Also, no more super heavy news analysis for a bit. That's part of why I forgot to eat. All the nastiness in the world has a way of sitting in the body, filling it with despair at our petty, cruel, tribalist little species (for all its many other charms!).

Paid newsletter readers will get a quirky history about a weird work of 19th century political scifi tomorrow! 👾

But now that work meetings are over... I'm diving into the novel again. :)

AFTER food. 👍🏻

Take care of your noggins and hearts!

I just realized that I have forgotten to eat for two days. (Coffee doesn't count, alack.)

🙃 Going to fix that now, but my brain is definitely in need of a little more grounding.

Maybe I need to *become* the grass. 🤔

That glorious feeling of when you can close nearly a hundred research tabs, over half of them depicting different atrocities and variously distorted write-ups on them, and go walk among the good earth and touch grass instead. 🙂

Okay, folks. 🕯️

I hope you've had a good Remembrance Day.

Today's piece grieves the parts of war not covered on this occasion, and how ill-prepared we've been to reckon with how civilians are "recruited" in war as well: if not in life, then through how we use their deaths to further the narrative "battle".

Everyone who died on October 7 and thereafter deserves better memorializing than our sordid rush to rumour has thus far given them. Will we ever do remembrance well?

https://onlysky.media/mclark/disembodied-grief-and-the-challenge-of-remembrance/

Heading off for the night, but one last wee thought:

I spend so much of my day glued to a screen I sometimes forget that, even though armchair commentary is about all I can offer the world right now, what happens on-screen *isn't* the world.

Right now there are people living in agony, wondering when their ordeal will turn from a stage of active horror to one that better allows for grief & the hard work of recovery.

Find your people.
Hug 'em. Love 'em.
Be present on those realer roads as well.

Perennial reminder that you are all damned fine people.

A lil' weird sometimes!

A lil' bite-y... when necessary!

But damned fine.

Glad to be weird and sometimes bite-y in here with you.❤️

True fact: this also works for times when you're venting to yourself. 😅

Just for balance. 😉 #waffles

Back to work!

Focus remains difficult.

I start, end, & "middle" my day not just checking the news but also "competing" forums, to see how our shared humanity shows up in how everyone hates on everyone else. I study the groupthink rushing rumor into fact, watch grisly video to see what the data shows...

And sometimes just sit with how much disinformation abounds.

We are all in *such* pain, but some keep pressing a finger to the collective wound.

Honour your grief, anger, and despair for what it is: Trauma.

Remember, remember, the 10th of November. :)

Have a good one, CoSo!

@thewebrecluse

The trauma management, too, is *so* strange. These are all articulate, high-functioning human beings who still... conveniently don't put in the work for themselves with therapy?

Relying on husbands, fellow victims, and each other to hold space all the time instead?

SUCH a weird disconnect between the walk and the talk.

So far, Margaret's seemed the stablest, in at least recognizing that her kids needed to be far from her inability to change, but WOOF.

What an uneven crew!

@thewebrecluse

Three episodes in, I totally see both the frustration and the appeal.

Shanola Hampton's stage presence is staggering; I could watch her walk, talk, and get business done all day. :)

A'zaria Carter also carries her fury and fragility *so* well.

But you're so right, too - the show's story and scripting are on par with The Equalizer (the hackers are similar, too!), & yet, it has this GEM of a novel concept, in the push-pull with Gosselaar's character, buried in the rough. 😬

Good morning to everyone working through personal issues while the world struggles, too. 🫂

It's important to remember that the right to be an individual is on the line with so much of our worldly trauma, which flattens us to labels, teaches us to flatten others to labels too, & insists that we must consign our whole lives to fighting singular causes.

You are large.
You contain multitudes.
And the parts worrying about "you" stuff matter, too.

Happy Friday, my fellow complicated meat sacks! 😊

The wall of Christmas desserts is up.

Natilla (a basic pudding mix, which comes in tradicional, arequipe, tres leches, coco, and maracuyá flavours) and buñuelos.

Can you get buñuelos easily any day of the year here?

Absolutely.

Do people still get excited for their Christmas-time buñuelos with natilla?

100%.

#Colombia is not a (series of) culture(s) that gets anxious about having the same thing all the time.

Why mess with perfection? 😅

(Gee, I guess there's a reason I thought Thucydides was worth revisiting in the first place! 🙃 #TheMoreThingsChange)

I was going to share a page of the novel with you fine folks, so you can see why I've struggled with it these past months.

But internet's wonky, so I'm out on a walk instead. 🙃

The novel is an anti-nationalist Thucydides in space - meaning one half has my historian recounting decades of nebular strife a certain way, while survivors of massacre take another path.

I wrote 3/4s in July. I'm revising chunks now, but some of the material... just gives me chills in its even greater relevance today.

#Podcast rec for the day, for my #SFF #Writers and readers:

Acid Horizon's "Solarpunk and Its Discontents" discusses the difference between the superficial aesthetics of progressive politics in contemporary SF lit and film, and the much more conservative structures that are maintained in plenty of fantastical stories.

Does your work ever interrogate the political assumptions in your world-building? Or just take the use of common genre tropes and settings for granted?

https://podcasts.apple.com/tr/podcast/solarpunk-and-its-discontents-the-politics/id1512615438

Today started okay, but then I was informed that someone I do not want to see is still asking folks in my street network if they've seen me.

At this news (which I'm thankful to my network for providing!), I got caught in an anger bubble, because the news means I still need to watch how I move in my neighbourhood for a while. I then poured my frustration into doom-scrolling around the state of the world.

Bad self-care? Definitely.

But now we're going to reset and start anew.

WRITING TIME. 🎉

Dawn in the misty park
at season's end
and start.

A breeze, a song,
a distant train
rumbling on--

I have not checked
the news
for hours.