#gonna keep reading more political and nonfiction works! feels good!

[auspicetaker]

i have read TWO (short, nonfiction, basically "lefty articles writ long") books in the past week, which is a big deal for me bc my brain has been atrophying for some time now

#nickel and dimed by barbara ehrenreich #and #elite capture by olufemi taiwo #btw #gonna keep reading more political and nonfiction works! feels good!

[m-madeleine]

hi! for the end of the year asks: 1, 3, 9, 14, 22, 24?

Hiiii!

1. How many books did you read this year?

Officially 33, although counting is difficult because I interned in publishing this summer and read some books that weren't out at the time. I keep thinking of more books I finished half a year ago. There's one that's announced for February and I guess I'll be counting it for this year instead??

Then there were also a couple that I technically finished, but am not counting for my goodreads challenge for Reasons, like I was basically skimming because of fast review deadline...or found so artrociously horrible I don't even want it to stain my account lmao. And that last one, I did the final edit for, so I know how bad it was even after multiple professional editing rounds :P

3. What were your top five books of the year?

In no particular order

A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik (EL!!! El, the girl who was born to be evil and fights tooth and nail to stay good out of spite T-T) (Also I realized I operate nigh daily on the exact same level of vigilance as a kid in a school that will KILL YOU and that's....a lot)

The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane (chill nonfiction about hiking and sailing mostly around Britain)

Shadow Girls by Carol Birch (girl's schools and ghostssss)

The Death of Bees by Lisa O'Donnell (two girls bury their own parents in their backgarden; macabre in the best ways, grim but full of love)

Dark Places by Gillian Flynn (essentially a fictional true crime case where you actually get the satisfaction of unpeeling all the layers through a round dance of POVs, left me Pondering for daysss)

Bonus: Along the Trenches by Navid Kermani (a travelogue that gets into the nitty gritty of the history and politics of Eastern Europe and the Caucasus) (I've only gotten halfway through, but I have to mention it NOW because it's amazing and Kermani has been cemented as my non-fiction crush)

9. Did you get into any new genres?

Not really! I def felt a taste for dark stuff this year though.

For the opposite of Getting Into, I had to read a lot of r0mance novels and new adult fiction for work, and mmmmmmm no. No shade, I did enjoy a couple, even though I'm not sure I would've finished them if I didn't have to. But they're just so formulaic T-T I need my books to have a kick.

14. What books do you want to finish before the year is over?

Worked hard on finishing In Männerkleidern by Angela Steidele. It's somewhere between an academic work and a conventional biography? The subject is a working class AFAB person in early 1700s Germany who lived sometimes as a woman and sometimes as a man, had a really interesting life, married a woman but eventually got busted and executed for "sodomy with a woman".

I think Steidele is pretty solid about dealing with the transman or lesbian or?? controversy potential, refers to the main character as whatever gender they were presenting as at the time and when discussing the possibility of interpretation at the end gives evidence for and against all possibilities fairly imo.

You're usually not gonna catch me reading history stuff outside uni, but this was a treat.

22. What’s the longest book you read?

Mansfield Park!

24. Did you DNF anything? Why?

Oh yea. For one, a lot of that was involuntary through work, often you'll only get a 50 page sample, sometimes the rest isn't even written yet.

One thing for work I DNFd more or less voluntarily was What Doesn't Kill Us by Ajay Close (sent in for translation licensing). I actually loved it and for the first and last time felt that famed editor "This is MY manuscript and I'm FIGHTING for it" feeling. Buuuuut it's very dark and visceral and I wasn't in a great headspace at the time, so I kind of just quiet quit on it during my last week. I did still write it a recommendation for as far as I got.

Outside of work, The First Day of Spring by Nancy Tucker. Only took me a couple pages to realize it was based on Mary Bell. I actually thought it was very well done, but it was tough to read just because of the subject and even flipping forward didn't help. I don't think I'll go back to it, I feel like I kind of know what it was doing and where it was going and I liked it, but don't need to experience it page by page.

#thank youuuu #i have a lot to say about books huh #lev reads #askbox meme #teddy-after-all

[t3tr0m1n0]

the merlin-mars meetup. set somewhere within the broader hhvcd canon/multiverse/whatever we want to call it, and in a library. features very little foreboding content. keyword: mundane.

will be available to read on ao3 once they get their pussy-ass servers back, and just below the cut once you click on it. enjoy.

Merlin hopes they aren't taking up too much space in the isle as they pop the book open to read its inside cover. The other guy in the stacks is there, and that's about all xe can think to observe about him.

"…Fourth wall breaking…" shy almost unconsciously comments aloud, once finished reading the blurb. Their instincts will take them next to maybe flip it open to a random page or just put it back on the shelf, neither of these possibilities capable of rhyming or reasoning with the other, conflicting in time-static limbo until the stranger intercepts the present.

"Hey, um, I've read that book before. I liked it a lot. Do you want me to recommend it to you?" He might be speaking nervously, it's not like ze's ever been able to tell.

Merlin's mind tries working fast. "Sure." There you go. "Uh, I guess, start with the philosophy stuff?" Working the book back to being cover-open takes 2nd priority as ey speak. "Like what is there to this? This is nonfiction, so I guess it's a bunch of exposition, or…?" They leave that openness to their dialogue in the hopes that their meaning gets across.

He's quick to pick up the conversation, at least. "Oh, yeah, it's kind of a primer on the schools—the history of western philosophy."

"Not the eastern and the whatnot."

"Ha, yeah, more the stuff that started in ancient Greece."

"Yeah, I," hy takes a second to really get the words ready for execution, "I'm not familiar with philosophy much at all, but that doesn't mean I haven't had a debate in a forum before, at least."

Fingers crossed, he can breeze through the non sequitur and keep with the topic of conversation— it's what Merlin always hopes for, even though it feels like it has little reason to expect it from people.

"Yeah, well," he continues, "there's more to it, also. Because the book has sort of a main character, who interacts with a lot of the exposition-ing—"

"Expositing?" He ignores them.

"There's kind of a philosophical debate that happens about all the philosophical debate."

"Ah, well, nonfiction with a- a narrative character, I know that can happen. I've seen it before." It's really something of a nothing response, and also, again, one ze hopes he doesn't inquire towards.

"Yeah, because the main character has, I guess, her own opinions and her own life and things, that's where the 4th wall-messing with reality stuff comes in. It gets really weird."

Merlin thinks such a description seems a little incongruous with the picture of nonfiction text that exists in their head, and that's a good thing. "'Kay then. I think that was what was gonna get me to try out this book, if anything."

This may be the moment when xey become the dominator of this conversation. What an odd thing to reflect on; they continue, "So are you, like, a librarian, anyway? Do you work here, I mean." He laughs a bit. "I don't mean that in a bad way," ve follows up, just to be polite.

"No, but like— I am a librarian, I just don't work here." He comes off like he could live his entire life between these shelves.

"Oh."

"I work at one of the Universities of Maryland," he speaks on with a tone that's fully shaping up to be earnest.

"Out of state. I, uh, 'm also not from here— I'm from California."

He stays receptive. "Ah, well, if it were the case that we were both locals, then we could see each other again; you could tell me how you liked the book."

"Normal librarian and patron stuff." It meant for that to come out as a question. "Um, however, we could," Merlin shifts the book around in their hands, closing it, then pulls their drawstring back to the front, "well, okay, give me a sec— don't mind me."

Ze pushes on, backing out of the stacks and planting the bag & book firmly on the nearest table. Their modus operandi is to waste as little time as is necessary; as soon as a notebook is lifted from, they're flipping it open, grasping for a pencil from their pockets and talking again.

"This paper has stuff on it, but, eh, I don't mind. You have email, right?" Truly, xe pauses for a response, sparing a couple looks at him as xe rips out the leaf of paper.

"Ah, damn," ey mutter carelessly with it tearing unevenly.

"Yeah, okay. This has my email address on it. So you can get ahold of me."

He takes it with one hand and then trades it for the other's cane. "Oh, sounds good." Reading it before getting straight into the file compression & storage shows him the patient stranger is merlinenilrem @ inself.net.

If he were to keep up reading while he folds it, he'd get even more incomprehensible, self-justified things, but instead he chooses dialogue. "Sorry about making you take out a page from your notebook."

"Eh, no. I've got plenty. Notebooks, I mean."

"I'm Mars, by the way."

"Oh. And I'm Merlin. Good to know, uh, your name."

Mars nods, a soft affirmation. "So, I think I'm going to go back to looking for a book," he says in all good faith.

"Right," replies Merlin, "then I guess I'll get to reading this one."

A beat, so it's clear Mars & Merlin can't stop the other from going off on their own lives. "Thanks, by the way."

"No problem." Merlin doesn't see him exit and he's not exactly gone.

#prose for pun and profit #<- best writing tag #that i could come up with #hhvcd #i wanted to get some writing out before i left so enjoy folks #rbs encouraged & all at this point #merlin auernheimer #mars rodriguez

[olliedollie1204]

for future reference

Virgil works at the reference desk. Logan is looking for a very specific book.

Pairings: Platonic Virgil and Logan

Word Count: 3,613

Tags: Librarian Virgil, Kid Logan, (very loosely) implied but not shown romantic Moceit

based on that one tumblr post that is maybe the cutest thing i’ve ever read? also, Logan mispronounces some words because he’s Babey, so I included a guide at the end to clarify what he was trying to say.

also i meant to make this short and simple but i tripped and came up with an entire new AU, so hopefully if y’all slam that mf like button I will find the energy to write the sequel

(Read it on AO3!)

Working at the reference desk was cool. When you walked through the main door of the library, you’d never suspect that nestled beyond the rows and rows of adult nonfiction, far away from the busyness of the community room or the chaos of the children’s section, was a neat and well-tended desk, behind which sat just one man.

That one man was currently alternating between scanning the sea of tables and chairs in front of him, and reading a cheesy romance paperback under his desk. Listen, he had an image to maintain, okay?

Virgil had always liked the solitude of a good library, almost as much as he’d liked the books themselves. Despite spending many long hours hidden away among dusty shelves when he was younger, he'd never thought about actually working in a library. He wasn’t a people person, and libraries, unfortunately, tended to attract people; so when he found out there was a position where he could get away with isolating himself behind a computer monitor all day long, where his main form of social interaction was helping patrons fix the printer approximately nine hundred times a day, where he could read or play Temple Run or just sit still and daydream for hours on end? He was sold.

He supposed he had to thank the library’s set up for his lack of work; truly, most people never made their way this far into the building, and those who did were usually just looking for a place to sleep for a few hours, so it wasn’t uncommon for him to go an entire shift without speaking to a single person.

It had looked like today was going to be the same, with Virgil halfway through his shift and having only spoken to one patron who was looking for the bathroom. He had just gotten to the part in his book where the farmhand and the farmer’s son were trapped together in the barn during an unexpected thunderstorm, shirts dripping wet and faces flushed from humidity and passion (and maybe Virgil had read this one once or twice already, don’t worry about it).

It was a perfectly normal day. Until the kid showed up.

“Excuse me, sir?”

Virgil certainly did not jump about a foot into the air at the kid’s sudden appearance, but it was a close thing. The librarian quickly sat up in his rolly chair, dog earring the already well-worn novel and shoving it back under the desk.

“Uh, hi,” he replied, gazing down at the child in front of him. He was small and scrawny, with wildly scruffy hair and a large pair of glasses on his face. As Virgil sat up taller, he was able to see that the kid was actually tiny, his chin barely reaching past the edge of the desk. Despite his small stature, he had an oddly serious look on his face.

“How can I, uh, help you?” Virgil asked haltingly.

“I need to find a book about baby names,” the child informed him plainly. His quiet, high-pitched voice felt completely at odds with the grave importance he seemed to place on his request.

“Oh?” Virgil said for lack of a better response. He quickly scanned behind the kid, looking for an adult that might’ve misplaced their incredibly somber toddler, but he quickly brought his attention back to the child in front of him as he nodded.

“My dads told me that I’m going to be a big brother soon and I need to find the names for my baby twin brothers who we are taking from a woman in the city because she is a sugar-ette and she is giving us her babies to keep,” the child replied in one long breath. Virgil blinked at the sudden influx of information.

“Ah,” he replied, absolutely nailing this conversation with this random, unaccompanied baby. “Let me… look that up for you.”

He paused for just a second before jerkily turning on his monitor, opening to the library catalogue’s search engine. Instinctively he opened the filter and clicked ‘search for keywords’ and typed ‘baby names’, until he looked down at the… really small child in front of him, like damn, were all kids that small?

“Um. How…”

How old are you? How many letters of the alphabet do you know? How stupid am I gonna look if I send you to the checkout desk with an armful of dense, high-level books about etymology?

