author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

OK, so, this week's post is kind of a bummer. Also a bit of a reprise, since I posted about it Monday over on Patreon.

Here's the thing: I'm leaving Habitica.

I know! I've boosted it so many times over the years! It's helped me organize my life in so many really useful ways! The camaraderie, the accountability, the joy of clicking a thing and saying "I did it!" and getting imaginary gold and experience points for it--these have all been good things! (Mostly good things, anyway. About that, more in a moment.) So what happened that suddenly I'm canceling my subscription and deleting my account?

Well... this.

That link goes to a Reddit thread that describes, in some detail, the abominable treatment that Habitica's volunteer community moderators have received from Habitica's paid staff team. And because I rarely ventured outside my various Guilds' social spaces, I had no idea anything was going until sometime last week, when a Mastodon acquaintance, who turned out to be one of Habitica former moderators, mentioned it. Anyway, if you want the full story, follow both links; and, on the Reddit thread, scroll down for comments by former moderators.

A brief and thus very imperfect summary of what transpired might look like this: A longstanding company culture of treating the mods with very little care, respect, or gratitude for their unpaid labor of love for the Habitica community culminated in the staff firing all the volunteer moderators in early December 2022, then declaring any discussion of the situation in Habitica's public spaces off-limits and against the Terms of Service. The inciting incident for the first firing was this: After a heroic after-hours effort by the mod team to deal with a fast-moving crisis in the message boards, one of the mods suggested that maybe the staff might say "thank you" once in a while.

Again, this is a summary, not the complete story. I have left out the steps between "How about a thank you?" and "We are taking moderation in-house." And there are some pretty horrific codas. Basically, click through the links above and you'll know as much as I do. If the length of the Reddit page is daunting, I can specifically recommend these comments by former moderators MaybeSteveRodgers and ALittleYellowSpider (Alys). But I think the whole thread is worth your time.

Anyway, I was appalled. I immediately decided I could not support the app anymore. I put myself "in the Inn" indefinitely (i.e. paused damage so I could ignore the app without my character or those of my party being punished for it), exported my user data so as not to lose track of my task lists, and began the process of letting my various communities know why I'm leaving. This blog post is part of that.

This blog post is also me realizing that maybe I'm better off without Habitica after all.

Not long ago, author Elizabeth Bear wrote an article about how "Gamification might be bad, actually?" and it got me thinking. Well, to be fair, it got me resisting. I've been using Habitica so long, it's been such an integral part of my day--how dare you suggest it might be bad for me? But since pausing damage and thus freeing myself from the obligation to check in, check the boxes, complete my task lists OR ELSE, I've been thinking about Bear's article a lot.

Every time I catch myself thinking, "I didn't water the plants today - but if I do it first thing tomorrow, I can justify checking the 'Water the plants' Daily." Every time I felt bad because I didn't "Feel good about your writing - and yourself!" and thus couldn't honestly check off that task. Every time I thought, "OK, posting the Monday Muse is blogging, so it's OK if I check 'actually writing blog' today even though I didn't post to the actually writing blog." Every time I regretted failing to do my daily physical therapy or was too tired to brush my teeth, regretted not because skipping those routines isn't good for my physical well-being but purely because it meant I'd leave a daily task incomplete--

Every time, in fact, that I thought of the things I want to or need to do every day in terms of whether I got to check a box, it brought home all over again that maybe, just maybe, task list gamification might be bad for me.

I think I still need some sort of task list manager--it could be an app, it could just be me writing a list of "What do I need to do today?" in my Morning Pages--because without lists I lose track of the day's wants and needs and, like I've said before, I just drift. (I've done a lot of useless drifting this past week, despite my best intentions.) But what I don't need is any further excuse to punish myself for failing to complete a task. I do that enough just in my own head--I don't need an app telling me how many hit points each party member lost because of my failure. And I need to retain a sense of doing the thing for the sake of doing the thing, not for the sake of checking a box.

OK, but no, I'm not leaving 4thewords any time soon. For one thing, it's not nearly as useful a tool for punishing my failures. If I don't make my 444 words for the day, I have oh so many stempos stockpiled for repairing my streak. For another, it's fun. It's got great community and lots of new content regularly and actively maintained software and a culture of listening to and respecting each other and please don't disillusion me on this point I could not take it

Anyway, that's where things stand for now.

I have some more leftover thoughts from last week. They regard an incident I've already regaled y'all with before, but that blog post was more than three years ago, and besides, it turned into such a tangent during the initial draft of last week's "here's my schedule" post that I can only conclude that it's important that I get it off my chest. Again.

If you followed that first link, the one to the post from November 2018, you probably see what I mean. If not, 's OK, you don't have to. I'm going to rehash it here.

So, last week, while delineating the Afternoon Shift part of my Monday through Thursday schedule, my first instinct was to describe those tasks as "real writing." You know, as opposed to the stuff I do during the Morning Shift that doesn't really count as writing and I only do it anyway because I'm a wannabe-writer loser who's constantly Wasting This Precious Gift of Time and playing around instead of working. Well, I corrected myself and said "career writing" instead. But even that phrase is a problem. It contains a tacit admission that what I do with my Morning Shift is orthogonal, irrelevant, to my writing career. As though the elements of my writing process that support and enable the creation of publishable works, but are not themselves directly involved with creating those publishable works, aren't part and parcel of my writing career.

This is not an original metaphor, but: As well tell a professional football player that nothing other than the actual game counts as part of their career. Not stretching before and after practice, not cross-training, not sports nutrition, nothing. As well tell a musician that scales and arpeggios and practicing specific techniques are wastes of time. Unless they are practicing the piece they are going to perform, or actually performing it, or maybe writing a piece they intend to perform or record, then they're not really making music.

