Nezuko's Rat's Nest

I write fanfic. Epic, world-expanding, side-character developing, backstory-building, alternate-universe exploring fanfic. Something I hear with fair regularity from people both in and outside fandom is, “Why are so many of the characters in your stories gay or bisexual? Why are you making this canon character gay or bisexual? Why are all his friends gay or bisexual? That’s totally unrealistic.”

[TLDR: It is so realistic. Queer people form social groups; deal with it.]

There are a lot of potential answers here, among them the fact that I’m queer and I want to write about (and read about and look at artwork portraying) characters like myself. I could go on at length about how queer fic subverts the cultural bias against male intimacy, and is a direct result of a sexist system that casts almost all the interesting characters as male. I could discuss heteronormative bias in mainstream media, and the vast reservoir of het fandom that exists in parallel to queer fandom. I could point out that actually, I write quite a few straight characters into my stories, too.

But there’s another answer that’s just as, if not more, important: It’s totally realistic.

I’m queer in real life. And in real life, so are the majority of my friends. I have straight friends, for sure, but I have a lot of queer friends. Lesbian friends, gay friends, bi friends, trans* friends. You know why? Because people with similar interests and life experiences tend to form social groups. We hang out together because, in part, we have queerness in common. In a world where our queerness makes us the “them”, when we’re together, we’re the “us.” That makes a huge difference to our psychological and social well being. In many cases we know each other because we are queer. That’s how we met—at an LGBT event or social gathering place. And then we found out we shared other things in common, and we became friends. Or we met at work, and found each other because we shared queerness, and that led, again, to a discovery that we had other things in common, and we became friends.

When I write about a bunch of queer characters all hanging out together and being friends, dating, and having sex with one another, I’m not inventing a fantasy social structure that doesn’t exist in the real world. Queer people really do hang out, form social groups, date each other, have sex, and set their other queer friends up with dates with each other. The fantasy element is that it’s these characters, in this particular world. And that it’s not such a big deal. It’s not just tacitly assumed that everyone is straight until proven otherwise.

So why is there so much gay in my fandom? Because just like in real life, there’s a fair amount of gay everywhere, if you look in the right places.

Discipline for doing daily journaling, it turns out, is something I don't have. I have, instead, occasional bouts of intention and follow through, followed by long spans of distracted spending of my time on other things.

But you know, they say the thing about trying to cultivate good habits is not to beat yourself up for your failures, so instead of wringing my hands over the number of times I've started and stopped the habit of morning pages, I figure I'll just get on with things and try again, while motivation is with me.

They also say to make goals specific and achievable. So my goal with morning pages is to write them weekly. And if I manage to do more, yay, but if I achieve at least one a week, I'll have succeeded.

Also I intend to ignore the whole "morning" thing. And to let myself write whatever the heck I please. And to be aware that I have an audience, and not care. So there, discipline.

So on my mind today is health, Or lack thereof. I'm on the next to last day of a two week course of prednisone, and while it was a huge win in terms of being able to breathe, I am feeling so inflated it's not funny. My belly is protuberant like a beach ball and my cheeks are chipmunkish. And while part of me knows it's a side effect and that I've been ill, another part feels indolent and unattractive. Especially because DK, my much loved housemate, started a new fitness program the very same week I got so sick, so while he's off exercising and slimming down and looking fabulous, I'm blowing up like a puffer fish and wheezing and lying around being pathetic and envying him his athleticism.

Which adds to my unattractiveness. Petty jealousy is hardly the stuff dreamboats are made of.

Maybe if I can make myself go to the gym during the day while he's at work, I'll stop feeling so pathetic. There's that discipline thing again, too.

I wish I was one of those people for whom exercise is its own reward, but it's just not. I don't enjoy it. I want to enjoy it. I want to be one of those people who says they feel emotionally better when they exercise regularly. I want to be one of those people who can tell a difference in their health and energy when they exercise regularly. I'm not. From what I can tell, when I exercise regularly, I get a tiny boost of emotional well-being from being able to say "I am doing this thing I don't like because it is good for me, see I am a responsible adult," and that's it.

Maybe I need to get back into Fat Acceptance and adjust my thinking that way.

Years ago, I subscribed to a FA magazine that I don't think is even published anymore. It had photos and essays of fat people doing active things, being happy, wearing clothes they liked, and generally not bowing to a culture that says fat is pathological.

