the wicked king of parody

2019 In Review

Fri, 03 Jan 2020 00:56:57 GMT

Well it sure has been a year.

And it really has been dominated by one thing: I found out in February that the Magnus Archives fandom had grown into an actual fandom, and then it ate my life, in the best possible way. I got back on tumblr and got embroiled in fandom drama; I met a ton of awesome people; I got sick of tumblr fandom and started a Discord server (well, piggybacked on and slightly hijacked April's Discord server). Also -

I almost doubled my AO3 wordcount and wrote over 100,000 words since March. Yep, that's all TMA fic. Oh, and I started writing smut! Twenty years in fandom and all it took was a canon ace character to get me writing smut, whaddayaknow.

(Normally I would list my fics here but goddamn. Here's my AO3 if you're interested.)

I've started transitioning my screen name; I've been jenavira since I was thirteen years old but it's started to give me a touch of dysphoria so I'm slowly changing accounts and usernames over to j_quadrifrons. I'm not sure if I can or will bother changing my Dreamwidth account but that's a possibility.

I didn't have any major health crises this year, but half my immediate family did, so that was...fun. (That was not fun. Do Not Recommend.)

I kind of tried to buy a condo this year and then gave up; the market around here is a nightmare. I did try to get a job with a better schedule closer to the city, and I got close but no dice. I'm low-key job hunting -- not that I don't like my job, but that I never meant to spend this long in the suburbs and it's starting to grate. I did move apartments because I finally got fed up with the management at the old place and now I have a balcony and central air, so at least I'll be comfortable for as long as I am still stuck in the suburbs.

My reading really fell off this year; I didn't read more than forty books this year, which okay still sounds like a lot but is a big drop-off from around a hundred and fifty last year. I spent the time writing, though, so I can't really complain. (Well. And getting addicted to phone escape games, but that was mostly during my move when I was too stressed and exhausted to think.)

I also started ADHD meds and I'm...about 75% convinced that the depression and anxiety are consequences of that? The anxiety for sure; the parts that messed me up the most track very well with rejection sensitive dysphoria and the rest of it is probably overstimulation. Also apparently ADHD meds killed my tendency to binge-eat? Weird but I'll take it.

I joined the WisCon concom for next year because I finally felt guilty about not doing enough volunteering and I'm always too stressed at the con itself to go through the work of figuring out how that happens. We're starting to kick into gear for that now; I've got proposals to review in the next week. It really is a stupid amount of work, fan cons are an amazing thing.

I cut my hair off! I've had waist-length hair for at least ten years and it's been twice that since I got it professionally cut, and this summer I finally got it all chopped off. "Make it queer," I told the hairdresser, and he did a great job. (It took me a while to find a hairdresser in the suburbs who would keep it up but I think I've found the right people.) And I got my first tattoo, an eye on my left shoulder; I wanted something that could be done in a walk-in because I knew if I kept putting it off I'd never do it. Now I have to figure out what I want next...

And I...think that's it? As if that's not enough. Whew.

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TMA Rarepair Exchange Letter

Sat, 28 Dec 2019 18:24:00 GMT

Bear with me, fellow writer, it's been A Minute since I've written one of these. But I'm excited to be here and I'll be thrilled with just about anything you write for any of my requests! I've tried to describe what it is I like about the dynamic at hand and be specific about my DNWs per pairing. Prompts are meant to be guidelines and springboards; if you have another idea you're passionate about, go nuts.

I'm j_quadrifrons on AO3 and Twitter and backofthebookshelf on Tumblr, if you want to look me up.

General likes:
dysfunctional relationships
failures of communication
unresolved tension (particularly tension that persists while other tension is resolved - they have sex but they still can't talk about feelings, etc.)
ambiguity about how much the powers they serve are influencing their choices/attitudes/personalities (voyeurism with Jon and Elias, manipulation with Annabelle, self-destructive impulses with Agnes, etc.)
appearances from other characters not involved in the ship
any rating, from soft handholding to PWP

Porn likes:
dubcon & noncon
voyeurism
humiliation
porn with feelings, especially complicated ones
bondage
watersports
...just go nuts with kinks, honestly ;)

Universal DNWs:
character bashing, of characters on or off screen
noncanonical character death
darkfic without any hope
allosexual Jon (any variety of ace, from sex-repulsed to demi to sex-interested is great!)
lengthy conversations about gender/sexuality
Corruption

Request 1: Gerard Keay/Jonathan Sims
This is my soft-and-fluffy request; I absolutely adore Jon's lil crush on Gerard Keay ("That would be our Gerard" fills my heart with joy) and how well they get along in the brief time they have together. This is gonna have to be AU, obviously; I'm up for anything. Jon didn't actually burn the page and he and Gerry fight about it but eventually they have time to talk? Gerry didn't actually die and Jon finds him in America? Or maybe they meet while Jon's still at uni and Gerry is working with Gertrude and they stay up all night sharing cigarettes and talking and maybe making out a little.

DNW noncon/dubcon for this one specifically; I like angst but I'd prefer it to be balanced with at least a little fluff.

Request 2: Martin Blackwood/Elias Bouchard
I love the slow somersault of their power dynamic: from Elias as the distant boss to an immediate threat to the person Martin is determined to hurt by any means necessary to the uncomfortable way Martin goes to Elias for answers in season four even though he still doesn't trust him. I love Martin as the aggressor here, and Elias being very into Martin's newfound manipulative streak. (Hatesex is delicious.) Also delicious: Elias having taken advantage of Martin in the past, and Martin turning the tables on him now.

My other favorite dynamic with these two: they're both pining after Jon, and maybe that's the only thing they have in common, but it's enough.

Request 3: Martin Blackwood/Elias Bouchard/Jonathan Sims
I love this triad as a goddamn emotional trainwreck, whatever the dynamics between them. Some of my favorites: Elias is hopelessly in love with Jon who settled for Elias's affections for a while but is now falling in love with Martin; Martin and Elias have an established relationship before Jon is hired and Elias encourages Martin to seduce him; Elias dubcons/noncons both of them individually before letting them know what's been happening to each other; Jon is seeing both Elias and Martin separately and they get very competitive over him (sexily or just trying to outdo each other for Best Boyfriend Experience). I'm particularly weak for Elias in denial of his own emotions (but he definitely has them), canon-typical Martin and Jon failing to communiciate, and conflicts over incompatible libidos.