I know this. I feel it. Yet every time I mention morning pages or my daily freewriting or even the Friday Fictionette project, I hear those condescending voices in my head saying, "But, Niki, after all that, what time is left for you to actually write?" And feel obliged to justify why morning pages, why freewriting, why this weekly self-publishing project that I'm constantly behind schedule on and stressing myself out over, when I could be taking all that time to write and sell more short stories and maybe finally a novel.

Why? Because those daily and weekly exercises are part of my creative process. They are part of my practice. They make the publishable works possible and they are non-negotiable. And I need to stop giving in to the guilt and shame I feel when I tell my co-writing colleagues that I'll be working on one of those things during our next sprint. I'm going to feel guilty and ashamed, sure, because brain's gonna brain and what can you do, but I don't need to act like it.

(I mean, yes, I'd like to begin getting up a little earlier so that I can do my morning pages before co-writing rather than during, but only because that would mean two sprints available for that day's Friday Fictionette efforts rather than just one.)

Hell with it. I'm going to Own My Damn Process and spend a few blog posts talking about why these exercises are valuable to me. And yes, I've blogged tiresomely on that precise subject before. But it's a new year, and I have new thoughts about them. Or new ways to word the old thoughts. Something like that. It's worth taking a look and seeing what's filed under those categories in my head right now.

On a maybe related note, I'm rethinking what days I can blog on. I got so very much stuff done yesterday, just this amazing amount of stuff, not a moment of time wasted whatsoever, and yet I didn't get to the "daily" blog post before it was time to get ready for roller derby. I guess that means there really is no room in a Tuesday for blogging. So maybe blogging happens on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays? Or maybe just Wednesdays and Saturdays because Friday is a day off? Except I'd really like to post more than twice a week? Which I haven't in a really long time?

Argh. Look, I'm gonna feel it out and see what works. Stay tuned.

So yesterday I laid out my schedule for Monday through Thursday. What about Friday, you may ask? Well, Friday is a day off. I started to jot that down in yesterday's post, but it soon became clear that I have a whole 'nother post in me purely on the philosophy of "Yes, I do get to have days off" and I should probably save that tangent for tomorrow.

Welp, now it's tomorrow.

Here's the thing about Friday: It's full of things. It starts off bright and early with recording a couple shows for AINC, the Spanish-language programming this time. One of 'em has to be uploaded for noon, but I will not be at home for noon, because I've got my Boulder Food Rescue shift from about 10:45 AM until 1:00 PM or so. And then there's whatever groceries need getting at whatever stores. And then I am tired, so by the time I'm home and have put all the groceries away, it's nap time, like seriously, and I am not very good at getting up from a nap and being productive. Pretty much the whole day is shot for further productivity.

This is a thing which has given me angst and guilt over the past few years. I've whittled down my Friday expectations from a full day to a half day to just 25 minutes of freewriting, come one, can't I at least do that? No? Well, then, I guess I'm just a lazy good-for-nothing so-n-so who isn't really a writer.

In fact, no. Obviously what I need to do is just stop expecting writing to happen on Fridays.

It sounds obvious, yes, but deciding that is sort of kind of a breakthrough. And it flies in the face of the internalized Wise Writing Mentor voice that says, "Being a writer means having homework every day for the rest of your life. Being a writer means you don't get weekends and holidays." And whoever thought those were reasonable things to say?

(I honestly don't remember. I want to pin it on that panel at World Horror Convention 2002 that was Neil Gaiman and Gene Wolfe in conversation, but it doesn't sound like the kind of thing Neil Gaiman would say or co-sign. My impression of him has always been that he's far too kind to do the "You must do X to be a real writer" schtick. It might have been one of my instructors at Viable Paradise in 2006, maybe Jim Macdonald, but if so, only after he emphatically reminded us that "Under the right circumstances anything I tell you can be wrong." Because, again, I don't see Uncle Jim as insisting on Only One Right Way to Be a Writer, no matter how strongly he feels that a short story is a key lime pie.)

Anyway, I damn well get Fridays off. I also get Sundays off, because they, too, start with 1. AINC reading (the Sunday edition of the Employment Opportunity News this time), 2. roller derby practice, and then 3. a very hard nap. They may also, depending on schedules, transition into Quality Family Time. But despite the lovely writing date that SFWA schedules for every Sunday afternoon with rotating author and editor hosts, Sundays very rarely involve writing.

And accepting that no writing will meaningfully get done on Friday or Sunday, and therefore not guilting myself over that writing not getting done, is part of my Write Happier in 2022 initiative.

But what about the Friday Fictionette? You may well ask. And I will tell you. Here's the plan: I upload that sucker by Thursday, and I schedule it to automatically go live on Friday at 8:00 AM. No actual work on Friday required. Ta-daaa!

But what, you may then ask, what about Weekend Warrior, whose prompt goes live on Friday and whose deadline is Sunday night? If you take Friday and Sunday off, when will you write your Weekend Warrior stories? ...Well, I guess that's what Saturday's for, isn't it?! Sheesh.

Well, Happy New Year, everybody. How was yours? I hope like heck it did not involve RAGING WILDFIRES. Because I have it on good authority that those suck.

(In case you were wondering and/or were worried, John and I are fine. We're a few miles north of the areas that were evacuated for the Marshall Fire, so our home was never in any concrete danger. THIS TIME. It had been so dry this winter, with very little measurable snowfall right up to the end of the year, that any spark could ignite the next catastrophe. We were fortunate to be spared this time around. We are also extremely aware that fortune today doesn't guarantee fortune tomorrow. It's kinda sobering to think about.)

