On change, and the love of a good potato

Dear Reader,

Just a short letter this time. This week I am marking a new chapter in my life. I am leaving my very stable, steady, conventional job to … well, to make art. To write and explore my creative brain, and wash off the thick dust of years of disuse. It’s exhilarating and a bit terrifying and intoxicating and just deeply strange.

I’ve worked at the same company for more than ten years, with a lot of amazingly cool folks who it has been a tremendous privilege to know. As a way to stay connected and share what I’m up to, I’ve kicked off a new newsletter project which will be much more PG-rated, So Many Moving Parts. The current headlining essay will look, um, awfully familiar as I absolutely was not above cribbing from myself to get started. Over the coming weeks, I will be adding more new writing and hopefully visual art as well.

With that, I also plan to keep writing in this space, but perhaps now lean a little harder into books and sex and romance. So, if that’s less interesting to you, you might want to hop over to the new project instead. But why not both, eh?

I had such a lovely adventure last week at the GayRomLit Retreat in Virginia. I met a bunch of amazing authors and fellow readers; enjoyed conversations about hookups with Steves-plural and the logistics of anesthetics for colonoscopies and other perfectly normal topics; and came away with an unreasonably heavy stack of books for someone planning not to check a bag. And on the creative side, all week I was seeing plot bunnies everywhere, which was very invigorating for someone on the cusp of this crazy life change.

I also developed a bit of an inconvenient crush on Anna Zabo. I mean, it’s fun to have crushes on people, but it’s also sort of like walking down the street and smelling a delicious, mouth-watering cooking smell from some random house as you walk by, and then getting home to your own boring kitchen and making the same boring thing you always make.¹

I didn’t bring my guitar with me to Virginia, since I was flying, and it was a little odd to go a week without any cathartic banging around. Then I got back and realized that while I’ve pulled together an assortment of queered covers of songs that I like, I haven’t done any using they/them pronouns. So, I rectified that and worked up a version of Mary Lambert’s “She Keeps Me Warm” with a pronoun change.

“They Keep Me Warm” - cover of Mary Lambert

I also managed to read some books while I was there, including some very off-the-wall recommendations that popped up like All He Wants For Christmas is a Fingerling by JP Sayle and Tina Løwén. This is an omegaverse shapeshifter romance in which a wolf falls in love with … a potato. Turns out potato shifters can have some unique talents like being able to shift in their clothing (which I read as a nod to jacket potatoes) or being able to regenerate from massive damage by being immersed in the magical dirt from Potatoville. Obviously the premise is very over-the-top silly, but I was impressed by how much the authors were able to do with it, making for a story that was wildly creative and quite funny and remarkably sweet.

Photo by Lucas van Oort on Unsplash

I’m going to wrap this letter up because it has been a very tumultuous couple of weeks, and I’m pretty well out of spoons at the moment. I’m excited to wrap up work this week and start my new adventure. My mother’s birthday is also coming up, and we have some very fun family dinner plans in the works. (Happy birthday, Mama!)

Love,

Beas

1. Or perhaps that’s overly negative — it might be “and then getting home to your own cozy kitchen and making the tasty thing you intended to make, which is perhaps even better than that fleeting tantalizing aroma that got your mouth watering.”