open wide

Quite often now, and as my time wore on in ye olde fandom days, I debated with myself the degree to which I was producing content as opposed to just talking to people. One of the biggest reasons I finally left social media was because I could no longer stand how much it felt like I was constantly putting on a show, desperate for roses thrown onstage at my feet. Once I realized that I wasn’t sharing things to share them, but instead curated, cultivated thoughts and opinions to encourage people to click the little heart icon and give me a never-good-enough shot of dopamine, I thought, huh, I’m not entirely convinced that incentivizing human social interaction in this way is a fantastic idea. And this wasn’t just on my fandom/public accounts either. It was the same on my private account, in my private online friend group. I’ve always been a bit of a people-pleaser— I don’t mean that as a humble brag, it’s a fairly insidious personality trait—and my time on social media and in fandom exacerbated that already unfortunate aspect of me to a pretty nasty degree. Please people; reap social rewards. Ad infinitum.

And now I have a blog. And I try to balance what I’m interested in vs what I imagine a reader might be interested in when I post on it. And I write original fiction. And I try to balance what I’m interested in vs what I imagine a reader might be interested in when I do that, too. And I try to be true to myself as a person and a writer in both avenues, while also maintaining an emotionally healthy distance between myself and the mostly anonymous users who have access to what I produce, meaning, yes, there is still an element of performance to it all. And I try to be OK with that. I try to accept that from the moment we wake up in the morning to the moment we fall asleep, there is an element of performance to our lives.

Where the rub comes in is that the more of myself I allowed to free-roam, the more “me” I tried to be, both here in this blog and in my writing, the less people cared. Which is a tough pill to swallow. When I performed, I got roses. When I didn’t, it wasn’t even that the roses got replaced with tomatoes. It was just the fact that no one showed up. I’m pretty certain there’s a few people just outside the door listening in, but for the most part, it’s just me and yellow here in the Squarespace void.

For what it’s worth, it’s not like I’m blaming or accusing anyone or feel entitled to anyone’s attention. When I was deep in fandom mode, if a writer I liked started writing for a different fandom/pairing, or even, gasp, branching out into original work, my general (and in the privacy of my own head) response was, cool! [close tab]. Sometimes, I even stumbled across the blogs (!) of writers I liked, but because they never talked about the reason I personally cared about their existence (their fanfiction), it was exactly the same thing. Great! [select big red X in upper right hand corner]. Fandom, for all it breathlessly strives to be an endlessly welcoming and socially progressive bastion of peace and love and Superwholock, is also incredibly mercenary.

I am trying very hard to exercise self-possession, here. As interest in what I have to offer dwindles, I am logically aware that the spaces I share my work in are not the right fit for said work. It’s not that the work isn’t good, it’s just not finding the right audience. However, I am also aware that the potential audience for my work, wherever it is, is deeply niche, and any fantasies I have of speaking to a larger human truth of being alive that are universally resonant will never come to be. Pop culture tells me to embrace being a weirdo, but then we all made fun of Jughead when he did exactly that.

Complete sidebar, but surely, that speech was meant to be tongue-in-cheek, right? Everyone decided it was funnier if Riverdale wasn’t in on the joke because a meme isn’t as good if it’s on purpose, but like… pretty sure they knew exactly what they were doing… anyway…

So here I am, right? Baring my soul as much as I feel I can pseudo-publicaly, and… crickets. I was certainly no fandom celebrity in the olden days, but people engaged with my work, and talked about it, and liked it. I produced; they consumed. It feels good when people like your work. It feels bad when they don’t. It feels even worse when you decide to let that go to your head, start cutting chunks out of yourself under the misguided assumption that people are interested, and not only are they not interested, but now I have pieces of myself missing with nothing to show for it. Come This Here July was maybe the most personal thing I’ve ever written. I’d like to be clear; no one owes me engagement just because of that fact. It was more the unpleasant realization that maybe I really am alone in how I feel. Maybe the facets of human experience I explored in that narrative don’t resonate with others near as much as I originally thought. I’ve talked before about how one of the few ways I can connect with people is through my writing, but that’s dependent on what I create being of interest or relevant to them at all. Connections are two way streets. If no one’s on the other end, it’s not going to happen. And then I’m left standing on my own, like a fool, ass in full view.

When I was in fandom, on social media, in a relationship, I could fake my way through my inability to connect with others pretty well. It didn’t matter that none of those things were good for me; they still gave me the tools to bury this significant personal deficiency instead of ever meaningfully addressing it. And now I have none of those things, and no apparent ability to patch this hole in my personhood, and I’m going to level with you with a bald, semi-mortifying admission; I am so, so fucking lonely as a result.

I did it to myself. I literally wrote myself into a corner. I made sure so thoroughly that people liked what I produced, with no regard for who I am. I remember the days on tumblr of people preaching that You Are Enough Come As You Are. But I wasn’t. And I’m not. Everywhere I go I lead with what I can offer. What I can produce. The content I can create. Can I be the nicest? Or the most amenable? Or the most competent or conflict-averse? Can I be a listening ear? What can I be for you? What can I give you? Or make you? Or create for you? Because whatever I actually am underneath all that fluff is nothing. The person I am, my “true self” as much as such a thing exists, which honestly I don’t think is much at all, is nothing. Because I never worked on her. It was never about her.

It’s actually the perfect internal tension for a character, one who is deeply lonely, but also doesn’t like people, and people don’t like her. And this is also the perfect example of what I do, and why I will never be enough on my own— because I can always create something better, more interesting, more entertaining, more everything. I can always do it better in my head. I can always do it better because it’s not about me. I can always do it better because the world in my head, while touching every part of me, simultaneously doesn’t affect me at all. What I have to offer as a real living breathing human person completely separate from my ability to create is not an impressive list. In real life, with the people closest to me, I’m difficult, and persnickety, and moody, and morose, and melancholy, and hypocritical, and depressed, and anxious, and quiet, and flippant, and sarcastic, and high strung, and you know what? The maxim rings true. I am weird. I’m a weirdo. I even wear hats a lot.

I don’t really know how to exist without producing content. I can’t conceive of a world where coming as I am is enough. Where just existing is enough. And, unfortunately, my experiences, both online and in the real world, seem to confirm this belief. People consumed my content. People will not consume my personality. And it’s not even like I want them to. Maybe I don’t know what I want them to do. Maybe it all circles back to the apparent axiom of my life that happiness is not a possibility for me, that fun and enjoyment are not emotions that are accessible to me… ever, really. And how could I possibly know what I want, or what I want from others, if the act of ‘wanting’ feels so deeply alien to me?

Do I really want people to like me? Because I don’t like them. Do I really want to like other people? Because most of the time, they exhaust or annoy me. Do I really want to publish a book, when it likely means shelving what I actually want to write about? Would I even want to publish a book where I had free creative reign when no one would ever read it? I swear I want a house, sometimes it’s the only thing I can really hold onto in terms of a concrete ‘want’ in my life… but do I really? Once I actually get a house, and the dream is realized, and I realize it is not, in fact, a dream, but just a house, exciting, but still reality, and something I have to wake up for every day… do I really? Do I really want that snack, when I know it’s going to make my stomach hurt? Do I want to take that sleeping pill, that will help me fall asleep after weeks of not being able to, but also make me feel hungover and shitty all day tomorrow? What about going back to weed or alcohol or hell, taking up gambling, anything to help me power through? Well, no, because I swear I want a house and all of those things will drain my bank account, which I need to get the house I so desperately want. I swear I want friends. And a wife. And a job I love. And maybe a pet, somewhere down the line. And people who love not just what I create, but me, too.

At the same time, I don’t know if I want anything at all. In my free time, I think, what do I want to do? And I don’t have an answer, really. I have to do something, because I’m sentient. But most of the time, it comes down to what I should do, or have to do. Or whatever will pass the time. More importantly, though, wanting things is a bad idea. Because if I want something, something real, and scary, and meaningful, and it doesn’t work out, you know, kind of like trying to get a novel published, well, then I’m left standing on my own, like a fool, ass in full view.

Part of the power of writing, and sorry, because this is obvious, but it’s that you can do whatever you want. You can write that one-in-a-million or never-gonna-happen scenario of Carolyn Mary Miller and Dorothy Mildred Francis falling in love despite the odds, despite Carolyn’s suicidal tendencies, despite Dorothy’s bad personality, despite everything, and still, they stay together because I say they do. It’s kind of universally accepted that playing God is a bad idea, but, like, that’s what writers do. I can come up with a million justifications and re-framings to make something bad something good, or something impossible, possible. If I was more well adjusted, it probably wouldn’t matter, but I’m not, so that means when my real life isn’t looking so hot, I can just write myself out of it. Doesn’t change anything materially. It’s just a band-aid. It’s a weird ass coping mechanism, and one I doubt can be CBT’d out of.

