Categories
movie

Belle, the “Metaverse,” and Online Community

Belle is an incredibly good and beautiful movie. I spent about half of it in tears for reasons I will shortly explain. You should watch it. Even if, like me, you’re not really into animated movies.

Most of what I’ve seen about Belle so far in critical discussion has been in one of two veins:

  1. Wow, Mamoru Hosoda made a movie about the Metaverse! So prescient!
  2. This movie says a lot of important things about online bullying.

Point number 2 is arguably true; there is a lot in the movie about “unmasking” (basically doxxing) being used as the ultimate threat by a bunch of bullies who envision themselves as superheroes. There’s also a great little vignette in there about bullying and rumormongering over text. But it really strikes me that the focus is so on that.

Point number 1 continues to get on my nerves, particularly considering the number of interviews I’ve now seen where someone breathlessly asks Mamoru Hosoda about the Metaverse and he politely tries to answer. Right now, I think anything that presents an image of a wide online community is going to immediately get pegged as “about the Metaverse” and it’s goddamn infuriating for the same basic reason that the so-called Metaverse itself is also goddamn infuriating.

It’s quite possibly an artifact of my age group and the online circles I inhabit, but the venom and mockery directed at Zuckerberg’s pet project is relentless. I am basically at the edge of the generation that has never known a world without some form of internet and online connectivity. Computers weren’t ubiquitous in my early childhood, but well before middle school I was posting on bulletin boards, and it only progressed from there. I have known an online community almost my entire life. And every goddamn breathless thing that gets written about the Metaverse rubs me raw because we already do that every day. The only piece of the grand design that’s missing from what we already have is that community being controlled by a single corporation that wants to introduce artificial scarcity and extract money from us. Damn, sorry to be missing out on that.

Where Belle comes into this is that when I watched it, I didn’t see a movie about the future of social media. I saw a movie about the online communities that exist, right now. The wrapper changes, the look is different, but the space and its function remains the same. For so many of us–and I daresay particularly those of us in the queer community–the online space is somewhere we can find ourselves and be ourselves, free of the preconceptions of those who know us (or think they do) in real life. Belle‘s representation of an avatar that is more conceptually real than your physicality has been a truth for many of us already. For artists, the online space can be a place to reach out and sometimes, if we’re very lucky, find someone who gets what we’re doing, that first all-important person who sees past all your flailing and connects with what you’re fumbling to create.

And for many of us, the people we find online are those we form closer connections to than we can with anyone physically around us. This is not to ignore the reality of bullying and toxicity in online spaces, but I also think we so often have to grapple with those that we forget the basic goodness of what many of us have found here, the people we’ve come to know across distances we’d never be able to otherwise bridge. The communities I’ve found online have made me who I am and brought me some of my truest friends.

This is why I spent so much of the movie crying. I have been that person, who deeply loves someone whose face I’ve never seen and whose name I don’t actually know. I have been that person, desperately trying to find a way to help someone who is in trouble when I don’t even know where they live. Sometimes I’ve even been able to do so.

There have been many movies and tv shows that dive with enormous, sometimes melodramatic glee into the dark and dangerous side of the internet, the way online communities can go bad, the predatory people that stalk them. But Belle is the first I’ve ever seen that, while acknowledging that darkness, truly captures the community and love and grace that also exist.

Categories
colorado pictures

Convergence Station

Tonight my housemate and went down to Convergence Station in Denver. I have been aware that it’s a place that exists because, hilariously enough, I spent two days testing the subgrade and asphalt in the north parking lot when they were building it. It was one of the few places where the site super made me do an extra safety orientation even though I wasn’t going to be anywhere near the building. All I got told then was that it was “some kind of art installation.” And something about Meow Wolf being an artist collective. (Which is not quite true. An arts production company is not the same as a collective.)

Anyway, calling it an art installation doesn’t do it justice. I’ve also heard it framed as “like the Children’s Museum, but for adults.” Which is closer, because there are a zillion things that you can interact with, buttons to push and phones to pick up and dial and listen to various messages, even spaces to crawl into if you have better knees than I do.

What I wasn’t expecting was the story that came with it. There’s a whole sci-fi tale about the multiverse and memory sharing and a bad scientist who wants to enforce world peace by basically removing everyone’s memories… and I can’t even tell you the whole thing at this point. Because the part that grabbed me the most is this story is lore based, which means you wander through the installation and read little tidbits here and there (or occasionally remember phone numbers from different areas and then try to call them on one of the phones) and build more questions on the answer, which take you toward… something I haven’t figured out yet. This is exactly the kind of fictional primary source plus vignette catnip that’s made me such a dedicated follower of Destiny‘s lore. And both work because there’s a solid emotional story with a lot of mystery and space to theorize and enough bread crumbs to keep you following along.

