being able to go sledding (if it snows, thanks Shell/Exxon/climate change), or walk the dog more than 1.5 blocks out and back, there’s also no more dancing — I miss dancing. My inner self often has music of my own or others playing and I am often dancing. I am so slow now.

Mine is not a long Covid story where I was once a marathon runner and now I lie on the couch. I liked lying on the couch preferably with comics, champagne, and bonbons. Ok, so that didn’t happen very often, but still.

Anyway. Everyone who is wearing a mask is helping everyone else. You are the helpers and I thank you. I appreciate all the notes from friends and strangers and am replying slowly. It is much easier to be flippant on Bluesky. I keep up with long Covid news.

We have pushed some great and weird books out into the world in the last 20 years, some further than others, but never a book we thought wasn’t odd and great and worth being a physical object in the world. No one knows the impact of a book that has sold 300 or 30,000 copies — it may change the world for one reader. It happened to us time and time again. I look forward to reading more good, odd books from other publishers in the future.

 


What about Small Beer?

Sat 18 Nov 2023 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

AKindling covers a follow up to my last post, ugh, I did go on, I wanted to give a clearer idea of what is happening with the press.

Of course, since we have the obfuscatorily named zine, the story isn’t 100% clear.

There are many things I can do for the press lying here on this couch. There are many I can’t and sometimes all I can do is watch TV or read the internet.

We have one book under contract that was just delivered. Because it is a different kind of thing it would take normally about 3 years to bring to publication. I am not sure how long it will take now.

Other than that, we have Kathleen Jennings’s collection of stories, Kindling, coming in January. The proofs just arrived from the printer and when I return them I’ll find out if we’re still on schedule. I don’t think we’ve only ever had one book in that forthcoming page before. Weird to see. Glad this dictation thing is working well today.

We hope to publish a limited edition of Kelly’s novel at some point next year. There would be some kind of poetry if that were our last book. Although I’m a big fan of accessibility, so it would be sad if our last book is a limited edition.

We closed completely to submissions in March and given that I have not improved, I do not expect to reopen anytime soon. The way I am now I could not do justice to any book that we bought. It is very strange not to read submissions after 20 years.  I’m going to try and keep the zine going. However, I’m not up to mailing it, and some days I’m not up to reading. This year we managed one this year.* Next year, who knows.

 

* Rather than correct the sentence I’m going to leave it to sure the basic level of brain fog detail missing that I know have. I’ve never been the best writer (I’ve published some of them, ha!), but at least I was able to string a sentence together and I enjoyed writing fiction, nonfiction, reviews, etc. I didn’t expect to write like this until I was 85 or so. What can I say, I’m ahead of my time.

 


This Sauce Is Weak

Sat 18 Nov 2023 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

I have — hilariously to me — just had my first cold in 3 years or so. Having a cold while having long covid. Phew, I do not recommend it.

I used to be decently fit. Not a runner, that was always painful for some reason. This screenshot of my phone/watch stepcounter shows my rather crappy daily average and how in the last few days it cratered. To get the generally unsaid part over with now rather than at the end (my own tl;dr), no matter when I die, mine will be a Covid-related death. To be brought so low by a basic cold demonstrated that my defenses/immune system/resources are weak sauce indeed and one energetic butterfly flapping its wings in a nearby town will be enough to tip me over. It sounds melodramatic but I’m over 50 and I read new studies every week about long Covid’s effects on my age group. So far, so not great. Check out the drop in my already low number of daily steps on the tiny chart. On the other hand, I am reading my first Vita Sackville-West novel, All Passion Spent, about an 88-year-old widow and very much enjoying every slow minute of her looking around and back at her life.

Anyway. What about lying around feeling even more rubbish than usual was hilarious? Just the very fact of picking up a cold despite taking the same Covid precautions as we’ve done for the last 3 years.

Over the course of the pandemic, I’ve only seen people who are either masked or people who test for Covid when they arrive. Last week I saw some friends — wait, I know how this often goes, but this story doesn’t go that way: we hadn’t dropped our guards, everyone tested negative and then we took masks off. So, no, since they tested negative and I did daily tests Sunday to Wednesday, it seems unlikely I had Covid23.

