It’s Thanksgiving today here in the states. Given the state of the country, I’m not feeling very thankful. I’m not feeling t all grateful. I’m fearful for what is to come in the upcoming years. I was going to set that aside, but I can’t do it quite yet. I’m still not over what happened at the polls, and I don’t know what to do about it. It really feels like a line-in-the-sand moment for this country, and I don’t know what I’m going to do with it.
The fact that over half the voters in this country are that threatened by a black/Indian woman being president was a cold, hard slap in the face. It’s fucking 2024. Aren’t we past this yet? My mother was half-joking that I should move to Taiwan. That’s not a good idea for several reasons, but they did elect a woman as president in 2016. I remember because it was the same year that Hillary Clinton was running for president. Taiwan is also the first Asian country to make marriage equality legal. My mother brought that up as well.
Those would be two very big reasons I would consider Taiwan if there weren’t other big negative reasons to counteract the positives. It galls me, though,that my country of heritage has done two very progressive things, one well before my actual country (assuming we ever elect a non-male president). It was such a shock to me how big the win was by because in my mind, race and gender should not matter at all. I don’t think of either in anything but a positive way, so knowing that others don’t feel that way–my fucking countrymen (and, yes, emphasis on men)–infuriates and saddens me.
I keep stumbling over the fact that we are regressing in a hurry. I had more rights when I was in my twenties than my niblings do today. And the next administratin will do their damnedest to make sure that generations to come have even less personal rights than our ancestors. And the fact that apparently queer people in general and trans people in specific are the number one issue to be dealt with. Even if someone is against queer people, how does it affect them at all?
So. What am I thankful for? I’m thankful for my friends and my brother. I’m thankful that I am still alive, I guess. It’s difficult to say that unequivocally because of what’s going on, though. I keep thinking, “I did not come back for this shit.”
Uh. Oh. I’m glad that I ‘m able to write again. Sometimes, it’s the outside pressure that gets me to do what I need/want to do. That was what grad school did for me. I went to New College of California (sigh. I’m sighing because they got their accreditation stripped for financial shenanigans) to get my MA in Writing & Consciousness. It was a year-long MA program, and while there were many problems with it, it made me write every day.
I had a really shitty year. An extremely shitty year. I don’t want to talk about it, but it’s still affecting me now. It’s a worse year than even my medical crisis year. I kept writing after that, but after the tragedy that hit me this year, I stopped writing. i jsut could not do it. I was grieving in a way I never had, and I am still not over it
In tandem, I have done NaNoWriMo for over a decade now. Probably closer to two. I have never had a problem with the word count because I am prolific. For most of that time if not all of it, I have been writing two-thousand words a day. Therefore, NaNoWriMo was no big thing. Hm. I think I must not have been writing 2,000 words a day when I started beacuse ottherwise, why would I do it?
After several years, I started to get bored with it. I switched things up by doing things like editing a novel one year and writing a manuscript another. Or rather, starting one. It was called The Year of Seven Penii, and it was a poke at the fact that movies had no issue showing vaginas, but very rarely showed penises. The main premise of the script was my protag would meet up and fuck seven men in a year.
It started out swimmingly, but then I got stuck on penis number three or four. Not literaally, but because the character it belonged to was someone I envisioned as played by Alan Rickman. He was (and still is) my favorite actor of all time. I had the protag being played by Jacqueline Kim, who is an etremely underrated actor. I saw her first in Xena:Warrior Princess as Lao Ma, one of Xena’s mentors. I was struck by her beauty and her acting, and I tried to find other things she’d been in. Unfortunately at the time, there wasn’t much. Her biggest role was as Darcy in charlotte sometimes, which was a really interesting Asian American-based experience.
I breezed along until I got to Alan Rickman’s character. I had the two of them involved in a BDSM relationship that got really deep really quickly. I didn’t want to leave those two characters to go onto the next relationship, so I spent several thousand words on that relationships. That’s when NaNoWriMo ended, and I never went back to it. If I had, I probably would have changed it to a script that was just about Jacqueline and Alan.
In the last five or so years, I’ve really just used it as a way to work on whatever I had going on at the moment. NaNoRebel started informally and that’s what I decided to do. NaNoRebel is doing whatever the fuck you want for the month of Novemeber. I found a freedom to it that really made my writing better.
This year, I decided to go back to the basics because I hadn’t written regularly since February. In fact, I hadn’t written anything other than my posts, and I have felt the absence of it keenly. I just couldn’t do anything about it because, well, depression, grief, and anxiety don’t work that way. My brain can say as much as it wants that I should be writing, but I just can’t make myself do it.
It was weird because I have only once had writer’s block, and it was only for a month or two. I have had difficulties writing since I got out of the hospital, but I had been doing it pretty consistently since then. The problem is that I felt stale, and I was getting stuck. I could not write the prose that I wanted to write. I had an idea in my head, and I even had it mapped out. But, when push came to shove, it just did not come out the way I wanted it to. Or imagined it would.
More tomorrow.