This blog post is content. I feel pressure to keep the few readers I have, and to keep readers, you need to produce content. I pay for this site. It’s not a crazy amount of money, but I still need to be able to justify the expense to myself when otherwise I’m pinching the majority of my pennies— I’m planning on buying a house, didn’t you know, because I want one so bad! I am, in a way, monetizing my struggles. But I’m also reaching out. But I’m also not, because I don’t make any money from this, and I feel conflicted about posting this type of… content… at all, especially because I have to weigh what type of posts do better than others, even when the numbers are so low it feels like it doesn’t matter at all, except it does, because if I ever manage to make any money writing or producing content or being sad publicly online, well, isn’t that all just going right into the house fund, which I want, and am saving for, and probably will fix all my problems once I finally get it, and finally, I feel, as I so often do when I feel any emotion at all, like I’m showing my whole, entire ass.

It is so weird, when you think about it, how we’re expected to package ourselves up online. There are expectations in the real world, of course, of who and how you should be. Online, though, it just gets even weirder. And being a person, but one who mostly learned how to be one online, feels kind of like a dog that’s been raised by a cat. Like, I kind of mostly get it? If you saw me from a distance, you’d be like, yeah, that tracks. But up close, and for any extended period of time, the disconnect becomes obvious. The fact that I’m just not quite all there registers. Doors and windows shutter on both sides. And then we part ways, and I imagine another world where the conversation continued, and we became best friends, and embarked on adventures together, and I was funny, and enjoyable to be around, and open, and likable, and lovable. And over and over, that doesn’t happen for me, and it can only not-happen so many times, I can only fail at hail-and-well-met-ing so many times before it does begin to weigh on me. I can only reach out, and have my hand slapped away, or ignored, or politely rebuked, or choose to drop it myself, before I’m reduced to crying it out in my car on my daily commute, as if being intensely sad will somehow make it happen faster, or fix me, or make me better at all.

From eighteen to twenty-eight, I could probably count on two hands the amount of times I cried. Not because I was so happy and had no reason to; more because I was nothing at all. The last year and change forcing me to become something instead of nothing has not been easy. The search for substance, and opinion, and backbone, and desire, has been almost entirely composed of steps backward. I’m so tripped up and tired and lonely and sick of this world and everyone in it, while also begging them to spare me a glance and I… don’t know what to do about it. I don’t know how to reconcile this. I guess for as long as I’m willing to pay it, I have the slight comfort of this blog to vent, or parse, or lecture, or whine. I have the grace of a solo commute to cry on. And word docs to play around in. And other stories in my mind to retreat to.

Years and years of being high-functioning online has taught me that I am not allowed to post something so maudlin without also including some kind of PSA about self-care or therapy or medication or [insert additional overbearing and overzealous generic wellness advice here]. I don’t have any to offer. I don’t even have a joke or some rueful mirth in the hopper. I am simply tired. I am disappointed that nothing has moved for me, writing-career-wise. I am sad that the most people cared about what I had to offer was when I was working from someone else’s IP, and I am sad that I care about what others think at all. I feel ashamed and stressed about the fact that I am trying to monetize so many parts of my life. I am struggling to come to terms with the fact that I am the way I am, and that is unlikely to change, and yet, at the same time, I don’t seem to have any idea of who I am at all.

I am lonely and sad. The best I can do at this time is say that if you read this far, you probably share at least some of my feelings. Staggered as it is, meager as it is, it’s two people, feeling similarly, on either end of what could conceivably be called a connection. It’s not much. But it’s not nothing.

word count

According to my ao3 settings, since I joined in 2013, I have posted a total of 1,529,923 words. Depending on the veracity of my sources, this is 500,000 words north of the combined word total of the Harry Potter series, 200,000 words south of the current word count of A Song of Ice and Fire series, 1,000,000 words more than the Twilight series, 15 times more words than Anne of Green Gables, and 30,000 times the word count of The Great Gatsby. Approximately.

Does that help? No, not at all?

2013 was 13 years ago. Averaged out, I’ve produced 115,000 words a year since then. This averages out to 9500 words a month, which averages out to 315 words a day. Approximately.

Does that help? Actually, it might.

Up to “might” at the end of the last sentence, this blog post is 127 words. A “standard” paragraph is approximately 100-200 words long. So, three-ish paragraphs a day, and you could write a full novel and then some in a year.

[Quick disclaimer, I am leaving myself 90-100k of wiggle room for novel two, which was written last year, and is currently in the editing stages but without an ending. It was just easier to use the ao3 total, but even then, adding 100k onto my ao3 total only brings the daily average word count up to (approximately) 337. Minimal difference.]

I was asked at one point to talk about being a “prolific” writer. I understand why it looks that way. Broken all the way down to a daily total of 315 words, though? A little less impressive, but I would hope helpful to anyone who feels like they struggle to get words down on the page. And keep in mind, an average is an average. There are days I write no words at all. There are days I bang out 3000 in no time flat, but let me tell you right now, those are the far end of the spectrum. Most days are like pulling teeth. Most days are a sentence or a few paragraphs and then, somehow, I just cannot continue for one more second. It’s not like I’m making up new words as I write, but still, I am making up the words as I write them. I am creating something from nothing, and that’s hard. It’s hard to create for an extended period of time. I can’t even imagine being pregnant. Nine months of creating without a break. Shudder to think.

Not even to mention that numbers are numbers, but admin is admin. Writing is full of admin; planning, plotting, scheduling, organizing, time management, grammar, syntax, flow, revisions, characterization, themes, and on… and on… and on… I don’t know how much time it takes to write 1.5 million words as the crow flies, but I can certainly tell you that’s not an accurate reflection of how much time it took to craft those 1.5 million words. Pretentious? Sure. But also true. Philosophically and artistically, you could certainly argue the amount of supposed “craft” in many of my works. Doesn’t change how long I spent thinking about/writing/editing/scoping/everything-ing the thing.

If quantity is all you’re going for, well, nothing is stopping you from typing “curtains” 60,000 times over until you have a novel-length document full of curtains. I don’t want to lull you into a false sense of security that if you write 315 words a day for a year, you will automatically have a novel at the end of it. Actually, you’re just going to have a lot more work waiting for you. And then some more. And then some more. And then, if you want to sell it, well, the work actually hasn’t even begun yet, because is it really “work” when you’re not getting paid for it? Up to that point, you were doing a hobby. Now, you’re doing work. And it might not have even been any good.

You could write a story forever, is the thing. You could describe stuff endlessly. You could spin the characters out on more storylines endlessly. You could send them into an alternate universe. You could kill them. You could make them kiss. You could make them criminals, or heroes, or normies, or bakers, or witches, or losers, and then back again. You can just keep telling the story. Quantity is not actually an issue. There is always something to write about. There’s always something you can add to the story (or take away, but that’s for another post).

Writing a story is different than writing prolifically. Writing a story implies you’ve crafted a narrative through a series of escalating plot developments from beginning to end. Writing prolifically means the story should’ve ended 200,000 words ago. This is going to sound rude, because it is, but if you come from the world of fanfiction (like I did, it’s a self-own), then the line between writing a story and writing prolifically is going to be blurry.

In fandom world, you just want to see the guys (because it is almost always guys) kiss. You want them to be happy and hold hands and have sex and many people, people who, to me, are deeply alien, want them to have kids and be a big happy nuclear family, too. Readers want no complexity, they want no difficulties or challenges or obstacles that can’t be resolved with a good speech or, in the more progressive and deeply annoying fics, therapy and medication. They want uncomplicated easy-to-digest romance narratives. Which is basically just regular degular romance, a wildly popular genre across the female demographic, so really, fandom, beyond being almost exclusively m/m, is not really that different than a lot of the normie boring romance that makes it onto booktok.

And actually, I’ve kind of owned myself here, because a lot of those narratives could barely be called such, and yet, there they are, on tables in Indigo and book-shaped and with pages and everything. It’s probably important to remember that a lot (not all, but a lot) of widely read books are… bad. But a good reminder that quantity (of words, of salaries, of royalties…) is not the be all end all.

