As part of my attempts to manage my communications better, I’m going to be using the schedule post function more often. For instance, my post about jury duty was written write after the one about boundaries and Tales of MU, because I wanted to get it out but I didn’t want to detract from the message of the two posts by having them right on top of each other.

I’ve just scheduled a post for tomorrow morning, too… a bit of what you might call bonus content made possible by CritterDB. I’d been wanting to do a semi-regular custom monster feature for a while, but CritterDB really makes the presentation part so easy that it really feels possible. Pretty much five minutes after I saw the thing, I had decided to make “Monday Morning Monsters” a thing on my blog. Then I realized that this Monday I’m going to be sitting in a courthouse, and then I realized I could schedule the post.

So hopefully, tomorrow morning there should be a neat monster post.

So, the sitcom that is my life decided to give me jury duty while I’m here trying to get things done and figure things out. I report tomorrow. I keep making plans for how I’m going to start things off right tomorrow morning, and then remembering that first thing tomorrow I’m heading for the courthouse.

My understanding is that they’re only going to tie me up for a couple of hours morning tomorrow, for a sort of orientation process, with any actual work days requiring my presence to be announced later. The helpfully threatening little slip of paper I have assures me that the average juror is only called to be present for 5 to 7 days during the month in which we are called to serve, but that doesn’t mean it’s outside the realm of possibility that I’ll be engaged for longer.

It’s also not outside the realm of possibility that my services won’t be needed at all. I am supposed to call in this evening to make sure I’m still on, and even if I’m still scheduled for my orientation, I might not be assigned to a case. I can’t really plan for that, though. I’ve got to assume I’m going to be busy for an indeterminate number of days on an indeterminate schedule.

This isn’t new news for me, as I found out last month. I haven’t talked about this for the same reasons I haven’t talked about much else. I’ve been quite anxious about it, though. Dealing with officialdom while trans is never fun. I have a lot of experience in doing so in an airport, but none in a courthouse.

I think the most likely scenario is that it’s not a big deal, few people notice (this is usually the case) and few say so. I know for most intents and purposes I’ll be a number, not a name, though I do expect my “wallet name” to be called out at least once.

The nightmare scenario, of course, is that my presence and existence are questioned, that my presentation of myself at my most presentable is interpreted as a mockery, and at the worst extreme, I’m subjected to legal repercussions for someone else’s decision to take issue with my life. (That’s ignoring the even worse extreme of being subjected to potentially lethal violence, but that’s always a possibility.)

There are still times when I suck it up and squash the dysphoria long enough to try to present myself as male in order to avoid what seems like a bigger headache. Apart from a high psychological cost, it rarely actually works. The number of times I’ve been challenged trying to use a male-coded restroom is higher than the number of times I’ve been challenged using the correct one. But even if I wanted to try it (and I really don’t think I could), it’s not like I have kept up a closet full of courtroom-appropriate masculine-coded attire. So it’s show up in a nice ensemble from Kohl’s, or old sweat pants and a t-shirt. There’s the risk that someone will think the former is me not taking things seriously, while the latter leaves no doubt.

So I’m just going to have to do what I always do, which is to show up as myself and hope for the best. If things go well, I’ll come back in the afternoon and hopefully have a lot of energy and motivation. If not, the day might end up being a wash, or worse.

Either way, I’ll let you know how it goes, once it’s gone.

So, something happened this morning that hasn’t happened in a while.

I woke up thinking about Tales of MU, and not in an “Oh, God, what am I going to do?” sense (and that has happened), but in the sense of thinking about the characters and their lives and what they think and feel and would be doing… so I got up and came to my office and picked up the notebook I had designated the MU-writing one (still empty, as of that moment) and began to write. I filled a page and a bit more pretty quickly with the opening that came to me, and I might do some more today after I finish this post, but it felt good to get it out.

