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Episode 484: Rax King is Sloppy
364 Plays21 hours ago
"I am tyrannical about noise and about quiet. I don't feel that I can control the amount of mess I make. I mean, I know I can, but I kind of can't. And there's just so many things about my character that are really detrimental to having a writing process, which I need, and it's just so opposed to everything that's going on in my disgustoid little spirit," says Rax King, author of Sloppy.
As I tell Rax in this conversation, I hadn’t been reading a lot of what I’d call “fun” books. I wasn’t having much by way of fun reading for a long time and that changed with Sloppy, which isn’t to say the book doesn’t have its heavy moments, but it’s couched in a buoyant and irreverent voice that I found very appealing.
Like Melissa Febos, Rax is something of a quote machine with acerbic wit that made this episode really electric. That’s something I notice from voice-heavy memoirists and essayists. Like, if you’re not throwing heat as an essayist, you gotta work on your game. Maybe there are some who can lyric their way through, but that’s not my taste, personally. I need people pointing out the absurdities and their complicity in the absurdity. I don’t even know what that means, but it sounded good.
Rax King also is the author of Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer and the co-host of Low Culture Boil with Courtney Rawlings and Amber Rollo. Rax's work has been nominated for a James Beard Award and has appeared in Food & Wine, MEL Magazine, Glamour and Electric Literature. You can learn more about Rax at her website raxkingisdead.com or follow her on the gram @raxkingisdead.
We talk about revisions, her sobriety, her sloppiness, money issues, steady-income spouses and a lot of other stuff. She really brought the heat.
Newsletter: Rage Against the Algorithm
Show notes: brendanomeara.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Importance of Reviews
00:00:00
Speaker
ACNF is how the hell are ya? Frontrunner strides into the dog days of summer. I've been getting those nice texts and emails from people. until They drip in.
00:00:12
Speaker
Turn those texts and emails into nice online reviews. Please. ah Be it on Amazon or Goodreads. No offense, but I'm not going to read them. I don't want to be, i have to protect my brain from the one and two stars that come out.
00:00:31
Speaker
And I haven't read any reviews, and I don't intend on it. But they will help the book in its visibility and for the wayward CNF-er. And speaking of that, the podcast hasn't had reviews in months.
00:00:43
Speaker
ah We can never have enough of those.
00:00:47
Speaker
In any case, stay clued into the newsletters or on Instagram at Creative Nonfiction Podcast. or brendanomero.com.
Featured Reader Announcement and Event Promotion
00:00:55
Speaker
And tomorrow, August 16th, it's Saturday, I'll be the featured reader for a night of nonfiction for Virtual Hippocamp 2025.
00:01:04
Speaker
twenty twenty five Visit booksbyhippocampus.com to register for the entire package or just attend all a la carte. My event is free, but there is a $10 suggested donation.
00:01:15
Speaker
There will be four debut author readings in that window. And then me, not a debuer. I am far from debuted. It's 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.
00:01:26
Speaker
Eastern Standard Time. Dig it. It's just so opposed to everything that's going on in my disgustoid little spirit.
00:01:43
Speaker
Oh, what do you know? It's two, count them, two podcasts in a single day. I merely acknowledge it knowing that nobody or very, very few people listen to every episode.
00:01:57
Speaker
just want to give you some context. It's a double feature Friday. It's the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak to people about the art and craft of telling true stories.
Introduction to Rax King's 'Sloppy'
00:02:09
Speaker
Episode 484 features Rax King, whose new essay collection is sloppy, or doing it all wrong. It's published by Vintage.
00:02:20
Speaker
As I tell Rax in this conversation, I hadn't been reading a lot of what I'd call fun books, or books that I... i wasn't I just wasn't having that much fun by way of reading for a long time.
00:02:32
Speaker
And that change was sloppy, which isn't to say the book doesn't have its heavy moments, but it's couched in a buoyant and irreverent voice that I found very appealing. Like Melissa Feebo's, Rax is something of a quote machine with acerbic wit that made this episode feel really electric.
00:02:52
Speaker
That's something I noticed from voice-heavy memoirists and essayists. Like, if you're not throwing heat as an essayist, you gotta work on your game. Maybe there are some who can lyric their way through, but that's not necessarily my taste, personally.
00:03:08
Speaker
I need people pointing out the absurdities and then their complicity in the absurdity. I don't even know what that means, but it sounded good. Show notes to this episode and more at brendanamara.com. Hey, there.
00:03:19
Speaker
You can peruse for... blogs You can sign up for the two very important newsletters, the flagship Rage Against the Algorithm and Pitch Club, where I invite a long-form journalist onto the show to break down a pitch. They share the text with me, and then I have them audio annotated, so you get these nice little clips of where of their reasoning at a given moment in the pitch and how this thing ultimately was sold.
00:03:48
Speaker
It's a thing I wish I had as baby freelancer 2012 or whenever the hell I started. helps demystify some of the process, and I think you'll learn a lot. You read a little, you'll listen a little, and you're going to learn a lot.
00:03:59
Speaker
Got a flood of good subs, new subs. Let's keep it coming. Flywheel's moving. It'll never cost a dime. All I ask is for your permission because platform is currency. That's what I can leverage into actual dollars and cents.
00:04:13
Speaker
Both and newsletters, first of the month, no spam. Can't beat them. You may also elect to support the show on patreon.com slash cnfpod to throw some dollar bills into the cnfpod coffers.
00:04:24
Speaker
You could earn some FaceTime with me, if you dare. Something of a literary therapist that can help talk talk some things through. That's what most of us need. Not more fundamentals with writing, but actually just talking through...
00:04:40
Speaker
The process, the doubt, and how to keep going in the face of this absurdity. Check it out, friend. Helps keep the lights on here. Ah, son of a bitch, the lights are flickering.
Exploring Rax King's Writing Style
00:04:52
Speaker
Rax King. She's also the author of Tacky, Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer, and the co-host of Low Culture Boyle with Courtney Rawlings and Amber Rolo, or Royo.
00:05:04
Speaker
It's R-O-L-L-O, so I'm not sure of the pronunciation. Let's go with Rolo. Rax's work has been nominated for a James Beard Award. Is that right? and her work has appeared And her work has appeared in Food & Wine, Mel Magazine, Glamour, and Electric Literature, among others.
00:05:21
Speaker
You can learn more about Rax at her website, RaxKingIsDead.com. Or follow her on the gram at RaxKingIsDead. It's R-A-X.
00:05:34
Speaker
In this episode, we talk about revisions, her sobriety, her sloppiness, money issues, steady income spouses, and a lot of other stuff. like It is just, you know how there are some essays you read and just the thing just comes off of the page. It's just like, wow, this thing is vibrant.
00:05:51
Speaker
That's what this podcast is. This hour is going to by. this hour is going to fly by That's a guarantee. Parting shot on mise en place.
00:06:02
Speaker
ah But for now, check out this new montage, Riff.