But despite all that, despite testing whenever seeing friends, despite me masking if I go to Book Moon (I go to so few places, it’s a curtailed world, but at least I can read and write about it), after all that care, I caught a simple cold, ha! The less hilarious part was how it absolutely flattened me. So stop reading here if you don’t like icky stuff about bodies. Which is me, I’d like to stop reading.

A pallet of boxes of booksColds, as I learned during this pandemic, are also coronaviruses. On Thursday morning, which I think was Day 5 of the cold, I started improving. Those five days were a grind on the household. I stayed in bed a lot more or, as is usual, on the couch. Not that different from my new normal, but without my usual ability to potter around the kitchen and put together a quick meal. That morning I made some porridge and felt that sitting at the table to eat (instead of lying on the couch — how often I have to type those words; almost as often as I . . . ) was a huge and difficult accomplishment. I’m expecting a congratulatory telegram from the president to arrive any time. Maybe tomorrow.

After, as I shuffled — these feet would not be lifted — to the couch, my watch was showing my heart rate at 118 and when I lay down it was ~95. I was lying here doing nothing, resting after a 10-yard shuffle, thinking about picking up my laptop, looking at our dog, unimpressed with me as I was not scratching her, on the other of the couch, then . . . I started sweating, and sweating more until I was wiping sweat off my forehead. Or fivehead as our kid likes to say. I was a whole gleaming ball of fivehead.

Me in the lift with yet another pallet of books.Was I moving a pallet of books per the photo above from a few years ago (I do order optimistic print runs) or the terrible selfie in the cargo lift (ugh, too lazy to shave) from October 2021? Nope. I was lying around. Maybe working out the poisons? I had a few sessions of sweating it out this morning and now I’m improved.

I wrote somewhere in a previous long Covid post about my new ability to lie around and not do anything and this week I levelled that up. When I was sick as a kid I remember being so bored lying in bed. Now, despite not going to sleep, I could look out the window — or more likely, at a wall, the window being too stimulating — for a while. When I’m sick(er than my new normal, etc.) I often feel I could do what needs to be done. Walk the dog? Of course. Do this, do that? I could, but the lever (pick your own mechanical, literal, or technological metaphor) won’t flip. I could do it and there’s no impatience as to the why not, it’s just I don’t. There’s no Bartleby, no draft card or bra burning, just seeing what needs to be done and being aware that I am not doing it.

I became a different person 23 months ago. Curtailed, diminished, disabled. When I caught the cold I’d roll between the high point of perhaps if I kick this my body will return to what it used to be and the low point of what if this is my new, new normal? Every day I wake up curious to see what’s happened and it’s not until I stand up and my heart rate jumps that I find out how I am. Meh.

Looking at what’s to come leaves a little to be desired. It’s taken a couple of days to write this because there’s no good ending. I answer a some work emails and just I run out of juice. When I walk, I shuffle and this new, new normal is a bit painful. I watch TV and try not to miss walking or running or singing or dancing. When I walk I feel as if I have worked hard all day. Step count, faithful step count, proves me wrong. It is a bleak series of thoughts to take into the darkening of the year. There are millions like me, trying different meds (yep, still am), masking when they see anyone, unable to do most of what they used to. Kelly described me as profoundly changed. My vulnerability has placed huge limits on what she and our kid can do. I am chronically disabled and now it looks like I am one good infection away from real trouble.

How annoying. How are we — all of us, not just this household — supposed to live? Well, I certainly don’t have a neat and tidy answer to that.

If you read this far and want to help:

— Please wear a mask in public.
— Or: we publish good, slightly weird books that make great presents and my PR efforts are a bit weak this year.
— Or: donate & support our kid and Kelly’s mum who will be doing the annual Hot Chocolate Walk in a week or two.


Hot Chocolate Walk 2023

Thu 9 Nov 2023 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , | Posted by: Gavin

It is almost time for the annual Safe Passage Hot Chocolate Walk (or run, for the more lively among us) here in Northampton. A while ago a friend persuaded me to take part and me and our kid did quite a few years together. We started long enough ago that I was pushing the pram around. Now the kid could push me around. This year our kid and Kelly’s mum are walking while I am raising money from this here couch.

