A thing no one talks about re: ADHD is that you can't... gain experience, the way other people do.
I don't mean you can't get good at things through repeated practice. You can do that, I have done that, but I don't trust it.
I was driving this morning and thinking about how I have never developed the blasé contempt for it most people seem to despite never having caused an accident in 20 years because my sense of time is such that I might as well have been driving for a week. I'm a good, safe driver, but I do not have a heap of confidence in my driving despite having regularly done it for two decades because my sense of time is such that those two decades may as well not have happened.
I finished editing a novel today. When I publish it, it will be the 64th novel I have published in the last 10 years, not counting ghostwritten work. You'd think after a decade and 63 novels I'd be confident that I was capable of writing, editing, and publishing a novel—even be confident about the timeline for this—but no. No, I feel like I'm doing it for the first time, every time, and I was surprised to have finished the editing at all, let alone on time. Because those other 63 novels were published in a past I have a vague at best concept of. I have a record that says it happened but I do not feel it.
I cannot trust my future behaviour because for me there is functionally no past. I know it occurred, I have records, but I don't feel it the way people without this kind of memory issue do. I feel inexperienced at everything I've ever done and I cannot accurately estimate my skill level at anything, particularly not on the fly.
I don't have a solution to this I just find it an incredibly frustrating phenomenon.
your ilya mental health crisis as a foreigner post has sososo many layers for me as a fellow eastern european clubrat stuck in Bumfuck, North America. your entire life you're well aware of The West but it's translated glimpses and your friend's cousin's cool new chuck taylors. the very mark of success is going there then coming back with a conviction that your own country is better. then you get here, and it's just... a blank slate of a country. it's saturday morning and people wake up with their spouse and run and walk their purebred dogs and eat surgary breakfasts around the time you're used to turning in for the night. other cultures come here and mingle and fuse but this happens in specific pockets. you're like SURELY i'm missing something, surely there's more to people's lives and aspirations than nuclear families in two-story houses. why is everyone grimacing at me and why is the server constantly asking me if i like everything. why is everyone dressed like they gave up on ever looking good. why does no one want to leave, aren't you ashamed of being so still? and you can't go back it's WORSE back home but you feel insane here. it's not just a language barrier, you feel fundamentally disconnected from the people around you and like you have to learn a new spectrum of human expression just to convey the american equivalent of the emotion you're having. it's not home but home isn't home either anymore so why do you feel like gnawing off your own leg to escape a trap even though you don't have anywhere else to go. at least this is what i project onto #myilya
i need to think about this for the next 3-6 months. i will say that this is not unlike the experience of being a born and raised american and moving from a big city to the midwest and the suburbs. you live like that? on purpose? i am going to drive my car as fast as i can into a tree.
and then i think about my grandmother who survived genocide and several wars and more loss and trauma than can really be described, who learned as a child to identify planes by their sound to know if she should find a shelter or not. and how at age 28 after 3 continents and 3 countries and 3 new languages she got to the suburbs of illinois and what a relief she felt spending the rest of her life in boredom, in blandness, in mediocrity. her whole house is carpeted. terrible, awful, unforgivable things have happened in that house. but at least it all was soft. i think to her, sometimes all you can do is pick the quieter violence.
for real though, if anyone has a good heated rivalry discord that's not too huge but has like, channels where writers talk about their writing, where maybe somebody would want to help me talk through this wip that is refusing to slouch toward wherever to be born etc, i would really
well, idk.
i guess i will whine about it here.
There are two major WIPs both refusing to cooperate. one of them is a big long thing in continuity with all my other stuff, and it got hung up on me trying to insert Plot and then realizing that i couldn't make it realistic or plausible. i had a new idea for it but it's also ambitious, and i just. don't. know how much Ambition i can actually pull off. Moving parts and such are within my abilities, technically, but without any external motivators it's hard to muster the oomph because it takes So Much Brain and i don't have that much brain.
