READING SUCKS with mlo

READING SUCKS with mlo

What I Read Last Week

My raging OCD, Haruki Murakami, Writing a Novel, a Prompt

Melissa Lozada-Oliva's avatar
Melissa Lozada-Oliva
Jul 15, 2025
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DISTRACTIONS

My book BEYOND ALL REASONABLE DOUBT, JESUS IS ALIVE! comes out in six weeks and my anxiety is winning. You can preorder it here, by the way. On my lunch break last week I was staring down a Chicken Tinga Burrito when an intrusive thought arrived that hadn’t in a long time. What if, I thought, I forgot how to chew. It moved further: what if I forgot how to drink water. What if I forgot how to breathe. Notice that I’m not thinking what if nobody buys my book and nobody comes to my book release and some op reviews my book for Kirkus saying that it sounds like it’s written by a Chat GPT entity named Garfetta. I wish I could concentrate on that, and maybe I actually should. It feels useful. But my brain is too sophisticated for that and instead concentrates on choking on my food and developing a new disease where I forget how to breathe. Don’t worry, I’m in therapy.

I’ve been thinking about becoming a little famous when I turned 23. My brain wasn’t fully developed yet and I didn’t think of the consequences of attention. I wasn’t really thinking about anything. When you’re that young you kind of think you deserve everything.

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