It’s Sunday night and I just made what feels like a horrifying social blunder, with another writer no less. Online of course. Where all the worst social blunders happen.
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I will preface this with a description of “the process” when you’re writing a novel seriously (it may happen with other things too, but my primary experience of it is with novels, which are long and complicated and take weeks or months or years and numerous drafts to finish .)

The process is what happens after you write something and while you’re working on it, making revisions, and especially when you look back at it or show it to anyone. You’ll initially feel some way about it, shortly followed by the opposite feeling. So if you feel bad about it, you will soon feel really good about it. Depending on how serious you are and how important this book is to you, you’ll likely repeat this process over and over.

So an author on Twitter said she’d read the chapter she’d just finished writing and it wasn’t too bad. To which I said, in front of God and everyone, “Ah, that stage of the process.” Sigh. Why do I do this? Is it because I watch too many sitcoms featuring teenagers who are always making social blunders or is it because I’m a big loser who can’t think past a tweet? Anyway…

Remember a couple of weeks ago I said I thought I was losing my mind twice during the writing of this novel? Well, it was because of an extreme experience of “the process” combined with the fact that my protagonist has weird experiences that she feels mean she’s losing her mind.
The thing is, on Friday night when I couldn’t sleep, I realized that it was because of this process and allowing myself to face the vertigo-inducing ups and downs that at last I was able to not only finish a novel, but to write something potentially really good.

In around 2008, I was in a car with Molly Gloss, who was my advisor at graduate school and she told me it was normal for writers to feel alternately really good about their writing, like “this is the best thing that has every been written in the history of the world.” And then about the same piece of writing, “this is the worst, my deplorable flaming dumpster in the universe.” Fifteen years later, and I’m just now getting that this is not optional. It’s “the process.” It’s what happens if you know what you’re doing. Novels are not just 100K words pasted together in space. They’re (or at least they have the potential to be) the Sagrada Familia of writing. If you say you don’t think the architect and builders of that thing had momentary freak outs, you have got to be kidding me.

Novels don’t just have to make sense. They have to induce a trance in the reader. You’re writing an elaborate set of words that will crack the code of the human psyche, inducing visions of characters, places, and events that never happened. Have you seen that they can now take pictures of brain images using fMRI scans? So if you do this right, science would be able to take photos of the images your book conjured inside readers’ brains. Okay, this hasn’t been studied, but hypothetically, it could happen.

​I don’t think people know about the required interplay of conscious and subconscious minds when they start writing. They think it’s just putting words on a screen, then they learn about various craft elements and if they get serious, they do a lot of reading and try to figure out how various books work. Well, that’s what I did, anyway. But lately, I’ve realized why it took me so long to actually do the thing I’d been helping other people to do for years. I avoided the doubt, keeping to the parts of writing I felt great about. That dark place, full of doubt, is terrifying to me. And not just to me. the thing is, it doesn’t seem to be optional. Writers have to court self doubt. It’s no wonder certain novel series never get finished. The better and more addictive and imaginative a novel is, the more the writer will be required to endure these ups and downs. At least for me that’s how it is. And from what I’ve seen, it happens to most writers. I can’t speak for all writers, but those I know who’ve succeeded, well…
I have to wonder if it wouldn’t help us all to know that this is the process, this is how our minds figure out the complex underlying aspects of longform fiction that hold them together as Story and as the code for a mental movie. It’s magic. It’s not easy. But no one tells you when you start (and even if they do, you probably won’t fully understand) that there’s a cost to this particular magic. The better you are at it, the more you’ll dig into the inner workings of the mind — your reader’s mind, yes, but first of all your own mind.

