The Ink-Pot and the Palette

Sigil of Odium 109

Sat, 26 Jul 2025 16:40:25 GMT

We, the ordinary people,
Call on the Power of the good green earth,
Power of wind and storms,
Power of flowing waters,
Power of the hearthfire,
To hear us.

We are beset by self-crowned monsters
Of greed and hubris, of evil stupidity,
And it is our will
That those monsters feel our odium,
Our righteous hatred
Of their inhuman designs.

You know who they are.
You know what they mean to do.
You know that they do not know you, O Great Powers.

So hate them with us!
They are rotting from their radioactive core
And burning the world with it.

We are nothing to them.
They do not think of us at all.
They simply want us to hate each other.
BUT WE HATE THEM.
And our plea to you is simple:
Shut them down.

Crack the foundations of their inhuman edifice with our deep-rooted hate.
Scour away their plans with the whirlwind of our rage.
Let their greed and lust burn them up inside.
Wash them away in the noisy flood of our saying no:
Four times, no.
Throw sand in the gears of their evil machine
So that its own soulless grinding destroys it.

Let them end in ignominy
Before this fateful year is out.
Let their names be trampled in the dust of history's forgetting.
Let the last thing they hear be our ridicule.
Let the last thing they see be us, the ordinary people,
Walking away in scorn,
As the molten, impenetrable glass of our odium
Encases their poison,
And closes around them,
Sealing them in with their own evil for a thousand years.

It is our will that the Great Universal Powers hear us.
Direct our hate.
Destroy these monsters and their evil plans.
VITRIFY THEM.

And in this way let us, the ordinary people,
Live and love and thrive together on the good green earth,
In your sacred names.
So say we all. So mote it be.

Background: On the Big River Wimal (the Columbia), upstream of Portland by a couple hundred miles, is the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, where fissile materials and radioactive waste are held. Engineers have devised a plan to safely store the materials for a thousand years by encasing them in large volumes of molten glass, which, when it cools, is so chaotically organized at the molecular level that it is impenetrable to radiation.

The Hanford vitrification project is one of the programs being cut from the US government.

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The Green Book

Sat, 25 May 2024 20:15:02 GMT

Last October I began a course on manifesting. I'd been creatively blocked for too long. I wanted to manifest my next book—the inspiration, the form, structure, something.

The instructions said to do one lesson per day. So each morning I visualized as directed while typing out what I saw (I think of this as "keyboard shamanism"), eventually racking up 144,000 words of...well, text.

But from Day One I felt a need to illustrate what I was seeing. Not yet aware of its evils, I used AI to generate some of my base images. Then I built a digital collage for each day's meditation using those images, stock elements, just-plain-purloined pictures, my own photos...whatever.

I wound up with a deck of 90 wide-format, high-resolution slides. Somewhere around Meditation 35 I accepted that this is the book: an oracle, a journey through time; unpublishable, of course—too personal, too many copyright issues, more AI elements than I'd want to put my name on.

But when I've distilled those 144,000 words down to 30,000 I'm going to commission a bookbinder to make a one-off, full-color, hand-bound, real book out of it, just for me.

Here's number 11: My Original Sound:

Upper left is Haystack Rock, upper right a large tolling bell. Across the bottom in blue-violet are the stereo soundwaves from a recording of Palestrina's motet "Sicut Cervus" and the words Sicut cervus desiderat ad fontes aquarum, ita desiderat anima mea at te, Deus from Psalm 41, which in the King James Bible is rendered "Like as the hart desireth the water-brook, so longeth my soul after thee, O God."

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Ensigillatin'

Wed, 22 May 2024 17:01:50 GMT

I practice sigil magic. British punk, Chaos-Magick types came up with the technique in the 1960s, a modernization of an ancient practice. Sometimes it works for me.

Here's how it goes:

Write out your intention simply:
MOM'S CONDO SELLS QUICKLY

Delete the vowels:
MMSCNDSLLSQCKLY

Remove duplicate consonants:
MSCNDLQKY

Fashion the remaining letters into a pattern that pleases you. Pencil on paper is typical, but a sigil can be as simple as lines scratched in the dirt. It's supposed to be unreadable; the idea is to forget it, to release it into the universe.

Finally, you "charge" it. The Chaos tradition calls for sexual charging, typically via masturbation, after which you burn or erase the sigil.

