Pennyworth Advice

Catkin, Half-Drowned

Half-drowned, still protecting.

As the Icepocalypse faded we had a few days of soaking rain–really, Pacific Northwesterners need a thousand names for the different types of liquid precipitation we get–at relatively balmy temperatures. 50F is not usual for January, and several trees are putting out catkins or outright flowerbuds.

I’m not so worried about the camellias and that one cherry tree down the hill always goes earlier than anyone else. But I do whisper to the others–please, be reasonable. We could still get more ice, or worse. Try not to get too excited.

They’re not listening. I got this snap of a half-drowned little fellow, tousle-ragged, protecting tender new growth underneath. I hope they make it.

I hope we all do.

See you Monday.

Switchback, Lightning Rod

The Year of the Real continues. We’re not even out of January and I already have a form of psychological whiplash, though I’m trying to look at it like the Very Large Unpleasant Thing was a wicket to run through, or a struggling out of a chrysalis, or a phoenix burning down in order to burst into fresh flame–you get the idea. An uncomfortable necessity, a forging to make me stronger even if I would prefer something a little less, uh, red-hot and hammer-y.

My second husband had a theory of enlightenment–he had theories for everything, naturally, it was part of his charm and his downfall, but I digress. “There’s two paths,” he would say. “One switchbacks up the mountain, where you get the howling wind, the falling rocks, the avalanches, the lessons administered time and again. That’s how most poor motherfuckers do it.”

“Heard of that one,” I’d say. “What’s the other?” I rarely minded playing the straight man to his comedian. Part of my charm and downfall, I suppose.

“Well, the other starts in the parking lot. It’s a big lightning rod that goes straight up, all the way to the peak, and there’s a forest of warning signs around it saying DO NOT LICK.”

At that point, I’d repeat what I said the first time he ever expounded upon this theory in my presence. “That sounds more efficient. Where do I sign up?”

Ninety-nine percent of the time, that did him in. He’d laugh until tears streamed down his face, and I’d be pleased to have done my part. The one percent it didn’t was the first time, when he stopped and gazed at me for several seconds, brow furrowed, and finally said, “You know, that doesn’t surprise me at all, babe.” (And then began to laugh.) It was somewhat of a mystery to him, how I didn’t mind the pain all compressed into a few blinding instants if it got me up the goddamn mountain. I was equally mystified by his apparent pleasure in switchbacks and frostbite.

He was about the journey, I was about getting the bitch to Mount Doom. For a long while our relationship worked because of those contrasting commitments. It failed for other reasons, certainly, but I still remember the parts which didn’t rather fondly. And that image–the different ways to enlightenment–has stuck with me ever since.

Even people who leave one’s life change one somewhat. Getting older hopefully means putting uncomfortable changes in proper perspective, and thankfully that process gets easier once one has some Life Experience socked under the mattress. Which could be an argument for the switchblade route, I know.

But I’ve always been a lightning rod girl. So I’m choosing to view the recent unpleasantness as one of my trademark tongue-stuck-to-electrified-metal moments.

Of course the joke is really on both of us. Once the peak is reached, one gets a better view…and discovers that there’s an infinity of mountains, each higher than the last, each with a path (or two, or fifty) and a lightning rod festooned with warning signs in the parking lot. Sure, nirvana probably arrives once one gets rid of the mountains or realizes they’re all in one’s mind, et cetera, but I like learning new things even when the lesson is somewhat painful. And I already committed to sticking around until all other beings get through that particular door first, since the universe interests me and (more importantly) I’m not leaving anyone behind in this mess.

Not if I can help it. Enlightenment’s rather useless, after all, unless one helps others up the mountain–in whatever way they prefer. I do tend to discourage the lightning-rod method, but the sort of people who choose it aren’t the type to be discouraged by my warnings. (Guess how I know.)

So I hit the lightning again, pick myself up on the peak, shaking my head and frowning at the crisped bits in my hair. Stagger away from the pieces of chrysalis, my wings drying to catch the wind afresh. Sing while I scrape the ashen remnants of my old self into an egg of myrrh, and feel the fresh fire in my vitals. Shift my grip on the croquet mallet and eye the next wicket, not worrying about how far into the weeds I’ve been sent.

Pretty soon I’ll arrive in another parking lot, and I might take the switchback route next time…

…oh, hell, who am I kidding? We all know what I’m gonna do.

See you at the top, my beloveds.