One of the recurring themes in MU is that desire is complicated… that as human beings can want things on different levels, it’s possible to both want something and not want something, and only the mind that’s doing the wanting/not wanting can sort out what to do about that.

My feelings about MU have been like that lately. I’ve wanted to continue the story, wanted to keep it going… but at the same time, I’ve wanted to throw my hands up in the air and be done with it. I talked about how fear of communication had paralyzed me recently. It made it very hard to write TOMU in particular, because while all writing, even fiction, is communication on some level…

Okay.

This is going to get awkward, but… every author has a few readers who have boundary issues. Writing one’s thoughts out, even one’s thoughts about make-believe people, is a bit of an intimate act. Reading those thoughts is also a bit of an intimate act. But it’s not an intimate act in the way that, say, letting someone into one’s living room is (ooh la la). The writing itself is a sort of filter or interface between the participants. When you read someone’s writing, you’re not seeing the real them. You’re not getting to know them. No matter how sure you are, it’s not true.

There was one day, years ago now, where I was trying to drum up some excitement within myself and the readership, and I did a sort of proto-listicle post on my LJ that had some behind-the-scenes tidbits of Tales of MU. And I had fun writing it, and I hoped people would have fun reading it, and so to keep the fun going I ended by saying that if it was well-received, I’d do it again, with “Six Surprisingly Semi-Autobiographical Elements of Tales of MU”.

Now, I was thinking of things like Mackenzie’s archenemy relationship with stairs, but one well-meaning—and I want to stress that, I’m sure this person meant well—reader commented to beg me not to write this, to “preserve the mystery”, because in their mind, it was obvious to “most readers” that a traumatic event that happened to one character was my own story in fictional disguise, but it would heartbreaking to know it for certain.

Folks, can you imagine what it’s like to be in the middle of a lighthearted, fun little exercise of giving readers a peek behind the curtain and someone comes up to you (virtually, at least) with that?

I’m using that as a representative example of a thing that happens too frequently, and while I wish I could say that I was used to it, it still has a tendency to knock the wind out of my sails. I’ll introduce something to the story and it’ll be going great and then… it happens.

Do you know that every time I write a conflict between Mackenzie and Ian in the story, or introduce a new female love interest for her, my boyfriend Jack gets flooded with messages of sympathy? Because obviously I’m Mackenzie and he’s Ian, and obviously if there’s someone new in Mackenzie’s life that can only mean that I’ve kicked him to the curb, never mind a) fiction and b) polyamory…

I’d love to say this kind of thing doesn’t affect me, but it does. Not at first, not in small doses, but no matter how good a duck’s back is it at whisking away the raindrops, it doesn’t do much against a tidal wave. It’s something that every author has to deal with on some level, but when you’re writing the same story day in, day out in such an immediate medium as the internet, there’s not really a break, you know?

I used to write on my Livejournal that writing is an arrogant act, that it takes not just confidence but arrogance to look at a blank sheet of paper and think, “I can do better than that.” Writing is a balancing act, and I don’t mean that in the sense that you have to juggle a lot of responsibilities (I’d call it a juggling act if I meant that), I mean it in the sense that the only way you can get through it is to keep moving, keep looking straight ahead, just keep going straight on until you’re safely on the other side, or you’ll start to wobble and then you’ll fall and it’ll be over.

But when readers are contacting me (and worse, people in my life) with their “observations” about what my writing means about my real life, I wind up doing the worst thing a high-wire artist can do, which is looking down. I second-guess myself. I stop being able to write a plot line without thinking about the implications, not the consequences for the story but whether it’s going to make my life and Jack’s life and our life together difficult, and who else it might reflect on, and what are people going to take away from this about me…

I don’t want to change the story in response to such silly externalities, but… I’m only human. Sometimes I pull away from a story because of it and then I have nowhere else to go with it. Sometimes I try to power through with what I had planned but the magic is gone, it’s no longer this exciting thing that’s coming together naturally but this hateful, horrid slog.

