book recommendations :)

I decided to take a bit of a breather after last week’s fairly heavy post and write something a little lighter on the heart, but don’t worry, my trademark irreverence will still shine through, grating as ever!

As a kid, I read (and re-read) voraciously. As a teenager, I read fanfiction. As an adult, I read (some of) whatever my instructors told me to read.

Reading for pleasure (beyond fanfiction), was something that I struggled with, and still do to this day. I think there is very strong anecdotal (and I’m sure scientific) evidence for our dwindling attention spans hugely affecting our ability to read. Not that we literally can’t, but that reading is one of the few activities where you entire attention is devoted to that one thing. You can’t read and scroll simultaneously like you can with other common downtime hobbies like watching TV/movies or listening to music.

I’m not a book purist at all— this will be apparent in my recommendations. The people who are “book people” and performatively gasp at dogearing the pages of a mass produced paperback and treat every book as if it’s a sacred text is like, a little much for me. But I do feel like losing my love of reading is indicative of a much larger phenomenon that I’ve been fighting against the past few years, namely falling slave to the endless scroll. Even though I deleted all my social media ages ago, the scroll still has me in its clutches. Youtube shorts, Pinterest, and even lurking on Reddit have caused me to spend endless hours consuming the most inane (or AI-generated) drivel possible. I may not be talking to or engaging with other people, but I am still participating in what I consider to be the increasingly harmful culture of the social media scroll. Technically, I’m reading on Reddit, but at the same time, let’s be real. That doesn’t count. It’s not anti-reading, but it kind of feels like it.

The joke here is that I wrote a book, when it feels like I can barely read one. One of the things I’ve learned since pursuing hobbies in the real world is that like anything else worth having, they require work. That may seem counterintuitive, but it only seems so because the internet and the algorithms within have convinced me that gormless mouthbreathing while the computer tickles the pleasure centers of my brain is the same thing as actively doing something. A few years ago there was that meme about having a smooth brain, referring to someone with a particularly dumb opinion or showing a lack of critical thinking. I’d argue that the thing that caused my brain to be smoothest of all was living my life in such a way that I’m even aware of said meme’s existence.

On and off over the past few years I have tried to read real books again. Fanfiction, while fun, does not qualify as a “real” book. Not only is it amateur fiction helmed by unskilled writers, but it rarely contains the elements you would associate with published novels. There are exceptions to this rule (and lots of published novels suck), but by and large, fic is enjoyable, but does not fall under the category of “book”. This isn’t a bad thing. They’re just different.

I thought if anyone reading this blog has gone through similar struggles to me, and also enjoys my work or my thought processes, may also enjoy knowing what I like to read. This comes with the huge caveat that what I read and what I write are often very different things. I can be very particular (but not necessarily picky, if that makes sense) about my preferences, especially when it comes to genres/topics/themes that are meaningful to me. This is where I would say I tend to embody the concept of if you want something done right, do it yourself. There are lots of personal neuroses tied up in this approach, but if nothing else, at least I try to walk the walk.

Anyway, here are some books I like!

• Tana French’s entire bibliography - if you like detective stories (or mysteries), Ireland, and incredible prose, give her a go. My favorite is the second book in the Dublin Murder Squad series, The Likeness (also one of her few novels with a female protagonist). If I could fully absorb one author’s prose-writing ability, it would be hers. I’ve always felt like my own prose is not particularly strong, so reading prose like Tana French’s is both a breath of fresh air and also very aspirational for me. Despite her elevated literary talent, her work is so unpretentious and human while also offering complex characters and an often unflattering and authentic look into the underpinnings (and underbelly) of Irish culture. She’s one of those authors who is internationally acclaimed but also no one seems to have heard of her. Read her stuff (and don’t watch the TV adaptation of Dublin Murder Squad, it sucks)!!!

• We Sold Our Souls by Grady Hendrix - I’ve read a number of Grady Hendrix’s books, and this is by far my favorite. I love the protagonist and I love that it’s about a metal band and their weird devil music. There’s something about incorporating creepy music into a horror novel that I find very intriguing. Similar to horror movie monsters, the less you see the better. Or in this case, the less you hear. I think this is technically billed as a horror novel, but it’s not very scary. I think what really makes this book memorable for me is how much I fell in love with Kris, the main character, especially because horror protagonists are often so forgettable. WOO KRIS (also, nothing to do with the quality of the writing, but all the various cover art I’ve seen for this kicks ass)

• The Silent Companions by Laura Purcell - not a ton to say about this one beyond thinking it was super creepy, and I love when books are creepy enough to be creepy (I know that sounds like it should be a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how many horror novels aren’t actually scary). I usually don’t care for books that jump around in timelines, but there was something about how neither of the timelines in this book were in the present that really worked for me. Basically, if you want to be creeped out, this is a great choice.

• The Saturday Night Ghost Club by Craig Davidson - one of, if not my favorite book since I got back into reading as an adult. It’s a coming of age story (a genre I rarely pick up in adulthood as, similar to YA, I feel like I’ve aged out of the target demo) and I couldn’t even pin down exactly what about it hit me so hard, but it really resonated with me. I’ve read a number of Craig Davidson’s horror novels written under the pen name Nick Cutter, which I mostly like, but this one was a lot more personal and emotionally hard-hitting (and not really a horror).

• My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh - Do I have to say much about this one? I think it did the rounds pretty thoroughly back when it came out. If you’re a depressed, cynical woman, read this and feel feelings, most of them not good, but definitely self-reflective.

• Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia - This is a horror novel that even my fairly strong stomach found a bit grotesque. It’s a slow burn, but once things get going, they really go.

• Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid - I think this is another one that got a lot of press, so I probably don’t have to say a lot about it beyond the fact that it was a really engaging read. There are scenes in this book that, as someone who really struggles with secondhand embarrassment, made me want to crawl under a rock forever. Which, of course, I mean as a compliment.

• Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton - You ever read the first page of a novel and think, “this author is so much smarter than me I don’t even know if I should keep reading because it would only be insulting to her??” That was the majority of my experience with Birnam Wood. The way this novel skewers well-meaning but ultimately self-centered leftists who fight over split hairs was like… almost too accurate? Like Such a Fun Age, there is one scene in particular that makes me want to shrivel up like a dried out sponge when I think about it (also in a good way). This is also one of the few novels where I don’t mind the multiple character POV as the writing was more than strong enough to carry it. My only negative about Birnam Wood is that I really disliked the ending. I see what Catton was going for, but it just didn’t work for me. It felt like the end to a satire, and while there were absolutely elements of satire in this novel, I thought it did itself a disservice by ending like it did since it had done do much fantastic character work leading up to that. But again, I wouldn’t be surprised if I was just too dumb to get it.

• Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat by Bee Wilson - I’ve really gotten into microhistories (non-fiction books about the history of one specific topic or thing) over the past few years, and I think Consider the Fork is my favorite so far. Learning about how the land and available resources shape food cultures feels like such an obvious conclusion, and yet somehow was also something that had never occurred to me. One of the things I really enjoy about microhistories is how they showcase the cycles of human behavior, as well as how those behaviors are impacted by external factors, which is really well illustrated in Consider the Fork. To be honest, that showcasing can also be really demoralizing and enraging to read, but it’s extremely interesting from a psychological point of view. Other microhistories I would recommend: White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf by Aaron Bobrow-Strain, The Poison Squad: One Chemist's Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century by Deborah Blum, Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween by Lisa Morton, Calling the Spirits: A History of Seances also by Lisa Morton, and, if you feel like you can handle some extremely gruesome descriptions of radiation sickness, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore.

• The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson - I don’t like Mike Flanagan’s work (except for Oculus, which is great, and Hush, which is pretty good) and I didn’t like his adaptation of Hill House. I eventually got around to reading the source material and was blown away. It was a really good novel, and it was extremely lesbian to boot. Like, to the point I was like, how was this allowed?? I know the concept of what actually constitutes homosexual behavior has changed a lot over time, but phew, this one really threw me for a loop. I didn’t realize just how lesbian Hill House was because I just assumed that was added in the Mike Flanagan version in the name of 21st century representation (and like… the way the Hill House adaptation was done is SO weird because the two female characters who have really intense romantic tension are siblings in the adaptation? I haven’t seen any of the other versions of Hill House so I can’t comment on those, but what a bizarre choice by Flanagan, because one of said sisters still is very much a lesbian…), but yeah, no, I am very surprised that Hill House doesn’t get talked about more as an example of early lesbian fiction, regardless of whether it was considered so at the time of publishing or not.

• The September House by Carissa Orlando - I read a lot of haunted house novels (and watch a lot of haunted house movies) because I really like haunted houses. Many of them are generic and unmemorable, and I expected more of the same from The September House… except I ended up really liking it! Another surprise is that novels about mother/daughter relationships are not usually my cup of tea (not for any nefarious reason, I’m just not usually drawn to them), so I enjoyed reading one that resonated with me. It was also a lot funnier than I was expecting, and I tend to be a pretty tough nut to crack when it comes to comedy.

• Where They Wait by Scott Carson - There are probably enough horror novels on this list that you’re like, oh she really likes horror. And you would be correct! But my joke is always that horror doesn’t really like me back. Most horror is crap, but I continue reading the genre because I know there’s diamonds in the rough out there. I’m actually in the middle of a personal challenge where I’m going alphabetically through my local library’s fiction titles (horror doesn’t have its own section, but at least the books have HORROR stickers on the spine) and checking out every horror novel I see that seems remotely in my wheelhouse and I haven’t already read. There have been a number of duds, but Where They Wait was one of the first ones I pulled and I ended up really enjoying it! It’s not perfect— Scott Carson is kind of like Stephen King if he were actually picky about what he wrote (this novel is even set in small town Maine)— but I am a sucker for horror novels that revel in atmosphere, deal with folklore, and have interesting premises, but are also still pretty traditional in execution. Similar to We Sold Our Souls, there are also aural elements at play that clearly I enjoy in my horror fiction. I also read Lost Man’s Lane by Carson which I didn’t like as much (very King-esque/IT-esque coming of age), and am now reading another of his called The Chill which I think will end up being more in line with Where They Wait, and therefore more to my liking.

And… fin! I think this list makes me look like a much more impressive (and wide-ranging) reader than I am. This list has been cultivated from the last half decade or so, so it’s not like this is just from the past month or anything. I used to use Goodreads, but now I keep track of everything I read in a notebook, with a sentence or two review if I feel so inclined. I felt like this was a better way to catalog my thoughts on any given book, as I didn’t have to worry about competing with the other chuckleheads on Goodreads to see who could write the pithiest review (and get the most LIKES! on a BOOK REVIEW WEBSITE! we live in HELL!) So now I can write little notes for myself that are very boring like, “not for me” or “learned a lot” without feeling like I’m somehow letting someone down. Also, reading Goodreads reviews should be investigated for its effectiveness as a torture tactic. Imagining how reviews for Don’t Worry About It would look on Goodreads is incredibly funny and agonizing.

Should I talk about booktok in this post? Probably not. I don’t actually know much about it other than that it exists and is… a lot. But once again I have fantasized about what Don’t Worry About It would look like in the world of booktok. I don’t know if the denizens of booktok know or care about lesbians fucking, it seems to be very Colleen Hoover and Reylo-centric, so maybe it’s best if those streams never cross. But, like, it would be really funny. Imagining Wren’s tits splayed across the #booktok #spicy table at Indigo or Barnes and Noble. Or, like, including it on the “diverse voices” table during pride month.

Okay, post over because now I’m playing the aw-shucks martyr and that’s enough of that. Also, I wrote this entire blog post in one sitting because I was procrastinating doing some more reading. Embarrassing.

Also, I am always taking book recommendations, especially horror or microhistory!! hit me with ya best rec.

on lesbian sex

note: this blog post contains spoilers for chapter 28 of Don’t Worry About It!!!

Sometimes, I struggle with being a woman. Sometimes, I worry I am a woman first and then a person, as in, my personhood gets “womanwashed”. I worry that my entire life is going to be lived through the marginalized experience of being a woman, and maybe, possibly, through an accidental gap in that emotional baggage, I will occasionally view a person with a personality and thoughts and feelings and hobbies and likes and dislikes that are detached from “woman”.

What’s funny about this is I’m not suggesting that women need to be any certain way or have any certain personality to be women. On my good days, I am a woman regardless of what I do. Bad days, other days, many days, I feel that Margaret Atwood quote from a book I’ve never even read down to my bones:

Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy: that you're strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.

In the sex positive world of fandom and the choice feminist world of liberal politics, there is no home for me. I struggle and I worry about being attracted to women. I feel all of the stereotypical things that lesbians feel about being attracted to women; predatory, guilt, hesitance, uncertainty. There is nothing revolutionary about being attracted to the people who have spent their entire lives being told they are supposed to be attractive. What is attraction? Other than a can of worms, I mean. Politics? Science? Biology?

Part of my (unsuccessful) pitch for Don’t Worry About It was its “titillating” nature. And guess what? I felt bad about that, too, despite the fact that lesbians are humans and most humans enjoy sex. Sex sells because culturally, we’re all prudes. You know how it goes. However, I also pitched it as an exploration of lesbian desire. A bit schlocky, maybe, but not incorrect. And a much kinder interpretation of my intentions.

I don’t know what to do when it seems like the line between exploitation of women and an honest, overdue examination of their sexuality grows so thin as to be nonexistent. I don’t know what to do when the majority of people (of women!) would simply say depicting lesbian sex and “owning it” is, in fact, the most feminist act a woman can participate in. That presenting female bodies (already considered commodities) in a sexual manner is empowering and nothing else. I don’t know what to do as a woman who is attracted to women when I think about what it means for women to be attractive.