Rope, Ladder, Net

Just when I think that perhaps I should throw up my hands and leave the merry-go-round completely (headfirst if necessary), the Universe throws in a few things to keep me hanging on. Like finding out a fellow writer is a fan, and that I’ve made their day by agreeing to a small request. Or like someone just finishing a four-book roadtrip I wrote and telling me about their favourite character(s). Or like a very nice letter from someone who found my YA books a lifeline while navigating the jungle known as the school system.

Small things, tiny things, precious things.

I often forget, working in isolation, that the work goes out into the world and finds those who need it. I consider myself an invisible midlister just chugging away, doing the best I can with what I’m given or can wrest from the dustheap, never truckling or bowing, ripping each word out of my guts or chipping from the cortex as occasion demands. Of course I’m an introvert, a bit of a hermit, and while not quite a misanthrope certainly no philanthropist, so I’m happiest being unremarked and left to toodle along my own little train track, building as I go.

But sometimes even I get lonely and discouraged. Sometimes the fight to keep the work whole and protected so it can become a line into the abyss for someone else is messy and draining. (It’s all very much like this Akimbo Comic, which lives in my head rent-free.)

And it’s kind of…funny? Each time I get to the point of kicking over the traces and abandoning the war, some small thing hits my inbox or my DMs, my texts or even out in meatspace. I get a little jolt, a piece of proof that one of my stories helped someone somewhere, even if it was just a momentary smile or a few hours’ worth of escape from capitalist hellscape dystopia on a boiling planet. That it had an effect.

And that gives me the strength to go on a bit longer, especially on days when even spite has failed me. Spit out the blood, blink away yet more hot claret, brace oneself on the broken sword, and rise yet again. Reach down just a little further and find the doorway for one last ultimate defense as the music swells breathlessly. Or simply scan the horizon, pick a point, and say, there’s the next one as your weary band of travelers looks to you for direction.

I have often disliked hope, especially in the past few years as the cycle between daring to feel any and being kicked in the teeth accelerates. But it keeps happening, springing up through the cracks in my heart like golden weeds, binding the pieces together in one more jagged whole. The kintsugi of endurance. Drive some ink into the scars, let them be a roadmap.

I should not have been born, by all odds I should not have survived nearly half a century, and I definitely should not be the one handing out hope to other ragged, haggard survivors. Yet here we are.

And so long as there’s even one person out there to help, so long as there’s even a chance that the ball will land in the lap of someone who needs it, I’ll be pointing my bat at the fence and getting ready for another swing. I’ve done it all day, I can do it all day, and tomorrow I’ll get up and do it all day again.

So if you’re a fellow writer/artist/singer/whatever, keep going. If someone made something that dragged you out of the abyss, try to tell them. And if nobody tells you that your thing is helping, take it from me–it has, and it will. Keep going, please, for the love of the gods, keep going.

Keep making.

Because the abyss is hungry enough to swallow us all, and the ropes we send into it become a ladder, a net. Because you never know when a flailing, questing, drowning hand will light on the rope you twisted and be yanked to the surface for a breath of knife-cold, blessed air. Because one day the net will catch you too. Because it’s our job, it’s our calling, it’s our humanity. Because fuck the greedy abyss-servant bastards who want to reduce us all to ad engagement. Because it’s a day that ends in “y”.

Because, just because. And someday when you’re at the end of your endurance, a little jolt will arrive. They happen along when we need them, more often than not.

And maybe this is one of them. So, let’s get up again, my beloved.

We can do this all day.

Ice Dragon

Very happy to be frozen, actually.

Another picture from the recent Icepocalypse. This fellow is a concrete dragon, and he lives at the base of the birch tree. You can see how he–and the vegetation around him–was coated with absolutely clear ice. (Which he was thrilled by, being a creature of all weather.) I got this snap while taking Boxnoggin cautiously around the yard since the street was a solid sheet of “oh hell no”. If I slip and almost go down thrice before getting to the end of the driveway, I’m not setting even a toe upon the street; fortunately, I was able to break through the crust where there was vegetation. Box, of course, was busy smashing his nose against the freeze and huffing it like an addictive substance, his eyes rolling back with ecstasy.

I don’t even know.

The melt is long past and we’ve had storms more appropriate to April than January. There was even some weak rotation in a few squalls, or so the meteorologists said. (No wonder my sinuses have been throbbing like a brass band.) I’m seeing insect life that normally doesn’t appear until March-April as well, and that disturbs me. We’re going to have a lot more crazy weather as corporations continue to cook the planet. I hold out no particular hope of them being forced to stop.

