Writing advice

For all this blog is, ostensibly, a writing blog, I haven’t written much about how to actually write. For the most part, this has been by design. I’m not a teacher and I’m not a professional writer. I can write about my own work and my relationship to it, but actually giving advice or pretending I can teach you how to write a novel or a novel-length fanfiction is just… not something I am qualified to do. I often give my own very personalized thoughts and opinions on the process of writing, which you are welcome to apply to whatever part of your creative process makes sense for you.

However, what works for me may not (probably won’t) work for you. In fact, much of what works for me may be considered actively terrible advice, so, buyer beware. Beyond the barest, most generic bones of “how to write good” advice, I’m not convinced writing (a story) is even something that can be taught. Writing isn’t the scientific method. There aren’t exactly best practice guidelines to writing, or, if there are, I certainly don’t follow them. In fact, my best piece of writing advice is not to take anyone else’s.

Here’s some anyway:

Don’t have a life

Sounds like I’m being glib, but I’m not. You need a lot of free time to write. Barring everything else that goes along with it (planning, plotting, editing, character work, world building, etc) the actual physical act of typing out 50k+ words takes time. I don’t care how fast you can type. It still takes time. When you’re writing for fun, that usually means you’re writing around a full time job/class/family/social schedule, whereas the writers whose actual job title is “author” have an 8 hour workday of just writing and the business and busywork that comes along with it. If your job title is not “author”, you can’t compete with that.

That being said, if writing is your hobby, then I encourage you to carve out time for it in your schedule like you would anything else you like to do. Oh, you have pottery on Tuesdays? That’s fine. Still six days in the week. You have bowling practice on Friday evenings? Well, firstly, how does it feel to be the coolest person ever? Secondly, no problem. I bet you still find time during the other five days to do other things you enjoy, even if nothing can compare to the ecstasy of bowling. Just like you find time for pottery and bowling and shopping and watching tv and hiking and whatever else you like to do, I know you can find time to write. In my fandom days, I saw women with careers and partners and kids somehow banging out novel-length fics over the course of a few months. I am not those women. I do not know their secrets. But they did do it.

If you ever look out my output and you’re like, “where does she find the time?” Well, now you know. It’s not like I pluck it out of a hat. It’s more the unintended consequence of being a misanthropic loser with no social obligations.

Also, for what it’s worth, I often go weeks at a time without writing anything more extensive than a grocery list.

Resign yourself to a fandom of one

Get excited about your own work. And I don’t mean in an “if you can’t get excited about it, why should anyone else?” way when you’re trying to market your stuff. I mean while you’re writing whatever you’re writing, you need to be invested in it. This will be a bit different if you write fanfiction or original work, but I am speaking strictly about original work here. While writing your own original work, especially if you’re just some rando like me who has no credibility in the mainstream publishing world, you are on your own, my friend. And it’s hard. Especially coming from fandom world where even if you aren’t a well known fanfiction writer, you still have people around you who are super excited about the IP you’re writing about. There’s some emotional padding there. There’s some amount of guidance and support there, even if it’s all through osmosis.

Writing your own original work is an entirely different beast. No one else cares about what you’re up to, unless you already have a built-in audience. Hell, even that’s not a guarantee— I was relatively well-known in Supernatural fandom, less so in MDZS fandom, and still, the numbers on my ao3 speak for themselves. No one’s on ao3 to read your original lesbian erotica/novel/baring of the soul.

How do you combat this? You gotta get excited. You gotta care about your work. I have no idea what real authors do, but my approach so far has been to “fandomize” my original work by constantly daydreaming about my current project. As I mentioned in the previous point, I don’t have a lot going on in my life, so this is fairly easy. Just like I did in ye olden days in fandom, now when I disappear into my head, it’s to consider and play around with and poke and prod at my original fiction.

When I was writing Don’t Worry About It, that’s what was on my mind, almost all the time. Same with Rat on a Horse. Same with Come this here July. Same with my second novel. Even when what I’m thinking about isn’t “canon” or doesn’t end up being the right fit for the story, immersing/waterboarding myself in the narrative is necessary, for me and my process. Good for my non-existent social life? Not so much. But very good for my productivity.

Avoid distractions

Open your current project and start writing. Doesn’t have to be good. Go on, do it. Just write. Word, Docs, typewriter, notepad, doesn’t matter. And don’t spoil yourself by reading the next line until you’re done.

Are you back? That was probably quick. How long did you last before you were not-writing? How long did it take you to grab your phone, or get up for a drink, or Google something real quick? Or check a social media account? Ten minutes? Five? Half of one? If this sounds like I’m being drill sergeant-y, don’t worry, it’s mostly directed at myself. It is so hard to stay on track. It is so fucking difficult to just sit down and do a task for an extended period of time that requires actual brainpower, or even none at all. The endless scroll made us dumb. Maybe I sound like a boomer, but I sound like a boomer who’s right. I can’t even sit down and watch a movie without distractions unless I’m in a movie theater and it’s forced on me. The thing is, our attention is worth money, and the world around us has figured out how to exploit that attention, and now no one can go thirty seconds without checking the little hand computer in our pocket because we might still have a dollar in there we haven’t yet parted ways with.

Fighting against the distraction impulse is difficult. I lose to it all the time. My writing sessions can be extremely short. I’m talking a few sentences in Word and then I bounce, either because I’m not in the mood and writing is hard (common occurrence) or because I’d rather mouthbreath in front of a screen and scroll short form content for a while, blazing new and awful neural pathways with every flick of my finger (also common).

I’m telling you to fight against it. As in, actively fight against it. If you find yourself reaching for your phone: stop! Better yet, don’t have your phone near you when you write. Make sure you have water, you’ve taken your washroom break, you’re comfortable, the room is the right temperature, and whatever else you need to keep yourself on task. Set a timer if you think it will help. The most important thing is that for whatever duration you set, you’re actually writing/staring at your writing and figuring out what comes next the entire time. There are no 911 Google emergencies when you’re writing, no matter what lies you tell yourself. You can always look it up later, even if it’s “necessary”. Unless you are literally experiencing a medical emergency, or your pet is making those tell-tale hurks over the rug, keep writing-and-nothing-else.

This is going to be uncomfortable, by the way. Forcing yourself to do something—anything, not just writing—without a phone distraction can cause literal physical discomfort, or, heaven help me, half an utterly stultifying second of boredom. At least for me, anyway, the hand motion of going to grab my phone is apparently just imprinted on me now. The non-thinking grab-n-unlock. And yes, thank you so much for asking, I feel dead inside every time I allow myself to acknowledge that it just happened.

Maybe I’m alone in this and my obsessive nature in general primes me to fall prey to this kind of insidious business. On the other hand, we touch our phones over 2500 times a day. And that data is from 2016, which was, christ almighty, nine years ago. So maybe I’m actually exactly correct.

Anyway, I try to use my phone less, and rarely succeed. But when I have been able to shuck it, I do notice an increase in my productivity and enjoyment and focus in almost all areas of my life, including writing.

Writing is hard; suck it up

I said in my previous point that sometimes I don’t write because it’s hard. Guess what? That’s a lame excuse. If it were easy, everyone would do it. If it didn’t require practice and dedication to hone your craft, everyone would be a master wordsmith.

When you’re supposed to be writing and you’re not and your only excuse is, “I don’t want to” that’s a lame excuse. Git gud. Sorry, but if it helps, this point really extra applies to me. If I took all the hours I spend complaining about writing and actually spent that time writing, I’d be like, three books further ahead.

It’s hard to create stories. I probably hate writing as much as I love it. It’s a frustrating, exhausting, emotional process. Unless you are literally an author (and if you are, is your agent accepting new clients?), you don’t need to do it if you don’t love it. Seems obvious, but it can be a surprisingly thin line between “this hobby I love sometimes frustrates me, which makes the completed project all the more rewarding” and “this hobby I think I love is actually just weighing me down and making me miserable”.

If my writing feels too easy, it’s probably because I’m not giving it my all. Or because I’m goofing off, or writing something silly, you know? Which has it’s place, but I am talking about “real” writing in this post. I’m talking about creating a piece of art. It’s like the opposite of what you want in a steak. You need to saw and chew your way through it. It should be hard to swallow. That’s how you know it’s good.

Embrace the puzzle

Though it might not always seem like it when you’re reading a well-constructed story, every narrative is subject to the slop of writing. Moving events around, fixing the timeline, fudging the timeline, ignoring the timeline, tightening the seams, ripping them out, patching plot holes, realizing your climax actually isn’t a climax and you need to come up with a whole other one in its stead, standardizing or un-standardizing tone, chapter/section breaks, adjusting dialogue, switching out personality traits, inconsistent worldbuilding, subplots that don’t go anywhere, unexpected detours, unexpected reactions, unexpected plot developments, unforgivable insults, messed up tenses, not-quite-right word choices, on the nose motifs, motifs that are too subtle, crowbarred-in payoffs, reverse engineered themes, and on, and on, and on…

Writing isn’t just one sentence after another. Being good at writing prose is almost an entirely different skillset than writing a whole lot of sentences that somehow tell a cohesive story. It’s an endless puzzle where you’re making up the picture as you go and also the picture is constantly changing, and so are the size of the pieces. Endlessly customizable, endlessly frustrating, there’s technically an end, but also, in a way, you’re never truly done, because you can always try something a different way, and maybe that will be better, or worse, or kind of the same, and no one else will ever know, but YOU will know, and it matters, and you could fuss over it forever and ever and ever and ever... you get it.

Enjoy the fruits of your labour and embrace the fruitlessness of the writing process. It’s the best and worst kind of puzzle.

Ape

What do you like to read and what do you want to write? Are they the same thing? They aren’t for me. Maybe they are for you. Or not. Step one should be to figure out where you fall on this spectrum.

Step two? Sticky finger time. Take everything you like from wherever you like it and start smashing pieces together until they resemble something you like even more; visual art, TV, books, movies, music, comics, colours, that random picture you saw on Pinterest, the feeling in your chest when you watch clothes sway in the breeze on a clothesline, nonsensical and inane conversations overheard in public, that recurring dream you’ve been having since childhood, the singular way the sunlight slants during mid-morning in autumn…

If you come from a fandom background, this will be easy. Fandom primes you to take disparate elements and stick them together with gum and string. My only addendum is to source inspiration from more than one, uh, source. This is the creative part of writing. This is the fun part. What do you like? What themes are you drawn to? Do you like ghosts and magic and witches or do you like dreary post apocalypses or do you like slice of life real-world romantic comedies? Do you like humour in your prose? Or do your characters do all the heavy lifting in dialogue? Do you like tying everything together with a bow or leaving things open-ended? Do you prefer character-focused or setting-focused or plot-focused narratives? You can like anything, and you can like it in combination with anything else. Unless you are literally copying and pasting another writer’s work, I don’t really think plagiarism is a thing so long as you’re doing it in good faith. Though I’m not a court of law; I am speaking from a philosophical and artistic perspective, not a judge’s.

Steal what you like. You can’t do everything yourself. The good news about building an entirely new world in a story is that you have the one under your feet to inspire you. Don’t be shy. Use it! Observe it! Experience it!

