It's important to have people you're really close to in life, who you can talk to about your problems and your big, difficult feelings, but I think it's also important to interact regularly with people you know but aren't close to, as well as with strangers, both for brief, impersonal interactions and for longer conversations.
This is not to blame you if you're not getting all of these types of interactions on a regular basis! I'm autistic but don't have social anxiety, so I know what it is to struggle socially but not what it's like to be terrified of interacting with people. And I have chronic health issues that significantly limit how often I can leave my home, which makes it much harder for me to interact with a wide variety people IRL on a regular basis, but I know that folks who are fully homebound or bedbound have an even harder time. And I'm sure there are other relevant life circumstances I'm not thinking of.
So I'm not trying to blame you if you don't have close friends, or if you almost never have meaningful interactions you aren't already close to, or whatever. This isn't about judgment.
This is an observation: when I go weeks only interacting with my partner, my best friend, and my parents, I become overly sensitive, self-absorbed, and deeply unpleasant to be around. I think constantly about my own problems and take deep offense when other people aren't thinking as much about me and my needs and preferences as I am. I feel terrible, and no matter how much love the people closest to me pour into me, it doesn't feel like enough.
And then I go somewhere where I have to interact with strangers and/or acquaintances (I go to synagogue, or I see a play where I sort of know one of the actors and we chat after the show, or I go to my neighborhood block party and meet people who live near me but who I've never spoken to before), and because going on and on about my problems and getting offended at everything anyone else says would be wildly inappropriate behavior for the context, I have to do something other than that, and it resets my brain a bit.
The details of this might be specific to me, but I think most of us have trouble being at our best when we only interact with the same few people for days or weeks on end. I've heard stay-at-home parents talk about versions of this, as well as elderly people who no longer work and no longer drive.
I don't think there's one universal amount of human interaction or variety that everyone needs, but I do think almost everyone needs to interact with more than a handful of people at least semi-regularly or they're going to start putting too much pressure on their main relationships and also losing perspective in general.
When you're going through a rough time, I think even more so than at other times, I think it's helpful to have a balance of interactions where you can and do talk about it, and interactions where that's not a factor (not in the sense of "I can't tell this person about my problems because they ARE the problem," but in the sense of "the appropriate type of interaction for this situation is pleasant chit-chat, so I'm going to try to give pleasantness and hopefully also receive it").
ten years ago as part of my creative writing degree we had a class on professional development where we learned how the publishing process works for different mediums and how to choose an agent and what the role of a publishing house is and back then, the advice was "self-publishing has its advantages but a traditional publisher will provide editorial support and market your book and if your book sells well enough they want to invest in your future" and now basically none of that is true anymore. books make it to shelves with noticeable errors and structural issues that could be addressed with one or two more rounds of developmental editing, authors are expected to do more and more of the marketing themselves to the point that they are expected to be social media influencers in their own right, and publishers appear to be prioritising flashy debut novels with huge advances they don't outsell, which means the author is less likely to get a follow-up deal.
Obviously a publisher is a business and a business needs to make money, but the idea used to be that you'd have a couple of very successful authors who bring in so much cash that they subsidise the new kid who is building a back catalogue of books that sell okay until they get name recognition and pay for themselves. I was told back then that a couple thousand pounds was very reasonable for a debut novel because you want to get royalties for the sales exceeding your advance and that way the publisher sees you as a profitable investment. The last couple of years I keep hearing about six figure book deals for debut (!) literary fiction (!) novels, what on earth?
I'm not saying that the publishing industry is uniquely awful or that it's worse than it's ever been or whatever, but especially in a time when reading and talking about books is trendy and there is so much money in books, it feels very, I don't know, symbolic? Prioritising flashy one-time projects over sustained and sustainable growth. Investing only enough resources to make your product fit for sale but not enough to make it good because people will buy it anyway. It's frustrating to me as a reader and as an aspiring writer and as a person existing in a capitalist system.
One of the tags referred to people thanking their editorial teams in acknowledgments, and I want to point out the growing prevalence of people thanking beta-readers and writing groups, both of which usually rely on a pre-existing community or relationship and, just as importantly, are unpaid.