The other one I started as a kind of cracky thing, and i wrote like 50k of it and it was pretty good stuff, some chewy angst. so i finally was like fuck it, i'll publish this one, and started looking at it more closely.
but like. so i wrote it really straightforwardly, just doing POV sections from anyone who I thought might know what was going on.
On reread, it works best if I strip out all of Ilya's POV and do it from Shane's instead, because Shane has absolutely no fucking idea what's going on, and it's much more exciting to reveal everything from his POV. He's like, sad, and anxious, and confused, but he has absolutely no idea how bad things really are. (Of course, most of the suspense will be removed by my tagging the fic properly, but that can't be helped.)
The problem is, of course, that only Ilya knows what's going on, and so only Ilya has like, a lot of the really juicy revelations. He's in a fucking SAW trap, and Shane is only finding out about it in horrifying dribs and drabs here and there. Which works great for the initial reveals. I had the bright idea of putting some of it in David Hollander's POV because he knows even less than Shane, which makes it even more exciting. But now that I'm deep in the weeds of this thing, having excised all of Ilya's POV, there's just a bunch of stuff we don't know, and there's one really great scene from Ilya's POV that makes a bunch of stuff really clear, but it rests on the previous Ilya POV scenes I removed. So either I have to frontload this scene with a bunch of minor details that I'd earlier established in Ilya's deleted POV scenes, or I have to excise this scene too, and let it go unreported what Ilya is feeling at this point.
Which I suspect will flatten him maybe too much. He's weirdly uncooperative, unreactive, skittish, unrewarding, and he's going to have a really explosive emotional revelation at some point, and if we've had absolutely zero insight into his POV at that juncture it might kind of all feel like a non-sequitur. Like, oh, this is a story about found family, how quaint, how cute, so fuzzy, and then Ilya drives a semi-truck through it with the horn blaring and a huge sign painted on the side that says I BELIEVE MYSELF FUNDAMENTALLY UNDESERVING OF LOVE, which would be entertaining but I can imagine might not exactly follow on from what the Hollanders' warm fuzzy POV has been carefully building.
Also I had a bunch of stuff from Wiebe's POV that I've also excised, and I might have to put some of it back, if only for him not to be a total deus ex machina. Like, this would have ended in disaster, but don't worry, this guy who's had almost zero lines turns out to be miraculously keyed-in and great out of nowhere, no fear! (mm is this wiebe driving a tow truck after ilya's semi with the yakety sax theme playing and a banner flying that says YOU CAN BE LOVED SHUT UP? about as impactful, maybe.)
(in my mind the Hollanders have scattered like bowling pins at this point but are weeble-wobbling around so it's ok)
So. I have a bunch of work to do on this and it's really unrewarding, as slogs go, because all of the really juicy stuff is Ilya's POV which I loved writing and also am going to delete. :(
I guess I just cut it all out and see if the thing holds together without it. But. Sad, because I wanted to publish something because I'm lonely, lol.
I could just put chapter one up. Maybe I'll do that. Maybe that will give me the energy to finish slogging? IDK man.
I also have a bunch of stuff from Bood's POV that I'm almost certain I'll never get to use and that's just a shame. There needs to be more in this fandom about Bood, who is actually Ilya's ride or die bro. (I have Hopes for S2...)
(Bood is setting the bowling pins back up. he's doing his best.)
Anyway. Here is a bit that I am probably deleting, but haven't figured out yet how to replace.
“Yes, [Ilya,]” David said. “[...] I’m sorry we haven’t known you before this. I’m really looking forward to getting to know you. You must be really special, to have been so important to Shane for so long.”
That poked right through all the apathy and sliced Ilya’s guts right open, so he sat there for a moment shocked at how much it hurt. Oh he had not at all been braced for it. “Ha,” he managed eventually, “maybe.”
“Oh no,” David said. Ilya must not have controlled his tone that well. “That didn’t land the way I was hoping. I meant it genuinely. We know Shane pretty well, so the fact that he didn’t tell us about you means you were something he was guarding pretty fiercely.”