I have a bunch of things to blog about over the next few days. Today I think I'm going to blog about New Year's Non-Resolutions.

I don't really make New Year's Resolutions. They strike me mostly as an opportunity to set myself up to fail. So much of the tradition seems to involve enumerating all the ways I suck, scolding myself for them, and attempting to be a person who sucks less. This is perhaps an ungenerous way of looking at the New Year's Resolution tradition. It is nevertheless representative of the tradition's historical role in my life.

But I do have some small changes to make to my day-to-day routine and to my self-expectations that, I hope, will make me, if not a less sucky person, then a happier person, someone who approaches the daily work without so much dread and self-recrimination.

I'm making some small changes to my schedule. I'll be expecting less from myself on those days when I know I'll have less to give. I'll be reserving more time for those goals that have gotten shortchanged in that respect of late. And I'll be reevaluating my relationship with writing with a focus on why I write.

This blog post by Chuck Wendig brought that into sharp relief for me: "Writer's Resolution, 2022: The Necessary Act Of Selfishly Seeking Joy"

I think we get caught up in the process, in the product, and we forget to identify and embrace those parts of writing that bring us true satisfaction and happiness. We started writing for some reason or another, and it's easy to lose a hold on that reason.

It's been a good long while since I read Ray Bradbury's Zen in the Art of Writing, but one of the bits that stands out fresh and sharp in my memory is the image of the author leaping out of bed in his eagerness to start the day's writing. And wow do I envy that. It's more common for me to wake up in a state of dread, knowing that all those things I blithely planned the day before have now come due, and I'm not ready. I'm just not ready.

I've often blogged about, complained about, lamented and griped about, my constant struggle with avoidance--with the difficulty of simply sitting down and getting started. And I have several strategies that can help with that, depending on the day. Co-writing sessions and their pressure to be punctual and productive. The "I'll just" method of replacing the Big Scary Task with a smaller, less threatening task ("Instead of revising the story, I'll just open the file and reread the current draft."). Letting external and internal deadlines convince me that I gotta do the thing regardless of whether I wanna.

But I wanna wanna. That's the whole point. Strategies for convincing myself to do the thing that I don't wanna do, they all sort of ignore that the whole root of the problem is that very don't wanna in the first place.

Instead of looking forward to writing, I'm dreading it. What a sad place for one's lifetime ambition to live!

I would like 2022 to be the year of remembering, in specific and sensory detail, all the reasons why I originally decided to be a writer. Why I wanted to write. Why making up stories and playing with words made me excited and happy. I'd like to recognize the moments when I do genuinely look forward to writing, and pay attention to how that feels, and why I'm feeling it, and see if there's some sort of anchor or trigger for that feeling that I can deploy at will.

And I want to explore the reasons for the dread, too. Like, what am I really dreading? Not writing itself, surely. What experience am I afraid of having? What unpleasantness am I assuming will be part of the writing process that maybe doesn't have to be?

I don't expect to 100% solve the problem of avoidance this way. But I'm hoping to mitigate it. I think that's reasonable.

Whatever I figure out, or even whatever I'm trying to figure out, you'll no doubt hear about it here. So, er, buckle up, I guess?

Hullo! This blog is not dead. Furthermore, actual writing happened today. On a Wednesday, even! UNHEARD OF. Generally my Tuesdays are epic and my Wednesdays are nonexistent. But this week both Tuesday and Wednesday were productive--and on a human scale, which is much more sustainable.

I've been experimenting with different scheduling brain-hacks, trying to see how best to trick my brain into behaving itself. Today's experiment involved a "done by" rather than "start at" check-list. "Let's see. Task one is my Morning Pages, which I'm in the middle of now" (Morning Pages tends to be where I figure out the shape of my day) "and I should be done by 1:00 PM. Next I have to record the Wednesday show for AINC, which I ought to be able to get done by 3:00 PM. Then the daily freewriting--that usually takes 25 minutes, but let's say done by 4:00 PM..." And so forth.

The unexpected benefit of all this was, although I had an idea that one task's "done by" was really just code for the next task's "start by," if I missed that start-by time by a few minutes, I didn't suddenly feel like I'M LATE I MISSED THE START TIME WHAT'S THE POINT ANYMORE. I knew I could get it done by whatever done-by time I'd intended. If I got it done early, I could futz around with clicky-games for a bit. Or I could futz around with clicky-games while I did the task, so long as I still got it done by the done-by time.

So, basically, we're talking about One Weird Trick to lessen the pressure and anxiety miasma surrounding certain writing tasks. It reminded me of Havi Brooks's "code words" strategy, although perhaps not at the same level of mental role play as the example she gives in the linked blog post. Today it worked. Who knows if it'll work tomorrow--tomorrow I may have a very different brain on--but I'll try it and see.

So, having gotten all my work (give or take a checklist item) done by a reasonable time of the afternoon, I had time to make salsa.

It has been a good year for tomatoes. A very, very good year. Every week, 63rd St. Farm has been sending me home with some five to eight slicing tomatoes and a selection of heirloom tomatoes, saucing tomatoes, and cherry tomatoes. It sort of piles up. And then there's a bit on one of the really pretty heirloom tomatoes that's starting to look iffy if not downright moldy, and that's how you know it's high time to do something with these tomatoes, y'all.