For fun (and to torture myself) I have often daydreamed about what a film adaptation of Don’t Worry About It would look like, and then I inevitably get to the part where it would be almost impossible to depict it onscreen in a way that feels both honest to the source material while not being disingenuous to its themes. Were it to go all out, like, full frontal, there is still a real woman who would have to play Wren. There is still a woman who would get paid to be on display for all to see, while spending the rest of the narrative wrestling with the concept that as a woman, she is meant only to be consumed, who copes with this by consuming other women in return.

These thoughts were fairly frequent while I was writing Don’t Worry About It, especially during the not insignificant number of sex scenes. Because I really did want to write an exploration of lesbian desire. But also, on a much more primal level, I was invested in writing about lesbians fucking, because it’s hot. In a way, these goals are contradictory. In a way, these goals feel like they cleave my mind in two. In a dark, dirty way that makes me feel very bad inside, I feel like my attraction to women is in competition with my support of womenkind.

In a way, it is not only Wren who is the one in the chair.

I understand why a lot of women have embraced the idea that attractiveness = empowerment. It is really hard to spend your whole life being told to be hot, then suddenly feminism swoops in and says, actually, you don’t have to be hot! Your attractiveness does not define your personhood! And then companies and marketing departments swoop in to capitalize on that, switching their mission statement from “this makeup/clothing/skincare/whatever makes you fuckable” to “this makeup/clothing/skincare/whatever empowers you”, and then, just like that, you can be fuckable and empowered. The best of both worlds, and the only thing that had to change was a slogan.

You might be thinking this applies to normies only, but have no fear, I was there when the tumblr crowd decided the new cool thing was to be the “hottest person in the room”. And maybe tumblr’s version of “hottest person in the room” is more anti-establishment than normie world. And the “queer” (quotes used because I personally do not use this term) version of “hottest person in the room” is similar to that. Trust me, as someone who has recently been introduced to the absolute horrors of online dating (don’t do it don’t do it don’t do it) being deeply hot is still deeply engrained in womankind’s collective consciousness.

Cause at the end of the day, regardless of sexual orientation, you’re a woman, and you need to be fuckable.

And that makes it really hard to write sex scenes where women fuck each other without feeling like I am contributing to my own subjugation. A woman with a man inside watching a woman. Turning any women who read it into voyeurs, participating in the evergreen watching of women, judging them, and their attractiveness, and their hotness, and their fuckability. An endless cycle from which there is no escape, let alone an opportunity to actually discuss or explore women’s desires in a way that doesn’t, in some shape or form, circle back to how much they are desired by others, even themselves, or the man inside themselves, forever watching.

The fandom scales started to fall from my eyes when I realized that spending the majority of my time in that environment meant endless discussing, analyzing, and fantasizing in some form or another about men. Not just men, but gay men, fully eliminating women from the equation. In a way, it’s just so much fucking safer. As a woman and a lesbian, I could pretty well erase myself from existence by proxy. And sure, we all played the game of including da ladies, whether it was through performatively stanning more-than-tertiary female characters or including them as (friendly or otherwise) exes, friends, and family, which is all well and good. But they existed, as always, to fill in whatever empty space the male leads left. So how easy was it for me to convince myself I was being normal about women and also being normal about my sexuality while simultaneously erasing both from my life.

(Sidebar: i know there are small pockets here and there of weirdo gay women online who hungrily and exclusively consume the tiny sliver of lesbian content out there/stan for random lesbian rarepairs, and honestly more power to you).

I’m sure there are women out there who do not carry this psychological weight in the same way I do. I envy them. I ignored the Woman anvil hanging over my head for a long time before the rope got cut and it squished me like a cartoon character. For a long time, I wouldn’t and couldn’t admit that I shared in the same oppression as every other woman. I wouldn’t and couldn’t articulate why girl power, body positivity, and choice feminism, even when obviously well-intentioned, never sat quite right with me. I pretended like every time I passed a reflective surface, I (the man inside) didn’t watch myself in it. The idea that my life will always suck just a little bit more because I’m a woman is intolerable and axiomatic.

I tried to capture this amorphous feeling in Don’t Worry About It, especially in the sex scenes, and especially in the sex scene in the most recently posted chapter (28). The strap sucking scene lived in my head for a long time before I got to this point in the narrative. I also changed my mind multiple times on how graphic to make it, and how far Wren and Ashley should go (for the sake of the narrative or my anxieties above? Sometimes it feels impossible to decode). For a while, I was convinced the furthest I could take it without it feeling needlessly gratuitous was the almost. I’m pretty sure by the time I got to this point, I had underestimated just how much Wren and Ashley want to fuck. It’s important for themes to drive characters, but my personal philosophy is that it’s even more important for characters to drive narrative.

Bloviating aside, navel-gazing aside, the narrative won. Wren has a lot of sex and Wren and Ashley have had a lot of almost-sex. Speaking of cleaving my mind in two, it is very strange to think all of the above, while also understanding that the story takes precedence over everything. This is a novel, not a pulpit. I’m not here to convert you, preach to you, or convince you of anything other than the fact that Don’t Worry About It is good. Everything else beyond writing a good story, no matter how worthy of discussion, takes a back seat. The narrative doesn’t grind to a halt because I feel conflicted about Wren getting her pussy out.

I think it’s fairly obvious at this point that Don’t Worry has things to say and points to make. But it’s not only about those things and points. It’s about Wren. Everything else is texture that enriches the story. Writers will always leave fingerprints on their stories— that’s just the nature of art, for good and for ill. There are pieces of me, conflicted as they are, sprinkled throughout Don’t Worry About It, for good and for ill. But Wren and her heart and her brain and her pussy and her autonomy are the center of the story. She certainly isn’t doing a ton of handwringing about wanting to fuck other women… a little. But not a lot.

Don’t Worry, in my mind, occupies a strange space between more on-the-nose feminist works that are blatantly about being a woman and character driven literary fiction that has less to say about external politics than internal ones. I think that’s fairly emblematic of my struggle described above— what feels like the forever tug-of-war between facets of my mind, of my genre, of my identity and my politics, of my writing and my characters and my themes. Part of being a writer is meshing all of these things. And I hope that as I gain experience both in writing and in life, that divide I feel between my work and my self can finally be bridged.

In the meantime, maybe just install some monkey bars or like, a human-sized t-shirt cannon?

stupid opinions about the cw’s supernatural that would’ve gotten me ostracized in 2017

I am (was) a relatively well-known writer in the Supernatural fandom for many years. As a result, I unfortunately have cultivated a number of opinions about Supernatural, many of which I have often joked would get me utterly obliterated by the same audience that currently enjoys my Supernatural fanfiction. If you started following along later in the timeline during my MDZS phase, this blog post will mean absolutely nothing to you. Because I’m not in fandom anymore and have done a lot of work to become less terminally online and more terminally normal (something I would wholeheartedly recommend and is still a work in progress for me), I feel little trepidation about posting my explosive fandom opinions on a blog that three people read.

Intro paragraph complete. Let’s go!