“Or ashamed of,” Ilya said, too hurt to keep his mouth shut. Fuck. Well, too late. “I don’t think you should presume his motivations. Unless he’s said something to you he hasn’t to me.”
“He hasn’t,” David said, slow and deliberate. “But, Ilya, I just don’t think he’s the kind of guy who’d be like that. I’d be really shocked if he’d said anything cruel like that to you.”
“Mm,” Ilya said, “he would probably do many things that might shock you."
anyway i guess i'm just whining but it did help to envision the semi truck and the tow truck and the bowling pins so thanks y'all.
So the Shedd Aquarium here in Chicago just took a delivery of four beluga whales rescued from a shuttered zoo in Ontario. The trade in "show" marine mammals is pretty barbaric generally and hopefully is on the way out but in the meantime we have to look after the ones that are already here, and there are many charming aspects to this story. These include:
One: the four Belugas we just got were chosen to travel together because of their deep bond, like Hobbits in Lord of the Rings or something
Two: "I believe I Can Fly" playing gently in the background
oh my god this is how i'm finding out that Marineland is, thank god, gone, but you know i will never ever get the stupid fucking jingle out of my head.
which did in fact contain the line everyone loves the belugas! which did not rhyme or scan with anything else
it was the worst jingle
i'm glad the belugas are going somewhere safe
i haven't watched tv in like ten years so i haven't heard the jingle in that long at least but. oh it's in there. i'll never be free.
OK i should write about my vacation. i keep not doing that but like, i reread this blog and it's really helpful for my shit-ass memory to write down things i've done. so.
Here Is A Brief Discussion Of My Vacation. Part One: Amsterdam
The trip was partly to celebrate Dude's mom's 75th birthday, although I think she's actually 76 now. it doesn't really matter. we had originally wanted to travel to Latvia, where her parents emigrated from, in 2020, but first Covid and then the outbreak of war in Ukraine scared us off. This was the last chance, though, as the Sole Grandchild is now 18, and will be a freshman in college in September, and won't really have any free time anymore.
He already doesn't, though. He and his mom and dad (dude's older sister and her husband) live in California, and he plays a very high level of competition in a sport which he's going to continue into college, and he had a tournament. So these guys embarked upon a fifteen-day European vacation fresh off a week-long tournament in Florida.
On the upside, it's shorter to fly from Florida to Europe than it is to fly from California, so. On the downside, christ almighty. Good thing they have good house-sitters.
So we were to meet up in Amsterdam. But the flight that Dude and his mom and I were taking from Buffalo to JFK got cancelled and couldn't be replaced. So we had to push off our departure almost 24 hours. It was so stupid, but we couldn't get to NYC in time to get on the transatlantic flight, so we had to.
Anyway. The California contingent made it to Amsterdam about 20 hours ahead of us, and stuck to the schedule. We had timed tickets for the Van Gogh museum for day 2, and those sell out weeks in advance. if we couldn't make it within the half-hour window, we'd have to forgo that stop entirely. So dude and mother-out-law and I got off the flight, sprinted across the airport into a taxi, and pulled up to the museum where we threw our belongings into a storage locker and immediately went in and Beheld The Van Goghs on, in my case, absolutely zero sleep. it was crowded like a fucking mosh pit in there.
We did the audio tour, and good thing too, because I couldn't always get close enough to read the placards. It was a very good audio tour.
I'd go back there, maybe, if I had a companion who hadn't seen it. Might try to go at a less busy time, or just accept that it's a high-demand place.
We bummed around Amsterdam for several days, seeing the sights-- went on a really great canal boat tour we enjoyed very much, the captain was a former history student. This was a theme of the trip-- booking a private tour to have a chance to actually talk with a local person really gave you a lot more insight into the whole thing. Learning about things like how the police are, whether gentrification is a big issue, what it's like dealing with foreign tourists and trying to stay in touch with your own culture, how affordable life is for normal people, all of that really makes it so much more interesting to be in a place. Of course Amsterdam is not a typical Dutch city at all, and we knew that, but it was great to get perspective on what it has been and what it is now and so on.
