shooting from the hip

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!

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.

Heal, Guide, and Comfort

I suppose I can be grateful for the recent unpleasantness in some ways. For so long I was thinking I was the problem; getting reassurances from trusted sources that I’m not, that the situation is deeply and genuinely fucked up, is helpful. It’s also a Very Big Thing for me to reach out and ask for any aid at all, since I do not trust easily and my upbringing rather deeply impressed upon me the idea that it is always unsafe to make oneself so vulnerable as to ask for help.

More than All That, though, is a decision that came upon me all at once while writing down a timeline of events. Writing isn’t just for my weird little stories. It also helps one think coherently, arrange, and see patterns. I suppose it’s no surprise I process a lot of stuff by literally writing through it.

In any case, I have come to a conclusion. My physical health has been permanently affected by this particular nonsense taking up years of my time and energy. Consequently I will never, ever allow myself or my work to be treated in this fashion again. I simply will not brook it, and if that means I have to be bitchy and insist instead of attempting to take care of everyone else in a situation at the expense of my own stomach lining, health, sanity, and art…then very well. I shall be a bitch. I shall be the bitchiest bitch who ever bitched a bitching bitch. If people will not listen when I ask politely or signal discreetly, then by the gods I shall kick the door down and demand.

A long time ago, when the kids saw Lilo & Stitch, they joked that I was very like Mr Bubbles. Apparently the line, “So far you have been swimming in the sheltered waters of my patience,” seems tailor-made for their dear Mum. As they’ve grown older, it’s become somewhat of a family phrase. My fuse is long, and even getting it close to the cask of gunpowder is apparently a banner event.

Anyway. I have made up my mind. A number of things are going to change in a hot hurry, that’s all.

On to better news! I managed a little over 900 words yesterday, more than I thought I’d get. (The ruckus has been affecting my daily writing schedule, which cannot happen.) It was such a relief to be back I was provoked to another crying fit. The warrior-woman who’s about to duel a sellsword has started talking, and she’s a fabulous character. I am also relieved House of the Fan isn’t dead, it’s very much showing signs of life and interest now that the nausea is receding a bit.

Yesterday I was talking about not yet getting to the fourth part of the Clerk’s Tale. (Canterbury Tales, for those just joining us.) I could just see the Wife of Bath’s expression during the introduction and the first three parts, but then ol’ Geoffrey pulled the rug out from underneath. The Clerk’s point was actually that Griselda was rare, real and normal women don’t put up with that bullshit, and actually he’d tell wives not to because it is bullshit. Which was a pleasant surprise, made me laugh out loud, and felt rather pointed, as if Geoff was reaching across the centuries with a knowing wink and saying, “Honey, you’re on the right track.”

The power of stories to heal, to guide, and to comfort never ceases to amaze. Next up is the Merchant’s Tale, and I am breathless with anticipation. However, I was too tired to attempt the hill last night. I have also found out that a young Ralph Fiennes, young Toby Stephens, Lena Headey, and Liv Tyler were in a cinema treatment of Eugene Onegin (it’s on YouTube, if you’re interested) and NOBODY TOLD ME. I immediately sent it to my writing partner, who was thrilled. (And quipped, “Once upon a time Voldemort, Arwen, Mr Rochester, and Cersei Lannister all attended a house party…”) I’ve watched a couple clips and am EVER SO READY to glory in the whole thing once I can set aside some uninterrupted time.

It’s lovely to have something pleasant to look forward to. For a while my definitive Onegin has been Dmitri Hvorostovsky, and one particular scene in a Met rendition of Tchaikovsky’s opera (a duet between the Siberian Tiger and the incomparable Renee Fleming) gave me a vampire story I’m goddamn determined to write one day, as soon as I can jam it into the schedule.

Speaking of the schedule, I didn’t realize that I could cross the Chained Knight revise off the master to-do list, which was a dopamine hit I sorely needed. I was so caddywumpus (and frankly so vomitous) that I didn’t even twig I’d reached a major milestone in the year’s schedule already–not even halfway through January, as a matter of fact. Which is frankly amazing and I deserve a cookie.

Toxic situations are not just thieves of joy and time, but also of quite reasonable and healthy estimation of one’s own worth.

It’s still icy and Boxnoggin will again get only a half-block’s worth of walkies, though the projected melt tomorrow will mean we’re back to the regular and not a moment too soon. There’s a lot to get done today; though I’m still feeling the aftershocks at least I’m not trying to force myself into an ulcer.

Onward into Tuesday we go…