Being asexual myself and uninterested in what 1960s British male chaos gremlins decided was necessary, I charge mine by making art out of them. Mostly I color them with paint and sparkle pens, encase them in glass, and photograph them.

Then I either send them to the friend they're for, or hang them up somewhere. This one went inside a closet in my mom's vacant condo, above the doorframe. I love the thought that it's still there. I mean, how often do you check inside the doorframe of your closets?

The condo sold in three days.

Usually, I just hang 'em somewhere on my house. The neighbors think I'm a witch. They might be right.

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Can anyone tell me...

Tue, 21 May 2024 01:41:38 GMT

...why my pictures aren't posting? I've uploaded to DW, copied, checked, and rechecked the embed and link codes, and my post still just displays the HTML.

I'm pretty rusty at Dreamwidth. Any tips? TIA

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Search?

Sat, 18 May 2024 17:19:42 GMT

Where are people going for online search now that Google has utterly succumbed to enshittification?

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How to say hello again?

Sat, 18 May 2024 17:17:43 GMT

I follow Denise on Bluesky (which is less crappy than Twitter, but still full of awful news and depressing arguments), and her presence there reminds me: hey, DW is still going! The whole internet disappearing up its own butt with AI seemed like as good a reason as any to drop back in to Dreamwidth.

So hello! I'm old! I didn't see the aurora last week (not for want of trying). Still in my little house (q.v., below), still wondering how much of my sense of decline is age, how much the pandemic trauma, and how much the sequelae of the COVID I avoided for three and a half years before finally catching it last summer.

I'm working on a book. I don't know what it is yet--not even whether it's fiction or something else--but I'm cutting 100,000 words from the 144,000-word zero draft and trying to shape it into...something.

Are any fellow writers still here? What are you working on?

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250 steps at a time

Wed, 02 Feb 2022 21:33:17 GMT

CW exercise/fitness

At a conference late in 2019 I noticed a colleague's smartwatch--specifically, that she was getting text messages on it. That seemed cool, so when I got home I bought myself a Fitbit and started getting MY text messages on it. (Honestly, I'm like a baby with toys.)

The device's primary function of fitness tracking was meaningless to me because I couldn't walk. Then I had hip replacement number one, and, six weeks later, hip replacement number two, and, six weeks after that, a pandemic that prevented me from completing all the physical therapy I needed.

Walking around was just about the only thing I could safely do, I couldn't do it--at least, not without pain.

So what with one thing and another it wasn't until six months ago that I finally started paying attention to the Fitbit's little hourly nudge to get out of my chair and take 250 steps.

It took only a couple of successful days (12 hours, 250 steps each) to notice a difference. My brain worked better. I had slightly more energy. Shortly after that, the half-mile walk to the close grocery store became pain-free.

Then the one-mile walk to the farther but better grocery store became possible.

One day while I was out and about somewhere, the Fitbit gave a burst of haptic feedback and pretty colors, congratulating me on 5000 steps. I started trying to make it do that every day. When that got too easy, I upped it to 6000. A couple of weeks later, 7000.

My average is up to 7750, and I can do the 9000-step round trip to my mother's house with little discomfort (though the rest and cup of coffee in the middle is helpful).

Now I just wish it would stop buzzing me about text messages.

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Big day

Tue, 01 Feb 2022 23:59:03 GMT

Whew! I did a webinar today in front of 300 people!

My pal Rachelle and I presented a class on some princples of story structure to a very engaged audience of writers. The slide deck was good looking, we were well-rehearsed, and we got a zillion questions and some very complimentary feedback.

Pages & Platforms, our three-woman business, has grown a bit since our first outing. That was a vendor table at a local book fair. If it were just me, nothing more would have ever happened. Heck, THAT wouldn't have happened. But because there are three of us with different skills and zones of genius, we barrel forward at the speed of Sue. All the sales and marketing stuff she understands is lightyears outside my interest, and my skills for the technical modern web stuff are rough at best.

But I love designing courses, writing blog posts, and conducting group calls with the writers in our club, where we talk about story. I like making podcasts and editing video. I love story theory.

So today was a win and I think it's ice cream time.

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Exchanging Twitter for some REAL reading

Tue, 01 Feb 2022 05:25:49 GMT

At some point a few years ago, Twitter became magically addictive to me. Prior to that I could take it or leave it, but something-something-SPN-fandom-something happened, and I got hooked.