00:06:12
Speaker
Is this a podcast where i can swear? That's the dumbest fucking shit. Total ego goblin. Just kind of a sloppy person. So true. I actually would not mind just growing people's flowers for them.
00:06:23
Speaker
but This is going to have to interest somebody somewhere other than me.
00:06:37
Speaker
I gateway into this is kind of the title of the you know title of your latest book, sloppy. And, you know, part of one of the essays where you kind of your father kind of notes that you're a sloppy person just like him.
00:06:48
Speaker
Similarly, like I'm just like chronically disorganized as ADHD adult brain.
Rax King on Personal Experiences and Work Environment
00:06:53
Speaker
And there's this one cook online, Derek Sarno, he's a vegan chef. i I love his approach. I love his vibe, but I especially love the nature of how he like cleans as he goes. And he's very almost religious about keeping the space clean and cleaning as he goes and making sure everything is in its place.
00:07:11
Speaker
And I find that very soothing and relaxing. I don't know about you. Is that, is that something that helps appease your natural state of sloppiness? Yeah. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Very relatable. I'll be sitting in my squalid apartment, just like surrounded. i mean No, squalid is the wrong word. I don't i don't fuck with like food mess.
00:07:32
Speaker
I'll have clutter everywhere. And like right now on my desk, there's papers that I didn't need you know in the past year, stuff that I haven't looked at for two years. And ah so I'll just sit in the middle of that morass and I'll scroll endlessly through these really satisfying, almost ASMR type videos of people being neat and organized and less so the cooking side of things than the ah like fashion and beauty side of things. I mean, it's a similar principle. You'll watch some incredibly put together woman
00:08:10
Speaker
like putting just i I don't even know how to describe the elegance and like organizational principles of these outfits they cook up. There's not clothes all over the floor when they're putting on you know outfits for my amusement.
00:08:25
Speaker
There's not garbage everywhere. It's just this clear shot of minimalist nothing and it's so beautiful to me and it's never gonna be me like right now.
00:08:36
Speaker
All that is clean in this room is the exact square that you can see in this little zoom window. everything you know i look to the left and it's mess, and I look to the right and it's mess, and there's a computer that doesn't work anymore directly in front of me Garbage everywhere. But I love neat people. I admire them so much. I i want to absorb their secrets somehow.
00:08:57
Speaker
ah Somehow I'm able to get work done in the face of this, you know, this garbage pile that I typically work in. And ah yeah for for you yeah how how are you, how do you manage that sort of visual and physical clutter to to do it is but to do what you do?
00:09:15
Speaker
So my honest answer to that question is that I am tyrannical about noise and about quiet because it's like like, I don't feel that I can control the amount of mess I make. I mean, I know I can, but I kind of can't.
00:09:29
Speaker
And I really, you know, there's just so many things about my character that are really detrimental to having a writing process, which I need. And it's just so opposed to everything that's going on in my disgustoid little spirit.
00:09:48
Speaker
So the way I compensate is I need to be alone in order to get work done and I need the room to be just dead silent. And if my husband is home, He's allowed to be home. He's not allowed to move around too much because all the shuffling you know gets in my head. If he sneezes, God help him.
00:10:05
Speaker
If he wants to, you know, sometimes he'll start talking to the dog and I'll just snap from the other room like, can you be quiet? I mean, it's just, I tyrannize my household with my shame about not being able to control anything else. And that is my honest answer to how I get work done is by being a little monster.
00:10:23
Speaker
Part of it is that this This job, such as it is, it requires me to let my mind wander a lot and to just, you know, there are stretches of my workday where I have to think and I have to fumble around for how I want to phrase something.
00:10:40
Speaker
ah have to, you know, read and do research. I have to do all of these processes that are very quiet and very interior and take a lot of focus. And so, like, I make fun of myself for it.
00:10:52
Speaker
because again, I'm just monstrous ah but about the the quiet when I need to work. But it does come from a real place. Like the clutter in my house is very much matched by the clutter inside my head. And I have to find ways to negate that if I'm gonna get any work done.
00:11:10
Speaker
If I can't have a decluttered mind on my own, then I need to enforce it by ruling my home with an iron fist.
Influences and Finding Authentic Voice
00:11:20
Speaker
but Very nice. and And backing up a little bit, you know, I always like tracking how people get into this morass that we get in, be it a writing nonfiction or essays, journalism, whatever it might be.
00:11:32
Speaker
And so for you, who were some of the the writers that really like, you know, turned you on, turned that light on for you and that made you want to pursue this kind of work? I would say the number one writer who you know, turned my world from black and white to color would be a memoirist and essayist by the name of Lisa Carver. Her work is just criminally underrated. and ah I've just loved every one of her books so much. They're all, you know, come from... ah different corners of the of nonfiction world. I mean, she just does all kinds of stuff and it's all really voicey and informal in tone, very friendly in tone, which informed a lot of of my own writing. I mean, i i think
00:12:19
Speaker
all writers have some writer who, I think the way Mary Carr phrased it is like they bust you out of your psychological hidey holes and they force you to really take a look at the kind of writer you want to be and the kind of writer you can be.
00:12:33
Speaker
And so Lisa was that person for me in a big, big way. She's the writer who, you know, she she taught me that the way that I speak and the way that I naturally write,
00:12:44
Speaker
was allowed. You know, you you didn't have to be really formal and academic and ah you know, you could research and you could report and i do those things to different degrees in my work, but you could also talk about yourself and you know, you could take yourself up as a subject of interest and that was allowed too. And so she was just so important to me for that reason.
00:13:11
Speaker
And I think in a similar vein, ah Eve Babbitt and Samantha Irby, like two other really voicey, informal writers and in different ways. You know, these writers are all voicey and informal in different ways.
00:13:23
Speaker
And it just showed me, i guess, the breadth of what nonfiction voices can sound like. they They don't have to sound that one specific academic way. They can sound personal and they can sound bright and gossipy and they can be funny, all that stuff.
00:13:41
Speaker
Yeah, you're bringing up voice. I have a hearing you talk about those writers and then just experiencing your work. You know, it's very voice driven, which is very refreshing and pyrotechnic.
00:13:53
Speaker
And yeah, just for you, a voice is a very, it's it's a very finicky thing. it It evolves. It's hard to come across. And like say, it does evolve over time.
00:14:04
Speaker
So how did you, at least up to up to this point, you know, cultivate your particular voice? I wish I had a good craft answer to that. Like, I wish I had an answer to that that would be replicable for someone who has that question.
00:14:20
Speaker
But the honest truth is that I write the way I talk pretty much. I mean, if you read my work, like there are all these little jokey ticks in it that come from just things that I say and and the way that I think. And I guess if I could turn that...
00:14:37
Speaker
into actionable advice for people, I think most people would do well to pretty much write the way they talk. it I mean, you can write like the the very best, most engaging version of how you talk. You can write the way you talk when you're really grooving on yourself at a party or something.
00:14:55
Speaker
But it should sound like you. It should sound like these words on this page could have come out of your mouth. And I think just whatever draws people to your voice when you're talking to them, that's going to be the thing that draws people to your voice on the page as well.