“How high is your reading level?” he settled on. To his surprise, the child puffed out his chest in pride.

“I am five and three quarters years old and I will be going into kindergarten in Set-member and Dr. Picani says that I am reading like a kindergartener and I even can read first grade books, too.”

Okay. Virgil didn’t know who Dr. Picani was, but that wasn’t important. Kindergarten to first grade reading level. He switched the filter to adjust for that new information, but he was quickly met with the realization that the kid was looking at him for… some sort of response, because that’s how conversations work, Virgil, come on.

“That’s cool,” he replied lightly. Lucky for him, the kid didn’t seem to mind his lack of social graces. He just nodded, rocking back and forth on his heels as he watched Virgil type.

“And my Daddy gave me a bunch of chapter books for my birthday and I already read them all because that was last year and he and Papa said that for my next birthday I can get some more chapter books but I hope they are mit-sery books because I like the mit-sery books most of all. Dr. Picani told me that’s because I like to collect and organize information. I like it when Papa reads the mit-sery books to me, even though I can read all by myself, because he is always bad at solving the mit-sery and I have to explain it to him every time.”

At first, Virgil had merely been listening with a polite interest, nodding a little as his eyes scanned the page for what books they had checked in, but as the kid continued to talk (and Virgil was seriously starting to wonder if he ever ran out of breath), he realized he was now listening with a genuine interest. This kid seemed pretty smart for his age, even with his tendency to mispronounce words in his rush to get them out of his mouth, and it was honestly kinda endearing. This coming from Virgil, who was running out of excuses as to why he couldn’t help out with any of the children’s programs that the library hosted in the community room twice a month.

He pulled his eyes back to his computer. “Okay, so, um, it looks like we’ve got a couple books that you might want.” They had more than a couple books about baby names, of course, but Virgil really didn’t wanna hurt the kid’s feelings by giving him a book that was too difficult for him.

“I’m gonna write the titles down on this piece of paper,” Virgil continued, pulling out an index card and one of the weird tiny golf pencils that were at every desk in the library for some reason. “Here’s what the book is called, here’s the last name of the person who wrote it, and here is the number of the shelf where you can find the book, okay?”

He finished writing and slid the paper across the desk to the kid, who hesitated for a moment before taking it.

“... Thank you,” he said stiffly, turning on his heel and marching away. Virgil wasn’t gonna look away until the kid was out of his sight, but to his surprise he stopped just about ten feet away from the desk, looking between the paper in his tiny hands and the tall rows of shelves.

Virgil stood up suddenly, feeling like an idiot. He’d just told an infant to go look for one specific shelf in a giant room of identical shelves. Alone. Fuck.

“Hey, kid,” he called softly, moving around his desk and hurrying to the child. The little boy turned to him, eyes wide behind his glasses lens.

“How about I help you find those books, okay?” Virgil asked, trying not to tower over the tiny child. The kid looked around for a second before nodding quickly.

“Okay, I think that is a good idea, because I know where the books are in the playzone but I think this li-berry is really big and— and maybe I’d get too lost and my dads are scared of me being lost and so I don’t wanna make them scared,” he finished, looking down and scuffing the toe of his shoe against the carpet.

Virgil raised an eyebrow at the end of the kid’s sentence. “Do you know where your dads are?”

The kid nodded quickly. “They’re having storytime in the group room!”

Virgil nodded. He knew there was an adult book club happening in the community room that day, so that definitely made sense. But still, he leaned down, catching the boy’s eye with what he hoped was an appropriately stern face for the circumstances.

“Do your dads know where you are?” he asked. As he expected, the kid began to look slightly guilty, scrunching the hem of his navy polo in his hands.

“Um…” he started. It was the first time Virgil had heard him pause between his words. “Well, technically, they told me to stay with the li-berrian, and they thought I was gonna stay in the playzone with Ms. Dot, but technically, if I can stay with you then I am with a li-berrian and so I’m not in trouble.”

There was a note of self-satisfaction in the kid’s voice, like he’d just solved a riddle as opposed to trying to explain why he disobeyed his parents. Virgil got the feeling that this was a kid who knew how to use his words to his advantage.

“Okay,” Virgil replied, gently pulling the paper out of the kid’s hand and scanning what he’d written. “We’re gonna go look for some books, but then I’m taking you back to the children’s section— uh, I mean the playzone— and Ms. Dot is gonna watch you until your dads are done, deal?”

The child nodded, watching Virgil with intensity, and the librarian gently ushered him to the side and led the two of them down a row of books.

“What’s your name?”

“Logan,” the little boy replied, running ahead a little and turning to wait for Virgil to catch up. “What’s your name?”

Virgil reached Logan at the end of the row just as he answered, “Virgil.”

Without warning, Logan darted ahead again, reaching the end of the next row before turning around to face him. “Daddy says I should call the li-berrians Mr., Ms., or Mx. What are you?”

“Mr. is okay,” Virgil replied, a little bemused by his childish bluntness. “And be careful, okay? I don’t want you to trip and hurt yourself.”

Logan trotted back to Virgil, walking backwards for a minute so he could look at Virgil while he talked. “I’m sorry for running, but I really want to find a book about baby names because my dads are busy making the babies’ bedroom and buying all of the baby clothes and toys and ex-cetera and I want to be a good big brother and I want my baby brothers to have names that are good but my dads are really busy and they don’t even know what they want to name the babies yet!”

Virgil smiled at the indignation in Logan’s little voice. Of course, he knew there were far more important preparations to make when expecting a new child (let alone two new children at the same time), but to a child as young as Logan, the name was probably the most important decision to be made.

“Well, they should be on the next shelf over, so let’s—”

Logan took off before Virgil could finish his sentence, running halfway down the row and looking at Virgil expectantly.

Virgil scoffed, an amused smile on his face. “Yeah, yeah, I’m coming.”

As he entered the row, he began scanning the numbers on instinct; he knew these stacks pretty well, but he didn’t have them memorized.

“Okay, 929.4,” he muttered to himself, bypassing books about genealogies before coming to the section for baby name books. “Here they are.”

Logan came towards him, standing on his tiptoes as he reached his arms up high.

“Mr. Virgil, may I please have the biggest book, please?”

Virgil looked back at the shelf, immediately seeing which book Logan was talking about. He pulled it out, holding it in both hands as he scanned the cover.

“‘Ten Thousand and One Baby Names For You’,” he recited, passing it down to Logan. “Is that enough names to choose from?”

Logan’s eyes were wide, struggling to open the heavy book while still keeping it in his arms. “I never even knew there were ten thousand and one names!”

“Same,” Virgil replied, helping Logan open the book without damaging it. “I think this book has lots of names from all over the world, plus some super old names from the last century.”

“Like the 1990s,” Logan said, nodding seriously, and Virgil had to pretend to cough to avoid laughing outright at the kid’s earnestness. He turned back to the shelf, pulling out a thinner yet still dense book.

“And this one is called ‘The Story Behind the Name’,” Virgil explained, holding it down to show Logan. “It tells you more about what the names mean, where all of the names came from… stuff like that.”

He held the book out for Logan to take, but to his shock the child was looking at him with something akin to distress.

“Do names mean things?”

Virgil blinked. “Oh! Uh, sometimes? Not really. But some names have things that they used to mean, a long time ago, but a lot of people don’t know what they meant. Like—”

He hastily flipped the book open to the ‘L’ section, skimming the page before he found what he was looking for.

“Like, ‘Logan’, for example, is an Scottish name,” he explained slowly, “and it apparently means… uh, ‘from the hollow’? Which, I don’t even really know what that means, so. It’s not that important nowadays.”

He looked back at Logan, who was looking into the distance with a pensive look on his face.

“But what if I give them a name that means something bad,” he pondered slowly, and Virgil’s stomach swooped at the idea that he’d just given this kid something to worry over.

“Well, here,” he said hurriedly, holding the second book out to Logan. “If you take this one, you can check that the names you pick mean good things. Some people like to choose names that remind them of something good, like nature or history or— or their favorite book characters.”

That perked Logan up, causing him to eye the book with a new interest. “Really?”

His gaze flicked between the second book, and the much larger book that he still held in his arms.

“I think I should take both,” he said after a long moment to think. “Just in case.”

He smiled up at Virgil, who literally couldn’t stop himself from smiling back if you’d paid him. Logan was just too darn cute.

“Well,” he said, “how about I carry your books and take you back to the playzone, and you can get started reading these before you check them out?”

Logan nodded, somewhat reluctantly handing Virgil his large book as the two made their way out of the nonfiction section. “That is a good idea, because I am already checking out a lot of chapter books and my book basket is full and so I think my dads will help me carry these books to the checkout counter because they’re really big books.”

“They sure are,” Virgil said conversationally, holding a hand out to stop Logan as another librarian walked by with a cart. Before he could take another step, however, he felt something small and soft wrap around his free hand. Virgil looked down to see Logan holding his hand in his own tiny grasp.

“Papa says I shouldn’t hold hands with strangers,” Logan informed him, idly swinging their hands together, “but I don’t think we’re strangers because I know your name and you know my name and you’re helping me carry my books because you are a nice li-berrian.”

Virgil felt an inexplicable surge of protectiveness over this child he’d met only fifteen minutes ago.

“Sure,” he replied softly, letting Logan continue to talk as the two walked hand in hand back to the populated side of the library.

He almost didn’t want to interrupt Logan when they did finally arrive at the playzone, but he wanted to make sure this kid got back to where he was supposed to be before his dads found out he’d left. Dot looked at him from behind Logan, her eyebrows raising at the sight of Virgil a) not behind his reference desk, and b) attached to the world’s chattiest five year old.

“Hey, Lo,” he gently interjected when Logan took a breath, kneeling down to be on the young boy’s level. “I’m gonna set your books down with your book basket, okay? Where is that?”

Logan paused, eyes flitting around the colorful rug. “Um… it’s… oh! It’s right there!”

Virgil’s eyes followed where Logan was pointing. There, on the ground next to one of the large plush sofas in the reading circle, was one of the library’s book baskets. From here, Virgil could see at least a dozen junior chapter books poking out of the basket.

“Oh!” Logan exclaimed, darting forward and grabbing the handle of the basket in both hands and tugging it back over to Virgil. “Mr. Virgil, look, I raised my hand and asked Ms. Dot if I could please have the storytime book to check out for a little bit because I liked it a lot, even though it’s not a mit-sery book, but it is about cephalopods and those are octopusses and squids and ex-cetera, and she told me to turn around and the shelf behind me had tons and tons of books about cephalopods, and I picked out this book because it has pit-chers but it’s not a pit-cher book, it has chapters, too—”

Logan flopped onto his butt in the middle of the carpet, pulling out each book one by one and explaining to Virgil exactly what it was about and how many chapters it had and how he couldn’t wait for bedtime so he and his dads could read them all together. He chattered on and on and on, and Virgil didn’t even realize when he joined Logan in sitting cross legged on the floor. He didn’t have to talk much, but every now and then Logan would actually pause to breathe, and Virgil would ask another question that set the young boy off onto an entirely different spiel that lasted another ten minutes.

It was so different from working at the reference desk, quiet and hidden and isolated. Different, but not bad.

“Mr. Virgil?”

Logan’s voice was suddenly quieter, and it snapped Virgil back to reality. He looked at the kid, who was looking at his own tiny hands folded neatly in his lap.

“Yeah, Logan?” Virgil asked. “Are you okay?”

Logan nodded. “Yes, thank you, I’m okay. I think you are maybe the nicest li-berrian ever.”

The sincerity in his little voice nearly made Virgil reel back in shock.

“Really?” he asked, and normally he might be embarrassed about how insecure his voice sounded after receiving a compliment from a five year old, but Logan nodded immediately.

“Yeah,” he replied. “Ms. Dot and all of the other li-berrians are nice but I think you are the nicest because I broke the rules and you didn’t tell my dads and you gave me the name books for my twin baby brothers and you let me hold your hand and I like talking about my books and you liked hearing me talk about them. So I think you are— I think you are the best li-berrian I ever met.”

Logan fell silent, looking down at his lap and fidgeting with his shirt hem, and Virgil was honestly a little speechless.

“Oh,” he said slowly. “Um, thank you, Logan. I think you are… the best reader I’ve ever met.”

No sooner were the words out of Virgil’s mouth that Logan looked up at him with wide-eyed shock.

“Really?” he squeaked. Virgil was literally going to get a cavity from all of this sugar.

“Yep,” he replied. “You’re smart and kind and you care a lot about your baby brothers. Your dads must be very proud of you.”

Each word of praise was brightening Logan up bit by bit, and he switched to sitting on his knees and bouncing up and down.

“Will you play checkers with me?” he asked, hands flapping in excitement. “I always want to play checkers but Ms. Dot says I’m not old enough, but you’re definitely old enough, right?”

