Recovering from Post-Election Existential Crises Mode

Dearest Resisters,

As someone with a chronic illness, it can be really challenging not to spend every email’s first half apologizing for being late. One thing I’m trying to be better at is giving myself a bit more grace. So, I am not exactly apologizing, but I do regret not keeping up with the big round-up emails here in my newsletter. Just know that I, like all of you, am a human, and 2024 was a doozy of a year.

I’m currently in my end-of-the-year recovery mode, but I wanted to send out some year-end updates. I’ll probably send a separate round-up of everything I had published this year. This is my more fun, personal check-in email to let you know of the things I have coming up in the new year (including a ton of workshops), and all the buffoonery I participated in last year.

2024 was a challenging year for me, particularly post-election. I don’t yet have words for what it has been like to live in the US (and Texas) in a world where 2025 means four more years of a dystopian landscape. If you follow my writing and art, you know that all of my work is at the center of a conversation about political issues—from feminism to human rights to censorship to gender to queerness. For me, writing is a way of processing the world and commenting on it.

There are a few major writing projects that I’ve been focused on in the last year. The first is a book of queer memoir poems. This project is pretty much complete, it’s just in the process of being sent out on individual poem submissions. The other project I’m still picking away at is my series of Encyclopedia erasure poems (available on my Tiktok/Instagram). Lastly, I’ve been chipping away at a little fun chapbook of poems I call “simulations”—all prose poems. Inbetween these, I create little arts of resistance.

One thing that really grates on my nerves is how people treat politics as something separate from art—but also separate from our individual lives. I think any marginalized person would disagree. I’ve been told, “It will be fine.” The reality is that for many (see Nevaeh Crain, Porsha Ngumezi, and so many more), it is not already fine. It is death. It is civil rights stripped. It is torture. Yet art still gets created.

In 2025, I don’t yet know where my creative focus will be or how I will process the future events that are inevitable in this landscape.

But I do know this:

I’m not giving up.

Writing is a creative practice that comes from a place we don’t entirely understand. When you write, you are tapping into an internal world that no one else can fully know. Writers have the special ability to take a difficult or complex topic and make it salient. Even if you’re just writing for fun, your words matter. Writing is also a huge, gigantic leap of faith. We don’t sit down to write assured what comes out will be good or even make sense. We rely entirely on our own minds and imagination. There are so many fantastic writers who never finish a book or publish or get successful. But on the other side of that—how terrible would it be if you never tried?

So I want to tell you that in 2025, I hope you write. I hope you write what you love, and I hope you love what you write. Because nothing is a given. We never know if our work will be complete, but we keep writing anyway. Time is fleeting (madness takes its toll!). So the time to write is NOW.

Write because you need to. Write because you want to. Write because someone pissed you off. Write because it helps you. Write because it helps someone else. Write for your imaginary best friend. Write because the world is on fire. Write to set the world on fire. Write like it’s going out of style. Write like tomorrow you might be sent to jail for writing. Write the truth. Write lies. Write—however you can, wherever you can, with as much heart and passion and love as you can. Write today and tomorrow and until the day you die. Write again and again and again. Write even if it’s bad, write like it’s going to be good someday. Write drafts and forget about them, write drafts and come back to them. Write what gives you joy, and write what makes you sad. Write all the beautiful things and all the ugly things. Write using tears as ink, or blood, or rage. Write hard things, write fun fluff. All that matters is that you love it.

With that in mind, my first big update to share is that I’ve got TWO new poems out in this anthology: Fumptruck: Open Letters, Essays, Fiction, Poetry, Artwork & Other Creations for & Inspired by the 47th President of the Divided States of America. The anthology has many fantastic names on the TOC and it is out now for sale. The two poems in this anthology are ones from my simulations project, and they are called “You Are Trapped in a Coma” and “There Is Nothing Wrong with You”.

As a reminder, If you love what I do and want to support me, you can now upgrade to this newsletter to get extra-weird perks:

• At least one subscriber-only post per month

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Every Weird Circular, I list upcoming opportunities to publish your writing geared toward writers of the weird (sci-fi, fantasy, horror, speculative!) I prioritize PAID opportunities by markets I trust and try to vet as much as I can.

Upcoming Submission Windows:

• 12/31/2024: Chicken Soup for the Soul Series: Theme: Miracles, Messages from Heaven, Angels. Short Stories under 1,200 words. Pays $250/story

• 12/31/2024: Dracula Beyond Stoker. Theme: Jonathan Harker. Short Stories and poetry (1.5k-5k words). Pays .05/word.