Well played, Meow Wolf.

This first trip was about two hours, which was definitely not long enough to see everything. I also don’t think this is the kind of place where you should even try to see everything at once. It’s something that wants multiple trips, and slower explanation, and noticing new things every time you go to keep building the story in your mind.

Also if you’re me, about two hours is also all you’ve got into you before it’s total sensory overload and you go from THIS IS SO COOL to please there is too much noise and too many flashing lights just let me out of here.

This is also the most people I’ve been around in two years of the pandemic, and that probably contributed to my overload and rising claustrophobia level. I’ve never done that well with crowds, but what constitutes a “crowd” for my has apparently gotten a lot smaller these days. The only reason I was even willing to give it a whirl was that I had an N95 to wear, but it’s not something I’d feel comfortable doing again soon.

Which is a shame because I wanna go look at everything again. And I want to take all my friends so we can look through things and all find different tidbits to share with each other.

Soon, I hope. Soon.

Categories
writing year in review

2021 Writing Year in Review

Well. This is going to be painful.

Writing This Year

Novels: 0

Novellas: 1 (IP Project)

Novelettes: 0

Short Stories: 3 (all fanfic)

Flash: Wrote a couple of interstitials for Alasdair over at The Full Lid.

Scripts: 2 audio scripts

Paid Nonfiction: Book Riot newsletters and posts; a lot of stuff on my Patreon. Also I wrote a little how-to guide for Six to Start on writing nonfiction scripts.

Editing: I did a lot of editing this year, including the first time I’ve been hired to edit scripts. So that was exciting! I also got to work on a project helping someone with their maps, which was really fun.

Consigned to the trunk of awfulness, never to return: None this year.

Best/Favorite story of the year: I’m really happy with the IP thing I finished up, but I am not allowed to tell you about it right now. I’ll squee later.

Statistics

Words: 333,201

Time Spent: 197:05

Days Written: 267 out of 365

Not too different from last year, in a way. About 1.5K more words, 5 less hours. But I worked 26 fewer days… that’s almost a month off. So I did about the same amount of words in less time. Not sure if that’s good or bad.

Publishing

Queries sent: 2

Rejections received: 2

Pending: 0

Most rejections received: Probably Glamazon vs. Deus Ex Machina Man at this point. Because it’s a very awkward size for a story and I have no idea what to do with it.

Gross Earned: $12,040.39

My income is up about $3.5K this year, and that’s basically a combination of how much editing work I picked up, plus the payments I got for the scripts I wrote and the IP project I completed last year but got paid out for this year. Patreon and the newsletter I write for Book Riot are also relatively small but very steady income streams that I appreciate a great deal. I made a little over $550 this year in royalties again, which is actually impressive considering I didn’t publish anything new in the last year that would get me royalties.

Published this year:

  1. Interstitials for The Full Lid, 6/4 issue

…well, that was grim. The other stuff I’ve turned in this year hasn’t been published yet. How does it feel? Feels bad, man. I wrote an awful lot, and I made a sum of money I really can’t complain about, but it’s funny how I still feel like I did nothing. Wait, not funny. The other thing.

Favorite Patreon posts for the year:

  1. The Matrix: Resurrections
  2. Alone in the Dark
  3. F9
  4. Liveblog of Geostorm

How did I do on last year’s goals?

  1. Continue averaging 6,000 words a week. Stretch goal: 6,500? Well, I did 6400 average per week, so I hit that.
  2. Write 3 short stories. I am counting fanfiction as valid here, even if I haven’t showed it to you.
  3. Finish drafting The Smallest God and The Greatest Baking Show in the Galaxy. *sobbing*
  4. Finish editing at least one of the above and make it DongWon’s problem.
  5. Do NaNoWriMo I actually started drafting a new Captain Ramos story for this, then had to devote the word count to an IP project. But I did it!
  6. Finally start the goddamn epic fantasy book. New outlines need to be done first because things have shifted.
  7. Read at least 60 books. I read 64! If you’re curious about what I’ve read, I do a monthly book post at my Patreon.
  8. If possible, finish the collaborative project (WE ARE SO CLOSE!) and start on the next book.
  9. Focus more on writing sprints. Figure out a routine that works with day job. I’m getting there. The strategy that seems to work is on days when I have work, I need to eat dinner, play video games for a couple of hours, THEN try to write.
  10. Work on expanding the Patreon audience; keep up faithfully with the obligations there. I’ve definitely got a bigger audience than when I started in January, but I seem to have plateaued. I have mostly kept up with the obligations I set myself, though I think I need to reassess the amount of work that goes into the TV write ups versus the reward.