00:15:10
Speaker
Yeah, imitating you know your influence is often how we start to exercise who we are, at least stretch stretch our boundaries a bit. you You mentioned a ah few writers here.
00:15:21
Speaker
Who are some writers, maybe it is these three that you had mentioned, that that maybe you were imitating a little bit before you really locked into yeah who you are? Like you said, the way the way you talk and the way you orate is like, oh, maybe that's the way I should be writing.
00:15:37
Speaker
I think that probably the earliest writer I can remember, not even just imitating, like outright stealing all of his moves, was ah David Sedaris. I got into his stuff when I was, you know, end of middle school, beginning of high school, something like that.
00:15:53
Speaker
And the first personal essay i can remember writing was almost word for word ripped off from one of his pieces of writing. I stole like all his best jokes.
00:16:06
Speaker
the formulation of his sentences i stole, like the way he does dialogue. I don't know people who talk like David Sedaris characters, but I made my people talk like David Sedaris characters, just ripped off tip to tail.
00:16:19
Speaker
And I remember I was taking this this this writing workshop like for teenagers. And all my life I had been told, you know, you're so good at writing, a plus in English, every semester from the time you were a small child.
00:16:35
Speaker
So I went in there like preening over my completely ripped off essay. And of course it got just shredded to bits. And I think I might have like walked out of that workshop and not gone back to a workshop until I was an adult. It spooked me so bad.
00:16:51
Speaker
But they were right. You know, it didn't sound like me. David Sedaris is a he ah of course he's he's great on the page but I think what really put him over the top was how he performs his pieces and reads them and the the cadence with which he's able to deliver those essays in public and before an audience to what extent do you exercise that the auditory experience as you're writing you know some people read out loud ah to to make sure it feels right you know how do you practice or incorporate that into your practice I guess, ah you know, I i did the audiobook for Tacky and I did this audiobook as well.
00:17:28
Speaker
And when I was writing Sloppy, before I knew that I was going to be doing the audiobook for it, I i would like read, i would read bits and pieces out loud just to see how it was going to sound. You know, it was always like I would be in rehearsal mode.
00:17:45
Speaker
And I got to say, Certainly I edit heavily. i ah make big structural edits and i I kill any number of darlings. But the way that individual sentences sound, like the way that my work sounds as you're reading it in your head...
00:18:05
Speaker
rarely change as much from first draft to final product. I mean, the things I cut still sound like me. i i never really have those confrontations with myself where I'm like, that doesn't sound genuine or it sounds affected. Like i To toot my own horn, one of very few things that I am 100% confident about as a writer is that my work always sounds good because it always sounds like me and I am generally a funny person. It's one of the things I have going for me out of like three total things.
00:18:40
Speaker
Well, I love that you bring up the the fun and the funny part. And I was just thinking to myself the other day, I'm just reading a particular memoir and it's not not a fun and light memoir. and I haven't done a whole lot of fun and light reading in a long time. Yeah.
00:18:56
Speaker
I was like, man, when like Brendan, when was the last time you had, i don't know, fun reading something? and And it's been a long time. And thankfully, Sloppy was that experience.
00:19:07
Speaker
I was just like, yeah, it's like it makes me want to write a stuff that has a bit more levity ah through my taste and sense of humor. And i just in a day a day and age where things things are heavy now, a lot of stuff, a lot of work, a lot of nonfiction just feels very heavy. So it's very refreshing to get something that is a bit more buoyant.
00:19:25
Speaker
um Just you dope for your taste, or is just is that what you see out there, kind of like this lack of a lack of levity? And you're like, you know what? I know I can imbue i view the literary landscape with something that is lighter and a bit more fun.
00:19:41
Speaker
You know, it's funny you say that. I mean, the answer is yes. There is a lot of very heavy work being published right now, fiction and nonfiction, you know, long form and individual articles and essays.
00:19:54
Speaker
That whole, the whole world is very heavy right now. And rightly so, because the things people are writing about and engaging with are very heavy. But ah most of my friends who are writers work in a similar vein to me. You know, I,
00:20:09
Speaker
I'm friends with a lot of really funny people. And the thing about that is, you know, yes, I i am proud to bring some light and levity into a dark time. And i know my my writer friends who do similar work are as well.
00:20:27
Speaker
But then I think, you know, the stuff that I'm writing about is actually very heavy. And I talked about that with my mom, actually. Like i I invited her to a reading of mine where I read out loud from one of the chapters in Sloppy, which is about the week that I spent in a mental institution.
00:20:44
Speaker
And, ah you know, the chapter was funny and people were laughing. And my mom came up to me afterwards and was like, you know, that was really funny. And it's weird because I remember that week and it was one of the saddest weeks that I've ever had in my life. And I was like, oh, yeah, me too. It was horrible. But that doesn't mean that.
00:21:04
Speaker
How many years has it been? Twelve years later, I can't find the humor in it. You know, there's humor in there's humor in everything, really. Right. Yeah. And it's when that humor comes from ah current when it comes from truth, it it it can. ah and it And it's the ballast of it is the heaviness. Like when you burrow below, you're like, oh, actually, this is pretty heavy and fucked up.
00:21:27
Speaker
But when you can imbue it with, you know, the some pastel colors in a in a really good one liner here and there. It's like you kind of forget how heavy it is and then you realize like, oh, my God, this is getting metabolized through a really, ah you know, ah just ah a wonderful filter that's just like you forget the heaviness, but then you're reminded of how heavy it is. And then you're like, oh, my God, how how was Rax able to write about this in such a way that I forgot how heavy it is?
Balancing Humor and Serious Themes
00:21:52
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's a it's often a balancing act, actually, because something that I really hope not to do is to just be so relentless with the jokes and the one-liners that the seriousness of what I'm talking about is just completely negated. Like, I don't want that.
00:22:09
Speaker
I want to write humorously about things that are unpleasant in life. I want my work to be, you know, light and funny.
00:22:20
Speaker
I don't want to go full, ah full Borowitz report where just everything is like a, excuse me, that's kind of haterism on my part. And it's completely unwarranted haterism because I do not know this man at all.
00:22:32
Speaker
But, you know, that's sort of the tone that I'm not going for is just everything's a joke. Everything is a sort of snide little one-liner. Like, I don't want to do that.
00:22:44
Speaker
I want my work to be funny, but I also want it to be warm and human, hopefully. Yeah, the the nonstop, like, you know, pitter-patter of those one-liners, like, that can be just exhausting. It's just like, okay, I get the joke, and that's pretty witty, but, like, when you when you can balance it with some degree of tenderness, you know, love him or hate him, I love him, like like a Wes Anderson movie.
00:23:07
Speaker
it often has that balance of like really zany humor and one liners, smart one liners, cause he's just such a intellectually smart guy, but it's often balanced with some really heartfelt things like Royal Tenenbaums, his masterpiece there. There's so much heart there.