Virgil laughed outright at that. He thought about his reference desk, sitting unoccupied on the other side of the library. He looked at Logan.

“Sure, kid,” he replied, standing up with Logan’s book basket. Logan grabbed his free hand, and Virgil let him lead them both to the game table, Logan already explaining the rules in anticipation.

Yeah. Different, but not bad. Not bad at all.

~

Post notes: As promised, here's the guide to Logan's incorrect words!

Sugar-ette: Surrogate Set-member: September Mit-sery: Mystery Li-berry: Library Li-berrian: Librarian Ex-cetera: Et cetera Pit-chers: Pictures

#sanders sides #sanders sides fic #virgil sanders #logan sanders #my writing #my posts #for future reference

[notjanine]

2020 in books!

the only kind of new year’s resolution i made as a naive baby last january was to try to read 40 books for the year. (i read 37 in 2019, for context.) well, with all of my commuting time eliminated and an increased need for immersive escapism, i ended up surpassing that goal three times over lmao (thanks library ebooks!)

idk how to summarize my year in books in a way that makes sense but

(f) = fiction, (nf) = nonfiction, (p) = poetry.

books that rewired my fucking brain:

braiding sweetgrass by robin wall kimmerer (nf)- GOD?!?!?! good. dr. k is right. ostensibly a book about plants, but actually a book about shut up and go outside. consumerism and capitalism are doing their damnedest to fuck you up, but you can just choose to value different things. take care of yourself by taking care of your environment. etc etc.

wasp by richard jones (nf)- lissen. when i got this book, my wasp-phobia was so severe that i had to put it away face down on a high shelf because there are wasps on the cover and i couldn’t bear to RISK even GLIMPSING them. now i am like... a wasp evangelist. (also due to the bugs 101 course on coursera it’s so good.)

wag by zazie todd (nf)- i have a dog, but i am NOT a Dog Person (i.e. i love my dog, but please keep yours away from me, thanks.) this book helped me understand my little guy better, plus it gives actionable tasks and activities to do with and for your pup! plus, y’know, learning about things you’re scared of helps to lessen that fear. i’d recommend this to anyone who has, wants, or regularly interacts with a dog.

a closed and common orbit by becky chambers (f)- is this series complete fluff? absolutely. am i fundamentally different after reading this one? maybe.

the best we could do by thi bui (nf)- this is so far outside of my personal experience but somehow still made me come to peace with my relationship with my mom?? and it’s barely even about that?? idk. this is probably objectively the best book i’ve read this year.

books that were just fun as hell:

mexican gothic by silvia moreno-garcia (f)- this book made me YELL out loud

death on the nile by agatha christie (f)- i grew up on agatha christie shows, but never actually read her before this year! she really was That Bitch. read this before the movie comes out

cosmoknights by hannah templer (f)- i read this in one sitting through the worst headache i’ve had in years. it is a goddamn DELIGHT. this book has everything: spaceships. mech suits. fighting the patriarchy. a perfect otp. fun art in bright colors with clean lines. onomatopoetic WAPs from before the song gave that hilarious context. 800 lesbians. this is an antidepressant in graphic novel form.

stiff by mary roach (nf)- ms. roach is like the 4th most represented author on my bookshelf because she 1. stays writing about shit i’m interested in and 2. manages to talk about gross and ridiculous things without resorting to sensationalism. it takes skill to write a hilarious book about corpses.

black sun by rebecca roanhorse (f)- excellent sexual tension between a horny siren pirate and a hot doomed... monk, kinda? set in the pre-columbian gulf of mexico with magic and shit.

cuisine chinoise by zao dao (? n/f)- this graphic novel about chinese food history/mythology is BEAUTIFUL.

the color of magic by terry pratchett (f)- you’d think a hardcore douglas adams stan would have gotten to this sooner, but no, i had to date a nerdy white boy to get here. it’s fun though! i’m not gonna read them all, but this one was good. bonus: contains one (1) great himbo.

gideon the ninth by tamsyn muir (f)- like 500 pages of action and mystery and jokes and space necromancy. harrow the ninth gets a special mention bc it has a meme reference that took me out so hard i had to close the book, lie down, and groan for an entire minute before continuing.

other minds by peter godfrey-smith (nf)- i love octopuses. on one tma bonus ep, jonny sims says that if a creature can choose to do evil, then it’s a Person. octopuses are People. but anyway frfr this has an explanation of the evolution of consciousness that is cool af. (this one is much better than the other recent popsci octo book which i will not name out of politeness.)

the perfect predator by steffanie strathdee and thomas patterson (nf)- i read this bc my microbiology prof recommended it and it’s cool as heck! it’s got adventure, drama, mystery, Science-with-a-capital-S. i’m biased bc i’m a bit of a microbes nerd, but i had a blast with this. (but only bc we know going in that everything works out okay; if i hadn’t known that, i would have been TOO stressed!)

books that were a little less fun but still very readable:

my sister, the serial killer by oyinkan braithwaite (f)- i couldn’t find this as funny as other people bc i, too, have a beautiful sister who’s an insufferable narcissist, so it hits a little too close to home, but. it is a wild ride.

piranesi by susanna clarke (f)- idek what to say! i went into this one blind just bc it had a cool cover and title, so i guess i’d recommend that for other people too.

the sixth world series by rebecca roanhorse (f)- monster hunting! a post-apocalyptic take that doesn’t feel tired.

the shades of magic trilogy by v.e. schwab (f)- easy escapism. some ideas feel a little first draft-y, but idk, it’s also a pretty simple premise (which isn’t a bad thing). it’s a decent urban fantasy set in ~georgian?-era london. very actiony. suffers from a bit of i’m-not-like-other-girls disease, but i didn’t even notice until book two or three, so.

the only good indians by stephen graham jones (f)- starts off a little ??? (and reeks of being Written By A Man) but picks up. the pacing’s great and there’s just a super fucking cool monster.

robopocalypse by daniel h. wilson (f)- this reads like a tv miniseries so much that i can’t believe it isn’t one yet.

confessions of the fox by jordy rosenberg (f)- not my usual cup of tea, fiction-wise, but still compelling. a fresh take on the white-male-english-professor-self-insert? but not insufferable. gets weird!

spinning silver by naomi novik (f)- rumplestilstkin, but make it interesting! a great, richly-told fairy tale, but like, large scale. good to read on a cold day while you’re wrapped up in a blanket with some hot tea.

interior chinatown by charles yu (f)- compulsively readable. a couple things bugged me, but not enough to make me dislike it. a fun companion piece to how to live safely in a science fictional universe. i like this guy’s style.

cannibalism by bill schutt (nf)- COOL. mostly covers the animal kingdom (fun), spends too much time on the donner party (less fun), ends with a SPICY take on prions that i cannot get out of my head!!!

buzz, sting, bite by anne sverdrup-thygeson (nf)- BUGS! broad but not overwhelming, neither dumbed down nor overly scientific, short enough to finish in a day or two. recommend this to literally everyone.

books that made me want to read everything else in the author’s ouevre:

the time invariance of snow by e. lily yu (f)- this FUCKS but it’s too short!!!

an unkindness of ghosts by rivers solomon (f)- okay this book is SO good and so well-written and interesting and blah blah blah all the good things, but... the whole time, i was just like?? why???? why is this what you’re choosing to write about??? (i did also read the deep and blood is another word for hunger after this one, and i did like them both, especially the latter, but i think they can do better! like i think they could write a perfect book and i am gonna be *eyes emoji* until then.)

the space between worlds by micaiah johnson (f)- a fine debut novel, but i want to see her do something a little more... idk, refined? i think she overreaches here, like it’s a little... idk looper? this is how you lose the time war? there’s a better comparison, but i can’t think of it, but you get the idea. and then halfway through it shifts gears to mad max. there’s something weird about one of the central relationships, like it’s not complex enough to take as long to resolve as it does. idk idk. there are just a lot of little nitpicky things. it’s not bad! but i think she can do better and i look forward to finding out.

postcolonial love poem by natalie diaz (p)- thinky! like i tried to read this before bed, but it’s not the sort of thing to parse out while you’re falling asleep, it requires more attention than that.

books that Learned Me Somethin:

smoke gets in your eyes by caitlin doughty (nf)- i am a self-professed death obsessed weirdo, fascinated by death and mourning, but i didn’t know all that much about what happens to a body between the dying and the funeral! this book isn’t big, but it covers a lot and doughty’s writing style is engaging and honest. it’s very memorable.

queer by meg-john barker and julia scheele (nf)- i’m gonna be totally honest and say Queer Theory is above my intellectual pay grade, but this book takes you by the hand and explains the basics.

vitamania by catherine price (nf)- LMAO my fellow americans, never take a supplement. this book is great and well-researched, but normal folks don’t need to read it, just listen to season two of the dream podcast, which definitely cribbed from this.

vegetable kingdom by bryant terry (nf)- this is a fine cookbook, my favorite of his that i’ve read so far. gets a special mention bc i had a religious experience just reading one of his kohlrabi recipes. absolutely gutted that i didn’t have an opportunity to try it this year, since the pandemic put the kibosh on all family bbqs.

the best american food writing 2020 edited by j. kenji lopez-alt (nf)- this really is just a great collection.

are prisons obsolete? by angela y. davis (nf)- yes.

i moved to los angeles to work in animation by natalie nourigat (nf)- before reading this, i had basically zero knowledge of how the animation industry works. now i know like three things.

the secret lives of bats by merlin tuttle (nf)- BATS! okay this book is more about the adventures of being a bat scientist than it actually is about bats, but there are bats in there. insectivorous bats basically shit glitter, you should know this.

books from valuable perspectives:

hood feminism by mikki kendall (nf)- a breakdown of who’s getting left out of feminist spaces, why that’s happening, and why it shouldn’t be happening.

all you can ever know by nicole chung (nf)- a (transracial) adoptee’s take on adoption and learning more about her birth family. the personal storytelling of this one really stuck with me.

motherhood so white by nefertiti austin (nf)- a single-mom-by-choice’s take on the foster system/adoption process. walks you through some things i always wondered about and some things i wouldn’t even have thought about.

this place by kateri akiwenzie-damm et al (? n/f)- i, like a lot of non- native americans, only know that history in broad strokes. getting this many highly specific stories in one dense and beautiful book felt like a lucky find. and taking that perspective into the future in the context of that history is v good.

empty by susan burton (nf)- eating disorder stories are important to me bc i care about food so much. this one is so relatable- not in its specificity, but rather its generality. it’s easy to empathize with her perspective because it’s like, Oh, i don’t have that exact problem, but i struggle with different problems in a very similar way. (feels like the opposite of roxane gay’s hunger, in a way.)

obit by victoria chang (p)- this exploration of grief is... woof.

short story collections are hard to evaluate bc you’ll never read one where every single story hits but i generally enjoyed these:

a thousand beginnings and endings edited by ellen oh and elsie chapman (f)

how long til black future month? by n.k. jemisin (f)

her body and other parties by carmen maria machado (f)

books i revisited:

the broken earth trilogy by n.k. jemisin (f)- i read the series backwards this time and like... i can’t really find any faults in these books, man. they’re just the best.

everyone’s a aliebn when ur a aliebn too by jomny sun (f... but is it really?)- half of this book’s sales are from me buying it for other people bc it’s the only way i know how to say i love you. i reread it every time just to make sure it still feels right and it always does.

other honorable mentions:

white is for witching by helen oyeyemi (f)- not to pit two bad bitches against each other, but this book does what akwaeke emezi’s freshwater was trying to do. it’s a little weird, a little haunted, a little of a lot of things. read this only in the dead of winter. (and with stephen rennicks’ score for the little stranger playing in the background.)

homie by danez smith (p)- there’s a lot going on here, but this just made me crack a smile a couple times in a way that no other book of poetry has ever done.

the murder of roger ackroyd and murder in mesopotamia by agatha christie (f)- That Bitch!

blues by nikki giovanni (p)- she sure has some Things To Say

the three-body problem by cixin liu (f)- interesting concepts, but... idk something’s missing? felt weirdly soulless to me. i’m probably not gonna read the sequels. but it did make some points!

the sisters of the winter wood by rena rossner (f)- i’m a slut for shapeshifting, okay. but this is a good fairy tale, it works!

parable of the sower by octavia butler (f)- i read this in march, when the pandemic was just kicking off and boy that was not the right time. def my least favorite of hers so far, but an octavia butler i don’t love is still better than a hell of a lot of other books. no idea when or if i’ll get to a good enough headspace for the sequel.

faves:

saturnino herrán by adriana zapett tapia (nf)- i got to learn new things about my mans and see some of his paintings i’ve never even seen online! GOSH.

on food and cooking by harold mcgee (nf)- yeah yeah, i’ve already mentioned this book half a dozen times on here this year, but i don’t care. this book lives off the shelf in my home bc i reference it like every other fucking day. this book is a part of me now.