The Conservatory Kitchen Presents: Improv Tomato-culling Salsa

1. Starting with the oldest, worst-looking tomato in the bunch and moving up from there, cut off the bad bits and see what's left. (The aforementioned heirloom with the moldy spot cleaned up surprisingly well!) Put the good bits on the kitchen scale until the kitchen scale says 2 lbs or thereabouts. Take these accumulated good bits, dice 'em and chop 'em and mangle 'em, and stick 'em in a big bowl. (Bigger than that. You need room to stir, OK?)
2. To this add about a quarter pound of diced onion--yeah, that half-an-onion that's sitting around in the crisper drawer (dear Gods, organic yellow onions are HUGE these days), that'll do--and maybe three green onions and five nice-sized garlic cloves and oh, hey, something hot. Five serrano peppers sounds about right. (Serrano peppers are another veggie I've been accumulating.)
3. Spices. Very simple. About a teaspoon dried oregano and about a half teaspoon ground cumin. Fresh ground peppercorns of all colors: black, white, pink. More than that. KEEP GRINDING. Maybe a teaspoon of salt? More? I dunno, the chips you're gonna dip in this mess are gonna be salty already, aren't they?
4. Stir stir stir. Taste. What do you think? Did I forget anything? No, I left out the cilantro on purpose. Can't stand the stuff. More for you, right? Hm. Maybe parsley. Maybe a diced peach if one's rolling around the fruit bowl.
5. Let sit in the fridge until party time. If no parties are in the offing, throw one for yourself. Show yourself a good time. You deserve it.

And there you go. Salsa. By the time I was done, I only had about 15 tomatoes left in the house and maybe 10 serrano peppers. SHUT UP, THAT'S PROGRESS.

My writing process is inconsistent. My writing needs are inconsistent. I'm going to whine about that now.

Getting back to Tuesday's lament: I wrote a 5K-word story more or less over 48 hours, submitted it Tuesday afternoon, then crashed hard. On Wednesday, I sort of puttered along at half-speed, getting about half my expected workload done. And if there's one huge takeaway I'm taking away from the experience, it's this: that's not sustainable.

Hence my goal of doing a little revision every day in July.

But I can't get away from how well Emergency Short Story Boot Camp worked. I don't just mean that it got written. I mean, there was an immersive quality to the effort that helped it get written. I lived inside that story all day, watching the characters interact, looking closely at pieces of their world, learning by trial and error the rules, such as they were, of the magic they manipulated. And it was magic for me, too.

It was just stressy as all hell, is all.

I find myself going back and forth between two different writers' blog posts concerning the words-per-day question. I don't really judge my output in terms of words per day, though I do track them; I also track hours spent writing, and I structure my writing day around a list of defined tasks I hope to accomplish or at least make progress on. But words-per-day makes a useful generic shorthand for all the different ways one might quantify the daily writing process. And in terms of words per day, these two blog posts I'm thinking of are talking about very different totals.

The first post is Tobias Buckell's "How Much Should You Write Every Day?" To be clear, that's a question he doesn't actually answer. He's not here to tell you how much you should write every day; rather, he describes how he figured out how much he should write every day, at least at this current point in his life. The answer he came up with was 500 words. Just that. 500 words of fiction every day. Only 500 words. But every day. It's a daily amount that allows for a healthy work-life balance, and, given a long enough run-up time, it's a sustainable pace at which to approach a deadline.

The post really resonated with me. Buckell describes periods during college when he'd binge several multi-thousand-word days and then spend the next couple days utterly collapsed--and I have been there. He describes deadline-oriented sprints followed by utter exhaustion--hoo yes. The slow but steady march of a defined and reasonable daily goal toward a finished project with "no drama" makes so much sense to me.

There's also the benefit of having "percolation time" built into the schedule. I can't just sit down at the desk and type until the story's done. I need nights spent thinking about the story as I fall asleep, long walks talking to myself about the plot, maybe even an hour in the bathtub trying to write the next scene out loud. There was a point Tuesday when, climax scene written and only the denouement left to go, I actively needed a fifteen-minute walk-and-talk session to clarify for myself what that denouement should accomplish, but I didn't have time. The submission portal was going to close in an hour. So I had to do my best hammering it out at the keyboard. The results were acceptable, but I think they suffered for the lack of walk-and-talk. A slow-but-steady pace would have allowed for lots of walk-and-talk, lots of hypnagogic brainstorming, lots of opportunities to dream and wake up and go "a-ha!"

But I'm still worried about this daily sessions in July thing. See, I've tried a similar process before: I spent a month holding myself to a daily 25-minute session of creating/revising/polishing the work in progress. And I succeeded at holding those 25-minute sessions fairly regularly. But I didn't seem to get anywhere. Why?

So here's the second blog post I keep coming back to: Kameron Hurley's "Life on 10,000 Words a Day: How I’m Hacking My Writing Process." She describes not writing a little every day, but rather writing a hell of a lot every Saturday. For her, a daily bite of time isn't conducive to that immersive waking trance she needs for writing novels. But with a dedicated six-hour block scheduled during an ideal time of day and in an ideal environment, she gets shit done.

And that resonates with me, too. It speaks to why 25 minutes a day, or even an hour a day, fails to move the meter on my work in progress. Having the freedom-slash-obligation to spend six hours Tuesday doing nothing but writing that story made the story happen in a way that half an hour a day had not.

Could I work that way on the regular? It sounds kind of thrilling, but also kind of exhausting. I don't typically choose to do just one thing over such a long period of time; the thought rather terrifies me. I'm not sure how much of that is me being hard-wired for multi-tasking, and how much of it is my just never having built up that kind of marathon-runner stamina.

Then there's a practical problem: I have too many things I want to do with my work-week--hell, with my work-day--to feel like such a single-purpose day is a good idea. I'm not willing to sacrifice my daily freewriting sessions; that's my time to get warmed up for the day and come up with story ideas. I don't want to fall behind on the Friday Fictionette project; I most certainly don't want to cancel it. Meanwhile, I have multiple stories in the revision queue at all times and I want to finally publish a gods-damned novel! And then there are all those non-writing obligations that life demands. How do I get everything done?

