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.

Year of the Real

I don’t often blog on Wednesdays, keeping those mornings for other things instead. But this week is a little different. My health is not good, we are literally iced in1, and I have been thinking about a few things.

One of them is my Word of the Year. Resolutions bear mixed results at best, not least for the self-punishment our culture encourages if a new habit isn’t easily and flawlessly acquired. So, somewhere around the internets, I saw someone had simply picked a few words to focus on for the year instead, and that seemed a grand idea.

January 1, I decided I would focus on one word, and I would keep it simple.

The word was REAL.

We are assailed by “AI” plagiarism pap–visual, audio, and textual–as well as disinformation and propaganda, to a degree unusual in my life experience. Of course disinformation and propaganda have been with us from the beginning, especially as humanity developed mass-communication tools.2 However, I feel like it’s currently heaped up, doused with jet fuel, and set ablaze, with lots of people merrily shoveling more highly volatile fuel onto the blaze just to see what happens.3

Not only that, but I work in publishing. It’s not quite Hollywood, where one is well advised not to believe even the simplest assertion until the cheque clears (not deposited, clears) but it’s still an industry largely built on the exploitation of creative people, and that exploitation requires broken promises, implicit deceit, outright lies, and shameless number-juggling to a degree that astonishes many folks, even those in other lines of work where such things are rampant.4

I cannot fix this. And I know there are a lot of people out there claiming to be writers when in fact they are marketers and view the actual writing as a chore best farmed out to ghostwriters, who are forced to scour Upwork and Fiverr for a pittance in order to barely pay ever-escalating rent. There are a lot of people claiming to be writers when in fact they are grifters attempting to score big with LLM plagiarism, running away with the cash before they can be brought to account. There are a lot of people claiming to be “publishing gurus” or “coaches” when in fact they are also grifters looking to profit off the desperation of those who think they could be a Big-Name Novelist if they could just find the Magic Handshake. There’s a whole host of people claiming to be artists in when in fact they are plagiarizing, thieving pieces of shit who think a Midjourney prompt is something that should put them on Rembrandt’s level.

These people are fakes. I prefer to be real.

I have been considered a bit temperamental because I want my books a certain way.5 I want my books to be as good and as honest as I can make them, and while I allow feedback from trusted sources the final decision is always mine. I have sometimes insisted on that to the point of open conflict, and I know I have passed up and lost certain opportunities as a result.

The few times I have allowed myself to be overridden by the well-meaning (or the vengeful), I have always regretted it.

I think readers respond to both hard work in and the reality of books. I don’t think readers only want plagiarised pap or bland, anodyne inoffensive mealymouthing. I think even if a book or an author is flawed, if they are honest about their experience, refuse to bullshit, and put in the work, readers will respond. I think human beings are capable of discerning the thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of tiny signals in a work of human art that say, “I made this with my whole being, and I give it to you.” Even if people dislike the piece of art in question, the emotional response is still there.6

I’m betting that people still want complex, nuanced, juicy books that take significant effort to write.7 Regardless of whether I win or lose the bet, I do not regret placing it and will never stop believing it’s the right call.

Concurrently, I am done with being shamed when I am “difficult” because a book has a complex plot or words that may require a dictionary trip, “unlikeable” characters or a non-happy ending. I will not betray the work. I will not, in any way, betray the Real.

That’s what I’m focusing on this year. In retrospect, perhaps I shouldn’t have chosen such a word after years of pandemic and escalating fakeness.8 I know the power of words–how on earth could I not? And the first challenge in my Year of the Real has been a doozy, possibly permanently damaging my health and driving me past patience.

But I’ve taken up the gauntlet. I have often said, especially since 2016, that I dislike hope because it just leads to getting kicked in the face again. Yet Hope is not a shrinking violet. She has been knocked to the ground, spat out a few teeth, blinked away the blood, reached for her shattered sword, and the bitch just keeps getting back up. Hope is the sister of the Real, and so long as I am faithful to them–so long as I do not truckle–they will return the favor.

Let’s see what the year throws at me next.

Lonely Wall

They paved paradise, and put up a retaining wall…

There used to be a huge bank of blackberry bushes here, home to birds, rabbits, and other small critters–probably the occasional daytime-resting coyote, too. But apparently someone decided the highway needed more room. I’m not against progress, yet this was completely unnecessary.

I take some comfort in the fact that the planet will survive just fine. Humanity may not–I swing back and forth on whether it will, sometimes hourly–but Gaia, uh, will find a way. (It will probably be crabs, since they’ve evolved how many separate times now?)

Anyway, sometimes Boxnoggin and I pass the work site during walkies, and I’ve taken to saying hello to this dry stick that was once a tree. The dog would desperately like to make its acquaintance despite the sound of traffic, but I restrain him. It’s simply not safe; heaven alone knows what’s lurking in the straw and his paws don’t need to find something awful there.