Anyway, we’re back on normal walkies schedule, I can eat a few bland foods again with 95% success, and if I’m going to avoid the incipient stress ulcer I need to continue doing what I’m doing. So these changes have a good chance of becoming permanent. Thank the gods my stomach concurs with the rest of me that caffeine is an absolute necessity for continued survival. I don’t know what I’d’ve done otherwise.

Have a lovely weekend, my friends. May we all be as serene as a dragon amid the foliage.

Not to Trend

I really should have known, picking the word of the year. I mean, I’ve striven for the Real all my life, but consciously setting the intention seems to have also set a great many things in motion. Not that it’s a bad thing! It’s just…a lot, and I should have bloody well expected it.

In fact, it’s rather akin to a rollercoaster. Out in the physical world I find such things quite soothing, nearly sleep-inducing, because once one is strapped in and the machine begins to chug, that’s it. You’re in the hands of the gods, nothing else to do about it, might as well relax. If a rivet pops, a catastrophic failure occurs, or lightning strikes, well, there it is. According to my (admittedly not very reasonable) nervous system, a rollercoaster is not a perceived helplessness (which is utterly damaging) but a chosen risk, and that makes all the difference.

Yes, I’m odd. We all knew that.

Anyway. The wonderful Ann Aguirre made a few observations on Bsky yesterday about writing to trends and why that’s not optimal. Right now there’s a lot–and I do mean a lot–of pressure to write proposals and synopses for projects that seem akin to those currently hot on BookTok (of all things), which is super short-sighted on the part of publishers, acquiring editors, and agents. By the time a book gets through the production process to take advantage of a flash in the influencer pan there’s no light remaining, only burnt, bitter residue sludge. It’s in influencers’ short-term economic interest to always have a hot new exclusionary thang to rave about, just as it’s in their economic short-term interest to manufacture drama for engagement ad dollars. And let’s face it, short-term is the only term the algorithm knows. Every platform depending on rage engagement, data scraping, and increasingly bizarre drama inevitably cannibalizes itself, leaving behind a trail of broken people and infrastructure. The initial grifters disappear early because they have their cut, and start looking for the new grift to inflict on the rest of us.

It’s much better and more long-term viable for everyone in publishing if the authors are supported in doing what they know readers want, because we’re the ones who hear from said reading folk. (Our names are, after all, on the covers.) Quality work produced with real, painstaking effort brings those readers and teaches them an author can be trusted. Unfortunately, with trad publishing consolidating into less than a handful of robber-baron megahouses and venture capital scenting the moribund beasts in the drying water hole (Amazon’s sucked all the H2O out to cool their ecology-wrecking servers, natch), we’re seeing increasingly short-term cycles of “this thing’s hot right now, GET ME FIFTY JUST LIKE IT, what do you mean it takes time to write a real book, fine, let’s just get the plagiarism machine to do it!” leading to “wait, why aren’t people reading our LLM-spewed ersatz with crappy covers, churned out in droves to game the KU algorithm? Aren’t the bots reading our fake books anymore? DO MORE OF THEM!”

It’s enough to make an actual flesh-and-blood author despair. Or drive them full-feral indie, which is a route I see more and more going for. It’s great that the tools exist and that more writers than ever are using them, but they still require hardware, software, experience, and time/energy a lot of marginalized folks just plain don’t have. I mourn for the stories we’re losing because trad publishing let Amazon foul the waterhole past bearing before sucking it dry. To be excruciatingly honest, a lot of trad publishing’s upper management saw only that Amazon was harming those pesky authors who demanded to be paid for hard work, but so long as those nuisances were the ones being hurt, that was just fine. After all, it made said pesky authors easier to exploit, and by the time publishers realized the ‘Zon was coming for them too, the monopsony and monopoly were both well in place and had years of unregulated shenanigans to provide it with plenty of nutrition for metastasis.

The fallout is ongoing, brutally devastating, and while the publishing ecosystem will eventually recover after the inevitable extinction event–whenever that happens–it’s going to penalize the already-vulnerable most. As per fucking usual.

Anyway, part of my re-commitment to protecting the work has been pushing back on the ridiculous “advice” and strenuous pressure to write “to trend”. I will not be performing to whatever some algorithm thinks will get the most advertising engagement for a third-party data-scraping platform, thank you. My goal is to write real, actual books. Besides, it’s fucking exhausting to run oneself ragged in that fashion. I mean, I’ll always try new things–I spent a year doing Reading with Lili before being driven out by harassment and bots, after all–but there’s a distinct difference between “giving novelty a spin” and “servicing the egos of those who wouldn’t know a good book if it bit them because they’re so busy looking for the next quick buck/score”. The first provides spice to life, the second is just a waste of precious, finite time and effort.

