I made a game, using the Texture engine by Jim Munroe.
It is somewhat troubling.
I am not very good at math.
However, I have also never done one of these before.
+ I live in beautiful Toronto again, and it is wonderful.
+ I am so completely bonkers in love that I often don’t know what to do with it all. So I am transforming into a new shape capable of holding it. This is a remarkable process.
+ My life is pretty great. Seriously, you guys.
+ For example, in the past six months, I have travelled to Portland, The Philippines, Michigan, North Bay, and just got back from London and Sheffield in England. While there, I saw a production of The Winter’s Tale at the Sam Wanamaker theatre by candlelight, and a few days later sat side stage for Godflesh at the final Resistanz festival. So great.
+ I share a rad place with Izzie Colpitts-Campbell and Halina Heron, and one day we are going to make some pretty extraordinary art together if we can ever manage to be in the same place at the same time.
+/- I am no longer working on my PhD.
– There are a lot of incredible projects and conferences that are happening that I am not a part of because I decided to leave the academy, and sometimes this makes me wish I was a different person better suited to this kid of thing.
+ I am writing much more again, and rebuilding my freelance portfolio, and sorting out projects, and doing a lot more work that I want to be doing, which means a lot of my writing is about fan fiction and that time I worked for a porn company.
– I am in more debt and experiencing more financial precariousness than I have ever been before.
+? Probably I am going to figure that out?
+ I do have work writing games and and doing some long-form journalism, and am trying to make my own work writing fairytales and more games, and sometimes it feels very, very possible.
– Often it feels very overwhelming.
– I have been working and travelling so much, and being in love and away from my home so much, that there are absolutely no edible groceries left here at all.
+/- Probably I should get my life in order at some point.
+ I am going to go find some breakfast.
This is what I look at whenever I am sad.
Absence sharpens love, (tele)presence strengthens it.
Since I moved away, I’ve gotten quite good at being a robot.
The Warm, Bright Centre Everyone Clings To
I’m oddly attached to insults people throw at me. Not the ordinary garbage, like the steady stream of boring hate I get in my twitter mentions or someone yelling from a moving car, but specific insults. Carefully crafted ones, selected with care. The specificity of them.
Chronology Projection Conjecture
A few days ago, I made the terrible, terrible discovery that my oldest blog (which I will not be linking to, you vultures), which I started when I was 18 or 19, is still online. It’s worse than you can possibly imagine. I am irritating as all hell and completely raw and feverish all the time. I’m breaking up with Catholic High School Boyfriend and beginning to date the man who would become my ex-husband. I’m not quite done being Catholic yet. Terrible.
Infinite Roses
So I’ve fallen into this thing. The thing in question, is that I look at this space and I panic, because so much has happened that I can’t figure out where to possibly begin, to contain and summarize and explain what the last three months of my life have looked like. Every time I try I freeze, or fail, or flail around for a while and delete the draft.
Really, I know better than this. I should just start in the middle of things. It’ll work it’s way out eventually.
On Wickedness and a Certain Lack of Rest
In The Winner Stands Alone, Paulo Coelho writes “life has many ways of testing a person’s will, either by having nothing happen at all or by having everything happen all at once.” I’ve never had any trouble at all with the former; the latter, however, seems to be less an occasional test and more the natural order of things in my life.
My Week In Writing: New Year Edition
Wherein I review some records, get back into the groove of writing my ass off, and have my writing compared to endorsing fascism very early in the year.
It’s Hard Out There For A Hench
I had an idea for a novel simmering in the back of my mind for a while. An image or a plot point would occasionally emerge from the fog, and for a few months I would occasionally pick away at it. Then, one weekend this past fall, something shifted into place in my head and I started writing. Hard.
I wrote the first 20,000 words in about 10 days.