Any donations are welcome with the understanding that everyone is stretched and has their own things they like to support. If you’re of a mind, I’d love your to support either our kid’s page and Annie’s, thank you!


Old House of Fear

Wed 6 Sep 2023 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , | Posted by: Gavin

Yesterday was a wash. After I put together breakfast for me and the kid, I had a health crash. It wasn’t hospital level, happily, rather one where, lying on the couch as per usual, I wanted needed to lie down. I was lying down but I need to lie down more. I had the smallest pillow under my head and it was a too much to bear.

In the morning my ambitions for the day had included a little light laptop work, making lunch, maybe even dinner, playing a video game, doing some dishes, skimming Bluesky, taking the dog for a short night walk. So all of those things fell to Kelly as I felt the squeeze of the air above me crush me down further. ~15 lbs of air above me was too heavy but there was nowhere to go.

The day improved slowly. I did as close to nothing as I could. That was easy during the first part where staring at the ceiling took everything I had. As time went by and I slowly (metaphorically) crawled back to my new norm, I realized I’d achieved the zen state of no thoughts. Zen-like, this made me neither happy nor unhappy.

Today I’m again on the couch, no different from the last eighteen months and my plans today are on the simpler end.

I’m attributing yesterday’s crash to Post-Exertional Malaise, a term I did not know before December 2021. On Sunday and Monday we had friends visit. They all tested — for which I am very grateful — and I did very little. While I was never a great host, now I am quite terrible. Someone else — Kelly — has to take care of welcomes and drinks and snacks and comfort and conversation and so on. Instead I sat half-slumped trying to be as near horizontal as was polite (ha, silly me, just give up and lie down) and to use as little energy as possible even as I was still delighted to see people (and dogs!). I did very little and removed myself from company after a little while and apparently it was all still too much.

So: no events, no conferences, no parties, no book fairs, no nothing that is just even the littlest bit interesting for a while yet more for me.

Hilariously I’d been meant to see my doctor last week. They cancelled it. I got a new last minute appointment for this Friday. Yesterday they called: and cancelled it. Maybe they’ll call me to re-arrange. I don’t have the energy.

———

List of 3 Russell Kirk booksWhat I’d wanted to write about this past weekend — instead of about this mushy piece of flesh attempting to pass itself off as a body — was a book I’d been reading: Russell Kirk’s Old House of Fear.

My mother died two years ago and in the run up to her anniversary I decided to read one of the books she’d included in a late-in-life reading journal. My mother loved books as much as anyone I know, although our tastes did not particularly align. However the books she recommended to me, siblings, extended friends, and family, were quite often a good fit. I also loved that she did not care one whit about condition or edition. A rare, signed first edition hardcover was the same book to her as an ex-library charity shop find. The story mattered, the particular book did not.

I’ve read and enjoyed all the books she’d recommended to me over the years and what fascinated me about these Russell Kirk books was their uncanny nature. She’d told me she loved Dennis Wheatley when she was young but her recent favorites included Dorothy Dunnett and Anthony Trollope — she was delighted to have found and read every book Trollope published. Kirk sounds like someone my mother would have argued with — she was religious but still a humanist. Now that I’ve read Old House of Fear, however, I can see why she had listed it. Or, without being able to ask, I think I can.

Old House of FearThe novel is set and was written in 1960 and published in 1961 and begins along the same lines as the film Local Hero: an American employee of a large firm is sent to Scotland to try and buy some land, here an island off the north coast. The novel quickly moves into John Buchan territory, with no one quite as they seem and strange events and behaviors, and then there are the stories within the story. Fair warning to readers, it is a novel of its time and while it doesn’t have some of the worst markers of the time the attitudes are sometimes rank.

If you read this edition, I definitely recommend leaving the introduction until you’ve finished the book — the writer says there are some great covers on the pulp editions. And if possible, read the book late at night. Even better if the wind is high and there are branches scraping at the window and you’re not quite sure there are any branches near enough the window to make that noise.

So that’s more writing than I meant to do and I’m stopping here before writing more about the book. Do tell me if you’ve read it or recommend more Kirk. I haven’t looked for the other 2 on my mother’s list.

