Letting Summer be Summer

New York is stepping into summer in classic fashion: heat wave.

Temps? Nineties. Heat index? Hundreds. Chance of a good hair day? Zero.

I used to bemoan New York summers, especially these kind of days, the ones where it’s stifling by 7am. And while I still catch myself whining, it’s mostly because I go into small talk auto-pilot when someone says, “whew, hot one today!” in the elevator.

The truth is, I’ve quit minding summers. Not because I particularly relish the sticky, smelly heat of the city from June through September.

But because life seems too short and unpredictable to be constantly wishing for the next season, the better season, the trip to a place with better weather.

In the past couple years, I’ve gotten a bit better at “being here, now.” Figuring out how to enjoy this moment. To find delights hidden in any forecast, in every season. Even summer in Manhattan.

No, it’s not particularly comfortable outside. I don’t step outside into the thick air that smells a bit like hot garbage and think, “Now this is nice!” I’m not Pollyanna.

But there are sneaky, other joys if I look for them.

The fact that that for a few months, the city is already awash in morning twilight when we start the coffee at 5am.

Entering a revolving door in swampy heat and exiting into the refreshing bite of my apartment lobby’s air-conditioning. The shock to the system. The respite of home.

The threat/promise of a summer thunderstorm. The kind that are either a doozy or not-at-all, and you likely won’t know which until you’re caught in one.

That said…

All my big talk about making peace with the weather aside, I mostly hibernate in summer. The way some hunker down in winter until the thaw, I go mostly underground in summer and emerge when it’s time to wear boots again.

Which means that summer tends to be an incredibly creative time for me. That’s perhaps an odd thing to say, since I’m a professional creative. Ideally all times are at least a little creative for me, and when they’re not I’m in trouble.

But summer is different. Even though I don’t have kids or head to the beach for the season, I’m not immune to summer vacation energy. Work hours shorten. Productivity seems somehow less the point of it all. When June hits, my creative pursuits skew more recreational than professional. Neglected art supplies come out, screens go away. My email inbox grows fat, but so does my sketchbook. The first from neglect, the second from little bursts of wobbly artist bravery.

A legacy from the summer of 2020. That strange, surreal time when it hit all of us that the COVID lockdown wasn’t merely a little spring blip. With no end in sight, I, like many of people, had to create new ways to fill the days.

For some it was making sourdough, for me, it was eating store bought sourdough, and dabbling with watercolor. I didn’t take to that particular medium—too imprecise—but I did fall in love with the process of creating something that I didn’t have to worry about making marketable. Of spending countless hours on something that would never become a side hustle.

Even more, I fell in love with the tactile. Of rediscovering the sensation of tools other than electronics beneath my fingers. My iPad Pro is one of my favorite and most used possessions, but I’ll take the scratch and flow of a real pen and real paper every time. Procreate’s a pretty cool app, but it can’t beat the satisfaction of painstakingly drawing a crooked tree on a blank page, even with smudged ink. Especially with smudged ink.

And so the long summer days begin.

The ever-more challenging quest to be out of bed before the first hint of dawn. Leisurely conversations over coffee as Anth and I muse whether this will be the day we finally figure out, what’s next, what are we doing, where are we going.

Maybe, maybe not.

But in the mean time, it’s ink-stained fingers, and fresh notebooks. Flowers doodled in margins. A new pen I probably did not need. Nectarines I ate a day before they were perfectly juicy because I couldn’t wait. A glass of ice cold rosé, dinner of tinned fish and baby carrots, because why not. Jazz. Frizzy hair. Linen everything.

And if I’m lucky, a summer storm.

Amazon

One of my least favorite things about myself is that I have daily fantasies about being brave enough to stop buying from Amazon …

But then five minutes later, place a Prime order for makeup remover pads. Pee pads for the dog. Sea salt Chomps. Laundry soap, toilet paper, dishwasher pods, loofahs, a new storage shelf, pens, notebooks, kitchen tongs, dish towels, bath mats, batteries, packing tape.

The list sometimes feels endless. My order history tells me it pretty much is.

Like so many people, I persistently fall into The Trap.

Amazon’s cheaper, easier, and it can be here tomorrow.

And so I try not to think about the other factors.

Like the fact that I live in Manhattan, and can walk to get all of those things myself, which would require no packing material or fuel, and would, you know, get me outside instead of waiting for UPS to do everything for me.

And then there are those Other Things we’ve heard and try to ignore, like Amazon’s reputed sketchy treatment of its workers, the broader environmental impacts, the accelerating decline of small businesses, that whole pesky monopoly thing.

And yet, if I want a new Midori grid notebook and I want it now, I am remarkably good about putting my head in the sand, or sticking my fingers my ears when it comes to the ethical implications of ordering from Amazon. Lalalala I can’t hear you!

Sort of how I generally eat well, am fully aware of the date on processed food and fast food, and yet good luck convincing me to say no to a Taco Bell chalupa.

And so I don’t say no, and then …

I feel gross after eating that chalupa.