Sensory details

Straying toward actually telling you what to write here, which is not really what this post is about, but bear with me. Grab a piece of your own writing. Grab a piece of writing you really love. Take a gander at a few pages. Note the sensory details on the page. Note the nods to sensory details on the page. Ea de parfume vs eau de toilette. Neither is actually wrong, I’m just using this as an example on the wide spectrum of sensory details that can be incorporated into your work. If you’re not into Ray Bradbury engulfing you in autumnal bliss every paragraph, that’s fine. You don’t have to french kiss fall to invoke the feeling of crunchy leaves underfoot. Often, less is more. Letting a reader’s imagination take center stage is more an art than a science. It’s amazing what you can achieve with the art of ‘just a tad’. A whisper. A kiss. Just a lil-itty-bitty inference.

Sight is easy mode. Touch, a little harder. Smell, hearing, and taste, though? Almost guaranteed you’re not taking advantage of them. You should! Excellent and evocative, all of them, when deployed well. Your reader probably is aware of the scent of freshly cut grass (fun fact: I hate the smell of freshly cut grass, especially when it’s wet), but there are other ways you can suggest it without directly saying it. I mean, you can directly say it, too. My point is, there are many ways to bring sensory details into your prose, and I would encourage exploring them.

Maybe you can even begin your journey in this blog post.

Music

I am not a music person. I like music, and have it playing almost constantly when I’m driving or out for a walk, but I am not a music person. I don’t love music for its musicality like I might love a novel for its prose; I love music for pleasant tunes in my ears, and not much more than that. Which is fine. You can’t love everything. Kind of defeats the purpose.

However, I also strongly associate music with writing. I can’t write with music (with audible lyrics) playing. However, during all the times I am not-writing but still thinking about what I am-writing, mainly driving or walking, you bet I use music to help me focus. I can be an obsessive listener, picking a number of songs to burn through in the course of a few months on repeat and then moving on to the next batch. This kind of perfectly works for my writing process; hard, intense, exhausting, annoying, overbearing, and then… onto the next.

The music doesn’t always have to match the tone of the novel exactly. Sometimes, a bit of dissonance is fun. Sometimes, song lyrics on their own sound like a neural net put them together so it doesn’t much matter either way. But sometimes they fit, too. I’m susceptible to all of these; so long as I have a mental association between a song and a piece of work, when I play that song, I think about that work. A lot of this process is not nose to the grindstone nitty gritty writing work, but I do often have breakthroughs while out on walks, listening to my Don’t Worry About It playlist for the 63rd time that week.

For the curious, some examples of songs I will never be able to associate with anything BUT my own work, through nothing more than demented, obsessive persistence and a Spotify subscription:

• Don’t Worry About It: Margaritaville by Jimmy Buffet, Solsbury Hill by Peter Gabriel, Loser by Beck

• out in the garden, there’s things you hid away (MDZS fic): Choke by I DON’T KNOW HOW BUT THEY FOUND ME, Great Vacation by Dirt Poor Robins

• Dean Winchester Beat Sheet (Supernatural fic): All the Pretty Girls by fun., I Want to Break Free by Queen

• Come this here July: That’s Life by Frank Sinatra

• Novel 2: Beyond the Sea by Bobby Darin, Forgotten Souls by Mother Mother, Build me up Buttercup by The Foundations, Motivation by Sum 41

One caveat here: much like I used to do when I was 12 and “writing a story for real this time” where my “writing session” would end with two sentences in 14 pt and spend the rest of the time determining which font to use, don’t lose the forest for the trees. Don’t spend more time on extras like formatting and playlists than actual writing. In fact, I encourage writing in the most dismally boring formatting you possibly can: body text, size 11 or 12, Times New Roman or Calibri, barely even indicate chapter or section breaks. Let the words speak for themselves first.

Physical movement

Body moving make brain moving. It just do. Note I didn’t say “exercise” (though I’ve had success with that in the past as well) but simply physically moving. Just a walk around the block is good. Headphones on, playlist up, fresh air, juices flowing. You are also moving in a car, so, that counts too, though I do think actually moving your limbs wins out.

I wouldn’t suggest super complex movement if you want to exert your brain power on thinking about your writing— no root-heavy hikes or anything involving counting reps. If I’m too focused on not losing my footing and falling off a cliff, then I’m not thinking about my themes or prose or plotting or how to twist the knife just a little more in my protagonist’s gut to really make an impact.

It’s also just good for you. Clear the cobwebs and get some vitamin D, your brain will literally never regret it. Unless you do end up falling off that cliff.

End

All of these items will take time to action. Some of them will be uncomfortable and annoying and inconvenient to action. I’m still working on all of them myself. It is wild that I can be writing and forcibly have to keep my hands on the keyboard so I don’t zombie out, grab my phone, and start going through the endless open-app-close-app-oh-my-god-existence-is-miserable-please-iphone-spare-a-crumb-of-joy rigmarole.

Working on a project/hobby that takes time and consideration and work without the promise of financial or social or artistic payoff (hey, they can’t all be winners, just look at literally all of my original stories) is… intimidating. And scary. And, if and when your stuff flops, or you flop in the making of it, incredibly defeating. You can always give up. You’re an adult. This is a hobby. No one’s making you do it. Don’t put undue pressure on yourself if writing isn’t for you. But, at the same time, remember that something being difficult is not the same thing as something being the wrong fit for you. Especially if you’re new to it. Especially if you live in the present day, which you do, because you’re reading this, where true craftswomanship is not really a thing anymore. The idea that we have to work at something to get better at it, outside of a gym, maybe, feels like a quaint notion from generations gone by. Why waste your time writing or creating anything when AI can do it for you? Why spend your time hunting down the perfect pair of comfortable shoes that will support you for the next twenty years when you can just buy a new pair for $10 on Temu, plus they have glitter? Why do anything at all, when doing nothing is easy?

Patience, passion, and persistence. Writing takes time. Writing takes care. Writing takes… a lot. And honestly? I’m not even sure it’s always worth it. As they say, the juice isn’t always worth the squeeze.

However, like nothing else in my life, I keep finding my way back to it. Maybe it’s Stockholm syndrome. Maybe it’s ego. Maybe it’s because I have nothing better to do. Actually, yeah, it’s definitely all three of those. But I also love it. It serves as a means of personal expression that I am incapable of achieving via any other avenue. Even when no one reads it or likes it or is moved by it. Even when I make typos and bad storytelling decisions and agents pass on my magnum opus. Even when I put off writing a real novel to write little shitty novellas for four months that don’t so much as move the needle as miss it entirely, with room to spare. Even when no one reads my blog. Even when 99.99% of people who read my work only do so because it’s about the fictional men they want to kiss.

Honestly, sometimes I become overwhelmed by how pitiable and even a bit pathetic my whole deal is. And not in a rude or spiteful way, but simply in the way that what I’ve achieved is so very, very far away from where I’d like to be, and where I’ll likely never be. And maybe those feelings coalesce into the least helpful, most grammatically upsetting, and most true piece of writing advice I can give here: I write anyway. I can’t not. AKA:

IF YOU CAN’T NOT, YOU CAN DO!

Back on top in June: Carolyn & Dorothy

The circumstances that led to the writing of Come this here July were as follows:

1) A friend suggested we do a prompt writing challenge. This may not sound too strange from someone who was both in fandom and wrote fanfiction, but I remind you that when I was writing in fandom, I never did anything like that. I was not a “participator” in “community events”. I took prompts back in my Wangxian days like… once. On Twitter. I never did challenges or charity writing or was even good at engaging with anyone else’s writing. I just wrote what I wanted in my little corner and never got any better at the community aspect of fandom. Are alignment charts still a meme? It was very true neutral of me. I think. I never fully understand those.

Also, the prompt that we (the prompt generator) generated was sci-fi. A genre I am both familiar with and also not familiar with at all. Of my own volition, I’ve seen some Star Trek and, not of my own volition, Star Wars. I’ve seen a handful of sci-fi shows like The X-Files and Fringe and a lot of Doctor Who, all in another life when I still watched TV. Supernatural always got classified under sci-fi/fantasy, too, which was hilarious. I haven’t read a lot of sci-fi, though. I’ve lightly dipped my toe in writing it. Technically, I did a treatment for a sci-fi show years ago that I dubbed “Firefly with lesbians”, and even wrote the first two episodes. Haven’t looked at them since then. They’re probably not very good. But the dream was there.

I also didn’t really follow the rest of the prompt at all. We included three words to help shape it, none of which I used, or even remember. I think “copyright” was one, which is immediately great fodder for a sci-fi story, but my bullish sense of Actually I’m Going To Do It My Way kicked in and I didn’t do any of that. Calling Come this here July sci-fi is pretty bold of me. I mean, it is sci-fi. But barely. Little itty bitty squeaky mouse-voice kind of just-slides-in-right-at-the-back type sci-fi.

2) Back in the fall, I read Frog Music by Emma Donoghue and got my feelings hurt.

If you’ve read Frog Music, you will see its DNA in the much less good, polished, and professional Come this here July.

If you haven’t read Frog Music, that’s fine. It’s not Frog Music fanfiction. Just inspired by it. Distant, distant cousins who aren’t blood related, and could legally get married, if Frog Music would ever be willing to lower its standards.

3) I am a big fan of the Fallout (video game) universe. Similar to Fallout, July was originally intended to contain more ray guns and Jetsons-style nuclear-powered cars and Jell-o molds. I listened to a lot of Dean Martin (and, per the title, Frank Sinatra) to keep the mood appropriate. However, because I’m me and I like to write about lesbians homesteading in the woods, that made it a little more difficult to incorporate the incongruously cheerful midcentury Americana (Canadiana) retro-futurism that makes Fallout so unique. I think there’s still a bit of a love letter to Fallout in there, somewhere. You just have to dig a little.

4) My unfortunate brain chemistry. July is about suicide! Probably best to keep the intricacies of my personal connection to that point to a minimum, so I’ll leave it at this: Come this here July ended up being much more than the “Here’s a lark, let’s do a writing prompt challenge together” that I expected. All on my own terms, by the way. I brought this all on myself, ignored the majority of the prompts, and the max word count was supposed to be 15k. Foiled once again by my Actually-I’m-Going-To-Do-It-My-Way-itis.

So, those are my extenuating circumstances that lead to what I think is a very strange, interesting, and endearing (to me) novella. It was a challenging writing exercise, but ultimately rewarding. Some further points of potential interest:

July gave me the opportunity to give into one of my worst instincts as a writer: getting too big for my britches and fucking around with prose in stupid, stupid ways. However, I will defend myself on this point. The schmaltzy, hokey prose only started stupid. The deeper I got into the story and realized it was about something as mawkish and overzealous as being near comically suicidal, the more I realized the prose needed to meet it where it was at. A deep, sad, morose, somber meditation on a character who desperately wants to kill herself, tonally, does not work for me. It’s boring and sad for no reason other than to be boring and sad. Or to stoically romanticize it. I decided my deeply suicidal character was going to have some pep in her step, and by God, I think Carolyn did. Does! She’s definitely probably most likely for sure still alive. Totally. If nothing else, Dorothy is very good at making honey-do and honey-do-me lists.

