Hi Darling Ones,

In 2012, after I found my biological father’s obituary, Sister #3 introduced me to the concept of ambiguous loss. This the kind of loss that’s not clearly defined by a dead body, a funeral, that kind of thing. The person doesn’t even have to be dead for you to suffer an ambiguous loss. They could be missing or cut you out of their lives.

In her memoir Horror Stories Liz Phair describes the ambiguous loss around her adoption as a piece of glass permanently lodged in her heart. I love that description because that’s exactly what this kind of loss feels like. They’re these little pieces of glass inside of you that feel like nothing until you accidentally bump up against it.

The beginning of January always pokes at the shards in my heart because it contains a trifecta of birthdays — Sister #3’s is today, Nolan’s is tomorrow, and Cade’s is the 14th. It’s been almost two years since Sister #3 unsubscribed from the Sister Club. It still hurts, especially the loss of The Tibbles. They are the collateral damage in her imaginary, toxic feud.

Writing about it makes me feel better. I was all weepy, my hindsight warped my rose-colored glasses. Then I read a few of my old posts. It’s a good reminder that Sister #3 was not good to me in any sense of the word. She used me and she gaslighted me. Now I’m angry and sad. Feelings are stupid and complicated.

You might be surprised, Darling Ones, to learn I did not come here today to bellyache about my psycho sister. I came here to brag.

This is what I came to brag about:

1. We’re three days into 2022 and I’ve taken five naps thus far. And I read two books.
2. I submitted the first chapter of Rock & Roll Loudmouth, aka The Beast, to Tin House.

Please control your envy at my ability to be super slacktastic while simultaneously working on my 2022 goals. I’ve had nearly fifty years of experience with this kind of dichotomy. This isn’t for beginners.

Thanks for reading,
Jodi

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Hello Darling Ones,

Earlier this week I read a frustrating and puzzling true crime book about a 50+ year-old murder at Harvard. The entire time I read the book I kept shouting, inside my head, “NOBODY CARES ABOUT YOUR PROCESS.” Most of the book is the author’s process of getting to know everyone involved in the mystery. It’s weird.

Clearly, the author was not familiar with Dolly Parton’s book Songteller where Dolly talks about how her husband of a bajillion years doesn’t even care about her process.

Now that I go back and read that post from January it seems I’m writing the exact same post. God, I hate when I repeat myself so hard. It’s like I only have six thoughts and all I’ve done is remix the shit out of them for the past twenty-one years.

So. . . anyway, what else has been going on in this joint?

• I had a dream the other night that I went to work at The Nerdery again and they were all super pissed at me because I forgot to show up for the past twelve years.
• I’m having The Youths & The Olds over for dinner tomorrow night and I spent most of the day making potato salad while intermittently writing and reading Fallopian Rhapsody.
• The writing was good today. I killed so many darlings and two exclamation points.
• I turned most of my clocks back an hour already and now I’m truly living in the past. It’s not that great here. I hope the future is rad! For some reason I’m convinced I will forget to turn my clocks back before I go to bed and then, I don’t know, there will be chaos in the morning.
• During CSA on Thursday, BFK and I decided there are two kinds of heterosexual men on this planet: those who care about your orgasm and those who do not. We both prefer the former and agreed that sometimes they care too much.
• In very good news to me, I got my Sister Club Game gift today. After hunting for months on eBay I found a red hobnail glass candy dish like my Grandma Chromey kept on her coffee table when we were kids. It is excellent.
• I put flannel sheets on my bed this morning and all I’ve wanted to do is crawl back into it all damn day. I’m going to try sleeping with a top sheet again, after banishing it a few years ago. I am wild and crazy. I live on the bleeding edge.

Well, I can’t promise I’ll have any interesting thoughts any time soon, but if I do you’ll be the first to know it.

Sincerely,
Jodi A. Chromey

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Hi Darling Ones,

One of my Tea Lady friends is taking a class at The Loft, which means I got to share with them my all-time favorite piece of criticism I ever got.

It’s not the note pictured above. I’ll get to that in a second. I don’t think theres photographic evidence of my favorite thing ever written on one of my short stories. Instead, I just carry the memory of those scrawled words in my heart and pull them out whenever the opportunity arises.

The words were scrawled on my story by a kid I called Johnny the Greek because his name was John and he was of Greek descent. He was a young ad agency copywriter who took the same short story workshop I did some summer in the aughts. Johnny was not my biggest fan from the get go. I’m not entirely sure why he didn’t like me. Maybe because I’m a fat, big mouth know-it-all and he did not like those kinds of women. Eventually, I won him over to #TeamJodi because I can be really charming when I try. Plus, he was an attractive man from Chicago. Even though he was not my type at all I still enjoy charming attractive men from Chicago. Man, it makes me feel like a woman. I don’t know, I’m reading a (kinda boring) book about the history of popular music and I just finished a section about Shania Twain.

Anyway, we workshopped my story before my charm attack on Johnny the Greek. I’m sure you can guess what he wrote in the margins of my story about a bowling alley:

“This story would be better if you were funnier.”

Gee, thanks for the help, Johnny. Would it really be better if I were funnier? Would it be better if I were a good writer? Would it be better if it were written by someone who was not me?

