:: Welcome to this month’s writing roundup…Looking back over the past year, here’s what I think about disclosing a psychiatric disability to your colleagues.
“Never Write for Free.” MLA Connected Academics. 29 June 2015.
Ironically, I wrote this piece for free. Consistency is a hobgoblin and all of that.
“Revisiting Disclosure.” Chronicle of Higher Education Vitae. 26 June 2015.
This piece was the latest installment in my Life of the Mind Interrupted series on mental health and higher education. The very first piece I wrote for the series was titled “Disclosure Blues” (published June 13, 2014—almost exactly a year ago), and I wanted to, well, revisit the issues I touched on in that column. Since “Disclosure Blues,” I’ve left academia and started writing full time. Things are different now. Looking back over the past year, here’s what I think about disclosing a psychiatric disability to your colleagues:
“So to my nontenured colleagues with psychiatric disabilities: Don’t disclose, not yet. Let your counterparts with tenure handle this campaign for a while. Or leave it to people like me who are beyond the academic chopping block.”
“On Finding Your Place and Time.” Shelf Pleasure. 19 June 2015.
I wrote about the challenges of writing fiction that is set in the near past, a past that people can remember—that you might remember, if spottily. I set my novel Entanglement (and its free prequel, Love and Entropy) in the 1990s. We all sort of remember the 90s, right? But when it came down to creating what it was like back then, creating those details, sometimes it felt like I might as well have been writing actual historical fiction. Why’d I pick the near past as my time-setting?
[T]he book’s place and time emerged from a combination of Los Angeles haunting me all these years later and my new knowledge of the kind of work that I would want a character like Greta to be drawn to, work on the edge of the film industry, physical, technical work, but work that is still beautiful.
“Become Your Own Retailer, For Real.” Underground Book Reviews. 19 June 2015.
After I published my first novel, I was hit by some bad news. Every time I buy an author’s copy to give away or sell, none of those purchases count toward my sales numbers. And for novelists, especially emerging ones like me, sales numbers are everything. So I decided to do an experiment: Could I become my own book retailer and make those sales count? Answer: yes! I wrote about the process in this column.
“Author Katie Rose Guest Pryal on Finding Courage, From NICU to Novelist.” Women Fiction Writers Blog. 15 June 2015.
I finished my first book sitting next to my first son’s bassinet in the NICU. It’s been six years since then. I talk about it here.
“Speaking Up in Academe.” Chronicle of Higher Education Vitae. 9 June 2015.
For this column, I interviewed an amazing education lawyer, and we talked through the challenges faced by those who might want to speak up against discrimination and other kinds of wrongdoing in academia. Brief summary: Speaking up is really hard.
“Book Review of BLADE SONG by JC Daniels.” Underground Book Reviews. 15 June 2015.
“Book Review of A DEMON BOUND by Debra Dunbar.” Underground Book Reviews. 1 June 2015.
Lastly, I wrote some book reviews for the independent author book review site I write for. BLADE SONG was incredible, and I read the whole series in a week. I CAN’T WAIT for the next book in the series to come out, but it’s going to be like six months and that makes me want to cry.