#long post #final total for the year will be 120 by the end of the day! #and i had a pretty good hit rate. would probably recommend at least half #and only outright hated four

[shitty-check-please-aus]

2020 Books Read So Far

Note: Most of these are audiobooks (listening to books counts as reading books and if you disagree I’d ask you to consider why you believe that), books I started and didn’t finish will be listed but not reviewed, and all my opinions are extremely subjective. I’m putting this on this blog because I want to and I think it’ll help me keep track of what I’ve read if I write it down in a couple places. 

Some notes:

I’m surprised that most of these are nonfiction! I don’t usually think of myself as a nonfiction reader. 

Having audiobooks has made me way more productive as a reader, since I can read while I’m doing repetitive tasks at work, when I have to stand on the bus, when I’m running, etc. 

Naked, by David Sedaris

3/5, the audiobook was “unabridged selections” which means “we didn’t edit the individual essays but you’re only getting half the book”– it would probably have been a 4/5 if it was a whole book. I liked that Amy Sedaris was reading parts of it, but that’s because I like her more than I like her brother. This is sort of an example of the difference between “comedic” and “humorous,” because it’s definitely the latter. 

Read it if: you want to read something pretty fucking weird. 

Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, by Sarah Vowell

4/5, I saw this recommended a lot when Hamilton first came out so it’s been in the back of my mind for a good while. The book had a great cast, and having different people reading the historical quotes was an excellent touch! 

However, I think Vowell’s conversational style is a little jarring here sometimes. It’s like “wait, why are you talking about Bruce Springsteen, I’m not that familiar with his work but he definitely isn’t from Revolutionary War times.” I got her book Assassination Vacation at a used bookshop recently as well, and both books suffer from post-2016 hindsight, where she’ll say something about how incompetent and foolish the politicians of her time are, and I just have to snort to myself and say “Sarah, you’re going to lose your goddamn mind soon.” That’s a bit of an unfair reaction, but it’s hard to avoid having it.

I was also, maybe unfairly, expecting to learn more than I did. The problem is that I know a Lot about the Revolutionary War, and from the introduction I thought we’d hear more about Lafayette’s later life (my knowledge drops sharply after about 1810). The book basically ends after the Battle of Yorktown, though.

Read it if: you have not seen/listened to both Hamilton and 1776, or if you want to read a summary of the Revolutionary War with a focus on one French captain. 

Assassination Vacation, by Sarah Vowell

3/5, honestly maybe a 2.5/5. Okay, so. Either I know a lot more about American History than I felt like I did or this is again a very surface level thing. Part of it is because she spends 123 pages on Abe Lincoln. There are 255 pages total. 2/3 of the states I’ve lived in are Indiana and Illinois, two states that fight about claiming Lincoln as their own, and I’ve been to D.C. 4 or 5 times, so I feel like I know enough about Lincoln. I know about John Wilkes Booth, and his brother Edwin who saved Lincoln’s son’s life, and the death train that took Lincoln’s body around the country. I did enjoy learning about the doctor who was probably conspiring with Booth and how he ended up saving tons of lives in prison when there was a yellow fever outbreak (also to be briefly unbearably nitpicky: I think she might have mixed up dengue and yellow fever? She calls yellow fever “breakbone” but I can only find instances online of people calling dengue fever that. Maybe they called them all breakbone in the late 1800s. If anyone reading this is an epidemiologist, let me know).

It was interesting to hear that Charles Guiteau, killer of President Garfield, was part of the Oneida cult. I’m trying to think of anything notable she said about Leon Czolgosz, killer of President McKinley. I guess she talks about how people assumed he was a foreigner because of his name, but I already listened to “The Ballad of Czolgosz” in Assassins, so I knew “Czolgosz, angry man, born in the middle of Michigan.”

This one is from 2005 so the politics stuff is a little more interesting, since at the time I was busy learning multiplication and spending one entire baseball season learning about baseball and following my team (they won the world series, I have excellent timing). I will say that in 2005 we did have Google, so I am again annoyed with some of her asides and personal anecdotes. Look, if you go to the Hemingway house and you don’t know there will be cats there, that’s on you if you don’t bring your Claritin. Hemingway is associated with only two good things, six-toed cats and Daiquiris. 

She also does not acknowledge that the parties basically switched platforms? Lincoln’s Republican party is not today’s Republican party, in fact kind of the opposite, so it’s weird that she starts the book with a dedication that’s like “to my lifelong Democrat grandpa, he’d be pissed I dedicated a book about 3 Republicans to him.” I guess she does sometimes say stuff like “how did Lincoln’s party become Reagan’s” (paraphrase), but she doesn’t actually get into it. 

Speaking of Democrats, she literally spends more time talking about Pablo Picasso than she spends talking about JFK. She doesn’t explain why she didn’t talk about JFK, but it seems bizarre to me to write a book about American assassinations and to leave out John Fucking Kennedy. Literally I’ve talked more about JFK in this section than she did in her assassin book. It’s not until page 253 that JFK gets a full paragraph. There are 255 pages total. Truly, if she’d taken a paragraph to be like “I’m focusing on the presidents who were elected before 1900″ or “the presidents whose immediate families aren’t still alive” or even “I didn’t want to travel to Dallas for research” or SOMETHING to explain why she left out JFK, I would have understood it more instead of flipping through the pages wondering what was going on. 

Read it if: You do not listen to too many history podcasts and you didn’t read the Wikipedia page for the musical Assassins. And I guess if you don’t want to acknowledge that JFK did also get assassinated and that was kind of a big deal. Actually just listen to Assassins instead. 

And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie

5/5 as a mystery, 0/5 for its original title (not gonna say it here but if you’ve ever googled the name of HP Lovecraft’s cat, it’s along those lines). Less than 6 hours, narrated by Dan Stevens from Downton Abbey, fairly ideal as an audiobook. I am 95% sure I’ve already read this, because I spent the summer before I started high school reading every Agatha Christie book in the library (I do not have a list of all the Agatha Christie books in my library the summer of 2010, so there is some question). 

Read if: you want to hear the guy from Downton Abbey deliver the line “I’m not a complete fool!” in a tone that makes it sound like “I’m not a fucking moron!” Sidenote: Can anyone tell me if Brits say “solder” by pronouncing the L that I’ve always heard as a silent L? Or if Dan Stevens just fucked up that one word?

Over The Top: A Raw Journey to Self-Love, by Jonathan Van Ness

4.5/5

This was a super enjoyable audiobook! It’s a testament to JVN’s considerable charisma that this book is full of him giving people in his past who would rather be anonymous Russian names, and it doesn’t get grating (as a Marina, however, I was shocked to not hear my name at any point; most of the other Marina’s I’ve met in my life are Russian). JVN has had a wild ride in life, and it’s a really raw, honest story of how he became who he is. I will say that if you are interested in reading this, please look up the trigger warnings; there are a lot of things that could be triggering to people. 

I feel a little bad at how much more I liked this one compared to Tan France’s memoir, but I also feel like whoever was ghostwriting that one did a bad job at making Tan seem... not extremely defensive, cocky, and prickly (it seems that JVN did not use a ghostwriter; Tan’s on the other hand, let the phrase “I’m proud to be a petty bitch” make it into the final proof several times). Also JVN advocates going to therapy in his book, while Tan kind of says that you should only go to therapy if you have no friends or family or life partner to talk to, which I fundamentally disagree with. I don’t know. I also feel like, if I were to get a makeover from the Fab 5, Jonathan would love my hair (I have great hair) while Tan would say that I’m dressing too old for a 24 year old and then take me to fucking Lane Bryant or Torrid (I wear a size 16 US so IRL options are limited). 

Read if: You like Queer Eye or Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness

Medallion Status, by John Hodgman

4.5/5

I really like John Hodgman’s podcast, and I got to ask him a question at an event he did at the Field Museum and he was very nice, so I went into this inclined to enjoy it. 

And I did! I had a good time reading it. I read it the first week of January and now it’s the second week of February so I have already erased much of the book’s content from my mind, but he somehow made the perspective of being a formerly kinda famous person really interesting. I would also recommend Vacationland, particularly if anyone wants to write an au where Nursey, as a New Yorker, has a vacation home in Dex’s town in Maine. That’s right, I brought it back around to the topic of this blog. And that would be a fucking fantastic au. 

Read it if: you like memoirs! it’s a good one. 

Murder on the Orient Express, by Agatha Christie

Gonna give this one a 3/5 for performance, because Dan Stevens (again, because I liked his narration in the other one) does a really annoying American accent for a few characters, and an extremely bad Italian accent for another. I’m starting this review only a few hours in, so if it turns out that the Italian man is not Italian, I’ll revoke my criticism. Still a 5/5 mystery, though. I did have to stop many times when they were talking about Istanbul to go over to Spotify and play “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” by They Might Be Giants. 

Books abandoned in 2020 (so far) (no real spoilers, I didn’t get more than a few chapters into any of them):

The Unhoneymooners, Christina Lauren

I got to a point where the main character was telling a lie that would put her newly accepted job into jeopardy, and it stressed me out so much as a relatively new hire that I stopped listening for the day and started another one, and then the week had passed and then the library took it back. I think I’d enjoy it more if I was reading it physically and I could control how fast I got through awkward parts (I am practically allergic to secondhand embarrassment). The performance was good and I did get a hankering for cheese curds. 

Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris

I had like three audiobooks checked out at the same time, and even though this was again an abridged version, I just didn’t have time for all of them. My mom has a physical copy, I’ll borrow that at some point. 

The Witch Elm, Tana French

This is one I may revisit someday. The main character is kind of an asshole, which is the point of his character I think, but it made it hard to get into the story. It’s also a 22 hour audiobook, which is kind of insanely long. Additionally, the narrator has a very slow way of talking, but if I tried to speed up the rate of playback I had trouble understanding his accent (I think I just have trouble processing really fast speech in general as well, but I would’ve had an easier time understanding someone with the same accent as me). Anyways, someone put a hold on it at the library and then I didn’t check it out again. 

#long post #off topic #Marina Reads #edit: put under a readmore bc I forgot to earlier

[zenosanalytic]

4/20/19 HSE 8

Ok back at it

MEAT 15

Cool Fight; Not terribly surprising.

MEAT 16

Dirk’s as much Rose’s father as Rose is his Mother. I guess maybe it’s more convenient, psychologically, to choose a causative direction and stick with it, rather than accept the Mobial nature of their genesis, but for some reason it bugs me this keeps getting overlooked.

Dirk’s over here talking about how right he is all the time and I dont think he was ever right about anything even once in canon(aside from certain aspects of his talk with Dave, and choosing not to kill Hal) XD The only “plan” of his to work was the one re: entering the Session, and 1)he outsourced it to Hal and 2)it only worked because he managed to improvise his way through every aspect of it failing to go the way he thought it would, and even that probably had more to do with their entry being part of HiC’s plan to use them, so she wasn’t trying to wipe them.

Another Thing: I dont think the Ascent Differential is Aspect so much as Personality.

Another Another Thing: That Rose, when discussing her life-long fear of knowledge as a corrupting and ruining outside force(this being a person who always felt her mother wasn’t her mother, in some sense, and responded to that fear by rejecting emotional intimacy with said mother), doesnt see the connection between that life-long fear and her fear that Ascending will be bad, damaging, and corrupting, is Notable. Perspective continues to be important, and lack of self-awareness continues to hamstring ppl in this narrative.

MEAT 17

I feel like this new narrative belligerence on Dirk’s part isn’t going to work out too well for him with a person as aware and recalcitrant to narrative meddling as John. It’s going to be John and WV all over again. This is also a wonderful example of how personal flaw and specificity isn’t solved by Godhood in HS, and can really trip you up; basically all of this, including the “impotence” applies to Dirk, too, when others disagree with the direction he’s trying to push them in, and this whole rant may be meant, ironically, as an example of dramatic irony: basically, that Dirk’s rant about total control and knowledge reveals the limits of his knowledge and will be followed by examples of how limited his control is, which he can’t be aware of, but which the “impotent” audience will.

MEAT 18

...And, almost immediately, John’s objecting to the narration and doing things before Dirk “writes” him doing them(the sigh).

MEAT 19

“So yeah, I’m gonna allow it” Notice how he asserts power over situations he does not, in fact, have power over.