Periodically since then I've quit, but I swear it's like quitting smoking. Just one peek at my notifications and within two weeks I'm back up to a pack a day.

A couple of weeks ago it was time to quit again, and so far the abstinence is paying off. My goal wasn't simply to stop wasting my life (I mean...hours per day!), but to read more books. To recapture the magic of reading.

It seems to be working. Since I deleted my Twitter app, I've finished two and a half novels and chunks of two nonfiction titles. (I'm talking actual text-on-page books here. My audiobook game has never wavered.) A side benefit is slowly-returning attention and focus in general.

Finished:
Black Swan Green by David Mitchell (the one he published after Cloud Atlas)
A Marvellous Light by Freya Marske (queer Edwardian magicians solving a mystery--loads of fun)

In progress:
Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead (his prose deserves the two Pulitzers he's won)
History in English Words by Owen Barfield (very old, but kind of charming)
The Passion of the Western Mind by Richard Tarnas (survey of Western philosophy; not easy reading)

Up next:
The "Capitola" novels of E.D.E.N Southworth (mid-19th century American adventures featuring a feisty girl protagonist named Capitola. Southworth was the most popular author of her day, publishing 60 novels between 1849 and 1915.)
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (to continue my project of reading all David Mitchell's novels in 2022.)

It is wonderful to be reading again.

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Stolen Focus

Wed, 26 Jan 2022 04:50:28 GMT

GRAIN O' SALT: PEOPLE ARE TELLING ME THE AUTHOR OF THIS BOOK IS A PLAGIARIST AND A BAD-SCIENCE PERSON WITH A POOR UNDERSTANDING OF HISTORY.

Book recommendation! Even though I'm only one-third through it: Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again by Johann Hari.

It starts, of course, with smartphones, but it goes much further, into the limits of the human brain's ability to take in information, a limit we're now reaching. He is very clear right from the start that inattention and "addiction" to social media are not strictly personal failings, but a systemic problem that we as individuals can't entirely do away with.

He tries. He describes a three-month complete internet/phone fast, acknowledging that it's not something most people can afford to do, and describes the wonderful results: deep reading, deep thinking, deep sleep, restored creativity. From hints at the beginning, I'm pretty sure his "cure" won't turn out to have been permanent. Yet it sounds like paradise.

I'm listening to the audiobook, read by the author in his very listenable un-posh London accent. It's good. I'm hoping there's enough here to guide me to at least some recovery of my ability to read, think, and create.

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Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens

Mon, 24 Jan 2022 23:18:43 GMT

In a talk before the Romance Writers of America conference in 2018, prolific author and neuropsychology professor Jennifer Lynn Barnes exhorted her audience to stop editing the pleasure out of their books.

(Link is to download-for-purchase, well worth the six bucks if you're a writer.)

Barnes's earliest published books, she says, were selling better than later works, though the later works were "objectively better," showing more craft, skill, and discipline. She set out to discover why, and what she found was an uninhibited delivery of pleasure in the earlier books that she had self-consciously edited out of the later ones.

This reminded me so much of the fanfic-to-profic writer's journey that I checked, and yup, she's a fanfic scholar as well as a doctor of psychology. Fanfic is pleasure. It is all about hitting the pleasure button over and over and over again. It's probably why almost everyone I asked said that fanfic is the one kind of reading they still have attention for in these troubled times.

What does Barnes mean by "pleasures"? She identifies a handful of universal pleasures:

Sex
Touch
Beauty
Wealth
Power
Danger
Competition

There are, presumably, others. (She acknowledges that "universal" here means most people in most cultures.)

She analyzes three stories--The Hunger Games, Titanic, and Twilight--to show how all those pleasures are abundantly present in huge mega-hits.

Then she goes into the smaller, less universal, more personal pleasures, which she calls Your Personal Id List. These are little story elements you love to encounter in your reading, and love to add to your own writing--things that scratch specific itches that you can't necessarily consciously explain.

These are the things Professor Barnes was editing out of her later books, thinking they were repetitious, unprofessional, somehow not original or literary enough.

Your Personal Id List can include absolutely anything. She reveals several of her own, then asks the audience to share some of theirs, and they run the gamut from twins, to eating ice cream, to "there's only one bed". From big important jewels, to long haired men, to forbidden love. From dining together, to scenes in the rain, to siblings.

