Cursed content
JINX, n., v. I started thinking about the word “jinx” today when a friend on twitter was surveying people about (1) whether they held with the superstition that it’s bad luck to talk about good things that might happen (in general, or specifically attracting the evil eye) and (2) whether they were Jewish.
While not a superstitious person in general, I am wary of talking about possible good things in the future without layers and layers of hypothetical statements. I had never thought of this personality quirk as Jewish—certainly we never talked about the evil eye in my very secular family. But it just feels right to me to keep in mind, at all times, that it’s a bad idea to talk too much about future good things. If you demanded that I explain this, I wouldn’t say anything about the evil eye. I’d say instead that if you talk too much or too openly about good things in your future, you might accidentally convince yourself they’ll happen, and then when something goes wrong, you’ll be even more crushed. Maybe this is a Jewish attitude either way.
The easiest example of Jewish attitudes about luck is that Ashkenazi Jews don’t hold baby showers. You don’t talk about your baby until your baby is born. Anything else is an invitation for catastrophe. You’ll jinx it.
Jinx is native to English, so the idea that talking about something good might prevent it from happening is not exclusive to Ashkenazim. Its origin is probably a type of Old World woodpecker called a “wryneck” or a “jynx,” a bird associated with witchcraft, and if you watch a video of these creepy little weirdos and their horrible snake necks, you’ll see why people thought they were cursed.
Seventeenth-century English also had the word jyng, meaning a charm or a spell, which is probably related to jinx. But contemporary usage doesn’t have much to do with these woodpeckers, no matter how eerily contortionist.
As a noun, jinx (or jinks) shows up frequently among superstitious baseball players from the 1910s onward, and it was probably in that context that it became a verb, although its verb forms don’t show up in writing until the 1960s. Before that, “Jinks” seems to have been the name of some incompetent or unlucky characters in 19th-century songs and Vaudeville shows, including one named “Jinks Hoodoo” in a musical called Little Puck. This musical seems to have survived only in dictionary entries about the word jinx, so perhaps it was itself cursed. (The use of “hoodoo” doesn’t make me feel great about the chances of the show not being racist!)
Other than a reluctance to talk about possible good futures with certainty, my main superstitious behaviors have to do with my own books. I walk around convinced that all of my books molder into embarrassments while I am not looking; the only good things I have ever written are the things I am actively typing. Perhaps you’re saying “that’s not superstition, that’s just regular old impostor syndrome,” but they reside in the same cobwebbed crawlspace of my brain.
This week I finished recording an audiobook for my novel Nightvine. It’s the second book in a trilogy, so it only makes sense to record the third book, Shadebloom, as well. I wrote Shadebloom in 2017 and early 2018, which as we all know was twenty years ago, so naturally I didn’t remember what was in it. Here is a list of what I recalled about the content of this novel, which is 439 pages long:
it ended happily
there were some scenes in caves
I used the word “thundering” in a way I’m still not sure about
a main character can’t tell how long she has been held captive, but she gets her period and that helps her determine how much time has passed (I remain proud of this detail—there should be more periods in books)
Most of the book was lost to me. I dreaded picking it up. There could have been anything in there. Whatever I found in those pages, I was going to have to read it out loud to another person. Talk about a curse.
I am happy to report that this one time, I have escaped unscathed. I opened my forgotten book and was pleasantly surprised to discover that the person who wrote it is into all the same shit as me. (There are, for instance, at least two minor digressions about the grammar of fantasy languages.) The urge to rewrite a sentence only seized me once or twice. A huge relief.
Does this mean the audiobook will be good? We can’t talk about that. I don’t want to jinx it.
I didn’t read any Capital-R Romance this week, despite intending to pick up Yuri Herrera’s Señales que precederán al fin del mundo again and receiving Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s Tram 83 in this very cool, heavily stamped package from France. (He’s a Congolese writer and I’m trying to learn about the Congo; more on that later.)
I did read a lot of small-r romance, though.
Two books I abandoned. Well, I resolved to dump books I wasn’t enjoying and I am adhering to my resolution. It makes me feel sad and guilty, but probably not as sad as I would be if I spent more time on books I didn’t like. I’m not quite sure how to handle my DNF books in this newsletter; my desire to talk about everything I read is at odds with my desire to be collegial with other writers, especially people I am likely to encounter online or at romance conventions. (Come hang out with me at NECRWA, y’all.)
