Monday, Avec Subtext

Recently, I was hanging out in my Discord server and someone asked, “How much thought do you give to the subtext of your novels? (With the knowledge that ~75% of people are there for a plot and won’t pick up on the subtext)”? Which was super interesting and I typed up a long reply, but the question’s been bouncing around in my head since.

I don’t think most people are reading for plot. I think most people are reading for an experience, an exercise in empathy; plot is often a component of that, and characterization is a very important overriding factor as well. But subtext, hmm. My answer boiled down to, “I don’t think about it at all in the zero and first draft. If there’s subtext, I only recognize it in revision–and most of the time the editor sees it, I don’t.”

A story is a living, breathing organic thing for me. In the zero and first draft my concern is only getting the damn thing out whole and undamaged as possible. Any subtext happens almost despite the writer; the story itself chooses what it’s about and its undercurrents. This is not an abdication of responsibility, just a feature of how creativity often works; many’s the time an editor has said, “I love how you put in X as a theme/subtext,” and I’ll go all shifty-eyed and reply, “Yes, haha, absolutely!” before digging frantically in a former draft to find out what the hell.

When I write, I’m concerned almost entirely with just getting the damn thing finished in as undamaged a fashion as possible, getting myself out of the way so the story can come through. Anything else is the Muse’s concern and purview, not mine.

Now, in revision, once I’m alerted to themes or subtexts (which is part of the advantages and services an effective editor provides), I made decisions about highlighting or redirecting, accentuating or burying. And of course, other writers no doubt have different processes; I’m sure there are those who naturally think about and handle the subtext as they’re drafting or even while outlining. So this is not a one-size-fits-all answer by any means, and if you have a different experience while building your own stories, awesome! Go with it. Do what works for you. That’s the entire point.

Moving on! The time change (Daylight Savings, for the curious) is highly unpleasant, as usual. There is a persistent myth that it was instituted for agricultural reasons, like summer vacations in American public schooling, but that just ain’t so. Factory owners wanted to squeeze more productivity out of their caged employees, so the time change was instituted, and proved a little profitable so there’s a great deal of resistance to scrapping the whole thing. It’s all about control and a few more cents squeezed from workers, like so much else. It’s deeply unpleasant and the sooner it’s abolished the better.

…I could also be cranky because the caffeine hasn’t hit yet and there’s a whole lot to do today. That’s a distinct possibility.

Said coffee has been finished but Boxnoggin hasn’t stirred from his first daily nap yet. He was thrilled to have dinner “early” yesterday, even though he’s largely a social eater and sometimes refuses his kibble unless someone will sit at the table and pretend to be snacking as well. Of all our dogs he’s the one who handles the time change best–though he does start lobbying for dinner an hour before the official moment–more out of duty than anything else, I think. He appears utterly convinced the humans will forget to eat if not reminded by their faithful canine supervisor.

Of course, going outside for his first bathroom break happened in predawn darkness, which meant Deathwish BunBun appeared in the ferns along the back fence, giving me a filthy look for invading what he considers as his domain. Amazingly, Boxnoggin was too concerned with peeing and getting back inside to the warm bed to even notice the snackable bit of rodentia nearby, a mercy I am devoutly grateful for.

I love this dog; also, “smart” and “observant” are two deeply inaccurate descriptors for him. He is loving, committed, sometimes cunning, goofy, and energetic, and it’s enough.

Onward to Monday. I’m in a bit of a mood, and unwilling to sugarcoat much if at all today. It’s oddly liberating, like trimming my own hair–another thing which happened this weekend, and it went as well as can be expected. The split ends are gone, I can throw it in a braid for sleep or exercise, and when it warms up a little more the bees will be able to hitch a ride. More doesn’t really concern me at this point.

I’ve got subtexting to do, after all.

Lightning, Once, Enough

Rolled out of bed to find that the Moka pot had been prepped on the stove for me, and one of my children (who had kindly set that up for their poor caffeine-dependent mother) was absolutely bursting to tell me all the news. Apparently that plagiarist Somerton is back at it with a fresh empathy-free nopology1, testing the waters to gain some engagement dollars from hatewatchers; I am continually amazed at the rinse-and-repeat cycles granted certain shameless narcissists.

Yesterday was a bit of a wash. I got a lot of administrivia handled, including things that couldn’t be done on the weekend, but that bled off the force I needed to get certain other things moving along. As a result, the writing part of the day felt like clawing my way out of Sarlaac pit. Both the serial and the Sekrit Projekt are chonky bois2 and being past the point of shiny-and-new makes for a lot of current to swim against, even without the Sisyphean emotional labor on the Sekrit. I want to add a third project to make them jealous, but so much of my energy is spent pushing against the resistance of previous damage there’s not a single leftover erg. Maybe that’ll change when edits for Chained Knight drop and I take time to do revisions on that book and Gamble.