Tallying it all up: I don't want any one writing task to monopolize my day. I want to spend a little time on each of the things every day. But I don't want to work on a project for so little time at a time that I get nowhere at all. And I definitely don't want to keep putting myself through the last-minute panic production process.

I suspect I'm not going to find the One True Answer. If there is a One True Answer, I suspect it will involve staying flexible about what the One True Answer is for any given day, week, or work in progress.

Writing process! What is it even? Well. I'm working on it. TBD.

OK, so, political thoughts I've been having. It starts with an anecdote about my Mom. And it's not a particularly positive anecdote, so I should probably start with the acknowledgement that in many ways, she was a wonderful person. But people are complicated, and there's a thing she did that wasn't so great.

When I was a teenager, I levied my share of teenager complaints against Mom. As teenagers do. And, because I was a teenager, some of those complaints were bullshit, reflecting nothing more than the muddled mess of heightened emotion and solipsism that teenagers can be prone to. But, because I was also an intelligent young adult who was rapidly acquiring tools for critical thinking and was very aware of the world around me, some of those complaints were spot on.

My Mom had the same stock reaction to all complaints. "Yes, you're right. I'm a horrible mother." These words would be followed by a smug grin as she turned her back on me. Sometimes, if I protested, she'd repeat those words louder (to drown me out) and smile even more widely and twice as smugly. The main implication was clear: any complaints I had were by definition illegitimate, because I was the one making them, because I was making them about her. The only appropriate reaction, she thought, was to ridicule my complaints as absurd on their face using this kind of hyperbolic reductio ad absurdum. "Yes, you're right. I'm a terrible parent. There's the phone; go ahead and call Child Protective Services."

But there was another implication behind this response. "The fact that you are complaining about me means you think I'm a horrible parent. And you will always think I'm a horrible parent, no matter what I do. Therefore I am not going to bother trying to convince you otherwise."

I suspect Mom was always anxious about whether she was being a good mother, so this knee-jerk dismissal of any criticism from me was in some part misguided self-defense. Misguided, because I wasn't the one calling her a horrible parent. The fact that I had a criticism or complaint didn't mean I thought she was a terrible person or a bad mother. It just meant I thought she'd done or said something fucked up and please don't, OK? (Or it meant that I thought it was terribly unfair that she wouldn't let me borrow the car to drive myself to the French Quarter, or that she'd forbidden me to take a job as a pizza delivery driver. Like I said, I was a teenager.)

(To be clear, I know she was anxious about whether she was a good mother. In those months after she'd lost a lot of her vocabulary and cognitive function but was still living at home and able to hold conversations, that's one of the last questions she asked me: "Was I a good mother?" The part I can only suspect, but can't ever know for sure, is that her habit of dismissing my complaints with ridicule stemmed from that anxiety.)

So keep that anecdote in mind while I seemingly change the subject.

Not long ago, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America issued a statement in response to George Floyd's murder, in solidarity with the protests, and in support of #BlackLivesMatter. In that statement, signed unanimously by SFWA's Board of Directors, the organization acknowledged the need to act, admitted their responsibility for having been part of the problem, and outlined a list of first step actions they were committing to immediately.

Now, those first step actions were primarily financial in nature. To me, that scanned. A similar conversation had been going on in the roller derby community, wherein skaters of color were pointing out that the sport's cost of entry was a disproportionately greater barrier to them than to white skaters simply because poverty and race are so inextricably linked. So roller derby leagues began talking about things they could do to address this.

And these were just first steps. Meanwhile, SFWA's statement included a list of educational resources for those looking for ways to help and a list of organizations to support with one's time, money, energy, and signal-boosting power. They ended with a further call to action, and with a link to the organization's email address so readers could share further how-to-help suggestions.

As a SFWA member, I was feeling kinda proud. My organization was being proactive and trying to help! They were fighting the good fight! And I, with my drop-in-the-bucket membership fees, was a small part of that! Yay!

Not long after, I read this response on twitter:

Jennifer Marie Brissett @jennbrissett Jun 4 How about dealing with the fact that several of SWFA approved magazines STILL have 0% black writers in them -- an issue brought to your attention YEARS ago by myself and others and the #BlackSpecFic Reports? Black ppl don't want your charity. We want equal and fair treatment.

And this is why I wanted you to keep that anecdote about Mom in the back of your mind. Because this is where I have personally witnessed a bunch of white people doing kind of the same thing she did.

Maybe it's because they're genuinely anxious about whether they're being good allies, and people are hardly at their best when they act out of their insecurities. Or maybe it's because they never really were allies in good faith anyway, and they're pouncing on an opportunity to let themselves off the hook. For whatever reason, this is where they throw up their hands and say things like, "See? It doesn't matter what we do! It's never good enough! Why should we even try?"

In many cases, what's going on is, these white people are looking for that One Neat Trick to end racism, so that they can perform that trick, pat themselves on the back, cash in their ally chips, and go back to Not Thinking About It. (You will recall that Not Thinking About It is one of the privileges of being white.) So they are asking Black people to all get together and make up their minds about what that One Neat Trick is. And then, when different Black people have different answers, these would-be allies want to know which Black people to listen to. Who's right? Who's wrong? Who's got the One Right Trick and who can be safely ignored?

That's no way to be an ally.