The coffee is finished, Boxnoggin is stirring from his first morning nap, and dawn is making itself apparent through the firs. I’ve another day of real work ahead of me, writing a duel interrupted by an entire army plus a Sekrit Projekt attempting to get off the ground. Maybe I’ll lose out by betting on the Real.

But in all honesty, there’s no other bet I can make. I’m buckled in, the safety bar is down, and we’re on the rails. Time to relax, quit second-guessing…and focus on protecting the work.

Developments, Good and Otherwise

What a weekend. Whew.

The big publishing news swilling around right now is the fuckery surrounding Hugo Awards given at Chengdu Worldcon. Aidan Moher has a good breakdown; so does Jason Sanford. I have zero skin in this game, being absolutely not an awards writer for a variety of reasons, so I feel it’s reasonable to make a few observations as well.

Namely, that from out here it looks like authoritarian political considerations were allowed to taint the voting process, which is unconscionable and a full investigation, as well as apology plus restitution, must be made.1 Furthermore, perhaps it’s not a good idea to have such a prestigious award at the mercy of a system that can be hijacked with such astonishing regularity. (How many of these have we had now?) The effort needed to change the Hugo process so it’s insulated from such things appears prohibitive, so the solution might well be another award less prone to being co-opted by fascist assholes gaining that prestige.

Either way, SFF publishing and fandom needs to take out its trash. This is ridiculous.

In publishing news closer to home, I’ve pulled the self-pubbed books I was distributing directly through Kobo, since their nonsense reached a pitch I couldn’t handle anymore. It took years, but they finally drove me away; come next month I’ll be using a third-party aggregator to distribute those books to that particular sales platform instead. So don’t worry, I’m still making them available, I’m just putting a layer of insulation on this end. I didn’t want to shift, because I like my eggs in different baskets in case a platform enshittifies and I know other authors have been blessed with much better treatment from Kobo. But sadly, my experience has been vastly different and this makes the change necessary.

Readers will often ask, “Where’s the best place to buy your books, the one that benefits you most?” I am always touched at the care evinced by the question–the overwhelming majority of Readers want their artists remunerated fairly! Honestly, my darlings, it’s best for you to buy in a way that’s convenient for you. The biggest thing a Reader can do under current conditions is rate a book they liked in order to give the silly algorithm a bump or two, and even that pales in comparison to telling your other reading friends when you liked something. Authors work very hard to give Readers a range of options and to make books available despite nearly insurmountable obstacles such as Amazon’s predation and rampant, outright theft; these are problems which must be solved by regulation and social disapprobation of art/content thieves like torrenters and “AI” grifters. In other words, where you buy the book isn’t nearly as important as the fact that you do buy it (or check it out at your local library!) and hopefully leave at least a rating to make it harder for the algorithm (programmed by human beings for profit, don’t forget) to hide.

I also had to take a company I’ve recommended in the past for good premade covers off my list and will be recommending them no more, since when I wrote to ask for clarification of their stance on “AI” image theft in their covers I got a snotty response boiling down to, “We’ll use theft-driven ‘AI’ for our covers and if you don’t like it, fuck you.” Which is sad, but that means more business for my very favourite cover designer, who is 100% “AI”-free and has a lot of beautiful premades for sale too.

The ice is gone, so I can run this morning. This is a marvellous development; I haven’t been able to purge stress in that fashion for nearly two weeks and it’s told on me. The endorphin rush will no doubt take the top of my head off and restore all things to their proper proportions. Also, it’s been a couple days without stress-vomiting and I’m getting a few solid hours’ worth of sleep at night, and both things are providing an almost obscene sense of wellness. There’s a lot on the to-do list springing from my decision to lean much, much harder into protecting the work. I keep muttering to myself a form of Louisa May Alcott’s determination to “take Fate by the throat and shake a living out of her”, and it’s rekindling the protective fire.

I finished the Chaucer early in the weekend, and it was fabulous. The Wife of Bath was still driving the bus, last I saw, and despite the misogyny and antisemitism there’s a lot to enjoy in the work, not least the phrases like “murder will out” which are apparently much older than I ever imagined. It got a lot easier once my brain did a version of that little “switch” it does when I read Shakespeare–the neurons suddenly begin to anticipate the rhythm, the text has taught or reminded me how to read it, and instead of going word by word I begin to pass smoothly through whole phrases.