Request 4: Helen/Jonathan Sims; Michael/Jonathan Sims
I missed out on the Jon/Michael trend in fandom but I love it: Michael's complicated relationship with personhood and the Archivist, Jon's fascination with this person-not-person who terrifies him. And Jon and Helen is one of my all-time favorite relationships on the show: he's willing to throw hands with an eldritch abomination over a woman he's met once for fifteen minutes, and then when she shows up again as the Distortion his reaction is vicious. I'd love anything exploring the Jon and Distortion relationship, but I'm particularly intrigued by Jon/Helen with a background of some Jon/Michael from the first season; explorations of personhood and physicality (Helen's comment about bodies not really being her concern any more is delightful, and this seems like a great place to throw in a trans headcanon or two); sex with nonstandard sensory experiences; Helen taunting Jon about his relationship with humanity

Request 5: Elias Bouchard/Annabelle Cain; Jonathan Sims/Annabelle Cain
Elias sounds genuinely afraid of the Web and I'm very into that; I'd love to see anything with Annabelle manipulating him, particularly if it brushes up against his ritual plans. Jon is absolutely terrified of the Web and Annabelle clearly enjoys that, but I can't believe at this point that Jon isn't part of whatever the Web has planned, so I'd love to see her manipulating or controlling him into helping her out with something, whether it's sabotaging another entity's activities or just playing house. And if Annabelle is playing Elias and Jon both at the same time? Even better.

(If you go with smut for this one, I have a deep fondness for suspension bondage, which is just tailor-made for the Web.) (Nonsexual bondage is also A++)

Request 6: Agnes Montague/Gertrude Robinson
They have a soul bond but they've never met! They never spoke or wrote or communicated with one another, but that bond had to influence them somehow, and I'm particularly intrigued by any exploration of what kind of effect that bond had on either one of them. Did Agnes know the other Lightless Flame cultists were protecting Gertrude, and how did she feel about it? Did Gertrude know when Agnes started dating Jack Barnabas? Did they want to meet, or did they try to avoid it?

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five things make a post

Mon, 11 Nov 2019 15:33:54 GMT

1) I was sick all weekend and last night I fell asleep on the couch and then dragged myself to bed, which means I lost my glasses for ten minutes this morning thanks to new apartment + sick brain (+ no glasses to look with)

2) and I didn't know it was snowing until I'd left the apartment, whoops

3) and I forgot when I moved into this apartment that the road it's on is the one that doesn't get plowed until after rush hour

4) so I did not have time to stop and buy more cold medicine before work

5) I did make myself a raspberry mocha, though, so that's nice

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MAG145: Infectious Doubts (a deep dive)

Fri, 19 Jul 2019 19:13:24 GMT

Posting this on Dreamwidth because a) it's more than 2,000 words long and b) I'm trying to spend less time on tumblr at work. Let's see if my cross-poster still works!

Timeline notes: the date on this is 2009 and Gertrude's been harassing the Lightless Flame for almost forty years - so since around 1970 or thereabouts. She might well have met Raymond Fielding. She was twenty-five at the time so born around 1945, which tracks with her comments in Nemesis. Hey, continuity!

And now:
Gertrude on the connection: "I somehow found just the right books, made just the right connections, and even got what I thought was a bit of blind good luck when I found a tin box in the ashes of Hilltop Road, containing some perfectly preserved cuttings of her hair. Of course, what I thought was a banishment ritual turned out not to be. The circle I constructed was more of a - an invitation. It let the Mother of Puppets bind me to Agnes, interweave our existence at some...metaphysical level, as it had with Fielding and the house."

( a whole lot of things going on here, mostly spidery )

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Mon, 29 Apr 2019 16:12:46 GMT

Just as I was seriously getting back into trying to post to Dreamwidth, I fall headfirst back into The Magnus Archives, where the bulk of the fandom is happening on tumblr and twitter and I don't do twitter fandom when the creators are also on twitter, so it's been All Tumblr All The Time around here.

This fucking show, y'all. Podcasts are so good to us, they give us the good queer content we all deserve, and if it's a clusterfuck of a group project, at least it's one where the group all likes each other and communicates and eggs each other on instead of undercutting each other at every possible turn. (Me? Bitter about my major media property fandoms? Never.) Anyway, TMA is not only the most genuinely terrifying horror anthology I've ever experienced, it's also in the sweet spot for wild theorizing about the overarching plot (which, not quite halfway through season four of a projected five total seasons, is still both surprising and deeply satisfying), it's full of casual diversity, queer characters, and absolutely 0% sexually exploitative horror. They're also very good at warning for sensitive stuff, but there's...not a lot of it? If you just wanna be scared by spiders and wildfires and the endless depths of the sea and the existential concept of loneliness, this show has got you.

I wrote a whole thing at clevermanka's about how cool this fandom is about the main character's asexuality, and of course immediately after that I walked headfirst into the Disk Horse which we can never escape (to be fair it's less intentional Discourse than an allo person being kind of clueless, but dammit, let us have this, how often do we get an actually canonically asexual character who's the main focus of the story and has a love interest and literally nothing about his asexuality is relevant to the plot?? in any way??? Let Us Have This.) But there continues to be an outpouring of amazing ace fic and meta that is quite honestly healing my soul.

(I can't decide if I want this to be my good good soft ace happy place fandom or my all-angst-all-the-time nightmare tragedy fandom, and fortunately I don't have to choose! It is both!)

So anyway I'll probably do some roundup posts over here soon because I don't trust tumblr to remain a stable archive, which sucks when that's where so much is happening, and also the tagging of this fandom's fic is...massively inconsistent. It needs rec posts.

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This Fucking Week

Sun, 24 Mar 2019 17:37:08 GMT

On Monday (my usual day off) I got a text from my boss at 10am, asking me to call her. Like most people would, I assumed the sky was falling and called back immediately, only to have her tell me that she'd given her notice and her last day will be April 12.

I've been in this job for seven and a half years, and my boss is a big reason why. We get along really well, we think along the same lines, we have the same priorities. And she's the one who pushed the board to make my job full time instead of part time, who got me a big raise at least once. I was planning on buying a condo this summer, but now I don't know -- if the new boss is no good, there's no reason for me to stay at this job, and I only live here because of the job.