Which is kind of an interesting dynamic to bring up in the context of authorship? I mean: in the realm of nonfictional works an author can’t “make” things happen, only alter for their audience what DID happen. In some respect this is being written as equivalent to that dynamic; the simple admission in M17 that Dirk is misrepresenting events also admits those events happened another way than he’d prefer, meaning it’s also an admission of his lack of power over actual events. And, of course, all the other things I’ve been talking about, and the fact that everyone’s “character” is rooted in natures established in the original work. But in a fictional work an author’s creative power is absolute, and this is a fictional work; though I suppose a derivative or transformational one, which accounts for the shortfall. Another interesting aspect of this is that the “Author” is presented as a Narrator; Narrators merely describe what happened, they don’t create it. I was going somewhere more concrete with this but it popped out of my head >:T >:T

Ok so other aspects of this: I agree that Jane’s been established as a pretty ambitious person, but she was also always a pretty moral person and the way she’s going about this so far doesn’t seem to be in keeping with that part of herself. And also: she literally wants to create shortages, and thus the suffering shortages will cause, for... what? Nostalgia? Because she think she can run Capitalism better than the adults from before all this?? Because Hierarchy is Neat??? Seems like a whole handful of really petty, selfish, and juvenile reasons to me. Also one guaranteed to cause social conflict; I doubt a civ that’s never known material want is going to react too well to sudden starvation and financially-manufactured forced-labor(which, lbr, is what most work in our world is).

Obvsl, as a snake and member of the storied gens Atheris, I agree with Roxy&Calli that patriarchal human concepts of gender are not the end-all-be-all of identity, but what really jumps out to me here is Roxy’s description of the nature of their love for, and previous sexual interest in, Dirk which I find really True. Like: the sentiment of wanting to see children of a person because you really like that person and think they should continue, or of thinking having the kids you might have with another person would be pretty interesting. Also that loneliness is a hell of a drug 8T

I’m trying to figure out why this conversation would be circumstantially simultaneous with The Furthest Ring being “destroyed”, but I got Nothing :T :T :T

MEAT 20

So yeah, Jade’s merging with her Alt!Selves, not too surprising since it was heavily foreshadowed in Endgame.

Given that Sessions are located IN the Furthest Ring, and Sessions MAKE new multiverses, I find it being made out of “negative potential. The absence of a future” pretty ironic :p I wonder if the tentacle hair bit is a nod towards the Horror-Terrors, and theories about them being Players? Rose and Dirk’s view of Ascension would seem to suggest HTs might be SUCCESSFUL players who eventually abandoned their universes out of fear of the damage they’d do misusing their godhood(as it doesnt solve your personal problems), rather than the old HC of them being failed Players.

MEAT 21

My theory about “The Economy” being code for sex doesn’t stop feeling ever more confirmed by this narrative :|

Dirk’s anger at the idea of anyone not thinking he’s right about everything is Palpable on this page. Also I’d just like to note that This:

Is being said by a person currently in the middle of metaphysically manipulating a friends towards her worst impulses(and also potentially some amounts of self-hatred, give her thoughts re: femininity) for the sake of establishing a dictatorship through which she, as his agency-dimmed puppet, will enforce his personal politico-philosophical preferences regardless of what anyone else thinks and he’s saying it about people who just said This:

which is to say: a bunch of political pluralists who are NOT seeking to impose their morality on anyone but rather to establish a system where EVERYONE can SHARE their moral understanding of policy issues and come to a consensus decision on them, within the context of a political society DEFINED by the equality of all as political actors. There’s just so much that’s wrong, weak, and easily dismissable about Dirk’s argument here. Not to mention his obvs, undisguised, physical disgust for trolls >:T

And he’s doing all this Purely because, given his fixation on “Winning”, he wants to Win. Like: he’s not actually even pursuing what he considered good policy; he is, literally, doing this all for Pure Ego, which he has the gall(and lack of self-awareness) to accuse others of acting from. And this self-deluding buffoon is a person who believes himself “Ascended” and therefore possessed of a “higher” and “clearer” perspective on matters above their “petty” concerns about, oh non-humans being allowed to live as they like, or practice any political agency at all, and all ppls being spared unnecessary and pointless suffering due to entirely manufactured shortages. So much (real, actual)Irony, of so many types, in all of this, all at once.

An aside: I am really liking the political-mindedness of these Epilogues so far; really playing to my Interests uwu

The bit about Hybrid babs and shipnames is funny, and it doesn’t read like a shot at the fandom to me at all; it’s more a joke at Dave’s expense given the obvs distress Kanaya’s in and his inability to stop making the situation more awkward(itself prob the result of Bro’s neglect/abuse)

Oh hey look: it’s Dirk the “Omniscient” being distracted, caught unawares and off-guard by the actions of others, unable to handle the role&work he’s chosen for himself(ie “out of his depth”), unable to split his attention between even just two conscious ppl at once, and not knowing what others are thinking. Given this and his handling of Jade’s thoughts in the last section, I kinda feel like it’s less he can actually sense the thoughts of others, and more that he gets some kind of inkling or hunch, or maybe that’s it’s purely just him guessing(that’d fit real well with his comments on Roxy being “inscrutable” to him), or even just having an awareness of the plot he is narrating(and thinks he’s writing). Of course it could also be some kind of Heart thing; not really even access to their thoughts at all, but a sort of awareness of their Agency? Like: Heart is The Self and The Self is expressed through Agency, so he has, in some way, developed an awareness of “Self-Action”, which is to say, Agency? Kinda like how Dave “feels” Time and Jade “feels” Space and Rose “feels” Relevance. Which, just as an asnide, would be something super-basic powers-dev wise, since Dave started having a sense of Time way back in the early Acts, long before godhood. Though I can see how Dirk developing an awareness of OTHERS intentions(and feelings, potentially, given Heart’s other associations) would seem like a big step for him, given how self-absorbed he is.

Ok that’s it for this one I think. I know I’m not being terribly kind to Dirk in all this but, tbf, he’s being kind of a huge snide Dick in basically every respect, and I also don’t have a lot of Chill in me when it comes to 1)arrogant people or 2)manipulators (:T

#Homestuck #HS Epilogue #Homestuck Spoilers #zA Opinions #analytic posts

[elanorjane]

A Princess in Theory [Chapter 3]

Summary:  Raised outside of her country, she’s about to find out that she’s a real-life princess. Political advisor Gold is hired to turn this princess in theory into a real royal - without falling in love with her.

AO3 link

Belle had been on a fair number of small planes in her life, but never anything like this. It was a private charter plane and the fanciest she’d ever seen. Instead of the traditional rows of seats, there were also tables and couches. Everything was white leather and dark wood with the Avonlea insignia tastefully peppered throughout.  

She hauled on board a knapsack filled with her most treasured belongings. Her photographs took up little room. With her mother’s tutelage, she’d mastered the art of traveling light a long time ago. When you’re forced to sift through everything in your apartment with a really impatient Scotsman standing right outside the door, it turns out very little holds sentimental value besides the memories. Even less had financial value. She and her mum had always scraped by with odd jobs and household goods bought at second hand stores. Belle had a small suitcase of clothes that Dove had carried on board. Afterward he’d disappeared up front with the crew, leaving her and the mystery man alone.

“Does he fly the plane, too?” she asked, watching Dove disappear behind a door. She plopped down into a soft leather seat and buckled in for takeoff.

Mystery Man took a seat on the other side of the aisle. He seemed more relaxed now that they were on the plane. He even went so far as to give her a half-smile. How generous. “No.”

After a beat it was evident that was all he was going to say to her. He’d been surly and silent ever since she’d confronted him about kissing her. Luckily, her seat was within reach of the liquor cabinet. Alcohol. Despite the safety restraint she was able to reach forward, unlatch the cabinet door, grab a bottle of vodka, a can of cranberry juice, and a glass. Her fingers glanced off the ice bucket so she’d have to drink it at room temperature, but she’d live. She sat back in her seat, satisfied with herself, and poured the two liquids into the glass. As she took a large gulp she felt eyes on her.  

She looked across the aisle. He’d watched her entire performance in complete silence. How can someone’s face be completely passive yet totally judgmental at the same time?

“I’m a nervous flier,” she deadpanned. In actuality, she was the opposite of a nervous flier. In fact, she relished the loss of control, it was liberating. She could tell he didn’t believe her, but she wasn’t bothered and went back to enjoying her drink. He could keep his judgments on his side of the plane.

When they were up in the air, with the alcohol coursing through her body, she finally had the courage to ask some rather important questions.

“Well, Mystery Man, what’s your name?” He slowly tore his gaze away from whatever he found so interesting out the window. “Or do I just keep calling you ‘you’?”  

“Gold.” He looked uncomfortable even sharing that much with her. This was a new interesting facet to her Mystery Man. While he was confident blowing up her life as she knew it, he was less inclined to be the focus of attention.  

“You got a first name?”

“Mister.”

She smiled in spite of herself. She always did appreciate sarcasm. “Alright, Gold, what’s your role in all of this? Besides stalking and kidnapping all in the name of shoving a tiara on my head?” She decided over her drink that she’d deal with the influx of batshit crazy information she’d received over the past several hours like some sort of cosmic joke. One that happened to be working in her favor thus far, considering the luxury plane and high end liquor.    

“I’ll be there to prepare you to become a princess and ultimately ascend the throne. There are innumerable protocols, rules, and social etiquette that you should have learned from birth but I will instruct you on over several weeks. Avonlea will want to welcome you home with a sort of pre-coronation event, officially welcoming you into the royal family. There will be an official celebration day, including a reception and ball. I’ll stay until you’re settled, then I’ll move on.”

Protocols. That sounded hella boring. Hanging out this close to Mr. Gold didn’t seem like too much of a chore through. He was bossy and disapproving, and, really, how was ‘Mr. Gold’ any better than ‘Mystery Man’? But she enjoyed turning the tables on him, of shocking and surprising him, and earning one of those half-smirks.  

“Sounds fun,” she responded, meaning anything but. Suddenly restless, she rose from her seat and poked around the plane, opening and closing cabinets at random. She found a television behind one and snacks in another. The whole time she explored, Gold alternated between reading the thick historical nonfiction book he’d boarded with, staring out the window, and leaning his head back with his eyes closed. Having run out of diversions, she meandered back to her seat, tossing a small bag of Cheetos onto the seat next to her.

Before she could sit down, the plane hit turbulence. The bumps weren’t bad, by frequent flier standards, but navigating the rolls in an open area while in heels was. She crossed her left foot over her right, overcompensated, and tripped herself. As she tipped she clawed at empty air, hoping to grab the back of a seat. The plane steadied and her fall was abruptly cut short when she landed with an oof in one of the seats. His seat. Not just his seat but his literal lap. If she hadn’t already met his cock earlier in the evening, they were getting very well acquainted now. She could feel it pressed against her bottom, right through the virgin wool of his trousers.

His cool passiveness from the bar was nowhere to be found. Beyond surprised to find her in his lap, he was unnerved. Even before they’d boarded the plane, he’d already started to pull away from her, to purposefully snuff out the spark that had been ignited between them at the bar. She had the sneaking suspicion that when they got to Avonlea he’d basically turn to ice. Which was a shame because they could have so much fun together.

He’d instinctively wrapped his arms around her when she’d landed. He didn’t look thrilled, but he wasn’t tossing her off him either. Instead, he quietly studied her face, then looked at her mouth. She felt his cock jump against her. This she knew. She didn’t need protocol lessons about this.

She took his stunned silence as an opportunity. Instead of standing up, she leaned in closer. “When we land, I’ll officially be a princess.”

He pressed his head hard against the seat but there was no escaping her. “You’re already a princess,” he breathed. “You always were.”

“What I mean is,” she smoothed her hands up his lapels to his shoulders. She longed to thread her fingers through the hair at the back of his neck. “I’m gonna have to be all proper and shit, yeah?”

His body was stiff beneath her. “That would be preferable,” he choked out.  

She narrowed her gaze, “Preferable for who?”

She closed the rest of the distance. She noticed again how, just at the bar, instead of puckering he opened his mouth to catch her lips with his. The drunken haze from the bar had worn off and he was still the best kisser she’d ever experienced.

When she finally pulled back his eyes narrowed at the corners in a disapproving glare that didn’t reach his dick. “You’re going to need to stop doing that,” he told her in his cold professional voice.

She didn’t buy it for a second. “Can’t I do whatever I want to now that I’m a princess? In fact,” she fingered his pocket square, “can’t I tell you what to do?” God, that would be fun. She pictured herself in a Marie Antoinette dress, demanding he drop to his knees. She’d order him to help remove her stockings. Then those hands of his would climb up under her dress, his fingers sliding up her calf, the back of her knee, her thigh. Her requesting him to keep going up and up and...

That got a half-smile out of him. He shook his head. “You’re not my princess, Princess. I’m not a citizen of Avonlea.”

She slumped her shoulders and pouted. “Then what fun is this going to be?” She should probably get up now but she’d settled onto his lap quiet comfortably.

He stared at her lower lip distractedly. “Not very much at all, I suspect,” he replied quietly, his eyes never leaving her mouth.