I think sometimes when people comment on the “amount” I’ve written, they aren’t necessarily commenting on the literal word count. Maybe they think they are. But I suspect when you really drill down on that question, especially if you’re a writer yourself, and you’re interested in and/or enjoy my work, what you’re really asking is how do I keep writing stories. In my head, anyway, that’s the true rub. Because the answer to the mercenary, numbers-only question of “how do you write so much” is simply that I write until the story is done. And as I’ve gotten older and better at writing, my work has grown more complex and layered and interesting, but not always longer. Longer doesn’t mean better, or anything at all, really, save the fact I badly need an editor. You just write until it’s done. Ten pages. Twenty. Five-hundred. My last Wangxian fic in MDZS fandom was 20,000 words long. Hardly a tome. But I hit 20k, and it was done. The story was over, so it was done.

Don’t Worry About It? Well, that was north of 100k. I wrote until it was done. I wrote until the story was over. Same approach as my final Wangxian fic, yet very different word count. Wren’s journey, from a narrative standpoint, reached its conclusion at 110k. I just received a deeply kind comment on it literally today that mentioned how great it would be to have a few one-offs where Wren and Ashley just got to have some romantic fun, and I agree! That would be awesome. At the same time, it’s not necessary. Not from a narrative standpoint. In fact, from a narrative standpoint, it would be useless.

—Which is fine, by the way. I cut my teeth on useless fanfiction. It’s a huge part of how I grew as a writer. Hell, every third literary fiction novel, basically nothing happens. I think—with great fondness—of Come This Here July as a victim of the classic Literary Fiction crime; dense as lead, and not a thing happens. Don’t Worry About It comes close. Novel two? Similar. Even these blog posts. It’s just kind of my thing, apparently. Very human condition of me. Sometimes to the point where I desperately want to plot out a genre caper with rigidly defined plot points full of obvious twists and turns and character archetypes, just to get some semblance of structure under my feet instead of the existential cacophonic muck my writing so often wades through.

Sometimes, I think people just aren’t prepared for the fact that writing is difficult. I talked about this in my previous blog post, but truly, sometimes, it’s just hard, and it’s easy to mistake persistent for prolific. There’s no secret to it, no matter what anyone says. To write, whether it’s a little or a lot, you just have to sit down and do it. Or stand, I guess, if you’re fancy. Think of it like exercise, maybe. A necessary evil, that, once complete, you will never regret having done.

Unlike a number of other writing elements I’ve spoken about on this blog, word count is not really a tool. It’s just a neutral measurement. It doesn’t mean anything other than practice, assuming you’ve hit that number in good faith and didn’t “curtains” your way to the top. I’m now 1.5 million words more experienced than I was thirteen years ago. I certainly wasn’t always thinking of it as learning or practice or experimenting or finding my style, but that’s exactly what I was doing all that time, and I’m better off for it, and just plain better for it.

Forget prolific. Focus on practice. The words count all the same.

Writing advice

For all this blog is, ostensibly, a writing blog, I haven’t written much about how to actually write. For the most part, this has been by design. I’m not a teacher and I’m not a professional writer. I can write about my own work and my relationship to it, but actually giving advice or pretending I can teach you how to write a novel or a novel-length fanfiction is just… not something I am qualified to do. I often give my own very personalized thoughts and opinions on the process of writing, which you are welcome to apply to whatever part of your creative process makes sense for you.

However, what works for me may not (probably won’t) work for you. In fact, much of what works for me may be considered actively terrible advice, so, buyer beware. Beyond the barest, most generic bones of “how to write good” advice, I’m not convinced writing (a story) is even something that can be taught. Writing isn’t the scientific method. There aren’t exactly best practice guidelines to writing, or, if there are, I certainly don’t follow them. In fact, my best piece of writing advice is not to take anyone else’s.

Here’s some anyway:

Don’t have a life

Sounds like I’m being glib, but I’m not. You need a lot of free time to write. Barring everything else that goes along with it (planning, plotting, editing, character work, world building, etc) the actual physical act of typing out 50k+ words takes time. I don’t care how fast you can type. It still takes time. When you’re writing for fun, that usually means you’re writing around a full time job/class/family/social schedule, whereas the writers whose actual job title is “author” have an 8 hour workday of just writing and the business and busywork that comes along with it. If your job title is not “author”, you can’t compete with that.

That being said, if writing is your hobby, then I encourage you to carve out time for it in your schedule like you would anything else you like to do. Oh, you have pottery on Tuesdays? That’s fine. Still six days in the week. You have bowling practice on Friday evenings? Well, firstly, how does it feel to be the coolest person ever? Secondly, no problem. I bet you still find time during the other five days to do other things you enjoy, even if nothing can compare to the ecstasy of bowling. Just like you find time for pottery and bowling and shopping and watching tv and hiking and whatever else you like to do, I know you can find time to write. In my fandom days, I saw women with careers and partners and kids somehow banging out novel-length fics over the course of a few months. I am not those women. I do not know their secrets. But they did do it.

If you ever look out my output and you’re like, “where does she find the time?” Well, now you know. It’s not like I pluck it out of a hat. It’s more the unintended consequence of being a misanthropic loser with no social obligations.

Also, for what it’s worth, I often go weeks at a time without writing anything more extensive than a grocery list.

Resign yourself to a fandom of one

Get excited about your own work. And I don’t mean in an “if you can’t get excited about it, why should anyone else?” way when you’re trying to market your stuff. I mean while you’re writing whatever you’re writing, you need to be invested in it. This will be a bit different if you write fanfiction or original work, but I am speaking strictly about original work here. While writing your own original work, especially if you’re just some rando like me who has no credibility in the mainstream publishing world, you are on your own, my friend. And it’s hard. Especially coming from fandom world where even if you aren’t a well known fanfiction writer, you still have people around you who are super excited about the IP you’re writing about. There’s some emotional padding there. There’s some amount of guidance and support there, even if it’s all through osmosis.

Writing your own original work is an entirely different beast. No one else cares about what you’re up to, unless you already have a built-in audience. Hell, even that’s not a guarantee— I was relatively well-known in Supernatural fandom, less so in MDZS fandom, and still, the numbers on my ao3 speak for themselves. No one’s on ao3 to read your original lesbian erotica/novel/baring of the soul.

How do you combat this? You gotta get excited. You gotta care about your work. I have no idea what real authors do, but my approach so far has been to “fandomize” my original work by constantly daydreaming about my current project. As I mentioned in the previous point, I don’t have a lot going on in my life, so this is fairly easy. Just like I did in ye olden days in fandom, now when I disappear into my head, it’s to consider and play around with and poke and prod at my original fiction.

When I was writing Don’t Worry About It, that’s what was on my mind, almost all the time. Same with Rat on a Horse. Same with Come this here July. Same with my second novel. Even when what I’m thinking about isn’t “canon” or doesn’t end up being the right fit for the story, immersing/waterboarding myself in the narrative is necessary, for me and my process. Good for my non-existent social life? Not so much. But very good for my productivity.

Avoid distractions

Open your current project and start writing. Doesn’t have to be good. Go on, do it. Just write. Word, Docs, typewriter, notepad, doesn’t matter. And don’t spoil yourself by reading the next line until you’re done.

Are you back? That was probably quick. How long did you last before you were not-writing? How long did it take you to grab your phone, or get up for a drink, or Google something real quick? Or check a social media account? Ten minutes? Five? Half of one? If this sounds like I’m being drill sergeant-y, don’t worry, it’s mostly directed at myself. It is so hard to stay on track. It is so fucking difficult to just sit down and do a task for an extended period of time that requires actual brainpower, or even none at all. The endless scroll made us dumb. Maybe I sound like a boomer, but I sound like a boomer who’s right. I can’t even sit down and watch a movie without distractions unless I’m in a movie theater and it’s forced on me. The thing is, our attention is worth money, and the world around us has figured out how to exploit that attention, and now no one can go thirty seconds without checking the little hand computer in our pocket because we might still have a dollar in there we haven’t yet parted ways with.

Fighting against the distraction impulse is difficult. I lose to it all the time. My writing sessions can be extremely short. I’m talking a few sentences in Word and then I bounce, either because I’m not in the mood and writing is hard (common occurrence) or because I’d rather mouthbreath in front of a screen and scroll short form content for a while, blazing new and awful neural pathways with every flick of my finger (also common).