• My favorite season is season 3

This is an unpopular opinion, though not a hugely offensive one. I like that it’s Dean-centric, I like the hopelessness that pervades the season as Dean’s deal comes due and they seem no closer to a solution, I like that ultimately there is no solution and Dean goes to hell, regardless of the fact that he did only because of the writers strike of 2007. There are a number of great episodes in this season (Bad Day at Black Rock, A Very Supernatural Christmas, Mystery Spot, Jus in Bello, Ghostfacers), many of which feature what I used to refer to as the patented emotional whiplash, where the majority of the episode is funny, and then, boom! What if it ended on a very sad note :) Also, I love Bela. She is one of the many complex and interesting and funny and tragic female characters Supernatural created over the years, only to panic and kneejerk kill them off because they didn’t know what else to do with them, and boy, did they do that all the way to the bitter end of the series!

• Despite its flaws, the initial five season arc was by far the most successful

This is my mainstream Supernatural opinion that the fandom itself largely hates. I’m not sure how much this idea still pervades the fandom world, but there was a period of time where people were convinced Supernatural should only be about Sam and Dean going to the beach and hanging out. Fandom hated conflict. The big refrain at the time were variations on, “Why can’t they just be happy!” Of course, this is a completely warped understanding of how narrative works— conflict drives narrative. This isn’t me defending Supernatural’s many, many writing flaws or bonehead story decisions. Conflict exists in many forms, and Supernatural almost always took the easiest, least interesting road when it came to resolving it. They often presented interesting themes and ideas, only to completely drop those threads an episode or two later because, y’know, complexity is hard.

I know that seems like an unrelated tangent, but hear me out: the first five seasons had a narrative and an overarching conflict that was (relatively) neatly resolved when the show was originally supposed to end. The seasons after that took the idea of an overarching conflict, but most of them were singularly contained seasons with one big bad and one resolution/cliffhanger ending that springboarded into the next season. Not only that, but the whole reason this narrative exists in the first place is resolved in the five season arc. When the show continues to get stacked on top of that, you’re left with an ever taller jenga tower with less and less foundational support as seasons go on. This is how life works, but it’s not how long-form content should work. Life should not go on after the driving conflict of the narrative has been resolved. It does not get better.

At the end of season 5, ignoring the parts I don’t like or that were shoehorned in because they got renewed last minute, the emotional arcs of the past five seasons have also been resolved. The mystery of the Winchester family has been solved and the revenge taken. Sam has finally found agency after years of being emotionally smothered by his brother and his future stripped away from him by external factors that came into play when he was only a baby. Dean, parentified all his life and having bent himself around Sam as a result of his mother’s death and his father’s neglect, has finally accepted that he is his own person, with his own life to live, and that all those years spent under his father’s shadow (literally carrying John’s weight on his shoulders in the form of his hand me down leather jacket!!!) may not have been the badge of honor he always pretended it was.

Maybe I just wasn’t paying attention, but there isn’t an equivalent emotional payoff in any future seasons that wasn’t a result of fandom supplementing and cherry picking (no judgement, I did it too! what were we supposed to do…) There are parts of post-season 5 Supernatural that are good, of course, 99% of them revolving around Dean or Dean/Cas, 0.5% revolving around bringing Mary back, and 0.5% miscellaneous (Sam fighting off clowns in Plucky Pennywhistle’s and them exploding in a cloud of glitter all over him… Dean’s slinky… for example…)

But it’s just not really cohesive, which, like, is the goal for storytelling.

• Cas got utterly nerfed as a character circa psych ward arc in season 7 and never recovered aka cas and the fucking bees

Years ago, this opinion would have gotten me crucified online because the corner of fandom I existed in was normal. This is also a controversial opinion because this implies Cas was nerfed for longer than he wasn’t, and unfortunately, this means I lose and the Cas/bees people win. Big L for me. Big L for deancas. Not saying characters can’t have layers, but it’s like Cas went through his rawr xD phase and the writers never let him forget it. Actually, this happened to Lucifer in season 7 too. Originally he was acting so zany because he was a figment of Sam’s imagination, but when they brought him back (🤮) in later seasons he was also, like, super zany?? which didn’t make any sense. alas, such were the later seasons of Supernatural.

• Jack ruined everything!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Lots of things made twilight years Supernatural bad. Jack made it nigh-unwatchable, for so many reasons. My pettiest grievance was how readily fandom became obsessed with him. Say something to me about nougat. I dare you.

My more substantial grievances are twofold: misogyny and thematic.

Misogyny is an easy finger to point. First, Kelly Kline. So much to unpack there. Then, for seasons, Dean (and Sam, to a lesser extent), served as something of a mentor for troubled teenage girls (Krissy, Claire, and others that I can’t remember because I am already deep in the memory weeds here, it’s been a while). This was how the writers felt most comfortable representing their mostly-female fanbase onscreen, because they just could not have adult female characters exist around Sam or Dean without some sort of romantic tension (Charlie excluded for lesbian reasons, obviously, but she met the same fate as every other female character, so, it evens out) or as a motherly figure. Supernatural, despite it’s surprising ability to create interesting female characters over and over, just could never be normal about women all the way. Neither can the world, so I suppose that’s a point in the art imitating life column.

Thematically, what drove me bonkers about Jack was how he changed the main thematic thrust of the show. At its loosest interpretation, Supernatural is a show about family (even as I type this, I hear my second year fiction instructor asking, “what about family? family isn’t a theme on it’s own. what’s the aboutness?” but this isn’t about her!!). Supernatural had a complex relationship with the concept of a family— sometimes being blood related was the most important thing, sometimes choosing your family was the most important, very oxymoronic of them. Either way, what Supernatural mostly dealt with was the family unit of Sam and Dean, and the subsequent, concentric circles reverberating out from that core duo. You could argue Cas eventually got enfolded into that center circle, but it’s tenuous at best (see: the finale, and don’t worry, we’ll GET to the finale on this list). Then, later and much to my chagrin, came Jack.

Circling back to the first sentence of the last paragraph, Jack changed the thematic thrust of the show from being about the complexities of the Winchester family unit to being about, what if a toddler/manchild/wunkerkid had three dads with conflicting opinions on how to raise him? My preferred way of referring to the situation was Dean, Cas, Sam, and their one-third son. So basically, the show turned into a show about parenting. And boy, oh boy, did I hate that! I never signed up for a show about parenting god-toddlers (goddlers?). The petty part of this complaint was I also hated how much discussion this generated in deancas fandom about Dean and Cas with Their Son Jack. Like, I just want deancas content! Get that baby out of here!

I don’t have very strong maternal instincts.

I don’t have any confirmation, but I suspect this change was meant to reflect the growing families of the three stars of the show. It’s not an inherently bad change, I suppose, but it’s about the worst possible change they could have made for me and my tastes, specifically. It also didn’t help that it created a weirdly nuclear family dynamic when before that, the blurred lines of familial relationships was actually a pretty interesting concept, how Dean and Sam were siblings, but also parent and child (Dean had to be a mother and a father 🥺🥺🥺) and then Mary came back and whew, blew the whole lid off everything. Or, well, she would’ve if the writers weren’t COWARDS.