When you’re someone who has been on the internet for a long time, it feels like formless, arbitrary mental illness is a lifelong condition. However, in the real world, it’s the opposite. Depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, and the like are seen as bumps in the road, not just roads. They are temporary afflictions, often brought on by external circumstances. Maybe the literature is changing now to reflect the tidal wave of formless, arbitrary sadness that appears to plague us all. Or maybe I’m right on the money, and in the offline world, depression is solved with a few months of pills, and then you’re back to business as usual. Leave that to the so-called experts, I suppose.

That being said, I have written a lot of characters who struggle with formless, arbitrary mental illness. It’s an incredibly difficult and interesting topic to write about, because from a clinical, writerly toolkit standpoint, it’s not a very good topic to write about at all. Losing the depression coin toss is not an actionable item. It’s not something that can be resolved— not the way I write it, anyway. Sad, depressed characters are not particularly motivated, which makes moving plots forward challenging. Many of the ways I’ve written around this have been in the form of characters who try very hard to mask their feelings, and as such, overcompensate for their empty insides.

I’ve written before about my complex relationship to high-emotion writing and how eventually, it becomes a bit of a cry wolf situation. I thought of the goofy prose in July acting as sugar would in a pasta sauce— cut the acidity a little, bring balance to the dish. Obviously, I’m biased, but I think it worked. Otherwise, it would have been a miserable reading and writing experience if I had approached it with all due solemnity (think papal conclave), despite the fact that suicide/being suicidal is, y’know, quite a serious problem that should be taken seriously.

I also think Dorothy being so deeply flawed in her response to Carolyn’s miserable guts really helped keep things grounded. A lot of the time, the person on the receiving end of their partner’s mental illness in fanfiction ends up being entirely self-sacrificing, perfect feelings-receptacles who huggle the sadness out of the protagonist with the power of love. Dorothy resenting and maybe even hating Carolyn a little for being suicidal is such a nasty and tantalizing character trait to engage with. I was especially enamored with that, paired with the pulling-teeth nature of how Dorothy looked after Carolyn when she was recovering from her suicide attempt. Dorothy is extremely in love with Carolyn, and the fact that her bad personality fights her on it every step of the way is just a bit delightful, unfortunately.

I am pleased with how complex Carolyn and Dorothy’s relationship ended up being, especially for something novella-length. Also, writing their dialogue was very fun. I had quite an enjoyable time crafting Dorothy’s insults. Something I feel I’ve held onto since I first started writing not only novel-length works, but novel-length works I think aren’t half-bad, is that the characters have to be on somewhat equal footing. It’s not so much that they have to be the same amount of nice to each other, but that they have to be the same amount of cruel, which sounds a bit absurd, but I think it holds water. Hear me out: at the beginning, your sympathies lie almost fully with Carolyn, right? Here’s a fun-loving dyke, flirting, joking, and clowning around a bit to try to soften Dorothy up and help her let loose a little, and in return, Dorothy’s a big old jerk. Yes, it’s part of their courting ritual, but still, a jerk is a jerk. More than that, she occasionally ups her jerkery to real asshole territory and says some pretty nasty things to Carolyn. Or just straight up slaps her. However, once Carolyn’s suicidal inclinations become clearer, and starts putting the screws to Dorothy, and also, oh yeah, Dorothy helps her run away after committing a murder, Carolyn’s high ground starts getting a little shaky. In the end, as far as the narrative is concerned, Dorothy’s coldness and cruelty is balanced out by Carolyn’s realization that her being suicidal is, in its own way, deeply cruel. It’s kind of cathartic. In an uncomfortable way. Balance equals stability. Sugar in the pasta sauce.

The first time I really caught myself on the balance aspect was when I was writing Dean Winchester Beat Sheet six years ago now (yikes!), and I needed a way to “even out” Castiel’s big betrayal at the climax (if you can believe it, the love interest was working with the bad guys the whole time!). And the thing was, Dean didn’t need to do a big climactic betrayal right back to return them to equal footing. Despite being the “better person” of the two of them, there were small moments of unintentional cruelty from Dean dotted throughout the story up to that point by refusing to acknowledge his feelings for Cas and his struggles with his sexual orientation. It’s not the same type of cruelty as Cas’ Act 3 Betrayal, and it doesn’t have to be, as far as I’m concerned. Cruelty looks different person-to-person, story-to-story. Distilled down, my argument is simply that one character cannot be 100% wronged and the other character cannot be 100% the wrongdoer. You can see it in my Wangxian fanfiction as well, and Wangxian are actually a great case study in this principle, as the cruelties they visit upon each other, both in the source material and my derivatives, were quite specific to their characters and dynamic. It was there in Don’t Worry About It, too. Wren could be quite a cruel person, but Ashley, similar to Dean in Beat Sheet, actually, had her cruel (sometimes on purpose, sometimes not) and closeted moments as well.

I hate the structure of July. I hate the NOW - THEN - NOW - THEN - NOW story structure. Hate it in movies, TV, novels, all mediums. However, I understand why it’s so ubiquitous. It allows for expedient storytelling, and also feels a lot less abrupt than it would have had I written this chronologically, my preferred way to construct timelines. The first original work I posted on ao3, baby, give me it, also follows that structure, also because it is short and I needed to get readers on board quickly. A few of my lesbian Wagnxian fics are guilty of this for the same reason. It’s just a bit lazy. My meager defense in July’s case is that it helped frame the murder of William May in such a way that it wasn’t a huge deal to the current narrative, while also still being an incredibly significant plot point/event. I will also say, chronological vs NOW/THEN gets sticky when you consider a chronological timeline with a lot of flashbacks, and I don’t necessarily mean the overbearing italics, but even a paragraph every few pages reminiscing on past events. When does that line start to blur? Either way, it is very likely that were I constructing July as a full length novel, the timeline would have been almost strictly chronological (which is a bit of a headspin, because at first blush, I have NO idea where I would start the story, but the good news is I’m NOT writing it as a full length novel, so, crisis averted).

When I was younger, I wanted to be one of those people who was into old-timey movies and that artsy-grungy-hipster black-and-white-is-better schtick, but it just never schtuck. The problem with old movies is that they’re like, pretty boring. But what I did love about them and wanted to carry over into Come this here July was that electrifying rat-a-tat-tat banter, both in the prose and dialogue, that we don’t see much today. Basically, I wanted to cannibalize the Transatlantic accent and its associated patter, run it through the meat grinder of gritty humanity-is-fucked sci-fi, and spit it out in the laps of two very difficult women who had the misfortune of falling in love with each other. Or fortune. Maybe just for one of them. Maybe depends on the day.

I’ve been victim to my own tiresomely cheeky prose before (there are a few serious offenders from my Supernatural days, and hey, just look at pretty much any post on this blog), but at least in July’s case, it’s semi-warranted. I’ve also grown a lot as a writer since then (no excuses for my current blog), and have expanded my repertoire beyond “look at how many pop culture references I can jam into one story”. Bit of a sidebar: an easy but still quite successful swap for external pop culture references in your work is just… internal references. Doesn’t matter if it’s a real world or fantasy setting, keep your references contained within the borders of your fictional world, and it will feel tighter, more cohesive, and less like the author is constantly elbowing you in the ribs, wiggling her eyebrows, and saying, “Get it? You get it? Funny, right?”

I love Carolyn and I love Dorothy and I love their story. However, I am not sure I could have spent any more time than I already had in their world. In a way, this was a completely boilerplate entry in my bibliography; difficult women in the woods making it work with no one else to cling to but each other, pastoral-leaning (this time with chamber pots), feminist talking points that everyone hates, and “Canadiana” that no one outside of this country’s borders would ever care about, and most people within them would look at me like I had two heads for thinking #bellletstalk is kind of fucked. Though I do think “New Trono” is very funny, thank you so very much to that one commenter who wanted me to write something set in Ontario. Somehow, I don’t think this is what you had in mind. I guess it’s more like Ontario 2.

On the other hand, less boilerplate was spending that much time with a character who can’t wait to kill herself. Lots of my characters are suicidal, and some have even attempted to kill themselves, but Carolyn’s mouthwatering anticipation of her own demise was new to me, and a little… emotionally taxing, to put it lightly. Despite the goofiness! Despite the bastardized Transatlantic accents! If you can believe such a thing!

If you have been following my yellow void exploits at all over the past few months, you may be wondering, hey, weren’t you (me, I) in the middle of editing your (mine, my) second novel? Yes. I created my document for Come this here July on January 21st and finished it on February 13th. That might sound impressive, but I would actually consider it a bit alarming, considering I also work full time. Anyway, I was intrigued by the prompt idea, and a (second) clean palate never hurt anyone during the editing process, and boy, howdy, did Carolyn and Dorothy give me something to momentarily sink my teeth into.

And now, I am admittedly pretty glad to be unsinking my teeth from them. Between them, they have plenty of teeth. My interference is no longer necessary.

Notes:

• Come this here July is available on my ko-fi as a PDF ebook, with the same pay-what-you-want-for-the-sick-cover structure as Don’t Worry About It.

• Also, Rat on a Horse PDF ebook coming soon because I absolutely refuse to give up my chance to use a line of little digital rats in place of the usual three asterisk section break.

• I’m working on epubs. No promises. They’re finicky.

the bigfoot chiro-wellness-alien-5g-windmill-keto connection REVEALED

On the incredibly slight chance you haven’t seen the hit documentary The Bigfoot Alien Connection Revealed, let me break it down for you: bigfoot (species) are not cryptozoological creatures at all, but aliens. As in, extraterrestrial. As in, not-of-planet-earth. And they are among us. What other possible reason could there be for no one having seen one, like, ever?

While talking about sightings, one “bigfoot contactee”, as described by the film, explains that he doesn’t even bring his camera with him anymore when he’s out looking. Sure, he used to feel like the crazy one who had to prove bigfoot’s existence, but now? Now he does it for his own personal experience (putting aside his participation in a film… trying to prove bigfoot’s existence). “No longer afraid of ridicule,” the narrator tells us over B-roll of a relatively crowded bigfoot/supernatural phenomena convention, “people are coming out of the shadows with their contact reports and have formed communities of their shared experiences.”

The Bigfoot Connection Revealed… changed me. Or maybe not changed, but it certainly crystalized my understanding of my own interest in how humans choose, relate to, stumble upon, and/or are born into their belief systems. When I say belief system, I’m talking the highest level of existential admin. I’m talking about the top-level bureaucracy that governs our own existence. The ones that attempt to explain the existence of the Other (here referring to supernatural creatures, aliens, cryptids, ghosts, chakras, energies, auras, pretty much any spiritual or religious concept that is unprovable by the—yes, belief system— we know as science).