I’m telling you to fight against it. As in, actively fight against it. If you find yourself reaching for your phone: stop! Better yet, don’t have your phone near you when you write. Make sure you have water, you’ve taken your washroom break, you’re comfortable, the room is the right temperature, and whatever else you need to keep yourself on task. Set a timer if you think it will help. The most important thing is that for whatever duration you set, you’re actually writing/staring at your writing and figuring out what comes next the entire time. There are no 911 Google emergencies when you’re writing, no matter what lies you tell yourself. You can always look it up later, even if it’s “necessary”. Unless you are literally experiencing a medical emergency, or your pet is making those tell-tale hurks over the rug, keep writing-and-nothing-else.

This is going to be uncomfortable, by the way. Forcing yourself to do something—anything, not just writing—without a phone distraction can cause literal physical discomfort, or, heaven help me, half an utterly stultifying second of boredom. At least for me, anyway, the hand motion of going to grab my phone is apparently just imprinted on me now. The non-thinking grab-n-unlock. And yes, thank you so much for asking, I feel dead inside every time I allow myself to acknowledge that it just happened.

Maybe I’m alone in this and my obsessive nature in general primes me to fall prey to this kind of insidious business. On the other hand, we touch our phones over 2500 times a day. And that data is from 2016, which was, christ almighty, nine years ago. So maybe I’m actually exactly correct.

Anyway, I try to use my phone less, and rarely succeed. But when I have been able to shuck it, I do notice an increase in my productivity and enjoyment and focus in almost all areas of my life, including writing.

Writing is hard; suck it up

I said in my previous point that sometimes I don’t write because it’s hard. Guess what? That’s a lame excuse. If it were easy, everyone would do it. If it didn’t require practice and dedication to hone your craft, everyone would be a master wordsmith.

When you’re supposed to be writing and you’re not and your only excuse is, “I don’t want to” that’s a lame excuse. Git gud. Sorry, but if it helps, this point really extra applies to me. If I took all the hours I spend complaining about writing and actually spent that time writing, I’d be like, three books further ahead.

It’s hard to create stories. I probably hate writing as much as I love it. It’s a frustrating, exhausting, emotional process. Unless you are literally an author (and if you are, is your agent accepting new clients?), you don’t need to do it if you don’t love it. Seems obvious, but it can be a surprisingly thin line between “this hobby I love sometimes frustrates me, which makes the completed project all the more rewarding” and “this hobby I think I love is actually just weighing me down and making me miserable”.

If my writing feels too easy, it’s probably because I’m not giving it my all. Or because I’m goofing off, or writing something silly, you know? Which has it’s place, but I am talking about “real” writing in this post. I’m talking about creating a piece of art. It’s like the opposite of what you want in a steak. You need to saw and chew your way through it. It should be hard to swallow. That’s how you know it’s good.

Embrace the puzzle

Though it might not always seem like it when you’re reading a well-constructed story, every narrative is subject to the slop of writing. Moving events around, fixing the timeline, fudging the timeline, ignoring the timeline, tightening the seams, ripping them out, patching plot holes, realizing your climax actually isn’t a climax and you need to come up with a whole other one in its stead, standardizing or un-standardizing tone, chapter/section breaks, adjusting dialogue, switching out personality traits, inconsistent worldbuilding, subplots that don’t go anywhere, unexpected detours, unexpected reactions, unexpected plot developments, unforgivable insults, messed up tenses, not-quite-right word choices, on the nose motifs, motifs that are too subtle, crowbarred-in payoffs, reverse engineered themes, and on, and on, and on…

Writing isn’t just one sentence after another. Being good at writing prose is almost an entirely different skillset than writing a whole lot of sentences that somehow tell a cohesive story. It’s an endless puzzle where you’re making up the picture as you go and also the picture is constantly changing, and so are the size of the pieces. Endlessly customizable, endlessly frustrating, there’s technically an end, but also, in a way, you’re never truly done, because you can always try something a different way, and maybe that will be better, or worse, or kind of the same, and no one else will ever know, but YOU will know, and it matters, and you could fuss over it forever and ever and ever and ever... you get it.

Enjoy the fruits of your labour and embrace the fruitlessness of the writing process. It’s the best and worst kind of puzzle.

Ape

What do you like to read and what do you want to write? Are they the same thing? They aren’t for me. Maybe they are for you. Or not. Step one should be to figure out where you fall on this spectrum.

Step two? Sticky finger time. Take everything you like from wherever you like it and start smashing pieces together until they resemble something you like even more; visual art, TV, books, movies, music, comics, colours, that random picture you saw on Pinterest, the feeling in your chest when you watch clothes sway in the breeze on a clothesline, nonsensical and inane conversations overheard in public, that recurring dream you’ve been having since childhood, the singular way the sunlight slants during mid-morning in autumn…

If you come from a fandom background, this will be easy. Fandom primes you to take disparate elements and stick them together with gum and string. My only addendum is to source inspiration from more than one, uh, source. This is the creative part of writing. This is the fun part. What do you like? What themes are you drawn to? Do you like ghosts and magic and witches or do you like dreary post apocalypses or do you like slice of life real-world romantic comedies? Do you like humour in your prose? Or do your characters do all the heavy lifting in dialogue? Do you like tying everything together with a bow or leaving things open-ended? Do you prefer character-focused or setting-focused or plot-focused narratives? You can like anything, and you can like it in combination with anything else. Unless you are literally copying and pasting another writer’s work, I don’t really think plagiarism is a thing so long as you’re doing it in good faith. Though I’m not a court of law; I am speaking from a philosophical and artistic perspective, not a judge’s.

Steal what you like. You can’t do everything yourself. The good news about building an entirely new world in a story is that you have the one under your feet to inspire you. Don’t be shy. Use it! Observe it! Experience it!

Sensory details

Straying toward actually telling you what to write here, which is not really what this post is about, but bear with me. Grab a piece of your own writing. Grab a piece of writing you really love. Take a gander at a few pages. Note the sensory details on the page. Note the nods to sensory details on the page. Ea de parfume vs eau de toilette. Neither is actually wrong, I’m just using this as an example on the wide spectrum of sensory details that can be incorporated into your work. If you’re not into Ray Bradbury engulfing you in autumnal bliss every paragraph, that’s fine. You don’t have to french kiss fall to invoke the feeling of crunchy leaves underfoot. Often, less is more. Letting a reader’s imagination take center stage is more an art than a science. It’s amazing what you can achieve with the art of ‘just a tad’. A whisper. A kiss. Just a lil-itty-bitty inference.

Sight is easy mode. Touch, a little harder. Smell, hearing, and taste, though? Almost guaranteed you’re not taking advantage of them. You should! Excellent and evocative, all of them, when deployed well. Your reader probably is aware of the scent of freshly cut grass (fun fact: I hate the smell of freshly cut grass, especially when it’s wet), but there are other ways you can suggest it without directly saying it. I mean, you can directly say it, too. My point is, there are many ways to bring sensory details into your prose, and I would encourage exploring them.

Maybe you can even begin your journey in this blog post.

Music

I am not a music person. I like music, and have it playing almost constantly when I’m driving or out for a walk, but I am not a music person. I don’t love music for its musicality like I might love a novel for its prose; I love music for pleasant tunes in my ears, and not much more than that. Which is fine. You can’t love everything. Kind of defeats the purpose.

However, I also strongly associate music with writing. I can’t write with music (with audible lyrics) playing. However, during all the times I am not-writing but still thinking about what I am-writing, mainly driving or walking, you bet I use music to help me focus. I can be an obsessive listener, picking a number of songs to burn through in the course of a few months on repeat and then moving on to the next batch. This kind of perfectly works for my writing process; hard, intense, exhausting, annoying, overbearing, and then… onto the next.

The music doesn’t always have to match the tone of the novel exactly. Sometimes, a bit of dissonance is fun. Sometimes, song lyrics on their own sound like a neural net put them together so it doesn’t much matter either way. But sometimes they fit, too. I’m susceptible to all of these; so long as I have a mental association between a song and a piece of work, when I play that song, I think about that work. A lot of this process is not nose to the grindstone nitty gritty writing work, but I do often have breakthroughs while out on walks, listening to my Don’t Worry About It playlist for the 63rd time that week.