(sidebar: i always told myself if i were to ever write spn fic again ((i will not be doing that)) i would write about dean and mary and how what they need most from each other is what they can never possibly give. dean is a grown man who wants his mommy and mary is a grown woman who wants her baby and they can never be those things to each other again! waghhh!!!!)

A lot of my hatred of Jack really is just personal taste. Oh well, it’s my personal blog so that’s what you get.

• The finale

Three bad covers of Carry on Wayward Son, and for what?

It’s common for series finales to look back to their pilots for a full circle moment at the end. That’s like, writing 101. I just don’t know if I’ve ever seen it done as hamfistedly as I did in the Supernatural finale. I understand it was filmed at a super weird time in the world where there were physical distancing guidelines in place and actors couldn’t cross borders and so on but at the same time like… it was really bad! Filming for TV is known to be a by-the-seat-of-your-pants endeavor that simultaneously takes months and months to prepare for, meaning you have to be ready to adjust on the fly. Like, that’s part of your job as a creative, pandemic or not. So it was just so strange to me (and also, because it was Supernatural, not strange at all) how hard they dropped the ball. Must we talk about Sam’s blurry wife, Sam’s child with his name stitched onto his overalls, Sam’s wig and old man makeup? Must we talk about how the finale ignored every single episode except the pilot? There was no, “look how far we’ve come” moment, it was more like, “i tried pressing the gas but forgot to shift out of park”.

So weird. My theory is for the last few seasons the Supernatural writers room was dipping into the communal Riverdale psychedelics stash.

• Cas’ love confession was bad and never should have happened

Ooh, here’s the biggie. the one I think would’ve gotten any cred I had managed to hang onto fully revoked had I stayed in fandom.

Listen. I rode the same high as everyone else on November 5th, 2020. Because Castiel confessed his love to Dean Winchester, and also because he did it on Jiang Cheng’s birthday, whose achievements had once again been overshadowed by gay people.

It’s funny because now that I’m on the outside looking in, I’m like, girl… chill. But at the time (and even then, I was much more removed from Supernatural fandom than I had been in the past) I was like, ascending. I was like, is this what happiness feels like?

Whatever I was feeling ended up being short-lived. Amazingly, I was one of the believers. I was like, they would never write a one-sided love confession two episodes before the end of the series without giving the receiving party a chance to respond and then just… never mention it again, right? RIGHT?!

🥲

So here’s the thing. I am aware that the writer of this episode is a gay man who had been gunning for something in this vein for some time. Much hay was made about the brave gay man who had fought for his right to write a half-baked and one sided love confession that the show frankly seemed embarrassed about and did everything in its power to pretend never happened the moment it was over. If this is true and it was really important to him that this got into the final cut, then, well, more power to him.

Less power to me, however, because it was bad. I’m not HAPPY about it being bad. It took me time to even admit to myself that it was bad, which was kind of mortifying in and of itself, to have been invested in something for so long, only to be given half of it, and deeply reluctantly at that. I was thinking, that’s really what you think of me, Supernatural? Sticking with you for all this time (okay, well, I dipped for a while because I hated Jack so much, sue me, I caught up), and my reward is a love confession so deeply cringeworthy and painful to watch (especially with hindsight knowing nothing would come of it) that the camera is practically recoiling from the secondhand embarrassment? Something so brutal to behold that I don’t need to see with my eyes to know that at least half the people on set are awkwardly clearing their throats during every take?

Having been a fan of Supernatural, the show that always took the path of least resistance, the show that had a storied history of sneering at its biggest fans (though mostly in the earlier seasons, and not always without merit), the show that, over and over, was allowed to be deeply mediocre 95% of the time, maybe I really did deserve it for thinking they could give me more. What’s one last disappointment for the road?

Something that really got me about the love confession? The utterly uncritical way that fandom received it. Just heap some more mortification onto the already overflowing pile. I wanted to scream, WHY ARE YOU GUYS ACCEPTING CRUMBS?! I felt like I was going crazy. The overzealous shapes fandom would twist itself into over the smallest perceived slights, and yet, this utterly milquetoast offering of solidarity (that, i stress, resulted in nothing!! there was no conclusion to this!!) was something to celebrate? A weirdly intense moment of disillusion with fandom culture as a whole.

Oh, I guess this also segues nicely into my opinion that deancas isn’t canon. Which people were saying in the wake of the confession. And was so weird. And still is weird. I don’t know if people are still saying it, but if they are, they are (unfortunately) incorrect. Like, it literally didn’t happen!

So, those are my big Supernatural opinions. There might have been more, but I don’t remember them.

A note to end on: some of the real life drama surrounding Supernatural remains, to this day, some of the funniest shit I’ve ever seen. I will never forgot Jared Padalecki’s insane tweets or the J2 divorce. The show sucked, but Misha Collins getting lost in the sauce at a convention and implying he’s bisexual then having to go on record later and come out as straight? That’s evergreen.

“where do you get your ideas from?” aka the creative process

The writing community, known for many things including rampant pretension, deep earnestness, and undeserved self-importance, also apparently hates being asked, “Where do you get your ideas?”. I feel like I’ve read multiple author’s notes, afterwards, forewards, interviews, etc, where a writer opines the plebs, once again, asking gormlessly, “but like, how’d ya think it up?”

When I told my parents I was writing a novel (terrible terrible idea, do not do this unless the ink on your publishing contract is already dry, extremely embarrassing otherwise), they both commented, multiple times, on their surprise that their daughter could produce a novel. Not because they thought I lacked the skill, but because neither of them are writers by trade, and in fact, both seem to view it as some sort of secret alien skill that is completely unknowable to them. My mom has declared, multiple times, “I wouldn’t even know how to start!”

Plebs 🙄

Anyway. I’m with my mom on this one. How do I start? How do I finish? How do I do that simultaneously boring but also vital stuff in the middle? How do I make it good? How do I make it worthwhile? How do I make it funny, or sad, or electric?

Maybe the writing community doesn’t like this question because the answer, so often, feels like, “dude, I wrote the damn thing and even i don’t know”.

Each writing element, on its own, is one thing. Prose, dialogue, character, themes, plot, structure, framing, atmosphere, the list goes on. But writing a story start to finish almost feels more like a completely separate skill than being good at any one element. It’s something that is more than the sum of its parts.

In the world of fanfiction, my creative process was thus: I wrote what I wanted to see. The characters and the world and the voice of the source material was taken care of for me— my only job on those fronts was to interpret as I saw fit. It was the plot and story that I had to come up with myself, and in fandom I was of the mindset that no one was going to give me exactly what I wanted except me, so… I just did it myself. Be the change you want to see.

