i hear the voices when I'm dreaming

I got notifications of comments on a few of my xmfc fics on AO3, so I went back and reread a few. There are some I don't even remember writing (Charles as a mermaid) and even the ones I do remember are ... distant? It's like a different me wrote them.

For one thing, my preference for the explicit sex has changed. A lot. For some reason I don't like it any more. I skim over the sex bits in Fourth Wing and Iron Flame; my own work I can barely read; it's not a moral change (I'm not judging it, just deeply uncomfortable) and not a personal sexuality thing (I knew I was kinky-ace when writing). Maybe some of it is because I have aides around more and my screen is big and I don't want them reading over my shoulder? I don't know.

But mostly I just felt nostalgia. For being able to write (I haven't for ages, as much because lack of ideas as because typing is difficult and slow), for being in the xmfc fandom (especially anon kinkmeme writing), for geeking out about it ... and for the strong pull of Charles And Erik Are Soulmates (which is not unique to xmfc of course, they're pretty much not-quite-married through all of X-Men stuff, but the xmfc-specific stuff was so very pretty and shiny.

(I am way behind on X-men stuff, saw DoFP but not Apocalypse, saw Logan, but nothing else; I don't doubt xmfc fandom is still kicking around somewhere but I don't feel like I have anything to add, don't feel part of it, don't feel part of anything; I haven't really had a community to speak of since Ravelry imploded; I have friends, kinda, but everything is just so different.)

...it doesn't help that the last time I tried opening my WIP file -- not just xmfc, though the main other one I can think of is a Secret Garden fic -- Scrivener had issues because it was from an older version, so I don't know if it's even retrievable. But I guess it doesn't matter if I'm not writing anyway, huh...

Encanto spoilers:

My brain has started popping up little fic ideas for Encanto:( Read more... )

...falling asleep so stopping the list but ... yeah ...

crying again b/c ~I should be writing~

...conversation on twitter has me remembering back when I was teenagerish and reading, like, All The Things (at least in sff and ya), and wanted to grow up to be A Writer. Not just in the sense of person-who-writes, but someone who wrote books that meant as much to Their Readers as, like, Valdemar or Earthsea or w/e meant to me

and, like

between the physical difficulties with typing, and the crushing pressure I put on writing as the Last Decent Legitimate Career Option available to me?

I can't even finish *fanfic* any more, let alone anything publishable

I am never going to be A Writer

and that just

hurts

and it feels like I'm letting down ... everyone, really, but especially younger me

A) last night I wrote a breakup letter to rav, just to get my feelings out. My feelings are less intense today, possibly in part because of the third thing, but I went ahead and made it public anyway: https://ysobel.dreamwidth.org/600530.html (sorry, too lazy to bother with html right now)

B) I have updated the post before that with text of the terrible horrible no good very bad missive that triggered the latest round of firestorm, in case anyone needs it. I'm sorry it took me so long to do that.

C) Jess (aka mama rav) has posted a letter on Ravelry that is an actual fucking apology. It's not perfect (seizures and migraines are not "anxiety") and I wish it had come five weeks sooner, but it's a good start. I remain skeptical that there will be enough useful changes to let me keep using rav once Classic goes away, but I'm also feeling hurt and cynical right now. (Rav as a whole does not have a good track record with access and visual issues.)

D) I'm not going to delete my account. There is too much of my life there, and too much of my knitting knowledge. But as I have the time and energy for it, I will be writing blog posts with some of my various knitting knowledges -- things like stitch mount and decreases, charts, lace charts and decreases and markers, möbius structures, my pet peeves in pattern writing (things like "each end" and "knit to X stitch" and whatever else), why yarnover video tutorials are misleading, etc etc etc -- so that it's not just on rav.

E) for that matter, I'm not abandoning rav. Yet. I have too many friends there, too many important people that I don't really have other ways of engaging with. But I feel seriously burned by this whole thing. (I'm sure rav tptb are ... more than burned, probably; charred? ... for different reasons.) Jess taking the wheel is a good start, and to some level my heart hurts for her (having to put out fires and keep rav from imploding and also support her wife through what's probably some serious shit) and I really hope she and Cassidy both have a good support network in place right now. But my heart hurts more for all the people who can't use rav because of NuRav, especially the people who had fucking seizures, who were then called liars; and it hurts for the designers who relied on rav as a central selling platform and now in some cases don't know whether they can or should.