You know what happened to “updates resume January 4th”?

I had this plan where I was going to spend some time writing to get ahead before I updated, right? If you read my blog, you know the plan. The plan was like this: I would alternate time “on” and time “off”, spending weeks at a time writing stories until I was at least four weeks’ ahead, and then take that time “off” to work on other things.

And the plan was happening less orderly than I’d wanted/expected, but it was happening. I was getting ahead. I was stringing together a plot line that I could sustain, that would carry me through. It took me until the end of my planned “on” session to actually get anywhere, but once I did, once the logjam cleared up and I had traction and I was moving, I was ready to keep moving…

And then I posted the first new chapter in months, the only chapter so far in 2016, and I got a reader query, “Does this mean no more Ian?”

Because the first new chapter had Nicki in it, I guess?

And to be fair, the query didn’t mention any intersection of real life and fantasy, and the reader might not have meant for there to be any. But it deflated me. It was like a punch in the gut. I let the stories that were growing in my head wither on the vine, and vacillated between coming up with a story that would be untouchable, bulletproof, and feeling like the whole thing was not worth bothering with anymore.

Now, things have been difficult for me in a lot of different ways lately, and this is not the only issue that’s been affecting my work. But it’s been compounding all the other ones. Barring that one post on Tumblr I made about Superman singing to Batman, Tales of MU is the greatest success of my career as a writer. Financially, it’s the top. Finding myself unable to continue it makes me feel like a fraud and a failure overall, which makes it hard to get up the gumption to accomplish anything, which just contributes to the cycle of perceived failure.

And can you imagine what it’s like to try to communicate within a relationship when you’ve got this weight of expectation from strangers who assume your imaginary story about ~19-year-olds finding ~*love*~ in college is reflective of your adult relationships as late 20 and 30 somethings? It makes everything that much harder, and then when we do have an issue that needs to be worked out, it just makes writing anything having to do with Mackenzie or Ian radioactive, because now the second-guessing is getting into third-guessing and fourth-guessing… what if it does creep in? What if Jack starts to believe it?

Please take this blog post as one part just me identifying and articulating a problem I have not yet articulated, just more of me thinking out loud very quietly, as I do here.

And please take it as one part further explanation for why things have been so very bad on the updates front lately.

But please, please, please, also take it as a plea: knock this shit out. Yes, I broke the swear embargo. Whatever theories you all want to have in your own private heads and private spaces, knock yourselves out. But when it comes to me, my space, my people, my life? Knock the shit out. Quit leaving your theorizing in my inboxes, in those of my friends and lovers, in the comment section of my website. I don’t read the comments on Tales of MU, but the reality of the modern internet is that someone has to moderate them or else let them be abandoned to the porn and pill bots, which means Jack sees them.

And this isn’t just about the personal stuff. Do you folks know what my inbox looks like when I start a new project? “So I guess it looks like you’re sick of Tales of MU.” Then I update MU. “So I guess you’re not sticking with [new thing] after all.”

Every time I start updating at a regular-ish time, five minutes after that time I get the first trickle of “I guess there’s no story this week” and “So we’re back to no updates, huh?”, and guess what that does to my drive to keep up a consistent schedule? Consistency is never rewarded except with demands for more consistency.

This kind of thing, it has got to stop. I have got to stop being afraid of it, but listen, as long as we’re being completely honest with each other (and we are being honest, aren’t we?), when I’m afraid of a thing, only some of that fear is fear of what will happen. Some of it… often a lot of it… is fear of what I’ll do. I used to be a very angry person. I used to get worked up utterly out of proportion over every little thing. I used to be not very nice. And part of how I changed that—to the extent that I have, everything is a work in progress—is by learning to simply not respond to things.

So if I stop being afraid of what we might term readers’ “invasive reactions”, I’m likely to get angry about them instead.

And that’s not going to be fun for anyone.

