Fran Magazine: Sunday Dispatch, Jul. 28-Aug. 3

I read three books! I watched two movies! I played Elden Ring!

This is the Fran Magazine Sunday Dispatch, a weekly culture diary for paid subscribers only. The Sunday Dispatch details what I’ve been watching, reading, playing, and listening to over the past week. Paid subscriptions help stabilize my writing career, but all readers — paid & not — are appreciated. You can also follow me on Instagram or Letterboxd (for free!). Thanks for reading!

Mostly I’m growing little tomatoes

It’s just now getting to the point in the year where every other morning I climb out onto the fire escape and pick a handful of tomatoes off the plants. Last year we had a month-long harvest that was abundant enough to make a few pasta sauces. I’m hoping for the same this year. I planted cherry tomatoes this year — last year I did grape, I think, or a mix of cherry and grape — and while most of them are the tiny little red berries you see on the left, I have one monster that finally started to turn yellow and then orange over the past 48 hours. To say that I’m excited to eat that tomato is an understatement. I think by Tuesday, or Wednesday at the latest, it’ll be ready to go. I’m sorry the picture isn’t more in focus, but it’s tough on the fire escape to do this veggie justice.

I wrote a bit about the main characters of the Paris Olympics and a bit more about the new tropes popping up in romantic dramas, both for Vulture. On the eve of the release of It Ends With Us, a movie about domestic violence as well as trying to decide between guys named Ryle and Atlas, I wanted to share an old review I did of the whole Colleen Hoover thing, just in case you’ve been scratching the back of your head during all those trailers.

I read very little online this week, but I loved David Sims’ profile of M. Night Shyamalan and the long-winded drama between these MFA weirdos. My grad school experience wasn’t like this at all, by the way — it was completely weird and insane in a different way, but nice try. I’m otherwise in the middle of more edits than I can count, which is probably my least favorite place to be as a writer. Writing a draft… generating ideas… putting words on a page = this, to me, is why I do what I do. Getting a draft back — or multiple… all at once or within 20 minutes of each other, or whatever — makes me feel like I’m in hell, or in trouble. I always convince myself that the light at the end of the editing tunnel is that suddenly I won’t have any more work to do. Wrong: that’s when I have to start writing again.