We did dumb tourist shit too of course.
Someone asked what we thought of Dutch food and I'll say we actually didn't get a great look at Dutch cuisine. The other party did stroopwaffels without us, and we ate more generic Whatever The Restaurants Are Selling type meals, and none of them billed themselves as Dutch Cuisine. So honestly I have no idea, besides the bitterballen which were amazing.
We did splash out on an incredible meal at a historic restaurant that turned out to be literally next door to our hotel. D'Vijff Vlieghen, it was called, the Five Flies. We had a six-course meal with wine pairings and it was incredible. Was this Dutch cuisine either? IDK but it was incredible. We don't eat like this at home. I think the California crew do, sometimes; they were into Michelin stars and knew what those were and such. But we don't, we just like good food.
So anyway. All in all, we enjoyed our time in Amsterdam very much, but don't feel we had any deep insights into Dutch culture.
I would go back; I would like to travel around a little more, and we missed the Rijksmuseum, which I would very much have liked to spend a day in. I would do another canal tour just for shits and giggles though, it was fun. We also did zero drugs, and I don't think I would do any. We also I think heard almost zero Dutch being spoken because it later jumpscared me on an airplane. Dutch is difficult, because it's very uncanny valley if you speak English, and it's hard to evaluate it because I keep thinking I've had a stroke or something because I almost know what's going on and then super don't.
One other observation: the Dutch do not seem to use washcloths, there were none to be had in the hotel. Is this a strange fluke? Lest ye be too called out, there also were none in Riga, but in Berlin they had them. Hmmmmmm.
The Amsterdam hotel, by the way, was the least fancy and also the most expensive by a lot. It is super pricey to live in Amsterdam. But charming as hell, of course.
no worse feeling that going on some subculture fashion clothing website and seeing the size chart runs from extra small to petite to pequeño to microscopique. yeah here at DeathKillFuckShadow Fantastique Cloth Imaginations i think you’ll find that we see the world a bit difference… we have bleak brutal imaginations… what if blood and fangs were COOL… but we cannot in our most tortured imaginations picture a woman who has a stouter frame than the fucking Insulindian Phasmid
Similar, the trend of "REAL workwear for REAL women BY real women!" when I was looking for like, sturdy canvas work trousers with functional pockets, and the largest size one (the best-looking, most feature-laden) company made was... size fucking EIGHT. The size chart said it was for a like, 33-inch waist.
(I investigated like four companies and only one of them went up to the 44" waist size I needed at the time, and that was its very largest size, so if it didn't fit I would have to return for store credit and then not have anything I could buy. So. Uh. No. I had to buy some cargo pants from Duluth Trading, sorry indie women-led companies who clearly don't want my fat money!)
For some context if you're not into inches, according to the CDC in like 2010 by the way the average American woman had a waist size of 37.5".
on a more cheerful note, Loretta Lynn spent our vacation in an expensive pet boarding facility, and sulked for the first day, but after that apparently got along fine.
but since we brought her home she has been her version of clingy, which involves following us from room to room, lying close to us to sleep, and even climbing into my lap to knead and purr on a blanket for about three minutes yesterday, so.
she also has been seizing my ankles to viciously attack me a lot. on earlier occasions, i had compared her appearance to that of an orca, and had called her a small land whale, but yesterday i was stricken with the inspiration to call her a floorca (get it. floor + orca. incredibly witty, no?)
another thing is that she likes to lie on her back or in a parenthesis shape and show off her belly. she is extremely cute, but also has this very sort of bluff, physical nature, and at heart i know she resents being thought of as adorable. she is tough, she is a jock, she is rough and tumble. so instead of cooing 'ooo lookit yer fluffy belly' i've started gruffly saying "show me yer tits" when she lies on her back like that.