I’m not going to lie… this has been a rough fucking year, just as bad as 2020, if not worse. I’ve had a lot of tired-and-sad-all-the-time brain, which has made it almost impossible for me to work on my own original content. All that’s kept me writing is when I’m under contract with someone else. Having that deadline imposed from without manages to kick me into a place where I get the thing done, because I have to. I’ve never claimed to be a brilliant writer, but dammit you will get your thing on time if not early when it’s coming from me.

I’m excited that I’ve started getting more contract work (especially IP) and that I seem to be slowly building a client base. It feels great to have people who will come to me because they need something done quickly, and they know I’ll get it to them on time, to their specifications. What I am missing is also having my own work out there, and I’m feeling a little bit lost as to how to get going on that again. I’ve got partially finished novels. Hell, I have two finished novels that just need some editing. Doing it has been the hard part, because this has indeed been 2020-Won, and because it is a lot more difficult to go to other people to be rejected, as opposed to having people come to you with a job they already know they want you to do.

Thank you to everyone who has given me work to do this year and trusted me to get it finished. It’s been a lifeline when I’ve been unable to self-motivate. (The money has been great, too, definitely.)

Goals for 2022

  1. Keep shooting for the average of 6,000 words a week.
  2. Finish drafting The Greatest Baking Show in the Galaxy. Stretch goal: The Smallest God.
  3. Sit down and freaking edit We All Burn.
  4. Finish the Captain Ramos novella I started and write another one.
  5. Superhero novella–get it outlined and maybe started?
  6. Finish that collaborative project. It’s going to happen this year. I can feel it.
  7. Keep up with Patreon and Book Riot obligations. Expand the audience if possible.
  8. Start dipping toes back into short fiction.
  9. Read at least 60 books.
  10. Do more posts on this blog. 2 per month seems like a reasonable goal.

Final Thoughts

The best thing I did for myself this year was I massively curtailed my Twitter usage. I’m still feeling burnt out and depressed, but I think it’s helped immeasurably. I’ve also greatly curtailed my news consumption; I read the local paper, I keep track of headlines, but I’m not the news junky I was before and I think it’s helped me a lot. The 24 hour news cycle is basically designed to make us feel constant impending doom so we keep watching, and it sure had that effect on me.

The other thing that’s helped me a lot, perhaps weirdly, is Bungie enabling crossplay for Destiny 2 so I can play my silly video game with more people. I’ve made a lot of friends in this isolated pandemic hellscape, and I think we’ve all worked to keep each other slightly more sane.

Compared to 2020, this year felt like we were settling in for a long haul, and the Omicron variant has only cemented this. I finally gave in and took a proper staycation this last week, and I’m… glad I did so. I needed some time, even if all I did was spend it in my house, playing video games and reading. I’m still trying to find a way to make my life work, and I know full well I’m a lucky person in that I’ve got my health and I’ve got a job that lets me work from home. That acknowledged, I still have to figure out how to live it… and then write in it.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading, thank you for sticking with me, and thank you for hanging in there. I wish you peace and happiness and strength for the coming year.

Let’s buckle down and do this.

Categories
colorado

Ash Falling From the Sky in December

You can donate to the Boulder County Wildfire Fund here.

In a minute I’m going to put together what I actually came over to this page for, which would be my year in writing review for 2021. But there are some thoughts I want to jot down, first.

Yesterday I was over at a friend’s house in the afternoon to play board games. I’m on vacation because Mike is visiting from Texas and I haven’t had a proper vacation since before the pandemic started, so I figured why the hell not.

When I popped out the door to grab our lunch delivery, the air smelled like wildfire smoke. There’s a distinctive scent to it that you recognize when you live in wildfire country, sharper and more grating than the more domestic smoke of a wood fire or the scent of a charcoal grill that registers as “something tasty is close by.” I mentioned that I smelled a fire and we checked around to see if there were any alerts. There weren’t, at that time. My sinuses felt like someone had attacked them with steel wool.