Meanwhile I'm juggling the effects of starting stimulants. Six weeks ago I finally saw a new psychiatrist and raised the possibility of ADHD, and he agrees that my self-diagnosis sounded valid and anyway stimulants are a viable supplemental treatment for persistent depression, so why not give it a try? Overall it's been a raging success, except for the part where if I don't eat breakfast I go all weird and shaky, and it seems to be punching up my anxiety symptoms as well. Oh, and it costs $40 a month (plus the copays for the prescriptions, since it's a controlled substance and they can't phone in renewals) even with every discount and coupon I can get. I see him tomorrow to discuss options.

Friday my grandboss stopped by my desk to ask me what I wanted in a new supervisor, and also to tell me that I'd be eligible for the position if I wanted to go for it. I think I'm going to. I'm a little scared of the personnel management side of things but shit, I've been saying for years that my plan was to take over my boss's job when she left. (I didn't think it'd be this soon, but.)

And then last night on my way home I rear-ended someone when they didn't move through the green light as fast as I expected them to. No one was hurt, she didn't want them to issue me a citation so they didn't, and I have accident forgiveness on my insurance, so really it's not nearly as painful as it could have been, but ugh. At least I'm on medication that helps me pay attention to details? Because I got the claim submitted this morning and an appointment for repairs tomorrow, if nothing else.

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Thu, 14 Feb 2019 18:04:55 GMT

You know, I was terrified for years of asking a psychiatrist if I had ADHD, because I've heard so many horror stories about people being labeled drug-seeking. But my new psych agreed with me that either I have ADHD or I have depression mimicking ADHD symptoms, and either way, a stimulant might be a good idea. Yes, filling the prescription is inconvenient; yes, it's expensive as hell. But I'm only on day three and I feel so much better - not better focused and only mildly less depressed, but the executive dysfunction that left me sitting on the couch playing phone games all evening instead of making dinner or doing anything else I'd planned to do? That's gone. And this is only on the pre-starting 20mg dose to make sure it doesn't give me the crawling horrors or anything. This is a Good Sign.

So, thanks to that, in the past three days I've: gotten two mortgage pre-approvals, cleaned out my pantry and spice cabinet, spun approximately 10 grams of fiber, been to the doctor about my tendinitis (hooray, another joint that will never work properly ever again), sent several emails I've been putting off for weeks (including one that my boss was gonna get on my case about soon), argued with my boss about how much racism we'll tolerate in the public library, rooted my old tablet and a truly ancient phone, and started reading a book I've had sitting around as "I will read this book next" for...a year now. So yeah, not more focused, but actually doing things at last. Which means that, someday, I might actually start blogging again about something other than my mental health.

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2018 Books in Review

Wed, 09 Jan 2019 20:24:11 GMT

I'm taking forever to get my 2018 (eta: 2018, good god, I have no idea what year it is) wrapped up, so here's my first stab at it. I stopped obsessively tracking my book reading a couple of years ago, but I still have my LibraryThing account and I keep it relatively up to date, so if I'm curious I can see what I've been up to.

And what I've been up to is: I read 164 books last year (counting abandoned, which I might as well): 83 from the library or otherwise borrowed, 60 from my own collection. Somewhere around 23 of those were books I acquired in 2018. (nb, I’ve started collecting review copies from Netgalley and Edelweiss again, which means I acquire way, way more books than I buy. Also, a bunch of those were craft books.) I acquired a total of 153 books in 2018, so I am, unsurprisingly, underwater. Only of those 60 books of my own collection, twenty were print books, and the other forty were ebooks, so I’m not actually making much of a dent in the TBR bookshelf that is currently taking over my entire bedroom. (I’d take a photo but I’m embarrassed.)

The oldest book of my own collection I read last year was an ebook issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies that dates to the SadPuppies Hugo debacle in 2012. The oldest print book I read from my own collection was The Lioness and Her Knight, which I got from the library booksale in 2016.

Top books of 2018:

The Tensorate series by JY Yang, starting with Black Tides of Heaven, a kickass gender-bending dystopian fantasy series you should be reading right now if you aren't already (with ownvoices nonbinary characters)
No Man of Woman Born by Ana Mardoll, a collection of fantasy stories in which prophecy and gender interact in interesting ways
My Own Devices, Dessa's essay collection
Melmoth by Sarah Perry, a modern take with a female Melmoth; this book was absolutely made for me in every way and I adored it
A Blade So Black by L.L. McKinney, the only Alice in Wonderland retelling I've ever liked (that sounds like damning with faint praise but this book was so fun you guys)
The Wicked + The Divine, I know I'm late to the party on this one but oh my god
The Barrow Will Send What It May, the second book in Margaret Killjoy's novella series about anarchist demon hunters, and I didn't think anything could be better than the first book but this was
Modern Tarot by Michelle Tea, a memoir-ish practical guide to using the Tarot both for readings and for magic and personal development, one of the best and most useful Tarot books I've ever read
Anathema! Medieval Scribes and the History of Book Curses by Marc Drogin, a man who spent many years collecting book curses and their contexts and then compiled them into this wonderful small book for us
Romancing the Inventor by Gail Carriger, a delightful steampunk lesbian mad scientist slow burn novella
Her Body and Other Stories by Carmen Maria Machado, which really ought to be marketed as horror stories, "The Resident" in particular was like being repeatedly kicked in the teeth in the best way

In aid of clearing out my TBR a little more efficiently, this year I’ve sorted it by date instead of by author, and I’m going to try working from oldest to newest. I’ve got four books I’ve been lugging around with me since before I went to college (so, seventeen years, oh my god). I’m gonna start with The Neverending Story - I only ever read the first half of it, up to where the movie goes, and never actually finished the damn thing. (I can’t believe I remember that.) But first, I’m gonna finish the books I’m currently reading, mostly from my own collection, too:

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky, the only library book I currently have going
Slow River by Nicola Griffith, a library booksale purchase from 2016
The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings by Philip and Carol Zaleski, a gift from 2015
Magick Without Tears by Aleister Crowley, yes I know he’s the worst but he has some good practical advice; I made a handbound edition of this in 2005 from an ebook I’d had forever so who knows how long this has been around
Chrysanthe by Yves Meynard, a review copy from by book blog days in 2012. (Sorry, Tor Books.) I’ve been reading this one since March of 2016 and I want to finish it before it passes three years in progress. It’s good! It just doesn’t have a lot of forward momentum.

Oh, and I’ve got a review copy of Marlon James’s new African epic fantasy novel, Black Leopard, Red Wolf, that I want to read before it actually comes out in early February. (I clearly won’t be able to stick exclusively to oldest-to-newest TBR books, but I’m gonna do my best.)