00:23:24
Speaker
And then you get in the, hum it makes the humor like that acid that cuts through a very rich thing. know, to use a cooking metaphor. So yeah, the, the balance is what makes things brilliant.
00:23:36
Speaker
I think, yeah, I think I would agree with that. I think that there's a type of humor writing that comes off sort of confected, like ah the the person doing the writing is just hell-bent on making everything into a joke, and you can like see the the strings being pulled almost. I mean, yeah, it's as you described, it can be exhausting, and I think that the balance is much more rewarding but for me as a writer, but I hope also for...
00:24:04
Speaker
ah reader who is like seeking maybe not to take their mind off things so much as to see a lighter side of things. Right. And, you know, a lot of times when we're writing essays and certainly books, when you're trying to, and in your case, like put essays together to to make a coherent whole, yeah there's a lot of there's a lot of doubt that goes into this business, a lot of self-doubt.
00:24:30
Speaker
And I wrestle with it all the time when I'm in the heat of something. I can barely get a night good night's sleep. I'm up at two to three in the morning just with those panic sweats. um But but bar for you, how do you wrestle with ah you know the doubt that is inherent to this line of work?
00:24:46
Speaker
ah Honestly, I try and ignore it as much as I possibly can. Put it under a pile of clutter somewhere. Literally, like i put it into you know at the bottom of a pile of brain clutter as much as I can. Because I'm someone, you know this book is also about me being an alcoholic and a drug addict. And that is the type of person who, you know,
00:25:07
Speaker
Total ego goblin, very prone to self-doubt, very prone to self-loathing and self-pity. And it's really easy for me if I latch on to a doubt at the right time, you know, an hour later, I'm just...
00:25:24
Speaker
sitting on the sofa in boxer shorts, like ripping a bong and gobbling down like my third thing of M&Ms and just, you know, it's really easy for me to metabolize professional doubt into just like saying fuck it and there goes the rest of my week.
00:25:42
Speaker
And ah that's, you know, that's the addict in me. If I can't do it exactly perfect to my own specifications, I'm just going to ignore it forever. And I can really screw up my life that way if I let myself. So to the extent that I can, when those professional doubts creep in, ah try and consign them to the big old none of my business file.
00:26:03
Speaker
And i you know, I revise to the best of my ability. i look for weaknesses in my work to the best of my ability. I'm not going to let myself do that like self-obsessed writer thing of haggling over a sentence for 45 minutes. Like I got to...
00:26:19
Speaker
I got to get out of that mode. I got to avoid that mode at all costs. Yeah, the self-obsessed writer thing over that. That's ah yeah really, really well put for sure. And a moment ago, you brought up this idea of some some of your friends have a similar sense sensibility of that kind of fun and whimsy.
00:26:37
Speaker
And ah that kind of underscores the element of community that is Often neglected, but very important to to being a writer. It's a very lonely business, but it doesn't necessarily have to be. I mean, sure, we have to be at our computer or at the ledger ah grinding away at some point. But how important has community been to your development and success as a writer to date?
00:27:00
Speaker
Oh, man, I ah ah really couldn't have done it without the people who turned this solitary business into a community-oriented business. I mean, I couldn't have done it without my writing group. I got to shout out Beth, John, and Calvin. They...
00:27:16
Speaker
have answered emails from me at all hours of the night. We've done so many draft trades at this point. And it's not even just about the feedback you can get from friends who are also writers.
00:27:28
Speaker
It's also about you know involving other people in this very solitary project of writing a book And, you know, obviously they're not going to have the same stake in it that I have. Nobody will.
00:27:41
Speaker
But that is a big part of what writerly community can do is remind you that you're not alone. And yeah, you have to chug away on this manuscript mostly by yourself, but it's going to be read by people. And some of those people will be, you know, very generous. They'll be friends of yours. They'll be fellow writers. They're going to pump you up and they're going to tell you In the gentlest words possible, what you need to do differently. And that's what's going to make me ready to confront all the people who do not know me and have no reason to be gentle.
00:28:14
Speaker
Might say any number of things that I will also have to confine to the not my business file. Yeah. And a little, a moment ago as well, you were talking about just, uh, in passing revision and stuff, stuff like, uh, stuff like that. And revision is such a big thing. and We all know that kind of cliche writing is rewriting.
00:28:33
Speaker
Um, but you know, for you be it in the generative phase revision, you know, where do you like to hang out the most when you're, when when you're writing or when you're sitting down to work on something?
00:28:45
Speaker
Ooh, that's a good question. That's like maybe the one process question I have never heard before. ah do love to revise. i There's like that little obsessive guy in my head who loves to just dig into a draft and spend all day identifying exactly what's wrong with it and like fixing it. I i love to be in that mode.
00:29:09
Speaker
Certainly the generative mode can be
Shift to Full-Time Writing Career
00:29:11
Speaker
a lot of fun. Like we've every writer alive knows that experience of all of a sudden you get hit with a thunderbolt and it just comes out of you like it's nothing and it it doesn't even feel like you're writing it. I mean, those moments are are magical.
00:29:25
Speaker
But at this point, I've been a professional writer for five years and I know that those moments are not reliable. They are luxurious and they are really tempting, but they're not reliable and you can't make them happen. And so I'm not gonna pretend that the generative phase of writing doesn't sometimes feel like a grind. There are days I sit down at my desk and I'm just like gnashing my teeth And I will do absolutely anything to avoid opening that damn Scrivener draft that I'm so sick of the sight of. Like there are days when my my workday is wasted because I'm willing to spend so much time avoiding the actual work of writing.
00:30:08
Speaker
At this point, I just have to think of that as part of the work of writing. It's like playing catch up behind myself when I've allowed myself to be a piece of shit for a day. but Take us to that moment five years ago when you you go pro, ah so to speak. yeah What was the the conditions under which you were finally able to make a go of it?
00:30:29
Speaker
Well,
00:30:33
Speaker
i ah I had been writing a column for Catapult in a very part-time way. I think my column was once a month for them. RIP Catapult also, RIP to a legend.
00:30:45
Speaker
Yeah, RIP so many of them, my God. Yeah, so many. But I had my monthly column with Catapult and I had had my first essay for them. it It went viral like a million times over.
00:30:59
Speaker
ah Love, Peace and Taco Grease, it was called. It's in my first book. And i also had written an essay for Glamour at that point that had been very popular. So I was like firmly on an upward trajectory as a writer and I still had a day job. I was working at a place I will not identify here, as tempting as it is every single time because I really did not like the way they handled this.
00:31:25
Speaker
But I got doxxed. I got doxxed to my boss by some guy who like sent her via email a bunch of my tweets where I had been like jokingly complaining about work and he also sent her a bunch of, ah well, thirst traps that I had posted.
00:31:43
Speaker
and i think the substance of his email was like, do you really want this person working for you? And she emailed me to be like, yo, what is this? And I ended up, you know, I say that I lost that job. She did not fire me. I did quit.