it is usually a trap, by the way, so that she can kick your ass when you touch her soft fluff, so.
anyway here is a photo of her, in Floorca Hunting Posture, which is of course, the Show Us Yer Tits pose.
ugh so i got back from vacation and the next morning woke up sick. so.
it's just chest congestion but joint aches too so i'm just mostly spending my days moving from one seat to another and then sitting there staring blankly until i get up and go to another place and have to immediately sit down and stare blankly, so. that's. useful of me i know. at least i got my trip laundry done first, though the sheets need changing and i'm just too tired to do it now.
i had several good idea breakthroughs on the various WIPs i've had sitting there waiting for me to finish them, but i have a huge block and that is just me... not... being able to like.... idk care enough? to finish them? i want them to be done and publish them but i can't convince myself that any of them are complete or interesting enough to share.
I got really spoiled, for a solid couple of years in the Witcher fandom I had a solid cadre of folks who not only would beta read my stuff but also would hang out in a thread in a channel on a particular discord server and would help me talk through my ideas. which was really selfish, it wasn't other people's writing ideas we were talking about-- there were other threads or channels where we talked about those sometimes, but the main thing for me was my thread and i could blather about concepts in there and there were several people who were happy to bounce ideas back to me. and it was so important and helped me so much in organizing my thoughts.
those people haven't followed me to the HR fandom, and the only HR discords i've found, there aren't threads for discussions like that. people are doing what is probably a lot more normal and like pairing off into little DMs or whatever to talk about beta reading and whatnot. and i can't find anywhere to spitball about it. which is like-- i mean, that makes sense. why would someone want to talk only about ideas i want to write? i'll post an idea and it will get three or four heart-reacts and the channel will go back to some highly specific omegaverse concept based around a specific squick of mine, and i'll have to move on, and that's that. this is fine and normal but i also don't get anything i can use out of that.
but now i really am struggling to organize my thoughts. and i tried it, with the original novel last year-- i tried doing it over google docs or in comments and things, but the logistics of that were enough of a barrier that i couldn't actually get over the hump and finish the project. (I have one chapter left, and i love every bit of feedback i got, but. well, it's mellowing, and maybe when i revisit it i'll know which bits i can make into something useful?) I don't have anywhere to spitball. that's where i'm falling down. i have ideas, i know how to write them, but-- should I try x or y, what if i cut out one entire POV and do it limited, what if they all got master's degrees, what if this character was trans. All the hypothetical stuff... I just don't have anywhere to spin that out.
so. I have like, a hundred thousand words of stuff in two different continuities, and I can't decide which parts to use, and maybe I don't like any of it enough to publish it anyway. so, that's annoying and obnoxious and stupid and I don't know what to do about it.
and I do appreciate everyone who's reached out to me and left comments and emailed and offered to help in various ways but I have to admit I always lose track of those right away, and it's not that I don't take the offers seriously I just actually don't know how to implement them. It's an executive function gap; I have no idea how to bridge the part between an intention and then actually doing the thing. It's just missing. I don't know how that works.
I need to spitball about it, and there just isn't anywhere I feel that comfortable talking anymore. Not tumblr, and not really in gdocs-- if it's beta-reading a doc I have already put too much into it, and most people aren't going to be able to give good strucutral suggestions at that point.
Anyway I also work on too big a scale for the casual beta-reading crowd. Telling me which fifteen thousand words I should use out of the hundred and fifty thousand words in this doc is a frankly insane ask.
I'm going to try to publish a thing, but I think I'm going to just peel about 20k out of this 50k doc and see if that still tells the story I want. That's how I'm going to do that, because it has sprawled to the point that I think most of it is overgrown garbage now :(.