Suddenly this whole princess thing didn’t seem like such a ripper of a situation.

He must have seen the flicker of uncertainty in her eyes. “You’ll be fine, Princess.” It was sounding less like a title and more like a nickname now. He rubbed her back comfortingly. “I don’t think you’re at all who you pretend to be.”

That sounded so sanctimonious she couldn’t let it pass. She sat up in his lap, turning to face him. “And who’s that?”

“You forget, I’ve been watching you. You’re a party girl with your friends but when you’re alone you like to study and read,” he matter-of-factly encapsulated.  

Something about that neat summation of her life didn’t sit right with her. If he thought he was plucking her from some kind of drudgery and believed he could control her, he was mistaken. She liked her life, she enjoyed her time out with her friends. Her motivation for coming with him was finding out the truth about her mum, her father, and her family, no to escape her life. She quickly stood, knowing she was giving up her chance to join the Mile High Club, and went to sit across the aisle.

She didn’t check to see if Gold looked confused her hurt from her abrupt exit. So what if he did? Let him be confused for a change. She pulled her phone out as she sat down. She had a couple “Have fun!” and winky face messages from her friends. They’d assumed she’d gone home with the stranger from the bar and wouldn’t expect to hear from her until tomorrow. That seemed like a lifetime ago now. Her thumbs hovered over the keypad. How to explain what had happened to her over the last few hours? She’d send a group text later, explaining that her father, finding out about her mother’s death, had resurfaced. It was the truth. Once everyone calmed down about her existence, she’d head back to Australia or have her friends come visit Avonlea. Wherever the hell that was. She still knew so little about her birthplace.  

She finally darted a glance at Gold. He was looking out the window again. She could just ask him since he was such a know it all, but her pride wouldn’t let her. Instead, she Googled Avonlea.

Thirty minutes and twenty tabs later, she was so immersed in her reading she didn’t notice him getting up. Or his blatantly looking over her shoulder on his way back to his seat. He smirked at her obvious absorption.

“Well you’re not telling me anything!” she told him.

He sat back down. “What did you learn?”

She took a deep breath. “Avonlea is located near the Southern Isles. The castle is located on the coast,” she recited. “They had a rocky history. The 1800’s are filled with them getting their butts kicked in various wars. But they made their money in the 1970’s and 80’s with the export of their natural resources. But what they’re best known for is being a melting pot. Lots of people immigrated there in the 70’s and 80’s with the economic boom. So tourists will notice all the different accents.”

“You’ll fit in perfectly.”

She doubted it. She’ll be alone, is what she’ll be. Arriving in Avonlea meant joining a group of people who have been living together for thirty years or more. Christ, she missed her mum. “Can I-” she felt silly asking for them but the need was overwhelming. “May I see those photos again?”

He slipped them out of his jacket and handed them across the aisle to her.

Belle thought of all the parts of her life that she’d effectively gave up by getting on this plane. “What about school?” She only had a semester left. The idea of giving up college didn’t sit well with her. She was never going to be a librarian now, like she’d planned, but she’d taken a lot of pride in her schoolwork. He hadn’t been wrong about her in that sense.  

“We’ll arrange it so you can finish your studies online. You’re close to graduating anyway.”

She nodded, not looking up at the images in front of her. She stared at the photos of her father, a complete stranger. She flipped through the rest slowly, relishing every image of her mother. If only she could have her mother with her, to tell her what to do and hold her hand. But she’d taught Belle to be an independent person who could think for herself, trust her gut, and make her own decisions. Was her parenting style purposeful? Did she know this day was going to come? When they were going to be found and Belle would be forced to make this very choice?

“Please tell me you packed proper shoes or, better yet, a shirt with a back?” he nodded at the outfit she wore, the same one from the bar. “I’d prefer you not create a scandal the minute we get off the plane.” His face told her he was attempting to lighten the mood and bring her back from her far away musings.

“You can’t tell me how to dress,” she shot back halfheartedly.  

He looked at her pityingly. “Princess, I believe you’ll find that not to be remotely true.” Then he smiled slowly, as if he was going to enjoy bossing her around.

Her stomach dropped from nerves, the plane, that smile, or some combination.  

When they landed and the plane’s stairs were lowered, Belle hesitated at the top. She knew she had to descend but her feet wouldn’t move. Up to this point, she’d been on a fun, sexy adventure. Follow a mystery man to an exotic location - another journey to put in her scrapbook! But this was real. This was actually going to happen. Once she disembarked from this plane and stepped foot on her native soil, that was it. She was a princess here and her life was going to dramatically change forever.

“Belle,” Gold’s voice was quiet behind her.

Her eyes were glued on the tarmac below. “Yes?” she answered conversationally, like she didn’t know what he was requesting of her.  

His voice was next to her ear now. “I told you I would stay until you were ready. I meant it. I promise I will not leave your side until you are ready for me to go.” Warm fingers slipped into her own and squeezed once but were gone before she could even register them.

She let out a long, shaky breath, “Okay.”

Stretching across the tarmac stood a line of men and women in what she assumed was military dress. They stood at attention, to her seemingly waiting for something. Was she supposed to order them at ease? Why were they just standing there? It was making her nervous. As they walked past them, Belle slowed to a stop in front of them, balanced on one heel and wobbly bent her knees.

Gold leaned over her shoulder, “What are you doing?” he murmured.

“I don’t know,” she hissed from her half-bow, “curtsying at everyone!”

“You don’t curtsy to them,” he told her slowly, “they bow and curtsy to you.”

“So what am I supposed to do?” she was stuck in her failed curtsy.  

“Besides never do that again? Stand up. Walk to the helicopter,” he instructed. One waited on the other side of the tarmac. “It’s time to go meet your father.”

#fic: A Princess in Theory #Rumbelle #Rumbelle fic #Rumbelle fanfic

[meyerlansky]

Oh goodness, what three or five characteristics can you boil Meyer down to? I'm sorry for one again asking you to elaborate on a throwaway line in your tags, but I'm so curious, and your meta is just so awesome.

@jasonjacinto said: if you’d be willing i’d love to hear more about you “you want me to be a villain? i’ll show you a villain” meyer meta 

OH NO you guys are just giving me an opportunity to ramble aaaahhhh /o\ okay so. to preface: i am a very big fan of a writer in a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT fandom who i think is fantastic at her craft, and who writes a loooooooot of AUs that stick the characters she’s writing into completely different situations than canon. but the characters are always recognizable because she’s very very good at distilling them down to a few key traits, and then having those traits interplay with the situation[s] of the AU. it’s a really effective way to go way beyond the canon content but keep the characters immediately in-character, and since reading her meta on her process i’ve been kind of trying to do the same for the only characters i ever really write fic with, and while i don’t think i can quite do it for charlie as definitively, i have Opinions on meyer and i also think meyer is the easier of the two to misunderstand and therefore mischaracterize, so that influences how strongly i feel about my read as well. after thinking about it a bit more in depth, the “you want me to be a villain? i’ll show you a villain” thing that the tags were on is teeechnically not one of those pillar traits of his, it’s a combination of two traits that ARE pillar traits, and i’ll talk about why it’s a combo trait later on. for the actual traits themselves, with longer explanations under the cut:

a drive to survive/succeed and a fundamental need for security;

extreme stubbornness;

Smartypants;

and the limited emotional expression we all know and love;

and the “i’ll show you a villain” thing is a weird blend of traits 1 and 2.

so in terms of Base Motivations, for me meyer’s number one priority is always always always his Drive to Survive/Succeed. in canon this is influenced by his traumatic childhood, because growing up in a place full of people trying to kill you and everyone you know constantly sort of makes survival the ultimate goal with everything that you do. but because i don’t like the idea that trauma and its effects are necessarily immutable parts of someone’s character, and because when we’re talking AUs the antisemitic violence the lanskys experienced in grodno was a very specific moment in history that can’t always be replicated perfectly when translating the character into an AU, i read a significant chunk of meyer’s focus on survival and security as an essential part of his personality. the circumstances around him can influence how he interprets survival and security, but in general, for me, his number one goal is “work towards getting to a position where no one can ever hurt me ever again.”

a sub-trait of this is that he is… extremely stubborn. he’s quiet about it, but he is next to impossible to win a fight with if he really digs his heels in, physically or verbally or whatever. the stubbornness has its roots in the survival motivation, but expresses itself in enough ways that aren’t directly related to survival/security that i think it can be counted as a separate trait. if he gets knocked down in a fight he’s gonna get back up again, he very rarely expresses uncertainty out loud or through body language, he very rarely asks anyone for anything as opposed to [politely, but without giving up ground by putting a question mark on the sentence] stating what he wants and what they’ll get out of it in exchange, and he never ever apologizes. for anything. like he might have apologized once ever in his life and if he did it was to his mom. like i said, this is related to his goal of survival and need for security, in the way that, like… if you can’t be sure of yourself, what can you be sure of? so in his view he is Never Wrong, because he doesn’t think he can afford to be.

trait number three doesn’t exactly help with Never Thinking He’s Wrong because trait number three is that he is Smart. whatever universe, whatever circumstances, he has an analytical outlook and an intellectual curiosity that is… pretty wide-ranging. he’s good at and enjoys math, which is the stand-out thing, because math is hard and it’s the easiest way to express being analytically-minded, so it’s what sticks out to other people the most, but he does just like to read nonfiction and absorb Facts in general. he’s also fairly good at predicting how people will react to things, so he has some degree of… emotional intelligence, i guess? in that he can use previous examples of people’s behavior and reactions to predict how they’ll react to other situations in the future, and he’s able to leverage that analysis of other people to his [and his partners’] benefit.

which leads into trait four, which is the emotional reservedness that i am always torn on how to explain, because to some degree i do think his tendency to limit his emotional expression is an intrinsic trait, but just because he doesn’t outwardly express his emotions as clearly as the people around him [in a way that people other than charlie can clock, anyway] doesn’t mean he doesn’t feel it at all. i guess sort of the delineation for me is that meyer’s emotional repression in canon is influenced by his trauma—his strong emotions tend to be a little muted because of his PTSD—but the limited emotional expression is a Pillar Trait—he might be more aware of his feelings in AUs where he has a lesser degree of trauma in his past, but he’s never going to be effusive about them. also he is… way more susceptible to outward expressions of anger in particular than he thinks he is, and he only gets better at restraining his anger after being around AR for a while, for whom that restraint comes a little more naturally. teenager meyer is a tiny ball of rage just waiting for some idiot to give him an excuse to let it out.

SO I THINK THOSE ARE THE BIG FOUR? i can go more in depth with sub-traits, particularly of number one, but suffice it to say that i think most of the sub-traits i can think of are all in service of Attaining Security—as an example, meyer demonstrates a higher consciousness of mainstream acceptability than any of the other baby gangsters do, with the acknowledgement that liquor’s only outlawed temporarily and gambling is also only on the fringes for now but Drugs Are Not Acceptable To Mainstream People, plus his interest in the land in tampa [and later havana] as a pathway to legitimate money via real estate development, and i think that for meyer has its roots not in a need to be Accepted [which i think charlie feels more keenly than meyer does tbh] but in an awareness that, basically, the less you stick out from The Norm, the safer you are. basically, “will it help me survive” will override almost everything else, in terms of “what motivates meyer,” and then the other traits filter in and influence and are influenced by the others.

IN TERMS OF THE VILLAIN THING. that basically comes down to a blend of traits one and two? because he Has To Survive, and the easiest/most sensible path to survival in canon is by doing the organized crime shit—which is not Wrong, because the ultimate goal of EVERYTHING HE DOES is survival, and crime shit enables the survival, but it conflicts with the awareness that by engaging in crime shit, he’s sticking out from the norm, which means there’s a tension between “i have to be secure” and “the actions i’m taking to make myself secure in one respect are making me less secure in another.” the resolution to that tension is not “get out of crime immediately and do something less profitable but more acceptable,” the resolution to that tension is “Everyone Else Is Wrong.” he’s just doing what he needs to do, but if society is going to insist that he’s A Bad Person, then fine, he’s gonna be the best at being bad, and gradually move into more acceptable things, because that’s not an admission that he’s wrong to be doing crime, it’s just a natural progression of his investments. so yeah! hooopefully all that makes sense and jives and i’m not just. rambling. without making sense?

#boardwalk empire #meyer lansky #dragon-in-drag #jasonjacinto #[i got your ask after i'd finished writing my response to d-i-d HOPEFULLY THIS ANSWERS THAT TOO THOUGH /o\] #THIS IS VERY RAMBLY AND HOPEFULLY IS NOT TOO UNBEARABLE TO READ? #thank u for the opportunity to babble though hahaaa i'm weak #you don't know what i have #asks

[cthulhuofficial]

September 3, 2019

Happy birthday to my brother! I love you and can’t wait to see you on Saturday, and for you to meet Sean. You guys are gonna get along like a house on fire.