Brisset isn't wrong. If SFWA sponsors Nebula Convention registrations for Black writers and donates to the Carl Brandon Society, but doesn't leverage their influence in the industry hard for greater Black inclusion in SFF publishing (not to mention equal payment!), then they're ignoring a huge part of the good that's in their power to do.

On the other hand, SFWA isn't wrong to take those financial first steps. Racial economic disparity is a very real problem. And the Black writers who are pointing out that very real problem--along with skaters of color in the roller derby version of this conversation--aren't wrong either.

But it would be wrong to mistake the economic symptoms for the whole of the disease. It would be wrong to think that once you've thrown money at the problem, the problem's solved. And it would be wrong to stop with monetary solutions when you have it in your power to do so much more.

Here's the thing: People of color are not a monolith. No one color demographic is a monolith, either. At any given time, different individuals will each face a different subset of that hydra-headed beast that is systemic racism. So they won't all have the same answer to "How can I help?"

And that beast is old. It's older than the U.S. and it's got its paws all over the nation's history and it's still got a hand in writing the nation's future. It came over with the smallpox blankets, and it came over with the slave traders. It staffed desks at Ellis Island, where it sliced people's hair off, made them throw away precious possessions, and fucked up their names. It "reeducated" Native kids. It wielded whips and firehoses and attack dogs and nooses. It's doing it still. It's throwing children into cages without benefit of soap, toothbrush, or face mask, and it's deporting those children's parents. It's shooting Black men for such heinous crimes as carrying a bag of Skittles or being found sleeping in a car.

It's been doing all these things and more for centuries. It's still at it. Where do white people get off thinking they can stop it cold with One Neat Trick, preferably performed in fifteen minutes or less?

Look. Y'all. You're partly right. Whatever you do, it won't be enough. That is because the problem is bigger and older than you. No one individual will slay the beast alone; no one entity can subdue it over the course of a single lifetime. And that's no reason to throw up your hands and storm off in a huff--that's precisely why doing whatever you can matters. What's important is not being the hero that single-handedly slays the beast (my, how we white folks love to center ourselves in the narrative! How angry we get when the story's not about us!) but contributing whatever you've got to the fight that eventually takes the beast down. And you contribute not, pace me several paragraphs ago, to puff yourself up with pride over having fought, but to hasten the day the beast goes down, because that is the priority.

Let's bring science fiction back into it with one more metaphor. You know about generation ships? A large community takes off on an interstellar journey of hundreds, maybe thousands of years. Space is big, and we don't go so fast. The people who board the ship on Earth will be many generations dead by the time the journey ends. But do any of them throw a fit for that reason and declare the journey not worth making? They do not. They celebrate the future arrival of their descendants, and they do whatever's in their power to make sure it happens. While they live and work as members of both a community and a starship's crew, they do their part to keep that ship on course.

Unless I am very much surprised, none of us, not me writing this post in June 2020 nor you reading it, will get to live in a post-racist society. There's light-years still to go. But while we crew this ship of Earth, we can contribute the level best we've got to keep its vector of travel bending toward justice, so that some generation to follow ours can reach that destination.

So, yeah. Do what you can to help. Listen to the people you're trying to help, because they're the authorities on whether you're actually helping. Realize different people will be focused on different parts of the problem, and none of them are necessarily wrong. Accept criticism with good grace. Accept that even if you do everything "right," it won't be "enough." Do it anyway.

...And that's what I've been thinking about these past couple weeks.

I'm sorry. I've been part of the problem.

I've been angry--furious--but feeling so helpless because it's like every goddamn week someone gets murdered by the police for the "crime" of existing in public while black and people rightly protesting this are being met with excessive police force and there are white assholes destroying shit under cover of the protests because while it is a FACT that "a riot is the language of the unheard" (thank you MLK) it's so goddamn easy for malign actors to coopt riot conditions to do shit like burn down bookstores and then yell "but antifa did it" and, what the hell, does anyone really need me to explain why I'm feeling angry and helpless? Seriously?

And I've been thinking, "I'm a writer, I should goddamn write something, what else am I here for?" But then I think, "I'm a fucking privileged well-off cis white woman, who am I to speak?" And then I think, "Well, leverage the shit out of your privilege and SAY SOMETHING," and then I think, "What the fuck can I say that doesn't sound like cheap token virtue-signalling performative hashtag so-called allyship?"

And so the anger turns inward and the helplessness overwhelms and it turns out my natural instinct is to turtle down. Just hide away in my own petty personal triumphs and tragedies, keep my mouth shut on anything substantial, and wait for the storm to pass.

And, wow, isn't that a big ol' sign of my white privilege all blindingly strobing neon? "I'm overwhelmed, so I won't think about it." White privilege is what allows me to go through life only thinking about issues facing people of color when I choose to, when I'm strong enough to, when I feel it would be useful. POC don't get to choose not to think about it, any more than I get to choose not to think about issues facing women. You don't get to choose not to think about the issues you're living. The world tends to shove those issues down your throat at every opportunity.

And it turns out that while anti-racism can't begin and end with a hashtag, and performative allyship is deadly, silence isn't any better.

Here's a thing--here is a huge stonking hypocritical thing:

I've recently been dealing with an emotional upset regarding a small online gaming community I've been part of. The member who said something misogynist and then doubled down when called on it was only the inciting incident, upsetting enough in the moment but not in itself the thing that's caused me to go on hiatus from that group's activities. No, the sustaining emotional upset came from the way the rest of the community handled it. A few community members moved very quickly into Missing Stair Defense mode--oh, I know them personally, they don't mean anything by it, they're going through some personal stuff, I promise this is totally unlike them--and that's a huge red flag. An individual asshole can stop being an asshole, or they can leave the community; but a community with a pattern of Asshole Advocacy has a serious problem with how it enacts community.