Whyyy is it suddenly like i've never written a thing before?????? I mean i know why but i don't know what it's called. ugh.
really losing my patience for any 'feminist' statement to the tune of 'we need feminism because women fill a fundamentally different and necessary role than men and will be better at doing x y or z'. like actually i think we need feminism because it is an unbearable death of the spirit by inches to exist in a world where you are not seen as a fully realized human being because of a single cultural determination, and because a world that enshrines such things creates systems that are fundamentally sick to the core
has the discourse cycle advanced past the point where I can post my ridiculous mental image wherein shane hollander does feel some resentment towards troy barrett (some of which is lingering and justified anger about troy's bad behavior and some of which is envy about troy coming out on his own terms and some of which is troy catching strays) and during a Rather Heated conversation troy is like "genuinely, I'm sorry and I'm trying and if there's anything I can do I'll do it but I don't know if there's anything else I can say here, like, go ahead and take a swing at me if it'll help" and shane is like "What." and they go round the What a few times before shane is like, you know what if you're offering, and slams a very solid right hook into troy's ribs, and then when troy straightens back up and gestures like, go ahead, shane lands another few hits on him, and actually it does help and it's honestly pretty cathartic for both of them like troy feels better afterwards too, and they find a balance with each other thereafter, and then three to twenty-two months later shane is doing some research for his own sex life, as you do, and goes down a rabbit hole of articles about nonsexual kink, and wakes ilya up at 4:26 in the morning to say "ilya I think I cheated on you by beating up troy barrett in a parking lot," and ilya is like "am I having a stroke??????"
I'm back from Europe and trying without success to fix my sleep schedule. Posting this from phone in bed with one eye open.
My incredibly talented body adjusted perfectly to the time changes the opposite direction by almost without fail making sure I awoke at precisely 1am local time no matter what time zone I was in or how little sense that made based on what time I'd gone to sleep or what time it was in the time zone i'd most recently left.
So I guess I shouldn't be surprised by this continuing. But it is inconvenient.
Anyway I'll write about the trip at some point probably. I did enjoy the company of dude's family but I need a break now, just physically. They were very go go go go and also despite having talked a good deal about not making Grammy walk too far on her 76-year-old knees fresh off a cortisone shot they thought literally nothing of taking us on a seven-mile walking route. So I've had some wear and tear.
I'm going to hassle dude into staying in better touch with them though.
We all shared our photos with each other in a Google photos album but it's over sixteen hundred photos. So last night I made a new album of the highlights, because while I understand every member of the party separately submitting two or three photos of each plate of food, I don't think I need to review them all every time I want to tell someone about this vacation. So. The highlight reel is still three hundred photos but I feel like that's more reasonable.
[image desc: the tower of St Peter's Church in Riga at twilight with birds circling]
2¼ cups cold water
6 green cardamom pods, lightly bruised (crack them, don’t pulverize)
1 small tej patta, indian bay leaf (optional but beautiful)
½ stick ceylon cinnamon (the delicate kind, not thick cassia)
6 to 8 whole black peppercorns
1½ inches fresh ginger, sliced, not grated
a pinch of fennel seeds (for bengal)
2 heaping teaspoons assam ctc tea
(ctc = granular black tea, find it at indian groceries)
1¼ cups full-fat milk
1½ to 2 tablespoons jaggery (preferred) or sugar
tiny pinch of salt (optional, structural)
method
bring the water to a thoughtful simmer. small bubbles at the edges, not a rolling boil.
add the aromatics: cardamom, tej patta, cinnamon, peppercorns, fennel, ginger. let the perfume rise for 3 to 4 minutes.
add the assam ctc. reduce the heat and steep for 2 minutes.
(ctc brews fast. that is the point.)
now the milk. pour it in slowly. bring the heat up until the chai swells and almost boils, then calm it. do this twice.
sweeten. jaggery if you can, otherwise sugar. a whisper of salt if you like balance.
let it murmur gently for 5 to 7 minutes, thickening slightly to a deep caramel.
strain into warmed cups. serve immediately. chai is a punctual emotion.
notes
• ginger decides the mood. add more in winter.
• sweetness is relational. adjust according to your life.