00:31:58
Speaker
But I just knew I was in an impossible position. I was for sure gonna be forced out. I mean, that job was like my boss and everyone but me working there was pretty much her immediate family.
00:32:11
Speaker
And so I was like, well, my goose is cooked. Like these people are all gonna know. exactly what this situation is and that's just humiliating for me and ah so I quit in a panic and then I got my book deal like that same week and ah so you know I'm really really fortunate that things happened in that order I'm really fortunate that I was able to default to being a professional writer. I mean, I know for most people it goes the other way. They try to be a professional writer and they're forced out of this contracting industry into some kind of day job like the one that I lost, but
00:32:51
Speaker
It just, it was sort of a necessity for me. Like it was COVID, it was the height of COVID. There was no way I was gonna find another day job. And I just said, screw it, let me make this enormous gamble. And I will say it's been a struggle. Like my life is not glamorous. If I did not have a husband with a union job and good health insurance, I wouldn't be able to hold onto this career.
00:33:14
Speaker
So I've gotten lucky in a lot of ways on that front, but yeah, that was my that was my journey. It was ass backwards. Well, that's exactly that. ah You bringing that up, ah your husband with a union job and health insurance.
00:33:27
Speaker
I bring that up all the time because my wife is the breadwinner by by a pole, as they say in horse radio, like by a long shot. We can typically live off of her salary and she has the health insurance.
00:33:38
Speaker
In my latest book, like the last line of my acknowledgements was like, thanks for the health insurance. And it's And it's one of these things, you know, it it helps people like us to be able to acknowledge that, that there are conditions under which we need to be transparent about to be like, this is the privilege under which we operate that so that we can do this.
00:33:59
Speaker
And that it isn't just, you know, you're like, you're doing more work than the two books you've written and I'm doing more than the books I've written. And, ah but holding us up and propping us up to be able to do that is a certain domestic institutional,
00:34:13
Speaker
ah framework that allows us to do that without stress. The fact that we have health insurance is like, talk about a, you know, a hierarchy of need that we don't have to worry about, at least right now. And that that frees you up.
00:34:26
Speaker
So, yeah, I think that's absolutely right. And, you know, when I say I couldn't do it without my husband's support, I mean, i could, you know, i i could be grit my teeth and take my little $45,000 a year and struggle.
00:34:44
Speaker
But in a very real sense, I am 33 years old. I got bad knees. I'm tired all the time. I got all these like chronic medical problems. I just can't. I can't and I wouldn't.
00:34:57
Speaker
And I think that there's no shame if you're trying to make it as a writer to just one day say, I cannot continue to grind away like this. Let me... Take some time to have a more normal life and come back to this later. I think you can always come back to it later.
00:35:13
Speaker
i don't think people should be burning themselves out the way I see people trying to do. Oh, for sure. 100%. i like having the opportunity to talk about, you know, day jobs and money on the show as well. Like there's, I think, inherent shame and admitting you might have a day job that subsidizes maybe the writing you want to do because you you kind of feel like, oh, uh,
00:35:40
Speaker
you know, this essay writing or this freelance journalism or whatever, like this should be the thing, like the bread winning thing, this is what puts money on the table. But sometimes like the very surrendering to that puts so much pressure on it and it doesn't allow you to be as free as say, i don't know, if you're just stocking produce at the grocery store, like there's really no, there's no shame in that. it But it's hard to escape that shame because you know, you might be college educated and here you are.
00:36:07
Speaker
you know, pushing a produce cart around and, uh, we're doing your writing on the side, but it, it doesn't feel like you're ah full artist. And yeah, i try to dispel some of that shame as best I can.
00:36:19
Speaker
Yeah, I actually had to have a sort of reckoning around that a couple of years ago, like after Tacky came out and ah ah I burned through that advance very quickly.
00:36:32
Speaker
Cocaine is so expensive. I don't do it anymore. I ran out of money. And there was this sort of fork in the road when I did run out of money where I was like, OK, I could at this stage do a huge freelancing push and like send ah million pitches a day and work my ass off to make this money in writerly ways. Or I could do something that I know will take some of that pressure off. I can get a job in a restaurant. I have done that work for years.
00:37:00
Speaker
I'm familiar with it. Feels like home to me. and it also, you know, to what you were saying, it freed up my brain to think about the sort of writing I actually wanted to do. It was about as much money as I would have made freelancing.
00:37:15
Speaker
And it was reliable hours, reliable pay. When you work in a restaurant, you rarely have to send those little like, hey, just following up on my invoice emails. So it just, it was the right choice for me.
00:37:27
Speaker
And i often recommend that to writers who are in a similar struggle phase is, you know, It might not be worth it to try and make that money writing. It might be way better for you and your sanity and your career ultimately to make that money some way where you don't have to think about it too much and save your brainpower for thinking about your writing without having to do the sort of writing that makes money.
00:37:54
Speaker
Rarely the sort of writing that excites you the most. Yeah, oh that's really well put. And um there's a moment in um in Sloppy where yeah it's the essay you're you're writing when you were dancing.
00:38:07
Speaker
And there's this one moment, and this speaks to making an income as a freelance writer, too, where um you write like, ah live urge me to harpoon a whale to make one of the richer, more generous men into my perusal.
Patronage Model and Financial Approach
00:38:20
Speaker
proves a ah regular customer uh you know what gives you job security otherwise every day is a struggle not to imply that like your life is a it's a struggle but the idea is if you're just doing these like little one-offs you'll burn yourself out and i suspect even in you know with that job but even in writing like the idea if you can get this big anchor client it kind of frees you up to do something else like i don't know. They just seemed there was a that that idea really rhymed with writing as well as with dancing.
00:38:51
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, i think that's spot on that. It's the patronage model. You know, it's the Medici model. Everybody is trying to find a Medici in every field, whether you're hoping that like some billionaire genius.
00:39:05
Speaker
gets a whim, gets a wild hair up his ass to like buy your company and boost everyone's salaries, whether you're hoping to find like a staff writer position where you only have to write, you know, 2000 words once a month or whatever, all of these gigs, you know, it, it certainly applies to service work as well. and And Brendan is being very delicate. He's saying dancing. I was a stripper.
00:39:28
Speaker
but When you talk about like whales in that context, it's that same patronage model. You don't want to be the stripper who's walking around to every guy in the room like want to dance, want to dance, want to dance. Just like burning yourself out, driving yourself insane, probably feeling very rejected and bad about yourself the way I still feel when I send out a bunch of pitch emails, nobody gets back to me.
00:39:50
Speaker
You're trying to harpoon a whale. You're trying to get some guy's attention who is going to come to the club regularly and give you money regularly in a way that imitates a salary. That is all any of us are trying to do is imitate a real salary because those don't exist anymore.
00:40:07
Speaker
Yeah, ah that's really really well put. And and there's ah another essay later you're talking about big spender. was talking about your dad and and that and money and everything. And then I love this line you had about and getting money. yeah And you were like, the idea was to beat the money to the punch, to spend it on things you liked before it could get garnished by a debt collector or sucked up at an interest payment.