I am willing to speak freely about, say, the work of Oscar Wilde (dead, famous) or Lisa Kleypas (living, successful, widely adored), but reluctant to critique work by people who are writing from a more vulnerable position. I do occasionally express a mild criticism in this newsletter, but usually it’s one thing that frustrated me in a list of other things I loved, which I feel is acceptable. Partly because when reviews of my own work include some complaints mixed in with compliments, I’m pretty likely to look at the complaints and go, “yeah, that’s true.” This might not be a solid foundation on which to construct a review policy, but it is how I live.
Whereas if I abandoned someone’s book without finishing it, well, if you don’t have anything nice to say, etc. Reviewing—and reviewing critically—is important work, but I will leave the negative reviews to the real reviewers.
That said, I would like to write about why I abandon books, but I will have to think about how to do that in a way that doesn’t feel targeted or identifying.
The Liar’s Dice (m/f, both cis and het, historical, novella) by Jeannie Lin. This is as much mystery as it is romance, and it’s set in China during the Tang dynasty, specifically in the year 849 CE—in case you’re not up on your Chinese dynasties, as I wasn’t until two seconds ago when I googled it. Lin’s writing is great, tense and evocative, and this made me want to read the rest of her work. Content warnings: murder, cis characters crossdressing, a supporting character is pregnant, a supporting character has a gambling addiction.
Briarley (bi m/gay m, both cis, historical, fantasy, novella) by Aster Glenn Gray. This is a queer retelling of Beauty and the Beast set in England during World War II, and it is gorgeous. I think Beauty and the Beast might be the most commonly retold fairytale in romance. It’s just such fertile ground for tropes: hate-to-love/opposites attract, forced proximity, haunting atmosphere. I also really love Suleikha Snyder’s Bollywood and the Beast (m/f, both cis and het, secondary m/m relationship, contemporary) and Aliette de Bodard’s In the Vanishers’ Palace (f/f, both cis and bi?, fantasy/sci-fi, novella), both wonderful and very different from Briarley and each other. I love this ship-of-Theseus game we play with fairytales and fanfiction: how many planks can you replace and still have the same vessel? In Briarley, the “beauty” is a middle-aged parson—he refuses to give up his daughter in exchange for his own freedom, and besides, she’s engaged in the war effort—and the text seamlessly incorporates his spirituality and the language of the Bible into the fairytale, so you understand why he feels called to help the “beast,” a sort of half-dragon. The whole thing is taut and emotional and also there’s a dog on rollerskates. Content warnings: war/bombings/fire, main character is twice widowed.
No Parking (f/f, both cis and bi, contemporary) by Valentine Wheeler. Full disclosure: Valentine Wheeler is my friend and I read an early draft of this novel. I love the fake Massachusetts town of Swanley where this story, a tale of two rival small business owners solving a real-estate mystery together, takes place. The story revolves around this very queer, diverse town’s local politics—the parking, the traffic, the independent bakery versus the Dunkin’ Donuts—and it feels a lot like where I live. I also love that the protagonists of this story are both around 60 years old, which is a rarity, and one of them is friendly with her ex-husband, also a rarity. This book has such a lovable community, the two women at the heart of it most of all. It comes out this month. Content warnings: divorce (long past and mostly amicable), a character’s father was a veteran with PTSD and depression.
Slave to Sensation (m/f, both cis and het, paranormal/sci-fi) by Nalini Singh. A reread. I’ve read… ten books in this series, I think? But it’s been years, and there’ve been more since. Nalini Singh is so good at worldbuilding—the scope of this series, my God—and pacing. I love her characters, too, although paranormal romance always feels like heterosexual camp to me. Maybe it’s the repeated insistence on the “maleness” of the hero or the “femaleness” of the heroine. It was fun to return to this, and I have immense respect for what Nalini Singh has accomplished in this series, but reading about “alpha” heroes makes me tired in a way it didn’t used to. Content warnings: murder/torture/rape by a serial killer (not described on the page), one protagonist’s parents have been murdered, the other protagonist has an emotionally abusive mother, the race of psychics in this world violently “rehabilitates”/institutionalizes or kills anyone who shows signs of emotion or mental illness and the psychic protagonist lives in fear of being discovered, sex.