One of the interviewees, a paranormal investigator, says, “Is it just that we’ve transposed this process [of alien abduction] to a technology and a language that appeals to us now? People are not talking about fairies the way people talked about some of these same things hundreds of years ago. So maybe just the clothing of the experience has changed to suit our modern age. But the process seems to remain fairly consistent throughout the ages and it results in the same sort of thing. Transformation of consciousness, which affects the body, affects how we think, how we interact with each other; an awakening of what in supernatural terms would be called superpowers.” OK, she went off the rails a little bit at the end there, but the first half of what she said is, as far as I’m concerned, hitting the nail on the head. Unexplainable events, or, similar but different, events that a layperson can’t explain, invites speculation, and often, that speculation takes on a reverent, supernatural quality that results in tight-knit communities like the ones seen in documentaries like The Bigfoot Alien Connection (seriously, watch enough docs like these, and you see some frequent flyers, especially anyone with legit credentials or author/investigator listed as their occupation). It’s not exactly new information that people band together over shared interests, and the more intense/eclectic the interest, the tighter the band. The weirder it is, the more you need support, validation, and re-affirmation from those around you. People caught in MLM schemes need it (why do you think they’re always on Zoom calls hyping each other up?!). Back in the day when Supernatural was still on-air and we were watching season 8 with our hearts in our throats because Dean and Cas were totally in love, guys (!!!), we may as well have been holding hands over a seance table and conjuring up spirits that were definitely real and not just Victorian-era special effects. I mean… people go to church every week. People flock to supernatural phenomena conventions to be around fellow believers. We like in-group (you believe what I believe) but… we also like out-group (what you believe is WRONG).

My (mediocre) understanding of this social phenomenon is that out-groups are actually more important than in-groups. So, as important as having a hand to hold is, as important as the foile a deux (or troi, or quatre…) of it all, it’s just as, if not more important that you have naysayers. Dare I say, the haters have an incredibly important role to play in all this. Like, yes, it was fun that we knew the secret truth: Dean and Cas are in LOVE. But you know what else was fun? When someone said they weren’t. When someone who liked Wincest tried to Wincest it up. Or when some CW exec got dogpiled on twitter about deancas and tweeted the equivalent of “what are you talking about they’re straight”. When there was a villain in that narrative, guess what that made us? How could we define ourselves as the progressive lefties rabid for representation while also just happening to get exactly what we wanted from a fandom perspective without, ugh, ugly old wincest shippers who were probably like, SOMEONE’S MOM, or some FAT CAT in a SUIT at the cw who had never even HEARD of gay people, and the conservatives, and probably Elon Musk for some reason, and all our stupid suburban mothers who didn’t know any better, to measure ourselves against? There’s no correct opinion if there’s no incorrect opinion. If there’s no one around to drag you down, no one else is going to extend a hand to help you back up. If no one argues with you about bigfoot’s existence, you have no reason to spend hours and hours of your life wandering around in the dark like a dolt trying to prove them wrong.

I’d like to make it clear that while I think these beliefs are ridiculous, much in the same way I think believing in god is ridiculous, I don’t think this alone makes these people crazy or unstable or any other unpalatable term that calls their sanity into question. Certainly, there may be comorbidities here— are religious people, fandom-lifers, or people who believe that bigfoot is an alien, or that bigfoot exists at all, regardless of its terrestrial status, more susceptible to certain mental illnesses, or certain proclivities, or certain patterns of behavior? Maybe. Keep in mind, though, I’m also totally batshit, and I don’t believe in any of this junk. So we’re entering a bit of the pot calling the kettle black situation here. Don’t get me wrong, I believe in making fun of these people, but I wouldn’t go so far as shoving them into lockers.

To demonstrate the intriguing devotion to pseudoscience, misinformation, and impeccable lack of critical thinking skills, here’s a clip from Animal Planet’s Finding Bigfoot (2011-2018) that will stay with me till I die:

As far as I’m concerned, my guffaws are obnoxious, but warranted.

Despite the obvious reality TV edit, I’m taking this clip at face value. Doctored as it is, I don’t think the excitement— especially on the part of our hosts— is manufactured. These people spent years making what I assume to be a reasonably high salary at their job of “believing in Bigfoot” and being a superhero to the freaks and weirdos all over the country (and world!) who believe in this stuff. I believe in their belief, but at the same time, I would not be surprised if that belief was… supplemented, shall we say, by the reflection of dollar signs in their eyes. This is not a Bigfoot specific phenomenon, though. Science, religion, technology, MLMs, cults, all the heavy-hitters in the world of utmost devotion, have their true believers, their snake oil salespeople, and, maybe worst of all, the ones who fall somewhere on that spectrum that is not one extreme or the other.

It does not take much in-depth Googling to find a “character sheet” you can fill out for your homemade blorbos. There are tons of options, with varying degrees of depth; favorite color, childhood memories, nicknames, political affiliation, hopes/dreams, wants/needs, fears, sexual orientation, attractiveness, skills, personality traits, etc… etc… etc… Insult incoming, but I can see how these are attractive to people who want to be writers, but aren’t. You should certainly know some of these things about your character— it will depend on the character, the story, and their role in it— but it’s kind of like a Pinterest board, right? Fun to make, pleasing to look at, not much more beyond that. The most important of these details will come naturally in a story— they’ll self-select. I can’t think of a time, beyond fact-checking canon while writing fanfiction, that having a character sheet with little Q&A’s about them would have been helpful. Like almost everyone does in real life, you have to go with what feels right in the moment, even if it doesn’t necessarily fit into the little personality checklist you’ve built for your character. We’re not static beings, and beyond unchangeable facts like eye colour or where we were born, how much or little of anything we are is going to be up in the air depending on the circumstances of the moment.

I’m making fun of character sheets because I’m about to make a case for understanding your character’s belief system, instead. A belief system creates a trickle-down affect. Whatever your character believes about the world and their place in it, the organization of society, our classification of everything, the machinations of the universe—even if they don’t think about it ever, at all— is one of the few things you need to know before setting them off on their narrative journey.

Supernatural was a TV show made by many different people with many different interpretations of the main characters and the main themes of the story. Not only that, but it was on for fifteen years, and often not good. This lead to worldbuilding inconsistencies, confusing character choices, and, well, just a lot of bad writing. I’ll caveat with the fact that “inconsistent characterization” isn’t really a thing in real life. You can feel “not yourself” but like, you do what you do, right? If you make an uncharacteristic choice, you still made it. In fictional worlds, that gets more complicated, because you’re walking the line between “real people are inconsistent” and “narratives demand character growth, which requires characters to be consistent”. I understand this. I find it very intriguing. However, back to my actual point: there were times during Supernatural’s run where a character would say or do something that was like… why? And the answer was: just cause. Which, whatever. News at 11, writers made a silly character choice because they work on a goofy-ass genre TV show that should have been canned years ago. But you know what gave me a banging high in the good old days? Taking those disparate pieces of the character (Dean, it was Dean, and much more rarely, Castiel) and making it all make sense. Why did Dean do this when it didn’t seem to make sense at all? Well, allow me to unfurl my scrolls and you shall see… And making something out of nothing almost always came down to a few unarguable facts about Dean and how he saw the world: no matter how hard you work to even the scales, the world is a cruel and uncaring place, made worthy only by the little guys who keep fighting the good fight, even when they’re going to lose. Not super pithy, but you get the point. As someone who considered herself a Dean Winchester scholar once upon a time, I think you can draw a line between almost anything he’s ever done and that belief system he holds.

Consider Wren (you know Wren, from the book), someone who is not in the protagonist of a bad genre show, but of a literary novel that takes place in an approximation of the real world. She’s not someone who’s had much cause to consider her own belief systems and isn’t particularly interested in investigating them. However, just because she doesn’t spend a lot of time philosophizing doesn’t mean she doesn’t have them. She’s a pessimist: the world is bad, and in an endless, violent power struggle that men consistently dominate. In a way, her journey in the narrative is finally finding a response to that unchangeable belief system, with a shrug and an, “OK, bye then.”

I think it’s more common for characters to have belief systems that are challenged, and then changed, as opposed to my current approach of a character accepting/coming to terms with their current, cynical one. An obvious example would be the anti-social misanthrope who is convinced by the bubbly love interest that there is still good in the world, after all. Or a character who believes strictly in logic and science, only to be confronted by a supernatural event. Belief systems are a very common discussion in the world of “learning to write”. At least in the world I inhabited, back in dinosaur times. It’s funny to consider how, in the end, stories all come back to conflict. Even the conventional approach to belief systems involves conflict— the opposing forces of “I believe X, but current events are challenging my understanding of X”. I am such a hard pessimist in my writing that I rarely write characters doing total U-turns on their belief systems. There’s not a whole lot of “I hate the world” to “I love the world!” pipelines in my writing. In fact, you could say my own cynical belief system prevents me from doing exactly that. I don’t think people can change like that.

This approach to writing also explains why every one of my works worth their salt has at least one discussion that emphasizes the fact that falling in love/finding happiness ultimately fixes nothing, and after the story ends, the characters are still the same people they’ve always been, and will face the same challenges, because while there may be a cure for a physical malady, there’s still no cure that I’m aware of for a difficult personality. The moment they release Ozempic for misanthropic losers with commitment issues, I’m all over it.

Every person is unique and beautiful and special and blah blah blah but also, people, largely, can be grouped under a small number of wide umbrellas, and that holds true for belief systems, too. Logical, spiritual, self-centered, utilitarian, I can enact change, I can’t enact change, facts over feelings, feelings over facts, we are alone in the world, we aren’t alone in the world, you get it. If your character believes in bigfoot, is she more likely to believe her love interest lying to her? If your character is in a pyramid scheme, is she someone without a moral compass who would recruit others for her own financial gain? If your character is a staunch atheist, will her rigid stances on things like astrology being garbage and tarot being absurd push away a potential relationship? Whether you have to state a character’s belief system in a story at all will largely depend on the story. For example, I don’t think Wren’s understanding/stating of her own belief system truly crystalizes until right at the end, when she’s decided to accept that the world is terrible and inescapable, while also carving out the scantest corner of fulfillment she can find. However, you could make cases for either end of the spectrum; a belief system that is trumpeted loud and proud from the start that gets plucked and picked at for the entirety of the narrative, or a much quieter one that never explicitly gets mentioned, but is still a strong driver of character and action. Either way, belief systems are very much the shadowy puppetmaster behind a lot of narratives. It’s just a matter of how much you decide to obfuscate them to meet the needs of your story.

Our worldviews and belief systems are human-created, and as a result, emotion-driven and largely irrational. Doesn’t matter if it’s believing that bigfoot is an alien or that cracking your knuckles causes arthritis or that having your body enter ketosis is healthier than losing weight, like, normally. Considering your characters’ belief systems is an excellent way to approach writing when you want “literary realism” as opposed to a blorbo checkbox. Nothing wrong with the blorbo checkbox— after all, you’re talking to a retired professional Fandom Blorbo Haver. However, I would suggest that if you’re looking to add complexity and contradiction to your characters and their relationships with both themselves and the people and world around them, I think this would prove a good thought exercise.

A thought exercise, I should add, I don’t always participate in. I don’t always practice what I preach, sue me. I can’t say I was thinking intimately about Lily or Rat’s belief systems when I was writing Rat on a Horse. Just as an example.

In Novel Two, though, I have definitely given more thought to it, and I think it’s paying off creatively (no comment on potential commercial value, haha, it’s fine). I know I mentioned in a previous blog post that I focused a lot on my characters’ relationship to class in this one, and letting that trickle down into how they view the world around them and theirs and others’ “rightful” place in it ended up driving a lot of the rewrites and strengthening the emotional narrative. Um, in my opinion, anyway. Kind of makes the comedy vomit early on feel a bit out of place, but tone standardization is a problem for later. I already know it’s not going anywhere, to be honest. If there’s going to be anything in my stories, it’s going to be a rom com dram vom. Batman has the bat signal. I have that.

