Jack pointed out today that it’s possible that I’m not fighting off an infection, I’m just dealing with low-level exhaustion because he keeps getting up in the night (he is actually sick), and I’m a light sleeper. He was prescribed antibiotics today, so there’s a chance it will clear up, if that’s what my issue has been this week.

One thing I don’t think I’ve mentioned because it kind of took a back seat to the snow and water shenanigans, but I have a wisdom tooth coming in. It seems to be coming in straight up and down and without running awkwardly into any other teeth or a wall or anyone I went to high school with.

It was pretty painful when it first started erupting, and after putting some numbing gel on it I wound up biting my cheek pretty badly, which made it swell up, which created a sort of vicious cycle where I would bite my cheek some more. I’ve had to spend a week or so taking extreme care every time I spoke or bit down on something, but as of today I can casually close my mouth all the way without taking a bite out of myself. So, hooray for that.

As long as I’m talking about weird body things: my recent change of habits is having a diuretic effect. This was not unexpected, but it kind of caught me off-guard how strong it was. I mean, caffeine is a diuretic. Green tea is a diuretic. Many of the supplements I take have a diuretic effect. This is something else entirely. I don’t think I have ever in my adult life or child memory gone to the bathroom as many times in a day as I did yesterday.

Did you know that it is possible for a human being to wake up in the middle of the night from a sound sleep, while still quite tired, for no reason other than they have a full bladder? I did not know that, and now that I do I would like to know who I can see about having that changed, because it’s really neither comfortable nor convenient. I don’t know whose bright idea that sort of thing was, but they should really reconsider it.

My mental and physical energy levels have been pretty low the past couple days after a really dynamic Monday, but that was also expected. Things should level out before too long, and meanwhile, my mood is excellent.

Well, yesterday we got our driveway cleared which allowed Sarah to get her car out and us to go collect Jack’s car from where it was towed. That was as pleasant an experience as it possibly could have been, as the tow lot folks were pleasant, personable, and professional about the whole thing, and they also did us the courtesy of digging the car out before we got there and waiving a day’s fees due to the storm. We are getting reimbursed for the cost, but a courtesy is a courtesy.

Today was our scheduled recycling pick up day. We only get pick-up every other week, they’ll only take what’s in the (admittedly large) container provided, and the last time we were scheduled for pick-up was the middle of the week we were away for the belated holidays. I had no idea if they were keeping to the pick-up schedule this week, but I wasn’t about to miss the chance to unload some of the backlog, so I managed to wrestle our recycling can down to the curb yesterday and carve out a spot in the snow-covered shoulder for it to stand where it would be accessible to the collections truck but not in the way of traffic or our driveway.

We were the only house on the street with our bin out, but my faith was rewarded when the truck pulled up at 9 and collected it as normal.

Our landlords just called to tell us that now that our house is accessible from the street, a plumber is coming over to take a look at the water heater within the next hour and a half or so. I have barricaded the cats inside the cat/author suite to prevent any further magical adventures in the root cellar for them. They’re warier about being shut up inside a room than they used to be, and better at opening doors than ever, but thankfully they’re still distracted by bird calls, even ones that are actually coming from a computer speaker. As I type this, they’re currently going window to window, trying to figure out where their elusive blue jay friend is hiding.

Based on my third hand understanding, it sounds like the plumber expects to just replace the heating element outright, and if that’s the case, we’ll have hot water again within the day. I mean, it’s going to be heating the whole tank from stone cold, so I expect it’s going to be hours before we get lukewarm. If it’s anything more complicated, he’ll be back tomorrow.

But either way, progress.

An actual beautiful sight this morning, as I settled into my office chair: both of our cats sitting on their platform by what I think of as the “tree window”, staring in rapt fascination at a pair of blue jays perched in the willow tree. The female was letting out the characteristic harsh jeer at a regular interval, and Tony, the more talkative and burbly of our tiny house panthers, was repeating it as best as she can every time she did.