I’m going to tie this off by laying out the law. I know readers have asked (mostly through Jack) for me to be more communicative through the Tales of MU website, to post more updates about what I’m doing there and so on.

No.

Just no.

We tried that, it didn’t work.

I don’t want to say “you blew it,” because I’m not saying that I’ve been perfect… this post is as much a catalogue of my own flaws as anyone else’s. From here on out, Tales of MU is where I post Tales of MU stories, this blog is where I talk about what’s going on. I’m not going to cross those streams again. There is a wall a thousand feet tall made out of force fields and fire and patrolled by little yappy dragons that spit out giant fire-breathing ones when they see intruders. I will continue to communicate more (more frequently, more candidly) here, but I’m not doing it over there. That space is going to be reserved for fiction until I’m sure that each and every person who’s reading it knows the difference.

So, all of this is to say: I’m writing Tales of MU again.

In terms of practical announcements, that’s it.

I set no deadline.

I announce no schedule.

I make no promise.

I make no pledge.

Every time I hit a stumbling block and start to un-stumble myself, it seems like there’s someone there to ask me when I’m going to “get serious” about things. This is not the most invasive thing I get asked, though it’s just as fallacious as trying to figure out what’s going on in an author’s love life by the ups and downs and ins and outs of her fictional characters. You can’t tell how serious someone is about something by how well they’re doing at a thing.

Trust me when I say that I’m serious now. Trust me or don’t when I say I’ve been serious about it the whole time I’ve been not writing and not updating it, too. Seriousness only gets you so far. I’m more serious now, if only because I’ve shoveled out a lot of baggage that was clogging the seriousness pipeline .

Right now, I’m so serious that I’m resolving to just write the damn story I want to write and not care what anyone thinks about it, or if anyone thinks anything about it. That’s the way it was in the beginning. I used to tell people who had little suggestions for making it more palatable to a mass audience that I’m writing the story I want to write, and if you want to read that story, you can. That was the deal in the beginning. That’s the deal now.

And if you want to read that story, then you only need to do three things:

1. Get out of my way while I write it.
2. Stay out of my way while you read it.

(Optional step 3: Give me your money, so I can keep doing it.)

I’ve had a couple nights of very rough sleep. Didn’t get much done today, except for some notebook writing. I’m hoping for a relatively early night tonight, then tomorrow’s going to be a production day on Angels of the Meanwhile. My recent delving into D&D development wasn’t entirely a sideline… I learned a lot more about formatting in February than I did in the years before that in which I’ve been publishing.

When I was younger, I used to joke all the time about what a huge procrastinator I was. “You think you procrastinate?” I would say. “I was supposed to have written the book on procrastination.” As an adult who sometimes struggles very badly with executive function and time management, this seems less funny.

Procrastination is among the least helpful of my habits, though I’m leery of calling it a habit. Procrastination can be a decision or a behavior, but once you’ve done it enough times, it becomes more a way of seeing the world, a way of life. It’s a coping mechanism, a pressure-relief valve, a method of dealing with problems.

It isn’t a good way of doing so, mind you. The word that springs to mind is “maladaptive” — behaviors or traits that emerge in response to a form of environmental pressure that is ultimately detrimental, either because of a change in the environment or because of unforeseen consequences. We pick up habits like these as defense mechanisms in specific situations, but they stay with us long after they have ceased to make any sense.

I can’t tell you why I started procrastinating in terms of an exact origin story, not how I started making the decisions that became a habit that became a perspective that became a lifestyle. I can tell you what it does for me, though, or at least the need that I’m scrambling to address when I do it: it reduces uncertainty to a more manageable level.

What procrastination did for me when I started doing it was removing a step from the decision-making process. For everything I had to do during the hardest, most stressful years of my childhood, I could offload the all-important decision of when to do it (and related decisions about the order and prioritization of assignments) by deferring to the deadline.