My day job is as a freelance editor for nonfiction books, and I can safely say that if the publishing industry were operating as intended, I would either not have a job at all or be working for a specific press. Authors pay me directly to do the work that a press editor used to do as part of publication contracts. This is because so many presses have started outsourcing all their editorial work to either third-party contractors or, even worse, to genAI.
In short, venture capital has broken the publication industry the same way it's broken the retail, restaurant, and travel industries.
I didn't go into this side of it in my original post but YES! Fuck! I know this is a huge issue for translators too because they're being asked to do more work in less time for less money and I've heard rumblings about human translators being brought in only to essentially proofread work done by AI, which is so disrespectful to the sheer skill and artistic abilities of (literary) translation...
Anyway, I love editing. I think I love editing almost more than writing, and I'm pretty sure that I'm better at it. Last year I edited an academic article from 11k to 9k words for my supervisor and I felt like a god when I finished it, but when my supervisor asked if I'd thought about doing this professionally, I had to tell her that there's just not a viable career in editing anymore. Publishers used to employ! editors! Several different kinds of editors for different stages of the process! That used to be my dream job!
Editing is so essential to making a text good. It doesn't matter how talented or dedicated you are as a writer, you cannot achieve the level of quality by yourself that you could achieve by working with a skilled editor. That's normal! The lone genius who comes out of the cave with the perfect novel does not exist! The manuscript that gets sold to a publisher is supposed to be handed off to an editor who tells you to tighten up that plotline and reminds you that every day can't be Tuesday and sharpens your prose so your voice really shines. Skimping out on that part of the publication process takes money out of the hands of skilled professionals, leads to consumers (ew) receiving subpar products (ew!), and is such an injustice to the writers whose work can't reach its full potential (and the writers who won't get published because they can't afford to pay an editor out of pocket!).
It drives me up the wall. I hate reading a mediocre book and knowing that a skilled editor could have easily raised it from 3 stars to 4. We should all be way angrier about it, frankly.
to be clear you SHOULD buy that cast iron pan and you SHOULD buy that knife set and you SHOULD buy that fancy rice cooker and you SHOULD buy that novelty mug. high quality kitchenware is always worth it you’re literally gonna be using that almost every day
everyone who is not currently in the process of moving please pause and take a moment to be grateful that you're not currently in the process of moving
What if Iris only just recently transitioned, and the Perihelion is excited to inform everyone that as ships also go by she, and as it is also "transitioning" into a ship, it will also start using the pronoun.
No one is entirely sure if this is the Perihelion being supportive, a copycat thing, a machine learning thing, a younger sibling bid for attention, or what. But that's something for the university MI developers to worry about, bc socially speaking those are (mostly) all perfectly normal reasons for a person to begin exploring identity markers, and Iris and Peri are both having fun.
actually I think you should be normal about ordinary citizens of authoritarian countries and yes that applies even to that country you're thinking of right now
"but they support [dictator] and [violent action]!" okay is it possible that a combination of propaganda, election rigging, and authoritarian crackdowns on dissent could lead a population to look like it supports something most people would find distasteful under more reasonable circumstances
literally everything people say about public defenders on the internet is so wrong and frustrating even when they’re trying to be sympathetic to us. and I certainly said some of that same kind of shit before I did this job. I didn’t get it yet. I get it now. the only people who really do get it are the people who’ve done it and the people who are in or also working with the communities we serve. representing a factually guilty person is the absolute least of any public defender’s fucking problems at any given time and the last thing I would ever lose sleep over lol
what a lot of people in the notes on the post that inspired this train of thought seem to imagine public defenders struggling with and getting upset about: finding out a client committed the crime they're accused of and having to grapple with the morality of defending a person who Did Harm To Others and what that means for the attorney as an individual immortal soul or whatever the fuck
Things that I have actually struggled to deal with in my 2 years as a public defender so far (non-exhaustive list):
Having to put the criminal records and self-esteem and livelihoods of clients I believed were factually innocent, people I'd developed relationships with and knew how much they had to lose if something went wrong, in the hands of a group of strangers who I'd had no more than 20 minutes to question about their knowledge and beliefs and biases.