I tried to snap a picture of the window with the two cats staring up at the birds, but the jays didn’t stay long (most birds, I think, are frankly weirded out when Tony starts calling back to them).

Funny side note: just now I went looking for a sound clip of the jay’s cry so I could figure out how best to describe it. When I played it on my computer, Tommy went running back to the window and pressed her nose against it, looking for the bird.

Something to remember for the next time I can’t find her.

So, last week my increasingly scattered and growing family met in Florida to celebrate a late Christmas. It was a lot of fun, but also more jam-packed with activity than I’d expected. I hadn’t planned on it being any kind of a work week, but I thought that with the kind of inspiration and momentum I’d been having, there would be the odd spare moments where creativity flowed anyway and I was able to post a few things.

Well, there were more odd moments than spare ones, and more of both than there were moments where I could reliably connect to the internet on my tablet, so here we are. It was a lot of fun, and obviously it’s always great to spend time with my family while I can, but it’s also great to be back sitting in front of an actual computer in my own room.

In keeping with the theme of a late winter and a late Christmas, I had a late epiphany this year, too. On my way home yesterday, while we were in the air, something crystallized for me. I don’t remember where the chain of thought started, but it involved a lot of things that have been swirling around in my head: the fact that writing Tales of MU isn’t nearly as rewarding for me as it used to be, that I don’t do enough of the writing that I want to do, how often it happens that I think I want to write something and I think I’m full of ideas for it but then I sit down and nothing comes, how often just when something is going great I just completely lose all ability to can, how many projects that I started off really strong on (Harper’s Folly, The One Called Wander, and a few I haven’t posted as widely) and then just hit a wall on when I should have been hitting my stride…

I’ve thought of most of this as writer’s block or fear of success or other things over the years, but I think it comes down to one thing: my projects always fall apart at the point where I’m writing to please other people rather than myself.

I know, I know… I already have as personal/professional mantras things like you can’t please everyone, write what you love and people who love it, too, will find it, et cetera. And that’s all very well and good until you realize that the people who love what you write have found it, and without realizing it you’ve started worrying about keeping them happy.

I mean, it’s not that I don’t want my readers to be happy. It’s just that as goals go, that’s a more nebulous and harder to reach one than making myself happy.

I’m one person, and while I don’t have perfect information about my tastes and emotions and expectations, I have a better inventory of them than I could ever have for anyone else, much less an entire audience of individual and discrete anyone elses. I can write a thing that I like and be confident in how much I like it. I can never be that confident in writing a thing and thinking my audience will like this.

And it’s not like I ever focus exclusively on the goal of pleasing other people, but sooner or later I’ll find myself in a situation where a thought occurs to me that goes something like, “Wow, I’d better make sure this is a good one,” whether it’s because I just got paid a chunk of money for it, or because I’m catching up on missed deadlines, or I’ve looked at reader comments and noticed that expectations are running high (or even just that people are really into the storyline), and as soon as that thought is in my head, then without even noticing I switch gears… and in particular I’m switching from the high-performance gear of writing something I’m excited about because I’m excited about it to trying to write to please an invisible and imaginary construct in my head.

Name a thing that I’ve been struggling with and I’ve probably said “I’m just not happy with the way it’s shaping up,” and that’s generally true, but it’s even more true that I haven’t been shaping it up to try to make myself happy. I’ve been trying to imagine what will make some generalized other happy and neither being personally happy with the results nor been able to convince myself that my idealized audience will be, either.

I’ve been going through this cycle with Tales of MU for a long time now where I’m just not feeling anything I’m writing, it becomes a noticeable problem, I stop and evaluate and figure out where to go with it that does excite me, and things start moving… and then I hit the same rut. And that’s because I’m only thinking about what I think and feel about the story in the moments of crisis where I’m trying to figure out how to get it moving again. When it is in motion, my attention inevitably (so far) shifts to “But what do the readers want?” and then it grinds to a halt.

