lydamorehouse: (Default)
 But for now, I will continue to update my hand-coded 1999 website using CuteFTP like the Neandertal I am. 

I mean, at least my website has a unique look, right?  And, you know, despite all this, it's up-to-date. I not only have all my publications and where to find them, but I also have all my up-coming convention appearances. So, I mean, if a person can get past the clunky look of it... 

Yeah, I should really do something about that.

Today was a general day for updating, which is why I thought of it. I sent out my ridiculous newsletter to all 9 subscribers and my Patreon update to all 8 subscribers. So, you know, it's the life of a popular author! Work, work, work!  :-)
lydamorehouse: (Default)
 With my new book out, I decided to dust off my ancient website and update the information on it. What I SHOULD do at some point, is update the whole thing, but instead I am a stubborn old coot and have hung on to something I personally hand coded in 1999 or thereabouts. I mean, part of me, at this point, feels like the creakiness of it is perfect for a bunch of cyberpunk books?  But, it's not the best if a person is looking for information about...oh, I dunno, Tate's subsequent career in the modern era? 

I've had dozens of offers to upgrade and update. Feel free to offer your two cents, as well. After all, I think, since I lost Tate's domain, I will finally do something more modern for her.  Maybe a Word Press site or some such. Who knows, I might even hire someone to design something truly lovely.  

In the meantime, though, I spent the morning trying to remember how to do file transfers with CuteFTP.... which, I mean... yeah, wow. It was very 1999 here for a moment.

So, let's see, other news...  

It's sunny today and is supposed to eventually warm up into the 50s (approximately 10 C).  I'm hoping Shawn won't be too busy today with meetings and we can go for our semi-traditional, daily walk. If not, I may go on my own after 1:00 pm. I am going to have to brave the pet store (or Target) today because our eldest cat has decided that she no longer likes the seafood pate. Being 19, skipping meals is not the option it once was (or would still be for our 25 pound orange boy). Plus, I should buy another bag or two of kitty litter for the continued stay-at-home order.

Otherwise, I just have to make some bread for tonight's dinner. Vera is not quite ready for us to harvest, I don't think. But, my family is actually only so-so on sour dough, anyway, and I traditionally make my French loaves to go with something like the lasagna we're having. 

I've been thinking a lot about my inability to write and I had an epiphany when talking to my writers' group, Wyrdsmiths, last night on video chat.  Obviously, the majority of it is existential anxiety, no question. But, I think there's another factor that I hadn't really considered. There's, of course, a lot of talk about the hassles of having your office suddenly become your living room. No one is much discussing the fact that *my* office has now been invaded by my family, whom I love and get along with famously, BUT, with that has come additional pressure to provide.

It's no longer just, "Ima, what's for dinner?" It's become, "Ima, what's for dinner? What's for lunch? What's for breakfast? Are we out of x? Are you making bread/cake/cookies today? When should we go for a walk?" And, so on.  One of my love languages is feeding people, so, again, this isn't about feeling necessarily overwhelmed or resentful of all of this--in fact, I take a HUGE amount of pride in the fact that we are going on a month of stay-at-home and we have yet to repeat a single meal.

But.

I used to have several hours a day to write.

Alone. By myself.

With no thought about lunch, unless I was hungry or I knew a friend was dropping by.  

Also, with Shawn occupying the living room, even though we have the luxury of a lot of space to spread out, it's funny the extent to which her office stress gets filtered out into the rest of the family. So, that's new and different, too. And part of why I've shifted to doing things like quilting, because physical activity, for me, shaves off all that stress and puts it to use in something. 

Anyway, I didn't say it was a brilliant thought, but it was new to me. It's funny because our house doesn't really have the usual division of labor that comes with gender, but, since making the choice to be the stay-at-home parent, I have often ended up with the lion's share of the emotional labor of keeping a household together.  When everyone is home all the time, that increases exponentially. 

Again, I feel fortunate in that none of this is really anything I hate or find particularly onerous. I've just suddenly realized that these duties, if you will, now occupy the majority of the time that I used to set aside for writing. I'm going to have to go back to how I used to write when I had a full-time job... oh, wait, I used to just shirk.

Damn it.

;-)

Well, honestly? I can do that with this job a little, too. 
lydamorehouse: (ticked off Ichigo)
 I need to be working on getting the sequel to Precinct 13 in order, but it is YET another rainy day and, right now, I don't wanna.