Worrying those strangers would favor the young, handsome white male prosecutors' arguments over my innocent clients who've had rough lives and it shows on their faces, because of whose voice sounds "authoritative" and who "looks like a criminal".
Never feeling like I had enough time to prepare a case for trial because I also had over 100 other cases pending at the same time.
Put simply, it is harder to represent a factually innocent person than a factually guilty person. I think basically all defense attorneys agree on this. It's more emotionally taxing because of the stakes. There are always material stakes for all of our clients, but for a factually innocent person there are also moral stakes.
Representing people who are technically guilty of the crimes they are charged with, but no one was actually harmed, and maybe the law itself is unfair, and also my client was certainly racially profiled and overcharged. And having to put that in the hands of a jury, because my client wants to maintain whatever dignity they can to the bitter end.
Not being able to just say to the jury, I don't give a fuck whether my client is technically guilty. He's a poor Black man, so he was guilty in the eyes of the American legal system before he was ever arrested. He gets that. I get that. Do you get that? Who gives a shit whether he's factually guilty of a technicality DUI that happened 2 or 3 years ago? What the fuck are we doing? Are we all just here to give another black father a criminal record? Fuck you all.
Representing multiple very young men charged with DV assaults who grew up with fathers who abused their mothers, or parents who abused them, in and out of foster care, multiple generations of cycles of violence and substance abuse passed down from parent to child. It doesn't excuse it. Of course it doesn't. They have done harm to their own partners and they know this isn't the example they want to set for their own kids. But they're human - the idea that abusers are somehow inhuman just sets you up to fail to recognize abuse when someone you love is the person doing it - and what the fuck other ways of dealing with difficult situations and relating to other people were these guys ever supposed to learn? They didn't have the opportunity to learn anything else. They never had a fucking chance.
And if they don't have a lot of history yet, maybe there's still time to turn it around. One of them talked to me about how badly he wanted to break the cycle and not have his kids grow up to be like that. I hope he can do it. I don't know if he will. That's what haunts me about that situation. Not the fact that I had to represent his interests in court. That's just my job.
Family after family after family who call 911 for help for a loved one in a mental health or substance-related crisis. And then the cops show up and throw their loved one in crisis in jail sometimes over the weekend because if you lash out at someone you live with for literally any reason that counts as domestic violence which means the cops legally have to arrest someone. And 24-72 hours later the family is in court upset telling the judge if they knew this would happen they never would have called 911. Cannot stress enough this happens like weekly in misdemeanor court.
A prosecutor submitting victim impact statements for the sentencing of a colleague's client who absolutely had killed their partner, and it was awful - but the victim impact statements were provided by the victim's family, many of whom she was estranged from, and many of them misgendered and deadnamed their dead "loved one". And the prosecutor just threw them all into the public record unredacted. Because of pressure to "listen to victims", in this case coming from the transphobic family.
A 16-year-old getting held in juvenile detention on unproven charges an 18-year-old would get released from adult jail on, because while the 18-year-old is presumed to have the autonomy to find another place to stay, if the charge is related to someone who lives in the 16-year-old's parents' house - or their parents straight-up just don't want them going home - well, then, they can't go home, which means they have nowhere to go. so let's keep them in jail.
On the flip side, having 18-year-olds get released to homelessness because their well-intentioned parents called the cops for whatever reason (see above) and now the court is imposing a no-contact order with someone who lives at their house.
A kid who got pulled over and charged with DUI/physical control of a motor vehicle while under the influence on her 18th birthday. She was a senior in high school. She had never been in trouble before. She had no criminal record. The law doesn't require someone to be booked and held in jail for a first-time DUI charge with no history, so the jail's policy is that they usually don't do that. If it was just the DUI she would have been cited and released. But the cop also cited her for 2 counts of minor in possession. So, because she had non-DUI charges, I guess, they booked and held her in jail. If it had been just one day earlier she would have been in juvenile detention. She cried. I almost cried. I sat in the attorney meeting booth with her for an extra half hour until they kicked us out for the lunchtime visiting area closure, just so she could be in a quiet space with a friendly face instead of back in the adult jail dorm. That was all I could do.