Twenty minutes later, there was news of power lines down and fallen trees blocking roads from the windstorm that was gusting up to 110 mph near Boulder. And blown by that wind, a grassfire that was racing east. The sky turned into a smear of brown smoke; we were directly under the plume. Ash started to fall from the sky. It’s not the first time I’ve seen that; we had a horrifying fire season in 2020 that I thought would never end. But even if you know you’re well away from the danger of that wildfire, it’s a nerve-wracking experience, because some animal part of you knows that you’re only a gust of wind away from being too slow to escape.

This was the closest one of the wildfires has ever come to us. We were, I would like to say, never in any danger. The pre-evacuation zones never extended quite far enough east for us to start packing our car. And I think that’s only because the wind died down. Driving home, I couldn’t help but notice how much open space is near us, along the US-36 corridor, which is one way the fire traveled. If it had made it a bit further south, I’d be writing a very different post right now. As it is, I’ve been staring at a picture of a hotel in Superior in full flame, one that I’ve ridden my bike past on countless warmer days as I biked up the path toward Boulder. The destruction in Superior is devastating. At least 500 homes are gone, as well as commercial buildings. That number could go up to 1000 once the damage is fully assessed. The highway is still shut down.

I’m lucky. I didn’t have to evacuate. My friends who were in the evacuation zone made it out safely, and have now returned to find their homes still standing. The snow storm that pushed that deadly wind in front of it has arrived and is blanketing the desperately parched area with inches of white fluff, a day too late. So far, no deaths have been reported, and I hope it stays that way. Boulder County’s response was swift and well-communicated and if everyone got through this alive, it’s to their credit.

Ash falling from the sky as 2021 closes out feels like an omen, as much as I try not to believe in those. The old year burning, perhaps. I hope it’s only that and not a grim indication for 2022. For now the worst I got was a headache and a bunch of stress dreams, and I can be glad for that.

Hug your families. Keep pushing state and local government about climate change. This is not the last devastating fire we’re going to have as drought and heat continue. This is not the last December I will see where ash falls from the sky instead of snow.

You can donate to the Boulder County Wildfire Fund here.

Categories
my exciting life personal

Fixing Small Things

Unintentionally, today ended up being a fix stuff around the house kind of day. I was planning to take it easy and get some writing done, so maybe this was me avoiding writing when my house is already pretty clean. But honestly, it felt really good to do. I had a light fixture falling a bit out of the wall, which I got back into place using a madison strip. And then I had a big crack in a different wall (which I accidentally caused with my sit-stand desk… long story) and I got that spackled and painted.

I’m not a big home improvement guy. Most of the time, I am well aware that I am not The Guy and I need to find The Guy and pay them to fix the thing that’s gone wrong in my house. But I can spackle, goddammit, and I can paint. And apparently I can stick a Madison strip in the wall after I’ve watched a sufficient number of YouTube videos.

There’s a tiny bit of magic in fixing a small thing. Even if at the time you’re sweating into your eyes and wish you could just figure out why the fucking screw isn’t going in properly. Maybe it’s a way to exert control over your environment, similar to cleaning and organizing. At least when it’s something small and manageable like this, rather than soul-destroying like drilling out a broken fence post so you can set a new one. And right now, I think I needed something that would let me feel like I had even a little control over my surroundings… since right now I seem to be drifting back into my bad old habit of sleep procrastination, something I’ve classically done when I don’t feel like I have control over anything else.

Though at least this time I can say I’m not sleep procrastinating because I hate my job. I do hate being trapped in my house because of a pandemic–and all the other shitfuckery going on out there–and I know I’m not the only one. I can’t do anything about these things except phone calls and letters, and I’ve already done those. Doomscrolling Twitter doesn’t actually accomplish anything. It’s made it difficult for me to write, if I’m being honest, because I’m just so damn tired all the time–and sometimes tired means actually tired, and sometimes tired actually means depressed.

So today I fixed a light fixture and I spackled a wall. They weren’t big things, or urgent things, but my house is just a little bit nicer because of something I’ve done. Tomorrow, I’ll bake a loaf of bread for my housemate and I to enjoy for the week, and my house is going to smell lovely. For today, that’s enough.

(I am also putting more into my Patreon, by the way. So far this weekend, I’ve watched and written about Love and Monsters and the first two episodes of WandaVision.)

Categories
movie rants thinking out loud

I am shocked that you think I wanted the thing I actively encouraged to happen.

This morning I found myself, perhaps weirdly, thinking of a particular scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. It’s the Nazi book burning scene, so obviously imagery warnings here.