Mason is also home sick. He woke up with a migraine, though I suspect at least some of this is a need for more sleep. It's getting to be the end of the year and he's got a lot of heavy-duty projects all coming due. He's been staying up late to work on them. I don't doubt the migraine, but I think an element of stress may also be involved.

Last night, on my Discord server, there was some drama.

I feel far too old to even be uttering that sentence. Mason loves to tell his friends about his ridiculous parent: "My ima is on Discord. She's in a server for her Tumblr anime RP group." This pronouncement, apparently, can stutter the minds of the youth of today. NO PARENT on earth should be involved in any of those things! Certainly, not all of them at once.

But, not only is it true, but somehow I got roped into being an admin on my Discord server. (For those of you who know nothing of Discord, which frankly, is also me, an admin is basically what it sounds like, the person who has the power to create channels, enforce rules, invite people, kick them out, etc.)  

I should preface this with a note: this is NOT a larger server. There are... or rather, were, but I'll get to that in a moment, all of 8 people involved. So, even though Discord is not entirely familiar space to me, I felt comfortable saying "yes," to this role, if only because there is also another admin and a person who is one step down in authority called a mod. So, out of 8 people, we had three with fairly serious authority.

Yet somehow we had a troll.

Not just any old troll, either, but the kind who thinks it's "funny" to post anti-Semitic memes two days after a synagogue shooting. (Not that there is EVER a good time to post that crap, but the timing could not have been less sensitive.)  

Alas, because our Discord server did not have posted rules, there was some dithering from my fellow admin and the mod. Can we just kick this guy out? Should we delete the post?

The answers seemed pretty obvious to me, so I assumed (and I think rightly so) that the issue was that no one wanted to be the person to ACTUALLY do the work and confront this bad actor.

I'm 52 years old, a mom, and a veteran of many a writers' group conflict, so I took point. I deleted the post. I PM'd the guy to let him know we'd deleted the post and would be deleting him. He shot back the classic Nazi rhetoric of  "learn to take a joke" / "I was just a LITTLE edgy, but FINE I guess this is good-bye," and then he blocked further discussion (because OMG, I would have unloaded on him and I think he knew it.) That was that.

Drama llama ding-dong, don't let the door hit you on the way out.

The biggest hassle, really? The mod and the other admin's post-drama processing. Should we have given him a chance to apologize? My reply, "I'm sorry, but how does one apologize for suggesting killing people is in any way funny?" Also, our private discussion revealed that the others had been PMed by this guy a bunch, in ways that made them uncomfortable. Our other admin wasn't feeling comfortable about "going green" (the indication that you're currently on-line) because they wanted to avoid talking to this troll. 

To that, I said, "I don't know how y'all define harassment, but I feel like I'm looking at it." 

Because if you're so uncomfortable with the way someone is talking to you that you AVOID going to the place you made (the other admin is the founder of the group) something is wrong. AND IT'S NOT WITH YOU.

I also understand the impulse of "What if this guy is just lonely and attention seeking? Didn't we just send him straight to the Nazis of Reddit?" My reply to that was, "Okay, maybe we did, but don't you think he's already been dipping his toes in that cesspool, because it's not like those kinds of memes roll past MY FEED on the regular? You kind of have to already know some bigots to find bigoted humor funny!" And to post it on such a small group? Especially a group where he'd already participated in a "why do you people always have to make everyone gay?" debate, in which we were far more civil than I think we should should have been. So, frankly, we had ALREADY DONE our due diligence to attempt to "educate" this person. The fact that he would drop an anti-Semitic meme in a queer space already tells *me* that this is not someone who needs a whole lot of second chances.

Anyway.

I actually suspect that the other two were worried about backlash. To be fair to them both, they, as I suggested above, are both queer--though they're definitely both in the more marginalized sections of queer than I am, so I get it. Even Shawn asked me, "Are you using a handle on Discord?" I'm not. I'm using my real name. I would not be hard to find. 

But, I've decided that I now know that my t-shirt would read: "Social Justice Main Tank."

Clearly, my job is to put up the shield and march forward to draw the fire so the rest of the team can do their work.






lydamorehouse: (cap and flag)
 ... to try to write about mundane things after Inky's death, but life goes on, I suppose.  

Shawn ended up doing a ton of research into "elderly" cats and discovered that Deliah, who is 16, and Ms. Piggy, who is 18, are considered BEYOND elderly and into geriatric. You can kind of see it on Ms. Piggy, she's been cranky and stiff for some time now, but Deliah? She still acts like a kitten!