Because it’s shit.

Much like the way I’m increasingly beginning to feel about ordering from Amazon.

Gross.

Because it’s shit.

For me, there’s something working beneath the surface, something more nuanced than listing “Amazon is problematic because…”

Increasingly I have an emotional, almost visceral reaction when I order something from Amazon. The nagging sense that something is just not right.

Frustrating me lately is my inability to put my finger on exactly why.

Why do I feel always feel like not quite looking myself in the mirror after a spontaneous click of Buy Now on Amazon. Or why do I feel ashamed of myself whenever I think about actually using that Amazon affiliate link I’ve had on the back burner for years.

Is it that Amazon knows I need to reorder tampons before I register my period is right around the corner? Or that when I add dishwasher pods to cart, I’m promptly presented with paper towels and I realize I’m almost out of those too. Convenient? Undeniably yes. But also distinctly unsettling.

Is it the way I type in a search with the exact book title and exact author name, I’m still presented with dozens of other search results that I very clearly wasn’t looking for?

Or that every book page (Amazon’s OG purpose, remember! books!) is smothered with sponsored ads to other books. Shopping on Amazon for books is like going to Barnes & Noble and picking a book off the shelf, and someone thrusting another book in front of your face because the author or publisher paid them to.

Is it the fact that Amazon has largely excused us from having to make choices. “Well, they said I got this last time, and that was fine, so …” As we shouldn’t be bothered to think or shop for ourselves because an algorithm knows better than us what we want.

Maybe it’s all of that.

All I know for sure is that there’s an instinctual unease. A sense that I lose a little something every time I choose to order from Amazon, or at least, become less the human I’m meant to be.

Anth I are dying to read Ron Chernow’s new Mark Twain. We make a point to order from Bookshop.org which supports indie book stores, or sometimes The Painted Porch, which is an indie book store. It’s always more expensive, and this is a (literal) price we’re willing to pay to ensure that when we travel to little corners of the United States, we’re able to tuck into little book stores trying to survive in Amazon’s wake.

But this latest book on Bookshop.org is $41.85.

Shipping is extra.

Woof.

We spend a lot of money on books, and this still felt like a hard punch in the face. So I couldn’t resist. I checked Amazon’s price.

On Amazon, the same format of that same book is $24.47 as I write this.

Shipping is free.

It was really hard to not just one-click buy on Amazon and have it delivered tomorrow.

And yet, I hesitate.

Maybe it’s because I’m an author myself, and know what it feels like to devote years of your life to writing a book. To 12+ hours in your chair putting words on a page in a single day. To literally ignore your family and everything around you because you’re so committed to birthing this thing.

Only to learn that Amazon is going to discount your work for $1.99 or $3.99 (in my case). Or $24.47 (in Chernow’s).

And perhaps the dollar amount matters less than the fact that Amazon cares very little about standing for something other Cheap.

Then again, who doesn’t delight in cheap shit.

“Damn, a set of twelve for $4.99, and this artisan store wants to charge me $19.99 for one?!”

Until we pause a moment. Change our emphasis. And realize we’re actually just getting cheap shit (see: the AA batteries we just bought from Amazon that last approximately 45 seconds, or the off-brand Q-tips that snapped in half when we merely looked at them.)

Or, just as bad, maybe worse, we all support a company that takes quality good and merely prices them as shit.

I’ll pause here to note that my argument is wobbly at best because it’s hypocritical. Most of my author income comes from Amazon, even as my touch points with Amazon as an author have been almost exclusively negative.

Hypocrite.

And I’d be silly not to mention that Amazon’s cheapening of the price of books means that they’re accessible to more people than ever, and that’s a good thing (and yet … libraries…).

Nuanced.

Or that for those of us without access to Costco or another big box store, Amazon’s price on Kleenex is hard to look away from.

Practical.

And yet, the ick remains.

This sense that our lives are determined by algorithms. And that we’ve lost the sense of discovery that happens when we go looking for our new nightstand lamp, and come home with a vase that looks like Medusa.

Or just the satisfaction of buying a quality hand-crafted picture frame direct from the person who actually made it rather than from the ginormous company that is going to throw it in with the same box into which it throws bulk dryer sheets.

Maybe next time I need my ankle socks in bulk, I care less about, “Wow, this pack of thirty socks is only $11.99!” and start asking why it’s only twelve bucks. Who made it? What was compromised?

Something is always compromised.

Perhaps I’m ready to treating myself, my belongings and the planet with more respect than Cheap Shit, Fast.

I may not yet ready to spend $41 on that Mark Twain biography, but I’m not going to give Amazon $24 for the book either.

Conceptually, I love the idea of saving $17.

Ethically? I question the actual cost. I’m ready to start asking what corners were cut to make that $17 in my pocket possible.

Yeah, I may gain cheap book. But what do I lose in the process?

Afraid

I was a quiet, awkward-ish kid with a big gap in my teeth, a unibrow, and a genuine excitement for writing assignments in school.

