One tiny good thing:

My experiment is over and I can have coffee and tea in the day again. 👌🏻☕

Okay, time to polish my Chesterton tale from yesterday and send out an overdue Patron post, at least.

🫂 Thank you, everyone.

More soon - but I sorely appreciate that I can be honest here: no affectations that publishing or journalism are easy fields to thrive in right now.

I hope your own days are going swimmingly.

#WritingCommunity

Sad news today. My agent doesn't like the book and isn't interested in the series.

This is always a hard part of the process. You pour your heart into something again and again, and again and again you're told that there's no space for your work.

Don't what I'm going to do with this novel, or the series I'd built around it. It might be that I don't have the right advocate for my work. It might also be me.

No big decisions right now.

Just going to try not to catastrophize.

Oh #Colombia. 🙃 I picked up a paper I didn't have time to read this weekend, and found two striking articles about ongoing struggle in this country (seven terrorist attacks from an ex-FARC outfit called EMC in 66 hours, and a 1,000% increase in people confined to their rural homes in my department from regional conflict, along with upticks in individual and mass displacement)... but I also found a great recipe for sancocho! And said hello to a merry moo cow! So it all balances out. 😊

Something a touch lighter today, for Monday Media Review: a reflection on storytelling about the world around us, drawn from Season 2 of Invincible. This is a wonderful animated show that merits the term "mature content" more than most: not because of the brutality it depicts, but because of the emotional discourse it advances so well, and seamlessly interweaves with depictions of surrounding cruelty.

Would that our news narratives did similar.

#BetterWorldsTheory #SFF
https://open.substack.com/pub/mlclark/p/mature-content-when-a-show-actually

This silly boy tried to nibble on my fingers this morning. I hope your day has started with good vibes, too. #Nature

Missed the link on this one, but you might enjoy this summary of Margery Kempe, 14th-15th century superstar of NOPE-ing out of a BS marriage and BS lot in life. 😁

https://thewisdomdaily.com/magic-of-margery-kempe/

On days when CoSo has been through A Lot, I feel the strength of this place the most.

I know I occupy a subject-position that not everyone agrees with. I'm a humanist, which is ANNOYING, because it's not the same as a statist, or specific Deist. It can feel like I'm playing at false neutrality, when there's nothing neutral at all about how much I want us to remember our shared humanity.

The point is, I don't expect everyone to agree here.

But I *love* when we can dissent safely, and press on.

HI @NiveusLepus! 👋

How's tricks? Have you been taking care of yourself while showing up so beautifully for others, too?

For #SFF readers, Margaret Killjoy's book club is always a treat. The work usually leans more fantasy, paranormal, and horror, but the writing is beautiful.

The latest episode is a reading of Katherine Sparrow's "Transmutation". It's about an ill-fated love between a magician and an alchemist, with brutal elements and lots of beautiful turns of phrase.

Slow-burn suspense, with some solid lessons for writers (and partners who don't listen to "no"!).

#WritingCommunity
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/czm-book-club-transmutation-by-katherine-sparrow/id1620562792

One thing I'm going to miss about this solar eclipse is not getting to teach kidlets about related science. I was working at an indie bookstore for the last one (a partial), but I encouraged my bosses to let me set up a pinhole projector with a display of science books. Then folks could take turns looking at it, and talk about the pinhole projector, too.

The kids loved it, and even some parents had forgotten the magic of a pinhole.

If you have a chance to share nerd joy tomorrow, please do! 🤓

#War

So like I said: more on propaganda this week. I didn't think we were ready for it before, but maybe we are now.

The key, though, is remembering the depth of psychological damage here.

The West has never really cared about this region except as a vague moral gloss, but real humans are caught under terrible governments. If zero-sum thinking arises from those traumatized by a wide range of domestic and international attacks, that's normal. That's trauma.

Tread carefully, and with love. 🕊️

#War

And now, even though there's a strong chance of a pro-Bibi nutter having harassed these families, the funeral wreath episode is being presented as a plant by an "Iranian asset" amid gov't prep for further Iranian strife.

Which is where this gets so stressful and painful: everyone is wound up and no one knows what to believe. The victims have been pawns for so long, and the whole country has seen democracy suppressed while pressured to keep up whatever infowar spin serves the war best.

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#War

This whole time, they've protested to be heard by this far-right coalition, and suffered police violence at sit-ins. Extremist gov't officials and media pundits alike have openly said that it's not a top priority, because for many it isn't. To them, all the victims are props.

And this latest case? It happened a bit before a Likud supporter drove into Tel Aviv protestors demanding a hostage deal. (Protestors have been out en masse in recent weeks, clamouring for this government to go.)

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#War

This isn't the first time that victims and their families have endured dismissal *within country politics*: people saying that their loved ones don't matter; that there is a more important objective in this war.

In the fall, it seemed like a pro-Bibi plant had been put in a meeting with hostages' families to give the impression that they preferred other mission priorities.

Those families had to fight for most *every* meeting ahead of and around planned government actions.

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#War

This week I'll be writing a piece on propaganda that I first tried to write in November, only to realize we weren't really ready for that conversation as a culture.

Today, six months in, I just want to mention a story that illustrates the mental strain around families made pawns in this war.

In Israel, a funeral wreath was sent to the family of a hostage on Friday, with a goading message that, while her memory may be a blessing, the country matters more.

Here's where it gets messy:

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Entirely possible that, instead of finishing a paid review this morning, I spun off a wee short story inspired by G K Chesterton and the moral landscape of the world today.

This was not in the plan.

I'm going to take a beat from it before posting - and I'm still deciding if it'll be locked or open, because the story is very much a reflection of broader relevance to the day - but for now, I cannot say this emphatically enough:

BRAIN.

WHAT ARE YOU DOING?

(Focus on your to-do list, you nut!)

All right! This one's for the #SFF crew mostly, but maybe the #WritingCommunity here might enjoy it in general.

In today's BookTube, I review the April issue of Clarkesworld, after a framing discourse about some of the material challenges for the SFF industry and our struggle to surmount them.

We talk about some great short stories, while also thinking seriously about how to ensure the longterm survival of such platforms for them.

(Highway sounds are just an "bonus".)
https://youtu.be/Y-4xh6sNJ3c