There is a very interesting divide that The Bigfoot Alien Connection Revealed highlights within its own community: those who believe Bigfoot is of-this-planet, and, of course, our heroes who are right and know that Bigfoot is an alien species. A little unfair, considering the bias is right there in the title, but then again, what are documentaries if not bias machines, well-argued? These are two subgroups in what I would already consider a subsub group of society. Becoming privy to this rather private drama feels equivalent to what someone who only casually watched Supernatural would feel witnessing the collective manic episode everyone (the deancas shippers on tumblr circa 2012) experienced after Dean hugged Cas in season eight, episode two, after they reunited in purgatory. Another unfortunate connection to be drawn is that bigfoot, extraterrestrial or not, is not real. Dean and Castiel, god as my witness, were not romantically involved. You guys… the shit that people believe. Imagine how granular these arguments get, over evidence that exists only in the mind of Schrodinger’s cat. If nothing else, the gems that can be mined from this intensity of… belief systems, I say kindly… are deeply valuable from a writer’s point of view.

Forgive me, a full grown adult, for referencing children’s media, but it’s like the Sorting Hat. You just get flicked into one belief system or another based on a pre-determined set of traits, pledge allegiance to it for no reason other than It’s What You Believe, and then you spend the next however many years leaning into it, cause it’s like, you already bought the color-coordinated scarf. Seems insane. Now consider the amount of adults you know who know exactly which house they’re “in”. Or how many people know their MBTI type. Or any other arbitrary personality test you can get a free version of online. Or sports fans who have “their” team. Or, hell, gay stereotypes a la, “only bisexual people cuff their jeans” and assorted nonsense. As long as there’s an in group and an out group, no matter how silly the item of contention, people will sort and divide themselves into one or the other, and then, as god intended, argue about it to the grave.

The clothing of the experience has changed to suit the modern age, that one interviewee said. And she was right. That’s it. There will always be new belief systems or new ways of engaging with old ones. Maybe more relevant at this point in history, there will always be a new way for snake oil salespeople to target and indoctrinate you into them, maybe out of true-believer-duty, more likely because you have money in your pocket they think would look better in theirs.

From a real world perspective, I have no solution for this besides assuming every single person who even breathes in your direction is trying to sell you something, and your best bet is to preemptively clamp your hands over your ears and sprint in the opposite direction. From a writing perspective, this is a fascinating tool to have in your arsenal when it comes to creating interesting, nuanced, and complex characters.

One final note: if you are someone who partakes in the devil’s lettuce, I highly recommend doing so right before starting up the documentary. It really heightens the viewing experience. Heck, plan a whole Friday night around it. Order pizza. You won’t be disappointed.

new year’s reservations

Everyone makes much hay about new year’s resolutions, whether they’re new year, new me-ers, or resolutions-are-for-loser-ers. It will likely not surprise you to learn I am a member of the latter club.

I don’t do new year’s resolutions. If I want to do something, I do it. If I don’t, I don’t. If I should be doing something and I’m not, I’m being lazy. If I shouldn’t be doing something and I am, well, that’s my problem. I try not to let the shimmer of a new calendar (although I do love a calendar, like, the physical item) suggest to me a path in life I wasn’t already considering. I spent an unfortunate amount of my youth and young adult years telling myself that tomorrow, I would change my life. Next week, I would change my life. On Monday, I will change my life. Things will always be better later. The world will be brighter in the morning. Guess what? I didn’t, they weren’t, and it wasn’t.

Weeks ago, I was cleaning out my closet in my childhood bedroom. I came across some diaries I wrote, ranging from about 12 - 15 years of age. During previous visits home, I have often paged through these and never quite had the heart to toss them. Even at the time I was writing them, I loved to go back and re-read what I had written (the author egomania starting nice and early!). It made me feel cool and interesting and like I was writing a story. In the early days, it was pages and pages full of friend drama, lists of boys I had crushes on, hating my parents, loving Twilight, attempts to start writing an actual fiction story with zero success or planning or depth, pretty much everything you would expect from a somewhat precocious tween/teen who was also a budding fandom loser and writer.

As time went on, though, even when I still wrote about the above, the tone started to shift. Not to put too depressing of a point on it, but I became deeply, agonizingly sad. Every page was full of melancholy, along with my exhaustion and exasperation with myself for feeling that way. Body image was a huge one. Even before puberty sent me on an emotional nose dive, I was constantly writing about how fat I was, or how ugly, or how I was going to stop eating because I was going to paddling camp this summer and didn’t want to be fat in a swimsuit! And, y’know, there was also the crippling depression. The pain I outlined in those pages was immature and childish and rife with a clear desperation to understand the adult world before I was ready to. Simultaneously, and conversely, there was a budding emotionally destitute you-are-going-to-be-a-very-mentally-ill-adult pain that I also didn’t understand, and also wasn’t ready for.

For years, when I was revisiting these diaries, they were easy to laugh at— who doesn’t love a good Three Days Grace song lyric to close out an entry? Even in my earliest journals, or the ones I wrote in school as an assignment, I couldn’t wait to be an adult. It was an incredibly romantic prospect to me. I daydreamed of being a harried brunette like in the movies, returning to her beautiful city apartment with a brown paper bag full of produce. I had my endless, fruitless list of crushes, my top five every week. I talked about the boy I was dating when I was 12 who wanted to meet in private after a school dance, presumably to kiss, though I never actually found out what his intentions were because I literally sprinted to my mom’s waiting car the moment the dance ended to escape. “I’m not ready to kiss anyone. I don’t even think I wanna kiss anyone,” 12-year-old me wrote, in lovely cursive and delighting in my adult-esque angst. In much less careful print, a few weeks later, while relaying drama with a different boy, and having described my own imaginary perfect partner as a result, my final lament was, “I don’t think I’ll ever find my perfect guy.”

In these diaries, I don’t talk about liking girls at all, despite knowing from about 13 onwards. All that pain already on the page, but this particular type of pain and confusion wasn’t to be tolerated, apparently. I was sick to my stomach scared of it. I do, however, remember having the distinct thought at about that same age that I was going to put it away and it was going to be a problem for future me. And, well, I guess it was, because I didn’t start dating until I was in my mid-20s. If only I had known when I was 13 that I was going to grow up a misanthropic lesbian, I probably could have saved myself a lot of trouble.

I currently spend a lot of time in the thrall of misery, and I have spent a lot of time there, as well. And I think my repeated failures to change my life, my documented inability to stick to a resolution, regardless of what the calendar says, speaks well to my aversion to new years and new me’s. Cause let me tell you, I’ve been around long enough to know there is no “new me” coming down the pipe. God, I wish there was. I wish that one day I will turn a corner and feel the sun on my face and realize this is what being alive actually feels like. I wish I was the protagonist in a difficult, yet cathartic lesbian novel about finding contentment in a world you hate that hates you right back. I suppose I realized my dream of becoming a harried brunette living in an apartment at one point, but I think we all know the majority of that produce I brought home in my brown paper bag ended up sitting in the fridge for weeks, slowly turning to mush, before finally embracing the sweet relief of death as I tossed it into the compost.

In the only relationship I’ve ever been in, there were times I would lie in our bed, stare at the wall, and think, this is not my life. I’m watching this from the outside. I would think, I’m about to wake up, sixteen again in my childhood bedroom, and go to school, and my life is the thing that happens at some indistinct point after that. Life happens… eventually. I figure it all out… eventually. It will all be okay… eventually.

And then, in the spring, the life I claimed not to have blew up. Funny how that works. How can something so insubstantial explode? And yet, there I was. Fleeing one coast for the other on Easter weekend, 2024. Packed up everything in a week (entire life in a few boxes—pathetic). Gave my job five day’s notice (so easily replaceable—pathetic). Hardly a soul to say goodbye to, after almost a decade of living there (do I have to explain this one— pathetic!). Still, though, the worst part of it was just the utter waste of it all. All those years… for what? All those late night fantasies younger me had about changing my life, only to do absolutely nothing about it in the cold hard light of morning, or only try, very briefly, and then give up— old habits! Teenage me saw the writing on the wall. She knew. She warned me, in print!

When I moved-stumbled-tripped-crash-landed back here with my tail between my legs, I tried. I thought the break-up brought clarity. I thought the break-up brought dreamed-of freedom. I put myself out there in ways I never have before. Hey, I started a blog! I got on Tinder! I joined group hikes! I actually spoke to the vendors at markets! Finally… life was happening! It was, it really, really was, I told myself, over and over, which is so funny, because I can so easily believe the bad things I tell myself over and over, but somehow the lie that I’ve got it all figured out never quite gets its claws in.

I have not been shy about saying that 2024 has not been good for me. I’m not the only one. No year, everyone seems to agree, is good. We evacuate every year like a building on fire. I can’t think of one year I’ve ever looked back on and thought, yeah, that was a good one. I don’t look back on my relationship with fondness, or my old jobs, or my old apartments. At the tail end of my 20s, I have only shed things; partners, pets, apartments, jobs, friends, belongings, cash, car, hair, hell, the stress even knocked a couple pounds off me.

And these things that I so easily sloughed off cannot be so easily reclaimed, minus, of course, the pounds. Someone get 12 year old me on the horn and tell her the true secret to weight loss is simple: complete emotional anarchy!

I wish luxuriating in misery was not the only true hobby I had. I wish the concept of enjoying things didn’t only underline the fact that I so rarely do. The problem is me, and I don’t have a solution for it. You may be thinking, what about drugs? Therapy? Surgery to remove your head from your ass? Drugs: tried. Therapy: tried. Surgery: I don’t believe in cosmetic procedures.

Writing (both fiction and this blog) is a blessing and a curse. It amplifies some of my worst personality traits: self-interest, inflated ego, need for validation, superiority complex, arrogance, and an embarrassingly lacking vocabulary. However, writing is also the only way I can connect with people. In the real world, I don’t really emote… normally. I do what I need to do to get by, and for the most part I think people who interact with me wouldn’t assume I struggle in the way that I do, which… is great! For them. For me, who feels every minor social interaction like a splinter, it sucks. I can bloviate for years in a Word doc or a blog post, but I really struggle to force words out of my mouth if I haven’t had time to prepare, or I don’t know the people I’m talking to well, or I know them too well.

Being alive is hard for me. I was exactly the right type of person to get sucked into the fandom world for as long as I did, because I fucking hated this one. As someone who is interested in cults and cult-like communities, I always liked to brag that I would never fall for one, while completely missing the fact that I was so desperate for community and fitting in and connections that I spent years convincing myself I was in the right place, with the right people, and that I thought and said the right things, and in return, I was rewarded with attention and validation and reassurance. Is fandom a cult? No. Was it an insular enough community that my specific personal experience with it damaged me immensely? Yes.