00:40:28
Speaker
And I just love this idea of like you getting this check. I got to get this thing out of my life ah because if it's gone, if it's gone, no one can come and claim it. It's a, but you maybe you can talk about that, your relationship to to money as a, that you kind of inherited from your father, at least in the context of this essay.
00:40:46
Speaker
Yeah, so this is the other reason that I need to have, for example, a husband with a good union job and health insurance. I am so bad with money, Brendan. I'm so bad with it.
00:40:59
Speaker
Right now, I have no idea how much is in my account. My whole life is being lived on credit cards. I just I'm a mess. I'm a money mess. and my position in that essay is that you should be allowed to be a money mess. You should be allowed to spend all your money on useless trinkets.
00:41:18
Speaker
That should be an option for people because like I don't know, yeah, saving money is good and it's important, but like also stuff that costs money is really, really fun. And I think I am entitled to that stuff despite not having all that much money.
00:41:35
Speaker
And so this is like the push pull of my entire life is just being a profligate mess. And ah yeah, I just think there should be way less shame around spending money on dumb garbage.
00:41:49
Speaker
What else is available to me? I'm never going to own a house. Like that's not in the cards for me. I'm never going to what, retire? like but yeah That does not sound like me.
00:41:59
Speaker
I'm going to spend all of this money on foolishness. I'm not going to like sock it away for some distant, unknowable future when maybe I'll get to enjoy it, maybe I won't.
00:42:10
Speaker
If I spend it now, I'm enjoying it now. And I cannot recommend that other people do this because I think people would yell at me if I did, but that's my approach. And so far, mostly nothing bad has happened. Mostly.
00:42:24
Speaker
I love the line too where it is your dad saying like, I got i got a discount is the classic guilty lie of big spenders. And i love that because I remember yeah growing up myself in the eighty s um yeah my family just had a real fucked up relationship to money. you know My dad was like frugal to the point of like draconian and my mom was a bit of a, yeah having they both grew up poor.
00:42:51
Speaker
She grew up real poor. So hanging on to money was not in her nature. And I remember if she ever took me out to the mall wherever and you know she wanted to buy me a toy or something that i pointed out to give me something that she could never have when she was little, um even just like a $5 Ninja Turtle toy or whatever, you know she would always be like, all right, when we get home and if your father asks, like we got it on sale. Yeah.
00:43:19
Speaker
And know like all the times was like, we got it on. So he had to be really sneaky about it. Yeah, you do have to be sneaky about it. Even when, you know, even when I'm talking to someone who my financial situation is none of their business, even if they're not asking me about money, if someone's like, wow, I love that dress. Where'd you get it?
00:43:37
Speaker
I have to lie. I have to be like, oh, I got it at such and such place. On sale. I got a discount. Like this person doesn't care. Nobody cares, but it's, yeah you know, money is this secret shameful thing. And every single person is convinced they're doing money wrong.
00:43:55
Speaker
They think that like, if they did money a little differently, they would have enough of it. You're never going to have enough money. Super rich people don't think they have enough money. So go ahead and like buy the thing that you can't quite afford.
00:44:08
Speaker
Worry about it later. I love how your you know your father is something of a recurring character and in these essays in some capacity. and you know He passed away a couple years ago. and i came across an essay that you wrote about him, how you would write emails ah to him after he passed away. and just wanted to maybe get you get a sense of, you know, your your connection to him and, you know, what, you know, how he mattered in your life to to the extent that you would write emails to someone who had who had passed away and ah and have him be such such a grace note through through sloppy.
Personal Influences and Sobriety Journey
00:44:42
Speaker
Oh, man, I loved my dad so much. He was so cool and funny and strange, ah just a deeply odd person. But like, you know, since I quit drinking,
00:44:55
Speaker
I've been devoting a lot of the money I used to spend on liquor and drugs to like hobbies to kind of have something positive that I'm doing with that money instead of just feeling bored and sober all the time.
00:45:07
Speaker
And I realized at some recent point, like I've been taking Yiddish classes. I've been learning to play the banjo. I've been going to boxing and like learning how to box. These are all things that I learned from my dad. Like I love,
00:45:21
Speaker
old time music because my dad taught me about it and he taught me my first few words of Yiddish and like he taught me how to throw a punch. he He taught my mom too. Apparently his like big piece of advice was you always keep your thumb outside your fist otherwise you're going to break it.
00:45:36
Speaker
But I didn't know that. hey we We would watch boxing together all the time and That was the thing he would say was like, you see how those gloves are? The thumb is separate from the fingers. You want to do that same thing when you throw a punch. And I'm like seven years old and I have asthma. And I'm like, okay, got it.
00:45:53
Speaker
But like he's, he looms in that way for me. Like I started doing all of those things, the the Yiddish and the music and so on. not really thinking about him and he just lives in my marrow like that. Like the the way I talk, I mean, I get some of my my speech patterns from him and I cough in the same ah voice that he did. Like when I cough, it sounds like him, which is super gross, but whatever.
00:46:22
Speaker
ah you know, his hair and his eyebrows are are on my head, all of that stuff. And, uh, I get, you know, I don't really write the emails to him so much anymore. That's something that I did right when he first died. And at this point it's been long enough that, uh,
00:46:37
Speaker
I don't really need to hold on to as many of those totemic gestures, but I still in my head will try and consult him for advice. I'll try and, you know, I'll try and hear what he might tell me about things. And of course, in in another essay in that book, I talk about how I have his...
00:46:56
Speaker
Fucking trinkets all over my damn house like just on every surface is stuff that I inherited when he died so like he's very much still a presence in my life and in both literal and more i guess metaphysical ways and he's still really important to me and he was all over my first book and all over this one and ah I Don't know that I'll ever feel like I have him completely figured out.
00:47:19
Speaker
Mm-hmm I love how you yeah how you bring him to life on the page. You know you seem like a you know pretty you know complicated and funny guy. Yeah, he was i mean he was the funny friend. like all the Every little group of friends has the the funny one who's like the life of the party, and he was that person in every group of friends he had. And also, the funny friend is often deeply depressed and like unhappy on just the cell level, and he was like that too. you know He was really funny and charismatic and magnetic. and Then when it was just me and him alone, he would get so deep in the dumps, it was like hard to reconcile the the two faces of his that I saw.
00:48:06
Speaker
Yeah, and you you brought up too as you were in sober talk and in dealing with the boredom, you know finding these hobbies to to best ah fill that fill that void, so to speak.
00:48:18
Speaker
I love one of the lines you wrote, like so like going out in public, you'd be like, sober I was a bad sport. And ah anytime that I've gone through long stretches of, say, not drinking, i have almost a hard time not looking like that wet blanket And I wonder just for you, how do you, how have you grown to overcome looking like the bad sport?