But worse than the Asshole Advocacy is the utter silence with which the whole group initially responded to my protest. Me, out loud in voice chat: "Hey, I'm not comfortable with [person] tossing misogynist slurs around casually like that." Them: CRICKETS. The Asshole Advocacy only came after I pushed back by repeating myself into the deafening silence--and that wasn't easy, let me tell you. And that's the major reason I continue to be on hiatus from that group despite certain members reaching out to me and telling me they've talked to the offender who feels super bad about it and promises it won't happen again. Because silence like that tells a body, "They don't have your back. You can't trust them. It will happen again, and this is how they will respond."

Yeah, so. Flash forward to today. Me, checking in with another social group's online communications hub for the first time in about a week. And reading post after post of people, primarily POC, saying, "I'm out, y'all. I've been waiting for someone to say something about George Floyd and the protests and #blacklivesmatter, but the silence has been deafening and I no longer feel safe here."

I'm ashamed. I'm a goddamned hypocrite and I'm ashamed.

So I'm not going to be silent anymore. Maybe I feel helpless and overwhelmed, but I can't let that be a reason to stay silent, when other people maybe also feel even more helpless and overwhelmed and also in fear of their lives. I've been proceeding from the somewhat unconscious assumption that these are issues affecting other communities, not mine; events happening in other states, not the one I live in; stuff going on outside my door, which I can close and lock while I hunker down inside the house and ignore the world. And I need to stop doing that. I needed to stop doing that yesterday, or more like two weeks ago.

I still don't know what, effectively, I should say, what I can do, but I'm going to move forward with the intent to fucking learn. Seek, learn, implement. There are quiet things a person can do: donate money to activist organizations, write Postcards to Voters, send letters to government officials. There a personal things a person can do: check in with friends who are directly affected, offer help.

And there are public things a person can do, like write a blog post like this one, admitting fault and asserting the intent to get better. Yeah, maybe it's still a species of performative allyship and hashtag activism, maybe it makes me look like yet another self-centered white person exercising my guilt and making it all about me. I don't know. I have to risk that, because silence is worse. Silence tells my friends that I don't have their backs and they can't trust me. Speaking, I might fuck up, but if I fuck up, at least I can learn from the fuck-up and do better.

#BlackLivesMatter is very easy to say, and yes, a lot of (predominately white) people consider their job done once they've said it. But it's even easier not to say it at all. Activism can't end there, sure. But it's a place to start.

So I'm speaking. And I'm sorry.

This blog isn't going to stop being my actually writing blog, primarily concerned with those personal and petty triumphs and travails to do with one woman's writing life. I also reserve the right to squee about fountain pens, geek out over video games and books and TV shows, and whine about first world problems. But this blog is going to stop totally avoiding matters of substance, because that's no way to live.

Friends: Stay safe out there. Or don't. Take big risks in the name of justice. Know that I love you. And I've got your back.

I have a thing to say. Kind of a manifesto. Mostly it's something I wanted to say in reply to someone else on Twitter, only I do not have the energy or free time to pursue a Twitter feud, and also 280 characters is insufficient.

But. By way of preamble, let me recommend you a Patreon creator to follow. My colleague Jason Sanford, a prolific writer of short speculative fiction, follows the SF publishing world closely and shares his findings in a regular newsletter, the Genre Grapevine. Those posts are free to the public, but they represent a huge outlay of effort and energy on his part, so if you find them useful, it'd be keen of you to send him a few bucks each month.

The Genre Grapevine covers a wide breadth of items, from the super-serious and important to the humorous yet arguably just as important. What I'm reacting to here falls into the latter category. In the most recent newsletter, there's a link to a tweet highlighting an egregious and highly facepalm-worthy specimen of Men Writing Woman badly. In case you have any trouble reading the text in the photo, or you'd just prefer not to click through to the original tweet, I quote the relevant excerpt here. (There will be a brief pause afterward, in which I will attempt to clean the slime off my keyboard. You're welcome.)

...cuffed, strangled with a bathrobe belt. A troubled young woman walking toward the abyss of destruction. She had had beautiful breasts as well.

Aomame mourned the deaths of these two friends deeply. It saddened her to think that these women were forever gone from the world. And she mourned their lovely breasts--breasts that had vanished without a trace.

This is an excerpt from 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. It is not a parody. Judging by some of the links tweeted in reply, it's also not the only book in which his female characters are totally, unrealistically, and laughably obsessed with breasts.

But I am not here to critique Murakami's novels. I have not read Murakami's novels; nor do I plan to. I am here, instead, to critique a very specific phenomenon that occurs in connection to negative critiques of novels. Let me pull a couple tweets out of the reply thread for you to give an example of what I mean...

@CodaReadsalot (10:21 AM May 27) This book is on my “to read” shelf and I am concerned now. I have not read any of his work because it struck me that he does not understand women at all. This is not helping.

@RobinCorrigan84 (12:52 PM May 27) How will you ever know, if you don't read any of his work?

My instinctive response, which I valiantly refrained from posting on Twitter, is this: I won't know. I will go on in ignorance. And somehow I will survive. Mostly by reading books I actually enjoy.

Here's the deal: There are a lot of books in this world. There are more books than you can read in your lifetime. Every book you choose to read represents a book you won't get to read. Ever.

So why should anyone other than you get to choose how you spend your finite reading time?