F) I breathe in other peoples' pain; I breathe out a sense of comfort for them. Pain in, comfort out. It's a form of meditation (tonglen, I think, is the name in Buddhist traditions). I don't know if it works but it makes me feel less helpless, and also makes my heartache (and physical pain) more meaningful if part of it is a shared burden from other people.

G) what am I doing up, it's after midnight argh. Go to sleep, self.

I saw a thing the other day that was basically this: if you're feeling tired and crappy and unproductive, it's not a moral failing, it's covid brain. Your brain is in (extended slow-burn) survival mode, so it shunts effort (and blood flow and stuff) away from things like higher-level thinking / planning / etc and towards staying alive, and if you're feeling less creative it's because your brain is putting all your creative muscles towards staying alive, and if you're sleeping more it's partly because your brain is burning energy much faster than usual. Etc.

I just realized: combine that with my realization a few months ago that I've basically been living with impending uncertainty for years, much longer than the pandemic, and that aide stress/uncertainty and health stress/uncertainty has probably been fucking with my brain

and you get a major dose of "why the fuck am I surprised I can't write"

Especially since typing is hard (can't physically access keyboard for touch typing, computer typing is done by mouse and onscreen keyboard which is painfully slow, phone and tablet typing is done with thumbs and a lot of typos (and autocarrot) and is faster but more prone to error) and ... ... yeah.

I mean, I'm also getting fewer ideas, definitely fewer "this story is basically writing itself" / "this story is requiring that I write it, and won't leave me alone until I do" stuff, but it's not that I don't have any (I was going back through my "fic I'm not writing" tag and found fairly recent stuff I'd forgotten about). It's just they don't get written. Or I write the sort of thing I call a fic sketch where it's not really fleshed out (or even necessarily grammatical) but has the important bits, but don't have the energy to go back and finish it.

But.

If, in survival mode, brains are less good at thinking and being creative--

--and if I've been in survival mode pretty much for years--

--well, *fuck*.

...more or less

One of my groups has concet tomorrow so we've been in rehearsal hell week ... compounded by a) the semi-idiocy on my part or being in two choral groups (so the extra rehearsal Tuesday night for the concert group came on the heels of the Tuesday afternoon rehearsal for the other group; I'm not the only one doing both but it's a lot) and b) a migraine on and off this week, partly hormonal (yay shark week) and partly exhaustion and partly migraine randomness.

The concert tomorrow should be awesome though. Assuming I survive. Heh. What masochist schedules a 9am rehearsal on the day of the concert, anyway. (rhetorical question. It's our one and only chance with the chamber orchestra though.(

I am doing a lot of random crochet things because I can. Nothing that's useful. Tiny socks and cactuses and such. By "a lot" I don't mean I'm getting a lot of it done, but the crochet that I am able to get done is mostly random stuff.

I haven't done any writing-writing in ages; I keep getting story ideas, nothing more detailed than Yuletide prompt level (e.g. the survivors of Deep Blue Sea get together for a reunion but definitely not sushi), but haven't figured out a good way to get back into writing. Maybe tablets are the way to go? Idk. (Relatedly, thank you for the reassurance that I wasn't just being irrational and petulant over the iPad update problems -- and I finally realized that it may be a first world problem in a technical sense, but it's also one of my connections to the world.)

Loki is still in a cone. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ There's no indication of why he keeps doing shit with his tail. Nothing is visibly wrong (they did an X-ray(. He's on kitty Prozac for now. Monkey is continuing to do her thing of sleeping on my stomach at times (only when I'm in bed, but it's sometimes at the start of the night and sometimes at the end of the night and sometimes the middle and there's no real pattern) and there's something magically special about having a warm purring furry blob trust you enough to not only relax on you but fall asleep, and it also sometimes feels like she's guarding me, and I love her so much it almost hurts.

Lastly: supposedly Babylon 5 is coming to amazon video. I am so fucking excited, y'all. I mean, yes I have the dvds, but streaming video is so much easier.

