So far so good. 🤞🏻 Next writing stint, while the icing ingredients soften and the layers cool. #CoSoBakes

I'm currently making a 3-layer banana-arequipe (dulce de leche) cake between tedious work bursts. The three tins are in the oven now, and while they're cooling I'll let the icing ingredients soften during my next half-hour writing stint. I've already made a few changes to my usual banana cake recipe, but like every arrogant baker out there I'm not writing them down yet. (I'll remember! I promise!) 😅 Only one mistake so far (ingredient adding order), so fingers crossed. #CoSoBakes #BackToWork

Related to my newsletter earlier, this is just one of a few reminders today's news brings us about the vast systems of inequity that keep most people from even beginning to imagine a life of creative labour. What are we doing with our work - in creative fields, and beyond them - to bring about meaningful systemic change?

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2023/mar/27/qatar-world-cup-migrant-workers-stranded-jobless

Happy Monday, CoSo.

Today's #Newsletter dives into a wee bit of drama in #SFF last week: an unkind article about Brandon Sanderson that got a lot of attention for the wrong reasons.

Here, I talk about the Story behind the Story: namely, the underlying industry conditions that get lost in the shuffle, whenever we fixate on singular stories of outsize fame and fortune. We can do better.

#BetterWorldsTheory #Publishing #Writers #WritingCommunity

https://mlclark.substack.com/p/the-map-is-not-the-territory-an-author

#CoSoBakes, I am torn.

Tuesday I'm dropping by the office for a last meeting with my podcast editor.

Part of me wants to try making macarons for the first time (dulce de leche), but I don't have almond flour, so I'd be using coconut flour for my first go. Too challenging? High risk of failure?

Alternately, I could make a very nice three-layer banana and dulce de leche cake, no issues save needing to slip out for a couple ingredients.

Play it safe for the thank-you bake? Or try something new?

Happiness is a good LRB article on a Sunday afternoon.

"The Structure of Scientific Revolutions had made Kuhn famous. It had brought him an audience he had neither wanted nor expected and whose attentions he found stressful. What to do next? One firm decision was never to write that sort of book again, never to write anything accessible to the general reader, never to strew intellectual pearls before swine. In this, Kuhn entirely succeeded."

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n07/steven-shapin/paradigms-gone-wild

😂 Just a normal Colombian afternoon.

(Getting work done has been tricky this past hour. Fútbol is life! I'll catch up this evening.)

The danger of starting a new TV series on break is that, if it's good, you kinda just want to binge the rest. (And then, if you're me, you just want to write an article about it ASAP.) Poker Face has me wanting to write a piece about intelligence, myths of meritocracy, and the American Dream in detecting fiction over the last few decades. Ugh. But I have other work to do! So, putting a pin on the rest. 👀 (Barely.) #CoSoTV

*social contract, but I'll accept that "social contact" has been undergoing its own run of failings lately, too! Time for tea!

Morning, lovelies. 💫

You know I had to write something on the Internet Archive verdict, which found in favour of Hachette & other major presses yesterday.

This news brief for #OnlySky pushes us to think about the deeper issues we forget when dwelling too deeply upon specific court cases.

Our tech use is currently being developed to shore up existing social contact failures.

It did not have to be this way.

And it can still be otherwise, if we so choose.

#Publishing
https://onlysky.media/mclark/internet-archive-loses-to-publishers-mediocre-tech-futures-continue/

I isolated this week to get work done - except for from street folk I always talk to on my walks. It's a hard gig, begging with candy for hours while others look away. Touched base this week with Venezuelan families about Semana Santa plans - who's travelling back with diapers, medicine, and tins of meat; who's staying to send money instead.

Today I learned about the extent of livestock & seed robberies on Venezuelan fincas.

These are very hard times.

Gratitude & mutual aid are essential.

Oh, there is Colombian karaoke blasting from the main yard in my building complex now. *Excellent* time for a park-walk indeed. 👌

There's a curious relief to having finished with a stage of my life, via the completion of revisions + promo materials for Children of Doro.

I still have more to release this year, but after trying so hard for years to get projects written & published, then hitting the ceiling with presses while the world burns & *so* much more matters to us all?

It's been clarifying.

BookTube & newsletter this weekend. Then I have lots to plan for next week.

Who and what will I be next?

Time for a walk. 🕊️

I made a trip to the bird to see what writerly crises have been going on this week, and whew, is there ever Drama. (But when isn't there?)

Here's a nice friendly reminder that, although we certainly bring our eccentricities to the page, they're not necessarily what "makes" us creative. (I've had people tell me that my difficult childhood made me a better writer. Absolute rot - but it's popular to believe that extremes are necessary. Just curiosity and exposure will do.)

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/mar/24/drugs-and-alcohol-do-not-make-you-more-creative-research-finds