“When should I do this thing?” is a small thing to worry about, but it is a thing, and when you’re drowning in things, the small things add up. If you have a one-hour assignment that is due in seventy-two hours, there are an almost infinite number of times in which you could start it, but only one point at which you must start it.

Which moment is the right moment? If you wait, something magical happens: the possible answers to that question shrinks. Uncertainty becomes certainty. When you have only one hour left in which you could possibly do the one-hour assignment, you know—you know, with all your heart—that the moment to do it is OMG RIGHT NOW.

There’s not a lot of margin for error in that kind of operation, and the stakes are actually much higher—in the sense that they actually exist—than if you make an error in choosing an earlier moment.

So why did I do this often enough for it to become a habit, and more than a habit? At a guess I would say that I (along with many other people who fall into the same trap) had far more confidence in my ability to turn something out in the minimum time than I had in my judgment about how things should be done. In the absence of a scheduled start time, the act of procrastination creates a start time. What from the outside seems to be—and in fact, is—a manufactured crisis brought about by dancing with deadlines is instead experienced by the procrastinator as the imposition of structure, the creation of order within a disorderly process.

This behavior reaches its destructive apex when dealing with tasks that most definitely and certainly must be done, but for which there is neither a clearly stated start time or end time. If the task is not seen to, bad things will definitely happen. It might be a disaster. It might be expensive in terms of actual or opportunity cost.  It’s something you definitely want to do, need to do.

But in terms of actual deadline pressure?

It’s more like a sword hanging over your head than a ticking clock.

You not only don’t know when you’re supposed to start, but you don’t know when you have to finish.

Faced with this, the procrastinator’s habitual response becomes an even worse coping mechanism than normal. We wait for the moment that feels right to arrive, because that’s what we’re really doing in our minds when we procrastinate, but that moment is always the last possible one, but we can’t discern when that is, so the moment never arrives.

As time wears on, the procrastinator begins to suspect that the moment already came and left, that things are already too far gone to be salvaged.

When this happens, the procrastination shifts into an even higher gear. How do you confirm that it’s too late to fix something? By letting it ride. Wait for something to happen, some further development that tells you either yes, you are still in the game, you still have a chance to make things right, or no, the whole thing is falling apart.

It’s like not being sure if you left the stove on or not, but instead of going down and checking, you lie in bed until the house catches fire.

None of this is rational in the sense of being objectively logical or making a lick of sense when viewed from the outside, through the cold lens of distance. All of it is rational in the horrible, horrifying sense that a human brain can produce this kind of thinking through a reproducible process of cause and effect, with decisions that not only make sense to the person making them at the time, but in many cases seem essential to psychological survival at the time they are made.

As I said above, procrastination starts (or started for me, at least) with greater confidence in one’s ability to get things done than in one’s ability to structure things “properly”. So what does this mean for an inveterate procrastinator who suffers a crisis of confidence?

Nothing good, I can tell you that.

At least in the short term.

The whole system—insofar as it is a system—stops working. (Insofar as it ever worked.) You miss deadlines, break commitments, sit on opportunities… all of which, of course, only does more to erode your confidence.

But there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

Because it means the structure that was originally built to support yourself, and which became a prison in which you were trapped, is crumbling around you. It might take you down with it if you don’t move, but you do have that opportunity to move. The walls are coming down.

Change is hard. Change is scary. But change happens, things change whether or not you change with them. I think when you actually change with the times, you don’t notice it as much. I mean, no one notices that they’re becoming a procrastinator, right?  And procrastination is, as I said, an adaptation to circumstances, which means that anyone who starts doing it is therefore capable of adapting to changing circumstances. All it takes is the right impetus.

