5 UFOs (unfinished objects)

plus a few bookish & personal updates

I’m sitting at my desk now, while Ripley plays with an empty thread spool (she especially likes the 250-yard Gutterman spools, which have ribs convenient for picking up with one’s teeth, so one can trot around with Spool Friend). To my left are bookshelves, the ones closest to me stacked with notebooks, a dictionary, my beloved encyclopedia, chapstick and fidget toys and an egg timer and a clay mug of pens. The mug has a cat on it, of course: a gift from a friend who stayed with me on her way home from Nicaragua.

No photo of my messy shelves, but this is a fairly accurate painting of my beloved World Book encyclopedia set

Also in this bookcase is a shelf of unfinished projects: UFO’s, as the crafting community calls them.¹ Some are recent; others, years old. Years!

Like every year, I am going into 2026 with many things left unfinished.

I’m not much for clean slates at the new year — l’m wary of epiphany, suspicious of my own oft-fleeting commitments to, in a single moment of decision, become a person who always puts her laundry away, eats all the recommended fiber and protein and vegetables, writes a 1000 words a day, never scrolls before bed, etc. I know myself too well to trust anything but the steady accumulation of days pointed towards the people and things I love.

So, I thought I would share five of the UFO’s I am taking into the new year.

1. Faux Dress: I cut out this tank top and skirt sometime in the spring, planning to make them into a faux dress. But I’ve lost the thread² of the project — would I even wear this fabric? The tank top calls for bias binding, which I find tedious and fussy. I cut the skirt based on a now-lost sheet of measurements, so who knows what I was thinking. It might all just go in the scrap bin.³

   

   I feel a responsibility to the fabric I buy — it’s the product of energy and effort, plant or animal and human! But sometimes I wonder, “What was I ~*thinking *~ when I bought this?!”

2. Late Night Bites: Years ago, now, I saw this tweet:

That would make an amazing game, I thought. I worked on it for a few weeks, hoping to submit it for a 1-page jam on itch.⁴ But the mechanics felt overly complicated, and I couldn’t find the balance of freedom (to allow the player to really imagine the world) and structure (to guide and support the player). I also spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to make it pretty in Canva.

I still think about the vampire queen, though, in her diner, waiting for something to shake her from her boredom. I opened the game file and notes twice this year, but couldn’t quite see my way forward. Maybe 2026 will be the year!

3. Jalie Flare Jeans: I cut the fabric for a pair of flare jeans in fall 2024 and then promptly fell into an editing hole. Last month, I picked the project up again. I knew, because it was a pattern I’d never sewn before, that it would need fitting, but I didn’t quite reckon with how difficult the stretch denim would make the whole process. So, it’s back on the shelf. The side seams need adjusting, but more intimidatingly, I need to unpick the waistband and cut a new one (do I have enough fabric?). Sometimes, the cascading steps of a project feel like a ladder on which I can slowly climb. Other times, they all crash in at once and I just throw my hands up, overwhelmed.

4. Bathroom/Bedroom painting: Our house, when we moved in, had awful, putty-gray walls.⁵ We’ve slowly been painting: accent walls in the dining and living rooms, a cheerful yellow in the back bedroom.

“Let’s paint the bedroom blue,” we agreed, sometime in 2023.

Sometime in 2024, we got samples and painted swatches. Time passed.

In fall of this year, I went and bought our chosen colors. More months have passed! We have the paint, the tarps, the brushes. Is it inertia that has stalled the project? Laziness? Am I not actually that excited about blue walls (even though the putty gray dulls all the rooms)?

5. I am going to sneak one less concrete UFO onto this list: my relationship to my phone. Are we all bored of hearing about our unhappy relationships with our phones and social media? I really enjoyed this apology to inconvenience, and it has been making me think: what inconvenience, what friction, am I trying to circumvent when I pick up my phone? Boredom? Sadness? Anxiety? Uncertainty? Friction is what gives life texture, and time meaning.⁶

   So much of Being on the Internet seems to involve authority and certainty — it’s all these shouting voices saying, “Worry about this!” “Buy that!” “Be sad/angry about this!” Everything is performed to a (passive, receptive) audience. It doesn’t feel good to me, to be either audience or authority. There’s no conversation in it, no real connection (mutual).

   (Oh yes, there is irony in me saying all this in a newsletter!)

   I’ve been trying (in my UFO relationship to my phone) to be on the internet less, and when I am here, to interact: hit “like,” leave a comment, send the link to someone and say, “This made me think of you,” to be less passive. Not authority or audience, but participant, conversationalist, community member.

Sometimes my UFOs feel shameful: evidence of unfulfilled hopes or ambitions, perhaps evidence of laziness.

Or, I think: a record of dreams, of inspirations, of intentions. Not yet fulfilled (how different, that construction feels! Growth mindset baby, growth mindset). So, I keep showing up at the desk, trying, day by day, to stay oriented towards the people and things I love.

Ripley and Spool Friend

Bookish updates:

• We’ve confirmed the narrators for the Homebound audio book! I’m completely thrilled that all four of the major characters will have their own narrator.

• You can preorder Homebound here (US & Canada) and here (UK)!

• There’s also a Goodreads giveaway (50 physical copies) running through December 22.

• Keep an eye on my Instagram — I’m going to be doing some ARC giveaways in January and February :)

Life update:

It felt like it would be strange, to write to you and not mention the biggest thing happening right now, even though I’m not really ready to talk about it in any kind of a coherent way. At the start of the month, Queen Mamsy, my dear companion-cat of fifteen years, passed away at the age of eighteen. If you have a furry loved one, please give them an extra kiss today.

Me and Mamsy in 2014, in our first Oakland apartment. We lived in seven apartments and two houses together, between Illinois, Victoria, and California.

With love,

Portia

1. At what point does a work-in-progress become an unfinished object?

2. I know! I know!

3. But what, you might rightly ask, am I doing with the scraps?

4. A journaling or tabletop role-playing game whose rules/etc all fit on a single, 8.5”x11” piece of paper! A couple of my favorites, which you can download for free, are One Page Left (horror) and Descend into Disaster (a twist on the Wikipedia game). I’ve also successfully made one, one-page game: How to Make Marks!

5. Lesson for future selves: bite the bullet and pay to have the whole house professionally painted BEFORE moving in!

6. My understanding of the research is that, basically, our brains stop storing information when it’s repeated information (the same thing for breakfast every day, so the mornings blend together, into one kind of uber-morning, and all of a sudden six months have gone by!). Friction, by which I mean texture or difference, seems like an antidote to that collapsing of time-memory-experience.