2020 Writing Log, Part 36

– I posted Chapter 42 of Malice, a modern AU Breath of the Wild fanfic.

– I edited Chapter 39 and Chapter 40 of Malice, thus completing the intensive editing project I started in June. Hooray!

– I posted the fourth story in Night of The Final Day, a collection of short vignettes about the minor characters in Majora’s Mask.

– I was accepted as a writer for Ties of Time, a zine focused on Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask, and I went ahead and got started on my story. It’s about Ganondorf visiting Hyrule for the first time as a child, and I think I’m going to call it “The Flower Thief.”

– I don’t know if I ever included this in my writing log entries, but my story for the Press Start Fanfic Exchange is now publicly available! It’s called “The Queen’s Tears,” and it’s about the characters in Final Fantasy VI exploring the Ancient Castle, which is one of my favorite areas in the game.

– I sent the file for my Haunted Houses zine off to the printer and designed a bookmark featuring the work of the amazing cover artist to go with it. The printer I work with, Mixam, has a quick turnaround time, so I was able to put the zine on Etsy and send a few free copies to friends via an announcement post on Instagram. Once I get everything in the mail on Monday morning, I’ll probably put a similar zine announcement post on Twitter.

– I started sending acceptance emails to everyone who submitted to the Legend of Haiku zine I’m putting together. I got some incredible contributions, and I’m aiming for Sunday, November 1 as a digital release date.

– I posted a short comic about Ceres from The Demon King. If you’re interested, I also started posting my WIP of the story itself on AO3.

– Thanks to the magic of time travel, I was able to donate every species of fish to the museum on my island in Animal Crossing, thus earning myself a golden fishing pole and completing my set of golden tools. And finally, after months and months, I managed to grow purple windflowers.

Nevertheless, despite using Animal Crossing and every other trick at my disposal to stay engaged during Zoom meetings, I’m starting to experience extreme fatigue right at the point of the fall semester when the academic year usually starts to get interesting. We’re all doing our best, I guess. Let’s keep going!

Nobody "Chooses" Economic Precarity

Covid-19 Explodes the Myth That Women 'Opt' Out
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-10-20/covid-19-explodes-the-myth-that-women-opt-out-of-the-workforce

In August and September, more than a million people dropped out of the workforce. Eighty percent of them were women. Women have been losing jobs at a rate far higher than that of men throughout this recession, figures that can’t be entirely explained by industry effects. And it might get worse.

I hope this will be the end of the “opt out” myth — the assumption that one reason, maybe even the main reason, you don’t see more women leading organizations or governments is that so many women “choose” to stay home. In reality, the number of women who give up their careers is small, and the choice is almost never truly a free one.
 

Neat.

Although the article includes a short paragraph about how "interviews with professional women who drop out point to intransigent workplaces as the biggest problem" (with "intransigent workplaces" meaning, in this case, jobs that don't allow for any flexibility of scheduling), something the writer doesn't address is how many women are probably being pressured to leave their jobs by mounting stresses within the workplace.

Not only are women expected to pick up more work at home, one can only assume that they're expected to pick up more work at their actual jobs as well. In addition, preexisting prejudices more than likely influence employers to see female employees as expendable, so women's (entirely understandable) inability to deal with the stress resulting from increased expectations in less-than-favorable circumstances is probably used as a rationality for either outright firing them or making them so uncomfortable that they leave of their own accord.

The purpose of this short article is to help bust the myth that women "choose" to leave the workforce because they're "opting out," which is perhaps why the author's focus is on married women with children. Still, unmarried women and women with no children have been forced to drop out of the workforce as well, so I think there's something else going on here besides "husbands aren't helping out with childcare."