You get Elsa, the hot Nazi archaeologist, looking slightly teary-eyed and upset while all the book burning is going on. As she walks away, Indiana (undercover in a stolen Nazi uniform) grabs her and takes his father’s grail diary out of her pocket, growling that they didn’t want the book to be incinerated. Elsa acts so shocked–shocked!–that Indiana would think she’d do such a thing. She believes in the Grail, not the Swastika! Indiana gets this close to literally strangling her, and only lets go when she threatens to scream.

(Now, one can argue this scene gets a bit undercut later when the temple is falling apart and Indiana tries to save her, but let’s skip that for now.)

There’s a thread going around Twitter right now in which a correspondent from USA Today has realized he shared transit with the one fascist who got shot and killed (who is a conventionally attractive white lady, funnily enough, rather like Hot Nazi Archaeologist Elsa) and wants to take it as a moment to recognize that hey, those violent fascists are also people! This is a jaw-dropping extrapolation of “he can’t be abusive, he was always so nice to me” out into a group of white nationalists. But since I’m drawing parallels from reality to this film, I’ll just note: Indie fucked the Hot Nazi Archaeologist before he knew she was a Nazi. And his take away was ultimately shock, disgust, and “well, guess I’m not gonna cry about it when the temple eats her.” Not, remarkably, “Well, shoot, I guess all Nazis are also hot people I could fuck, really makes you think.”

The Indiana Jones movies are problematic as hell on a bunch of axes (and I love them anyway), but one thing they are relentless about is how much they fucking hate Nazis and have basically zero sympathy for those who claim they’re definitely not Nazis while happily riding the Nazi coattails to glory. In Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, Belloq gets exploded by the power of the ark. In this movie, Elsa gets swallowed by the temple as it destroys itself. They signed up with the Nazis. They don’t get to run away from that association. Elsa might not personally be advocating for the burning of books–in fact she might find it a bit upsetting–but she’s still standing there and doing nothing while it happens. She might claim she doesn’t believe in the Swastika, but she’s happy to wear it because it helps her get what she wants. Thus, she gets to share the fate of the other Nazis, and no one is sad.

So you can bet this sprang instantly to mind as I watched a bunch of Republicans, including Mitch McConnell, trying to backpedal from the white supremacist mob they unleashed on the capitol yesterday. They’re shocked–shocked!–that we could think they wanted that to happen, after all they’ve been doing is hanging around with these violent fascists and tacitly encouraging them either with mealy-mouthed words or strategic silence. I am not, of course, advocating for basing morality off a pop cultural artifact. But I’m saying in this case, Indiana Jones is very, very right.

You don’t get to run away from this. It doesn’t matter if you don’t, in your heart, believe what you’ve been cynically encouraging others to do. You signed up with the Nazis. When they go down, so should you.

 

Categories
writing year in review

2020 Writing Year in Review

Writing This Year

Novels: 1 (finished editing)

Novellas: 1 (finished editing)

Novellettes: 3

Short Stories: 1

Flash: 0

Paid Nonfiction: Book Riot newsletter and a couple of posts

Editing: Several small freelance editing gigs

Consigned to the trunk of awfulness, never to return: None this year.

Best/Favorite story of the year: I’d have to say it’s actually One People, One Purpose, which is my first ever IP story.

Statistics

Words: 331,712

Time Spent: 202:45 hours

Days Written: 293 out of 365

Wow, this is a big jump over last year. Probably helped by NOT having any of my bones fused. It’s weird, because I don’t feel like I’ve been more productive, yet I definitely have been. And that even though this has been the worst year ever, basically.

Publishing

Queries sent: 8
Rejections received: 6
Pending: 1
Most rejections received: That would be Raising the Steaks, which finally did get published this year by Andromeda Spaceways! I’m so proud of that story.
Gross earned: $8,457.39, almost $3k less than last year. Which was unfortunately already down from the year before. The good thing is, this is more than I expected to make! I had one big project roll in unexpectedly during the summer, and a couple of sales, but this was mostly several regular revenue streams (Book Riot Newsletter, Patreon, and my regular freelance proofreading gig) just adding up together; I only made about $550 from royalties this year.

Published this year:

  1. The Books That Hate Us for Sarah Gailey’s Personal Canons series (8/18/20)
  2. One People, One Purpose for the 10th Anniversary of Blizzard’s StarCraft II (7/28/20)
  3. Raising the Steaks in Andromeda Spaceways Magazine #78 (6/18/20)

Well, if my word course made me feel like I’d actually been productive this year, this list sure just set me straight, didn’t it. I’ve at least also put up some content on my blog and Patreon, but that’s really not the same as someone else publishing it.