In things that are neither Romance nor romance, I read a couple chapters of Jason Stearns’ Dancing in the Glory of Monsters, which is a non-fiction history and overview of the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The refugees I interpret for are from the DRC, so I want to understand more about what’s happening there. It is so complicated that you essentially have to read an entire book to even begin to grasp it. I certainly haven’t yet. Stearns is a great writer, and the book is gripping, but it’s so full of human cruelty and suffering and hopelessness that it’s a tough read.
Is knowing more about the DRC going to help me help the families I work with? I’m not sure. Most of the time, I visit one family and help them sort their mail, which I am pretty good at despite living in total ignorance of their country. Do I have a duty to educate myself anyway? I don’t know the answer to that, either.
On a more cheerful note, here’s Drew Magary with some writing advice that’s really about learning to love writing, which resonated with me. As is probably obvious from my superstition/impostor syndrome confessional above, my finished works cause me some consternation. I do also struggle with composition—am intimately familiar with the dread and the self-doubt and the staring-over-the-cliff-edge feeling where the cliff edge is the end of your draft and the unknown, potentially deadly fall is the 57,000 words you haven’t written yet—but I genuinely love it, too. I talk more about the struggle than the joy on twitter; the latter feels like barging into someone else’s somber conversation about their difficulties and going, “Oh, that thing you’re having a hard time with? I love it.” Unbearably rude.
And you know, as mentioned, I don’t always love it—did not love a single one of the 86,000 words of my doctoral dissertation—and I would hate for somebody to rub it in my face that their writing is going great when mine isn’t. Writers: we’re all touchy as fuck.
(If you’re a writer who’s having a hard time right now, just skip this next paragraph, okay? But the Drew Magary essay might still be worth your time.)
In this newsletter, which is more like inviting people to my house than making a speech in the loud, crowded public square of twitter, I will confide that most of the time I am having a ball. I love the inchoate note-taking part and the repetitive tinkering part. I love the gradual emergence of something publishable and readable from something private and illegible. I love writing this fairly rough, stream-of-consciousness newsletter and I love writing more carefully crafted fiction. I love that I get to indulge in all this almost every day—and on days when I don’t, I get melancholy and cranky. Because writing is my favorite thing.
You know what else is my favorite thing? Talking about what makes a really, really good sentence, as Christian Kiefer does in this close reading of Garth Greenwell’s work. I especially love this note about James Baldwin and rule-breaking:
And yet we find many instances in which great writers break all the rules of grammar, semicolons notwithstanding. James Baldwin, for example, loves run-on sentences, many of which (but not all) appear as comma splices. For me, these are instances where the writer is not so much breaking the rules as they are simply remaking them in the image of their own text. Baldwin isn’t making grammar errors; he is making a new grammar for himself. Remember that we are discussing grammar as a tool of meaning-making. (And I would argue that befuddling, confusing, obfuscating, and un-meaning-making are also forms of meaning-making.)
Hat tip to Kate Clayborn, whose tweet brought this essay and its surrounding conversation to my attention:
everything about this thread (and the essay referenced) moved me, but especially this. i spend a lot of time on sentence-making—sound and sense, sound and sense—and it’s a balm whenever i hear it articulated as important by others. https://t.co/xXYj9w9BeQ
Garth Greenwell @GarthGreenwell
Art-making, sentence-making is so much about feel, about working & reworking until something feels right. You hope your apparatus is so constituted (by long apprenticeship, by praxis) that this “feeling right” is a meaningful form of knowledge.
January 23rd 2020 4 Retweets 85 Likes
Romance novelists rarely get credit for our sentences.* Recently I’ve been delighted by posts like this one on Close Reading Romance, where my friend Charlotte applies her literary expertise to romance novels. (The linked post is about the opening of Cat Sebastian’s A Duke in Disguise.) I think it makes a really good pairing with Kiefer’s essay, since they’re doing the same kind of work.
*I had to type and delete this sentence four times in order to make it say “our sentences” instead of “their sentences.” What’s my job again?
I wanna wish you all a good week but I’m feeling superstitious now, so all I’ll say is that if you see any weird-necked birds around, get the hell out of there.