00:48:38
Speaker
So, God, I have, I think every single response I've given on this podcast, I've begun with, so I've got to stop doing that. I think that when I wrote that line, when I wrote the essay that it comes from proud alcoholic stock,
00:48:55
Speaker
I had been sober something like a month, you know, at most. And I was still seething about it. Like I knew that sobriety was something I had to do. I knew that if I didn't do it, I was going to die.
00:49:10
Speaker
But there's that great line from The Sopranos where where Tony has ah has just had that attempt on his life and he's talking about how every day is a gift. And he says that a few days in a row and then becomes more subdued with it.
00:49:22
Speaker
And he's like, yes, I still think that every day is a gift, but does it always have to be a pair of socks? And that's very much how I felt was like every day. yeah Okay. Every day is a gift. And I'm not puking hung over all the time anymore, but every day is very much a pair of socks. Like I'm no longer throwing my life into disarray just to see what will happen. And I'm no longer like,
00:49:46
Speaker
cheating on every partner and telling the, well, I guess I still tell my share of pointless lies, but you know, not high stakes ones. Like I, a lot of those instincts just had nowhere to go.
00:49:58
Speaker
At this point I'm sober three years and change. So my relationship to sobriety is just different. I have a lot of friends who are sober. I have friends also who like might not be sober, but don't expect me to go out partying with them, which is equally important. And I think that when I first got sober, my attitude was like, everybody in the world should get sober so that I have some company because I'm bored as shit and I don't know what to do with myself.
00:50:23
Speaker
And at this point, you know, I'm very generously like, yeah, you can drink. People can drink. That's allowed. I'll allow it. But ah I'm not going to. And I'm just not going to go places where I feel like a wet blanket about it. Like I still go to a lot of shows. i still love live music. I come from Washington, D.C., which has a really robust quote unquote straight edge scene, or at least it used to. And so i grew up not associating shows with partying.
00:50:53
Speaker
I'm still very comfortable going to shows, I think, as a result of that. And there are other places that feel like like a demilitarized zone where sober people and non sober people can find some common ground and can find something to do together. And I just try and do as much of that stuff as I can.
00:51:10
Speaker
And I try really hard to see the less. That's the best advice I can give anyone is see the less. Yeah, there you you wrote to like, I occasionally ponder whether I was ever a real alcoholic or if my anxiety and self-obsession talked me into self-diagnosing unnecessarily. In 12-step parlance, I'm white knuckling my way through getting clean.
00:51:33
Speaker
And ah is that something you still quite relate to? White knuckling not so much anymore. I have a much better support system than I used to. I guess at this point, actually, like that line you just read, the the little circle jerk of like, was I really an alcoholic or did I just convince myself, of you know, all that stuff.
00:51:55
Speaker
I have come to accept that I probably wouldn't even be stuck in that thought loop if I was not definitely an alcoholic. Like I wouldn't be thinking about how much I'm thinking about it. You know, I would just drink or not.
00:52:07
Speaker
And it wouldn't be so wouldn't be so fraught for me. And it is fraught. It's incredibly fraught. And every time I feel like maybe i could theoretically have a drink with dinner or whatever, like, no I have to remember that even having that thought and having it like sneak into my head at unexpected moments is a sign that I can't because if I could drink and not have a problem with it, I wouldn't have so many problems with it in my head either.
00:52:38
Speaker
Yeah, and ah Melissa Feebos' latest book, um Jesus Christ, Dry Season. Dry Season. oh she's so cool. Yeah, but she writes about that too and her struggling with addiction. and like that The fact that you have such an internal dialogue about it when you're rationalizing it or you're feeling guilty, or like that in and of itself is itself.
00:53:01
Speaker
the sign of the sickness when when you have to like constantly rationalize it or de-rationalize it or whatever whatever the talk is, if there's a constant chatter between your ears about it, like that in and of itself is the red flag you should be heeding.
00:53:16
Speaker
Yeah, and you know and that's the whole reason, really, that I quit drinking. I mean, certainly I had screwed up my life, and I had made some really big mistakes that you know if I kept drinking, I would make a mistake I couldn't come back from.
00:53:31
Speaker
If I kept drinking after that, I would die. Like, I did know that. Mostly, my impetus to quit drinking was like, I cannot devote this much thought to drinking anymore.
00:53:43
Speaker
I can't spend so much brainpower on like you know exactly how to titrate my alcohol intake so that I could get really maximally wasted without being too hungover the next day. All those endless calculations. like I was just enslaved to them. I had no brainpower for...
00:54:02
Speaker
Anything else pretty much. And I knew like, yeah, I needed to quit for my own safety, but I needed to quit so that I could think about something else again. i needed to like turn the damn page on all the drinking, all the thinking about it.
00:54:18
Speaker
Yeah. And in a collection of this nature, you know, you're talking about, you know, front of the house, working in restaurants. You know, we've talked about, you know, the ah money. There's another essay about Wolf of Wall Street in there, which kind deals into sobriety and boredom and other surprise.
00:54:33
Speaker
There's just a lot of a lot of stuff. But it does feel ah of like ah it does feel cohesive, I guess what I'm trying to say. And so when you're putting together an essay collection, you know, how were you thinking about it putting putting these things that are some in some ways disparate together so so you can read each one, you know, all a la carte, but altogether it does feel like, oh, yeah, these belong between these two covers.
00:54:59
Speaker
Well, the original way that this book was going to be was a more straightforward sobriety memoir, i guess, you know, capital S, capital M sobriety memoir, the sort of thing that is, I guess, kind of discouraged now because there are so many of them.
00:55:16
Speaker
And that's how I originally envisioned it. And ah in talking more to to my editor, we decided that the organizing principle should be bad habits in general and not just drug addiction bad habits, although that does come up numerous times, but shoplifting is in there and being bad with money, as we've talked about very much in there, lying for no reason that's in there, having an anger problem, like all of these unsuitable behaviors that I'm still stuck on to some degree or other. And so in that way, there are some essays in here that I think of as kind of triumphant. I mean, obviously I'm not,
00:55:59
Speaker
in active addiction now, so so the general arc is fairly triumphant, but there's also all kinds of bad habits in there that I am still entirely guilty of. And I guess taking it away from that addiction memoir space was a way to deny the easy payoff of like, well, I used to be a fuck up.
00:56:21
Speaker
i quit drinking and drugs. Now I'm not. No, I'm still such a fuck up. I'm going to be a fuck up probably for the rest of my life. Certain things about myself are unfixable. They're manageable.
00:56:33
Speaker
They're not fixable. And so this is much more a collection about coming to terms with that inherent unfixability of the human spirit than it is about like, oh, I triumphed over addiction and adversity.
00:56:46
Speaker
Yeah. Well, it seems like the, I think the perfect salve to our airbrush social media era to lean into those imperfections and the sloppiness of our life and the way each day is its own mess of bullshit.
00:57:02
Speaker
And how do we, how do we, so how do we surf that bullshit? Because anything less than that is not only inauthentic, but just completely unrealistic. Yeah, I definitely never want to present the polished version of myself. Honestly, is there a polished version of myself at this point? I, you know, I can like put on a nice dress for a wedding or something. I cannot be polished. I've been working for myself too long.
