northstargalaxy

Rogan: normally I don’t dream journal here, but recently there have been a couple I want to remember.

This morning, I woke up from a dream that I remember nothing of, only that it had a singularly beautiful (and reproducible) rendition of Amazing Grace, Mac’s favorite hymn. It was instrumental, performed on fiddle and... either another violin or a viola, playing accompaniment. Unlike the classic gospel style I’m familiar with (and which Mac mostly sticks to), this was played with a swing beat, folk or bluegrass style. I’m still humming it, trying to fix it in my head like the other dream songs.

(I swear the first version of Daniel Johnston’s “Devil Town” I ever heard was placed simply on the piano with vocals. I’ve never found it, and it was the best version. Drives me crazy.)

The other dream was a few days ago. It was one of those dreams where the vessel’s lineage alters all share a body like in waking life, but the others have their own corporeal bodies. Us alters were with our dad, Sneak doing gymnastic tricks, while Dad took photos of us. Even though nothing bad was happening, I kept feeling like something was wrong, I’d stopped talking to Dad for some reason, something it was very important to remember...

And then I remembered Mac, and immediately I knew I was supposed to be with him instead. I tore myself from the Dad photography scene and instantly found myself instead in the middle of me and Mac’s wedding. It wasn’t like the real one we’d had in 2009; we wore fancy suits in blue and gray, rather than our black rented tuxes, and we were outdoors, surrounded by ladies in saris doing a riotous, silly dance of joy. But the joy in my heart and Mac’s face (fifteen years ago! His hair was so short and his face was so young!) were the same as they were then, and that was all that mattered.

Rogan: two years ago, I got hit with a six-month period of memory work unprecedented in the ten years we’d been doing it. ( Because it involved someone good, and now he’s getting a project. )

Rogan: we rewatched Glass Onion with our roomies, because I felt a need to read about an idiot tech billionaire getting his royal comeuppance, for SOME REASON.

( a post about a specific kind of stupid, full of spoilers because we assume you’ve seen it already )

Rogan: I like doing sensitivity reads.

I don’t get those jobs super often, and I wouldn’t want them to be my main thing (there’s a reason it’s expensive), but I’ve discovered I really enjoy hearing other people’s ideas and acting as a sounding board to help bring out their best! It makes me happy. The people who hire me bring so much heart and hard work to the table, and they often have really creative ideas that I never would’ve thought of! It’s wonderful when that happens.

There can be a lot of anxiety around sensitivity reading, I think. There’s this image of going to some knowledgeable person who tells you self-righteously how wrong and awful you are. But that’s not how I see it; I see it as a collaboration, me working to help someone do what they’re already doing. We state our hard limits on the webpage, and by the time someone’s gone through all the trouble of reading that, contacting us, and paying me, they’ve taken that into account. (And if they didn’t, it’ll come up long before money’s changed hands.) And if it’s not a hard limit for me, my reaction is generally curiosity and excitement. More multi in the arts! Woo yeah!

I definitely used to be more sanctimonious about this, long before I did this for pay. (Indeed, part of why I CREATED that “hire me” page was, I wanted to stop people from asking me to survey their Jekyll/Hyde murderer multi characters for free. It worked!) But I’ve mellowed as I’ve aged, in large part because I have read enough good multi stuff that I no longer feel that starving urge for Perfection Or Nothing. You don’t need the One Perfect Story when you have a bunch of good enough stories already! I have Paprika, and the Book of Autonomancy, and Mefisto in Onyx, and all the rest of it. I’m no longer culturally starving! (It’s also a nice side effect of Sneak running pluralstories.)

I also have more realistic expectations of what fiction can and cannot do in the world. Nobody who has hired me has been a blockbuster creator of the next Sybil. They’re folks who make nice little webcomics or play D&D. They are not responsible for single-handedly removing ableism from our society via the power of story. Come on. They don’t want or need a politically expedient parable of plurality, and neither do I. It’s the friction of our experience and hopes meeting reality that gives stories their charge, that grate of imperfection and frailty that comes with being a being. The agony of the relationships in Pipe Up! make it way more compelling than if the singlet friend was perfectly, utterly accepting right off the bat, or if he was just not worth the emotional investment. But that messiness? Oh man, that messiness makes it POWERFUL.

My job isn’t to remove the mess. It’s to go, “ooooh, you know what would make this mess EVEN STRONGER...”

This was the winner of this month's fan poll! We appreciate that in these bullshit times, we can bring you the boobs and smoochery y'all clearly so desire.

( Images behind cut! Boobs are a state of mind, really... )