Just to not drop entirely into radio silence for multiple days after that last post… Friday night’s “going out to dinner” turned into “staying out late at the bowling alley/arcade”, hence why I never finished or posted the blog post. Saturday was D&D day, and today is Jack’s birthday. Since I’ve taken primary charge of Jack’s birthday this year, I’ve been busy since Friday with stuff relating to it. I’m going to be cooking for a good portion of the day today, as well as decorating the dining room as soon as it’s prudent to pen the cats up upstairs.

So, I’ve been struggling really badly off and on for the past year with what I’ve termed at various points anxiety and depression, and this week I think I had a breakthrough about what’s actually happening, specifically, beyond those general terms.

When I was young, I acquired a phobia about phones in general and a terrible anxiety around communication in general. It came from having a hard time understanding social cues and a harder time making myself understood. I preferred writing to talking, and when the internet became a thing, I found a huge relief valve in there. I didn’t really start communicating with the world around me in a way that felt good until the internet, and there was always a clear divide: face-to-face communication was hard, phone communication was harder… but the internet? The internet was easy.

I think it’s in part because my handwriting and speech issues were never a thing on the internet but even more so, it was the fact that the internet was a blank slate for me and I was a blank slate for it. I had no negative formative experiences with the net. The net didn’t have any preconceived notions about me. It was great.

Over the last year and change, though, things started changing. Almost right away, right around January 2015, the internet stopped being as welcoming. There were things going on that turned my email and messengers into a source of anxiety, for the first time ever. Entirely separately from that, there were people out there trying to figure out where I lived and who I was related to, mostly on account of some of the things I had blogged and tweeted about. Over the course of the year, the internet lost a lot of its magic for me. It no longer felt safer than anywhere else. I withdrew more and more, and the more I withdrew, the more the lurking dread around everything intensified.

The only places I’ve really been active online in the past few months are places I was never active before, because the dread hadn’t had a chance to spread to them. I think that’s how I wound up being as invested in D&D stuff as I have lately. That, and it’s always been a refuge for me.

Like most things that happen incrementally and over time, I didn’t realize it was happening. I knew things were wrong. I knew things were off. I did realize I was going quite a long time without checking my email except for the specific things that automatically get highlighted for me, stuff from family and stuff like that. I knew I’d stopped really communicating with my patrons, stopped writing newsletters. I called it depression, because I was depressed and it happened in conjunction with it. But even when the depression was at low ebb, even when I was in a genuinely good mood and full of energy and felt like I could take on the world… it all seemed too much.

My recent experiments in writing by hand again have helped me figure this out, because they’ve been going so well… but mattering so little. I can sit down and write like the very Dickens (or like the Alexandra) whenever I want… but as soon as I start trying to type it up to share with anyone, the freeze sets in, and if I’m thinking about publishing or sharing something as I’m writing it, same thing.

It’s not writer’s block, it’s publisher’s block. Sharer’s block. Communicator’s block.

The real breakthrough came, though, when I was talking to Jack earlier in the week. He has noticed that I’m a lot less responsive to emails, and often I’ll come down to reply to something he emailed me about in person (the first time this happened, I guess I should have realized how bad the problem was, since my inclination has always been the other way around), and that if I don’t have a chance to answer in person, I often forget.

I was trying to explain what was going on with me, and in the course of trying to make sense of it for him, I made sense of it for me: all of my old communication anxieties had crept back in, and spread to my new forms of communication. I have been so isolated and so afraid of basically everyone and everything and so without any outlet, and because I didn’t know what was happening myself, I have been unable to tell anyone.

At the same time, I’ve been making progress. I’ve been chipping away at the other obstacles in my life, self-erected and other. I’ve been improving my work routine, my work environment, my habits. I’ve been managing my mood and my motivation.

But I could only get so far before I’d hit this big, unspoken, unexamined thing that has been in my path, and bounce back.