Most of us can instantly name a dozen or so of our favorite things--things we've included in every story, things we adored in our childhood reading. Our bulletproof kinks. My writing community avidly jumped all over this concept, and it turns out, giving ourselves permission to include that one thing yet again makes writing hard scenes easier and more fun.

Here are some of mine:

Competent craftsperson
Weaving, knitting, spinning, dyeing--fabric stuff
Making physical things
Fluent in another language
Portraits, painting
Tailoring
Men wearing earrings
Home, coming home, arriving in a comfortable place
Rings (especially magic ones)
Liminal places
Albatrosses
People from the stars, people who are stars, stars in general

What are some of yours?

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Wombo

Sun, 23 Jan 2022 18:06:23 GMT

My pal Xina introduced me to one of those phone apps that's probably evil and collecting data on me and destroying culture as we know it, or whatever, but is just so damn cool, called Wombo.

Wombo is an AI that creates art in one of about twenty styles ("Baroque," "Etching," "Fantasy Art," "Steampunk"...). You put in some keywords, choose a style, and let it rip for a few seconds. Next thing you know, it generates art.

The novel I'm trying to work on, set in the early 1900s in Portland, includes an actual historical event where the working girls from the brothel down in Old Town rode their bikes through the respectable part of downtown, past City Hall, in their scanties, ringing their bells, to drum up business.

So I put "1905 Bike Prostitutes*" into Wombo and selected the "Pastel" style...and behold!

*Yes, "sex workers" would be more correct, except, you know, 1905.

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Reading and listening

Sun, 23 Jan 2022 04:33:23 GMT

I continue to have trouble focusing on reading. I mean actual reading from a book.

In an attempt to re-corral my attention and recover some of that pleasure, I've

Sworn off social media (we'll see how long that lasts...)
Joined a silent reading party where twice a month we get together on Zoom and just read for two hours (a form of accountability)
Got at least four very different books going (so that when it's reading time, I can pick what I'm in the mood for)
Established a couple of comfortable and well-lighted places to read.

So far this year I've finished:

Natalie Goldberg's Three Simple Lines (a lovely memoir and rumination on haiku)
David Mitchell's Number9 Dream (long novel; I'm aiming to read all his novels in 2022)
Ken Mogi's Awakening Your Ikigai (kind of a little philosophy/lifestyle guide)

Currently in progress:

Colson Whitehead's Harlem Shuffle (a caper/heist novel)
Richard Tarnas's The Passion of the Western Mind (a huge survey of western philosophy)
Sean Russell's Moontide and Magic Rise (a really long fantasy that I've been picking at for several months)
Matthew Salesses's Craft in the Real World (on correcting some of the faults of the American MFA writing program)

...plus a bunch of audiobooks. I get a ton of reading done via audiobooks, and I'm okay with that, but there's nothing quite like the pleasure of silent, visual reading.

How do others keep themselves reading?

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Covid notes: so far so good knock on wood

Fri, 21 Jan 2022 19:04:54 GMT

After two years of practically-paranoid risk avoidance with Covid, I came down with a fever and a woozy head a couple of days ago.

The only place I've gone in months, besides for a walk in the uncrowded streets of my neighborhood, is to my isolated mother's house and to pick up groceries outside the store, and an occasional masked dip into the neighborhood cafe for a takeout latte and scone.

But then there's my sister, who lives in a motorhome in my driveway and uses my shower and laundry--I don't control her contacts--and the folks who clean my house, though they're masked and vaxed and I leave while they work and run a window fan...

Well, you can really spiral with this endless anxiety and stress, looking for ways to perfect your precautious and blame yourself.

I did a rapid antigen test yesterday and it came out negative. Did another one today, also negative. So the low-grade fever and wooziness, which have passed, could've been an allergy thing, or a microdosing thing--psilocybin has made me woozy more than once--or a purely psychosomatic manifestation of this endless stress, but it apparently wasn't the 'rona.

Nevertheless, I'm gonna persist in my near-paranoid (but not perfectly paranoid) risk avoidance.

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Goodbye to Graydie

Fri, 21 Jan 2022 01:10:18 GMT

April 4 2009 was the first time I posted on here under the tag "Sam and Dean the stray cats". I thought they were brothers, and Sam was theone that was coming inside my house a month later.

Eventually I figured out that Sam was a female, and that "Dean" was probably her son. Dean never did come indoors. He led a hard life, and by the time my neighbors Wally and Nick adopted him, he was sickly and didn't live very long.