This kind of introspection doesn’t tend to lead anywhere without an action plan attached to it. I don’t have such a plan at the moment. I have many times resolved in the past to focus more on the sorts of things I want to write and to do so apologetically, so I don’t want to just say that I’m going to do this thing. I think the reason I’ve failed to keep it going in the past is not understanding the process by which that morphs over time into trying to please the audience I’ve attracted by doing so, so I could just say “forewarned is forearmed” and press on ahead.

I am going to be focusing on writing to please myself and telling myself that forewarned is forearmed, re: the cycle described above. I’m just also recognizing that this isn’t enough, in and of itself. I think perhaps something like a “mindfulness exercise” where I remind myself of these things on a regular basis might work. I wonder if it would be weird to set reminders in a digital calendar to tell myself that I write best when I write for myself and that trying to write to please others goes nowhere would be weird. Having said that, I wonder if I care.

Stuff to think about.

It’s happenstance of circumstance that I didn’t post a MU chapter last Monday, but I’m kind of glad that it happened because it’s very much a chapter I wrote in an attempt to imagine an audience and then imagine what would please them. It’s also more due to circumstance than anything else (the timeframe I was working in when I set the return) that I wound up with Monday as a MU posting date. I’m going to switch it to Friday to give me a chance to get back into the higher gear this week and have a chapter I’m happy with.

I guess that is something of a plan.

Today I made the decision to remove comments on my blog. It’s been a long time since I’ve had the spoons to deal with moderation, and the reality is that not moderating is not an option. Even if there weren’t people out there who are still very angry about some of the satirical posts and editorial stances I took in 2015, there’s spam.

I also increasingly find myself agreeing with the critiques of internet culture and (the sub-culture of internet celebrity) such as Tauriq Moosa, that open-ended “engagement” is not worth the price it extracts on the engaged. When I feel up for engagement and invigorated by engagement, I am active on multiple social media platforms. When I don’t, I’m not.

Having open comments on my blog is like leaving the door to my living room open so that anyone can wander in and talk not just to me but anyone I’m entertaining, whereas being on social media is more like me going out into the world to hang out with people.

There’s a meme that goes around in the circles that feel entitled to use my living room or your living room or anyone’s living room as their own personal symposium and lecture hall that this kind of move is anti-free speech, that it’s hypocritical for someone to say they’re interested in starting a conversation or having a dialogue if they do not allow comments. I can blow this out of the water in one easy step.

Actually, I already have.

See how I mentioned Tauriq Moosa’s commentary on internet engagement?

That’s me, responding to Tauriq Moosa’s commentary on internet engagement. No comment section necessary.

And then in the paragraph that starts “There’s a meme…”, I also responded to his critics.

And if any of them—or anyone else—wants to write a response to me, they have their own space to do it in. Oh, I probably won’t see it, but that’s okay. When people debate, they’re not trying to convince each other, but the audience. Formal debates don’t end when one party cedes the point to the other, thoroughly persuaded.

The thing is that even when comments at this blog at their best and I’m at my best, I don’t think having comments turned on here does a lot for me. Back in the glory days of Sad Puppies Review Books, I would make a thing and then spend all day refreshing, watching my site stats and reading the new comments, and responding to them. That’s positive engagement, but it didn’t really bring me anything more positive than a short-lived endorphin buzz. That’s not what I’m here for.

Once you reach a certain level of profile you can’t really have a comment section and not pay attention to it, but I don’t see the gains from paying attention to it as being worth it.  I mean, my goal includes writing things that people like, things that resonate with people, that make people laugh, that people enjoy. But that’s not money in the bank, and at the end of the day, it’s not even real, lasting satisfaction.

I like feedback. At a certain level, I think I need feedback. But the way the web works now, those things can come to me from points further “downstream” (crossposts and the like), where they’re not happening on my turf and it’s easier to keep some emotional distance and perspective.