Current TBR total: 484, of which about half are ebooks. My goal is to get it under 450 before I buy any more books (or download any more review copies I don’t intend on reading immediately), and hopefully keep it below that for the foreseeable future. Wish me luck.

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best of tumblr

Wed, 05 Dec 2018 02:29:00 GMT

So hey, I've been meaning to make this post for a while, so now that tumblr's got approximately two weeks to live, how about a best-of-my-tumblr-posts collection?

My most overwhelmingly successful post, Some Things Your Local Librarians Would Like You to Know. If you've ever seen this posted to a professional library group, please don't let me know. I live in terror of the day my director finds it and posts it in the break room or something.

My last B5LoveMonth contribution, The Long, Twilight Struggle of our times.

My most RelatableTM post, apparently, the greatest moment of joy in a writer's life

That time I read The Annotated Hobbit and Diane Duane reblogged me

That time I read The Quest of Erebor and we were all in Hobbit fandom at the time so everyone loved it

Bard was the only good character in the Hobbit movies part one, part two

My knee-jerk reaction on 11/7/2016

My favorite Babylon 5 quote + Matt Murdock's sad ass

fandom doesn't like it but it's true

My Hotch Feelings, Let Me Photoset Them

(I haven't posted a ton of original content on Tumblr Dot Com, to be honest, and I probably won't be sad to see it go, so long as we all find somewhere else to yell about feelings and invent new ways of keysmashing.)

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Wed, 08 Aug 2018 00:53:05 GMT

It never fails, I get a message about lease renewals and my heart rate goes up and my mood just drops. Why?? There's no particular reason for it. It's just that dealing with leases and rent and moving and everything makes me deeply, profoundly unhappy.

There's a non-zero chance I'll be in the middle of buying a condo at this time next year, and can you even imagine what I'll be like then?

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WisCon42

Fri, 01 Jun 2018 21:23:01 GMT

This was my seventh WisCon, believe it or not (and honestly, I can’t - I’m still astounded that I’ve done anything for seven years running). And while a lot of times I leave WisCon feeling like I’ve been challenged, stretched and pushed in new directions, this year it was a much more comforting experience. Most of that is down to me spending most of the weekend going to nonbinary-featured events - a workshop on using neopronouns in fiction; a panel on being nonbinary in professional spaces; a reading of trans and nonbinary writers’ work. It was just so good to hear people talk, over and over, about gender struggles and rewards, about presentation versus identity versus being out. To watch a whole panel full of nonbinary people who all presented in very different ways and to be able to see them all as nonbinary. WisCon was where I first learned that nonbinary gender was an option for me (and I will never forget sitting in the back of the freezing-cold Assembly room, wrapped up in my sweatshirt and shaking not from the cold but from the sudden range of options that had suddenly opened up in front of me) but this is the first time I really let myself live in that identity for the whole con, to identify with other nonbinary people and feel comfortable putting myself in that category, and it was - well, it was fantastic.

I wanted to make it to the trans safer space, but I wasn’t brave enough for that; I wanted to go to the trans dinner on Sunday, but by then I was exhausted and it was 97 degrees outside and I knew I didn’t have the energy for strangers. But I did go to a ton of readings this year, which I always say I’m going to do more of, and successfully attended a party for the second year in a row and talked to strangers. I was recognized as belonging to the con by two conrunners, which was gratifying, and at least said hi to several people I’ve met there before. (I have this perpetual belief that I don’t really exist to other people when I’m not actually there, so I’m always pleasantly surprised when people remember who I am.) Which means, of course, that I went to proportionately fewer panels - and for whatever reason, the panels I did go to were light on book recommendations this year. (I mean, that’s what happens when you go to panels specifically about TV shows and video games and activism, I guess.) So I’ll update my LibraryThing with the book recs I did get, but there aren’t a ton; most of it will be re-tagging books I already have on record.

Panel highlights: “Odin Would Punch You In the Face,” about the Nazi appropriation of Norse mythology and how tremendously wrong they get it. I was pleasantly surprised to find that two of the panelists were practicing Heathens and got a few ideas for hunting down local groups, but mostly this was a joyous discussion of genderfluidity and why talking to Nazis is a waste of time. This was also where I was introduced to Alex Iantaffi, whose book I had already bought without knowing it. They host a podcast called Gender Stories which I am super excited to get caught up on.

Also, a Monday morning panel on the new formats in speculative fiction, which was really outrageously good for a Monday morning panel, in which Sunny Moraine raved about 17776 and I got so many recommendations for things that cannot possibly go in Goodreads that I’m going to post them here, so if you like weird fiction formats just start clicking:

Tracery, a tool for generating text and making twitter bots

17776, which cannot be described, only experienced

Her Story, an entirely non-linear game of piecing together narrative

Emily Is Away, a game that takes place in an AOL chat window

Kentucky Route Zero, a game that takes place on a dream highway

The Interface Series, aka 9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9, a story told in Reddit comments

I Love Bees, the classic ARG

Marble Hornets, a YouTube Slenderman series (not the movie, the movie is shit)

real-life fps on Chatroulette, honestly one of the most brilliant uses of technology ever

Attract Mode, a Twine not-game

The Manuel Thread, a Twitter fiction

Twitch Plays Pokemon, an experiment in collaborative gameplay

Porpentine, a Twine creator whose works were recommended as a whole

And of course, the classic, the original, Homestar Runner

There were many other things, of course - good food, good panels, outstanding guest of honor speeches - but those are the things I keep coming back to. WisCon has always been a liminal space - cons always are - but it’s starting to feel very much like home now.

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Re-Learning How to Write: Feelings

Sat, 07 Apr 2018 14:56:42 GMT

So, um, I’ve figured out one of the biggest blocks I’ve had, and it’s so obvious it’s a little embarrassing to admit, but also it’s a little terrifying to acknowledge that this was completely invisible to me for so long.

Writing felt like going through the motions because I couldn’t feel anything.