This might have been noble if I wasn’t otherwise a snooty, picky bitch about the fic I actually did read. In both Supernatural and MDZS fandoms, at my most entrenched, I was barely reading fic by other authors because I was so easily annoyed by interpretations I deemed wrong (funny enough, much of this drama revolving around the fact that I think both Dean and Wei Wuxian are gay ((THERE ARE DOZENS OF US!!!)) whereas most of fandom thinks they’re bisexual). So I ended up taking on the onus, if you could call it such, of writing such hits as, “What if Dean was gay and didn’t realize it?” or, “what if Wei Wuxian was gay and didn’t realize it?”. At least in MDZS, this is literally a major plot point… though it could be argued it’s a big neon anvil-shaped character note hovering over Dean’s head for the entire series, threatening to drop at any second, crushing him like a bug. (Writing that last sentence gave me such a nostalgic rush of “hehe i love when bad things happen to characters I love.” Ah, the foibles and follies of ye olde fandom days…)

So, where my fanfiction ideas came from was the source material. Or, being generous to those with different opinions, my interpretation of the source material. Still, though, I would argue that a primary driving force for me, even in my fanfiction where I was writing in worlds and with characters I didn’t create myself, was to draw an arrow between the writing elements above directly from the source material to my story. For example, one of the themes in MDZS that really hit for me was Wei Wuxian finally finding a safe place to land with Lan Wangji after years of instability from both societal and familial external factors as well as internal factors like his own fevered brain (<3). This same theme manifests in pretty much all of my MDZS fic, and draws directly from the source material. Supernatural is similar (allowing room for difference as it’s a source material created by a bazillion people which will always invite wider interpretations as opposed to the single viewpoint of a single author like MXTX). Dean’s self-worth issues and projection as a masculine suave cool guy action hero ladies man when in reality he is a soft-hearted mommy’s boy with a heart of gold who just wants to be loved and domesticated is like, the central theme of pretty much every deancas fic I ever wrote, lol.

Maybe this seems obvious, but there is a large quantity of fanfiction out there that is almost completely divorced from the source material. And some of that fanfiction is also divorced from all other writing elements, but there’s no need to be mean, and fandom is and should be a place free for creative expression, so let’s leave that right where it is.

Fanfiction, to me, is like a frayed sweater. There are a lot of threads, knit by someone else. I have now come into possession of this sweater somehow (stolen, thrifted, gifted, dealer’s choice) and the question at hand is: which threads do I want to pull? And how do I weave this sweater back together in a way as to complement the original garment that is true and authentic but also leaves my mark on it? An egregious metaphor, but you get it.

My approach to original work is similar, except now I have to knit the sweater myself, which is like, a lot harder. Any threads I choose to pull were already left there by me. It’s mes all the way down.

I’ve never found getting ideas to be the hard part about writing. Ideas come in a million ways, from a million different directions, and in a million gradations of detail. Some ideas I’ve spent weeks daydreaming about, only to never put pen to paper (fingers to keyboard) and actually write anything out. Some ideas are like newly birthed babies in my palm, and end up getting raised, clothed, fed, and put through college by me. And the thing is, the difference between these approaches isn’t the quality of the idea, but simply the ideas I saw through to the end. Which sounds inane, but inane things can be true.

When I knew I wanted to write a novel, it wasn’t a matter of “Gee, what am I going to write about?” It was “Gee, I actually have to commit to one of these thousands of ideas I have and write about it for an entire book.” So, Don’t Worry About It, as much as I love it and cherish it and think it’s a worthwhile and good story, was mostly born of me closing my eyes and blindly deciding, “Okay, I’m sticking to that one.”

And I did. And it was hard. I have commitment issues.

Once that part was over, the hardest part of writing began: the actual writing (whatever step of writing you are currently on is the hardest, btw). Don’t Worry, in its very earliest stages, leaned way harder into the romcom aspect of fake dating (and may have originally started as a fanfiction idea but i’m taking that to my grave). And then, as many of my fics that started as romps did before it, it became a lot more serious, and, frankly, interesting.

I write all of my work almost entirely in chronological order. There are scenes here and there that I start chewing on in advance, which tend to get written out in either my phone’s notes app, or an email to myself, or at the end of the story document, etc. Somewhere within easy reach. These then serve as benchmarks I can write to, though there are also a lot that never make the final cut because I never run into a place to naturally slide them in— it ends up being a give and take, though I like to imagine I err on the side of “what’s right for the story” as opposed to “I wrote it, so it should be included”. Fine line to walk, because “what’s right for the story” is an incredibly amorphous statement.

To the Supernatural crowd, remember the days of “we go where the story takes us”? For those not in the know, anytime something shitty happened on Supernatural, TPTB would default to, “we go where the story takes us” to justify their shitty decisions. Obviously, this drove me nuts, because, like, stories don’t exist independently in the world. You guys wrote it, you take ownership of it. Acting like a story is an overexcited dog that slipped its leash and is off pooping in all the neighbors’ yards and causing general chaos and acting like you have no responsibility over it is stupid, right? “Well, the dog did it, not me.” Ok, dummy, sure, except for the fact that it’s your dog.

AND YET.

It would be disingenuous of me to pretend like there isn’t a deeply intangible part of my writing process that is similar to “going where the story takes [me]”. Sometimes, it really does feel like the story is happening without me and I’m scrambling to type fast enough to keep up. Yes, it all comes from me, but it’s almost like the story comes from somewhere in my body other than my brain, bypassing conscious thought altogether, and exiting out through my fingers.

The funny thing is, this intangible part of my writing process is probably the most important. Sometimes I’ll include a turn of phrase or line of prose or character note that feels important, only to realize upon editing it felt so important because I had already included it earlier on (likely weeks/months ago, so like, I’ve forgotten, but also not??). This internal, unconscious dialogue that always seems to be happening inside me when I’m writing a story is very strange, and feels even stranger to try to put into words. Sometimes I refer to it as “lateral thinking”, where concepts and themes and dialogue and so on all smash together in my head and somehow sort themselves into something legible and meaningful. Like when you put a bunch of garlic in a plastic container and shake it up and the cloves come loose from the skin.

So… it just happens. But also, it doesn’t just happen…s.

To make matters more complicated, I know that I have a natural knack for writing. I’ve worked hard and honed my skills, to be sure, and will always be learning, but even when I was a kid, I had the ability to put words to page in a way most of my peers either couldn’t or weren’t interested in. So here I am, saying I have a mystical "lateral thinking” creative process, plus at least some innate talent, which again, not much of this is actually explaining how I write. I’m bragging about my writing prowess, but can’t even put how I do it into words. Typical pretentious writer bullshit.

