Good To Be Back

Welcome to the Stone Soup Digest! This is where I share what I'm up to and some of my favorite things from around the internet. Subscribe to Stone Soup to get this in your inbox every week.

Holy shit, I’m writing. I can’t tell you what project I’m working on right now, but I can tell you that it is going faster and smoother and easier than any other writing I’ve done in the past three years. It feels incredible.

You want to hear about something gross? I burned my hand quite badly a couple of weeks ago with boiling oil. I ended up losing quite a bit of the skin on one and a half fingers. It was extremely painful and hideous to behold. The skin I didn’t lose was (I’m sorry, I told you this was going to be gross) cooked–a deep maillard brown in places–but still attached. When you get a burn, you want as much skin to stay on as possible, to protect the new growth beneath, so I’ve spent a lot of time looking at that cooked skin. It has not been pleasant.

Your body heals from the deepest layer upward. So, for two weeks now, as I carefully clean and dress and re-bandage my hand, I’ve gotten to see what it looks like when skin regrows over a large area: The way the tissue forms structures to build on, the serum and lymph that keep the new skin clean. Layer by layer, it’s built itself back up. I honestly don’t know if there will be scars or not. Already my hand is almost back to normal.

None of that was a metaphor–it all really happened, and I would very much like for it to never, ever, ever happen again. But it’s not not a metaphor, either. Because holy shit, I’m writing. I’m writing and I feel good. 

It’s amazing to finally have wind in my sails after about a month of–let’s be honest, you knew this from the pizzadilla recipe–pretty deep depression. I’ve been feeling exhausted and isolated and aimless. Once I realized it was depression and not just fatigue, I dragged myself through the things that make it easier to steer out of the pit: The miserable little positive lifestyle changes, the reaching-out-to-people, the sleep schedule repair. I started working on this new project, and forcing myself to leave the house, and cooking even though I didn’t want to eat. And none of it felt like it was working–until this morning, when I woke up finally feeling alive again. 

It’s miraculous to be able to touch the back of my hand and feel smooth–if fragile–new skin. It’s euphoric to feel normal, even if that energized happiness is fragile, too. I’m so happy to get to be here with you again after this period of painful, careful, slow healing. -gailey

Currently Reading: All We Ever Wanted Was Everything by Janelle Brown

When Paul Miller’s pharmaceutical company goes public, making his family IPO millionaires, his wife, Janice, is sure this is the windfall she’s been waiting years for—until she learns, via messengered letter, that her husband is divorcing her (for her tennis partner!) and cutting her out of the new fortune. Meanwhile, four hundred miles south in Los Angeles, the Millers’ older daughter, Margaret, has been dumped by her newly famous actor boyfriend and left in the lurch by an investor who promised to revive her fledgling post-feminist magazine, Snatch. Sliding toward bankruptcy and dogged by creditors, she flees for home where her younger sister Lizzie, 14, is struggling with problems of her own. Formerly chubby, Lizzie has been enjoying her newfound popularity until some bathroom graffiti alerts her to the fact that she’s become the school slut.

The three Miller women retreat behind the walls of their Georgian colonial to wage battle with divorce lawyers, debt collectors, drug-dealing pool boys, mean girls, country club ladies, evangelical neighbors, their own demons, and each other, and in the process, they become achingly sympathetic characters we can’t help but root for, even as the world they live in epitomizes everything wrong with the American Dream.

Barnes & Noble | Bad River Website | Local Library | Find an Indie Bookstore

Featured New Release: The Everlasting by Alex E. Harrow

Sir Una Everlasting was Dominion’s greatest hero: the orphaned girl who became a knight, who died for queen and country. Her legend lives on in songs and stories, in children’s books and recruiting posters―but her life as it truly happened has been forgotten.

Centuries later, Owen Mallory―failed soldier, struggling scholar―falls in love with the tale of Una Everlasting. Her story takes him to war, to the archives―and then into the past itself. Una and Owen are tangled together in time, bound to retell the same story over and over again, no matter what it costs.

But that story always ends the same way. If they want to rewrite Una’s legend―if they want to tell a different story—they’ll have to rewrite history itself.

Barnes & Noble | Bad River Website | Local Library | Find an Indie Bookstore

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In the meantime, remember: Do what you can. Care for yourself and the people around you. Believe that the world can be better than it is now. Never give up.

-gailey