I’d say focus on making it resonate with you, first; are you actually feeling what you’re writing, or is it a more mechanical & box-ticky process of moving your characters through plot? That said, finding trusted beta readers is also great! #DripAMA https://t.co/ASqaztc9OT
— Amal El-Mohtar (@tithenai) April 4, 2018

I know intellectually that emotional numbing is a side effect both of depression and of antidepressants, but it’s truly amazing how long you can go around without actually having emotions other than a vague despair and never really notice. Out of sight, out of mind, I guess (or rather, out of mind, out of the realm of possibility). It can be overwhelming when it changes -- two weeks ago I was complaining to my therapist that I was having to make room for all these feelings I was having all the sudden, and it was screwing up my schedule -- which is also not terribly conducive to getting work done, but at least I can see the possibility of work from here.

But that opens up another avenue for exploring ways to work on my writing process: an emotional connection is necessary. And totally aside from the medical problems I have with emotions, I’m not always good at that. I’m pretty good at plot, and I can write character sheets all day long, but all too often I dive into the details of a story without taking the time to become emotionally connected to my characters. Which is probably why most of my novels start to bore me to death about halfway through -- I just don’t care.

This is, I suspect, why I find fanfiction easier to write and why it’s the only thing I’ve ever written in a white-hot flash of inspiration. The emotional connection already exists, I’m just expanding on it. So I made the right call for NaNo last year when I decided to write fic instead of original fiction. And that also probably explains why my 2013 NaNo novel, the one that was such a total disaster of plot that it’s entirely unsalvageable, still won’t let me go -- I based my main character on Ray Vecchio, and I love her so much that I’m gonna write a totally different novel about her.

Creating characters from scratch, then, doesn’t seem to work for me. Neither does creating characters to serve a plot purpose. What I need is to build characters out of people or characters I already care about, plop them into settings I’m interested in, and then spend enough time with them that the story grows out of there. This is...nothing at all like any “how to write a novel” advice I’ve ever seen, so I’m not entirely sure how to go about this, but it feels like a promising direction to explore. And so for the first time in this series, I’m assigning myself homework: to spend some time working on a couple of character ideas. I’ll report back next week how it went.

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Re-Learning How to Write: Resources

Sat, 03 Mar 2018 18:21:11 GMT

I’m working on day two of a migraine headache, so rather than a post, here’s some relevant links:

Isabel Yap on starting to write again after a hiatus:
https://twitter.com/visyap/status/967986825271758849

Chuck Wendig on how the writing gets done:
http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2018/02/27/three-truths-about-writing-and-how-the-writing-gets-done/

Austin Kleon on tools:
https://austinkleon.com/2018/02/24/the-tools-matter-and-the-tools-dont-matter/

Story Hospital on the importance of motivation in maintaining focus:
https://storyhospital.com/2018/02/27/84-staying-focused-long-enough-to-write-a-novel/

(and just discovered) John Warner on bad writing advice and how everything is process:
https://twitter.com/biblioracle/status/970013416755810304

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Re-Learning How to Write: Process

Sat, 24 Feb 2018 20:06:36 GMT

This is likely to be a little more scattershot than the earlier posts, because it turns out that process is the thing I’m having the most difficulty with. I’ve never paid serious attention to my process; I wrote when I wanted to, and sometimes I tried to do something like NaNoWriMo or other structured writing challenges, but I haven’t paid much attention to what works and what doesn’t.

I established last week that NaNo doesn’t work, largely because of the time frames involved: a month is not enough time for me to produce an interesting draft, and a year is not enough time for me to both edit the previous draft and generate enough new ideas to create another interesting draft. I am never going to be a book-a-year writer. (This is...a little painful to admit, because one of my lifelong dreams has been to support myself with writing, and it looks like, unless I pull a Gillian Flynn or turn to journalism, that’s never going to be plausible.)

It seems that the key piece that I’ve been missing out on in the past few years, though, isn’t time or focus, as most writing advice tends to assume, but idea generation. Good ideas never come singly; they’re the combination of many ideas being smooshed together until something good and interesting emerges. This requires both a certain amount of intellectual curiosity - finding enough new things to put together into new ideas - and also the spare mental cycles to stick those ideas next to each other, like putting together a puzzle, until something good comes out of it. I never have a problem finding new things; my intellectual curiosity is why I became a librarian. (Relevant) If I had to guess, I’d say that depression destroys the spare cycles (when I’m depressed I do everything I can to use up all my mental capacity at all times so that the depression can’t get a toehold) but the Zoloft destroyed my ability to find interesting connections between things. This is good news, actually - it implies that those two years on Zoloft weren’t a total waste, because I was still reading and listening to and thinking about new things, and all I have to do is go back over my book reviews and journal entries from that time to scrape up some new puzzle pieces to put together.

Putting together those puzzle pieces takes time, but it also takes practice, and I think that this is what a daily practice would look like for me: not trying to hit a specific word count every day, but trying to spend time every day thinking about writing. Whether that’s shuffling through old notes, or putting pieces together to see if they fit, or working on outlines for stories I’m thinking about writing, I need to find a way to make time for that every day. If my past output is any indication, just doing that will eventually result in finished work, when everything comes together and I need to get it down in words.

Outlining is fraught for me. If I outline too thoroughly, I lose the impulse to write the thing - I know what happens, why bother? But if I don’t outline enough, I wind up in the weeds with either ridiculously predictable plot developments or tangents that go nowhere. I’m working on not being too upset about the tangents; some of them have turned out to be useful and interesting after all. The predictability is harder to fix. But I think it might actually be more productive to tackle the “I know what happens, why bother writing it down” problem. I’m a plot-based writer, but a character-based reader. I have a hard time fleshing out characters enough that they come to life, and I think that’s why I feel like a plot outline is sufficient, because the characters aren’t real yet. I’ve wanted to tackle this problem in the past but I’ve always been doing it on a deadline, which means it usually doesn’t ever actually happen. I suspect that if I had characters who felt real and a plot outline that was good, I’d still want to write the actual story. So that’s another skill to practice: character-creation.

I don’t remember when I first heard of the Snowflake Method but I’m guessing it’s after I started working on NaNo, because my memory of it is that I’ve never had time to do it properly. The idea is that you start by making a really broad outline and continue applying the same outlining steps in more and more detail until you have an outline that’s turned organically into a draft. I really think this has the potential to work for me, if I quit with the deadline-setting and give it time to work.