Meanwhile, one day at least a year after Sam adopted me, her former human knocked on my door. He was trying to learn the fate of his cat Graydie, now my cat Sam. He and his mom, evicted from a nearby rental house, had been forced to move to a place that didn't allow pets. Graydie had disappeared at moving time. He had come around for weeks calling for her, leaving food out, trying to find her.

Finally, he traced her to my house. He couldn't take her back, but he was ready to pay for cat food and veterinary care. I told him she was doing well, even coming indoors sometimes at night and in bad weather. I never heard from him again.

Graydie lived with me for almost thirteen years. She sat in my lap exactly once, for 20 seconds, but she always liked to be near me. She would follow me when I left the house on foot, sometimes all the way to the busy street where I caught my morning bus. She would go out for a walks with me around the block.

Over the years, she slowed down, of course. She stopped going all the way around the block with me, then stopped following me. After a while, she couldn't jump up on the bed anymore, and slept on a heated rug under my desk. Walking became harder and harder.

She stopped eating sometime in December, and a few days before Christmas she died.

She was quiet, and she was beautiful, and once in a while she purred. I think she was happy here.

Young Graydie when she first adopted me:

Graydie on her last day:

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Writing sprints on the AlphaSmart

Wed, 10 Mar 2021 22:58:45 GMT

On November 2 (in the endless year of our lord 2020) I launched a writing sprint group on Zoom.

It was a bit of a marketing thing, a tie-in with NaNoWriMo and a goodwill builder for Pages & Platforms (where we offer content to help writers write a better story and build a marketing platform).

It went well so we kept going.

And now it's just an ongoing thing that I do every day at 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time: get up, deploy my green screen, brush my pandemic-length hair, open the Zoom meeting, and write quietly with about 15-20 other writers from as far afield as New Zealand and Ireland.

In the process I've made great strides on the current novel (working title The Footman) and have taken a technological step backward to the AlphaSmart.

It's a mechanical keyboard with a 4-line LCD screen and a tiny memory. No wifi, no internet, no apps, no backlight, no color. No distractions. No temptation to scroll around and edit yourself. It's too much trouble.

It runs on three AA batteries. When you want to save what you've typed, there's an old-fashioned USB cable that connects to a real computer.

The beauty of this $50-on-eBay, refurbished typing device from the early Aughts is that that is all you can do with it. So that's what you do.

Plus it's built like a tank. I can throw it in my bike basket and take it to the café (when those days come again), and I don't need a power outlet or wifi or anything. The memory is persistent, and big enough for text.

Also, hello everyone. And if you'd like to join the sprint group, you can sign up here.

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Masks and Portland and Tyranny and Getting By

Thu, 30 Jul 2020 06:16:35 GMT

It's been a weird 50-something days here in Stumptown. The teargassing doesn't affect me directly. It's all confined to a small area downtown, about four miles from where I live (but exactly where I spent my whole working career). If not for Twitter, I'd probably not be aware of it, except to wonder about the nightly sound of helicopters.

I fall out strongly on the side of the protesters. I love my town, and I hate to see graffiti at the best of times, so it disturbs me to see it sprayed all over downtown buildings, layer on layer. It's ugly and it's hard to remove from stone.

But you know what? It's just paint. And this is a historic moment, and if those protest markings linger for a while to remind us that even here in lily-white Portland, Black Lives Matter and the police are corrupt, and we didn't ask for federal troops, well then, so be it.

As someone with a couple of "co-morbidities" and a healthy belief in science, I've elected to stay well away personally. I'm honestly terrified of getting covid, and I'm able to stay the fuck home, so that's what I do. If I have to go out, I wear a mask.

Boring as hell some of the time, but mostly I'm getting by. Latest foray into Chinese-language drama: Sleuth of the Ming Dynasty, which I'd describe as more adorable than brilliant, but fun and pretty.

How's everyone?

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Breaking up is hard to do

Sat, 25 Apr 2020 18:17:52 GMT

I've been producing the Story Grid Editor Roundtable, a reasonably successful writing podcast, for the past couple of years. We've made 115 episodes, 95 of them fully scripted hours. I've edited them all. I'm proud of our work. We put it out there in less-than-perfect state, improved as we went along, and broke a lot of new ground in our subject area.