In the last ten years, fat has become the new boogie monster. It's medicalized and stigmatized like crazy these days. Newspapers decry the "obesity epidemic" but always with that edge that says it's the fatties' fault—they make bad choices, eat bad things, don't try hard enough, don't care enough, and while we're at it, they're bringing the rest of society down and costing us money. A thin lifetime smoker who gets lung cancer and emphysema gets more sympathy than an active but fat person who gets diabetes. Nevermind that more than two-thirds of North Americans are considered "overweight or obese". Seriously. Two-thirds. What that means is that "normal" weight isn't the norm. The norm is to be fat.

I look at my round belly and feel disgusting and hopeless. And I look at athletic people and think: I can never be that. I feel less than. A second-class citizen at best.

Aaaaand now I've depressed myself. Maybe stream-of-consciousness writing is not such a great idea after all.

I'll remind myself that I once thought it was unattainable to transition, and that turned out to be false. It took money and effort and time, but mostly what it took was a willingness to believe that I could be a man if I wanted to be. And now I am one.

So there's that.

Maybe when I stop being so wheezy. Maybe even if I don't stop being so wheezy. Maybe next week. Maybe I will try one more time to make exercise a habit.

I think collaborative writing has ruined me. Or maybe I'm not really a writer. I mean, I say I love to write, but I have no discipline, and I never finish my stories, and I have a really hard time making myself just sit down and write unless I'm writing with someone else.

I love writing collaboratively because you get feedback and you get unexpected plot twists, and you get to share in the creative experience, and two heads (or three or four) are so much better than one. It's just endlessly exciting. But writing by yourself... that's lonely. I can sustain it for a while, but then I lose interest, and if there's a collaborative project to work on, I drop the solo one.

Of course when there's no collaborative project to work on, that's also lonely.

And when your usual partners are busy collaborating with each other and you're not? Hella lonely.

If I wish I were writing and there's no one to write with at the moment, the logical thing to do, I tell myself, would be to go work on something solo. But somehow writing alone feels oddly painful.

Or I could go find something different, different friends, a different collaboration to work on, but I'm picky as hell about my collaborations. I have ridiculously high standards, and I know it, and screw it, I'm entitled to them. It's just not fun if I'm not also aiming for perfection.

No matter how many times I take the Myers-Briggs test, I come out ENFP. Just a little more extroverted than introverted, but it's enough to mean that I crave interaction more than solitude. I don't like that about myself — it's a weakness and I'm ashamed of it — but I can't seem to change it. I'm only a little less introverted than extroverted, though, so that means I also need a good bit of down time, alone time, recharge time, and that confuses me, since I'm so close to being a properly introverted creative genius, but I miss the mark.

I understand the rest of my attributes. That N? Intuitive. 100%. Head-in-the-clouds, dreamer, theorist, imaginer, connect-the-dots, creative leaps, big-picture kind of guy. F? Feeling. Although that's another one where I'm only slightly more Feeling than Thinking oriented. But that's a matter of being smart and having been raised to value logic over emotion. The truth is, when push comes to shove, I might analyze something to death, but in the end I'll still follow my heart. And the P? It stands for "perceiving" but it really ought to stand for Procrastinator. 100% again. I love to start projects but often don't finish them. I hate to be locked into a plan too early, and chafe at rules and standards. I have a fun ethic, not a work ethic.

There must be some trick to it. Some trick that lets real writers feel satisfied working by themselves. And that gets them to not just start projects but finish them, and do all the hard work it takes to get them published. Some trick I could use on myself.

Also some trick to getting over needing other people to cheerlead and collaborate.

If you know what it is, please tell me.

Yesterday morning I got up late feeling agitated, after not enough sleep. I had a huge list of things I wanted to accomplish, not enough hours in the day to do them, and a general sense of anxiety about it all. I had writing to do for my D&D group, writing to do for Fallen Leaves, writing to do on my gay romance so I can sell it and make some money. Also there were doctor's appointments to make, DMV issues to deal with, bank statements to reconcile... But I made myself take the morning routine one step at a time, begrudging every one of the necessary actions that were the prelude to getting to work on writing for the day. I snarled my way through brushing my teeth, resented my shower, ate breakfast with disdain. Then I finally sat down at the computer, all prepared to get to work, and the phone rang.

( It was JB calling to ask if she could ruin my plans for the day. )

And now it's a new day.

15:30 - JB texted me a few hours ago: She was at the hospital for her recheck. Her hand was still swollen but the wounds looked okay, so they were giving her some IV antibiotics and taking X-rays. I'll post an update when I know anything.