Shawn sent me a lot of the articles she'd read and it was comforting to read that we're doing everything right by our older cats. It's absolutely correct to be feeding on demand (small amounts, often,) and looking for foods high in protein and fat.  Of course, this is doing NO GOOD for our fatty orange boy, Buttercup. But at this point, I'm very much looking at our cats and saying "WHATEVER YOU WANT, MY PRECIOUS BABIES."

Today is Imbolc, but my family is going to celebrate tomorrow. Normally, in our tradition, we dedicate ourselves to work with a particular deity for a year. No one in this household has had he wherewithal to do the requisite research, so our plan is to make something yummy for breakfast (I'm thinking cinnamon buns) and spend a little time as a family planning out some of the rituals we all want to do together.  That seems 'close enough' to the spirit of the holiday for us right now.

I made some piroshki for dinner tonight at the urging of my family.  

piroshki on a plate

This is a recipe that Shawn got from her "Recipes North Dakota" FB group. Shawn has the best FB groups. She's in "Liberal Preppers," "Recipes of North Dakota," "Simple Vintage and Homemaking," "Stocking our Shelves," and "Weird Thrift Store Finds."  All my FB groups make me vaguely annoyed, and meanwhile, she's showing me pictures of strange things found at Good Will. To be fair, Shawn spends a LOT of time curating her feed. She has a modest number of friends that she follows and she is very fast with the hide, snooze, block, and unfriend buttons. Meanwhile, I friend anyone. Part of that is because: writer.  I never know who is following me because they've read my books and they just want to know what might be coming out next.

Mason had work today at KAYSC. He said they had an open discussion about various projects they're considering undertaking. It sounded very much like baby's first meeting. He came home and bonded with Shawn about various buzzwords, "fostering synergy" and such like. 

He's now playing D&D on Discord with a bunch of people he's in an amateur Overwatch league team with. I'm so glad he found his people. I have no idea who I'd be if the internet had existed when I was his age.

Otherwise, I spent part of my day going through old DW journal entries updating my tag set. It started because Shawn and I had one of those arguments couple have about the timing of various things in our collective memory. Did this thing happen first, or that other thing? Both of us were SO SURE we were right, and I knew I'd blogged about the events in question.  BUT, it took me forever to figure out how to track down the whole story because I'd been really sloppy with my tagging. So, I spent an hour or so reading through the old entries from 2011 and making the tags consistent.  

It was really funny to watch my comments numbers drop precipitously after I became a Bleach fan.

Ah, speaking of finding one's tribe, if only I'd known about Tumblr back then (or whatever other fan communities existed.)  

Otherwise, it was a quiet day. I've been a bit more spotty with my Spell-a-Day, but I did manage yesterday's. Not much to report, however, just a renewal spell/meditation. 
lydamorehouse: (Bazz-B)
 Do you ever have mornings where one dumb thing sets you off?  

Today, I was a big jerk to my family because, as we were getting ready to leave for the day, I could NOT find the bag that I keep all my pen pal correspondence stuff in. Normally, I wouldn't even be looking for it at 6:45 am, but I had to take Shawn to a dermatology appointment and the idea of sitting in the waiting room staring at the walls annoyed me no end. I thought that if I could at least write a letter or something, it wouldn't feel like wasted time.  I have a book I could read, but I couldn't find that either, because... well, probably because last night I gave away one of my lucky coins to the "good neighbors" that stole my pen at Wyrdsmiths last night, but that's another story which I will get to momentarily.

Suffice to say, I was a grouch-bag about my bag the entire way into to school.  As it happened we arrived to the appointment early enough that Shawn told me that I might as well do some of the errands I was annoyed at not being able to get a jump on, and I even had enough time to go back home and find the stupid bag. 

I got back just as Shawn was finishing, so did I get to write that letter? No.  In fact, when I got home and went to take the bag out of the back seat in order to move it somewhere safe in doors, I managed to spill the contents onto the icy street... possibly ruining all the unused stationary.

Yeah, after that I decided I needed to appease some gods, so the first thing I did was post a cat picture to the internet:



And, so, I posted this with the tag line: "Because everyone needs a cat in a basket today." Now, if I saw someone's picture of their cat doing something cute, I would totally write "Wow!" or "Adorable!" or "Kitty!" in the comments.  It seems kind of a natural response to me.  My friends, apparently, don't think that way. My first comment was a joking tease that maybe bird people don't need a cat in a basket, the second was another tease (a little rougher) with some kind of joke about today, when I could really use a basket! What am I to do with all the stuff that needs a basket?  The last comment so far is, "That cat looks pissed."

