To the park
Gus has been eating sand; I have been writing (sometimes)
Sand buffet
One of the highlights of my day is taking my dog Gus to the enormous off-leash park behind our house.
“Dog park” is misleading—it’s not a “stand around and let the dogs play” area, but a giant “go for a walk in the woods” park. I’m bad at estimating acreages, but our morning walk on the trails is usually about three kilometers (a bit less than two miles).
Gus knows it as The Park, making “go to the park” one of his favourite phrases. He has dozens of doggy pals he meets on his walks, and I credit his daily plays with helping him be a Well-Socialized Boy.1 Gus credits them with making him extremely Park Popular. (“Wow, he has such good vibes,” are words another dog owner has actually said to me.)
One thing Gus has so far failed to learn on his park walks is that sand is not thirst-quenching. (That might be one of those sentences that requires two reads.) After a big romp, he frequently laps up mouthfuls of dry sand while I yell, “NO SAND, GUS.”
I offer him water. He drinks it. He stops eating sand for the day. The next day, he does exactly the same thing.
“He might have some kind of mineral deficiency,” I can hear you typing—but no, I would bet actual human money that’s not what’s going on here. He eats snow in the winter when he’s thirsty, and I’m convinced this is just the snow-eating reflex manifesting in snowless times.
So far sand has had no impact on his digestion, as far as I can tell, but it has a big impact on the frequency of me experiencing a sympathetic gag reflex.
On writing the sh*tty version
This is by no means an original thought, but I’ve been working on a (long) short story (maybe more novella… novelino… pedants now circling with word-count-o-meters), among other projects, and I find myself thinking, “For now, I’m just writing the sh*tty version.”
Is this meaningfully different from thinking, “I’m just writing the first draft”? Probably not, but I have to find little ways to hack my brain.
“This is just the bad version of the thing” is a great life-preserver for me when the thing really does seem bad. And when I start thinking about all the things I’d need to do to make this version into “the good version” of the story… pas de problème, my friemd. That task will be assigned upon completion of the sh*tty version and is a problem for Future Natalie.
I might go into this more some other time, but I’ve had writers I was coaching or editing ask if it was okay that their writing was terrible when they tried the first version of something. With the huge caveat that everyone’s process is different (some working writers apparently do polish each paragraph before moving onto the next one, and then never return), I’d say that not only is it okay, but for most of us it’s essential.
So, a cheap mind hack for anybody who needs one—we’re just doing The Sh*tty Version right now.
“But will it ever turn into The Good Version?” you ask. Um… tbd. Watch This Space.
Stack title improvement project
The current title of this Substack is kind of a placeholder. (Generically bookish!)
Feel free to comment with any ideas for a better one. (Or should I just use my name? Is that the move?) Inquiring mind(s) want(s) to know.
Hits du jour
A selection of things I’ve liked lately:
These two cartoons by mr. joshua / pants. I love all his stuff. He is completely brilliant. Expect his cartoons to feature frequently here if posts continue.
Ascension Press posted a novena for the repose of the soul of Pope Francis, and my fiancé John and I have been praying it in the evenings. I’m grateful for the readings they’ve included (scripture, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, papal writings, etc.). This is a much bigger topic, but having a set ritual to carry out in the days after someone dies is (I think) a huge support and consolation—praying a novena is a tiny version of that, but it’s been a blessing all the same.
I’ve been loving a second book about Anscombe et al. at Oxford by Benjamin J.B. Lipscomb. (The last one I read was Metaphysical Animals by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman, also great.) Maybe both deserve a longer post. Also, my loving both books is a good reminder that competition is not really a thing in book sales: as someone put it in a talk I heard recently, if you’re interested in a vacuum cleaner, you research options and buy exactly one vacuum cleaner; if you’re interested in books on a given topic, you buy every available book on that topic.
This fifteen-minute video in which a guy builds a train for his cats out of Lego. Hours of engineering go into it, just to be met with user experience challenges at the very end: Will the cats even sit in the train?? I love it.
Till next time, amigos.
Relatively Well-Socialized Boy, I guess. We will discuss his feelings about children between 5 and 15 years old another day.