00:57:31
Speaker
I've been writing about my little peccadillos for too long. Not a polished person. And I think that, you know, There is value, actually, in reading these memoirs and and reading personal writing from people who aren't pretending to be polished and aren't pretending that they've corrected their essential selves or whatever. That is not interesting to me.
00:57:54
Speaker
I'd much rather read about somebody grappling with their imperfections and... And also letting them be, you know, not not changing them, grappling with them without fixing them. I don't want to read the story of somebody who's fixed. That is not of narrative interest to me.
00:58:13
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. It's too tidy and unrealistic to think of it like that. It'd be like, oh, this is this kind of bullshit. This doesn't ring true at all. Yeah. Yeah, and I think there's a real temptation that there certainly was a temptation for me in writing these individual essays to find some note to end on where I could be like, but I don't do that anymore.
00:58:33
Speaker
But that's not the reality. i i do almost all of these things that I write about in some degree or other to this day. The only things I explicitly never have done since I started writing this book, I have not gone back to drinking and I have not gone back to cocaine.
00:58:50
Speaker
But all of the essential character flaws that I'm writing about are very present and I think always will be. And I think that's worth writing about, honestly.
Advice on Revising Drafts
00:59:02
Speaker
Nice. Well, Rex, I want to get ah ah just a couple more things from you um as i as we kind of bring our conversation down for a landing. And and one is ah be it hard-earned or advice you've received from, say, a mentor or even in your writing group, you know what's a great piece of writing advice that that you heed or have heeded, continue to heed, that helps you and get get work done maybe when you're feeling a bit down?
00:59:29
Speaker
Here's a writing advice tip that I can't remember who originally told this to me, but I remember hearing it and it really pissed me off and I started obeying it and I was like, damn it, this person is right and this sucks so bad.
00:59:42
Speaker
And I will inflict it on your audience. And that tip is when you're reading your draft with an eye to revising it, the moment when you start to get bored by your own writing,
00:59:55
Speaker
readers got bored like 10 sentences ago and that's when you need to like drastically cut or condense or do something to diffuse that boredom and when i heard that advice my thinking was well that can't possibly be true because the reason i'm bored is i've read this draft 64 000 times and you know blah blah blah and no it's that's not correct it's the opposite I am much more interested in my own work than I can rely on anyone else to be. And so if my work starts to bore me and if I start to get distracted reading it, I have to trust that I am more excited by it still than anybody else is going to be.
01:00:37
Speaker
Nice. and And lastly, I always love asking the guests for a recommendation of some kind for the listeners. And that would be just anything you're excited about. Branded coffee, socks, fanny pack.
01:00:48
Speaker
Totally up to you, Rex. So yeah what is something you might recommend to the listeners? I am going to recommend, actually, if you can give me one second to confirm yeah something.
01:01:01
Speaker
Yes, I do indeed know what this record is called. I couldn't remember the order of the words in it. ah It's the new record from a band from DC, hometown. The band is called Sex Faces and the record is called Bad Vibes OST.
01:01:16
Speaker
And I've been listening to it on repeat for like a month and a half since it came out. I mean, it's so much fun, sort of garagey and punky and bratty and a really great time.
01:01:28
Speaker
And i believe they're either on tour now or they're ah about to be on tour. If sex faces come to your town, I cannot recommend highly enough going to see them. I've been talking up this record every chance I get.
01:01:42
Speaker
And ah yeah, highly, highly recommend. Super fun. Oh, amazing. Well, this was such a ah great time to spend an hour with you, Rax, talking about you know writing and and and sloppy.
01:01:53
Speaker
it was I loved it. Like I said, during the conversation, I wasn't reading a whole lot. of i like I haven't had fun reading in a long time. And this one, I had fun reading it. And that was very nice and very welcome. So I just want to commend you on an amazing job on this book. And just thank you for carving out time to talk shop.
01:02:10
Speaker
Oh, Brendan, I'm so glad you had fun with me. And thank you again for having me. This is ah this is a great conversation.
01:02:24
Speaker
All right, don't forget about the virtual Hippocamp all weekend, and specifically a night of nonfiction featuring me as the headlining reader. I might pluck out a new thing, or I might just stick with Old Faithful.
01:02:37
Speaker
I still have only read like this one excerpt from the book, and I haven't read it at all since. a I still can't stand the sight of my own writing. August 16th, 6 to 8 p.m. Eastern.
01:02:49
Speaker
Register at BooksByHippocampus.com. Now, this episode with Rax started by me asking her about the calming effect of people who are gloriously tidy.
01:03:02
Speaker
Rax and I are definitely sloppy. Oh, and by the way, thanks to Rax for coming on the show. RaxKingIsDead.com and at RaxKingIsDead on Instagram.
01:03:13
Speaker
Yes, watching Derek Sarno's YouTube channel, Vegan Chef, very calming for me. I also like Aki, the Japanese memorabilist. But with Cerno, he's huge on his mise en place. He is a classically trained chef, preparing all his ingredients before he cooks.
01:03:33
Speaker
ah He puts them in these little plastic deli containers, and he obsessively cleans his station, his cutting board, his knife as he goes. When he used to cater at people's houses, he made sure he left the host's kitchen cleaner than when they arrived. I mean, that is just fundamental kindness right there.
01:03:54
Speaker
And kind of like the old camping slogan, leave a place better than you found it.
01:03:59
Speaker
Now, the cartoonist Dana Jerry Mayer, she looks at a clean desk with a heavy bout of skepticism. And I largely agree. But if I could do something similar with my cook station, meaning my desk, what would that look like? What are the ingredients I'm cooking with?
01:04:16
Speaker
ah Here are my notes. Here are these articles. Here's this book. you know When your mind is so frenetically frantic, so batshit all over the place, then taken up to 11 by caffeine and fascism, creating a sense of calm and clarity around the workspace makes a lot of sense to me.
01:04:35
Speaker
It's a little more work up front to get everything ready and in its place, but there's something to be said for keeping things in order and staying on top of it.
01:04:46
Speaker
That's part of the reason I'm so attracted to the idea of just tiny houses and tiny living, because you have to work within those constraints. And the constraints make decisions for you. It's like flash nonfiction or flash fiction. and you know When you've got only a couple hundred words, you can't be indulgent with that.
01:05:05
Speaker
Say with tiny living, if you you only get to keep 20 bucks, not 300. As my wife says, humans are like gases. We expand to fill our places and our spaces. And right now, my cook space, such as it is, is not ideal.
01:05:20
Speaker
yeah i am not walking the walk. I have four books, a DVD, two handkerchiefs, a ruler, two pencils, and a dirty bowl from breakfast four hours ago, and a cup of iced coffee that is depressingly room temperature.
01:05:33
Speaker
Yeah, so this whole mise en place is a work in progress. so Very much in progress. So stay wild, see in efforts. And if you can't do, interview.
01:05:44
Speaker
See ya.