I don't get story ideas much any more because I don't write. (Partly I don't write because the mechanics are hard and awkward, and writing a paragraph feels like a marathon. But partly there is a self-reinforcing cycle where I don't write because the ideas don't come (or they come as a vague concept with no idea for execution, or they come and then immediately die in the throes of logistics) which means I don't write which means the ideas don't come which means...)

But lately I've been wanting to do a retelling of Beauty and the Beast where "Beauty" is an ironic nickname: she is disabled, deformed, probably has vitiligo, whatever. And so they call her Beauty to mock her. Maybe even she's visually impaired so they're doing it to mock her intelligence/perception as well (ha ha she doesn't even know we're making fun of her, how pathetic is that)

And then today I realized: the Beast, often, is cursed such that they look like they act. I don't know quite how disabled!Beauty meets her Beast, but I have this image of her hearing the curse story and going "what no that's *bullshit* i mean do i look this way because I'm a horrible person? Does (Gastón analogue) look like he acts? Pretty sure not. Fuck this."

...and then I'm like well what if part of the purpose of the curse is that the pre-Beast had an attitude of "disabled people are inferior" and so got made disabled as a very ineffective morality lesson

...and then I spent about half an hour flailing about because AUGH NO, red alert red alert, you are going to fuck this up in completely ableist ways, flaiiiiiil.

Because my brain is logical like that...

Trying to decide whether to do NaNo this year.

Pro: I would be likely to get something written; I would have a last gasp chance at not failing GYWO; and if I actually do some prep work in October I might manage to even get a novel out.

Con: I don't need more pressure on myself; November is always busy; doing NaNo would reduce my crochet output (which is already abysmal); I can't really type and don't have a good dictation setup yet so I'd be doing it entirely by ipad, which always makes writing slow.

I want to be a writer; I miss writing. But it's just way too awkward, and I don't know if it's how I want to spend my spoons right now.

Mrgh.

(But otoh, if I get plot and characters set up, and break it down into 30 chapters, that's only one chapter per day; easy, right?)

My remix fic is currently 490 words of fic-sketch. Think I can expand on that?

*narrows eyes at fic*

ETA 5:43: Have re-consumed the necessary portions of canon. I have rants but it would give away fandom, heh.

ETA 6:38: File stands at 671 words now, and I'm, hmm, somewhere between a third and a quarter done. (I delete the sketch-paragraphs as I write their replacements, so it's not *quite* as pathetic progress as it seems.)

8:28: 962 words, and time to stop for today.

So a discussion on the internet (never a good start) about 50 Shades of Grey (run away) and whether or not there is rape content (spoiler: I was on the "oh hayull yes there is" side) has resurrected the "rewrite 50sog as a story about an asexual discovering her kinky side" bunny I had a few years back.

Except now my brain wants to write it as a lesbian relationship.

Yay?

#

In trying to dig up any 50soa journal entries, I found babblings about a year where the novel progressed from "unicorns that are totally not Companions" to "unicorns vs zombies" to "unicorns vs zombies and also unicorns vs evil murlocs" to "also a dragon" to "unicorns vs zombies plus unicorns vs evil murlocs plus zombies vs evil murlocs plus evil murlocs using plants as defense (hence plants vs zombies) plus unicorns vs dragons plus unicorns and dragons vs zombies omgwtfflail"

So I dug up the scrivener file for that year, and discovered a bunch of stuff that's decent, and a bunch of stuff that's salvagable, and a bunch of insecure flailings, and some major non sequiturs:

There need to be more mermaids in this book.

How do you get to mermaids?

Follow the hippos

And for the dragons I stole names from WoW because I could, and so then there's this:

"I haven't come this far to give up," Marek said fiercely. "Is there nothing we can do to change your mind?"

(you can go on a quest to kill six snow meese! ...and then repeat it daily, along with feeding sea lions that are too stupid to find the opposite sex, and gathering supplies that are two feet away from me, until we like you enough! ...wait, that's Kalu'ak, not one of the dragonflights. never mind all that.)

Also the characters abuse sarcasm:

"...bother," Marek said. "I suppose we could go take a vacation and party or something."

"That was sarcasm, wasn't it," Aniela said.

"Oh you know it was."

#

Now I just need to find the scrivener file from the year I started a YA story that is Totally Not X-Men (With A Disabled Protagonist).