At the very least I’ll be using different mental muscles. Sometimes that’s as good as a rest.

The promo experiment over the weekend went well, too. There’ll be a second experiment next month, and if that goes well I’ll consider recommending the particular promo platform to others. I was amused (and touched) so many folk decided any book capable of garnering that particular “fuck God” review was worth picking up for four bucks and giving a whirl; thank you all. I hope you like it.

I wrote Moon’s Knight during lockdown, in something of a fugue state. And I wasn’t going to publish it, but the howls of protest from my beta readers–who received an early draft on the theory that it might help them escape their own stress during that time–convinced me otherwise. There are whole passages I got to revision on and thought, whoever wrote this sounds like me, makes the choices I would…but I have no memory of this place. It was a very Gandalf set of moments, and I was quite jumpy looking for the Balrog.3

Chained Knight will be out later this year–I already have the cover, it’s a real beaut–and maybe I’ll write the third Tale of the Underdark next winter. I know precisely what happens and how it closes the circle. Of course, these books are variations on a theme rather than a proper series, as I’ve said before. If Moorcock could do it with a certain albino Melnibonean, why can’t I with a riff on something else? It’s the sort of project I wouldn’t be able to do without self-publishing technology and the experience garnered over the last couple decades, so at least I can feel good about that. Even if nobody ends up liking these books, I’ll be happy.

Of course, the response to Moon’s Knight has been overwhelmingly positive, notwithstanding that one hilarious “fuck God” review. Which, again, was absolutely priceless promo, the likes of which I might not ever see again. Ah well, hit by lightning once is enough. The amusement itself is worth the price of admission.

Today is for a meeting of clan-lords during which a certain sellsword receives what is, to her, very bad news, and a scene during which two prisoners somewhat bond over their fate. It’s the latter I’m looking forward to most, since it presents a chance to invert quite a few tropes. Turning such things inside out pleases me mightily, and honestly I doubted I’d get to ever write this particular scene. There have been many dark nights of the soul lately, only a few shafts of random light poking through to accentuate just how hopeless I’ve been feeling.

Quite frankly, it’s been awful. Maybe some of that is breaking up, though. Hand over hand, clinging to a rope made of stories, I keep climbing–and throwing out ropes of my own for others in different pits. It’s a life’s work and as I get older it seems more and more inevitable; I was always going to end up here, and I largely don’t mind. Weaving a net to keep others from the abyss keeps me occupied enough to struggle upward another few handholds.

And now it’s time for breakfast. Boxnoggin was an absolute fur-covered brat during yesterday’s walkies. He’s simply in that part of recovery, which means I need to be even more vigilant about making sure he doesn’t re-injure himself–a thankless task, to be sure, but a necessary one. I just heard him shake his collar as I typed that last sentence, so off I go.

Happy Tuesday, my beloveds. Let’s keep hauling ourselves upward.

The Devil Does Promo

The interval after one gets the first sip of coffee down but before the initial blessed intimation of caffeine in the bloodstream is a liminal space. Thresholds are funny things, and this one’s no different. Technically caffeine’s one of the few substances capable of going straight across the stomach lining (along with aspirin, very simple sugar, and a proportion of alcohol) and by the gods am I ever grateful for that. It’s not so much that my brain needs jump-starting–the collection of squirrels inside my skull is always coked up and singing, thank you–but coffee seems to impose some order on the damn chorus and bring the body into sync as well.

Whew. Anyway, over the weekend I did an experimental promo thing with Moon’s Knight, offering it for $3.99US in ebook. (It’s still going; today’s the last scheduled day for the price drop even though the official promo is done.) I’m testing a certain marketing platform, and I also highlighted the sale on social media. I can’t tell which proportion of sales is which yet; those analytics should be interesting.

Of course, it was sort of a gimme, since this is the book that garnered one of my favourite Amazon reviews, in which a pearl-clutching “Avid Reader” took exception to the protagonist thinking, “fuck God” at the funeral of her best friend. Normally I don’t glance at such things, but the stars aligned in this particular case and I had to laugh. I mean, you can’t buy promo like that, it’s bloody priceless. I’ll probably find that the bulk of the sales are people who saw that on my Mastodon or Bsky feeds and said, “that sounds like a good time”.

The fact that the book almost wasn’t published at all–only the intervention and insistence of my beta readers convinced me to do so–only makes it funnier.

You all know how much I loathe marketing, but if this is the year I’m prepping to go full-feral indie, I need to get more comfortable with it. Intellectually I know that living under late-stage capitalism means we’ve got to use the tools we have, people won’t know about the books unless I tell them, and that it’s necessary and good for an artist to talk about their stuff and make a living. But the brute work of promo does not move me and I have no patience for the douchebags who want to shame artists for having to engage in it, so I’ve been avoiding the whole shebang except when I absolutely cannot.