Our long-range purpose was to give away the store: generously share our fiction-editing expertise and thereby slowly build our platform and our "social proof," and attract paying clients. This has worked fairly well--better for some of us than for others. Me, I'm unapproachable and scary, so my clientele has grown slowly, but I get the scary, serious people, and that's how I like it.

Now signs are pointing to my leaving the show behind. The first sign was a bit of a rearguard action a week or two ago that seemed intended to undermine my own contribution to the show. The second was Kim announcing her intention to leave at the end of our current 12-episode series. The third was my own inability to even think of a contribution to the episode we recorded last week--to the point where I made no contribution at all. This pandemic situation robs me of about nine-tenths of my mental battery most days.

Naturally in a group endeavor some in-fighting is bound to emerge. Differences in style, goals and personalities have become more marked in this time of unprecedented stress. What's more, nothing lasts forever, and it's okay to let a good thing go when it no longer feels like fun.

Still, I've got a considerable investment here. If I walk away, I cede the platform we've built together. There's no obvious way to carry any of that social capital away with me.

So I proposed to the group that instead of recording an episode in our usual Monday morning slot this week, we have a meeting to discuss refreshing the show's format and trying new things as a way of salvaging it. My proposal met with near-silence, so I imagine that Monday's meeting will result, after all, in my leaving.

I'm not sure I care. Right now (and the mood is extremely variable these days) I feel only relief at the thought of no longer having to produce an episode a week. But next week, who knows?

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How's the pandemic going?

Wed, 22 Apr 2020 22:12:37 GMT

So far so good here, at least in terms of not catching the virus. But we're all going a bit nuts in our respective homes.

To pass the time, I've been through The Untamed several times and will probably make at least one further foray--that's just how rich and complex the story is. For variety, I've also absorbed Guardian, a modern-setting fantasy involving an upper world rather like ours, and an underworld where dwell alien beings who wield dark energy. The title refers to the job of the lead character, Zhao Yunlan, in investigating and stopping incursions by underworld beings into upper world. It's kind of a police procedural with magical objects, snake-people, cat-people, twins...and epic love between our Chief and a mild-mannered university professor whose True Nature hides behind his dorky round glasses. Oh, and genuinely terrible special effects. But loads of charm.

The charismatic star of Guardian has gone on to play the lead in Detective L, basically Sherlock in Shanghai in 1930, with a tweed-clad female Watson and some great costumes and sets. So now I'm watching that.

Last night, in I think it was episode 7, a character uttered a sentence exactly word for word from my Mandarin Chinese 1 super-basic language lessons: 我不明白你说什么。Or, in Pinyin, Wǒ bù míngbái nǐ shuō shénme, which means "I don't understand what you're saying."

But I DID! It was so cool!

I hope everyone's staying safe and healthy.

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Fan mail

Wed, 08 Apr 2020 20:55:31 GMT

A few days ago I got fan mail from a (not-incidentally gay, male) friend:

I finished Restraint last night near two in the morning then fell asleep awash with emotions. Principal among them was a sense of satisfaction a reader feels when a story has not just worked but has transported them. Upon the conclusion of your wonderful novel, I arrived at a place quite distinct from where I departed. Please know that it wasn’t simply a pleasurable excursion but a transformative one.

The ride concluded, I also felt a palpable sense of longing yearning for more of John and Tristan’s story and hunger for more of your writing. When you have the pre-orders available for [your work in progress], I would like to be the first in line. Your prose is rich, exact, elegant and seemingly effortless though by now I know well that effortless is more often an effect than an accurate description of how it arrives so miraculously on the page. In fact, as the story took its final turn in Book Four, I purposely slowed my pace, savoring the experience washing over me, not unlike the sensation that John and Tristan each had in cherishing the limited time they had left together. Quite an achievement considering this reader had never partaken in the genre of romance queer, historical or otherwise.

I just wanted to share that. It's only a small portion of a long and thoughtful actual letter on paper.

I don't write for a broad, general audience (whatever that is). I'm aware that M/M stories are largely by and for women, and I'm fine with that. But I'm also aware of certain appropriation or fetishization problems with the genre, so it meant quite a lot to me to hear from a gay male friend that a) he'd trusted me enough to give my novel his time and attention, and b) he found it satisfying enough to write me a fan letter.

Maybe I'll keep writing.

