Re: A Golden Mean

Okay, I'll admit it. There's one thing Twitter is extremely useful for, and that's organizing grassroots protest movements. I wish, though...

...and I’m not saying that everything needs to be SERIOUS BUSINESS all (or even most of) the time, because lord knows life is hard and we all need a break, but...

...I wish that conversations about social justice on social media were less about attacking people who like "abusive" fictional characters and more about sharing concrete resources (not to mention specific times and places) for civil disobedience. I'm so fucking scared of mentioning anything even remotely related to race and gender and sexuality and disability in fandom that sometimes I forget how incredibly empowering it feels to actually be a part of a real social movement.

That being said, I'm happy that I'll be moving to Philadelphia, where community action and organization tends to be easier to access and join in person. I'd like protest to be an aspect of my daily life, not something I can only learn about and join when I get the news that something is happening on Twitter.


As a bizarre side note: This was a weird time to learn, without doubt, that J.K. Rowling does in fact spend time on TERF blogs and forums. Yikes. I hate call-out culture when it's directed against independent creators in marginal positions, but this is the sort of thing I would in fact like to know.

2020 Writing Log, Part Twenty

- I wrote Chapter 38 of Malice, but I decided to hold off on posting it. In this chapter, the person who was initially set up as the villain turns out to be not such a bad person, just someone who was forced to make an awful decision when he was younger and has had to spend the rest of his life trying to justify it to himself while dealing with the consequences. I’ve been gradually (and subtly, I hope) building to the reveal that there’s an actual antagonist in this story, and this chapter is where that reveal happens. I want to take another week to make sure I can pull it off successfully.

- I edited Chapter 37 and posted it on FFN. According to the site’s statistics, this story has an ungodly number of hits, but I’m not sure what that means exactly, especially given that it has so few followers and reviews. If I had to guess, I would say that FFN still gets a lot of traffic even though actual fandom engagement has moved elsewhere.

- I also edited Chapter 2. I hope it’s not pretentious for me to say that this chapter feels much less dependent on tropes than I remember it being.

- I ended up writing about two thousand words of the story based on The Tale of Genji that I mentioned last week, but I decided not to submit it. I also decided not to write to the anthology editor to ask for a deadline extension. I realized that this piece has the potential to become something much more interesting if I give it more time to develop. I think it would be cool if there were a frame story in addition to the Heian period diary that contains the core of the narrative, and I also think it would be cool if the narrator of the frame story had my actual name and was in fact my actual self.

- I actually wouldn’t mind being a recurring character in my own fiction, come to think of it. If Stephen King can do it, and if Andrew Hussie can do it, then there’s no reason why I can’t do it too.

- I posted a review of a light novel called Overlord, which – to be super honest – sounds a lot cooler than it actually is. I still had a lot of fun reading and writing about the book, though.

- I really enjoyed working with Frankiesbugs on a comic about Ocarina of Time, which is posted on Tumblr. It’s so gratifying to meet someone who shares almost my exact taste in horror, namely, an appreciation of both classics and trash and the desire to pet, hug, and/or be bffs with the monsters. Basically, I love horror, but I don’t take it too seriously. So when I wrote a comic about all the spooky monsters in Ocarina of Time, but I also wanted them to be cute while at the same time making fun of Ganondorf, it was such an amazing realization that I could actually work with an extremely talented artist like Frankiesbugs instead of having to take three or four months to draw the art and try to make the joke work all by myself.

- I said earlier that I commissioned an artist to illustrate the climactic chapter at the end of the fourth story arc of Malice, and that the illustration would more than likely be amazing. That artist is my best and most excellent friend Krokodilov, who managed to create a goddamn masterpiece when I wasn’t sending them rambling bits of speculation about the apocalypse via DM. This painting is so good that it makes me re-evaluate my relationship to art, and this artist is only getting better with every piece they create. Seeing something like this come into existence right in front of my own eyes has filled me with determination!

Anyway, I spent most of this week packing up my apartment, which was a huge pain in the ass. I’m moving to Philadelphia tomorrow morning. It’s going to be dreadful, but I’ll be happy when it’s over.

Oh! And just in case anyone missed it: BLACK LIVES MATTER.