Writing and posting a chapter of Tales of MU after months of floundering under feelings of across-the-board inadequacy was a bit of a relief and a weight off my shoulders, but weirdly, writing and posting an introductory post about my theories of pretending to be a cavalier that contained nothing I haven’t said on Twitter or D&D forums before was a huge relief and a huge weight off my shoulders.

I went to bed last night feeling supremely confident, light, airy, high on life, and like I could do anything I set my mind to. And also weird, because… WTF? How did such a small, simple thing make me feel so good? I mean, I’m not unfamiliar with the sensation of being pleased with a job well-done, but this was more than that.

In the end, I think it is the fact that it’s a small and simple thing… one that I’ve wanted to do for ages, but didn’t feel capable or worthy of. I had fallen prey to the kind of thinking I’m constantly refuting for others, which we might call the Special Type Of Person syndrome, or STOP syndrome for short.

STOP syndrome is the belief that not just anyone can sit down and do ______ or go out and do ______, that it takes a Special Type Of Person to do that. I can hold forth about D&D because anyone can have opinions, but I can’t sit down and actually write a blog about it in any kind of formal capacity because I am, in some inherent sense, not a D&D blogger. That kind of thing.

The thing is, probably 90% of the people reading this, if they’re reading this in the right frame of mind will look at that, roll their eyes, and go, “Well, that’s ridiculous. It’s not like there’s an accreditation course for writing about pretend dwarves.” And the same 90% of the people reading this, if they’re reading it in another frame of mind, will look at that and go, “Oh, someone has a name for that.”

“I’d like to draw, but I’m not an artist.”

“I’ve always wanted to write fanfic, but I’m not really a writer.”

And so on.

STOP syndrome is not something you necessarily think in so many words, but more often, something you instinctively feel with such depth of feeling that you know it to be true. It’s basically a subset of impostor syndrome, one that, well, stops us from even trying to do a thing in the first place.

The antidote to STOP syndrome may be what I call the Doodle Theory of Doing Art, which is basically that the world is enriched when people doodle, or do whatever the version of “doodling” is for something else. Sing in the shower, whether you’re a singer or not. Doodle on napkins, whether you’re an artist or not. Make up stories, whether you’re an author or not. Nobody is perfect when they start out, and few people are recognizably good, that takes practice… but more than that, a lot of what makes something good is subjective, and even more than that, you don’t have to be good at something for it to be worth doing.

Kids scribble with crayons and sing at the top of their lungs and make up jokes and stories that make no sense because it’s fun to do so, because it’s fun to express themselves and it’s an emotional release and it is rewarding on a distinct and profound level.

It’s a very bad day when I have to convince myself that I am an author, but there are things that I have periodically *known* I’m not (an RPG designer, an anthology editor, etc) at exactly the moments when it was most crushing to feel that. Not just anyone can do those things, it takes a Special Type Of Person to do so…

I think this is another area of life where our focus on “self-esteem” as a society hurts us. “You can do anything you put your mind to because you’re special.” sounds like such a positive message. When we tell a child this, we think we’re telling them two great things: they can do anything they want, and they’re special. But the conjunction there isn’t “and”, it’s “because”. We’re actually telling them something that is contingent, conditional: as long as you’re special, you can do whatever you want. Even if we don’t spell out the “because” and just say, “You can do anything you put your mind to. You’re special.”… the human mind is good at finding connections, even when they’re not meant to be there.

So what we take away from these childhood message is this: there are special people who get to do whatever they want, so you’d better pray you’re one of them.

You can occasionally succeed in making someone feel special, but it is a difficult task to impart someone with the sure and certain knowledge that they are special, in a way that will stand up to the seemingly overwhelming evidence that is their own up-close knowledge of their own shortcomings and the many contrary messages that likely inundate society around them.

This is not even getting into how unevenly society distributes the “you are special, you can do anything” messages. We all get the message that special people can do everything, but some among us get told, in varying degrees and to various ways, that this affirmatively does not include them.

