Have you ever seen bird breath

also, eight seconds of bliss

Ellen Huet

Mar 28, 2022

Yoooooooooooo — you’re right, it’s been a (long) while, and you might be wondering —

☠️ “How’s the book going?”

Slow but steady progress! A few milestones since the last newsletter:

finished a full first draft(!) (viva la barf draft)
then “finished” one attempt at “revising” said draft (lol this will never actually feel done)
have started the terrifying process of getting feedback from a few early readers
and, of course, still interviewing people/researching stuff, because overreporting is my feeble attempt to exert control over our unraveling universe

My most recent ridiculous way to trick myself into writing: cutting a task into 20-something sub-tasks. It’s a very basic trick, but I became absolutely dependent on it during this last round of revisions. I’d go through a chapter and “subsection” it — that is, number every minuscule change I wanted to make, even as small as “replace this weak adjective.” Every time I finished a teeny task — even if it took 30 seconds — I then had an excuse to celebrate. (And I could report each subsection’s completion to my accountability enforcer.)

One tiny crumb of accomplishment!!! I’ll take it.

In between subsections, I was distracted by:

figuring out the keyboard shortcut to post a Google docs comment (it’s command-enter; very obvious but still pleased with the hundreds of clicks I’ve now saved)
realizing that distraction is just dis-traction, a lack of traction?!?!?!

Was not distracted by:

writing this newsletter in a timely fashion, clearly

Two snapshots

I spent a week in January holed up on a farm outside of Seattle with a dozen-ish friends. It was my first time joining an annual tradition where people work on solo creative projects during the day, then share their work for group feedback at night: fiction writing, VR experiences, painting, weather satellite imagery, songwriting, poetry, documentary films and more. (We also did a spirited table read of a freshly drafted absurdist play about 16th-century Portuguese shoemakers caught in a love triangle.)

1) Here’s a picture of the view I had that week when I wrote the last word of the last chapter of my first draft (on a very clacky keyboard that annoyed my desk neighbors). Then I read it aloud to a room full of people and heard their million good ideas about how to make it better. Felt very lucky.

2) One chilly morning that week, our friend Chris led a bird walk. He spotted a red-winged blackbird and set up a scope. As we were admiring it through the lens, the bird started to sing, and its breath made tiny swirls of vapor in the the cold air — like this!!!!!

Bird breath! I had never seen nor even considered it before. Sorry to any birds I have offended with my lack of thought.

here’s the bird, breath not pictured but use your imagination. photo by Wyatt, bird-spotting by Chris

P.S. For more bird stories, I recommend the first and last acts of this bird-focused This American Life episode. The first story features turkey vultures eating a dead deer’s gums; the final one is simply unhinged.

☠️ Read my stuff

A couple stories I wrote in the last few months, in between bouts of panic-sweat about the book:

“Unicorn” companies used to be rare. Now there are more than a thousand. Does anything have any meaning anymore? Here’s a meditation on rarity, plus a look at the dubious distinction of being the 1000th unicorn (btw today’s count is now 1,066)
I learned to ski in my twenties, an arduous experience that has never provided me any professional benefit until now, when I got to write a Businessweek profile of 18-year-old freestyle ski Olympian/fashion model/geopolitical drama lightning rod Eileen Gu. She was born and raised in the US but skied in the Beijing Olympics for China. Controversy and skiing metaphors ensue!!

✅ Review it with Huet: the mini crossword leaderboard

The best thing about the NYT mini crossword is it’s totally mindless. It contains none of the profound, hard-won rewards of the regular crossword. It can, if you’re lucky enough, be done in under ten seconds, without thinking at all. You black out, eight seconds fly by, and then you’re jolted back to earth by the the telltale NYT crossword jingle (cool people will now hum it to themselves).

The mini would probably get boring fast, except for one huge innovation: the mini crossword leaderboard. It’s a … niche social network?? … where you can add your friends and compare speeds each day. On top of that, I’ve somehow ended up in a 16-person group chat whose sole purpose is to trash talk each other about our mini crossword times that day. Some of the people in the chat don’t even know each other directly but are united by a shared desire to compete with strangers about how quickly they can fill out a hamster-sized puzzle.

All other social networks are too complex; all other puzzles require too much brainpower or don’t provide enough adrenaline rush (yes, I’m talking shit about Wordle). Long live the single-purpose speed-demon brain fart that is the mini.

See you next time!!! To tide you over, here’s a costume of … something

mimihaddon

A post shared by Mimi Haddon (@mimihaddon)

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