In my memory I laughed off this little bit of critical vomit right from the get go. However, I know what I’m about and I bet I sulked about it for at least a fortnight. Hell, I’m still kind of sulking over that shitty comment the mean lady left on I Will Dare back in August.

Eventually, I got over it, charmed Johnny into going to Grumpy’s with us and we all lived happily ever after. Or we all lived. I have no idea what happened to Johnny the Greek after that class. We might be connected on LinkedIn or were at some point. LinkedIn is creepy and I’m unwilling to go check. I would do anything for love, Darling Ones, but I won’t do that. No. I won’t do that.

So, let’s get to the picture at the top of this post. It’s the first paragraph of a critique I received from Dale Gregory Anderson, someone who taught me a great deal about writing. I keep this image (sans frame) in the writing folder where I store my myriad drafts, false starts, and things I mean to finish.

I don’t usually gaze at the picture that often. I know it’s there. I know what it says. Usually that’s enough. But lately, Darling Ones, lately all I do is look at the picture. I look at it instead of writing. Looking at the picture is basically one step above laying on the couch watching the ceiling fan when it comes to my “in a funk” activities.

I’m floundering right now and feeling super insecure re: writing. I have convinced myself that my ice robot heart is incapable of the emotional capacity to write fiction. Who wants to read fiction written by an ice robot hearted spinster?

Bleh,
Jodi

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Hi Darling Ones,

A lot of my friends laugh when I tell them the exact last time I got shit-faced drunk. It was the night in August 2008 when Barack Obama accepted the democratic party’s nomination for president. For some reason I decided that would be a good occasion to drink a lot of gin and then type words to the Internet. It was not pretty and point I confessed to twitter that I was eating lunch meat out of the fridge with my pants unzipped.

As regrettable as that whole thing was, the next day was worse. I had never been so hungover in my entire life, and I spent most of the day whining to Wolfdogg on Google chat.

“I’m dying.” I said.
“You aren’t dying.” He said.
“Bring me a moolatte,” I said.
“No.”
“I’m dying.”
“Go get a moolatte and some French fries and you’ll feel better.”
“I can’t I’m dying.”

Imagine that conversation over and over for hours until I finally got myself a moolatte and some French fries and surprise! felt much better. Imagine that conversation and ponder why Wolfdogg continues to be my friend.

At some point either during the drunkenness or in the aftermath I tweeted about how I was full of gin and regret and he said that should be the title of my memoir.

Since I have no plans to write the boringest memoir to ever exist (this here website is probably enough), I did take Wolfdogg’s advice and called chapter 18 of the beast Gin & Regret.

Even though patron saint of all that is good and holy Dolly Parton said in her book Songteller that nobody gives a damn about your creative process, I’m gonna tell you a wee bit about my process today.

Today I experienced a kind of consecrated convergence of creativity, music, and motivation and it was as close to a religious experience as this agnostic was gonna have. I put on the Smoking Popes’ very excellent 1997 album “Destination Failure” and got to typing. Since I was using a Pomodoro-kind of app to help limit distractions things were going pretty well, but then “Pretty Pathetic” hit and I think I was moved my the holy ghost or something.

The song was emotionally exactly what I was trying to accomplish in the chapter — a sad ending that happened unexpectedly when a character least expects it. It was fucking amazing. The next two-thousands words just fell out of my fingers so fast I could hardly keep up.

It was glorious and marvelous and I just wanted to tell someone.

Please forgive me Dolly for I have sinned,
Jodi

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Hi Darling Ones,

Not only did I sleep like total garbage last night, I had one of those dreams that you can’t shake off and infects your entire day. Every time my brain is still for more than 12 seconds flashes of the dream come back. I’ve spent most of the day feeling pensive and low-key icky despite bailing on all my productivity plans. I spent most of the day finishing The Songbook of Benny Lament and unsuccessfully trying to nap.

One thing the dream, which featured a hot make-out sesh with a handsome man, did do for me was get me to work on that scene that was bugging me yesterday. It wasn’t a real deal sex scene, but rather a scene about sex.

There are two real deal sex scenes later in the book and I’m 86% convinced they read like this song from Bob’s Burgers.

I make things even harder on myself by having these scenes in a man’s point of view. What do I know about what goes through men’s heads when they’re on their way to having sex? Nothing. I think men are Boobs! Boobs! Boobs! Orgasm. Snore. about sex. They get me going, but I don’t know if the sexiness is actually on the page. Or if the sex sounds like it’s being described a heterosexual woman. I had a guy friend who kindly answered 8,384 intrusive questions about sex and he affirmed what happens in the scenes, but I’m still unsure.

What I’m not unsure of is my Sexiness playlist. It’s got the sexiest songs I can think of in it. All eight of them.*

There are twelve other mood-setting playlists in my R&R Book folder on Spotify, which help me feel the things I need to feel when I have to write the things I need to write. There’s also a fifty-song playlist that includes every song mentioned in The Beast thus far.

Guh. Nobody’s ever gonna want to read this book, are they?

At least it amuses me,
Jodi
 
*It’s probably controversial to include “Supernova” of all Liz Phair’s songs, but it playful sexy and not obvious, kind of like me. I know most people would include “Flower” because of it’s explicitness, but it’s not a sexy song as far as I’m concerned.

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