For the curious, some examples of songs I will never be able to associate with anything BUT my own work, through nothing more than demented, obsessive persistence and a Spotify subscription:

• Don’t Worry About It: Margaritaville by Jimmy Buffet, Solsbury Hill by Peter Gabriel, Loser by Beck

• out in the garden, there’s things you hid away (MDZS fic): Choke by I DON’T KNOW HOW BUT THEY FOUND ME, Great Vacation by Dirt Poor Robins

• Dean Winchester Beat Sheet (Supernatural fic): All the Pretty Girls by fun., I Want to Break Free by Queen

• Come this here July: That’s Life by Frank Sinatra

• Novel 2: Beyond the Sea by Bobby Darin, Forgotten Souls by Mother Mother, Build me up Buttercup by The Foundations, Motivation by Sum 41

One caveat here: much like I used to do when I was 12 and “writing a story for real this time” where my “writing session” would end with two sentences in 14 pt and spend the rest of the time determining which font to use, don’t lose the forest for the trees. Don’t spend more time on extras like formatting and playlists than actual writing. In fact, I encourage writing in the most dismally boring formatting you possibly can: body text, size 11 or 12, Times New Roman or Calibri, barely even indicate chapter or section breaks. Let the words speak for themselves first.

Physical movement

Body moving make brain moving. It just do. Note I didn’t say “exercise” (though I’ve had success with that in the past as well) but simply physically moving. Just a walk around the block is good. Headphones on, playlist up, fresh air, juices flowing. You are also moving in a car, so, that counts too, though I do think actually moving your limbs wins out.

I wouldn’t suggest super complex movement if you want to exert your brain power on thinking about your writing— no root-heavy hikes or anything involving counting reps. If I’m too focused on not losing my footing and falling off a cliff, then I’m not thinking about my themes or prose or plotting or how to twist the knife just a little more in my protagonist’s gut to really make an impact.

It’s also just good for you. Clear the cobwebs and get some vitamin D, your brain will literally never regret it. Unless you do end up falling off that cliff.

End

All of these items will take time to action. Some of them will be uncomfortable and annoying and inconvenient to action. I’m still working on all of them myself. It is wild that I can be writing and forcibly have to keep my hands on the keyboard so I don’t zombie out, grab my phone, and start going through the endless open-app-close-app-oh-my-god-existence-is-miserable-please-iphone-spare-a-crumb-of-joy rigmarole.

Working on a project/hobby that takes time and consideration and work without the promise of financial or social or artistic payoff (hey, they can’t all be winners, just look at literally all of my original stories) is… intimidating. And scary. And, if and when your stuff flops, or you flop in the making of it, incredibly defeating. You can always give up. You’re an adult. This is a hobby. No one’s making you do it. Don’t put undue pressure on yourself if writing isn’t for you. But, at the same time, remember that something being difficult is not the same thing as something being the wrong fit for you. Especially if you’re new to it. Especially if you live in the present day, which you do, because you’re reading this, where true craftswomanship is not really a thing anymore. The idea that we have to work at something to get better at it, outside of a gym, maybe, feels like a quaint notion from generations gone by. Why waste your time writing or creating anything when AI can do it for you? Why spend your time hunting down the perfect pair of comfortable shoes that will support you for the next twenty years when you can just buy a new pair for $10 on Temu, plus they have glitter? Why do anything at all, when doing nothing is easy?

Patience, passion, and persistence. Writing takes time. Writing takes care. Writing takes… a lot. And honestly? I’m not even sure it’s always worth it. As they say, the juice isn’t always worth the squeeze.

However, like nothing else in my life, I keep finding my way back to it. Maybe it’s Stockholm syndrome. Maybe it’s ego. Maybe it’s because I have nothing better to do. Actually, yeah, it’s definitely all three of those. But I also love it. It serves as a means of personal expression that I am incapable of achieving via any other avenue. Even when no one reads it or likes it or is moved by it. Even when I make typos and bad storytelling decisions and agents pass on my magnum opus. Even when I put off writing a real novel to write little shitty novellas for four months that don’t so much as move the needle as miss it entirely, with room to spare. Even when no one reads my blog. Even when 99.99% of people who read my work only do so because it’s about the fictional men they want to kiss.

Honestly, sometimes I become overwhelmed by how pitiable and even a bit pathetic my whole deal is. And not in a rude or spiteful way, but simply in the way that what I’ve achieved is so very, very far away from where I’d like to be, and where I’ll likely never be. And maybe those feelings coalesce into the least helpful, most grammatically upsetting, and most true piece of writing advice I can give here: I write anyway. I can’t not. AKA:

IF YOU CAN’T NOT, YOU CAN DO!

Back on top in June: Carolyn & Dorothy

The circumstances that led to the writing of Come this here July were as follows:

1) A friend suggested we do a prompt writing challenge. This may not sound too strange from someone who was both in fandom and wrote fanfiction, but I remind you that when I was writing in fandom, I never did anything like that. I was not a “participator” in “community events”. I took prompts back in my Wangxian days like… once. On Twitter. I never did challenges or charity writing or was even good at engaging with anyone else’s writing. I just wrote what I wanted in my little corner and never got any better at the community aspect of fandom. Are alignment charts still a meme? It was very true neutral of me. I think. I never fully understand those.

Also, the prompt that we (the prompt generator) generated was sci-fi. A genre I am both familiar with and also not familiar with at all. Of my own volition, I’ve seen some Star Trek and, not of my own volition, Star Wars. I’ve seen a handful of sci-fi shows like The X-Files and Fringe and a lot of Doctor Who, all in another life when I still watched TV. Supernatural always got classified under sci-fi/fantasy, too, which was hilarious. I haven’t read a lot of sci-fi, though. I’ve lightly dipped my toe in writing it. Technically, I did a treatment for a sci-fi show years ago that I dubbed “Firefly with lesbians”, and even wrote the first two episodes. Haven’t looked at them since then. They’re probably not very good. But the dream was there.

I also didn’t really follow the rest of the prompt at all. We included three words to help shape it, none of which I used, or even remember. I think “copyright” was one, which is immediately great fodder for a sci-fi story, but my bullish sense of Actually I’m Going To Do It My Way kicked in and I didn’t do any of that. Calling Come this here July sci-fi is pretty bold of me. I mean, it is sci-fi. But barely. Little itty bitty squeaky mouse-voice kind of just-slides-in-right-at-the-back type sci-fi.

2) Back in the fall, I read Frog Music by Emma Donoghue and got my feelings hurt.

If you’ve read Frog Music, you will see its DNA in the much less good, polished, and professional Come this here July.

If you haven’t read Frog Music, that’s fine. It’s not Frog Music fanfiction. Just inspired by it. Distant, distant cousins who aren’t blood related, and could legally get married, if Frog Music would ever be willing to lower its standards.

3) I am a big fan of the Fallout (video game) universe. Similar to Fallout, July was originally intended to contain more ray guns and Jetsons-style nuclear-powered cars and Jell-o molds. I listened to a lot of Dean Martin (and, per the title, Frank Sinatra) to keep the mood appropriate. However, because I’m me and I like to write about lesbians homesteading in the woods, that made it a little more difficult to incorporate the incongruously cheerful midcentury Americana (Canadiana) retro-futurism that makes Fallout so unique. I think there’s still a bit of a love letter to Fallout in there, somewhere. You just have to dig a little.

4) My unfortunate brain chemistry. July is about suicide! Probably best to keep the intricacies of my personal connection to that point to a minimum, so I’ll leave it at this: Come this here July ended up being much more than the “Here’s a lark, let’s do a writing prompt challenge together” that I expected. All on my own terms, by the way. I brought this all on myself, ignored the majority of the prompts, and the max word count was supposed to be 15k. Foiled once again by my Actually-I’m-Going-To-Do-It-My-Way-itis.

So, those are my extenuating circumstances that lead to what I think is a very strange, interesting, and endearing (to me) novella. It was a challenging writing exercise, but ultimately rewarding. Some further points of potential interest:

July gave me the opportunity to give into one of my worst instincts as a writer: getting too big for my britches and fucking around with prose in stupid, stupid ways. However, I will defend myself on this point. The schmaltzy, hokey prose only started stupid. The deeper I got into the story and realized it was about something as mawkish and overzealous as being near comically suicidal, the more I realized the prose needed to meet it where it was at. A deep, sad, morose, somber meditation on a character who desperately wants to kill herself, tonally, does not work for me. It’s boring and sad for no reason other than to be boring and sad. Or to stoically romanticize it. I decided my deeply suicidal character was going to have some pep in her step, and by God, I think Carolyn did. Does! She’s definitely probably most likely for sure still alive. Totally. If nothing else, Dorothy is very good at making honey-do and honey-do-me lists.