You get to make that decision, based on whatever the hell you want. You can decide, if you want, never to read another book by an author whose last name ends in a Y. Or even an F! (I'll be sad, but I will support your decision, because it is yours.) You can certainly decide not to read a book based on an excerpt such as the above. However out of context that excerpt might be, it exists! In that book! If you would rather take the time you would have spent reading that book, and instead read a book in which such excerpts do not exist--books by men who don't insert weirdly male-gaze-a-licious boob-fetishization into their female characters' inner narratives--you can do that! The world does not lack for such books! Nor indeed does it lack for books written by women! You could so easily spend an entire reading career never reading a single book with an "also she mourned their boobs" moment. It's easy!

It's your life. You only get so many hours on this Earth. Regarding those you spend reading for pleasure, you have the unilateral right to decide which books are worthy of those hours, and which are not. No other human being on this planet has the right to browbeat you into reading something you don't enjoy by mealy-mouthing some smarm about "what a shame to deprive yourself of such a work of genius for no better reason than petty identity politics" or other high-handed nonsense. If you need a counter argument, here's mine: What a shame to deprive yourself of books you might enjoy, because you spent that time instead reading works you didn't enjoy out of some sense of duty toward someone else's literary opinions?

I mean, this is why I'm not wasting time getting into fights with smarmy, mealy-mouthed, high-handed bullies on Twitter. Also not wasting my time reading Murakami's novels. And if by doing so I am depriving myself of an important experience, that's OK. I'll be over here having other important experiences, thanks.

(For instance, I still haven't read N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy. WHY?! Talk about depriving myself! And I'm still working my way simultaneously through Martha Well's Books of the Raksura AND ALSO her Murderbot Diaries. And Ann Leckie's Provenance is still sitting on the shelf, mocking me. TOO MANY BOOKS TOO LITTLE TIME AAAAAAAGH!)

Hey, look, it's tomorrow, and I'm dang well writing a blog post. And I'm going to start it off with more maddeningly vague news of a celebratory nature: Today's email included two rejections (one a form and one personal) AND ONE ACCEPTANCE. That's three acceptances in a single month and I'm starting to wonder when the other shoe will drop.

Maybe it already has dropped. I mean, just for example, if you're a Rush fan--and I'm a huge one--January got off to a rocky start, to say the least. (I don't feel I can blog about Neil Peart's passing yet. Maybe not ever. It's too big and sad, and others have said anything I could have said about it much more eloquently.) And if you're a sports fan, you just got some pretty terrible news this weekend about Kobe Bryant. The year 2020 is being totally tactless about how it hands out its good and bad news, just utterly failing to read the room. "Hey, so, don't be mad, but I killed off one of your lifelong heroes. Sorry, kid. Everyone dies eventually. But, hey! I'm making sure you get a ton of stuff published! So... we still cool?"

2020: The year of Really Good Stuff and Really Bad Stuff. Just like every other year in human history, I guess. I hope others affected by the Really Bad Stuff have some Good Stuff of their own to balance things out and make the Bad Stuff easier to bear. Because 2020 owes all of us a goddamn debt, right? Let's make it pay through the nose.

So, OK. This post was supposed to focus on the Good Stuff, so let's do that.

My two big fiction sales in 2019 were reprints, and I was glad of them, but they did leave me wondering if I'd ever write any publishable prose ever again. The flurry of poetry successes isn't to be sneezed at, true! But short stories are where my heart lives, and I began to doubt whether that love was requited. Then came the sales to Daily Science Fiction and Cast of Wonders, which made me do the Happy Dance Incessant! And yet those were pieces written in 2014 and 2018, respectively. What if I just... never wrote anything good again? What if I was doomed to sub and resub the same stable of stories, either placing them or trunking them ("trunking" is filing a story away as unpublishable and not submitting it anywhere anymore), maybe reprinting a few, but never successfully finishing new publishable works again?

(I believe that cognitive behavioral therapy calls this "catastrophizing." I'm kinda prone to it, if you hadn't noticed.)

So, hey, turns out that's not the case. The story that just now today got accepted for publication was written in its entirety during the first week of January. Hm. Well. "First week" is overstating things. I'd say 90% of the drafting and all of the editing was done on deadline day, because me and responsible adult time management are hardly ever in the same room and also not on speaking terms. I stayed home from roller derby practice to finish it, which meant I finished it Under Pain of Regret--I'd have desperately regretted skipping practice and not had a story submission to show for it. But I did finish it, I did submit it, I felt good about it, and I went to bed hardly regretting the lack of skating in the previous 24 hours at all.

And now that story's been accepted, which not only makes me feel that much less guilty about skipping practice that night, but also helps to reassure me that, there, Niki, you see, you can still write new stuff and get it published! Look at you, writing and selling new stuff like a real goddamn writer and everything!

I'm also pretty pleased because one of the hardest things to do is take a story that was specifically written to a particular market's theme and then try to sell it somewhere else. I'm still kind of annoyed with myself for failing to revise that old bringing-potato-salad-to-the-cult-meeting story in time to submit it to Galactic Stew, and that theme was just "spec fic in which food is important." This theme was much more specific. You just know that the editors at all the other markets are going to be like, "Ye Gods, not another story about Kangaroos from Alpha Centauri! Rejections must be going out for the Marsupials in Space anthology. *facepalm*" (Note: My story was not about Kangaroos from Alpha Centauri. If you like the idea of a Marsupials in Space anthology, feel free to Kickstart it yourself, because I don't think it actually exists. Yet.) For this reason the Clarkesworld guidelines list "stories written for someone else's theme anthology or issue" among their hard sells. So I'm rather relieved not to have to worry about a new home for my very specifically themed story at this time.

OK, so, well, that was a heck of a lot of blog post to write about something I'm not even sharing useful details about yet. Hi. This is my brain. I hope you've enjoyed your visit. MORE LATER. Good night!