![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Mar. 21st, 2024 05:20 amThis post comes in two parts.
Part one:
Everybody feels weird about their childhood, right? That's like, a universal thing. One of the downsides of my parents moving nearby is they feel the need to just randomly drop off a box of stuff from childhood, without warning.
This latest one had a few toys that I parceled out to the kids, but a whole lot of things that fall into the I Would Rather Not categories. Old pictures, journals, stuff from high school and middle school. I don't want to go through this but I would also feel bad just chucking it all in the bin. I did that with my yearbooks when they dropped those on me in Arizona, which felt weirdly liberating.
Any suggestions on what to do with it would be welcome. I could burn the journals, at least. That might be freeing.
But it really does feel like they just left a box of hand grenades and some of them might still be live and some not, but do I really want to risk sorting the good from bad?
It's also frustrating because like, I spent my 20s getting over so much of the stuff represented in that box. So why does it still cause me pain?
Speaking of pain (a neat segue into Part Two:)
I can't shake this malaise that has formed like a crust around everything writing-related. I have stepped back so much from most of the publishing world and most of the arbitrary deadlines and rules I was setting for myself, but always kept one toe in the proverbial publishing waters. Partially because it's hard to not know what's going on and partially because I really wanted to keep going with the queer books list.
But I should've recognized I needed a break in 2023 when the List became a monthly struggle instead of the mainly once or twice a year work of joy it had been. The downfall of Twitter really made managing and creating the List infinitely harder. I went from mostly just asking on Twitter and getting all the books to having to scour Edelweiss (a publishing hub where publishers share their catalogues) and squint sideways at reviews. When authors themselves aren't the ones loudly and happily telling me about their queer books, it becomes a lot more of a chore, who knew.
I just didn't feel like I could stop yet, and I didn't want to stop. I just wanted to magically have the many extra hours it was taking to create the List and have time to write. But I couldn't do both, wasn't doing both, so. I'm allowing myself to take a break. I can always put the list together at the end of the year, like I did the first time. Or just - gasp - let it go entirely. SFF appears to have firmly shifted into a queerer territory in general now and the once impossible to suss as gay is now loudly touted as such.
IDK, I'm not making an Official Decision on that just yet. But I am going to step away from all of it: Bluesky, the List, any discords or servers I'm on, any publishing podcasts or news. I need a clean break. Maybe, maybe then, I can finally heal.
Part one:
Everybody feels weird about their childhood, right? That's like, a universal thing. One of the downsides of my parents moving nearby is they feel the need to just randomly drop off a box of stuff from childhood, without warning.
This latest one had a few toys that I parceled out to the kids, but a whole lot of things that fall into the I Would Rather Not categories. Old pictures, journals, stuff from high school and middle school. I don't want to go through this but I would also feel bad just chucking it all in the bin. I did that with my yearbooks when they dropped those on me in Arizona, which felt weirdly liberating.
Any suggestions on what to do with it would be welcome. I could burn the journals, at least. That might be freeing.
But it really does feel like they just left a box of hand grenades and some of them might still be live and some not, but do I really want to risk sorting the good from bad?
It's also frustrating because like, I spent my 20s getting over so much of the stuff represented in that box. So why does it still cause me pain?
Speaking of pain (a neat segue into Part Two:)
I can't shake this malaise that has formed like a crust around everything writing-related. I have stepped back so much from most of the publishing world and most of the arbitrary deadlines and rules I was setting for myself, but always kept one toe in the proverbial publishing waters. Partially because it's hard to not know what's going on and partially because I really wanted to keep going with the queer books list.
But I should've recognized I needed a break in 2023 when the List became a monthly struggle instead of the mainly once or twice a year work of joy it had been. The downfall of Twitter really made managing and creating the List infinitely harder. I went from mostly just asking on Twitter and getting all the books to having to scour Edelweiss (a publishing hub where publishers share their catalogues) and squint sideways at reviews. When authors themselves aren't the ones loudly and happily telling me about their queer books, it becomes a lot more of a chore, who knew.
I just didn't feel like I could stop yet, and I didn't want to stop. I just wanted to magically have the many extra hours it was taking to create the List and have time to write. But I couldn't do both, wasn't doing both, so. I'm allowing myself to take a break. I can always put the list together at the end of the year, like I did the first time. Or just - gasp - let it go entirely. SFF appears to have firmly shifted into a queerer territory in general now and the once impossible to suss as gay is now loudly touted as such.
IDK, I'm not making an Official Decision on that just yet. But I am going to step away from all of it: Bluesky, the List, any discords or servers I'm on, any publishing podcasts or news. I need a clean break. Maybe, maybe then, I can finally heal.