I was just looking at some clothing on Amazon, reading reviews, and I had an incredibly cruel thought reading one - so cruel that it made me a little sick to my stomach that such a thing even occurred to me. I am trying to give myself some grace, since I am in a bad place right now, and the first step to recovering is recognizing it, right? Truly makes me understand how much work I’ve got to do, though. The solution for this kind of behavior is self-love - if I love myself, then I have no need to tear down other people.

What have I done today towards that end? Got up and made my bed this morning, didn’t immediately start scrolling my phone, took breaks during work to go for walks, meditated, did yoga, called up a couple of counselors to try and get an appointment. And now, I want to do some thinking about the values I find most important, the goals I want to achieve, and the habits I can work on to support them both.

Values

The research participants who demonstrated the most willingness to rumble with vulnerability and practice courage tethered their behavior to one or two values, not ten. This makes sense for a couple of reasons. First, I see it the same way that I see Jim Collins’ mandate “If you have more than three priorities, you have no priorities.” At some point, if everything on the list is important, then nothing is truly a driver for you. It’s just a gauzy list of feel-good words.

Second, I’ve taken more than ten thousand people through this work, and when people are willing to stay with the process long enough to whittle their big list down to two, they always come to the same conclusion that I did with my own values and process: My two core values are where all of the ‘second tier’ circled values are tested.

-Brene Brown

Here are some values that are important to me:

kindness: both to others - all living things, truly - and myself. Assuming the best of people’s intentions. Forgiving mistakes and misunderstandings and miscommunications. Accepting my flaws and quirks, and those of others, as part of life.

competence: to lean into the things I’m skilled at, such as programming.

authenticity: owning my own mistakes. Forgiving myself and others for making mistakes. Being willing to admit I’m wrong, or see another side of things.

creativity: to let go of perfectionism and do things for the love of them. To exercise both the logical and the artistic parts of my mind. To seek out new ideas and think critically about them.

simplicity: no multitasking. Living in the moment. Focusing on one thing at a time.  Appreciating a beautiful piece of art or a delicious meal or time with a loved one.

beauty: to surround myself with things I love. To adorn myself in such a way that I feel good about myself. Spending a little extra to get a nicer item sometimes, instead of always going for bargain prices. Getting some candles, putting something over my bed.

self-care: exercising, eating healthier, taking vitamins, meditating. Buying some fragrances for aromatherapy. Coming up with a pre-bedtime ritual that I can do to wind down, such as lighting some incense and reading a book in bed. Allowing myself downtime.

growth: pushing myself out of my comfort zone so I can grow. Taking the challenging route.

love: allowing myself to lean on those that I love and who love me. Being there for them. Taking notes about the important people and events in their lives. Checking in.

discipline: remembering my values, goals, and priorities even when I’d rather sit and scroll Tumblr. Keeping my house neat. Working on my anxiety and depression exercises.

optimism: Believing the best of myself and others. Not catastrophizing.

faith: Believing things will work out in the end. What will happen will happen. Not fretting about things I can’t control.

grace: allowing myself room to make mistakes, be lazy, and mess up without punishing myself.

I can isolate two important values here: kindness and discipline. Kindness allows me to take care of myself, rely on others, make mistakes, and, most importantly, to serve others. I rarely feel as good about myself as I do when I am being helpful and kind. Discipline allows me to get out of my comfort zone, to challenge myself and grow. I need discipline about my physical and mental health so that I have the energy to be kind, to create, to challenge myself.

Goals

Given my current mental state, my goals right now are pretty simple:

Finish Cracking the Coding Interview.

Read more. Read more poetry. Read one nonfiction book before the end of the year.

Build up healthy habits surrounding nutrition, exercise, and meditation.

Cultivate a pre-bedtime ritual that I can follow that avoids a computer screen (buying incense and a burner and burning a stick while I read in bed for at least 30 minutes).

Make a list of important people and keep track of the last time I checked in with them and/or saw them in person.

Find a therapist.

Work on combating negative thoughts.

Habits

Read 10 pages a day.

Read 1 nonfiction book before the end of the year.

Read 1 poetry book before the end of the year.

Make bed every morning.

Exercise or meditate (or both) every day.

Take vitamins every day.

Avoid political blogs.

Bring lunch 4x a week.

No Starbucks.

Tidy once a day.

Listen to Discover Weekly and Release Radar playlists every week.

Do one outdoor trip per month.

Action Items

Make list of important people and write down as many details as I can think of.

Figure out how to track habits.

Buy some incense or aromatherapy oils.

Clean out closet so I only have nice clothes in it and can better put together outfits and identify missing pieces.

Call counselors and make an appointment.

#a journals #a

[andhumanslovedstories]

what I’ve read 2017 (books 7-10)

Sex on Six Legs: Lessons on Life, Love, and Language from the Insect World, Marlene Zuk

A Time to Dance, Padma Venkatraman

Big Girls Don’t Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women, Rebecca Traister

Get it Done When You’re Depressed: 50 Strategies for Keeping Your Life on Track, Julie A. Fast and John D. Preston

or, God made bugs kinky; we explain so many things through interpretative dance, maybe it’s time for interpretative dance to be explained; no not that election the other election;  and this book about depression made me more depressed

Nonfiction: Sex on Six Legs: Lessons on Life, Love, and Language from the Insect World, by Marlene Zuk (1/15)

  Despite the first part of the title, which is the only part I read before I immediately checked this book out, Sex on Six Legs is in fact about much more than just insect sex. The majority of the book focuses on other aspects of insect communities and relationships, as Zuk takes a plethora on nonsex angles to examine the intricate interdependence of these highly sophisticated social structures. You have to read most of the book to get to the sex, which is good because all of the book is interesting and gosh I’d never thought about the complexities of insects this way and boy does it make you question how humans consider ourselves so unique in our complexity when insects are just as complex while also being staggeringly diverse in that complexity, yes, all of this is true, but I’m not here to lie to you. My main takeaway from this book has to be that, yall, bugs fuck so weird. 

  Yall. 

  Yall. 

  They fuck the weirdest. Bugs fuck like xenophiles aren’t thinking big enough. Bugs read your Mass Effect fanfic and they aren’t impressed by your sex scenes. Gimme them vaginas that store multiple deposits of sperm so that the female can select whichever she wants to fertilize her eggs. Gimme them males who answer the question “what that dick do” with “scoop out my competitor’s sperm, obviously, while ejaculating like someone dropped a mentos in diet coke.” Yall, I find out that ant queens mate once, in a midair orgy as they fly to their new hive, and that’s their store of sperm for the rest of their lives. There’s competitive secret egg fucking. There’s exploding penises. There’s a lot of death. Insect sex (Insex? no. no let’s not go with that) is as diverse and otherworldly as insect social structures are, and a book like this should be mandatory reading for anyone doing science fiction or fantasy world building. The natural world is weirder than your imagination. And Zuk is a good writer to escort you through it, with clear expertise paired with a minimum of jargon, a sense of the best insect anecdotes, and the kind of dry humor you often find in science writing about traditionally esoteric or disgusting subjects—a convivial kind of concession that, yes, this is what I’ve dedicated my life to studying, yes, I can see how that might seem an odd choice, no, I’m not embarrassed in the slightest, now please follow me as we find out what that dick do.

Fiction: A Time to Dance, by Padma Venkatraman (1/16)

  I struggle with books written in verse, largely since I spend the book wondering why it isn’t just written in prose. If I’d noticed A Time to Dance was entirely in verse when I’d picked it up at the library, I might not have brought it home. Having said that, small freeverse chapters do allow you different opportunities for writing style and flow, and Venkatraman takes advantage of both the possibility for increased lyricism and increased fragmentation to convey dance and trauma. The novel centers on Veda, a teenage dancer of Bharatanatyam, an Indian classical dance. Her career is derailed after an accident after a competition costs Veda her right leg. The book covers Veda’s relationship with her body, her family, and her dance, as the accident forces her to dig deeper into the spirituality behind physicality. It’s dance as dance and dance as prayer, which works well (I grudgingly admit) as verse.

Nonfiction: Big Girls Don’t Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women, by Rebecca Traister (1/29)

  I’m going through the books in the order I started them, rather than the order I finished them. Usually they’re the same thing. Sometimes, as is the case here, the book takes a long time to get through. It turns out that this January I was not really feeling reading a book examining the impact of the 2008 election. Especially when the first half was, “Why did Hillary Clinton lose?” Traister opens the book talking about her own conversion from a John Edwards supporter (hey remember when we thought he wasn’t a piece of shit?) who thought Clinton was too compromised a candidate to a Clinton supporter sobbing in public the night Hillary conceded. She talks about the transition of Hillary Rodham to Hillary Clinton and the decades she spent as the lightening rod of feminism in politics, from taking her husband’s name some years after marriage because it was hurting him in the polls, to why Hillary Clinton has always been her most politically popular when she is suffering personal lows. And post 2016, it’s fascinating studying Clinton’s genderless (or probably more accurately, masculine) 2008 campaign, where after a career of focusing on women’s issues, Clinton moved them to the background, to her detriment.

  But it’s not a book about Hillary Clinton. She is the largest figure in it, but Traister analyzes Sarah Palin’s brand of conservative womanhood, the Obama bros and their gender troubles, Michelle Obama (who comes off amazingly in this book, Traister straight up admits that when she was reporting on the campaign she had to call her editor and be like, “I can’t report on this woman any more, I now love her too much”; the analysis of Michelle as reluctant political wife with a complicated relationship to her country is one of the standout sections of the book), media figures like Katie Couric and Rachel Maddow, and one of the parts I found most interesting, Elizabeth Edwards. Elizabeth Edwards, Michelle Obama, and Hillary Clinton form an interesting tryptic of the new political wife—women who are as accomplished as their husband, who are routinely credited as the brains of the partnership, and who struggle publically with traditional femininity (which is especially complicated for Michelle Obama as a black woman) and political ambition.

Nonfiction: Get it Done When You’re Depressed: 50 Strategies for Keeping Your Life on Track, by Julie A. Fast and John D. Preston (1/18)

  I picked up this book because I was starting school again, because I was feeling mature and aware of my problems, because I’ll pick up anything even self-help related. (Sidenote: self-help is my number one guilty pleasure. I’ll read self-help books on whatever, problems I have and problems I don’t. I’ve read about raising your child who has ADHD, about dating after divorce, separating your life from narcissist parents, dating multiple men at once, and reentering the workforce after decades of teaching in academia. My ultimate wish fulfilment is anything that promises me a solution in 300 pages or less. ) 

  The book’s chapters, each a different strategy for being productive while depressed, are a few pages long and rigidly formatted: an explanation of a problem caused by depression, a testimony from someone with depression, a testimony from author Julie Fast on her own experiences with depression, an explanation from Dr. John Preston as to why depressed brains do this, and some advice on implementing the advice. Most of the advice made sense—keep a schedule, get sleep, find the place that you work the best—while other made sense but were also a deep affront to my soul—namely if you can’t do something, just ask someone else to do. The visceral horror I felt reading this advice has forced me to confront how I think about my own and other people’s mental illness. (also an affront: maybe drink less caffeine, which I’m gonna pretend I didn’t read because I’ve been trying to drink less caffeine because it makes me jittery and now I can’t stop taking naps which are taking over my days, so I think jitteriness is less of a detriment than the exhaustion, and by the way, this sequence of trial and error body balancing is perfect microcosm for trying to cope with depression.)

  I’ve had a check tire light on in my car for weeks now, a light that, oh boy, I should do something about, but every aspect of checking the tires, from finding the pressure gauge and actually using it, to figuring out the steps to take if there actually is a problem, seems like so much effort that it’s easier to ignore the problem. Which translates to, it’s easier to force my hand by making the situation a crisis than it is to motivate myself to do preventative maintenance. It’s occurred to me that I could ask Dad to do this for me. Or ask him to at least come with me to the garage. Why don’t I? Answer: because I am capable of handling this tire if I function at my best and make it a priority, because Dad might ask how long this has been a problem and I’ll have to admit that it’s been weeks, because a serious car problem would drain what’s left of my savings, because Dad will be so ashamed of his lazy adult daughter that he’ll never respect or love me again (I never said these were all reasonable excuses.) So I don’t ask him to help with this. And I think less of the author for admitting that she would.