Finally, it’s time to jettison every single piece of advice I’ve ever heard, read, or received about setting goals and sticking to deadlines. It does not work for me. If I miss a self-set deadline, I’ll either try to move forward without giving the thing I was supposed to do the time it needs (a strategy that works shockingly well with work deadlines), or I’ll just give up entirely, because my schedule has been destroyed so why bother? The only goal I should focus on is doing something every day, not on completing a specific step by a specific time or date. It’s possible that I’ll wind up in the mess of “someday I’ll finish this novel I’ve been writing for fifteen years” that so many people seem to fall into, but, to be honest, I’d rather have that problem than the one I have now, where I spend most of my time feeling guilty for not writing and one month a year throwing myself at something I am not prepared to do.

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Re-Learning How to Write, Stage Two: Speed

Sat, 17 Feb 2018 17:12:01 GMT

(Stage Two was gonna be process, but it turns out I have some feels about speed-writing.)

I've done NaNoWriMo on and off since I was in college. I won it for the first time in 2012 - "winning" NaNoWriMo being "writing 50,000 words in the month of November and ideally having a story with a beginning, middle, and end." I won it again for the next two years, got underwater pretty badly in 2015, started strong in 2016 and dropped out on November 10, and managed about 7,000 words last year. I think I'm done with NaNo, at least as an annual event. There are things I like a lot about it - the camaraderie, the mad rush feeling of being totally absorbed in a project along with a lot of other people doing the same thing, the many many challenges and statistics that provide anyone with the slightest bit of competitiveness a mark to push against. But I don't think it works well with my process.

Of my three completed NaNo novels, one turns out to be based on a pretty racist core idea and needs to be scrapped, one was a holy disaster with no actual plot but a setting and a main character I still want to do something with, and one is about 1/3 of an interesting sci-fi novel with none of the really interesting ideas fleshed out. That's not bad, really -- most NaNo novels are garbage, after all, they're written in 30 days at a breakneck pace. What's bad is that reflects most of my writing output for six years, because one of the "rules" of NaNo is that you start with a new project every year, and my brain just doesn't go that fast. Even if I spent a whole year revising last year's novel, I still wouldn't be done with it, and then I haven't put any effort into planning the next novel.

I mentioned in my last post that I learned to write fiction by being a fiction sponge, which means my brain is full of stories but also my memory isn't very good, so really what my brain is full of is the average of all the stories I've ever read, and have you ever read a novel that's an average of all the novels you've ever read? It's not very good, is it? But if I'm writing at speed, the only goal to get in today's word count, that's what I'll come out with: a story that always chooses the most obvious path forward, the most bland and predictable character developments, the most stereotypical, cisheteronormative, white and basic plots and personalities. All of which is the very opposite of what I want to do: I want to write stories featuring people like me (and people not like me) who aren't written about very often! But I need to work at a pace where I can catch myself doing the obvious thing so I can do the interesting thing instead.

For example, for last NaNo I spent two days outlining a romance with an asexual main character where the core conflict turned out to be that he was asexual and his partner wasn't sure he was okay with that. Which, um, is not the affirming, joyful story I wanted to write. But if I had spent those two days making wordcount instead of outlining, I wouldn't have noticed until the whole story was finished and then I'd either have needed to start over from the beginning or I'd have given up and scrapped the whole thing.

Because here's the other problem: I don't know how to edit. I literally just haven't spent enough time in my life practicing it. I can edit for other people, helping them clarify ideas and find weak spots in the story. I can copyedit, refining language and tightening pacing in individual scenes. But I don't know what to do with a draft that is broken in a core place, a draft that needs a whole other plotline inserted into it, a draft that's only a third of the length of the full story.

NaNoWriMo has been described as writing a "zero draft," more a detailed outline than an actual story. Zero drafts don't work for me. I am just now ready to think about that 2015 sci-fi novel, the one that needs two entire plotlines and a great many more characters written into it. It's possible that if I'd been working more diligently on other things in the meantime I wouldn't have needed three years' distance from the writing of the zero draft to the writing of the first full draft of it, but...it's also possible that I would. The things I've written that I'm happiest with, that I feel like were a good reflection of what I can do? They took me about a year for every 5,000 words, but also no more than two full drafts and a polishing revision.

I can probably do faster than that, but not 50,000 words in a month faster. Because I don't know how to address an entire 50,000 word draft with serious flaws, not without taking plenty of time off to give myself enough distance to be able to think clearly about it, but I do know how to address a 5,000 word outline with flaws, that can then be turned into 10,000 words and an outline with unsolved problems, and then 50,000 words that covers the first third of the plot but which feels rounded and satisfying and has interesting places left to go.

I'm incredibly grateful for NaNoWriMo for teaching me that I can throw all my energy into a thing for a month at a time, and I can finish drafts, and that writing can be a social event. But I'm also grateful that it taught me a way that I can't work, so that I can say goodbye to it properly and move on to my own method.

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Re-Learning to Write #2

Sat, 10 Feb 2018 18:00:30 GMT

Motivation comes in two pieces, the urge to write itself and the urge to finish, polish, and publish something. I've been lacking in both lately but I think they're separate things that need different strategies.

The urge to write - the appearance of ideas, the desire to sit down and create something, the rush of getting the right words in the right order - is still mysterious to me. Last month I read The Midnight Disease by Alice Flaherty, a book about writer's block she wrote after coming down with a severe case of hypergraphia, or obsessive writing. She locates this fundamental urge to write somewhere in the limbic system and the temporal lobe, regions of the brain also involved in emotional regulation, language, and meaningfulness. So losing the desire to write when the depression is worst is not at all surprising; meaning is one of the things that depression drains from the world, and what's the point in attempting to communicate when you have nothing to say? Why Zoloft would also kill the desire to write is a different mystery, but not a pressing one for me right now; I will settle for being off of it and seeing how the new meds work.

The urge to produce writing is different, at least for me. It's a more abstract desire, for one thing - it never feels like a compulsion, like the process of putting words on paper can. That means it's the part that can be derailed by a lack of motivation, or by perverse incentives that push me to focus on something that has nothing to do with my actual motivation. (That's nice - it means I have a method for solving this one.)

It also feeds into the other motivation, the "I am full of words and I must get them out," although not in a direct way. "I am full of words" is why I sat down and started this text file that I eventually decided to turn into a series of blog posts; "I am going to turn this into a series of blog posts" is what got me to put my ideas into enough of an order that I could determine that, yes, I am working with two different kinds of motivation and I can handle them differently. Writing for an audience is different than writing for myself.* For one thing, it's easier to slide over ideas that seem obvious in the moment when I don't have an audience in mind - and it turns out that those ideas are not actually all that obvious, even to me, later on. (I wish I'd written down my original outline for this blog post series, but I thought I'd remember it. Hah!)