When you’re someone who has been on the internet for a long time, it feels like formless, arbitrary mental illness is a lifelong condition. However, in the real world, it’s the opposite. Depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, and the like are seen as bumps in the road, not just roads. They are temporary afflictions, often brought on by external circumstances. Maybe the literature is changing now to reflect the tidal wave of formless, arbitrary sadness that appears to plague us all. Or maybe I’m right on the money, and in the offline world, depression is solved with a few months of pills, and then you’re back to business as usual. Leave that to the so-called experts, I suppose.

That being said, I have written a lot of characters who struggle with formless, arbitrary mental illness. It’s an incredibly difficult and interesting topic to write about, because from a clinical, writerly toolkit standpoint, it’s not a very good topic to write about at all. Losing the depression coin toss is not an actionable item. It’s not something that can be resolved— not the way I write it, anyway. Sad, depressed characters are not particularly motivated, which makes moving plots forward challenging. Many of the ways I’ve written around this have been in the form of characters who try very hard to mask their feelings, and as such, overcompensate for their empty insides.

I’ve written before about my complex relationship to high-emotion writing and how eventually, it becomes a bit of a cry wolf situation. I thought of the goofy prose in July acting as sugar would in a pasta sauce— cut the acidity a little, bring balance to the dish. Obviously, I’m biased, but I think it worked. Otherwise, it would have been a miserable reading and writing experience if I had approached it with all due solemnity (think papal conclave), despite the fact that suicide/being suicidal is, y’know, quite a serious problem that should be taken seriously.

I also think Dorothy being so deeply flawed in her response to Carolyn’s miserable guts really helped keep things grounded. A lot of the time, the person on the receiving end of their partner’s mental illness in fanfiction ends up being entirely self-sacrificing, perfect feelings-receptacles who huggle the sadness out of the protagonist with the power of love. Dorothy resenting and maybe even hating Carolyn a little for being suicidal is such a nasty and tantalizing character trait to engage with. I was especially enamored with that, paired with the pulling-teeth nature of how Dorothy looked after Carolyn when she was recovering from her suicide attempt. Dorothy is extremely in love with Carolyn, and the fact that her bad personality fights her on it every step of the way is just a bit delightful, unfortunately.

I am pleased with how complex Carolyn and Dorothy’s relationship ended up being, especially for something novella-length. Also, writing their dialogue was very fun. I had quite an enjoyable time crafting Dorothy’s insults. Something I feel I’ve held onto since I first started writing not only novel-length works, but novel-length works I think aren’t half-bad, is that the characters have to be on somewhat equal footing. It’s not so much that they have to be the same amount of nice to each other, but that they have to be the same amount of cruel, which sounds a bit absurd, but I think it holds water. Hear me out: at the beginning, your sympathies lie almost fully with Carolyn, right? Here’s a fun-loving dyke, flirting, joking, and clowning around a bit to try to soften Dorothy up and help her let loose a little, and in return, Dorothy’s a big old jerk. Yes, it’s part of their courting ritual, but still, a jerk is a jerk. More than that, she occasionally ups her jerkery to real asshole territory and says some pretty nasty things to Carolyn. Or just straight up slaps her. However, once Carolyn’s suicidal inclinations become clearer, and starts putting the screws to Dorothy, and also, oh yeah, Dorothy helps her run away after committing a murder, Carolyn’s high ground starts getting a little shaky. In the end, as far as the narrative is concerned, Dorothy’s coldness and cruelty is balanced out by Carolyn’s realization that her being suicidal is, in its own way, deeply cruel. It’s kind of cathartic. In an uncomfortable way. Balance equals stability. Sugar in the pasta sauce.

The first time I really caught myself on the balance aspect was when I was writing Dean Winchester Beat Sheet six years ago now (yikes!), and I needed a way to “even out” Castiel’s big betrayal at the climax (if you can believe it, the love interest was working with the bad guys the whole time!). And the thing was, Dean didn’t need to do a big climactic betrayal right back to return them to equal footing. Despite being the “better person” of the two of them, there were small moments of unintentional cruelty from Dean dotted throughout the story up to that point by refusing to acknowledge his feelings for Cas and his struggles with his sexual orientation. It’s not the same type of cruelty as Cas’ Act 3 Betrayal, and it doesn’t have to be, as far as I’m concerned. Cruelty looks different person-to-person, story-to-story. Distilled down, my argument is simply that one character cannot be 100% wronged and the other character cannot be 100% the wrongdoer. You can see it in my Wangxian fanfiction as well, and Wangxian are actually a great case study in this principle, as the cruelties they visit upon each other, both in the source material and my derivatives, were quite specific to their characters and dynamic. It was there in Don’t Worry About It, too. Wren could be quite a cruel person, but Ashley, similar to Dean in Beat Sheet, actually, had her cruel (sometimes on purpose, sometimes not) and closeted moments as well.

I hate the structure of July. I hate the NOW - THEN - NOW - THEN - NOW story structure. Hate it in movies, TV, novels, all mediums. However, I understand why it’s so ubiquitous. It allows for expedient storytelling, and also feels a lot less abrupt than it would have had I written this chronologically, my preferred way to construct timelines. The first original work I posted on ao3, baby, give me it, also follows that structure, also because it is short and I needed to get readers on board quickly. A few of my lesbian Wagnxian fics are guilty of this for the same reason. It’s just a bit lazy. My meager defense in July’s case is that it helped frame the murder of William May in such a way that it wasn’t a huge deal to the current narrative, while also still being an incredibly significant plot point/event. I will also say, chronological vs NOW/THEN gets sticky when you consider a chronological timeline with a lot of flashbacks, and I don’t necessarily mean the overbearing italics, but even a paragraph every few pages reminiscing on past events. When does that line start to blur? Either way, it is very likely that were I constructing July as a full length novel, the timeline would have been almost strictly chronological (which is a bit of a headspin, because at first blush, I have NO idea where I would start the story, but the good news is I’m NOT writing it as a full length novel, so, crisis averted).

When I was younger, I wanted to be one of those people who was into old-timey movies and that artsy-grungy-hipster black-and-white-is-better schtick, but it just never schtuck. The problem with old movies is that they’re like, pretty boring. But what I did love about them and wanted to carry over into Come this here July was that electrifying rat-a-tat-tat banter, both in the prose and dialogue, that we don’t see much today. Basically, I wanted to cannibalize the Transatlantic accent and its associated patter, run it through the meat grinder of gritty humanity-is-fucked sci-fi, and spit it out in the laps of two very difficult women who had the misfortune of falling in love with each other. Or fortune. Maybe just for one of them. Maybe depends on the day.

I’ve been victim to my own tiresomely cheeky prose before (there are a few serious offenders from my Supernatural days, and hey, just look at pretty much any post on this blog), but at least in July’s case, it’s semi-warranted. I’ve also grown a lot as a writer since then (no excuses for my current blog), and have expanded my repertoire beyond “look at how many pop culture references I can jam into one story”. Bit of a sidebar: an easy but still quite successful swap for external pop culture references in your work is just… internal references. Doesn’t matter if it’s a real world or fantasy setting, keep your references contained within the borders of your fictional world, and it will feel tighter, more cohesive, and less like the author is constantly elbowing you in the ribs, wiggling her eyebrows, and saying, “Get it? You get it? Funny, right?”

I love Carolyn and I love Dorothy and I love their story. However, I am not sure I could have spent any more time than I already had in their world. In a way, this was a completely boilerplate entry in my bibliography; difficult women in the woods making it work with no one else to cling to but each other, pastoral-leaning (this time with chamber pots), feminist talking points that everyone hates, and “Canadiana” that no one outside of this country’s borders would ever care about, and most people within them would look at me like I had two heads for thinking #bellletstalk is kind of fucked. Though I do think “New Trono” is very funny, thank you so very much to that one commenter who wanted me to write something set in Ontario. Somehow, I don’t think this is what you had in mind. I guess it’s more like Ontario 2.

On the other hand, less boilerplate was spending that much time with a character who can’t wait to kill herself. Lots of my characters are suicidal, and some have even attempted to kill themselves, but Carolyn’s mouthwatering anticipation of her own demise was new to me, and a little… emotionally taxing, to put it lightly. Despite the goofiness! Despite the bastardized Transatlantic accents! If you can believe such a thing!

