Our @A_Jay_Adler's latest at Substack is a lovely meditation to sit with if you're a writer who's been on a long and winding road with their prose.

This was a great salve of a read after my own Patreon post today.

The journey will look a little different for other #WritersOfCoSo, but that deep, gently awestruck, and ever-wondering feeling - a little like the protagonist at the end of John Williams' Stoner, perhaps? - will surely resonate with some here.

#Writers

https://open.substack.com/pub/ajayadler/p/a-portrait-of-the-artist-from-a-young

Okay. 😅

I don't know what this says about how old I feel inside, but since I don't follow celebrities outside their roles, I only just now learned that a character I'd been trying not to adore in too creepy a way (Erica "I fly the ship" Ortegas), thinking that she was surely a whippersnapper in her twenties, is actually played by someone a year and a half older than me.

So 1) yay! I can crush non-creepily!

But also

2) how old IS my internal clock running, that I assumed she was "too young"?!

Morning loves. 💫

Again, thank you for being present with my middle-of-the-night existential crisis a few days ago. I'd originally planned a much more drastic change, and it was weighing on me all month.

Today's Patreon reports on a... much more measured refocus. This is a tough season for so many. My workflow will be changing, but above all else, I *hope* I can say that I'm putting my energies into the places that best serve (myself, and my communities).

#WritersOfCoSo
https://www.patreon.com/posts/just-looking-for-87194855

Some #Colombia news, for those interested. @Blue_Skyesr_here: the country is as ever making ambitions plans for the world ahead.

(For non-Spanish speakers: There's an upcoming South American and West Indies assembly in Brazil that I'll be writing on soon, in which government leaders will hash out strategies to combat guerrillas and cartels impacting climate change mitigation efforts. This is a slice of how Colombia in particular is trying to prepare for our coming world.)

#News #ClimateChange

And I made a new #BugFriend on the way back! 😍 How lucky can one person get?

#Nature

Also:

Reading over last night's replies, I'm noticing how many variations of cosmology and philosophy showed up--respectfully, yet with integrity paid to personal truth. That's just gorgeous.

We are *all* creatures great and small, and when we're at our smallest individually, that's when we need others at their greatest most.

You were all just the greatest last night.

Hope you're doing splendidly today. 🕊

Okay, no, now I'm joining the rumba class in the square. It's a day for starting out with music and dancing. 💪🏻

(You watch one musical episode of Trek and suddenly it's in you all the time... 😅)

New day, who dis?

Off for a run. Sometimes writing into the night with a bottle of wine is, ah, very good for existential posting and waking with renewed energy, huh? 😅

(Thanks for sitting with it, beautiful creatures. Good morning and good moving forward to you all. ❤️🕊)

But in the end, I'm just one very flawed human being whistling in the dark.

Aching over how hard this is.

But also rousing when, on brief wondrous occasions, someone else in the murk finds their own courage long enough to whistle back.

So thank *you* for doing so.

Thank you for keeping this thread alive. 💙

(And good night to all of you. The world is hard enough without us being hard to ourselves in it. May you always have grace for how you've chosen to move through this wretched storm.) /📜

And that courage and audacity is hard to come by.

Some days I find myself reeling in the faith that others have had in me, when I am *such* a mess, and so flawed.

I want to move the needle.

I want more kindness for us all.

I want all of us to see what we're capable of, especially when we work together to mend the wounds caused by truly just a few out of our many fierce billions of fellow striving kin.

It hurts *so* much every time I encounter what we choose to focus on instead. /x

It hurts to have this much knowledge, know-how, and experience, and to be able to do so little with it.

My industries are failing.

My industries cannot pay me enough to do anything of note with my body of expertise.

I need... so much courage, and so much *audacity*, to think it worth continuing anyway. To keep trying to share the hard-won fruits of my experience, in the hope that my messy, fraught story might help move others to do what they can in their own corners of this broken world. /x

Meanwhile people are dying of floods and heat stroke.

Meanwhile war and climate change are exacerbating resource wars, environmental refugees, and internal displacement at levels we're nowhere close to ready for. All our escalating nationalisms? Part of the same eco-ethnic pressure-points.

I feel like I need scream at the top of my lungs most days: PAY ATTENTION.

But I'm also nothing, nowhere close to as well platformed as necessary to move the needle even a fraction with all I've learned. /x

There's a common trope in SFF right now. A rhetoric that many use, of--oh no, this venue is closing! and so few will accept stories from X demographic in the first place!--that completely overlooks how hard it is for *anyone* to make a living on stories in the best of times, & how many other groups tell stories just as challenging.

Every time this emerges, what I see is people fighting over scraps in an economy of artificial scarcity around livelihoods shaped around affluent forms of labour. /x

Much of what I do is... so frivolous. The sci-fi. The fiction. The media analysis writ large.

While pursuing these creative ends, I have also seen and stood by people in the middle of far more immediate hardships. I have *endured* hardship at the hands of complicated figures - including assault by those who were experiencing war-induced PTSD at the time.

I have... such experiences of real-world deprivation, and violence. And so little that I can do with all that I've lived through. /x

The world we live in is unjust to its core, and it's more deeply wounded than we can hope to amend in our brief lifetimes.

I left my social contract of birth to feel the pulse of different argumentation, when the West seemed so caught up in *such* a reductive cycle of concern. I wanted to learn from something truly different, if I could.

But now, having felt that schism, I feel helpless to do much more with all the ensuing intellectual growth.

And this eats at me... so much, so frequently. /x

I grew up atheist, and therefore full of wonder at our indifferent cosmos. No god, no purpose save what we make for ourselves. But we keep making TERRIBLE choices.

And it can be unbearable.

A child often has a better sense of right and wrong at times than we adults, many of whom have crafted lifetimes' worth of elaborate and academic/political vocabularies to justify the unequal and unjust positions into which we were so unthinkingly born. /x

📜 So - middle of the night reflection, because I can't seem to post the Patreon piece I need to without saying something deeper here, o CoSo, where the "human" in me is at its safest:

I'm in an odd spot. I'm able to care for many, but I'm in no position to help myself. I'm an immigrant in constant precarity, and also not at all the most vulnerable of immigrants in the world (or of people living in the land of their own birth, for that matter). /x

These two characters resonated with me deeply this year. Possibly strange choices? But also, whew! What journeys they've been on, of learning to make the most of flawed life-paths to date.

Who's moved you the most this year so far, from either recent or re-watched (older) #TV land?

I have had "Don't Give Up" playing in my head all week. Many versions, but I'm going to share the So Awkward That It's Somehow Beautiful Hug version for anyone who needs a wee reminder tonight.

Don't give up.
You still have us. 💙

#CoSoMusic
https://youtu.be/VjEq-r2agqc

You folks really are the bee's knees.

The cat's pajamas.

The capybara's spats.

(We really need to bring that last one back.)

That is all. No punchline.

Just keep on keepin' on. ❤️