So writing nonfiction - blog posts, explainers, tweets - helps me, like Flannery O'Connor, to know what I think. Writing fiction is a little different, partly because I learned to write fiction by being a fiction sponge and I still have a tendency to choose the most obvious path forward in any story. I don't like it, but I keep doing it. But I don't start out meaning to do that - I start out wanting --

Well, I start out wanting one of two things. Either I feel something very strongly and I try to put it into words; this produces poetic snippets that sit around on my hard drive until, usually years later, I see how to weave three or four or five of them together into something that looks more like a story. Or I start out wanting a story like one I've read but more me: with more gender variation, with asexual relationships centered, with the focus on the thing I wish the last book I'd enjoyed had paid more attention to. I write to create things in the world that I wanted to read.

So that implies a piece of motivation I'm missing in finishing fiction: I need an audience in mind. The audience for the emotional pieces almost doesn't matter; those feel like screaming into the void and hoping that the void is practicing active listening. It also means that, although those are the pieces I'm usually happiest with, they might not be the best to start submitting first, because they're going to feel more personal when they run into the inevitable rejections.

The other stuff, though, the "I want more things that cater to me in the world," that I've usually decided didn't need an audience in mind because the audience is me. But I'm never going to publish anything if my only audience is me; what would be the point?

(Why do I want to publish anything? Because I crave the external validation of having a professional editor say, "Yes, this is Good Enough, I will give you money for it." Self-publishing has never been on my radar for that reason, but if I manage to redirect my brain enough to have an audience in mind that might change.)

Well, the point would be that it's going to be better, more interesting, and more satisfying if I write something expecting that other people will read it. The point would be that there are other genderqueer, asexual, aromantic people in the world. The point would be that I have something to contribute to the overall fictional discussions of things I am interested in - technology and society, memory and truth, justice and revenge. (Okay, that's another thing I don't always believe - that I have something to contribute - but that's also something that depression drains out of the world, so hopefully that too will change.)

So maybe my audience isn't me, but Fifteen Year Old Me, who thought they were broken because they had to work to have a crush on someone and wasn't obsessed with sex. Maybe my audience is someone like my friend who loves fantasy stories about heroic women but doesn't understand transgender people. Maybe my audience is the unsolved crime discussion board I read where we yell all the time about the unreliability of eyewitness testimony but can't find novels that deal with it seriously. Maybe my audience is different for everything I write and figuring out who that audience is needs to be a much more important part of my process.

Stage two, coming next week: process.

*This is a brilliant illustration of the phenomenon I have been walking headfirst into for the past couple of years, where I come to an amazing insight and then realize it's identical to advice I've been hearing forever and apparently not internalizing. The process of coming to insights on your own is a weird but apparently necessary thing. I guess the whole advice-giving industry is lucky that most of us are in denial of that.

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Re-learning how to write

Sat, 03 Feb 2018 16:50:10 GMT

Sometime in the last three years I have forgotten how to write. I couldn't tell you exactly when it happened, but I remember when I noticed. I'd been on Zoloft for a couple of months, and I realized one morning that I felt amazingly better even though my personal diagnostic measure hadn't been met - usually I knew I wasn't depressed any more when I wanted to write. I used to write like breathing. It's not that I finished a lot of things, finishing used to (and still does) distress me, but I would always be working on something, except in my very darkest places. Zoloft lifted my depression, but it took away my words.

I'm off the Zoloft now, and still fighting through the depression, but the desire to write is coming back. (Why that particular medication kills that particular desire I don't think I will ever know, but part of the reason for quitting it was that many other people told me they had the same effect.) Except - I can't remember how. I have the desire again, but I can't remember what the sequence of events is like. How do you go from a desire to an idea to a project? How do you bring a character to life, construct a plot, put words together in the order that creates an emotional response?

The longer I'm off Zoloft, the less clear this feeling is. Six weeks ago, when I was getting ready to switch meds but not starting the process yet, I wanted, abstractly, to write a novel, but I had no idea how to go about it. Now, two weeks off it, I feel like it's theoretically possible to sit down and start writing, but I still have that awareness that there's something missing. And I think that the something missing is all that stuff I kind of glossed over before because the desire to write was so strong that it didn't feel necessary to go about it in any kind of methodical way. The details of characterization, the fine points of language, the actual interestingness of stories.

I also think that somewhere along the way NaNoWriMo did me some damage. Don't get me wrong, I've had a lot of fun doing it - but it doesn't match my process at all. I am not a fast writer, and I am not a "garbage first draft" writer, and both of those things are how NaNo does it. And trying to do it that way has been exhausting and counter-productive. It's possible that at some point in the future I'll be in a place where NaNo is useful, but right now I think it's just making it worse.

So. In the aid of actually starting to write again (I have a space opera universe I'm getting really invested in, and I miss writing short stories), I am starting with blogging about the process. Stage one, coming soon: motivation.

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The Magnus Archives: Twice as Bright

Wed, 17 Jan 2018 16:17:45 GMT

Look, it is a good thing that I slept in past the end of my building's quiet hours, because I listened to the new episode while making breakfast and THERE WAS YELLING (and not just from the recording). Jonathan Sims, you absolute disaster of a human being, have you ever read a fairy tale in your entire life?*

(If you are seeing this post on Tumblr, maybe click on the link below and come yell with me about Jonathan Sims, Head Idiot on Dreamwidth? I have invite codes and anonymous commenting turned on, and it's so much easier to talk about stuff. Trying to keep up with this fandom on Tumblr is killing me.)

*Other than the one about spiders, that one doesn't count.

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Good Riddance

Mon, 01 Jan 2018 04:28:09 GMT

I had every intention of making a year-in-review post, but let's be honest: 2017 sucked. My mental health was bad, the world was bad, my job was insane, it's over and I'm not interested in reliving it. Let's try again, shall we?

Instead, I thought I'd share my personal growth playlist, 13 Things I Learned This Year. I try to do one of these every year; sometimes I make it to thirteen songs, sometimes I don't. There was a lot of angry music to choose from this year. There are often repeats. ("Drought" has been on it...more than once.) But it's useful, too, to be able to look back on and think, yes, I did make that decision once.

(Yes, there are fourteen songs. The last one is a bonus, kind of. Also there wasn't anything I was willing to cut to get it on there.)