• 1/15/2025: Neon Hemlock, Shatter the Sun: Queer Tales of Untold Adventure: Fantasy epics. Short Stories (up to 6k words). Pays .08/word.

• 1/21/2025: Fairy Tale Magazine: Theme: Sleeping Beauty. Short stories (900-2k words), poetry (up to 500 words). Pays $25/piece

• 1/31/25: Nonbinary Review: Theme: Mistaken Identity. Short Stories (up to 3k words), Poetry (up to 3 Poems). Pays .01/word, $10 for poems.

Need more submission ideas? Check the Grinder's newest markets, Duotrope's calendar, Submittable’s Discover Feature, Heavy Feather Review’s Where to Submit, SFPA's Speculative Poetry Markets, Horror Tree, Moksha's Open Publications, or The International Writer’s Collective Blog.

Since it’s the end of the year, I am going to make all of my prompts for this issue of the Weird Circular themed around year-end writing activities. I hope these will help you refocus for the new year to come and rediscover the inspiration you may be missing.

Prompt #1: Why Do We Write?

Listen to the above excerpt of Anaïs Nin talking about why we write. For this writing prompt, spend some time thinking about why YOU write. What have you accomplished this year? What do you want to accomplish in the new year? What’s holding you back from writing? What inspires you to write, and how can you cultivate that in the future?

Bonus Round: If you feel down on your writing because you haven’t accomplished everything you wanted this year, I suggest journaling about self-forgiveness. How can you forgive yourself for the past? Writing is a journey and it takes different paths for different people. What if you could let go of that self-judgment? What would that look like for your writing life?

Prompt #2: 10 Ideas

I come back to this prompt over and over again. Come up with 10 ideas for writing pieces. They might be ten stories or ten poems or ten essays or ten books. Write the ten ideas down and then summarize each one in a sentence. Now circle the ones that seem most exciting or juicy. Which ones feel too epic or difficult at this moment? This is a fun way to get ideas down on the paper without having to start on them just yet. Marvel at your ability to generate ideas 🙂 

Bonus Round: Write the first page or first few lines of one of your ideas.

Prompt #3: Project Check-In

Make a list of the projects you currently have in progress. Now for each project, make a list of the remaining tasks to finish that project. Which project is calling to you the most? It’s okay to follow your heart here.

Bonus Round: Make a plan to finish that project in the new year. “A Plan” might be a list of tasks, it might be one task to get you started, but it shouldn’t be “concepts of a plan”.

📖 Weird Book of the Month: I’ll admit that here at the end of the year, I’m rereading my cozy classic fav, Anne of Green Gables. But I recently read Finna by Nino Cipri and I adored the worldbuilding. If you’re an Ikea fan, you must read this one!

🧵 Craft Article of the Month: “How to Write Words and Make Art in this Dire Era of Clowns and Cowards” by Chuck Wendig

I’ve loved Chuck Wendig’s writing advice for a while (highly recommend the book Gentle Writing Advice), and this post resonated with me because it’s basically the approach I’ve come to take when I look at how terrible the world can be. Fuck it. I have to admit that my humor is pretty sarcastic and dark, and I know not everybody can handle that. I wish I could protect you, pretty starry-eyed babies. But the reality is, the fuck-it mentality can really serve you well as a writer.

I say it differently: Eyes on your own paper. Which is to say, everything might be falling apart, but in the end, it’s just you and that stupid piece of paper. Keep writing.

🎵 Music to Write by: So, usually, I share writing that doesn’t have lyrics, but for this issue of the Weird Circular, I want to share a song that’s been helping me get through December. “No Children” by the Mountain Goats, which has been trending on TikTok lately. This song pretty much encapsulates how I feel about life right now. I have been feeling deeply bleak and angry at the world.

But this song has a pretty clever structure. If you listen, you may realize that it utilizes what I call the “double negative” statement. After a few listens, it becomes clear that the song can be interpreted either as a completely nihilistic view of the world and the relationships in it, or you can assume the speaker of the piece actually desires the opposite of what they are saying.

This is a structure that works really well in a poem or story, too. So try it out in this extra prompt:

Write a poem, story, or essay that’s full of the OPPOSITE of what you want to say. If you need a starting point, finish this statement: I hope …

This newsletter is entirely run by me, Holly, your corporeal host. I’m just a bundle of anxiety shoved into a sweater and glasses fueled by caffeine-free-zero-sugar coke and feminine rage. I really, really love having you around, though. So if you want to keep reading, please consider becoming a subscriber: (please don’t make me join substack.)

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