Now it’s time for me to put my computer aside and take a break. We have a book out next week, so maybe I can do some last minute work on that. Maybe not. I am definitely not able to do as much work, Small Beer or otherwise, as in the past. So any help spreading the word about these new books is always appreciated.


Closed to book submissions

Wed 1 Mar 2023 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

We have slowed down our publishing schedule and as of today, March 1, we are closed to book submissions for the foreseeable future.


The 2022 I Knew

Thu 15 Dec 2022 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , , | Posted by: Gavin

This is about my own year, not the press’s. 2022 was . . . constrained. I look at my steps recorded on my phone — and the watch I got this year to assuage worries about my heart rate — and from the ups and downs and the ever-so-slight rising line I think 2023 will be more of the same. It is hard to think of another year like this but I’ll be grateful if I improve. My resting heart rate is about 80. My standing heart rate is a joke, say 105.

I still spend most of my days lying down. I have learned resting and pacing, although truthfully I have learned it any number of times this year. I get up and I feel fine, I forget I am sick, I start to walk at my normal pace, I am reminded bodily that I am a new slower person. I have tried many supplements: I’m a skeptic but if a friend says a tincture or pill helped them, or I read some long covid study, I’ll try it. I had an MRI (clear!), a CT scan (yes, I have an odd bod but mostly ok and not the cause of this), and I even had an EMG test, needles stuck in me, woah, which was all clear. Now I hope to get a microclot blood test but that may take some months.

When, after an hour or so, I start to lose focus on my laptop, I play Asphalt 8+ on my phone or on the TV. I haven’t played videogames in years and this game is both boring and lightly exciting and sometimes literally circular. It passes time in which I can’t think about all the things I either have to do our would like to do. I have watched everything on TV and finished twitter. I did go start a Mastodon account for me and work — I think this will get you there.

I’d like to write both more and less here. I’ve gone away and come back to this a couple of times already today so maybe this is enough. I’ll be back in 3 months for another update.

In my teenage years I wasn’t at all sure adulthood would be worth the wait and while this year has been a somewhat similar very slow dragging out of time while waiting for things to improve I am grateful to my family for their patience and love and to friends near and far who have reached out and helped support us all during this.

There are so many, many crappy people and things and yet there are a lot of good people out there doing mitzvahs for others that are never publicized. I’m getting old and sometimes it’s all Vonnegut all the time in my head, just be kind, why don’t you.

 

 


2 Steps Forward

Tue 18 Oct 2022 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , | Posted by: Gavin

[Previously] A few months ago I was texting my hilarious, sardonic,  pragmatic doctor brother telling him I’d dropped off the slow improvement line I’d been on and he said something like, “Oh, that’s a shame . . . it’s the old two steps forward, one weekend in bed.” It was a throwaway line he didn’t remember a couple of months later — “uh oh, worrying when people listen to me” — and while at first it was a bit much to take in I’ve found it to be increasingly helpful this year especially times such as last week when I had my legs cut out from under me once again for no reason I could see and am in good running, as it were, for a gold medal in the Western Mass Couch Lying Event for a couple of days running.

Before that my daily steps report had been slowly rising and one day I spent 2 hours at Book Moon, not really doing anything but enjoying being there. Still a bit exhausting but also a little exhilarating. I was in as we had two people out, one with Covid (they tested positive for 18 days . . . ) and one sick. They’re both back now, phew, and Book Moon is getting busier, phew. All orders appreciated!

So now I’m slowly building my steps back up. Often times I think I am doing things slowly enough I am wrong and have to slow down again. It is incredibly frustrating. The difference between where I am and being able to pull 1,500 pounds of books on a pallet jack is unmeasurable. At the moment carrying a box of books upstairs is impossible, ack. Thankfully Small Beer tiptoes along as the booksellers at Book Moon are mailing out the Advance Reading Copies of Ayize Jama-Everett’s Heroes of an Unknown World this week and Kelly and I have a new cover for the Advance Reading Copy of Sarah Pinsker’s Lost Places.

Over the weekend I read Naomi Novik’s fabulous pageturner The Golden Enclaves. I could not read it all at once, too tiring (woah, annoying), but it was great fun and much more than that. Highly recommended.