Needs must when the devil drives, though and Mama’s got rent to pay. I keep hearing that bit in Always Look On the Bright Side of Life where Eric Idle riffs, “Incidentally, this record is available in the foyer…some of us gotta live as well, you know…”

There are far worse earworms upon a Monday morn.

Today is for setting up the next pitched battle in Highlands War and getting a protagonist locked in a dungeon elsewhere. After, of course, Boxnoggin gets his ramble and my own corpse its endorphin-producing shamble. The former will be reasonably pleasant since his leg seems well on the way to full healing, but I’m still keeping him on very easy walkies and discouraging indoor parkour. He is only moderately upset at that last bit since we’re providing canine puzzles and lots of other not-so-leaping fun and encouragement to keep him occupied. (By “puzzles” I mean “very easy Kong toys”, since…well, we love this dog, but he is not a rocket scientist, let’s put it that way.)

The morning has been passing weird, which is to be expected on a Monday. I’m waiting for the Chained Knight edit letter to drop, at which point I’ll shift to revising that book and Gamble. Hopefully this week should see some other things shake loose…but if they don’t I’ve got more than enough to keep me occupied. Rather like Boxnoggin, in fact.

Time to grab some brekkie and stagger forth.

Awards, Co-Opted

Well, release day has come and gone, and I’m still a nervous wreck. That’s to be expected, since this series has had such an awful time being born. Recovery always takes thrice the time I think it will, even when I pad out the schedule to what I consider “reasonable”. This perhaps means I am an unreasonable person who drives herself too hard, or…you know what, I’m just going to drink more coffee.

The big news in my corner of publishing right now is the Sanford & Barkley report on what precisely went down with the 2023 Hugo Awards in Chengdu. Yes, it was censorship. Yes, the call was largely coming from inside the house–censorship and bribery often function indirectly, after all. And yes, this bears out my point that if an award is so easily co-opted by bad actors, perhaps it should not be so very prestigious.

I should, in the interests of clarity, make it explicit that I can say this because I am not and will never be an “awards”-type writer. The reasons are various and sundry, but the reason I mention this boils down to me not having any skin in this game. I am aware my position is relatively privileged in that respect. I would like to think that if this were not the case I would still say the same things, but upon that path lies hubris so it’s best to just be honest.

Look, most (if not all) literary awards are popularity contests. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, since the approbation of one’s peers and/or co-professionals is in many cases desirable indeed, and in a wider sense popular works are that way because they appeal to a wide number and variety of people. It’s a good thing to have other folks in your industry say openly that you’re fantastic at your job, and popular works that get more people reading and talking about books lift up the rest of publishing/bookdom, a rising tide heaving all boats up a few inches. Nothing is wrong with that AT ALL.

However, there is a dark side to any awards process. Those who are good at bureaucracy or brigading have a natural advantage when it comes to gaming such things, and any work which speaks to a wide number of people also speaks to their fears and collective id. The former is far more insidious than the latter, and will be relentlessly taken advantage of unless the awards process is constructed in such a way as to curb the enthusiasm of ill-meaning bureaucrats and bigots.

Ideally, an awards process constructed to curb those advantages garners prestige. In the real world, prestige is often bought, or a function of combined age and catering to dominant prejudices, and we are faced with one of the most highly sought and well-regarded awards in SFF being co-opted with stunning regularity by bigots and censorious dickwads. Those who have spoken about this problem when it surfaces face relentless harassment and mockery before being proven right every. damn. time. I don’t think this particular incident will end any differently. The inertia of the Hugos, the “it’s too haaaaard to change!”, are heavy indeed. The old-guard vested interests will simply wait for the storm to pass before going back to co-opting and pulling levers, and in another few years we’ll have yet another “omg the Hugos are fucked” moment. Plus ça change

So yes, this is bad. And yes, I think some version of this fuckery will happen again and again, up to and including “well-regarded” fansites mocking and brigading those who point out problems as they’re developing. It won’t stop until SFF publishing and fandom put a stop to it, but herding those cats–especially if there’s money to be made and egos to be massaged–may well prove impossible.

The real horror here is that Chinese SFF authors, publishers, and fans had a brief shining moment of hope which was relentlessly stamped out by the arrogance and collusion of people in charge of the Hugos and their ringleader, a breathtakingly egoistic, bigoted, and contemptuous white dude. The damage extends far and wide, and will no doubt be forgotten by Western SFF publishing and fandom by the time the next shiny spaceship awards are handed out.

plus ce même chose.

I mourn for all the stories and fandom deliciousness we’re missing out on because this shit keeps happening. Things could be so very different, yet they are not. There might indeed be an arc bending towards justice, but damned if I can see it.

Anyway, I need more coffee and Boxnoggin wants his walkies. After that it’s back to writing. I have the great good fortune to continue making my books, at least for the moment, and I’d best use it to the hilt.

Let Thursday begin.

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.

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!