In the past, I’ve described my layered approach of storytelling as leapfrogging. It sounds deeply unromantic to say it out loud, but essentially what that looks like is:

• THEME AND/OR PLOT POINT 1

• THEME AND/OR PLOT POINT 2

• THEME AND/OR PLOT POINT 3

• THEME AND/OR PLOT POINT 1

• THEME AND/OR PLOT POINT 2

• THEME AND/OR PLOT POINT 2

• THEME AND/OR PLOT POINT 1

• THEME AND/OR PLOT POINT 3

• THEME AND/OR PLOT POINT 1

So, really, it’s just structure. It’s just balance. There have been times during the editing phase where I will just copy and paste chunks to different parts of the story because it helps even the scales. Or times I have deliberately added transitional scenes solely to break up a THEME AND/OR PLOT POINT that’s gone on for too long. It’s not elegant in the slightest, but I always try to remember that the only person who knows how many times I’ve changed the order of something, cut things here and added things there… is me. I’m looking at the story from behind, with all the tape and glue and popsicle sticks and gum. Readers are, hopefully, only seeing the story from the front, where as far as they’re concerned, that’s the only version of it that’s ever existed. Don’t Worry is actually a great example of this, because in an earlier draft, there was a whole subplot with Wren and her personal trainer meant to supplement the theme of Wren’s desire for control, and what happens when she meets someone who pushes back against that. She was also meant to be one of the few supports Wren has in her life, so when it inevitably goes sour, it’s part of the overarching story of Wren’s emotional tethers, tenuous as they are, finally being cut one by one (and of course, Wren’s the one doing the cutting— working title of the novel should’ve been Wren Scissorhands).

Imagine my surprise, when, desperate to cut down the final word count (debut literary novels should not be almost 120,000 words), this subplot got cut and it was only about 4000, or 3%. That’s not a lot. There’s no hard and fast rule, but I’d say having a subplot that only takes up 3% of your total word count is not really earning its place in the final product. It’s off balance. However, at the same time, I was afraid that cutting that subplot would throw the balance way off in the opposite direction— that is, not enough was happening in the remainder of the story to justify… well… the story. Like it was too much THEME AND/OR PLOT POINT 1 with no 2 or 3 in between as a buffer. EVEN THOUGH 1 is the main plot and is by far the most important. But also buffers aren’t just filler. They fill out your story, but they shouldn’t be just filler. But also, by definition, they are not as important as the main plot. So why include them at all? Well, because you need a buffer to help keep your story balanced aaaaaand we’re right back at the beginning. The leapfrogging is not perfect. The leapfrogging is not all knowing. Stories can be told in an infinite number of ways, but the stories I tell cannot. I subscribe to the frog.

This is somewhat of a sidebar, but all of this is compounded by my fear that my stories are boring. I know objectively they’re not— I have more than enough feedback to confirm this— but if insecurities were that easy to dispel, there would be a lot less makeup brands in the world. Like so many things, the more confident you are in your writing, the more likely other people are to respond in kind. Being transparently insecure, fishing, or “playfully” undermining your skill only invites scrutiny, which only leads to an unhelpful and unproductive feedback loop.

Obviously, I am an overthinker. And a circular thinker. And, dare I say, a “lateral” thinker. One of the ways I am attempting to combat the worst of all of these is to invest generously in my self-esteem. The ultimate enemy of overthinking is the confidence that you’re a competent human being who can do things well. It is simultaneously humbling and horrifying to consider the ways in which I’ve held myself back, both in my personal life and my writing, because I struggled for so long to take myself and what I have to offer seriously. It’s alarming to draw such a definitive line between between my ability to create and something as mawkish and nebulous and societally manufactured as the concept of self-esteem. I wish I was above it. But I’m not.

The good news is that with the sticky concept of self-esteem comes humility, humour, and a healthy amount of self doubt. Because the goal of creating isn’t to get it right the first time every time and accept no criticism ever (unless you’re one of those people who said you didn’t like dean winchester beat sheet because of dean’s fashion choices, your critiques mean nothing to me!!!). Actually, maybe it’s not confidence that’s the ultimate enemy of overthinking, but creating. Is there anything that says “screw you” to self-doubt and overthinking more than actually having pushed through the muck of both of those and come out the other side with something you made—and finished— with love and persistence and determination?

I can only speak for myself, but I suspect there are authors out there who are much more efficient and much less woo woo about their work than I am. In fact, a lot of the advice I’ve seen about taking your writing seriously is to treat it like a job, where you write no matter how “creative” you are feeling that day. At my most expeditious, I have done exactly that and seen the benefits of it. Sometimes, you really do just need to put some damn words on the page to shake the cobwebs loose. However, I don’t expect to become Stephen King levels of prolific anytime soon. I don’t think I have it in me, nor do I think I need to have it in me to feel like I’m a worthy writer.

All of these words to say exactly what I said at the beginning: “dude, I wrote the damn thing and even i don’t know”. I don’t have all of the answers, or even most of them, or even some of them… but I can say that creativity is an experience unique to everyone, and there is no clear road map to a “successful” creative session no matter what anyone says. That being said, willingness to make mistakes and be imperfect and embracing a reasonable amount of self doubt while at the same time feeling secure in your abilities goes a long way.

With that oxymoronic advice out of the way, I have one final word on the matter:

ribbit

failing to get the magnum opus published, then writing another, worse novel anyway

In the query letter for Don’t Worry About It, I said, on its potential impact: This novel takes a complex, unflattering look at how the world views women, and a complex, unflattering look at how women view each other and themselves. It is a novel about the damage women do to each other, and the lateral societal structures that encourage them […] DON’T WORRY ABOUT IT is an adult novel of 110,000 words that combines lesbian erotica, literary fiction, and romance into thought-provoking social commentary. This novel is meant to titillate body and mind, exploring female and lesbian desire in a way few other mainstream works have. It is meant to be a challenging story, encouraging debate and word-of-mouth discourse.

I didn’t oversell its themes, but I absolutely oversold the number of people who would be interested in reading such a thing. And yes, I sure did lean on the erotica aspect in the spirit of how much everyone wanted to gawk at 50 Shades back in the day, despite the fact that 50 carries with it an entire airport’s worth of cultural baggage, and also, aside from that, just sucks. This novel is not like 50 shades at all, but there is a lot of sex in it, which is a whole other blog post all its own.

My point is that aside from the usual stink of eau de Buy My Book Please that pervades all query letters, what I say in mine holds water. To me, anyway. I believe this is an important story with a lot to say, and I didn’t pull my punches when it came to critiquing our cultural and political moment, specifically as it relates to (a subset of) women. I was well aware while writing this novel and falling in love with it that it would be an uphill battle to catch an agent’s interest, and that’s before even discussing the current state of lesbian fiction (bad). Even finding comparative titles was really hard, both because I don’t read lesbian fiction (mea culpa) and because, for better and worse, Don’t Worry is fairly unique in its genre.

But I followed my heart anyway. I pushed aside what The Man asked, expected, nay, demanded of me, and pursued my art in an as pure, as unadulterated, and as authentic manner as I could. This isn’t to say there wasn’t more I could have done. I am sure there was a way, or even many ways, in which I could have moved forward with this manuscript— whether that meant getting back on social media and soliciting interest there, or digging deeper for agents, or paying a professional editor/querying service to ensure my submissions were up to snuff, and so on— but I didn’t. After a year, I threw in the towel, in the sense that I accepted mainstream publishing wasn’t interested in Don’t Worry and likely never would be, and the ratio of blame as it pertains to my writing abilities vs Society will always be up for a debate that can never be resolved, and that’s just how it is, regardless of if I can reconcile those feelings or not.