I hope you all have a happy new year. Stay warm, don't do anything too stupid, and give 2017 the kick in the ass it deserves.

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I saw a Star War

Sat, 16 Dec 2017 15:56:12 GMT

( it were a good 'un )

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Sat, 09 Dec 2017 17:11:24 GMT

You guys. I love G'Kar SO FUCKING MUCH it is causing me actual, physical pain. I thought I had no fandom feelings left in me. No, they just slumber, up until the point when I decide that if real-life politicians aren't going to suffer any actual consequences for being garbage people, I could at least watch fictional ones. (Turns out Babylon 5 is remarkably therapeutic for this political climate, if you pick your episodes right. On the other hand, I just realized that technically we've only just lived through Season Two, and we all know shit doesn't start to get real until Season Three.)

It snowed last night, but not the inch they were predicting, more like a quarter of an inch. I thought I had absolutely no holiday feeling this year but now I'm starting to feel festive. More Solstice than Christmas, though, so it's nice that I have more thorough plans for Solstice this year: Illumination, and food plans, and knitting, and the day off after so I can do the all-night vigil and not want to kill myself the next day.

I have been practicing being nice to myself. This means I haven't been doing much of anything, because it turns out that the only way I get things done is by either being in a really good place both physically and mentally or by pushing myself so hard that I completely collapse the first chance I get, and since I'm trying to avoid collapse, I spend my evenings mostly recovering from being at work all day. (Yesterday I was so overstimulated from work and dysphoria and general physical discomfort that I did collapse.) I keep telling myself that winter is for hibernating, that it doesn't matter if I don't accomplish anything when I'm not at work, but the thing is it does matter, because if I don't do anything I enjoy then I start to resent everything. At least it's the weekend tonight, and since I haven't pushed myself to collapse all week I should be able to enjoy it properly. Fingers crossed.

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NaNoWriMo Update

Tue, 28 Nov 2017 17:33:50 GMT

NaNoWriMo...did not work.

At least, it didn't do what I wanted it to do, which was to catapult me back into a creative and productive mindset. It was always a long shot, and I knew it, which was why I steadily revised my goal downward in the first week, from 50k to 25 to 10. (I've capped out at about 7,000 words; most of them, I think, are not terrible.)

It did do a few other things, though. It made clear to me that I'm not over my depression, I'm just over the really bad patch that stretched from about July to mid-October. I've spent more time in the past ten years at this baseline, Depressed But Functional, than outside it, I think. There was about a year (it was 2016, weirdly enough) where I was feeling pretty good, but for a long time before that I was unhappy but didn't see much room for improvement. Now at least I know there's improvement to be had.

I've talked with quite a few people in the past couple of weeks who confirmed that while Zoloft helped their depression, it really did a number on their creative energy, which is roughly the same thing that happened to me. So I think I'll be talking with my doctor about switching meds in January. I miss writing; I miss being able to write without having to take at least four hours to isolate myself in the story first.

It did get me 7,000 words further into a fic I still want to finish, so that's nice.

It also confirmed for me that while I need to be doing something creative with my time and energy, however limited that time and energy is, writing fiction is not really the thing right now. Maybe it's the meds, maybe it's the depression, maybe it's the time of year. I've become convinced lately that I need to adapt my primary activities by season, and fall and winter are, for me, incoming seasons, where I need to focus on learning new things and processing new experiences, rather than creating something wholly new. I've checked out a pile of nonfiction books from the library (including one on creative blocks) and I think I'm going to go back to coloring for a while.

But I still do better when I can get my thoughts out somehow. When I've thought of myself as a writer, it's as a fiction writer, even though I've produced much less fiction than I have writing of other varieties. I might work on some other kinds of writing for a while, and see how that goes. I may end up launching my website again after all. But I'm making no promises right now. December is always kind of rough, and if I'm changing meds soon, it's not going to be easier any time soon.

(Last year I wanted to spend two months focused on fixing my diet & exercise regime, and wound up spending the whole year on it. I could have, maybe should have, kept going, but Other Things happened. I have not paid enough attention to my body for most of my life. Apparently I'm still not done.)

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Wishlists

Fri, 27 Oct 2017 23:38:47 GMT

Hey, so, it's getting to be Gift-Giving Holiday Time, and I'm scraping up gift ideas for friends, and also I put together a wishlist to make life easier for other people

(I don't buy things on Amazon any more but there is no ethical consumption under late capitalism and I might as well make things easier on the people who do, so it's an Amazon wishlist)

here it is

If you are a person I usually buy gifts for please consider this a plea to update your own wishlists so I'm not flailing around helplessly this time next month

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As promised, sketchbook scans!

Wed, 11 Oct 2017 21:06:12 GMT

( Read more... )

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Five Things Make a Post?

Thu, 28 Sep 2017 23:09:47 GMT

1. I think I have finally figured out why people say that crying is an emotional release. I have never felt better after crying by myself - I've felt less like I wanted to cry, and sometimes I have cried myself to sleep and that's better than staying up all night feeling bad, but that's not the same as feeling better. But today is the third time I've cried a ridiculous amount at therapy and felt so much better afterwards, and I think it's not the crying but the doing the thing that makes me cry. Want to cry every time I try to say something out loud? Better say it. Start to cry every time I open a box of my grandma's things? Better go through them. (It's also possible that having someone there who listens sympathetically and doesn't try to get me to stop crying and doesn't lecture me through it is part of it. This goes against every animal instinct I have, but there you go.)

2. This is the year where I stop taking myself so goddamn seriously and start doing witchy things because I want to. Small magic for no reason. An old-fashioned broom on the wall because why not. I have a Too Witches Pinterest board, and goddammit, I am going to do everything I can to embody it in real life.

3. Kind of related, kind of not, I think I'm inventing a Halfass Cthonic Visionary ritual this weekend. (If I ever have a witchcraft blog again, it will be called Halfass Witchcraft.) If anyone is interested, let me know and I'll write it up.

4. Sketchbook scans are coming. I have them scanned, I just need to resize and upload the pictures. I promise I will upload all of them. (I don't remember if I mentioned this earlier, but having people asking to see my sketches all the time when I was traveling was magical. It sounds terrifying, but actually doing it was incredibly freeing. I have no idea how to translate this insight into writing, because my writing process is so incredibly different, but I hereby promise to share all my attempts at visual art, however slapdash, because it seems to be good for me.)

5. There is no number five, so this is not a post.

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