I guess the best way to describe the way I’ve been feeling lately, now that I’m thinking about it, is that I am all alone in a big house that used to feel comfortable to me but which now has grown oppressively terrifying. One room is this blog. One room is Twitter. Another is Facebook. There are rooms for my stories, too. All the rooms are empty, as far as I know, but I can’t let go of the idea that there might be something in them. I know that if I check there will be nothing and that should put my mind at ease, and sometimes I do and it does, for a while, but the house is still big and empty and I am still alone in it, and so mostly I stay in bed and hide under the covers.

I occasionally go out, when needs drive me to, and when I do I turn on all the lights and talk to myself and laugh to show I’m not afraid, and sometimes I feel better… but as soon as I’m back in the bedroom, it’s like that never happened.

The fear of communication is in part the fear of exposing yourself, of putting yourself out there where you’re vulnerable. It’s partly the fear of letting other people in. But in my case, it’s mainly the fear of what I’m going to hear. What am I going to read, when I open up my email? What’s going to be waiting for me when I sign into Twitter or Facebook? One by one, I turned off all my notifications on every social media site I’m active on, but even then it’s still a lot of effort to make myself look at them.

The point of this post is not to engender sympathy. I don’t have comments turned on at my blog (I think probably in large part due to this burgeoning fear, though I do still philosophically agree with the movement against comment sections being de rigueur) anyway, and I haven’t been looking at the notes and stuff on crossposts. The point of this blog post, as with most of the ones that are about me, self-inventory, self-accountability… and hopefully in this case, self-empathy and self-forgiveness.

I have felt better about this problem since I identified and named it. I felt better already when I told Jack about it, as much as I could when speaking out loud and off the cuff and without a pen in my hands or a keyboard under my fingers, earlier this week. I felt better when I told Pope Lizbet, who has been waiting patiently for me to get my stuff together and finish the anthology I dedicated to her a year ago, what was going on and gave her permission—nay, asked her—to contact me directly and hold my feet to the fire as we finally kick it out the door.

Even though there’s a lot of processing in this blog post, and more processing to do, I felt better even when I made the decision earlier today that I was going to write it.

Naming the problem is not a solution. It’s a step forward, though. I go through this thing periodically where I make a resolution that I’m going to blog more, because it’s my blog and I shouldn’t have to worry about whether I’m blogging right, or what people will think if I’m blogging about something they don’t care about, or what I should be doing with my time, and then I never make it very far, because I’m not dealing with the thing that makes it hard.

I mean, the whole “blog more” thing, it’s not about me not having things to say or time to say it in. It’s not about forcing myself to write anything, it’s about not forcing myself to not write things.

The fact is, I always have a lot to say, about a lot of things. I always have a lot of stories in me. There are a lot of exciting things happening in my life. People are nominating me for awards. I’m up for two Rhysling Awards and there are people nominating me for a Hugo, which whether or not I make it to the ballot is huge. Also, I’m up for jury duty soon. That’s potentially going to be “fun” because trans stuff, but it’s a thing that’s happening.

But instead of talking about that stuff, I’m sitting here in my notional bedroom, afraid to turn on the lights while my big, cold, empty house crumbles around me, talking about D&D because that’s the only thing that feels safe, and even that, the dread is starting to creep into.

I’m going to start another blog post as soon as I finish this one. I’m not sure what it’s going to be about, because I’m going to be making it just for the sake of making a blog post, shaking out the cobwebs from this corner of my internet house. I might not actually finish it before I have to run out for dinner (we have plans tonight with family friends), so don’t be alarmed or think I fell down into the notional cellar if you don’t see it. But I’m going to do it.

I’m also going to crosspost this post in its entirety into my Patreon feed, so my patrons can all read it directly. I’m sorry I have been so unreachable lately, a time frame which for a number of you encompasses the whole term of your patronage. I am going to be talking to you all directly over on Patreon next week, near the end of it. Let’s check in with each other.

It’s going to be hard, because communicating is, you know, the specific thing I’m having a problem with… and I’ve been trying the whole “communicate more” thing a lot without sustained results… but I really think doing it with awareness of what the problem is will work out better.