The respite I cling to in all the noise is that I am far from the only one who views my twenties as a complete wash. You see all the time: “your 20s/30s/40s/X0s are the best years of your life!” Well, they can’t all be, so which one is it, random online listicles and tweets that claim such things? This answer, obviously, will be different for everyone. Our lives can’t be measured in good decades and bad decades, or good years and bad years. Even when it seems like a string of bad things have happened, or a string of good ones, it’s not like there’s some objective, existential tally of the events that happened to you, a singular person, during one rotation of the earth around the sun. Sometimes it feels like trying to measure up periods of your life as anything beyond “still kicking” is a fool’s errand best left to the eternal losers trying to make order out of the chaos, aka storytellers.

Even what I’m doing now, here in this blog post, about as inartlessly as one can, is bundling my own personal never ending existential dread, neuroses, and misery into a narrative for you. What I am presenting here is a filtered version of the truth, same as what every other person speaking publicly about similar things is doing. I’m not calling these people liars. But they’re not telling the whole truth, because the whole truth is just reality, which can’t be encapsulated in an Instagram post/tiktok/Youtube video. There are no themes or motifs in reality. There are no universal lessons or hard truths to be learned. We package our lives up,— wins, losses, hurts, struggles, hopes, dreams, expectations, pros, cons— edit them, and sell them back to an audience with the false promise of replication and resolution. “If you do X, you will be happy!” “Here’s how I stopped being miserable and started enjoying life!” “I am a motivational speaker and I will motivate you to get rich, happy, skinny, blah blah blah blah blah.” When I write a blog post and wrap it up neatly with a bow… I am lying to you! It’s not wrapped up with a bow, because I have to wake up the next morning, too. When motivational speakers go home at night, close the door behind them, and shut the curtains, do you really think they’re practicing what they preach?

I am so intently zeroed in on narratives. We all are, to a degree. I would argue the difference is that while I’m drawn in by them, I also create them. When I’m working on a story, even when I’m not physically at my computer writing, I’m in the narrative. I don’t mean this in a super intense method acting way, like I don’t become the characters or think I’m part of the story or anything. I just think about it a LOT. And it’s not always “good” stuff, either. I’ve mentioned before how I dreamed up a whole-ass fanfiction concept for Don’t Worry where Wren joins a bigfoot-hunting group in southern Oregon. For Rat on a Horse, I daydreamed about the relationship drama that ensues when Rat has to disappear for days/weeks at a time during wildfire season and Lily goes out of her mind about it. In my current manuscript, when I’m not actually editing it or thinking about the changes I still need to make, guess what, I have a goofy cryptid-adjacent concept for these characters, too!

None of this is… relevant. But it eats up space in my mind palace like no one’s business. I’m consumed by this stuff, and being consumed by it means it seeps into other aspects of my life, too, as much as it can be said I have one. I expect life to be something that happens to me, that is artfully crafted and pieced together with love and consideration and care, because that is what I do with the lives I create. Call it a demented God-complex, but I live like this, and sometimes it hurts my feelings that I put more care into creating fictional life than the universe did into creating me. It’s comforting to know someone is always there to hold your hand. No, the characters don’t know that I’m there, dictating their every move like an evil puppetmaster, but I’m there nonetheless. What I put them through is all in service to a greater purpose— The Narrative. They don’t know it, but they’re being carefully guided through a series of obstacles, each increasing in difficulty, until they cross the finish line, triumphant, and then their existence is over, their growth encased forever in amber, to be displayed on a shelf in my mind palace’s library.

The population of global atheists is growing. People are replacing religion in their lives with other institutions, other belief systems, other understandings of the world. If I could convince myself to believe in god, I probably would. If I could convince myself to believe in anything other than a cold, dark nothingness, I would. If I could convince myself that some benevolent higher being wants to hold my hand and guide me toward a specific-to-me eternal happiness? Damn, I sure would. But I can’t, because these things don’t exist and aren’t true. So, instead of becoming a pagan or a wiccan or a “witch” or joining a cult or an MLM or another fandom… I just created my own… everything, I guess. To compensate for my lack of religion, I create my own new belief system, inside my head, with every story I write.

For what it’s worth, I had the above personal revelation in real-time as I wrote it, which was harrowing. The dangers of endless self-reflection are immense.

As usual, I’m of two minds about it, “it” referring to being very sad. Mind one: Everyone feels this way sometimes, I am just une bébé who can’t handle the cold hard reality of the world. Mind two: There is no way everyone feels this way as often as I do, because otherwise, everyone is walking around keeping a skyscraper without safety rails in their peripheral vision at all times, just in case (no crisis numbers in the comments, I’m exercising my creative license). I actually don’t know what I would prefer, to be honest. I want less people to be miserable, and even if number one is true, I have been unable to find someone to commiserate with on that level, like, ever, so I guess I default into the socially beneficial option.

Near the end of my relationship, when I was really circling the drain, I said at one point that I didn’t think I was ever meant to be happy. It was quite a bracing slap in the face when my ex’s answer was, “I think you’re right.” Sic, I guess. My memory is terrible. However, the Artic cold-plunge of that exchange did crystalize my understanding that relying on someone else for something as fundamental as your own happiness is never, ever going to be successful. So, not only did I strike out on the ability to make myself happy, but I can’t even convince myself, like most people do, that being in a relationship, no matter how miserable, is the answer to my problems.

So… if I can’t make myself happy, and nothing else can, either… what do I do?

At the most basic level, there are only two options: keep truckin’ or don’t. The only goal of all life on earth is to continue. In that way, I’m no different than a fish, than a plant, than a virus. No matter how bad one day is, no matter how bad things may stay, I will continue. Life doesn’t care if it sucks— it only cares that it hasn’t been snuffed out.

Instead of pushing that rock up that infinite hill, happiness sitting smug and untouched at the top, why don’t I just let it roll? How much more miserable do I make myself by constantly beating myself up over the fact that my happy muscle didn’t form correctly in the womb? My pinkies are all fucked up, too, and I don’t waste near as much brain power on them. It feels defeatist to say that I just accept it. At the same time, you gotta know when to call it. Had I been able to incorporate this mindset into my life earlier, I wouldn’t have wasted so many years trying to force a square peg into a round hole, when the true show of growth and integrity would have been to say goodbye, move on, and move forward. I think I’ve linked this poem before. I don’t like poetry. This is my favorite poem.

In the spirit of moving on and moving forward, I have made strides. It’s easy to feel like I haven’t, starting from scratch like I did this year, but that’s not true. I’ve accomplished things— I posted one novel, and finished (the first draft of) another. I got a job. I got a loose five year plan. Outside of accomplishments, I’ve had way more opportunities to explore hobbies than I’ve had in years, so even for the ones that don’t stick, I can at least say I tried. I started this blog— trying to encourage dialogue about the process of writing, offer insights into my own process, and hopefully meet more writers along the way.

I’m still working on the people part. I suspect that will forever remain my struggle. Speaking of accepting myself as I am, unhappiness and all, I am also trying to accept that I’m just not a people person. Maybe there is at least one people out there who I will become a people person for. If I ever meet her, that will be cool. Otherwise, though, I will continue to talk into my yellow void. If you’ve engaged with me at all on this site, whether it’s leaving a comment or emailing me, that means a lot to me. Thank you for indulging the weirdo who wrote a few Supernatural fan fictions half a decade ago and now whines about being sad on a text-only website that looks like the most boring of the 90s Geocities offerings. There is an IP tracking function in Squarespace that I found one day while clicking around on the back end that allows me to see where visitors are coming from, and of the millions of hits I of course get per month, they come from all over the world, which is very cool. Also, the IP tracking is a built-in feature, not, like, something I turned on for data harvesting purposes, promise.

As for what I hope you can expect in 2025: health, wealth, peace, love, great sex

As for what I hope you can expect from me in 2025: I’d like to get some more short-form writing out, in a similar vein to Rat on a Horse. I had a ton of fun with it, and it was a great palate cleanser when I needed to take a break between edits for the “real” manuscript I’m still working on. Once I have a query-worthy draft for novel 2, I expect to document that journey— I talk about being miserable now, imagine how cooked I’m going to be once I have to figure out comps. I had a great time putting together that decorate-for-Christmas-with-me post, so there may be more of that. If you don’t care about decor, well, SORRY, it’s my yellow void, not yours. I just want an excuse to waste hours browsing the kaleidoscopic technicolor hurricane that is the internet for lovely pictures of interiors that aren’t soulless AI scrapes. Until traditional publishing realizes what it’s missing, I’d also like to find a way to expand my audience, which sounds dangerously close to “work on my personal brand”. I’m thinking more like seeking out other online avenues or demographics that may be interested in my stuff, or finding sites like AO3, geared more toward original works, that may open some doors. And yes, I have considered Kindle, and yes, I haven’t completely ruled it out, but I certainly haven’t completely ruled it in, either. Not going to lie, my association with Kindle-exclusive books is not particularly flattering.

I shredded those old diaries, for what it’s worth. It wasn’t like it was super liberating or anything, and now that the ghost of 12 year old me isn’t hovering over my shoulder at all times, I can finally be free. Mostly, it was just nice to free up the space in my closet. I will say, though, I definitely didn’t need to hold onto those reminders of the lingering sadness of my youth— the very current sadness of my adult years is more than enough to carry on its own. Goodbye, move on, move forward, right? Time may be an illusion, but my limited storage space is not. 12 year old me may have gone through the shredder, but 29 year old me is still here to give it a shot.

Thanks for reading, guys— seriously, thank you. Happy holidays and hope to see you in 2025.

🎀

let’s all take a load off and decorate for christmas

Don’t worry, despite lulling you into a false sense of security and Christmas cheer with the title of this blog post, I still promise to engage in my signature, grating commentary on insignificant things that infuriate me. For example, you ever see those fanfiction-blue LED Christmas lights that physically hurt your retinas? How could you not. They are impossible to unsee, like, literally. Try blinking after you look at them. Try blinking after you see them out of the corner of your eye. Try driving after you make a turn and they are unexpectedly in your direct eyeline squeezing the life out of someone’s bushes like an anaconda. They are eternal. They are inescapable. If fanfiction-blue environmentally friendly Christmas LEDs are the only things keeping this planet from boiling alive because of climate change? Fuck this rock! We deserve to burn.

If you’re unfamiliar (please trade lives with me), this is what I’m talking about:

Anyway. I don’t like those. But I do like some holiday decor, and I do watch a lot of interior design YouTube, despite not owning or even renting a single interior space within which I could… design. Because I don’t have a lot of money. And things are expensive. But that is what Pinterest and Google Images and middle-upper class homewares stores like Crate & Barrel and Williams Sonoma are for.

In my head, my perfect holiday decor is traditional, but not cloyingly so. I can handle a bit of cheese, and even sometimes enjoy it, especially around this time of year. For example, I am currently sitting in front of an armchair by the fire, with a cup of hot chocolate and a burning holiday candle and a lit Christmas tree in the vicinity. I am surrounded by my family’s goofy Christmas decor. This is pleasing to me.

Shall we set the scene? We live in a house. Preferably, one with some character. We’re talking medium and dark toned wooden beams and flooring, custom millwork, built-ins, solid foundation, brick fireplace or woodstove, craftsman-esque, solidly made furniture, plaid, quilts, texture, vintage, and warmth. Our normal colour palette is earth tones, greens and browns, along with goldenrod and rust and burgundy. To brighten things up a bit, I will allow a dash of warm-neutral cream tones. There are slight, charming touches of whimsy throughout. Also, this house and I (we) live together on a large swathe of private property encased by woods. Think misanthropic lumberjack.