  It’s more acceptable to hate yourself for your mental illness than it is to hate other people, because self-hatred at least allows you to be both victim and victimizer. But I judge people for procrastinating on the things they know they should be doing while I strenuously avoid all my tasks, I judge people for their depression while I keep bursting into tears in parking lots because I don’t want to get out of my car, I judge people for their anxiety while I crank up youtube videos of hand massages so I don’t need to focus on my own thoughts, and I excuse my judgment of others by arguing that I’m no harder on them than I am on myself. And if (when) I am, it’s because clearly I am putting in the work to handle my problems while they aren’t. So I disliked Fast for most of this book. I hated her anecdotes and her honesty. When she talked about how her depression had lost her relationships and profession opportunities, I quickly listed all the ways that way my depression was better than that depression. The book took me longer than I expected to read; it’s hard to speedread when what you’re reading makes you feel ugly.

  I had my epiphany around strategy 45: I hated how she talked about depression in the present tense. I hated how she had a book’s worth of strategies for coping with depression, and she was still depressed. I didn’t (and don’t) want to cope with my depression. I want to not be depressed. But she’s still depressed. And I’m still depressed. And maybe I’m going to be depressed forever. In which case, it’s good for me to remember that loving myself and loving other people are one and the same. Empathy for me is not a high-road, moralistic treatise on how we should behave; it’s simply that when I make the strong effort to love people who do and think the same ways I wish I didn’t, I get better at loving myself. Maybe more useful than the entire book’s worth of strategies was the one that I ended with, my strategy number 51: Forgive us our depression, as we forgive those who are depressed.

  Someone please come help me check my tire.

#booklr #marlene zuk #padma venkatraman #rebecca traister #depression #julie a fast #150 books #sorry mobile readers i hope the read more works for you

[infinitegrowthpage]

Reading fiction helps your career, but reading poetry helps more

We have known for a while that people who are most successful in business read fiction.  And people who read fiction have more empathy, no matter where they land on the gender or personality trait spectrum.

It’s interesting to me that genre fiction — sci-fi, mystery, and political satire, for example — do not increase our empathy, and exposure to nonfiction correlates with loneliness and lack of social support.

But what about poetry?

It’s hard to find examples of famous writers of fictional narrative who also have flourishing careers in the business world. For the most part, novelists have a day job and jump at the chance to quit that day job as soon as they can reliably support themselves writing. Yet the world of poetry is full of writers who had long careers in business. T.S. Eliot worked in banking. After Wallace Stevens won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He turned down a faculty position at Harvard because he didn’t want to leave his position as VP of an insurance company.

It turns out that poetry is especially beneficial to people who want to lead and manage. John Coleman wrote in the Harvard Business Review that “poetry teaches us to wrestle with and simplify complexity…Business leaders live in multifaceted, dynamic environments. Their challenge is to take that chaos and make it meaningful and understandable. Reading and writing poetry can exercise that capacity, improving one’s ability to better conceptualize the world and communicate it — through presentations or writing — to others.”

Fictional narrative expects the reader to keep turning pages  to connect with a character and feel what they feel. Poetry demands that the reader decipher each line in for understanding — the world, or the self or others. Both poetry and fiction develop empathy, but fiction is better for that. Poetry, however, is the practice of simplifying complex topics. (Extra credit alert: To illustrate this, read  Because I could not stop for Death by Emily Dickinson)

Most people can make a good business decision if they have all the relevant data in front of them. But the most successful executives are excellent at making decisions with incomplete information. The less information you need to make a decision, the higher you can rise. Think Elon Musk deciding he can go to the moon. Or Mark Zuckerberg assuming he will be able to get millions of people to use his Harvard dating website.

Dana Gioia explains that this decision-making skill is about sorting complexity to come up with a guess at the truth. And in Knowledge@Wharton he says reading (and writing) poetry, rather than conventional fiction or nonfiction, is the most effective way to develop these skills.

Claire Morgan, author of What Poetry Bring to Business, cites studies that show readers of stories and poetry generate nearly twice as many alternative endings for the poems, and poetry readers develop great self-monitoring strategies that enhance the efficacy of their thinking process. Morgan says these creative capabilities help executives keep their organizations entrepreneurial, find imaginative solutions, and navigate moments when they cannot rely on data to make good decisions.

The world is full of examples of executives who read poetry Steve Jobs collected the works of William Blake. The Sidney Harman founder of Harman Industries, always tried to hire poets into management, arguing,  “Poets are our original systems thinkers. They look at our most complex environments and they reduce the complexity to something they begin to understand.”

Recently The Nation published a poem that received so much backlash that the magazine published an apology longer than the poem. When have so many people cared so much about a poem? I had to read it. And I love it. So I’m republishing it here. This is a career blog, and reading poetry will help your career. So read it. And tell me in the comments what you think.

How-To

by Anders Carlson-Wee

If you got hiv, say aids. If you a girl, say you’re pregnant––nobody gonna lower themselves to listen for the kick. People passing fast. Splay your legs, cock a knee funny. It’s the littlest shames they’re likely to comprehend. Don’t say homeless, they know you is. What they don’t know is what opens a wallet, what stops em from counting what they drop. If you’re young say younger. Old say older. If you’re crippled don’t flaunt it. Let em think they’re good enough Christians to notice. Don’t say you pray, say you sin. It’s about who they believe they is. You hardly even there.

Reading fiction helps your career, but reading poetry helps more published first on https://dataentrytestpro.tumblr.com/

[moodboardinthecloud]

HOW TO BE A WRITER: 10 TIPS FROM REBECCA SOLNIT

1) Write. There is no substitute. Write what you most passionately want to write, not blogs, posts, tweets or all the disposable bubblewrap in which modern life is cushioned. But start small: write a good sentence, then a good paragraph, and don’t be dreaming about writing the great American novel or what you’ll wear at the awards ceremony because that’s not what writing’s about or how you get there from here. The road is made entirely out of words. Write a lot. Maybe at the outset you’ll be like a toddler—the terrible twos are partly about being frustrated because you’re smarter than your motor skills or your mouth, you want to color the picture, ask for the toy, and you’re bumbling, incoherent and no one gets it, but it’s not only time that gets the kid onward to more sophistication and skill, it’s effort and practice. Write bad stuff because the road to good writing is made out of words and not all of them are well-arranged words.

2) Remember that writing is not typing. Thinking, researching, contemplating, outlining, composing in your head and in sketches, maybe some typing, with revisions as you go, and then more revisions, deletions, emendations, additions, reflections, setting aside and returning afresh, because a good writer is always a good editor of his or her own work. Typing is this little transaction in the middle of two vast thoughtful processes. There is such thing as too much revision—I’ve seen things that were amazing in the 17th version get flattened out in the 23rd—but nothing is born perfect. Well, some things almost are, but they’re freaks. And you might get those magical perfect passages if you write a lot, including all the stuff that isn’t magic that has to be cut, rethought, revised, fact-checked, and cleaned up.

3) Read. And don’t read. Read good writing, and don’t live in the present. Live in the deep past, with the language of the Koran or the Mabinogion or Mother Goose or Dickens or Dickinson or Baldwin or whatever speaks to you deeply. Literature is not high school and it’s not actually necessary to know what everyone around you is wearing, in terms of style, and being influenced by people who are being published in this very moment is going to make you look just like them, which is probably not a good long-term goal for being yourself or making a meaningful contribution. At any point in history there is a great tide of writers of similar tone, they wash in, they wash out, the strange starfish stay behind, and the conches. Check out the bestseller list for April 1935 or August 1978 if you don’t believe me. Originality is partly a matter of having your own influences: read evolutionary biology textbooks or the Old Testament, find your metaphors where no one’s looking, don’t belong. Or belong to the other world that is not quite this one, the world from which you send back your messages. Imagine Herman Melville in workshop in 1849 being told by all his peers that he needed to cut all those informative digressions and really his big whale book was kind of dull and why did it take him so long to get to the point. And actually it was a quiet failure at the time. So was pretty much everything Thoreau published, and Emily Dickinson published only a handful of poems in her lifetime but wrote thousands.

4) Listen. Don’t listen. Feedback is great, from your editor, your agent, your readers, your friends, your classmates, but there are times when you know exactly what you’re doing and why and obeying them means being out of tune with yourself. Listen to your own feedback and remember that you move forward through mistakes and stumbles and flawed but aspiring work, not perfect pirouettes performed in the small space in which you initially stood. Listen to what makes your hair stand on end, your heart melt, and your eyes go wide, what stops you in your tracks and makes you want to live, wherever it comes from, and hope that your writing can do all those things for other people. Write for other people, but don’t listen to them too much.

5) Find a vocation. Talent is overrated, and it is usually conflated with nice style. Passion, vocation, vision, and dedication are rarer, and they will get you through the rough spots in your style when your style won’t give you a reason to get up in the morning and stare at the manuscript for the hundredth day in a row or even give you a compelling subject to write about. If you’re not passionate about writing and about the world and the things in it you’re writing about, then why are you writing? It starts with passion even before it starts with words. You want to read people who are wise, deep, wild, kind, committed, insightful, attentive; you want to be those people. I am all for style, but only in service of vision.

6) Time. It takes time. This means that you need to find that time. Don’t be too social. Live below your means and keep the means modest (people with trust funds and other cushions: I’m not talking to you, though money makes many, many things easy, and often, vocation and passion harder). You probably have to do something else for a living at the outset or all along, but don’t develop expensive habits or consuming hobbies. I knew a waitress once who thought fate was keeping her from her painting but taste was: if she’d given up always being the person who turned going out for a burrito into ordering the expensive wine at the bistro she would’ve had one more free day a week for art.

7) Facts. Always get them right. The wrong information about a bumblebee in a poem is annoying enough, but inaccuracy in nonfiction is a cardinal sin. No one will trust you if you get your facts wrong, and if you’re writing about living or recently alive people or politics you absolutely must not misrepresent. (Ask yourself this: do I like it when people lie about me?) No matter what you’re writing about, you have an obligation to get it right, for the people you’re writing about, for the readers, and for the record. It’s why I always tell students that it’s a slippery slope from the things your stepfather didn’t actually do to the weapons of mass destruction Iraq didn’t actually have. If you want to write about a stepfather who did things your stepfather didn’t, or repeat conversations you don’t actually remember with any detail, at least label your product accurately. Fiction operates under different rules but it often has facts in it too, and your credibility rests on their accuracy. (If you want to make up facts, like that Emily Bronte was nine feet tall and had wings but everyone in that Victorian era was too proper to mention it, remember to get the details about her cobbler and the kind of hat in fashion at the time right, and maybe put a little cameo at her throat seven and a half feet above the earth.)

8) Joy. Writing is facing your deepest fears and all your failures, including how hard it is to write a lot of the time and how much you loathe what you’ve just written and that you’re the person who just committed those flawed sentences (many a writer, and God, I know I’m one, has worried about dying before the really crappy version is revised so that posterity will never know how awful it was). When it totally sucks, pause, look out the window (there should always be a window) and say, I’m doing exactly what I want to be doing. I am hanging out with the English language (or the Spanish or the Korean). I get to use the word turquoise or melting or supernova right now if I want. I’m with Shelley, who says that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the universe, and I am not fracking or selling useless things to lonely seniors or otherwise abusing my humanity. Find pleasure and joy. Maybe even make lists of joys for emergencies. When all else fails, put on the gospel song “Steal My Joy”—refrain is “Ain’t gonna let nobody steal my joy.” Nobody, not even yourself.

But it’s not about the joy, it’s about the work, and there has to be some kind of joy in the work, some kind from among the many kinds, including the joy of hard truths told honestly. Carpenters don’t say, I’m just not feeling it today, or I don’t give a damn about this staircase and whether people fall through it; how you feel is something that you cannot take too seriously on your way to doing something, and doing something is a means of not being stuck in how you feel. That is, there’s a kind of introspection that’s wallowing and being stuck, and there’s a kind that gets beyond that into something more interesting and then maybe takes you out into the world or into the place where deepest interior and cosmological phenomena are at last talking to each other. I’ve written stuff amidst hideous suffering, and it was a way not to be so stuck in the hideous suffering, though it was hard, but also, hard is not impossible, and I didn’t sign up with the expectation that it would be easy.

9) What we call success is very nice and comes with useful byproducts, but success is not love, or at least it is at best the result of love of the work and not of you, so don’t confuse the two. Cultivating love for others and maybe receiving some for yourself is another job and an important one. The process of making art is the process of becoming a person with agency, with independent thought, a producer of meaning rather than a consumer of meanings that may be at odds with your soul, your destiny, your humanity, so there’s another kind of success in becoming conscious that matters and that is up to you and nobody else and within your reach.

10) It’s all really up to you, but you already knew that and knew everything else you need to know somewhere underneath the noise and the bustle and the anxiety and the outside instructions, including these ones.

http://lithub.com/how-to-be-a-writer-10-tips-from-rebecca-solnit/?utm_source=Jocelyn+K.+Glei%27s+newsletter&utm_campaign=aca782bb53-Newsletter_09_22_16&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0d0c9bd4c2-aca782bb53-143326949#