Katharine Coldiron

Thank you for writing this. It stunned me.

In fact you are not! Still haven’t affirmatively placed the MS!

Headline from the New York Times, 1939: “Goebbels ends careers of five “Aryan“ actors who made witticisms about the Nazi regime.”

www.nytimes.com/1939/02/04/a...

Thank you 💜

Photo of book Out There in the Dark by Katharine Coldiron

This book is fantastic! I'm not much of a film buff even & I still loved this. So sharp, well crafted, absolutely fascinating. I want to shove it into everyone's hands & shout "Read this! Read this!" So yeah, read this.

@autofocusbooks.bsky.social
@ferrifrigida.bsky.social

#smallpressseptember

This pins down exactly what this administration has been doing all year, and I only wish I’d been able to phrase it this well. It’s fake, shammy authoritarianism, but in sheer execution it becomes the real thing.

💕

fwiw National Socialists had incredible tailors

as a minor update, the Holiday Inn isn’t kidding about the Express part - I’m sitting in bed less than half an hour after the car dropped me off

I developed a mini-specialty in ragging on this book in the late 2010s, to the point that a guy who wrote a biography of the author emailed me to mansplain what I’d written

So here I am in the back of this fleet car. Tired and disheartened, only cried out for the moment. Not willing to give up, but not gonna lie about how shitty it is sometimes to be an indie author. /end

By GOD I don’t want to damn either of the two events I have remaining on this tour, and I’m sorry to complain when I do have the resources to get myself out of this kind of emotional mess. But this month has been so hard. So extremely hard. 12/

My flight tomorrow is at 7 am. I won’t get to the hotel I’m staying at tonight until 10:30 or so. I am exhausted and disheartened and sick to death of talking to strangers. And I’m a few days away from putting on a happy face and trying to sell more books. 11/

That basically meant I had to ask a limo service to come get me, and to accept their schedule and rate for a 90-minute ride to the airport.

The earliest they could get me was 9 pm. The cost was $170 plus gratuity. I said yes. 10/

See, getting to and from Chautauqua is challenging. It’s 90 minutes away from the Buffalo airport, not near any train stations or bus stops. No regular shuttles. Uber and Lyft barely operate in the area, and there are minimal taxi services. 9/

In the afternoon I decided that rather than going all the way home to CA and then to BR, I’d just go to BR a few days early and spend some time alone in a Vrbo. So I shifted my flight around, booked a room, and called around to various car services. 8/

Everything felt different at CHQ, for a variety of reasons, and I was lonely and worn out. But I decided to stick it out and try to rally.

Today, Tuesday, was not great either. Too hard to explain. I wound up crying on a public bench like a total grownup woman. 7/

I booked an entire week in CHQ, hoping to relax, read, maybe write a little. The event was Monday, and I thought seriously of going home. My next event is in Baton Rouge on Sunday, and I was booked to go from Buffalo to Louisiana on Saturday. But a few days at home sounded good. 6/

After I was finished, someone walked up and asked if I’d sewed my own jacket, implying that it looked homemade. This was not an ideal comment at this time. 5/

Plus there was another author event going on at a different location at the same time. So nine people showed up.

While I talked, four left.

No one bought a book. 4/

I set up an event in Chautauqua, NY, which is one of my favorite places on earth. They’re a literate crowd in CHQ; I brought 20 books to sell.

The event occurred just after a big speech by Doris Kearns Goodwin, while ppl were still in the signing line. 3/

This month I’ve been touring around the east and south of the US: Philly, Baltimore, Richmond, Dallas. It has been going badly. Handfuls of people at the events, ones of books sold. 2/

I am in the back of a fleet car on my way to the Buffalo airport at 9:45 pm. I think I’m going to tell you how I got here. 1/

Well, are you? 😛

Some highlights:

A General Primer on Bad Film | Katharine Coldiron Get more from Katharine Coldiron on Patreon

Bc of how complex my knowledge of bad movies is, & how necessarily short these interviews are, I created a post to answer in depth the common Qs I get asked. $3 or sign up for monthly essays. www.patreon.com/posts/136323...

Okee, so the BBC has interviewed me for print & radio recently, & is set to interview me for TV in a few hours. That’s great, but also, this is the 2nd time that a national station has interviewed me hundreds/thousands of miles away from my professional microphone & attractive zoom bg setup at home.

Francesca Woodman

I have hinted that I would

YES, someone needed to say this