Favorite Patreon posts for the year:

  1. Well, I read It (public)
  2. Jiu Jitsu
  3. The Lighthouse (2019)
  4. Chapter 17: How It Feels

Favorite blog posts for the year:

  1. Quiz: Protoss or Ikea Furniture
  2. Thoughts on Turning 40
  3. Slush v Solicitations: Just Tells Us Where We Stand

How did I do on last year’s goals?

  1. Figure out how to incorporate writing time into my new work week; achieve an average of 6,000 words per week.
  2. Write at least 3 short stories. (Additional: I really want to write a story to sub to Silk & Steel so one needs to be early in the year.) I actually technically did this, though only one of them is an original short story, the one I wrote for Silk and Steel. Which did not make it into that anthology, so I am sentenced to the hell of trying to sell it elsewhere.
  3. Finish both of the novels that I started this year. I get half credit for this one; I finished one of the novels, made some progress on the second.
  4. Do NaNoWriMo. Finished it again!
  5. Read at least 60 books. Read 75!
  6. More blog posts. I think? Does Patreon count?
  7. Refocus on character, character, character.
  8. Put fair share of time in on ongoing collaborative projects.
  9. Spend less time on Twitter. LOLOL

Considering what a goddamn dumpster fire 2020 was, I actually did really well on my goals. Shockingly so. Even if goal #2 is completed on what feels like a technicality. And yet I’ve come through the year without much of a feeling of accomplishment, even after crossing all these things off. I think that’s mostly linked to how little I had published this year, even though I felt like I was working my ass off under very trying circumstances. My writing income has shrunk two years in a row, my credits have shrunk, and it doesn’t feel great. Financially, this is not me panicking; I got a new job back in 2019 and I’ve been working it for a solid year now, and I’m in the best place financially I’ve been since I got laid off in 2016.

The new job has come with a lot of new challenges, one of which has been trying to figure out how to write around the brain drain of 40 hours a week of mental labor, which was not something I had to do when I was working in construction. (Then, I could be physically exhausted at times, but I still had a lot of unstructured waiting time where I could literally pull out my laptop and write while I was waiting for crews to get their shit together.) The financial stability that’s meant I haven’t had to scramble so much to do other people’s work and stress constantly about money has instead meant I don’t have as much energy to do my own work. I’m sure there’s some kind of irony there–though I’m certainly not complaining, because at least, as I mentioned before, I’m not constantly freaking out about money which is its own kind of brain drain.

I think ultimately my feeling of discontent and sadness at the end of 2020 is partially just because the year generally sucked. And the other part is the anxiety of being a writer, where you’re absolutely certain that the minute you aren’t publishing something, you will disappear and be forgotten. Social media does not help this, and honestly neither does my Book Riot gig where I’m constantly tracking what new things are coming out. When you’re never the new thing, and all of your peers seem to have a lot more in the pipe than you, it’s hard not to feel like you’ve sunk beneath the water. There’s a certain amount of “keep your eyes on your own paper” that comes into play; everyone’s career is unique and you cannot measure yourself by the achievements of others if you don’t want to lose your fucking gourd.

But on the other hand, I’m also only human, and at this point even deleting Twitter forever wouldn’t stop me from noticing how much everyone else is doing because it’s kind of my job to pay attention to that. So I’m just going to have to deal with the constant, choking feeling of inadequacy and soldier on. The most annoying thing about writing is I can’t even soldier on in the determination that in the future, my day will come. While I can do things to try to reach that goal, it’s ultimately out of my control. All I can do is set my shoulders and keep doing the work.

Which is an answer, and maybe the only answer, but it’s not a very satisfying one for hollow feelings.

Goals for 2021

  1. Continue averaging 6,000 words a week. Stretch goal: 6,500?
  2. Write 3 short stories.
  3. Finish drafting The Smallest God and The Greatest Baking Show in the Galaxy.
  4. Finish editing at least one of the above and make it DongWon’s problem.
  5. Do NaNoWriMo
  6. Finally start the goddamn epic fantasy book. New outlines need to be done first because things have shifted.
  7. Read at least 60 books.
  8. If possible, finish the collaborative project (WE ARE SO CLOSE!) and start on the next book.
  9. Focus more on writing sprints. Figure out a routine that works with day job.
  10. Work on expanding the Patreon audience; keep up faithfully with the obligations there.