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Causualties of social distancing

Mon, 30 Mar 2020 06:12:43 GMT

Are you noticing unexpected side effects of the lockdown? Setting aside for the moment the big, obvious ones, which have been coming at us all day after day, I'm beginning to wonder about subtler ones.

I made a new friend a few months ago. He was a listener of my podcast, and followed me on Twitter, where we had some back-and-forth. Back in November, between hip surgery 1 and hip surgery 2, he happened to be in town and asked if we could meet.

It was just one of those instant friendships. We sat over coffee and talked for hours. Next time he was in town, shortly after my second surgery, we did the same. In between, lots of messages flew--about writing, politics, LGBTQ issues, and culture. We quickly forged a thick, rich connection. A real friendship.

But he lives alone in an isolated situation, and struggles with anxiety at the best of times, which these times decidedly are not. The thick connection is thinning, not easily maintained via text. There's a very real sense that "we don't know each other well enough for that"—"that" being the little extra prying or persistence that an older and more tested friendship might permit.

It would be relatively easy to let the connection thin out to nothingness and drift away. After all, we've only known each other a few months. I hope that doesn't happen. But is there enough will on both sides to hang onto it?

I wonder how many new things, like seeds planted at the wrong moment, will fail to weather this strange time.

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Remembering the Old Normal (Meme)

Sat, 28 Mar 2020 04:47:17 GMT

Meme from misbegotten via yourlibrarian. Last time I did things we can't do anymore.

Last time I traveled abroad: August 2019. Went to the UK and France. Writing retreat on a farm in the middle of nowhere around where Limousin melts into the Dorgogne region. Led by Una McCormack. It was glorious.
Last time I slept in a hotel: Nashville, September 2019, for a Story Grid Live event.
Last time I flew in an airplane: Coming home from the Story Grid Live event in Nashville, September 2019. It was notable for my increasingly critical disability, and having to have wheelchair assistance in airports.
Last time I took a train: The Heathrow Express into London, September 2019.
Last time I took public transit: Portland, Trimet, bus to physical therapy right after my hip replacement surgery in November 2019. Since then I've been back on my bike and have been able to avoid buses, crowded or otherwise, for which I'm immensely grateful. Trimet has just announced a 50% cutback in bus service. Hopefully they'll survive.
Last time I had a houseguest: Early summer 2019, I think. A fellow Story Grid Certified Editor and co-host of my podcast came into town for an event.
Last time I got my hair cut: February 2020, and let me tell you, Kim Rhodes's haircutting video today makes me really tempted to get an electric trimmer and just go to town. I <3 her.
Last time I went to the movies: Sometime in November, as I recall. It was between surgeries, so one leg/hip was working and the other was still causing me to limp the several blocks between bus stop and cinema. My sister and I saw Fantastic Fungi, a documentary about the mycelium kingdom, including the magic mushroom branch. Have I mentioned that I've been experimenting with psilocybin microdosing? It's really interesting.
Last time I went to the theater: I SAW HANNAH GADSBY LIVE in Portland in February! In a 200-seat theater space, incredibly intimate and wonderful. She was fantastic. "Douglas," her show was amazing.
Last time I went to a concert: Does ballet count? I was privileged to see "Romeo and Juliette" at Sadler's Wells in London in August with ravurian and ruric and it was brilliant.
Last time I went to an art museum: It's been a couple of years. Portland Art Museum.
Last time I sat down in a restaurant: breakfast at the counter, Cadillac Cafe, probably about four weeks ago. I miss this kind of thing the most.
Last time I went to a party: Sunday, February 16. A dinner party. I feel like I dodged a bullet there. Crowded room, shared meal. Didn't get sick.
Last time I played a board game with more than two people: I...don't play board games.

I'm sure we're all thinking about what the world will be like when this is over. I'm beginning to realize that, for good and ill, it's not going back to "normal." Normal was awful in many ways, and we have a lot to learn from being forced out of it by this extreme, slow-rolling event.

Take care, everybody. Wash your hands a lot.

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Cleaning

Thu, 26 Mar 2020 00:37:03 GMT

I'm a crappy housekeeper, and the new pandemic requirements around cleanliness have put me into cognitive dissonance. I don't know how to manage.

I'd like to share what I learned today about cleaning from the LSHTM Viral podcast. (S1 E17 titled "Is Washing Your Hands Enough?" is the episode in question).