Tiny old people in jail. Tiny old people, deep in dementia, deeply upset, who got angry - personality changes including becoming very quick to anger are common with dementia - lashed out at family members and got arrested on domestic violence charges. (Again, see above.) And all I could see was my own late grandmother, who was a tiny old lady with dementia who lashed out all the time, but she was a rich white lady who could afford to live in a home with professional caregivers who were trained to handle those situations and deescalate, instead of having to rely on overwhelmed family members. And getting praise from teammates for how well I handled those clients and their jail hearings, and knowing it was because there but for the grace of god go we.
A guy who stole 2 beers from a grocery store, products that cost like $13 total, getting held on $1000 bail because he has warrants in other counties. $1000 bail when he's charged with taking $13 worth of beer. From a gigantic corporation. And he stayed in jail. Because if someone is stealing from a grocery store, they probably don't have $1000 to pay.
I think people who talk about the moral conundrum of public defenders get too stuck on the defender part and forget the public. Public defenders, by definition, simply do not represent the worst of the worst. People who hurt others because they can, quite literally can, because frankly most of them don't end up getting arrested and prosecuted for the ways they hurt people in the first place. And if they do, they can usually afford to hire a private defense attorney. I think most of us know the actual statistics about rape and abuse reporting, but for some reason that goes out the window when people talk about public defenders. (The reason is racism.)
Acting with (perceived) impunity is a privilege. It's for rich (and mostly white) people. The vast majority of crimes prosecuted in the U.S. are crimes of poverty and addiction (and that includes many violent crimes - yes, really), and that vast majority is where public defenders operate. There aren't moral quandaries in knowing what our clients did. The part that hurts is understanding the systems that have led them to this place, and knowing what those systems are going to keep doing to them once their case is resolved, and not being able to do jack shit to stop it.
"the feeling of shame, therefore, is not triggered by how others view ourselves (this is better understood through the concept of reputation) or how we view ourselves (this is better understood through the concept of self-esteem) but rather by our own negative judgment regarding how we want others to view ourselves. it is a complex form of self-consciousness whereby an individual a) is conscious of being seen as X and b) forms a negative judgment regarding what it is to be seen as X. this follows even in cases where the individual does not think of herself as X, for what is important is that she not want to be seen by others in this way ... this also follows in cases where "being seen as X" is not—from the point of view of the audience—a negative judgment. for example, velleman argues that sometimes "[w]e keep something private not because we fear disapproval of them but rather because we fear approval of a sort that we would experience as vulgar or cheap" and would result in a feeling of shame. my self-presentation can be compromised by approval if i do not want approval of the sort offered. shame always involves a negative judgment but the negative judgment is that of the individual who feels the shame and not of that individual's audience—i can disapprove of your positive view of me if i consider your opinion contemptible."
privacy, shame and the anxieties of identity, lisa m. austin
hearing anything about the nolan odyssey is so funny. it's like "they cut the extremely important and infamous nobody scene" "the cyclops is a giant puppet that they put in an actual historical cave + gave circe animatronics for her pig transformation instead of cgi" "they dumped plastic skeletons in an environmentally protected location they were not supposed to be in" "they recreated ancient greek instruments in order to have an accurate score" "all of odysseus's agency is basically gone" "anne hathaway actually learned how to weave ancient looms" "the women in this movie are treated like shit" "they actually buried actors alive to get those underworld shots" "did you see what the fuck zendaya was fucking wearing holy shit you can't DO THAT, MA'AM" "what do you mean there was a legitimate epic the musical reference" "NOT A SINGLE FUCKING GREEK WAS CAST IN THIS MOVIE"
like did nolan have two guys standing at his side at all times whispering ideas in his ear and one told the truth and the other told lies and they didnt tell him which was which until they wrapped production cause
sometimes after you learn what your story is about, you resolve to write a thematically appropriate sequel. this, unfortunately, means you have another section to edit, and now your story means two things. maybe more. imagine.