If you have been following my yellow void exploits at all over the past few months, you may be wondering, hey, weren’t you (me, I) in the middle of editing your (mine, my) second novel? Yes. I created my document for Come this here July on January 21st and finished it on February 13th. That might sound impressive, but I would actually consider it a bit alarming, considering I also work full time. Anyway, I was intrigued by the prompt idea, and a (second) clean palate never hurt anyone during the editing process, and boy, howdy, did Carolyn and Dorothy give me something to momentarily sink my teeth into.

And now, I am admittedly pretty glad to be unsinking my teeth from them. Between them, they have plenty of teeth. My interference is no longer necessary.

Notes:

• Come this here July is available on my ko-fi as a PDF ebook, with the same pay-what-you-want-for-the-sick-cover structure as Don’t Worry About It.

• Also, Rat on a Horse PDF ebook coming soon because I absolutely refuse to give up my chance to use a line of little digital rats in place of the usual three asterisk section break.

• I’m working on epubs. No promises. They’re finicky.

the bigfoot chiro-wellness-alien-5g-windmill-keto connection REVEALED

On the incredibly slight chance you haven’t seen the hit documentary The Bigfoot Alien Connection Revealed, let me break it down for you: bigfoot (species) are not cryptozoological creatures at all, but aliens. As in, extraterrestrial. As in, not-of-planet-earth. And they are among us. What other possible reason could there be for no one having seen one, like, ever?

While talking about sightings, one “bigfoot contactee”, as described by the film, explains that he doesn’t even bring his camera with him anymore when he’s out looking. Sure, he used to feel like the crazy one who had to prove bigfoot’s existence, but now? Now he does it for his own personal experience (putting aside his participation in a film… trying to prove bigfoot’s existence). “No longer afraid of ridicule,” the narrator tells us over B-roll of a relatively crowded bigfoot/supernatural phenomena convention, “people are coming out of the shadows with their contact reports and have formed communities of their shared experiences.”

The Bigfoot Connection Revealed… changed me. Or maybe not changed, but it certainly crystalized my understanding of my own interest in how humans choose, relate to, stumble upon, and/or are born into their belief systems. When I say belief system, I’m talking the highest level of existential admin. I’m talking about the top-level bureaucracy that governs our own existence. The ones that attempt to explain the existence of the Other (here referring to supernatural creatures, aliens, cryptids, ghosts, chakras, energies, auras, pretty much any spiritual or religious concept that is unprovable by the—yes, belief system— we know as science).

One of the interviewees, a paranormal investigator, says, “Is it just that we’ve transposed this process [of alien abduction] to a technology and a language that appeals to us now? People are not talking about fairies the way people talked about some of these same things hundreds of years ago. So maybe just the clothing of the experience has changed to suit our modern age. But the process seems to remain fairly consistent throughout the ages and it results in the same sort of thing. Transformation of consciousness, which affects the body, affects how we think, how we interact with each other; an awakening of what in supernatural terms would be called superpowers.” OK, she went off the rails a little bit at the end there, but the first half of what she said is, as far as I’m concerned, hitting the nail on the head. Unexplainable events, or, similar but different, events that a layperson can’t explain, invites speculation, and often, that speculation takes on a reverent, supernatural quality that results in tight-knit communities like the ones seen in documentaries like The Bigfoot Alien Connection (seriously, watch enough docs like these, and you see some frequent flyers, especially anyone with legit credentials or author/investigator listed as their occupation). It’s not exactly new information that people band together over shared interests, and the more intense/eclectic the interest, the tighter the band. The weirder it is, the more you need support, validation, and re-affirmation from those around you. People caught in MLM schemes need it (why do you think they’re always on Zoom calls hyping each other up?!). Back in the day when Supernatural was still on-air and we were watching season 8 with our hearts in our throats because Dean and Cas were totally in love, guys (!!!), we may as well have been holding hands over a seance table and conjuring up spirits that were definitely real and not just Victorian-era special effects. I mean… people go to church every week. People flock to supernatural phenomena conventions to be around fellow believers. We like in-group (you believe what I believe) but… we also like out-group (what you believe is WRONG).

My (mediocre) understanding of this social phenomenon is that out-groups are actually more important than in-groups. So, as important as having a hand to hold is, as important as the foile a deux (or troi, or quatre…) of it all, it’s just as, if not more important that you have naysayers. Dare I say, the haters have an incredibly important role to play in all this. Like, yes, it was fun that we knew the secret truth: Dean and Cas are in LOVE. But you know what else was fun? When someone said they weren’t. When someone who liked Wincest tried to Wincest it up. Or when some CW exec got dogpiled on twitter about deancas and tweeted the equivalent of “what are you talking about they’re straight”. When there was a villain in that narrative, guess what that made us? How could we define ourselves as the progressive lefties rabid for representation while also just happening to get exactly what we wanted from a fandom perspective without, ugh, ugly old wincest shippers who were probably like, SOMEONE’S MOM, or some FAT CAT in a SUIT at the cw who had never even HEARD of gay people, and the conservatives, and probably Elon Musk for some reason, and all our stupid suburban mothers who didn’t know any better, to measure ourselves against? There’s no correct opinion if there’s no incorrect opinion. If there’s no one around to drag you down, no one else is going to extend a hand to help you back up. If no one argues with you about bigfoot’s existence, you have no reason to spend hours and hours of your life wandering around in the dark like a dolt trying to prove them wrong.

I’d like to make it clear that while I think these beliefs are ridiculous, much in the same way I think believing in god is ridiculous, I don’t think this alone makes these people crazy or unstable or any other unpalatable term that calls their sanity into question. Certainly, there may be comorbidities here— are religious people, fandom-lifers, or people who believe that bigfoot is an alien, or that bigfoot exists at all, regardless of its terrestrial status, more susceptible to certain mental illnesses, or certain proclivities, or certain patterns of behavior? Maybe. Keep in mind, though, I’m also totally batshit, and I don’t believe in any of this junk. So we’re entering a bit of the pot calling the kettle black situation here. Don’t get me wrong, I believe in making fun of these people, but I wouldn’t go so far as shoving them into lockers.

To demonstrate the intriguing devotion to pseudoscience, misinformation, and impeccable lack of critical thinking skills, here’s a clip from Animal Planet’s Finding Bigfoot (2011-2018) that will stay with me till I die:

As far as I’m concerned, my guffaws are obnoxious, but warranted.

Despite the obvious reality TV edit, I’m taking this clip at face value. Doctored as it is, I don’t think the excitement— especially on the part of our hosts— is manufactured. These people spent years making what I assume to be a reasonably high salary at their job of “believing in Bigfoot” and being a superhero to the freaks and weirdos all over the country (and world!) who believe in this stuff. I believe in their belief, but at the same time, I would not be surprised if that belief was… supplemented, shall we say, by the reflection of dollar signs in their eyes. This is not a Bigfoot specific phenomenon, though. Science, religion, technology, MLMs, cults, all the heavy-hitters in the world of utmost devotion, have their true believers, their snake oil salespeople, and, maybe worst of all, the ones who fall somewhere on that spectrum that is not one extreme or the other.

It does not take much in-depth Googling to find a “character sheet” you can fill out for your homemade blorbos. There are tons of options, with varying degrees of depth; favorite color, childhood memories, nicknames, political affiliation, hopes/dreams, wants/needs, fears, sexual orientation, attractiveness, skills, personality traits, etc… etc… etc… Insult incoming, but I can see how these are attractive to people who want to be writers, but aren’t. You should certainly know some of these things about your character— it will depend on the character, the story, and their role in it— but it’s kind of like a Pinterest board, right? Fun to make, pleasing to look at, not much more beyond that. The most important of these details will come naturally in a story— they’ll self-select. I can’t think of a time, beyond fact-checking canon while writing fanfiction, that having a character sheet with little Q&A’s about them would have been helpful. Like almost everyone does in real life, you have to go with what feels right in the moment, even if it doesn’t necessarily fit into the little personality checklist you’ve built for your character. We’re not static beings, and beyond unchangeable facts like eye colour or where we were born, how much or little of anything we are is going to be up in the air depending on the circumstances of the moment.

I’m making fun of character sheets because I’m about to make a case for understanding your character’s belief system, instead. A belief system creates a trickle-down affect. Whatever your character believes about the world and their place in it, the organization of society, our classification of everything, the machinations of the universe—even if they don’t think about it ever, at all— is one of the few things you need to know before setting them off on their narrative journey.