The first week of the new year is closing out in a holding pattern. I’m a little awry from good news. Perhaps the trend will continue.

See you Monday.

Connected Problems

Spent the weekend attempting to rewrap insulation on the wires in my head, with mixed results. On the one hand my agent really wants sample chapters for the romantasy (she’s a courtesan assassin, he’s a wandering swordmaster, hijinks ensue) and on the other there are revisions that really need to get done (Gamble first among them) and I want to get back to the serial as soon as possible because the Steelflower and her princeling need another lesson in cooperation. And if the former sets something on fire, the latter will be very happy about it–but their barbarian friends may not be.

Hrm.

Nothing will get done if I continue to flail, but flailing is part of the zero draft recovery system, and after staving off one book hangover by writing another book in a slightly less compressed timeframe I am forced to admit (again) that one cannot use a book hangover to fend off another book hangover. All one gets is FrankenZillaMega Book Hangover. On the other hand, I really want this romantasy off the ground and at least some sample chapters with the agent, so I spent time that I might otherwise have used attempting to get to another book hangover on worldbuilding stuff, just faffing about. Which was pleasant, informative, and healing in its own way, certainly.

So. The coffee tastes particularly fine this morning, even if I am certain I’m going to have to switch back to espresso. Drip is nice but it doesn’t have the slam effect espresso does, and that’s what I’m after. But that’s a problem for another month with some room in the budget, which may not come around for a while. Ah well.

The atmospheric river dumped a lot of very nice rain on us over the weekend, which we sorely needed. Rain here means snow in the mountains, and that snowpack takes us through the summer–especially with climate change producing heat domes, scorching, and summery Octobers. I am taking a great deal of solace in the fact that the planet will survive humanity just fine, and that’s the important thing.


Oh, and the big thing online right now is a video on YouTube/online plagiarism. Maybe some people will now admit it’s a goddamn problem since a white guy with a few subscribers has done an almost four-hour explication. (I’m not holding my breath.) Just like ebook theft, the apparent ease and perception of low consequences for online plagiarism have provided a bumper crop of pure shit. I hold the two problems related because of those two features–the apparent ease (it takes a few clicks to steal an ebook, it takes a few clicks to steal someone else’s content and “brand it” as your own) and the perception of low consequences (eventually writers stop producing what you love because they aren’t paid for stolen work, while the flood of shitty online plagiarism gives an illusion of “more content” while in fact lowering the proportion of real stuff you’d want to watch). Both are seen as “victimless crimes”–ebook thieves harass writers who protest and call us “intellectual landlords”, while plagiarists are rewarded with algorithm bumps and (in the case of LLMs/AIs) wads of venture capital cash. Apologists for both plagiarism and ebook theft use harassment and threats to wear down their victims, and are very successful in the short term.

Where this all ends up is the “enshittification” of entire industries. While I find that term beautifully apt and the initial explanation of it magisterial, I have not yet seen the person who coined said term offer apology for coming out swinging in defense of ebook thieves lo these many years ago, an act which sent many of their “fans” to harass less well-known writers (overwhelmingly marginalized or femme-presenting, natch) with threats for a long time afterward. As a matter of fact, the Big Name male authors who were on the “piracy is good” bandwagon years ago are fitfully starting to see ebook theft as a problem, probably because it’s pinching their own ample bottom lines.

But I digress.

The basic quandary here is that creative labour is deeply devalued, those who provide it seen as fungible and easy exploitable. In the long term this means less of the books, fics, movies, songs, and other things you love to consume. In the short term, well, it’s so easy to steal with a few clicks, everyone’s doing it and you might even get some algorithm cash, why not? Plus there are the shitheels who just feel good tormenting and harassing other people online; they love to take aim at artists, feeling like they can get a little clout every time they leave a shitty comment, a review-bombing, or sockpuppet around a block.

The people who love to steal artists’ labour are the same people who write nasty little letters demanding an author “write faster”, with a side order of demanding we write to their personal little peccadilloes. Under this kind of sustained assault, it’s no wonder series people claim to love are being canceled and wonderful writers can’t make a goddamn living so they leave the industry entirely. The end result is a flood of shitty pablum choking the ecosystem, and then the people who have terabytes of stolen art on their hard drives moan that they can’t find anything good to read/watch (or, let’s be honest, steal) anymore.

What will solve this? Meaningful consequences. What’s the thing least likely to be applied to these kinds of thefts? Meaningful consequences. So this is a problem we’re stuck with until it becomes socially unacceptable or financially disadvantageous to steal creatives’ labour. Which might not ever happen since it’s so short-term profitable to exploit creatives under current late-capitalism conditions. Creativity is hardwired into humans–we shall be Making Things forever, for it is what we are–and the exploiters quite naturally believe there will always be a fresh crop of neophytes to take advantage of or steal from.

