The Manuscript is back

(kind of)

Hi everyone!

I just took a whole week off for the first time in… a year?

After working nonstop on the first draft of the book, including on Christmas and New Year and weekends, on top of my day job, I am trying to remember what it is like just to live. It took a week to tidy a year’s worth of clutter, to replace the batteries and worn out clothes and various cables my cat had chewed through over the course of the year. (I mean this literally, because I haven’t had the time or energy to deal with anything that’s gone wrong around my apartment, but it also functions as a metaphor).

I’m sure there is a lot more work waiting around the corner. But right now, my draft is submitted and I’m on sabbatical. So this feels like a good time to make plans for the newsletter!

Before my break from Substack, I posted a few reviews of new books on Swift because I was offered some review copies, it doubled as research, and I was curious what other people were writing and wanted to spy on them. Whether or not this feature is here to stay in the long run, you can expect a newsletter soon in which I cover the books on Swift I’ve read in the last few months. (Thankfully I liked them all!)

But what I really want to do with the newsletter is something more like my seminars, offering deeper dives into topics related to Swift with assigned reading and lecture-type audio or video elements, organized into classes that last several weeks or even months. This is not going to be rolling out anytime soon, as I will need to completely finish the book first. (Also I am working incredibly slowly right now; five days have gone by between starting to write this newsletter and typing this sentence…) But that’s where I see the newsletter going. I’ve been putting together some notes for the first of these classes, on Swift and the novel - or maybe Swift and fiction, to incorporate other story-telling media.

If you have time, you could fill in this tiny little survey? (You would not be committing to anything; also, I think this is anonymous).

So stay subscribed if that sounds interesting! I’ll keep posting weekly until I go back into edits for my book. Thanks so much to those who signed up while I was on hiatus!