This was the week where everything had to get done.

(CW: weight loss and dieting)

After the previous week’s chaos, my boss had me take off Monday and Friday this week. Those days off were much needed: I needed a lot of sleep (likely a side-effect of my diet – see below) and my chores had fallen behind. Next week could be a return to the intensity I saw the week before, or it could finally even out.

This has been, in recent memory, the busiest week of my professional career. I spent every workday in crunch mode for a site launch, handling hourly emails of bugs, copy edits, and additions. By Friday I was so brain-fried that I slept for 12+ hours that night.

Oh, but work hasn’t been the half of it, either.

As some might have noticed, I made my Twitter profile private. This is part of a more general withdraw from Twitter as a whole. There are a few reasons for this: 1) I’m sick of spam bots following me and DM-ing me when I follow back, 2) my timeline is reduced to people shouting at each other, and 3) misinformation seems to spread more readily on Twitter alongside the true stuff, which I’ve fallen victim to on occasion.

Since my many (haha!) readers may want to know how my life is going, I’m going to start a weekly update schedule on general life events and observations. I’ll still post occasional essays/rambling screeds on different topics, but the weekly updates will be labelled differently.

In a way, it’s a return to how I blogged when I was on LiveJournal years ago. Of course, my LJ was private, so everything posted here will have to pass the “would I tweet about this?” test.

That said, how’s my life going?

Not long after I posted about “The Moral Arc of the Universe,” I realized how nihilistic I sounded. There have also been much better explorations of that quote than my own musings. I’ve decided to revisit that quote.

Trump, beyond his personal failings, represents the union of two awful movements: post-modern “truthiness” and 21st-century fascism, aka the “alt-right.” These aren’t merely typical, spectrum-graphed American political positions, but existential threats to a secular, multi-cultural society. “Truthiness,” the warping of truth in the pursuit of entertainment, breaks a belief in objectivity. Fascism punishes the other, either conforming everyone to the same mold or casting them out, metaphorically or literally. Trump, an entertainer, distorts the truth for political power, and allies himself with far-right movements that are reviving xenophobia in the 21st century.

How many times have I put aside/sorta quit/tried to walk away from writing? I could list practically every other blog I’ve posted here. It was almost six months ago that I wrote “Writing Shouldn’t Hurt”, about how awful the grind had become.

(As it turns out, the short break I took has helped a lot. I recharged my batteries, finished the draft of Altars and Acolytes, and I’m now halfway through a new short story, my first in several years. I also found some success, which I’ll be happy to tell you about when an official announcement is made.)

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. - Theodore Parker, by way of Martin Luther King, Jr.

I’m not sure I believe this anymore. It’s a common refrain among my fellow UUs after the events of this year, a reminder that, like love, justice takes time and justice takes work. But I don’t know if there is any inherent moral arc of the universe. God is inscrutable, possessing something beyond our conception of consciousness and morality, so how can we know if our conception of justice fits?

Final count: 17,746 words. I may not have “won” NaNoWriMo this year, but in a larger sense, I accomplished exactly what I wanted.

My draft of Altars and Acolytes, aka Oh, How I Wish Stories Wrote Themselves, is done. Still needs work, but the story’s coherent, it follows an outline, and successive edits won’t be nearly the slog that this draft was. I wrote maybe 13K to get to the end. My plan of throwing out everything and writing the third act from scratch actually worked.

As of this morning, I’m just shy of 10,000 words written for Altars and Acolytes, aka Please Just Let Me Finish Writing You: The Erik Gern Story. In any other NaNoWriMo, this would be not-so-great progress, but for this book, it’s been amazing.

The strategy of throwing out my last act and rewriting it from scratch has paid off. The chapters have been substantially easier to write with a strong outline, as I’ve been able to finish about one per day. I still get the luxury of minor course corrections, such as changing the milieu of a scene from Point A to Point B, without worrying if it’s going to slow me down too much.

I’ve been bullied at all stages of my life. In elementary school, one boy set his sights on me after I ended a phone call early to watch Deep Space Nine. He teased me endlessly. The advice of my stepfather was to punch him. So I did.

He punched back. I didn’t know what to do.

I fell into a bad crowd in high school for a month or two: teenagers who decided to play on my naive, socialized nature. I was almost literally rescued by the theater crowd.