Frankly, trad publishing could spend significant resources shutting down ebook thieves and make it financially disadvantageous to engage in said thievery, but they have not and I suspect they won’t because it’s a short step from there to disadvantaging the other exploitation of writers. Put another way, ebook theft doesn’t harm trad publishers enough for them to meaningfully discourage it, because as far as they’re concerned there will always be a new crop of people desperate to break into trad publishing who will accept predatory contracts and other mistreatment, while the old hands and more experienced writers drain away after trying hard for a long time to change the industry from within. I’ll say it again for the nosebleed seats: Ebook theft doesn’t hurt the corporations, it harms the individual writer you’re stealing from, who is overwhelmingly likely to be living below the poverty level.

Put yet another way, ebook theft provides a pressure point for trad publishing to make sure writers stay easily exploitable and therefore willing to accept worse contract terms, especially as trad is consolidated into fewer and fewer megahouses, at least one of which is now owned by the same fuckheads who killed Toys’R’Us. (Yes, I’m STILL BITTER, and likely will be for a while.) This is much the same dynamic as movie studios wanting to use LLMs/AI to pressure writers and actors into accepting worse contract provisions. Which didn’t pan out for a variety of reasons, but it was still a close-run thing.

Eventually there will be a market correction, probably when Amazon is finally regulated out of its monopsony/monopoly practices–that will cause a ripple through the entirety of publishing, and will probably burn down the monoculture of, in effect, less than four big trad publishers. Indie and small publishing houses will see a huge spike of growth and we’ll have a publishing ecosystem instead of monoculture, but the damage in the short term will be incalculable, we’ll lose a lot of good stories and voices during it, and who knows when this will happen? The thing about an avalanche or other natural disaster is that it can hold off for years while entire cities are built in its path, and warnings about “hey, this isn’t a great place to build” are shrugged off so long as it’s profitable.


Anyway, I’ve spent too much time this morning brooding on this bullshit. I’m sure I’ll get a crop of nasty letters/comments from ebook thieves and harassers, but what else is new? I find these two problems are connected at their core, but hold out no hope there will be any sort of solution so long as our society rewards the behavior it does. Retreating to a bog witch life grows ever more appealing.

I wish I could afford it.

Underworld, Recovery

Fleecy pink clouds for a rain-washed autumn dawn. Boxnoggin pulling a “JE REFUUUUSE” until I fish out his collar and clip it on–the proprieties must be observed, and if he’s not wearing his jingle-jangle how on earth does he know he exists? Boris the coffeemaker burbling. The terrifying vertiginous suspicion that I will never write again, never finish another book, taunting me as I stagger uncaffeinated to the keyboard.

Was reading about certain shamanistic practices last night before turning out the lamp, and it struck me that even a simple bad day can be a journey through the underworld if treated with enough attention and respect. Waking up physically miserable and convinced my career is wreckage (a solvable problem, to some degree) and I’ll never finish another story (a terrifying nightmare, in any degree) is a golden opportunity to put that theory to the test. Of course it’s also part and parcel of the book hangover–finishing a zero draft requires recovery time, and though I do my best said recovery is always two to three times longer than I like.

Pushing myself past exhaustion? Sure, no big deal, that’s expected. Running on broken limbs? Just another day in the motherhood game. But actually taking the time to let body and soul rebuild and replenish? All of a sudden I am a whining baby, unable to understand why the world is inflicting such torture on me. I want to be working, goddammit.

If a friend were having this difficulty, I’d counsel rest and offer snacks, gentle consolation, a few half-laughing threats to make them kinder to themselves. “Don’t you dare talk to my beloved friend in that fashion. You will be good to yourself, because the world can’t afford to be without you. You’re necessary, and that requires caring for yourself.”

Like Alice, I give such very good advice, and am very bad at following it.

Pink dawn has faded. I’m a quarter of the way through coffee and things seem a little brighter. There are objective indicators that I will indeed finish another book, not least the fact that this trough is one I’ve sailed through before. It happens after every zero draft no matter the amount of self care, a lite version of the terrible postpartum depression I endured with both kids. Doing it enough times to see the pattern is some comfort, at least.

So today is about traveling through the underworld. There are allies to speak to, the descent to perform, the dust to endure and the nadir to reach. After that is the ascent back to the living world, like I’ve done again and again. Each time is different, sure, but the pattern itself holds. If this is the narrative that gets me through recovery, then fine, it’s the one I’ll use.

Now the clouds are smooth nacre; it’s the kind of early PNW morning that feels like being inside a giant pearl. The trees are quiet, murmuring, rain-drunk after yesterday’s downpours. People will need me soon and even if it proves unsellable I’m gonna write that portal fantasy. I left the serial in a good place, ready, easily picked back up. The Ragnarok book is quiescent, but I sense activity below its surface. Life is (apparently) not done with me yet.

I might as well finish the coffee and see what the underworld looks like this time around.