1. Audit the touched surfaces in your home. Knobs, buttons, handles, countertops. Keyboard, mouse, touchscreen, remote. The movables: phone, earphones, keys, wallet, credit cards. Steering wheel, dash, door handles. Handlebars, brakes, and shifter.

2. Clean surfaces using this rule: "One cloth, one wipe, one direction." No scrubbing back and forth. Elbow grease is important. The idea is to force any contaminants in a single direction away from the area of use and onto the cloth, and then change cloth so as not to redistribute those contaminants to the next surface.

You wrap that soapy cloth around the door handle or the rail or the cabinet knob, and you grip and pull, in one direction. Then you put that cloth aside, and get a new one.

I'm using cut-up microfiber towels stuffed into a jar of soapy water or disinfectant solution. When I'm done, I rinse the used ones out and put them in the laundry. Then I wash my hands. Again.

3. When you come back in from being out, assume you've come into contact with the virus. Wash your hands first. Then take off your outer clothes and put them in the laundry. Then you wash your hands again and put on clean clothes.

Then clean any surfaces you touched on the way in (doorknob, mailbox, washer door handle), and any surfaces you touched while out (phone, keys, wallet).

Even if you haven't been out lately, it's a good idea to wash your clothes more often than you might have before.

And that's what I learned today about virus management. Next up: making my own masks.

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Masterwork Experiment

Mon, 23 Mar 2020 23:38:50 GMT

I'm writing a new story.

It began as an experiment. Shawn Coyne, my editing mentor, wanted to find out whether an accomplished writer (me) could create a fresh story by borrowing the deep structure of a masterwork, but changing the setting.

If I could, he would publish it.

The masterwork he chose was Annie Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain," and my task was to transpose it to Regency England.

The experiment was a success in that it did inspire me to start a new story, something I haven't been able to do for more than three years.

It was a failure, however, in that all Shawn's rules blocked me for almost nine months, and I wasn't able to break the blockage till I broke most of the rules.

Once I finally let my story diverge--from "Brokeback," from Shawn's idea of its meaning, from the scenes I'd written in the first days of the experiment, and at last, from the experiment itself--it was no longer the thing Shawn wanted. Which means Story Grid probably won't publish it.

It is the story of two lower-class men (servants) who meet on the job and fall in love. But that's where the "Brokeback" scaffolding ends. I'm changing everything else. Above all, I am not going to kill one of them. I don't think we need any more buried gays.

Instead I borrowed other stories' scaffolding: the devoted but deluded servant in The Remains of the Day. The relationship dynamic from The Untamed. Part of the ending of The Song of Achilles.

And the true-life history of Matthew Tomlinson whose 1810 diaries were recently uncovered.

I'm submitting the first act of this no-longer-anything-like-Brokeback story to a writing partner in a couple of days, and we'll see how it goes.

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Never say never

Mon, 23 Mar 2020 00:13:15 GMT

I thought I was done with fandom. I hadn't read any fic in ages, and the last couple of fandoms I put a toe into--Teen Wolf, maybe? and, IDK, Sherlock, a little?--never fully grabbed me. My fannish life seemed to be over.

Then a month or so ago, Twitter lured me to the edge of The Untamed and I fell off that cliff backwards*.

I've now watched all 50 episodes twice and am on my third pass. I'm almost done reading the 900-page source novel (translated by enthusiastic amateurs). I'm five episodes into the Special Edition (a cut of the TV series that skips the political stuff and focuses on the love story). I've loaded my Kindle with fic, and I'm making a podfic of a Cinderella AU story featuring the two main characters.

Oh, and I've re-started Mandarin lessons, which I first began way back in the Firefly era. I've even made an icon.

The series can seem a little queer-baiting, but the novel it's based on is explicitly gay. They had to skirt Chinese censorship by cutting any kissing or sex that's on the page in the source novel, but I swear it's singlehandedly bringing back intimacy through longing looks, private nicknames, eyefucking, and so little skin showing that a glimpse of a collarbone is hot.

Costumes: gorgeous. Sets and locations: stunning. Story: operatic.

The Untamed is long. It's complex. Everybody has four different names that you have to learn, it's in Mandarin, the subtitles are odd, the conventions are unfamiliar...and I love it to bits.

Why? Soulmates. Longing. Opposites attract. Tightly-controlled rule follower meets outrageous rule-breaker. Matchmaking siblings. Hurt/comfort all over the place. Operatic tragedy. Redemption. Bunnies.

It's available on Netflix.

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