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I will explain.

No, it is too much. I will sum up.

The odds of one of my students finding my Dreamwidth are incredibly small. But not zero. When I was in undergrad, one of my friends followed a long trail to find his prof's literary erotic horror fan fic.

If you have an unpaid Dreamwidth subscription, you have to change the privacy settings of every previous post individually. This was not going to happen.

So I went nuclear. New account, with a new name. I tried to follow the bulk of the people I'd be following before, but I didn't get everyone. But it's still me! Just with a different picture of my cat, and now prepared to up the privacy settings before I complain about local government or the impending heat death of the universe.

Today is grocery day! My household has achieved a new high score - 22 days since we went further than the back garden. The limiting factor seems to be milk. We used up the cow milk, and then we used up the oat milk,  and now we must shop. We intended to go yesterday, but my aikido club did an online sword class, and that's more important than milk in coffee.

By Bernardine Evaristo. It can be found here:

Https://www.newstatesman.com/bernardine-evaristo-short-story-white-mans-liberation-front

I'm not sure what to say. I read it once and really liked it and when I got back into Dreamwidth I thought I should review it. And I wrote a post, but then I reread the story and now I really dislike it and I'm not sure what at all to say about it. It's free to access so I'm curious if anyone else has thoughts.

From The Bulwark:

Most government offices, at any level, don't encourage crying in meetings.

I don't have Twitter, so this is via my brother telling me what he'd just retweeted:

I promise to vote enthusiastically for the Democratic Party nominee if you promise not to remind me it's Biden.

This book is a glorious romp, and I'll definitely read the next ones in the series. It's like a cotton candy fanfic, with sassy lesbians who hate-love each other and sword fighting and necromancy. It's your basic murder mystery dinner party at a nearly abandoned planet with skeleton servants and a complex riddle to solve. An excellent beach read, if you put a towel on your livingroom floor and maybe sprinkle some sand in it. Cat litter will do in a pinch.

If my praise sounds qualified, that's because it is. I had trouble telling the characters' voices apart at times, and you know how important character is for me. Worse, while everything made sense as it happened, looking back I have a lot of trouble figuring out why certain characters did what they did. I don't want to give spoilers, but here's an early example. The twins are fighting, but when their swordsman gets involved they tell him to stay out, and he's surprised and upset about it. It's obviously a scene so the POV character can see how the three interact. But it doesn't make sense. Is this their swordsman's first time watching them fight? His first time interrupting? They've been together years and it seems like they've wrangled much of this time, so surely not.

My stories are edited by probably the best Readers in the whole world, and they keep me honest. If I come up with the world's best line but it doesn't make sense in that character's voice, they call me on it. I think that more of the publishing industry should have access to my Readers for their stories*.

That said, the world building is phenomenal, and while plot/character are sometimes at odds, plot/world never are. If you like really well developed fantasy rules, internally self-consitent, used to tell a story about disaster lesbians... Well. Who doesn't like that?

*You can't, they're mine.

In addition to reading novels, I want to read essays. I majored in Science, so a lot of the things that one might take for granted that someone of my political persuasions will have read, I have not. And there's certain things that are so foundational or transformative that I need to read them.

Examples: The book I bought of Audre Lorde's essays. The PDF I found out The Power Of The Powerless. My "next-up" in the list is Max Weber's (sp.?) Politics As A Vocation.

I don't need 101 level texts to teach me that sexism is bad (no thank you to my teacher-training course where we spent a three hour class discussing why non-white/non-straight/non-upper class/non-male students might find University harder than rich white straight men and I wanted to gnaw off my own leg to escape the boredom). But there's a lot I don't know, and I don't need to reinvent the wheel every time I want to buy bread, as Audre Lorde said.

Other things I need to read? All you #woke mutuals, advise me!

From Audre Lorde "Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism":

My fear of anger taught me nothing. Your fear of that anger will teach you nothing, also.

My husband made English muffins from scratch this morning. Butter appears three times in this recipe: in the batter, fry in butter, slather in butter before eating. They are delicious.

The third manuscript is now out waiting on someone's revisions who is delayed by lockdown. I mean, I bet he wish his home wifi would download the file without shenanigans. But now I'm at 5 documents waiting for revisions.

Reader One's story is a fanfic for a canon I don't know. I love it. But it's really driving home to me why it's so much slower when I write original fiction than fanfic. It's not just the fact I'm building things instead of borrowing them. It's that I can fall into a shorthand for the Reader, instead of trying to achieve that perfect exposition level where the Reader finds out the facts they need but the Protag doesn't explain something that everyone in the verse knows.

Last year we got some boxes of mixed herbs from an allotment sale. We decided to transplant some of the survivors since I thought the "mixed" nature of the boxes was leading to the demise of everything except thyme. My husband moved the "curry plant", which we've been eating since we got it, and on a whim, tried out one of those apps to see what type of plant it was since "curry plant" isn't very specific. Turns out it's not an herb at all. It's not even meant to be eaten. Oops?

Update: I checked with the XR gardening group and they are for eating, they just look similar to a plant that's not. Phew!

Writing my second novel, not that I finished the first one, but a protag defined by "tired" is more my jam right now than one defined by "angry". 9000 words in, which is a lot for me.

Writing two grant proposals, two papers with co-authors who are finding the lockdown slowing down the rate they can get me back revisions. Not their fault, but annoying.

Writing one paper with a co-author who is working able to put more time to editing since her regular tasks are all delayed by the lockdown. Not great for her but fantastic for me. Hopefully that's in sometime around two weeks from now. It was rejected twice so there's very little left to change, it was just waiting for me to have the emotional energy to reformat, clarify, and try again. I wish I was the sort of person who didn't take rejection quite so hard, could've done this 6 months ago, but here we are.

Lots of board games online with friends. Probably playing more often than before the shutdown?

Looking for more creative/online avenues for my energy. Gonna see about finding a text based rpg. Beta reading for another friend. Trying to keep writing. Definitely more than 1000 new words since lockdown. Suggestions for rpg/beta reading/scenes to write/other appreciated.

Out of beer, out of white wine, but the Scotch goes ever on and on.

The back garden is fuelled by all my fears about starving in the Apocalypse + all my and my partner's love of tasty food + all my partner's love of plants. Every bed is full. Buckets we found in the basement are full of soil and plants. Things are growing. It's amazing. We're also sprouting everything that will sprout (lentils, moth beans, mung beans, alfalfa, mustard seeds) in a jar. I'd say it's so we get fresh veg without needing to go out regularly and that's true, but mostly I'm fascinated by the growing process. I can explain how to do it if anyone wants? It's even easier than I remember as a child.