Maybe an analogous explanation would be learning to jump out of an airplane. Here’s what you do, the mechanics of putting on and securing and double-checking your parachute, the measures to keep you from flying into the plane’s engines, etc. I’ve never done it, but I feel like if you ask how to deal with the very real fear that happens when you meet the reality of falling thousands of feet, they’ll give you advice about how to keep it together. But no one does that with writers (that I know of). No one says, “You’re going to be scared and feel a lot of self-doubt when you actually get close. And here are some ways to deal with it. It might feel as if you’re losing your mind. It won’t just be pressure from outside. Your own subconscious is going to try to derail you. Just know that this is the process. Trust the process. If you feel horrific doubt and lie awake at night terrified of what you’ve done with your words, you’re probably a fiction writer.”
Rule one: When another writer is in the up phase, never remind them it’s just a stage. The up stage is how we get through the down stage. Cling to it like a parachute.
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To the author I made the mistake of doing exactly that to, I’m very sorry. I was just surprised to see that even someone who I recently saw named as one of our greatest authors is having these ups and downs. But yeah, of course you do. It’s the nature of the thing, isn’t it?

A couple of weeks ago I discovered the film ‘Yesterday,’ a 2019 British/American project that imagines what it might be like if suddenly all the music of The Beatles had been lost to memory. You may wonder how it could be that I’d never heard of this film, not even once, but that’s a story for another day. (Written with a cheeky grin!)
Apparently the key to enjoying this film is not to have ever seen the overwhelming advertising campaign. Advertisers take note.

I absolutely adored the film. So much so that I watched it five times the first week and a couple more times the second week. I’d like to tell you I’ve gotten all the watches out of my system, but I would probably be lying. I may watch it a few more times, a bit more leisurely.
This film is one of a handful I’ve seen that asks the question how would things be different if we changed one thing?
It’s a similar idea to what if this person who is otherwise ordinary was unordinary in one particular way? I’ve just written a novel in which I came up with the idea by asking myself that very question. What if we took something that even now we’re skeptical about and gave it to someone a hundred or more years ago? How would it affect their life?
It’s like that game Jenga, with the wooden pieces stacked on top of each other, if you pull out the crucial one the whole thing falls down. Some pieces do nothing. In ‘Yesterday’ the protagonist discovers some other small things have changed. There’s no Coca Cola, only Pepsi. No one cares. There are no cigarettes. No one seems to notice. There’s no Harry Potter. No one is devastated. I guess it would’ve been the same with The Beatles’ music, if the protagonist hadn’t remembered.
So go ahead. Think of the world at a particular time and change one thing. Give a person a special gift (in Yesterday it’s his memory of The Beatles along with the ability to sing and play the piano and guitar).
In general, stories hinge on one thing. If you’ve ever had something go terribly wrong, you have probably spent time afterward thinking about what one thing could’ve prevented it. If only you’d arrived five minutes faster, so if you hadn’t stopped at that Seven Eleven to get a soda. If only you hadn’t asked your friend to come with you  If only you’d stayed home.
It does kind of make you think about what one thing we could change that would save the world.
In London, on a corner where I was frequently asked which way to the Maida Vale Tube station, unexpectedly a sign appeared that pointed the direction of the Tube station. There was no evidence whatsoever that it was a new sign. It was planted in the pavement (sidewalk, for Americans) and yet the cement looked just as weathered as the rest of it. The people at the doctor’s office a hundred meters away said it had always been there.
I blame that sign for a lot of things that happened later that year. It was 2016.

I chose this photo because it amuses me to think a photo of a light bulb lying on a desk with writing supplies would ever be the right photo. The mind boggles.

I'd like to start getting in the habit of writing something daily about writing and life and, you know, the world. Although I would call it "this weird and crumbling dimension." How do we get out of here alive? And not just alive, but whole and happy and well and together? Because getting out alone or with a few friends would be a pretty crappy solution.

This seems like sci fi. As someone who writes sci fi told me a decade ago, it's really hard to write sci fi now because hey, look out your window. In the past, when I imagined I could write sci fi, I had a house with no windows for security and privacy reasons. In the place of windows there were computerized and coordinated faux windows around the house. They played different versions of the same reality. There was no actual window, just a wall-mounted flat screen set into the wall with all the trappings of a window, like curtains and perhaps some automated lights that came on when "the sun" was bright and a small fan that made the curtains move when "the wind" blew. I recall that the bedroom window looked out on a grassy field with a black and white milk cow grazing in it. Mountains in the background.

They came in sets, these faux windows. A program you could buy that would put you anywhere you wanted to be. You gave it the place, time and number of windows plus their orientation. Downtown London, for example. Even downtown London in the past. You could "time travel" and place travel. I suppose you could have had a set that would put you on Mars or inside a fantasy world from a novel.