Do me a favor, wear a mask to protect yourself and everyone around you,

Cheers!
Gavin


Cracked Egg

Wed 28 Sep 2022 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Yesterday Kelly drove me over to Book Moon — someone was out sick so we covered while Laura was out for lunch. Saying I covered anything is a complete exaggeration. I sat at the front, poked a little at our new point-of-sale software (great, complicated, beyond me at the moment), recycled some junk mail, admired the place, and really just sat and waited. Kelly brought in a new card rack (too heavy for me, meh), signed books, wrote a shelf talker, did a lot of work. A year ago I’d be getting into everything. I was so wrung out by sitting up and paying attention that when we came home I lay on the hammock (outside, easiest surface to reach — ground was closer but getting up and down seemed a challenge), lay on a couch, got up for dinner, lay on the couch.

The good news is that this morning I had the same amount of energy as yesterday morning. A few months ago a day like yesterday (leaving the house for at most a couple of hours) would knock me down for two-to-three days. I have no idea when I’ll be well — I am so glad I don’t have to go to the store (or the office, I miss the office) today. I can go in for 1/2 an hour, one day a week. I know people go to work 5 days in a row but from here that’s like watching Serena Williams play tennis, amazing. I never was that and will never reach it, but at least my watch says my step count is ever so slowly going up.

I got home and started reading (and stared at trees and read the news on my phone and drank coconut water — prescribed by doc, yay!) Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million. I’m maybe sixty pages in but it is near unputdownable. I put some on order but we’re going to have to order more because if there’s anyone like me who missed, I want them to read it!

 


Could Have Had a Baby or 2 By Now

Wed 21 Sep 2022 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , | Posted by: Gavin

tl;dr still out sick. This is my 3-month follow up my June post which was a 3-month follow up my March post:

I’m writing from my couch where I’ve been laid up since mid-December [2021] with something — most likely post-viral fatigue . . .

and I am more frustrated with the thought of writing this (or another one in 3 months time, ugh) than anything since I don’t know — maybe since I was stuck trying to write poetry to order in high school and was only able to commit doggerel whereas of course otherwise I could write pages and pages of poetry/songs/ballads/epics.

Anyway, this post brought to you by the letters C, O, U, C again, and H, as well as H and P — Harvard Pilgrim, our family health insurance provider which we pay for, being self-employed and all that. My cheery Boston-based pulmonologist, whom I’ve spoken to twice by zoom, wants me to get a CT scan. Since I’ve had an ultrasound and a chest x-ray I was happy to try and collect the full set. Just got a call from the local hospital saying my insurance has denied the request to cover it. Here on the couch I am not filled with rage, who has the energy for that? Instead I am on the edge of tears. A side effect of either my age or condition: I’m getting much better at crying. Now the cheery pumonologist has called to do battle on my behalf. I wish him luck. [Later: nope, not covered. Appointment cancelled, dr. will try again. Will wilting but meh.]

He told me that whether or not I ever had Covid, he’s including me in the post-Covid cohort as my symptoms (basically fatigue or what I feel to be uselessness) fit. He does some testing for the groups associated with a fatigue study I just read about in New Scientist which is cheering. Resting, pacing, coconut water, more salt in my diet, and recumbent exercise are all on order. Apparently there may be some physiological changes in blood flow that can be picked up during an exercise test with a pulmonary catheter placed. If I could, I’d up and run away at the thought of that but that’s out the question so maybe I will get that done at some point. So it goes.

I am in two minds (at least, always) about how much to write. I may be improving as my phone says my step count is inching up but is that just me learning how to live with this? I am still immensely physically limited.

I can do some of the Small Beer and Book Moon work that I need to do and I can help our kid (from the couch) with her homework. I can make breakfast but actual standing around cooking for any length of time is too much — I sit down if I am chopping anything, etc. I’ve been to Book Moon twice for about 20 minutes each and hope to visit once a week but even the trip there (ooh, out the house!) is exhausting. Apparently my bandwidth, for lack of a better term, is still very limited. I haven’t been to the office but Kelly collects mail every couple of weeks. Kelly does way too many things! I can’t mail things out or move books — I can send emails and so on although even there at some point every day I realize I am done and need a break as I’m not comprehending what I’m reading or unable to type more than a word without a typo. I have taken up Asphalt 8+ to pass time. I don’t think I was a hugely active person before this but I did enjoy kicking to do things off lists, going places, seeing people. Maybe in the future.