I’m a little unsure face about refocusing on Patreon (since depending on someone else’s infrastructure is always frought), but it was an important income source for me this year and I think I can do a better job with it. It’s a more viable platform for me than a newsletter model, I think. I already write two newsletters a week for Book Riot and I cannot currently brain more.

Final Thoughts

Well, that was sure a year, wasn’t it. A year horrible enough to be a capstone on four already horrible years, and I’m not some fool that thinks things are magically going to be better because it’s 2021, but I’m not a cynical hope-eater, either. I don’t have anything profound to say about how fucking awful things were (or will probably continue to be for another half a year at least) other than we got through it because we’re the lucky ones, and the only way to truly honor that is keep fighting for both justice and kindness and flipping the bird to the people who have tried through hatred or ignorance or selfishness to kill us.

This is my tenth year doing year-end writing reviews… I started in 2010 but somehow ended up skipping 2011? I don’t know. I was in grad school and very busy. If you’re curious about a walk down memory lane just check out the year in review category.

I think me of ten years ago might be impressed that I was making money in the thousands from my writing. Would be seriously excited that I have an agent and have had books published. And would be sad that it’s not nearly enough money for me to be doing things full time. But 2010 me was also pretty realistic about things.

This year, I:

  1. Bought an ebike with the intention of regularly doing the 36 mile round trip for work that way. And… yeah. That sure didn’t happen. But I’m still really enjoying the bike.
  2. While I know that the lockdown isn’t necessarily a good measure of one’s ability to work from home because of these weird, stressful circumstances… I think this did tell me I could do it. If somehow I could make enough writing income to cover my bills, I could keep my shit together and get the work done. Especially because I’d be able to leave the house on occasion, unlike this year. I’ve actually really enjoyed working from home, despite the circumstances.
  3. Had a hysterectomy and it’s literally the best thing I’ve ever done for myself medically. As surgeries go, it was way less horrible than the foot surgery, too. Three cheers for gender-affirming care!
  4. Got hired to do IP fiction writing for the first time ever, which was cool and fun and I loved the work I did and the people I worked with.

Here’s hoping 2021 will be exponentially better. And I wish us all the strength and stamina to do the work that will make that happen.

Categories
awards eligibility

Awards Eligibility 2020

Since it is that season… again… here is what I’ve done this year.

  • One People, One Purpose – A story written for Blizzard (which still counts as a thing I’ve written!) about the Protoss trying to figure out how to move forward and come together as a people. I’m really proud of this story. (Published July 28, 2020; Wordcount: 10, 141)
  • Raising the Steaks – A near future low-stakes science ficton story about a cooking competition and collaboration between the arts and the sciences. (Published March 2020; Wordcount: 9,382)
Categories
movie

[Movie] Happiest Season

Just for shits and giggles I watched Happiest Season last night. It’s a gay Christmas romcom that’s available on Hulu. Abby (Kristen Stewart) normally just stays by herself and pet watches over Christmas since her parents died when she was 19, but this year her girlfriend, Harper (Mckenzie Davis) asks her to come home and meet her family. Except when they’re on their way to the nameless, picturesque New England town full of rich people Harper is from, the drops a bomb: she’s not actually out to her family, and she promises she’ll come out to them after the holidays, but her dad is using this Christmas season to try to impress donors (he’s a local politician) so can Abby please just pretend to be her straight roommate? Hijinks ensue. I laughed a reasonable amount and there were only a few times there was enough embarassment that I wanted to hide under a blanket, which is pretty good for a comedy.

I want to say this is probably the first movie I’ve seen Kristen Stewart in where she’s gotten to act like an actual human being, and I am into it. (Also, her Actual Lesbian costuming throughout the whole movie is *chef kiss.*) Honestly, everyone in the movie turns in a good performance, but I feel like Mary Steenburgen as Harper’s mom, Tipper, and Mary Holland as her slightly weird I’ve-been-working-on-a-second-world-fantasy-novel-for-ten-years-let-me-tell-you-about-it younger sister Jane are both total stand outs as well. And Daniel Levy as John, Abby’s flamingly gay best friend, was my absolute favorite character of the film.

But the big draw of the movie is that it’s presented as a very mainstream Christmas romcom, but it’s about a lesbian couple figuring their shit out, combined with a coming out story for Harper. It’s by no means the first LGBTQ romcom out there–to even imply that would be an insult to all the movies that came before–but it’s definitely in a very small vanguard of what could be considered mainstream along with Love, Simon.