What a beautiful home. Let’s decorate it. Some ground rules:

• As much real greenery as possible (caveat will be discussed later)

• NO WORD ART (this is a 24/7/365 rule, not just Christmas)

• Handmade (by someone else) is preferred. Mass produced factory junk will be evaluated on an individual basis. DIYs that actually make sense are acceptable.

• Common spaces are most important, because this fantasy takes place in a world where I am flush with love and romance and friends and neighbors and community and everyone wants to come to my house during the holidays and share seasons greetings and warm tidings and other assorted text you see in holiday cards.

• NO BEADS ! NO GNOMES !

• Nothing movie or book themed. No Elf, no Grinch, no Home Alone. You get it.

Let’s outline. The colour pallete of the house is already warm, so we’re off to a good start. With the season, I want to bring in wine reds, forest greens, soft creams, and rich golds. Materials include wood, brass, knits, greenery, wool, and plaid. Tasteful sparkle/glitter is allowed, and in small doses. View my vision boards:

We’re getting a real Christmas tree. No gods no masters no fire codes. We’re keeping it watered and far away from open flames. Our tree is an appropriate size to our space. I once had a fake tree that was thin like a pencil because the terrible apartment I lived in was long and narrow and it was the only tree that would fit. Real Christmas tree also means real Christmas tree smell, and as a longtime candle lover, carcinogens be damned, smells are incredibly important to the overall mood of a space. I get this from my mother. People constantly walk into my parents’ house and comment on how nice it smells. Much like the Big Bang, getting that occasional Christmas whiff right to the face may actually create something (joy) out of nothing (no joy). I want my Christmas tree to be full and bountiful and without flaw, though part of the authenticity of getting a real tree is that real trees, much like me, have a few sparse patches up top. And the thing is, once it’s decorated, it’ll look great no matter what. That’s what I tell myself every time I put on a hat, anyway.

The rustic, homey nostalgia of a pine/fir tree scent is great, but I do love other scents as well. I might even consider one of my main hobbies going to craft fairs or Bath and Body Works and smelling the entire spread, every time, no matter how many times I’ve smelled it before. My preferred Bath and Body Works scents are almost exclusively from their autumn line (Leaves represent!!!) but there are some other winter-y ones in the mix that are nice, including the one, fittingly named, Winter (white woods, pine needles, sparkling clementine and spiced clove). One of the ones with “Christmas” in the name I liked from my most recent sojourn, but for the life of me I can’t remember which one. I’ve gone through my musky phase (yes, I was into Mahogany Teakwood for a while), but if you’re still in yours, I recommend Flannel (fresh bergamot, heriloom mahogany, and soft musk). I also went through a phase where I was obsessed with their eye-wateringly strong Balsam Fir scent.

I buy local as well. I won’t be naming any of the local companies I like just for privacy’s sake, but I will say I have bought some incredible smelling candles from them, accepting the approximately $30 price tag with just the smallest of tears in my eyes. Bath and Body Works candles are almost $30 regular, but I only ever buy them on their half off sales. The local one I most recently burned has notes of blue spruce, precious wood, and, wouldn’t you know it, musk. Basically anything that isn’t overwhelmingly sweet I can get on board with.

You can do more than candles, too. I don’t like artificially sweet smells, but obviously I love the smell of baking. Great news, since that’s a common activity during the holidays (I have gingerbread oatmeal cookies in the oven right now). Or, chuck some meat and potatoes in your slow cooker and let er rip. Sweet, savory, doesn’t really matter as long as it’s actual food.

See also: potpourri… simmer pots, if you don’t mind wasting a bunch of your produce and herbs… pomanders… wax melts… essential oils NOT from an MLM… cinnamon/star anise decorations… there are so many options to make your home smell good during the holidays.

Okay, with scent covered, I also want to chat music before getting into the actual decor. Retail workers are exempt from this paragraph because I think by Christmas most store employees have heard Jingle Bell Rock so many times they’re ready to go postal. Fair enough. Music is important! I am on the record stating my dislike of pretty much all modern Christmas music. I don’t want to hear Justin Bieber or Mariah Carey or Ariana Grande, or whoever else is doing either original Christmas music or pop covers of vintage Christmas songs. Strangely, though, I am neutral on Michael Buble. My mom loves Josh Groban and my dad has a penchant for the Trans Siberian Orchestra, so I guess those get a pass on nostalgia alone. I was actually just thinking today that of all contemporary singers I am aware of (admittedly, not many) that Adele has an incredible voice for Christmas music. I’ll call her up when I have a free minute and suggest it. I’m also a sucker for those “oldies playing in another room” genre of Youtube videos. They have vintage Christmas versions too, and they are very effective nostalgia traps. Obviously, you can play any music if you’re by yourself or having people over during the holidays. But I do think Christmas music evokes a very specific type of warmth in people. As for the people who hate it? Sorry, I guess! Christmas comes but once a year, stay strong. Home for the Holidays by Perry Como is my favorite Christmas song, if your favorite Christmas song can also be the one that makes you cry every time you hear it, no matter your circumstances, including working at the local grocery store as a high schooler and browsing the candle section at Homesense as an adult, which are definitely not embarrassing real-life examples.

Now that we’ve covered smell, sound, and a little bit of touch (texture), let’s actually get to the point. Sight! As for taste, I guess I mentioned I was baking cookies, so we’ll just check that off to complete the sensory bingo.

As mentioned above, plaid is already in the mix. However, that doesn’t mean we can’t add in some more. As the years have worn on, I’ve grown picky with plaid (leftovers from being in Supernatural fandom). The material it’s printed on/made with, yes, but also the granulation of the pattern itself. For example, the plaid on these ornaments is wrong. It doesn’t taste good in my mind-mouth. Plaid shouldn’t be smooth and hard.

The plaid on the ornaments below, though? Even though plaid is technically only a pattern, it really feels like that soft, rustic texture is an integral part of it. I’ve had versions of these ornaments from Walmart in the past, actually. It was a couple bucks per ornament and they worked just fine and if I hadn’t left a huge amount of my belongings behind when I moved earlier this year, I would probably still have them for this Christmas. And I deem this an acceptable DIY, especially when the whole point is that they look rustic, cozy, and handmade (this unleashes an entire new world of the types of ornaments you can DIY, hindered only by your local fabric store’s selection).

Here are some more ornaments I like:

Obviously, this is a large assortment, many of them statement ornaments, not all of them stylistically compatible, so I would not put them all on the same tree. One of the things I’ve found as I’ve delved deeper into my own personal design style is that the number of things I think are cool/nice/pretty/lovely is much, much larger than the number of things I would want in my own home, even on an unlimited budget. The textural variation in a lot of those ornaments is very fun. Even if I don’t like velvet on its own, I can appreciate its contribution to an overall Christmas tree landscape. The last photo, you’ll notice, is retro-style gift tags. Those were included because before I found the set of tiny ornaments I decided on for my own little tree, I was considering buying some nice hanging gift tags and using those as ornaments instead. They’re cheap and can be easily reinforced by sticking them onto cardboard, boxboard, whatever. The ones pictured are retro-style, which I feel like I’ve largely grown out of as a design motif, but, as established, I’m not above a bit of holiday cheese when the situation calls for it. There are some really sleek modern gift tags as well if that’s more your style.

Speaking of my own little tree…

You might be thinking, that’s a pretty ugly (and fake) tree for someone who’s talking a big game about “good” holiday decor and real greenery. To that, I say… yes. But also, my promised caveat:

I bought this ugly little tree from Michael’s during the 2015 holiday season, the majority of which I spent alone and sad (and overheated, the heating was busted and I woke up on Christmas morning to a blazing hot apartment). This ugly little tree has outlasted university degrees, relationships, and even personalities. Every year I pull this miniature fire hazard out of storage and plop it down somewhere in my current residence. Every year, it’s a little worse for wear. Originally, I furnished it with cheap ornaments from Walmart. In fact, I think that frosted white one with the holly branches is an OG Walmart. The other two, though, (including the blue one in the bottom right that I didn’t get a close up of) were given to me by my mom. Would I have chosen them for myself? No. Do they mean a lot to me anyway? Yes. My mom and I don’t have a ton of overlap in our design preferences, but during the holidays especially, I find that matters very little. I still troll her a little (seeing the word art NOEL sign from the back and asking why she owns a LEON sign). But the sentimentality and the nostalgia of the season outweigh the design sensibilities. That blue ornament? Totally throws off my preferred colour scheme. To that, I say… TOO BAD. It goes on the tree anyway. I do draw the line at the text printed on the back of those ornaments, though, which is why those sides are facing in.

Here are some Christmas linens, blankets, & pillows I like. Note that some of these do not evoke Christmas directly. A lot of the broader decor is meant to be season-specific as opposed to holiday-specific, because then you have multipurpose items instead of, say, a blanket you can only use for four weeks out of the year. I mean, you could use a nutcracker print blanket in May. No one is going to stop you. But it’s not a life choice I would make for myself. Seasons and their associated decor—having the inside of your home reflect and respect the state of the natural world outside of your home— are meaningful to me, and I like the feeling of alignment and cohesiveness and serenity that comes along with it. This would be the perfect time to admit I’m into grounding. Could you imagine. Actually, don’t.

The Santa pillow is mine. I got it from Homesense last Christmas, and if you’re in Canada and like them, they have them back this year. It took me weeks to pull the trigger on that purchase. Who knew this much headspace as an adult could be taken up by internal discussions on how much Santa paraphernalia you’re willing to have in your house (and if you’re willing to pay $34.99 for it…).

Regarding the red/white woodsy tablecloth: during the rest of the year, I’m not a huge fan of Scandinavian design— it’s a little too sparse/minimalistic/neutral for my tastes. But come Christmas, I do often find myself drawn to the woodland-esque vibe of Scandinavian holiday decor, though I don’t want to take the motif too far— as stated, I love the outdoors and forests therein, but I can’t recreate one in my home better than the real thing, so why try? Just a few touches are nice. Alignment and cohesiveness, not mimicry.

I am a self-proclaimed mughead. I love mugs, but I am also extremely picky about which mugs I allow a place of honour in my cupboard. I currently own 3.5 mugs. Two of my mugs are anytime mugs. The third is a Christmas mug I got from Value Village, but the handle is too small. You know when the handle is too small and it drives you batty? I want Christmas mugs. The pickings this year, at least as they pertain to my taste, have been SLIM. Between Rae Dunn and Hello Kitty and the Grinch and Disney I cannot catch a fucking break and find a nice seasonal mug, and I have been looking.

Now is probably a good time to mention that I rarely shop online. I can’t speak for other Canadians, but online shopping here is rough. Shipping (even domestically) takes forever and it’s expensive as hell. I can almost never justify the expense for whatever junk it is I want to buy. Plus, I like being able to go and see things in person. I like being able to touch it, because texture is a big thing for me, and online sellers love to lie or mislead about their products. But if I’m going to be spending my hard earned money on something, I want to ensure it’s something that is pleasing to both my eyes and my hands. And my nose, if it smells. And my mouth, if it’s edible. And I guess my ears, if it makes noise, but that doesn’t come up much in the decor world. And I would prefer it’s good quality, but, well, you do what you can and you can afford what you can afford.