Now, I was a good student, but not a particularly dazzling one. Group projects were my nightmare, I could never sleep the night before a math test, and science experiments were just never nearly as cool as the teacher’s excited tone implied they would be (A battery out of a potato you say!? Boy oh boy, I hope they make lab coats in size Fifth Grader!)

But a double-spaced, one-inch margin, 12pt Times New Roman two page essay on MLK, tornados, or the theme of My Ántonia? I loved every part of that. The trips to the library for research (this was the 90s, so I yes, I was probably wearing Doc Martens or Adidas Sambas with my school uniform as I perused the Dewy Decimal system like a casual pro). The satisfaction of writing the notes in my college-ruled spiral Mead Five-star notebooks, even as I wondered why they didn’t come in cuter colors. And most especially, the almost unworldly satisfaction of watching a blank page fill with words. My words.

👆The above love of writing as a kid is usually part of the story I tell when people ask if I always knew I wanted to be come an author.

Yes. Yes, I did always want to become an author, and when I was 28 I quit the corporate world to do exactly that. And I’ll forever be grateful to have spent more than a decade living my dream career. But in hindsight (I’m 42 now, and therefore Wise), I see that that something happened without me realizing it:

In my concentrated pursuit of becoming a published romance author, I somehow narrowed my view of what it meant to be a writer. Even when I broadened my scope to include screenwriting, in my head, being a writer meant creating fictitious stories.

Which might not have been a big deal, had my life gone to plan. I thought I’d be like my icons, Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Nora Roberts, and the late Mary Higgins Clark, writing novels well into my 70s and beyond. And nobody was more miffed than me to wake up at 40ish with the uneasy but unavoidable realization of:

I don’t really feel like doing that anymore—at least not right now.

So I hit pause on being an author.

And so ingrained had this idea become that for me, writing = novels, that I inadvertently hit pause on being a writer as well. I closed the door on that life-long identity because I thought it no longer fit now that I was no longer publishing romance novels every year.

It’s a strange sort of blind spot, considering I read nonfiction almost exclusively, but while I strongly considered (and attempted, and failed) to pivot to another fiction genre, it never occurred to me that I could step away from novels and still be A Writer.

I’d forgotten that girl who delighted in writing the cliché “What I did over summer vacation,” who couldn’t wait to write the book reports that my classmates loathed. Or the college student who pulled an all nighter writing to Simone de Beauvoir and the application of The Second Sex to politics, even though the paper wasn’t due for another week.

And you know what happens when you turn your back on the thing you were born to do, even accidentally? You listen to Billie Eilish’s “What Was I Made For” on repeat while eating string cheese, drinking Chard, and trying not to freak out about what you’re supposed to do for the next several decades.

Who am I if not a writer?

One of my most-used apps is Things. Don’t worry, this is related. So anywa, Things is not only my task manager, but my “catch all” for thoughts and ideas I want capture when I don’t have a notebook nearby.

For example, it’s not unusual to open my Things inbox and find things like “Is time a natural phenomenon or human framework?” sandwiched right in between “buy toilet paper” and “clean out the cheese drawer.”

The other day, a thought kept nagging me, so I opened Things and typed this:

I feel like I have things to say, but I’m afraid to say them.

Then, as I usually do when I’m in the app, I did a quick scan of the rest of the inbox items to see if anything need to be scheduled or deleted.

My eye caught on this, written months ago:

I feel like I have things to say, but I’m afraid to say them.

Verbatim of what I’d just written.

Suddenly, the very thought became very loud. Less a recurring passing thought, and more a calling. And a realization that when I’d put down the pen, so-to-speak, I’d inadvertently been censoring myself. Silencing myself.

I knew that when I typed “I have things to say” was that I really meant was “I have things to write.”

Writing isn’t just something I do, it’s who I am. It’s how I express myself. It’s when I’m most alive. The most me.

Things I’m meant to write. Not just made-up stories, but my stories. Essays. Poems. Papers. Opinions. Articles. Blog posts just like this one. All those things I’m afraid to say, but somehow suspect that I’m meant to be the one to say them. Even just collecting other people’s writing in a commonplace book of sorts.

But I’m rusty.

Enter, The Summer Writing Project.

Every day from June 20th to August 31st, I’ll be writing something. Anything. And posting it here on this blog. (Yes, we’re starting using the start of astronomical summer for the start date, and the end of meteorological summer for the end date. Because today is the first day of “official summer,” and that’s handy, but also, summer is dead to me on September 1st.)

My husband decided to join me in the SWP. (an acronym makes it real)

There are no rules. Not in length or topic. It can be a list of things we ate that day, a book review, a poem, a rant, a personal essay, a deep thought, or a single sentence.

You can subscribe below to get notified of new posts if you want, though you should know I make no promises on what sort of content you’re going to get. They may be only lightly edited, or not at all.

I spent more than twelve years writing 42 novels that I hoped other people would like.

This summer, I write for me.

It’s what I’m made for.

(No, YOU went too deep on the first SWP installment …)

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