I think what Happiest Season brings to the table (other than putting Kristen Stewart in the lesbian formal uniform of a snazzy jacket with an untied tie and a shirt unbuttoned halfway down her chest out there to make people question their sexuality) is its focus being more on the family comedy aspects than the romantic comedy aspects. For me, the biggest suspension of disbelief lift the movie has was believing the tortured logic of trying to believe Harper had good intentions of inviting Abby into her miserable, closeted homelife and then springing it on her in the car. I honestly still don’t buy the setup situation.

But once you get Harper into her family environment, her being so closeted mostly makes sense. It’s very much a wealthy white family story (for which it can and should rightly be criticised) but you get to see Harper basically regress into a child competing with her sibling Sloane (Alison Brie) for the affection of their parents, while Jane just desperately wants to be included in anything because she’s the family weirdo. It feels well established that their dad, Ted (Victor Garber), is very much the big fish in a little pond, and while it seems ridiculous that him being a city council member and wanting to run for mayor is so all consuming if the town is that small, we’re also apparently talking a town of very rich white people.

In a way, the setup is an interesting construction on why someone might not be out even if they’re not surrounded by overt, violent homophobes. Sloane’s been heaped with praise for getting married and having kids (even as she is disaparaged for having given up her legal career); you get the impression that not being heterosexual isn’t even an option that was presented to Harper until she got out of the house. Risking losing her parents is also a non-option for Harper for most of the movie, because she’s been so programmed by her upbringing to at all times be trying to earn their love. And there are plenty of homophobic dog whistles thrown in as well. The two that stand out to me is Tipper mentioning Riley’s (the town’s token lesbian, played by Aubrey Plaza) previous relationship  as a “lifestyle choice” with dismissive horror. And of course, Harper’s dad makes a country club speech where he makes statements about not letting “depravity” into the town. Theirs is the genteel homophobia of rich conservative people who just see themselves as protecting their “way of life.” On the other hand, I think it’s something that probably could have been–and would have been if this was a family drama instead of a romcom–developed more and explored more, but part of the problem is that you need a happy ending when it’s a romcom. And for this kind of movie, mainstream and presented for viewing by non-queer audiences, the happy ending needs to be Harper’s parents being able to get over it and invite Abby into their family. At the end, you’re left wondering if Ted even really believes all that shit about “depravity” and he’s struggled to reconfigure his understanding of the world in approximately twelve hours or if it’s something he’s just been saying because he’s not nearly as much of a bigot as the donors he’s been trying to woo.

It’s a generally fun movie and as a romcom you know how it’s going to end. Abby and Harper make a cute couple, even if watching Harper devolve as one sometimes does around one’s family makes both the viewer and Abby question why the hell they’re in a relationship in the first place. The movie still mostly worked for me, even if I think it could have used a little more establishment of Abby and Harper’s relationship before throwing a wrench into the works. If you like romcoms of this sort, give it a whirl, though I had to do some work at the end to actually want Abby and Harper to stay together.

There’s one other thing I want to talk about, which could be considered a spoiler so I’m going to put it below the fold.

Continue reading “[Movie] Happiest Season”
Categories
tv

Star Trek Discovery and Unburying the Gays

I’ve really, really, really been enjoying the Star Trek: Discovery season so far. I love how much the focus has moved to the crew trying to find its way in a future so far, the show can functionally do whatever the fuck it wants with world building, so they’re just having fun. The quest to rebuild Star Fleet is an obvious parallel to the crew trying to rediscover their place in the world and a new mission for themselves after they’ve completed the one-way trip of their final assignment.

And I’m going into paroxysms constantly about Saru as captain, because the show is really leaning in to the importance of kindness and empathy generally, and Saru is the perfect captain for that because his thinking continually emphasizes the wellbeing of the whole. Also, him getting to interact with Hugh, whose superpower is also empathy even if he applies it with a lot more frankness, is excellent. They’re letting the bridge crew become more developed characters, because there’s space for them to do that. We’re getting a meta plot that can string together more episodic shows. I am pleased.

The one thing I’m feeling conflicted about is honestly the second queer relationship we’re getting in the main cast. To be clear, I am beyond pleased that we’ve got a nonbinary character (Adira) and a trans character (Gray) and they make an absolutely adorable couple. I didn’t think we’d get cuter than Stamets and Hugh, but here we are. Where I’m less happy is the state of the relationship, as in

SPOILERS FOR S3 EPISODE 4 ONWARD

 

Continue reading “Star Trek Discovery and Unburying the Gays”