The principles that are varyingly called self-empathy, self-forgiveness, and self-compassion might be the antidote to the deficits of self-esteem, as instead of insisting against all the evidence of our fears and doubts that we are special, they tell us that we don’t have to be. Often, embracing this gives us the space to find the things we like best about ourselves. Recognizing that we are allowed to fail gives us the space to try, which might lead to success.

But ultimately, I think it’s important to know that effort and expression are both worthy endeavors in and of themselves.

The type of person it takes to do a thing is the person who is willing to do it.

That’s all.

I always figured I would be the last daily-computer-using person in the world to get a tablet. I resisted getting a touchscreen-only phone for the longest time because I can type faster and with less thought on a physical keyboard, even a tiny one, and I had very little interest in getting a tablet because by the time you attach your tablet to a keyboard, you’ve basically got a laptop and those already exist.

It seemed to me that anything I wanted a tablet for could be better done by my phone (being more portable and easier to hold) or a full computer. This is where someone pops up to say, “Oh, but a tablet’s so much easier to read,” but I’ve never had a hard time reading anything on my phone. Maybe that’ll change as I age, though oddly at the age of 35 I can read tiny print (and hear in the upper register) better than a lot of twenty-somethings I know.

I didn’t want a tablet, but Jack has wanted a tablet for a while now, so when I went Black Friday shopping with my family (by which I mean, while we all sat on the couch with our phones, laptops, and tablets looking for deals online, where we could comparison shop), I kept my eye out for a good deal. Money has been tight, as he was temporarily out of a job at that time and I hadn’t been able to work, but I found one that was well-rated by what appeared to be actual financially disinterested human beings, had excellent specs, and was marked down from well above my price range to well within it. It wasn’t a brand I’d ever heard of (there are a lot of those, making Android devices), but all the numbers were right.

So, I ordered it.

Now, as fate would have it, Sarah had also decided to get Jack a tablet when she upgraded her phone, which fell in early December. I found out when they asked my opinion on the tablet under consideration. I did some quick mental comparisons. The one I had already purchased and taken delivery on was a bit more of a beast (both physically larger and more powerful), but this one was name brand and had cellular data capability. I decided it would be better for his needs to have a more-portable tablet, since he doesn’t have as easy a time reading things on his phone, so I told them I thought it looked like a good deal and on an unrelated note I needed to get Jack a new Christmas present and also I now had a tablet, too.

They were both a little shocked that I would have bought a major electronic thingy for someone else in the household without any kind of coordination or information sharing. My defense? “Well, I didn’t think anyone would buy something as big as a tablet without saying something, so I figured it was safe.” It’s okay for me to be hypocritical. It’s only a problem when other people are.

So now I had a tablet and I wasn’t sure what I would do with it, except for maybe play games that my phone couldn’t handle well (mainly Fallout Shelter, the free Fallout spin-off/gateway game). But I had it, and I found myself oddly giddy about it. I’d never been excited about the idea of tablets, never asked to borrow Sarah’s or anyone else’s unless there was an immediate need to look a thing up online and nothing else available, but now that I had one I wanted to see what it could do.

It turns out that it can do a lot. It doesn’t really do anything that a computer or cellphone can’t, but it does a different combination of them? It gives me something closer to the desktop experience in a more portable format. The touch keyboard is even more of a problem on the tablet than it is on the phone, but I just took the little pocket bluetooth keyboard I use for my phone and synced it to the tablet. If it looks funny having a 10 inch tablet propped up on its easel stand cover while I sit a few feet away thumb-typing away on a 4 inch keyboard… it works. 90% of the stuff I posted as Things of the Day in December were written like that, and that was some of the first real writing I’d done basically since Halloween.

I haven’t done any longer writing on it yet, as it’s sort of taken me a while to take it seriously as anything other than a super fun machine, but I suspect I’ll get there.