All that to say, I know there are more options online. I am simply unlikely to pursue them. I also go to local craft fairs a lot, so I keep my eyes peeled there, too. The difference there is handmade things are expensive (understandable) so I have to be very picky about what comes home with me. And in terms of mugs, convenience is also incredibly important. Unless it’s the most beautiful mug in the world, if it can’t go in the dishwasher, I don’t want it. If it’s uncomfortable to hold, I don’t want it. Same with glassware. I Will Not Hand Wash This. I’ll hand wash cookware if I must. But everything else can go to hell where it belongs (dishwasher).

Also of note: “shaped” mugs are not my thing. It always feels like the drink inside is going to spill everywhere. Also, if it’s like, a head shaped mug? I don’t want to feel like I’m drinking out of someone’s skull… or like… a tree… I also tend to reject mugs where the wraparound print ends at the handle. It looks cheap and machine-made. Then again, I don’t like when mass produced mugs/glassware/servingware tries to look handmade, either. So I guess I’m just impossible to please.

Here are the Christmas mugs I own. Note the print ending at the handle on the floral one. It was 2 bucks at Value Village, okay? Give me a break. The blue one is my favorite winter mug from childhood. I stole it (hence the .5 of 3.5) when I moved for university and now that I’m back, so is the mug. Domestic jetsetter, that one.

And, some mugs I like (including glassware and servingware, because, as stated, the mug landscape of 2024 is bleak):

And where would you be without some cute Christmas doormats? What, you want your guests to think you’re an ANIMAL who doesn’t wipe her feet?!

Would you like to see some Christmas decor that I think is bad? Just kidding. I know you do.

It looked just like that in the Wayfair listing, btw. I didn’t stretch it for comedic effect. It was also, like, $60 or something. I’m dying to know what actually shows up if you were to order it, because there were a ton of mugs like that, all stretched out and overpriced, from the same vendor.

If it’s cutesy cell-shaded art that looks like you made it on your Cricut I don’t like it. Those cups also kind of suck because they don’t hold much liquid, right?! And they’re glass so they’re going to condensate like crazy, which double sucks if it’s winter-themed and you keep having to grab the cold wet glass when you’re already cold. Also if they’re dishwasher friendly I’ll eat my hat.

Self-proclaimed Grinch? I wish you the best, keep that attitude away from me. Also, I don’t like “mean” decor in general. I don’t like when decor tells you to fuck off or that you don’t give a fuck or you think everyone around you is dumb. Also, Grinch-specific, isn’t the moral of the story that he actually becomes a nice, uh, Grinch by the end?! Didn’t his heart grow three sizes?!

And not that it matters at this point, but for the sake of graphic design, at least have the middle finger stand in for the I. “Merry ficking Christmas.” Come on, man. It was right there.

That white table runner is included because it’s sherpa. SHERPA. ON THE DINING TABLE. over my dead body.

I don’t like bottle brush trees. The texture is bad. They’re also just dinky looking.

Do I need to explain why those deer are terrifying? Modern art or the monster in The Ritual?

Scary folk art Santa gets a caveat— not because I don’t think he’s scary, but because folk art like this always makes me a little uneasy but like, in a way I like. Would I have this in my home? God no. But I appreciate folk art in general. For example, I love Johanna Parker despite the fact that very little of her work makes sense with my design style.

The minimalist smooth Christmas trees look like sex toys. I don’t enjoy that. These aren’t even the worst offenders.

Things that have initials on them: why? Do you not know your own name? I am unsure why this seems to be more of a trend amongst women than men, unless you’re my dad, who owns a mug with his first initial on it. I suppose I never drink out of it, so maybe there’s a use-case for an initial mug. Maybe I have such an outsized hatred of personalization because of how flooded Etsy is with low-effort personalized everything. Do you really need your name laser engraved into a cutting board? A picture frame? A necklace? A “chocolate hazelnut spread” jar label?

The plaid pitcher is another example of why “hard” plaid is bad. But also, there’s something that looks so unfinished about that specific pitcher— I think because the outline/inside is white. Did you forget to put the pattern on the rest?

The thing about a shaped pillow—especially one as shaped as that snowflake— is that it doesn’t function as a pillow anymore. I do not like when something functional, like a pillow, is manufactured in such a way that it looses that function. That would take the place of an actual pillow that you could lean against! Is it just me?! I imagine leaning against that and shudder. It’s not like it’s sharp, except for the fact that it is. Unrelated to Christmas decor, but I feel the same way about spherical pillows. I hate those things.

Santa at the beach is a no from me. Remember what I said earlier about honouring the world outside with your interior design? This is the opposite of that. This is a level of fun and whimsy and quirkiness I cannot abide. If you’re in the southern hemisphere and celebrate Christmas? OK, maybe this makes sense for you. If the Australians want board shorts Santa, they can keep him.

Back to good stuff. Well, one good stuff. Christmas lights should be warm white. I will also allow green-and-white, red-and-green, or red-and-white alternating lights, like so:

Scratch that, I couldn’t find any pictures I liked. You’ll just have to use your imagination, or come see that one house in my neighbourhood that apparently had the only string of good red-and-green alternating lights in the world. By this point, I doubt it will surprise you that my preferred outdoor Christmas set-up is traditional; greenery, red/burgundy bows, warm white lights. You really don’t need to go crazy outside. Candles in the window are also very good. All red makes you look Satanic. All green (especially the neon green you usually get with exterior lights) doesn’t evoke the spirit of the season at all. And if you own these monstrosities? That are on every third house for some godforsaken reason?

You’re dead to me. “They’re LED and environmentally friendly!” Please. I don’t want to hear it, but you know who does? The 12ft tall inflatable Minion in a Santa hat in your front yard. I’m sure the preservation of the earth’s resources is top of his mind as hydro pumps him full of air for six-eight hours every night before you go to sleep.

At the end of the day, I think a lot of my design and decor preferences stem from that image, actually. Um, not the Minion in a Santa hat, but a warm candle in the window, beckoning you in from the cold. It’s a straight line to so much of what I love about writing, too. The catharsis of a long journey undertaken, well-ended in a chair by the fire.

… Well, it makes sense to ME.

The above are kind of the bits and bobs I had leftover from the, frankly, HOURS I spent sourcing images for this blog post. However, you may be like, why do those last three pictures look kind of washed out and sad? That’s because they’re mine, lol. No, I didn’t choose the world’s most boring paint colour, it was like that when I got there. Anyway, I think my various and underwhelming personal pictures and decor scattered throughout this post is a really good reminder that what I save on my pinterest boards is not at all equivalent to what my real life looks like. Those red truck lights, sitting right on my windowsill, kill me because they are SO ugly. But at the same time, I got caught up in the Red Christmas Truck phenomenon a few years ago, and that’s the result. And they’re fun and cute. So like, whatever.

Something that occurred to me while writing this post is that I have probably contradicted myself multiple times. I say I like or don’t like something, and I’m sure, scroll down a bit, and you’ll see me claiming the exact opposite. I’ve found that sometimes, with interior design, I like something because I like it or I don’t because I don’t. As in, you can’t always explain what moves the spirit. My tolerance for a certain type of cheesy decor may be higher than the next for no reason beyond: It Just Is. (For example: I said no word art EVER. Yet, how many times have I drunk coffee out of a mug yelling JOY at me already this holiday season? Granted, I don’t own the mug, but still.)

I love looking at the shiny baubles and the new, goofy ways people come up with to depict Santa. Most of it is ugly, mass produced shit, but to me, that’s kind of the fun in all shopping— finding the diamond in the rough. Sorting through the ugliest, tackiest decor you’ve ever seen at Homesense, only to find the one good thing they’ve managed to source this year. Or the one nice piece you allow yourself to splurge on at the department store. It can be an overwhelming prospect, and sometimes I do get existentially angst-ridden by the amount of STUFF that exists in this world (the one and only time I went to an At Home store in America I feel like I walked out with a mild case of shell shock). But, that comes with the territory. I thrift a lot, too. At the same time, I rarely buy anything. I’m very picky, and no one is allowed to buy me home decor because I probably won’t like it, or I’ll be annoyed I didn’t get the chance to pick something out myself.

Christmas is the one time of year I try to stow the cynicism and the pessimism and just enjoy things. Most of my recent Christmases have been spent in a self-proclaimed Grinch environment, with ironic trees and disdain toward local holiday events and a proliferation of Amazon shopping, which was always difficult for me, as it implies losers like me are sheep-brained morons for getting into the spirit of the holiday. But the thing is, like with most things, Christmas is what you make it. Tapping into the warm nostalgia of holiday decorations and cooking and baking and gift giving (as someone who enjoys shopping for others) is intrinsic to my enjoyment of the season. The time and thought I put into sourcing gifts for the people in my life is basically the only avenue I have of expressing my feelings for them. I was far from a perfect partner, but you can bet I showed up when it came to gift-giving occasions. It’s not about the money, is the thing. I never bought anyone the most expensive anything, but I did do my best to source gifts that would bring people joy, or make their life easier, or more fun.

It has not been a good year for me, and I have not been able to show up in the same way I have in years previous. So, in a way, writing this goofy little blog post has helped buoy my spirits. If nothing else, you can always brute force some holiday cheer by looking at overly curated pictures on Pinterest and spending days sourcing pictures of ornaments you think are pretty. It’s not a gift, per se, and I am not showing any person affection by writing this. However, I have carved out a little semi-private nook where I can exercise my care and enjoyment of the season in a way that brings me joy, and maybe the few people who read this some as well.

At the same time, I feel strangely melancholy about it all. There is something incredibly lonely about curating My Perfect Christmas in a digital snowglobe as opposed to embracing the authentic spirit of the season. As I so often am, I feel torn. Even when I was young, though, I felt this way. The day itself was nothing compared to the anticipation. When I was eagerly awaiting Christmas, anything could happen. When it was Christmas, well, then it was just Christmas again. Just another day. I have always been searching for a way to wrap my arms around every possibility at once. I have always been searching for a way to hold everything at once, and let nothing slip through my fingers. I have always been searching for wholeness, and contentment, and arghhhh catharsis, it always comes back to catharsis! No wonder it’s all I write about. Such a cruel aspect of human nature, to only want what we can never have. To only want it because we can never have it! Because as long as I don’t have it, it will be perfect! But the moment it leaves the realm of possibility, and enters the realm of reality, then it’s just reality, and reality is imperfect! Waghhhhh

Maybe the true takeaway from this exercise is that perfection is a curse and catharsis is unattainable and life is not meant to be anything, and instead simply is. That is, meaningless and inexorable and nothing more.

And with those warm words of comfort, I wish you a joyful Christmas, whatever that looks like for you. Even if that includes hugging your personalized blue LED lights and sherpa snowflake pillows and plaid red trucks just a little closer tonight because someone on the internet was mean about them.

Merry ficking Christmas, everyone!