And that’s hard, emotionally. Anyone who has put their art out there only to have it rejected—for whatever reason, whether it’s a result of their own skill level, market forces, or other factors— will feel the sting of your Most not even being enough to pass the first hurdle, let alone the finish line. And the response to that is, like, wow, okay, so I put my heart and soul into something and now my feelings are hurt and my heart is crushed and i flayed myself open, every sticky crevice on display, the most vulnerability i have displayed in my time on this earth so far, and i didn’t even—

—profit off it.

did you hear that? that metallic popping sound? it’s the can of worms i just opened.

We all want to be seen, we all want to be understood, and how we are seen and understood is often through the art we create. But the art we create cannot exist independent of profit unless you’re already independently wealthy and you have endless time, resources, and physical/emotional availability. Sure, you can make crafts or visual art or do any other type of creative activity in your spare time as a hobby, even though sometimes it feels like hobbies are dead and everything is a side hustle now, but I’m referring to making art for a living. If you create as a hobby, well, the money you have has to come from somewhere, y’know?

On paper, I despise the monetization of hobbies. In practice, for years I wrote fanfiction for free, which was a hobby, and now I’m writing original fiction, and I want money, please. I would like to monetize my hobby, please.

Nothing about marrying these disparate streams of thought is easy. In the past, I’ve been asked once or twice about how someone can give me money in exchange for fic i write (always with kind intentions, I don’t begrudge these people at all) and have received many comments about how the commenter would like to purchase a book I write someday, or wish they could compensate me financially because they enjoyed the fic, stuff like that. Toward the end of my time in fandom, it became common for people to write a threadfic (is that still a thing in fandom?? do people know what that is??) and then put their ko-fi (is that still a thing in fandom?? do people know what that is??) at the end. with the passage of time and my exit from the fandom world I feel like I can admit I always judged this choice (funny, considering how easy I accepted the concept of people taking fanart commissions/selling prints… is there a difference or is this just another instance of me demurring and undermining the concept of writing as a skill that deserves compensation?? should anyone in fandom make money off their peers?? sweet, merciful jesus, can anything ever be simple??). And then i wrote Don’t Worry, and while this is an original work, I also originally claimed that I didn’t want to “monetize my audience” when I first had the idea of publishing it on ao3 or self-publishing if the mainstream avenues didn’t work out. And, y’know, here we are. I have a donate page ready to go on this site and the only reason I haven’t activated it yet is because I have to upgrade my squarespace subscription for it. I mean, they do say you have to spend money to make money. Money I will soon be asking you, my audience, for. haha.

On top of that, there is always, thrumming just under the surface, the killer, nigh-undefeatable imposter syndrome. It seems impossible that I can objectively know I’m at LEAST a competent writer and storyteller, and yet, the thought of receiving even a cent in exchange for my work is excruciating. Other authors have written much worse books than I have and they’re getting paid for them. I used to say that the moment I receive compensation for my writing is the moment I stop writing forever. And it’s not out of some moral quandary. I’m just afraid. Of what? I don’t know. What if I’m really not that good? What if, independent of quality, people don’t care for my writing and I never publish another book because I just don’t sell? What if people care so little about women, specifically lesbians, that writing stories about them never generates enough income for me to live on even though this is the most natural, authentic shape for how I share my art with others? What if there’s a bomb strapped to the loonie and I don’t notice?

The unfortunate side effect of these posts is getting to know me at least a little, no matter how much I’d like to keep this writing blog and my personal life separate. Almost like my writing and my personality feed into each other! who knew. Anyway, I tend to overthink things, and not just once. The paths of my mind are well-trodden.

“Well-trodden”, though, is also a funny way to describe my mind, because the ultimate outcome of the woolgathering and pussyfooting and hand-wringing above is just: au??ghuughhuu?hughhh????

And still, all of this comes down to exchanging money for goods and services. I want to publish a book, and I want to get paid for it. I want to create stories and receive financial compensation in return. I want the widest audience possible. I want (my work) to be seen. I want to live my life in a way that is meaningful and fulfilling to me, and we live in a world where meaning and fulfillment come hand in hand with financial success, and on a smaller, more boring scale, I have bills to pay and only dead-end career prospects and financial mediocrity ahead of me otherwise.

Amidst this mental ensnarement and existential dread, I am writing a second book. I’ve already started off on the wrong foot because this one is also about lesbians, and gay women just do not generate the same mainstream interest as stories about straight women or gay men. However, I am keeping in mind that the current lesbian fiction scene is very milquetoast, and the narrative I’ve constructed reflects that. A fun easter egg: while constructing the story I asked myself, what’s the most non-threatening social justice issue to hinge the protagonist’s character arc on? Why, environmentalism of course! Which is not to say environmentalism isn’t a worthy cause— just that there’s not a lot of nuance to the general public’s opinions on it, and you won’t stir up a whole lot of controversy by saying, “Umm, maybe we should stop killing the planet we live on?” Scathing commentary.

It’ll be fun. And romantic. And funny. And probably, genuinely meaningful to at least a handful of people. There will be at least a few goodreads reviews for it that begin by listing the REP(resentation) stats like they’re Pokemon cards, with little to say about the actual novel itself. I’ll have a few bucks in the bank. The cover will have that god-awful paper cutout look that is so popular with contemporary romance novels right now.

And, um, all will be well?

This is so confusing and harrowing. I fear the hopelessly contradictory nature of creating art for profit will never free me from its clutches. Imposter syndrome can only be fed by a lack of self-esteem and, simply, self, both of which I can address in my personal life. Uncertainty is more likely to take hold while feeling directionless and like I’m lacking purpose, also things I can work on privately. My fears, doubts, and judgements surrounding this topic are not unique. I am barely a blip on existence’s radar, and that should free me from such earthly concerns. Art is a worthy human pursuit regardless of whether it generates profit or not. Art is a worthy human pursuit regardless of whether anyone else beside its creator ever lays eyes on it. Art is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it, and what someone is willing to pay for it is often utterly arbitrary and generated by a complex and external series of consumer trends and economic factors and says nothing about the intrinsic value of the work itself, if a monetary value could even be assigned to such a thing in the first place. A soothing mantra I repeat to myself every night in bed before I fall asleep.

And then every new morning, I still wake up with a piece of me having been deemed unworthy, and a less worthy, in-progress piece of me in microsoft word waiting to find out what happens next, and if the lesbians can save the world with the power of love from evil energy drink CEO Dr. Litterman and his giant laser that is going to speed up global warming to even more unprecedented rates all so he can make a new patented formula in an effort to gain back the market shares he’s lost to all those seven year olds who are addicted to prime.

For what it’s worth, none of this negates how proud I am of Don’t Worry and how excited I am to finally share it with an audience. I can’t say much for sure, but one thing I can is that I’m at my best and my happiest and my most fulfilled when I’m crafting a story. Whether it’s serious or goofy or erotic or milquetoast or complex or just for silly fun, it’s always part of me, and I hope that part of me connects with part of you.

And with that brief preamble out of the way: saltyfeathers donation page coming soon 🥲