I was going to dive into a history book afterward, but needed a little more insulation for my nerves so King’s The Stand–unabridged edition–jumped the queue. I still think the 90s miniseries is one of the better King adaptations–Jamey Sheridan is hands-down the best Randall Flagg, notwithstanding McConaughey’s oozingly chilling turn as sorcerer-Flagg in the recent Dark Tower movie–and may do a rewatch once I knock off the book this time around.

Boxnoggin has gone back to bed, but the prospect of proper walkies will roust him soon as I start moving towards the toaster. So much to do today, including getting through an awkward found-family dinner in the serial and setting up the second Cain’s Wife book. I’d best get started.

Happy Monday!

No More Tied Hands

A very long time ago, I ran across this article by Jenny Crusie, about taking out the garbage and protecting the work. Since then, the phrase “Protect the Work” has been knocking around in my head, on various Post-its stuck to several different laptops and desktops, and is a truth I return to over and over again.

Toxic person throwing a tantrum? Protect the work. Publisher starts behaving nonsensically? Protect the work. Distribution platform enshittifying? Protect the work. Bad-faith reviews, trollery, reviewbombing? Protect the work. Online ruckus? Protect the fucking work.

The fact remains that nobody will protect your books if you do not. Publishing, especially trad, is a business full of exploitation, arcane holdovers from a literal century or two ago, grifting, greed, and ego. Prioritizing your own work, your own health, and your own time is crucial to any sort of success or longevity in the field.

I will be the first to admit that I have let my caretaking instincts and my willingness to bend drive me to deprioritizing my own time, health, and effort to a distinct fault, especially over the last few years with A Certain Series. My commitment to the work itself has never wavered, and at least I can rest assured that I have only very rarely allowed what I knew was best for my own work to be overruled. (My mistakes in that area can be counted on one hand, fortunately.) Yet having to go into battle for my books with one hand tied behind my back has had increasingly deleterious effects on my physical health, and that has been my biggest mistake.

Each time I have finished a fight, I’ve come back to the simple, stark phrase, Protect the work. It’s taken almost two decades in the biz for me to reach the point of snapping, and there will be no more tied hands in battle. Nor will I feel bad about what’s necessary to advocate for my work or my own interests. Our society would prefer women not to do that, publishing would prefer writers not to do that, and exploiters as a whole will use every trick in the book to make you feel bad advocating for yourself, to undercut your confidence so you’re more easily taken advantage of. Perhaps it’s a function of age that I find myself singularly unwilling to entertain that folderol any longer.

Along with this, how I spend my daily time is changing. I can’t be as accessible for certain things during working hours, and I have got to find a way not to feel guilty over the fact. That will be the next life skill I work on.

I’ve once again put PROTECT THE WORK on a Post-it, and stuck it to the desktop. I’ll apply the reminder as many times as it takes.

Moving on! The Chaucer read continues apace. I’m in the weeds of the Merchant’s Tale now, and my loathing of January (who has married poor May) knows very few bounds. I can’t quite tell where the story is heading, and I think it’s marvelous that so much of this corpus hinges on the Wife of Bath’s Tale. It seems like she decided to talk about what she felt was the problem with the Knight’s Tale–indeed, with every tale before she got her chance to speak–and now everyone is reacting to her. She’s driving the entire damn bus, not the Host and certainly not Chaucer himself. The more this goes on, the more I find her the meta-character at the heart of the entire endeavour, and this pleases me even if I sometimes felt she was being a bit long-winded. Of course her culture rarely gave women the chance to speak, and she’s forced to do so through a male writer, so…maybe she had reason to yell while she had the mic.

Seeing the traces of paganism (filtered through Roman versions of Greek classics) throbbing under the constant hum of medieval Catholicism is interesting as well. Plus there are former versions of sayings we use to this day, trapped in amber, smiling like old friends. Now that I have the rhythm of the language–it really is like Shakespeare, teaching one to read it as one goes along–everything is much, much easier.

In fact, I couldn’t wait to get back to it this morning, and stole a little time in bed with Boxnoggin snoring next to me, breathlessly reading Hades and Persephone beginning to argue about January, May, Damian, and the whole situation. I can’t wait for Persephone to bonk her husband on the head and point out he’s certainly no paragon of marital behavior.

And my scheduled time for blogging is over. It’s a wet, icy mess out there, “slicker than gooseshit” as some of the locals say, and the dog might not get the walk he wants unless we set out after more of the hazardous ice-sheets have washed away. But the back of the freeze is broken and it’s disintegrating bit by bit.

Hopefully that’s a sign. Onward to Thursday.