Supernatural was a TV show made by many different people with many different interpretations of the main characters and the main themes of the story. Not only that, but it was on for fifteen years, and often not good. This lead to worldbuilding inconsistencies, confusing character choices, and, well, just a lot of bad writing. I’ll caveat with the fact that “inconsistent characterization” isn’t really a thing in real life. You can feel “not yourself” but like, you do what you do, right? If you make an uncharacteristic choice, you still made it. In fictional worlds, that gets more complicated, because you’re walking the line between “real people are inconsistent” and “narratives demand character growth, which requires characters to be consistent”. I understand this. I find it very intriguing. However, back to my actual point: there were times during Supernatural’s run where a character would say or do something that was like… why? And the answer was: just cause. Which, whatever. News at 11, writers made a silly character choice because they work on a goofy-ass genre TV show that should have been canned years ago. But you know what gave me a banging high in the good old days? Taking those disparate pieces of the character (Dean, it was Dean, and much more rarely, Castiel) and making it all make sense. Why did Dean do this when it didn’t seem to make sense at all? Well, allow me to unfurl my scrolls and you shall see… And making something out of nothing almost always came down to a few unarguable facts about Dean and how he saw the world: no matter how hard you work to even the scales, the world is a cruel and uncaring place, made worthy only by the little guys who keep fighting the good fight, even when they’re going to lose. Not super pithy, but you get the point. As someone who considered herself a Dean Winchester scholar once upon a time, I think you can draw a line between almost anything he’s ever done and that belief system he holds.

Consider Wren (you know Wren, from the book), someone who is not in the protagonist of a bad genre show, but of a literary novel that takes place in an approximation of the real world. She’s not someone who’s had much cause to consider her own belief systems and isn’t particularly interested in investigating them. However, just because she doesn’t spend a lot of time philosophizing doesn’t mean she doesn’t have them. She’s a pessimist: the world is bad, and in an endless, violent power struggle that men consistently dominate. In a way, her journey in the narrative is finally finding a response to that unchangeable belief system, with a shrug and an, “OK, bye then.”

I think it’s more common for characters to have belief systems that are challenged, and then changed, as opposed to my current approach of a character accepting/coming to terms with their current, cynical one. An obvious example would be the anti-social misanthrope who is convinced by the bubbly love interest that there is still good in the world, after all. Or a character who believes strictly in logic and science, only to be confronted by a supernatural event. Belief systems are a very common discussion in the world of “learning to write”. At least in the world I inhabited, back in dinosaur times. It’s funny to consider how, in the end, stories all come back to conflict. Even the conventional approach to belief systems involves conflict— the opposing forces of “I believe X, but current events are challenging my understanding of X”. I am such a hard pessimist in my writing that I rarely write characters doing total U-turns on their belief systems. There’s not a whole lot of “I hate the world” to “I love the world!” pipelines in my writing. In fact, you could say my own cynical belief system prevents me from doing exactly that. I don’t think people can change like that.

This approach to writing also explains why every one of my works worth their salt has at least one discussion that emphasizes the fact that falling in love/finding happiness ultimately fixes nothing, and after the story ends, the characters are still the same people they’ve always been, and will face the same challenges, because while there may be a cure for a physical malady, there’s still no cure that I’m aware of for a difficult personality. The moment they release Ozempic for misanthropic losers with commitment issues, I’m all over it.

Every person is unique and beautiful and special and blah blah blah but also, people, largely, can be grouped under a small number of wide umbrellas, and that holds true for belief systems, too. Logical, spiritual, self-centered, utilitarian, I can enact change, I can’t enact change, facts over feelings, feelings over facts, we are alone in the world, we aren’t alone in the world, you get it. If your character believes in bigfoot, is she more likely to believe her love interest lying to her? If your character is in a pyramid scheme, is she someone without a moral compass who would recruit others for her own financial gain? If your character is a staunch atheist, will her rigid stances on things like astrology being garbage and tarot being absurd push away a potential relationship? Whether you have to state a character’s belief system in a story at all will largely depend on the story. For example, I don’t think Wren’s understanding/stating of her own belief system truly crystalizes until right at the end, when she’s decided to accept that the world is terrible and inescapable, while also carving out the scantest corner of fulfillment she can find. However, you could make cases for either end of the spectrum; a belief system that is trumpeted loud and proud from the start that gets plucked and picked at for the entirety of the narrative, or a much quieter one that never explicitly gets mentioned, but is still a strong driver of character and action. Either way, belief systems are very much the shadowy puppetmaster behind a lot of narratives. It’s just a matter of how much you decide to obfuscate them to meet the needs of your story.

Our worldviews and belief systems are human-created, and as a result, emotion-driven and largely irrational. Doesn’t matter if it’s believing that bigfoot is an alien or that cracking your knuckles causes arthritis or that having your body enter ketosis is healthier than losing weight, like, normally. Considering your characters’ belief systems is an excellent way to approach writing when you want “literary realism” as opposed to a blorbo checkbox. Nothing wrong with the blorbo checkbox— after all, you’re talking to a retired professional Fandom Blorbo Haver. However, I would suggest that if you’re looking to add complexity and contradiction to your characters and their relationships with both themselves and the people and world around them, I think this would prove a good thought exercise.

A thought exercise, I should add, I don’t always participate in. I don’t always practice what I preach, sue me. I can’t say I was thinking intimately about Lily or Rat’s belief systems when I was writing Rat on a Horse. Just as an example.

In Novel Two, though, I have definitely given more thought to it, and I think it’s paying off creatively (no comment on potential commercial value, haha, it’s fine). I know I mentioned in a previous blog post that I focused a lot on my characters’ relationship to class in this one, and letting that trickle down into how they view the world around them and theirs and others’ “rightful” place in it ended up driving a lot of the rewrites and strengthening the emotional narrative. Um, in my opinion, anyway. Kind of makes the comedy vomit early on feel a bit out of place, but tone standardization is a problem for later. I already know it’s not going anywhere, to be honest. If there’s going to be anything in my stories, it’s going to be a rom com dram vom. Batman has the bat signal. I have that.

There is a very interesting divide that The Bigfoot Alien Connection Revealed highlights within its own community: those who believe Bigfoot is of-this-planet, and, of course, our heroes who are right and know that Bigfoot is an alien species. A little unfair, considering the bias is right there in the title, but then again, what are documentaries if not bias machines, well-argued? These are two subgroups in what I would already consider a subsub group of society. Becoming privy to this rather private drama feels equivalent to what someone who only casually watched Supernatural would feel witnessing the collective manic episode everyone (the deancas shippers on tumblr circa 2012) experienced after Dean hugged Cas in season eight, episode two, after they reunited in purgatory. Another unfortunate connection to be drawn is that bigfoot, extraterrestrial or not, is not real. Dean and Castiel, god as my witness, were not romantically involved. You guys… the shit that people believe. Imagine how granular these arguments get, over evidence that exists only in the mind of Schrodinger’s cat. If nothing else, the gems that can be mined from this intensity of… belief systems, I say kindly… are deeply valuable from a writer’s point of view.

Forgive me, a full grown adult, for referencing children’s media, but it’s like the Sorting Hat. You just get flicked into one belief system or another based on a pre-determined set of traits, pledge allegiance to it for no reason other than It’s What You Believe, and then you spend the next however many years leaning into it, cause it’s like, you already bought the color-coordinated scarf. Seems insane. Now consider the amount of adults you know who know exactly which house they’re “in”. Or how many people know their MBTI type. Or any other arbitrary personality test you can get a free version of online. Or sports fans who have “their” team. Or, hell, gay stereotypes a la, “only bisexual people cuff their jeans” and assorted nonsense. As long as there’s an in group and an out group, no matter how silly the item of contention, people will sort and divide themselves into one or the other, and then, as god intended, argue about it to the grave.

The clothing of the experience has changed to suit the modern age, that one interviewee said. And she was right. That’s it. There will always be new belief systems or new ways of engaging with old ones. Maybe more relevant at this point in history, there will always be a new way for snake oil salespeople to target and indoctrinate you into them, maybe out of true-believer-duty, more likely because you have money in your pocket they think would look better in theirs.

From a real world perspective, I have no solution for this besides assuming every single person who even breathes in your direction is trying to sell you something, and your best bet is to preemptively clamp your hands over your ears and sprint in the opposite direction. From a writing perspective, this is a fascinating tool to have in your arsenal when it comes to creating interesting, nuanced, and complex characters.

One final note: if you are someone who partakes in the devil’s lettuce, I highly recommend doing so right before starting up the documentary. It really heightens the viewing experience. Heck, plan a whole Friday night around it. Order pizza. You won’t be disappointed.