20:50 - JB is home. Her hand is not broken, but the infection continues to be a problem. At the hospital they called in a hand surgeon to debride the wounds, gave her additional and more serious painkillers, and packed the wounds with wet-to-dry dressings (look them up if you're not squeamish. I've had them, and they aren't as dreadful as they sound) and told her to come back on Monday for another recheck, as long as it doesn't get worse. She sounded drugged but okay. Her dad is flying up tomorrow morning to look after her, and she said she was fine for the night. I'm trusting her on this.

The whole point of morning pages, according to the book The Artist's Way, is that you get up in the morning and do a brain dump of stuff, and that frees the creative channels so you can then go on about your day writing fiction or painting pictures or crafting sculptures from tiny hummingbird eggs, or otherwise create in whatever way your particular talent takes you.

Except what I do instead is get up and write on Fallen Leaves first thing if I have a date to do so, because my morning is England's evening, and often the only free time for the day for my writing partners, even in my same time zone. So I get up and if I have a writing appointment, I write, and it flows beautifully and I don't really have any dross blocking my creative channels.

Why, then, am I doing Morning Pages? And given that I hardly ever write them in the morning, why do I call them that at all? Let's tackle that second one first: I call them Morning Pages because I think it's kind of funny. Besides, as many have been known to point out in justification of a midday glass of scotch, it's five o-clock somewhere. Also I have an lj tag called "morning page" and it lets me find them all easily. I suppose I could call them "Daily Pages", but "Daily Page" sounds like a bad riff on the Daily Show, and also implies I'll do them every day (which I won't), whereas Morning Page merely implies that morning was happening while the words were being written. I'm fairly certain morning is happening in Tokyo at the moment, so see, that part is true. It's also been suggested I could just call them "Pages" But that's kind of... I don't know. Soulless.

So I'm keeping the name "Morning Page". It's ironic, amusing, and has continuity.

Now the bigger question: why am I doing them? I never liked keeping a diary on paper, but part of that was the fact that I don't like writing things longhand, The keyboard solved that problem. Fundamentally, I am a writer, and I like to organize my thoughts in words.

The Morning Page thing got started for me when I took a class on The Artist's Way. In the class, we had to keep Morning Pages by hand, on paper, in a sketchbook, and for the duration of the class, what I found, while I gritted my teeth and hated my way through them, was that I seemed to end up with interesting things. Insights about myself. Deeper questions to ponder. Moments of humor. Fodder for my other creative efforts. In short, the things the exercise was supposed to engender did in fact happen.

Nothing like positive reinforcement to keep you doing something. And with a laptop and LJ, they are even relatively palatable to create.

So sometimes my Morning Pages are dross, and usually they're written when morning is taking place at a location I am not, and they are often rambling, stream-of-consciousness, undirected things. But they have a value to me. I used to say as a designer that if 50% of my ideas were good ones, I was batting a thousand. You have to be willing to try, and willing to fail, to do anything truly outstanding.

So that's why I'm writing them. Now here's a question for you: why are you reading them?

October September 24 is was National Punctuation Day, or so says Sylvia. Who am I to doubt? To (belatedly) honor the day, I suggest you make a vow to use apostrophes correctly in possessives and contractions, observing the tricky intersection of the two in the well-known it’s/its conundrum*, plural possessives**, and possessives of words and names that end in S***.

If you're feeling even more fervent, you could try using correctly typeset quotation marks and apostrophes, “like this” and ‘this’. You could even get fancier and use proper em dashes (—) and ellipses (…) though that takes looking up the codes or playing around with your keyboard until you find them. And really, it’s kind of a pain in the ass to put correct curly quotes in. Unless I’m typesetting something for print, I usually don’t bother.

Now if only I could convince sign makers that quotation marks do not give emphasis so much as lend irony. There’s a service station near me that has a sign: We “now” offer smog checks! Which of course begs the question, what exactly are they being ironic about? An ironic now is an interesting thing: do they really mean perhaps in the indefinite past or future? Never?

It probably says something worrisome about me that this bugs me as much as it does.

Happy Punctuation Day! Only a month late…

*It’s/its conundrum: it is or it has = it’s; belonging to it = its.
You can remember this rule more easily, perhaps, if you consider that other pronoun-based possessives such as his, hers, theirs, and ours also do not take an apostrophe.

**Singular vs. plural possessives: a single cow’s calf; multiple cows’ calves

***Possessives from names that end in S: Hades is the Greek god of the dead. Hades’s domain is the underworld. (It is also considered correct to drop the final S, and say Hades’ domain, but I have a preference for using the duplicated S.)