As cool as I still think this would be, in a way I already have one of these. And so do you. It's called imagination and I believe it's the only way we're getting out of here. I don't mean we just have to pretend we're somewhere else. I mean, we have to imagine what the possibilities are then act on them. This is where genre writers have an advantage over a lot of scientists and politicians and those who are part of, well, normality. As Albert Einstein said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge."

They say, "That's not possible," and we say?

"Here. Hold this."

So get busy, y'all.

This year, I plan to take this blog to Substack, and see what happens.

I've been advised both ways - do it and don't do it.

On the basis of the fact that I've had the blog away from Substack for a long time, I'm going to do it and see if I can commit to a blogging schedule. I'm still deciding on what I'll write though, so it  might take a little while longer.

Other things I hope will happen this year:
My novel will ... do something. I don't think it will be pubbed this year because publishing works at glacial speed. But hopefully I'll at least have a pub date.

Tim and I will visit Paris. Not just because my novel is set there.

I will get nourished.

Some other cool stuff.

I have finally written a novel of my own.

I'm letting people read it for me now. Friends and writers and Tim -- oh my!

As an editor I'm aware of how much work goes into writing a novel and I don't think knowing that means I'll get off with any less work. In fact, it probably means I'm more of a perfectionist. Or something. I know perfection is impossible, but as Tim, my writer/editor husband says, "You just keep working on it until there's nothing left to do that's worth the effort." and also "We'll know when it's ready."

What is it about? You'll find out, I hope.

At the beginning of September, I wrote here about how Twitter was secretly marking my account as potentially sensitive. I say "secretly" because never told me. they never gave me a chance to appeal. And there was no sensitive content  ever. The only thing I could figure out was that they didn't like it that I made my own content warning for a link to a Kicckstarter campaign for a graphic novel that included shibari, a form of rope bondage based pm a Japanese style.
 
There was nothing sensitive in that tweet either. You had to click a link to get to anything remotely sensitive. I just wanted people to know what they were going to see, which I should add had all the naked bits blurred out anyway.
 
So today for the first time I can actually see that all my images and videos from YouTube! Have this at the bottom.

  From the other side, where viewers are, it looks like this, a friend informed me.

Every single thing I've posted today with an image or even a linked YouTube video (of a song for a friend) has been flagged like this.

It's starting to feel very personal, since I've never posted nude or violent content. I don't even retweet it. Twitter has long been my most used social media platform. I need it to work.

It's done by AI, right? As soon as they realize, they'll fix it, right?

Twitter is easily my most used social media platform. I have in the past often referred to it as ' my beloved Twitter". Lately though, I've discovered that if someone without a twitter account would try to go directly to my profile, they would get a content warning about potentially sensitive content and they would be asked if they were sure they wanted to go to my page.

I know this because someone reported it to me and when I logged out and went there, that's what I saw. I also saw that if I changed my settings to get a warning about sensitive content, i.e. photos or videos that contain nudity, sexual stuff or violence, every single one of my photos and videos are marked as potentially sensitive and hidden. (They are mostly cats and AI art. There is never violence or nudity. Except cats or other animals not wearing clothes.)

When I tried to get this fixed, (my own option to change it is greyed out), I discovered that this is not something Twitter allows you to appeal with them. They never warned me. I can see it happened when I tweeted a link to a Kickstarter for a friend's graphic novel. They claim you will lose your ability to unlock the sensitive warning if you repeatedly post sensitive photos or videos without marking them. I never did that and even this post there was no photo or video and I wrote in the tweet that it contained consensual kink. I suspect that's why they did this to my account, even though no one else got this for just posting it. I'm baffled and bemused.

Anyway, if you're new to my Twitter and it tries to keep you back for sensitive content, just uncheck your sensitivity box. (The worst you'll find on my account is retweeted news updates, which to me are often the stuff of nightmares. I try to keep it to a minimum._) And typos. Sadly, I make a fair few typos. Where is the edit button, Twitter?

Chilly, Athena and Floof. Floof is a toy I bought for baby Hermes. They've all adopted him now.

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