Pinning this for all the new faces!

#MeetTheNauts

✍️ of sci-fi, news analysis, essays, translations, reviews
👨‍🍳 of baked goods, hearty meals
🇨🇦 by birth
🇨🇴 by residence, since 2018
🗣️ English, Español, familial French (learning Arabic)
🏳️‍🌈 Queer & nb (but I don't stress pronouns because I move in 2 very different language contexts)
🌎 Secular humanist
🦋 (nature)-lover: no pets, but will share insects & birds!
📖&🎞️ nerd

And all-around advocate for being kind to yourselves. Life's tough enough as is. 💙

Hey #CoSo! 👋 For my upcoming article at #OnlySky about my first week here, I've put together a visual guide for the new free-account user, to help them make sense of the maybe-new-to-them layout.

I thought it might be a good shareable resource right away for the #CoSoTips crowd, too, though, so I hope this is useful for others just getting started.🤞 If you see someone confused, please feel free to send this image along!

M L Clark's 3 #Writing rules:

1) Write what you *want* to know.

2) When writing another context, always elevate its own storytellers. Be a megaphone to the lesser-heard, not a "voice to the voiceless".

3) Let any given story go. If the theme is true, it will come back to you. 💛

And with that, I'm off for the week. 🫂 (Meeting nerves.)

The world is so big and so full of pain, and the hardest part of sentience is that we're *just* self-aware enough to feel frustrated by the limits of our agency in it.

We take it out on ourselves.

We take it out on others.

We try our best to act with integrity from our subject-positions--and we screw up all the same, because our subject-positions are never the full picture.

It is enough that we're still here, though--and still trying.

Today's BookTube was supposed to be up last weekend, but it got interrupted by a massive street protest--which is kind of in keeping with the theme: a reflection on the reading context for Vajra Chandrasekera's excellent THE SAINT OF BRIGHT DOORS (with an essay by the excellent Gautam Bhatia, too!).

Westerners sometimes overlook the richness of the world outside our political contexts. In the process, we miss lessons from other active discourses today.

#SFF #Books

https://youtu.be/VWCcLN-4VvA

Also:

I still haven't decided if I'll post the newsletters this week to CoSo, but if I don't, it will simply be out of respect for the *community* aspect of this space. I don't believe in just popping on to self-promote.

I know we've had a really awful week, with many folks battening down the hatches. I think I've been muted a few times, blocked once, myself?

The world outside this space is heavy with stressors, but--

We'll get through how that pain is manifesting here.

One day at a time. 💙

Okay. Patrons finally have an update, and a return to normal workflow after a couple of rough "brain" weeks there.

I've also sent off my pitch materials to one of my beta readers; I'm pretty solid on them, but another pair of eyes is always a gift.

Tomorrow, I'll post BookTube, and then I'll be off social media to steady my nerves around the difficult meeting with my agent this week. It sucks to start over, but the industry and world really suck, too.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/notes-in-advance-103180358

😬 Alternately, though, I'm pretty sure that Dostoevsky would have been even more of a nightmare than the rest of us if he were online today, so I'm glad he had his era, and we have ours!

😂 I've said this before, because the trial scene in THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV is excellent for describing the whims of the crowd, but hot dog: Dostoevsky had social media *down pat* long before our current tech.

I first read NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND as a teen, when the self-loathing protag best sings out to self-loathing youth, but I've always loved this chapter, and its description of how even educated humans will sometimes make a public spectacle of pain just to regain some agency over suffering.

I've always loved this quote, because of how seamlessly it transitions from the innocuous to the dangerous.

It starts with "instrument". It ends with "weapon". But it can be difficult to trace the shift from one to the other in the text.

I think I'll be writing on Murrow's speech next week. 1958, and yet it feels like yesterday.

We don't change as much as we think we do.

But we have to live through our moment like everything *can* change. Maybe, just maybe, this time it will.

#MediaLiteracy

I love when a thunderstorm here is so intense you can see the storm-clouds move in vertical waves horizontally, as they roll across the landscape.

Mountain valley living! You can just *feel* the thunder in your heart. 💛⛈️

Sometimes when I'm out doing the crucigrama with my vendor friend J, I'm left minding the stand while he's "watering the trees", which is a lot of fun because *no one* takes me for a tourist while I'm in the chair. I make tinto or cafe con leche, dole out ciggies and sweets, and only if I make a syntactic slip does anyone squint and go "Heyyyy". Otherwise, I sling street slang and confites with the best of them.

It's such a funny reminder that context cues are huge in looking like you "belong".

CHEERY, RIGHT?

Now, we walk. 👌

Be good to your silly brains, bleeding hearts, and the creaky meat sacks all around them.

This piece for paid subscribers took a lot more time than I expected, in part because I think I was trying to argue myself out of a conclusion that’s hardly upbeat.

But today, for better and for worse, we look at the strange notion of “culture”, as it relates to our advocacy around saving ourselves from external threats, including climate change disaster.

What is this “us”? And what if our notion of “culture” is self-destructive by nature and design? What then?

https://open.substack.com/pub/mlclark/p/building-on-culture-the-extinction

Didn't quite finish newsletter revisions before class (I quarrel with myself in the editing phase, and today came to new places with the thinking), but I'll of course have the piece up later tonight.

I'm also thinking I'll take a wee reprieve from social media after Sunday (I have a BookTube I want to share). Next week I have a rough meeting with the agent, and I should probably focus on making sure I'm ready to leap into next steps right away.

More later. Be well, all.

And tread gently, eh?

Also--with apologies to Picard--I WISH there were four lights.

:( Alas, there are not.

No home internet tonight.

(Fingers crossed that I have enough data for a YouTube before bed. 🤞🏻)

#Philosophy

Understanding different subject-positions isn't easy work, and many people will suspect you of both-sides-ism for doing it.

But seeking to understand others protects you from two fallacies: straw man and incredulity.

Straw men are fun punching bags that tell you nothing useful about what you're resisting.

Incredulity lets you say "I can't imagine how anyone would naturally hold another POV"--& fill in the blank with conspiratorial conjecture.

Both leave us tilting at windmills.