Small Beer: I am just about to send an extended edition with bonus material of Ayize Jama-Everett’s 4th and final Liminal novel, Heroes of an Unknown World, to the galley printer. 100+ indie bookstores will be getting copies along with reviewers. All four novels should be available on Edelweiss. We’re really trying to get the completion of this series celebrated in February when it comes out. The Liminal books are pageturners, full of action and also the complicated dynamics of friends and family.

————

I have gone away from this and come back to it a couple of times and there’s a disappointing lack of narrative to it, sorry, but I am at the many typos stage again so that’s it for now. Next Monday I get another vaccine booster, woo.

In my ancient mariner way, supine on the couch, I recommend wearing a mask.


6 Months in a Leaky Boat

Wed 15 Jun 2022 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , | Posted by: Gavin

This is a 3-month follow up my March post:

I’m writing from my couch where I’ve been laid up since mid-December with something — most likely post-viral fatigue. In the first week of December I had a small cold(?) and had multiple negative Covid results.

which was a 3-month update on me succumbing to some kind of post-viral something last December. The stunning accuracy of my self-diagnosis is the same as it was then.

Now it’s early summer and as I was then, I’m writing this lying flat on our couch. I can lie around and do a little bit of work but I can’t lift a box of books (ha ha ha. No chance) or do most of the things I’d usually do. I walk around very slowly. My max is about about 200 yards and then I regret having walked so far as going back takes twice as long. If I do anything physical or a lively phone or zoom call that will be me flat on the couch for 2-3 hours (or, worst case: 2-3 days, ugh) doing nothing. I haven’t worked at Book Moon — or the Small Beer office — since December and do I miss it.

I’m taking more vitamins and supplements than I ever have. Do they work? Don’t know. I’ll try just about anything now. Talked to my doc today who’s referring me to a post-COVID clinic in Boston — after previous cardio, rheumatology, and neuro referrals.

Small Beer: we’ve slowed down on publishing — Ayize’s 4th and final Liminal novel, Heroes of an Unknown World, was too much for me this month. It’s needs more energy behind it so we moved it to February. (Don’t ask me why as it’s not us, but the ebook is onsale at a certain website for $1.99.) We’re at the contract stage with a few more 2023/2024 titles and I’m working — even slower than usual — on the new LCRW.

I have no idea of my prognosis. Maybe this is middle age for me or maybe this is long covid. If it’s the latter (I am 2 x vaxxed, 2 x boosted), good golly, wear a mask.

ETA: thank you for lovely emails, comments, support. I would be completely pancaked out on the floor but for Kelly’s patience, love, and advocacy — please spare her a thought as I lie here, yes, on the damn couch.

 


NoWP 2022

Thu 24 Mar 2022 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , , | Posted by: Gavin

I’m sorry not to be at AWP (ha) this week.

tl:dr I am out sick

Longer version:

I ladventuristsike tabling. I like talking to people about books, selling some, surprising people with LCRW (a paper zine? What?!), and the accessibility of being right there for people to ask questions about Small Beer/publishing/whatever. I like wandering the book fair and buying books and magazines from publishers new and old. I like going to an occasional panel and some readings — I especially like putting on or being involved with other presses putting on an offsite reading — and I really enjoy catching up with people I know, meeting new people, all that.

If we were there . . . we’d have a stack of Richard Butner’s new collection The Adventurists — it’s so good! It came out this week! We’d have books by Small Beer authors who are at the big show: Sofia Samatar’s world bestriding A Stranger in Olondria and her collection Tender; Juan Martinez’s Best Worst American — one of his stories is soon to be read on Selected Shorts at Symphony Space; and Elwin Cotman’s NPR Best of the Year Dance on Saturday. And we’d have all those pretty books in that picture below that came out oh just quite recently.