I mean, I'm getting happy hearts and likes and whatnot, but literally no one can say anything nice about my cat.

So, those are my friends.

When I could use some cheering up and thought to myself, "Hey, I'll post a nice cat picture so people can tell me how great my cat looks and I can feel better about today," I get a bunch of not terribly funny jokes and "That cat looks pissed."

So I'm going to change my luck again. Back to the bit where I gave up one of my lucky coins to the f-a-i-r-i-e.  Yesterday night, at Wyrdsmiths, I put my pen somewhere and could NOT for the life of me find it again.  I joked that it was stolen by the fairy, but it was weird. Completely gone, it seemed.  Naomi said, "To bad you don't have anything shiny to trade." But I always do, I keep 5 coins in that little, otherwise useless pocket in my jeans. It's something some Feng Shui book told me to do once.  I never worry about losing them because I figure that when I do, I just need to grab another coin and "change my luck." So, I left a coin out on the table. The instant I did, Naomi said, "Oh! I see it!" I had, APPARENTLY, stuck it in the collar of my shirt.

I took the coin back, which might have been my mistake.  I'll have to give them one as I leave today, so make it clear we're square.


lydamorehouse: (Default)
 Yes, I know it's discombobulate, but blame Bugs Bunny. I always say "discom-boob-ulate." It's funnier that way.

Speaking of preemptive explanations, I have decided that the Internet is a terrible parent. I've been on the "Innerwebs" since its inception. If, several years ago, you asked me if the internet is destroying communication, I would have laughed at you and called you an alarmist.  However, the thing that I'm noticing more and more as we get entire generations who have grown up communicating via text is a tendency to assume the worst of the OP (the original poster.) Today, for instance, I got a comment on one of my fics that was a perfectly reasonable response to an author's note that I'd written several years ago that seems, in retrospect, a bit tone-deaf regarding genderqueer/gender fluid folks. This person probably think they took a neutral tone, but it came off as "The thing you need to understand...", which made me want to knee-jerk with doubling-down and yelling "$%!@ OFF."

Luckily, while I wrote a bit of that initial reaction in reply, I'm used to the fact that most of my fic readers are 12 (like, for real).  So, I try not to start with the swears. I try to say, "thank you for the information" and go from there.  Luckily, I also thought to re-read my intro and spotted WHY this person thought I was either a bigot or a moron.  THEN, I was able to go back and write, "Ah-ha! I get your point now, I will fix this so I don't look like a raging moron/bigot." 

And, yeah, I get that *this* is on me from the start. It's not the offended person's responsibility to treat *me* with respect that I don't seem to deserve. In fact, they mostly did.  

It's just that it really strikes me that, at least, for myself, going forward, I would like to pledge to recognize that even intelligent, wanting-to-do-right-by-everyone people like myself have this knee-jerk reaction to being "called out." For myself, so long as the person on the other end has not made it super clear that they are a NAZI in need of punching, I'm going to start with the expectation that the mistake was honest and maybe just soften my initial blow with something as simple as, "I don't know when you wrote this fic, but..." or "Maybe you already know this, but your introduction makes it seem like maybe you don't..."?  

I guess my point is, is that the internet did not teach us how to have a constructive argument.

You *can* have CONSTRUCTIVE arguments on the internet, though.  I've had, actually, a number of amazing, eye-opening arguments on the internet, specifically on AO3 over mistakes I've made in my fics. I learned, the hard way (by hurting someone), why trigger warnings are actually important. In those arguments, I had to do a lot of hard work. I had to let go of my ego and really listen and that's super-hard to do when you feel massively guilty. I also managed to have a conversation on Facebook about women in science fiction without having to go nuclear on the trolls. It can be done. It just takes a lot more commitment than we're used to giving anyone on the internet.

Anyway, truth is, I'm writing about this, because I'm avoiding a bunch of other writing I really need to either do or decide NOT to do.  
lydamorehouse: (Default)
Wow, I had one of those weekends where I totally disappeared from the universe. Sorry, here I am. How are you?

I think I got buried in the snow. It was cool, wasn't it? After slipping and sliding our way to Mason's second to last swim class, Mason and I played snowballs. Much wet fun was had.

I've been having dreams about forgetting my flight back from Europe and driving without breaks. I think that means I need to get more writing done. Or I should check to make sure I'm not forgetting other gigs.

Okay, Mason's bored now (he has off for Thanksgiving, etc.) and we went back to out old coffee shop, and for some reason he gets bored here a LOT quicker than at the new place. Plus the prices have gone up. I won't be coming back here any time soon, alas.

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