We aren’t there for 2 reasons: the first is Covid — which as far as I know I have never had. I have had all 3 of my vaccines. I’m delighted that AWP required vaccinations and masks. Science, FTW! But the idea of being in a book fair with up to 3,000 people is too much for me. Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center (updated 3/24/22) has the US covid fatality rate at 1.2%. The deaths are mostly among the unvaccinated and the immunocompromised — but risking my (and by extension my family’s) life on someone else’s masking choice when there is a 1 in 100 chance we might die is too high for me.

I am sorry not to be at AWP, but: I haven’t even been to the Small Beer office or Book Moon in more than 3 months because the second reason we’re not there is that I am out sick.

I’m writing from my couch where I’ve been laid up since mid-December with something — most likely post-viral fatigue. In the first week of December I had a small cold(?) and had multiple negative Covid results. A week later I was in the ER. I’m improving — at a glacial rate. I have only left the house since then to see the doctor. I lie around all day, do a little work, watch Abbot Elementary and Better Things and sometimes read (including, for my sins, twitter) — although that brain fog made fiction too hard for a bit. So please accept my apologies for being slow at everything, including email. In early December I was running up the stairs from the Book Moon basement carrying boxes of books. Now a zoom conversation leaves me exhausted. (As in: I will lie flat for 3 hours and do nothing.)

Ugh, I did not want to have to write this but since I am missing a very enjoyable event and have been down for 3 months it seemed like time. I am 51 (when did that happen?) and despite having to lie around all the time (walking is a lot; running is woah so very far away) I feel very lucky, very well looked after at home. I’m not really looking for feedback — unless you have a similar experience with post-viral fatigue — and I apologize in advance for not keeping up as I’ve used much of today’s energy to write this. Although my prognosis is unclear, if all goes as it seems it might, it looks like I will be healthy again by summertime. Fingers crossed!

And if you just can’t help yourself and must buy some books, why, stop by here. Or: we have a tiny, mighty bookshop, Book Moon, with fabulous booksellers who can help you out Monday-to-Saturday 10-6.


Gravity Again

Tue 18 Jan 2022 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , | Posted by: Gavin

On January 1st of this year I hung up my space boots and Weightless Books became the sole property of my friend and cofounder, Michael J. DeLuca.

Michael and I began Weightless in late 2009. Weightless was nominally owned by me as I had the Small Beer business infrastructure in place so that I could pay sales tax and send out annual 1099s but it was an equal collaboration: we were each paid equally every quarter and we made decisions together. I admire Michael both for his work ethic (how American of me!) but also his wandering off to the woods, the way he and his wife are raising their kid, his way of moving through the world, his home brewing and baking, and although Weightless is a small niche website that could always be better, I have always enjoyed it as an excuse to work with him.

Where and Why Weightless

In 2009 Michael and I had been redoing the Small Beer Press website from a clunky hand-coded html site to an up-to-date (for its time) WordPress site and among the problems  we ran into was that of selling both print and ebook formats simultaneously from the site. (Let’s not talk about the difficulty of trying to bring in years of my hand-coded zine pages over!)

We’d been selling ebooks on the old site since 2005 but the PayPal cart architecture made selling both formats complicated. As is still true, Am*zon was dominating ebook sales and part of their method was to remove or threaten to remove the buy button on a on a book’s page. I did not want to have all the Small Beer ebooks in one basket so I self-distributed them to Fictionwise, Google, and B&N as well as Am*zon — as then, they dominate the ebook market. However, if we had our own site we’d never need to worry that one company could make all of our books disappear.

When it comes to publishing, I always like seeing if I can do something myself so we decided to try building a website that could automate some of the ebook delivery work. Michael is the technological heart of the website and he coded it. At the start, we had some Small Beer interns who helped – shout out to Diana Cao and Felice Ling! — but over the years it has been Michael on the tech side and then both of us doing everything else: importing ebooks, sending them out, fixing our own and publisher errors, paying royalties, hunting down missing ebook formats, importing yet more ebooks, dealing with hosting failures or PayPal and WordPress blips where sales did not come through, &c., &c. In the weeks since the new year I’ve already found it odd not to be regularly checking the Weightless email to see if there are questions. We designed the site as one that we’d be happy to buy from — although no matter what we did, it would always have been better if we’d had more money to make it load faster — so:

  • there are no pop-ups
  • we never sold ads
  • we never sold anyone’s information
  • we only stocked DRM-free ebooks.

In early 2011, friends of ours who run Blind Eye Books published a huge ten-part serialized novel by Ginn Hale called The Rifter which was incredibly popular and it helped us realize how much people like subscriptions. We approached mostly sf&f publishers and some of them tried the site and left and some are still there. We found that genre (primarily science fiction, fantasy, & horror and to a small extent, mystery) ebooks generally outsold nongenre ebooks. We worked with big and small publishers although given the time constraints of two people working in the interstices of their lives we had to set limits to what we could bring on — some of the parts we’d hoped to automate had never quite worked — so after bringing on many small magazines (closer to my heart on paper than ebook, but still) we eventually closed to new publishers although since we are both interested in forefronting diverse voices in recent months we did manage to bring on khōréō and Constelación.

But Also

In the past 11 years Michael and I have done a lot of other things. Most of my time has been taken up with our kid or Small Beer Press and a few years ago Michael founded Reckoning, an annual journal of creative writing on environmental justice.

Then in 2018 a used and new bookshop came up for sale in the next town over, Easthampton, where our Small Beer office is. I met my wife, Kelly, while working at a bookshop in Boston and I love the diversity of viewpoints independent bookshops put out into the world. At Small Beer we can only publish 6-10 books a year. At a bookshop we could put hundreds of books in front of people.

Kelly and I had long played with the idea of running a bookshop — but it was play. I knew we couldn’t afford to buy or open one in Northampton and since I hope never to move house again it was safe to think it would never be more than play. Our bookstore could be four stories with an elevator; 10,000 sq ft on one floor; it could only sell books by 19th century left-handed Scots writers. Besides, although we’d both worked at a couple of bookshops, we didn’t know how to run one. But on inquiring, it turned out the bookshop was much quieter than we’d known, and therefore affordable, and in 2019 Kelly used part of her MacArthur grant to buy it.

Kelly’s a full-time writer as well as the art director and editor of many Small Beer books, so as we imagined how our lives would be if bought the shop (and while we bounced hundreds of possible names for it off one another), it became clear we could only do so if I spent a fair amount of time there — which I wanted to — and if we found people we could work with.

The bookshop, Book Moon, has been fun and I’m happy to say we found great people to work with — although the first few months of the pandemic were a grind and as I type two booksellers are out with Covid (fingers crossed) and we are back to being only open for Curbside Pickup again. But over the past two pandemic years I kept running into the problem of there being too little time or not enough me to do all I wanted and I realized that something had to go: Small Beer, Weightless, or Book Moon.

3, 2, 1, You’re Out!

During one of our regular discussions on the future of Weightless, Michael said he would be happy to run it himself. Even though I knew I had to leave, I didn’t jump at this quite as fast as I expected I would. Not surprisingly, I found it quite hard to give up something I’d helped start, worked on, and still enjoy. But it seemed better for the site if I stood down since Michael was re-energized and excited about future possibilities. Michael has built a strong community with Reckoning which made me think that perhaps he could grow Weightless, too. Besides, if needed, I can still pitch in.

I’ve found the hard part is not to think I have lots of free time so I should go start something else. So far that’s been somewhat easy as (sorry, writers) there’s a lot of Small Beer reading to catch up on, 1099s are due, and our next book, Richard Butner’s The Adventurists, is coming out soon.

So now I’m part of the great resignation. Michael has registered the business in Michigan, the PayPal and bank accounts are now his, the hosting and url registration has been transferred. Historically Weightless didn’t made tons of money. It wasn’t volunteering but it was more that the site was a service that we liked providing, a place for readers to find something interesting and not just be part of the datacloud Am*zon etc. are eating every day. The site pays does not pay anything resembling Michael’s actual coding rates so  so I did not “cash out” my half of the business. I transferred it to Michael and walked away.

Thanks to everyone who has ever bought a book or subscribed to a magazine on Weightless. It was, believe or not, fun. It’s much better to have tried it, it did ok, than not try it. I strongly believe in the principles we founded the site on so Small Beer ebooks will still be distributed DRM-free on the site and I look forward to working with Michael for years to come.