Since Mother Eve in the Garden long ago

Mildly frustrated lately about the difficulty of trying to categorize my writing. It started when I was writing my cover letter for the novella and trying to describe it properly ...

Romantic relationships are generally central to my plots, because I like them and I like the way that centering a story on two individuals with/who develop feelings for each other brings out different aspects of these characters and changes their goals. But this is all really affected by my aceness: I'm just not that interested in sexual attraction and I don't tend to include much of it, not consciously - it just doesn't occur to me when I'm formulating a plot or conceptualizing characters. So I'm not interested in Romance The Genre (which from my perspective is almost entirely based on sexual attraction - the characters only realize they're in love when they've experienced sexual attraction to each other for a long time, there's typically very very little interest in each other's personalities) and I'm definitely not writing it. I think my stuff may come off in theory as "Sweet Romance", ie romance with no sexual content in it, but that bugs me because I think that's a genre/content choice and that's not what I'm doing. I'm writing romantic character arcs/plotlines from an aspec perspective, which I feel like isn't "queer enough" to count for outlets for queer fiction.

It's just annoying, you know?

Felt like utter shit this morning and I don't really know why. I mean, I did have a Work Flub yesterday that got me a "you did a wrong thing" email from my boss, but I feel like it's deeper than a response to that. Just burnout, I suppose. ADHD something or other from having been too on-the-ball earlier this week. Had a browse of MANY, NEMA, and Hartwick's job boards and found nothing at all for me.

OTOH feeling like this always gives me a bit more of a drive to write, because a) there's the remote possibility of magically being able to support myself by writing so I could quit (extremely unlikely but hey, so are so many good things one hopes for) and b) I find the idea of just going to meetings and dusting paintings while having coworkers know that even if they all think I'm a fuck-up, I'm a published author (technically already am but it doesn't count because of Reasons) very funny. This is all very silly but one needs something to cling to.

Paused working on the sequel novella to go back to finishing my novel because it is SO CLOSE. I could have the first draft done in like two weeks, or rather two weekends.

Yesterday I added three thousand words to Happy Secret! I only need-need two thousand more and I'm also within a few scenes of the end, so I suspect it will end up coming together with me hitting the minimum as I get to the end of the story. (This is so common for me ... I assume it's psychological, something deep in my brain paces myself to meet a minimum in a way I would never ever be able to consciously manage.)

Several big chunks turned out to be written in a very nineteenth-century style, so quite a lot of the work was rewriting them to not sound like ... that. I really wish it were not my default. It always means rewriting paragraphs from scratch rather than tweaking because it's like the entire way I structure and combine sentences is daffy. it's deeper than style, it's something to do with the coding of my brain. Why why why?

Aaaaaagh I need to sew to make clothes for me to wear! But I also need to write because Luna Press is only open for submissions on March 16 and I still have 5k to add to hit their minimum word count! Why do I have to have a fucking job to take up all my time?!

I keep forgetting that I bought a paid account and have dozens more icon spaces now. I don't know where my icons are from my old icon-making days though so I don't have anything to upload. I should make some more when I'm procrastinating from both writing and sewing.

CW is definitely not interviewing me at this point, I think. Ah well. I wonder if this current spate of curatorial jobs in fashion/textiles is a bizarre blip or if it reflects the museum field opening up and hiring more people ... or I guess maybe it reflects one fashion/textiles person getting a new job, and then their old job opens up, and then the old job of the person who gets hired for that one opens up, and so on. Looking forward to seeing who gets this one so I can compare myself to them and get depressed. (I was being defeatist at Sarah over how I thought being in collections for so long made people disqualify me for curatorial jobs and she was disagreeing with me because of people she knows who've made the jump, which I think was her being positive and supportive but unfortunately also implies that I just suck on an individual level and that's why I don't get interviews for these positions.)

I'm trying to finish my novel and I was making great strides - wrote several more chapters - until I decided to let myself have a little break and write some porn. And now I'm like "well I could write my one self-insert self-actualizing and thinking about stuff while locked in a room by the villain or I could write my other self-insert getting railed in a foursome," which is an unfortunately easy choice. (At least it is now! It's crazy when I think about how much more comfortable I've gotten with writing explicit sex over the past year.)

Over the past, I don't know, few years? one year? six months? I've been doing what I call "Daniel Deronda-ing," by which I mean Getting More Jewish. I'm incredibly insecure about it because of course a lot of people would say I'm not Jewish (as my father's Jewish, not my mother, and he's very very secular and we did not really participate in any Jewish cultural practices when I was a kid), but anyway I'm trying to have a proper Sabbath dinner every Friday and it's tying in well with my resolution to start eating vegetable side dishes rather than going "oh well this meal is vegetarian so it's healthy enough." The way I manage it is to make each bit on different nights, so I'll have a leftover entree with a fresh side and not feel overwhelmed by having to cook too much at once. OTOH I made borscht a few nights ago and I will probably be eating/drinking it for a week and a half, it's SO much and I'm kind of tired of it already.

I submitted a short story to an anthology back in November that then upped the deadline to the end of December, I guess because they weren't getting enough offers, and they turned me down. :( It wasn't my best work (despite erinpuff's great editing!) in fairness. The Cinderella retelling I just finished is much better.

Just finished a modern AU genderbend E-rated fic. I think it's fantastic. To be posted tomorrow.

I haven't posted any fic in months - just a couple of podfics - because I was writing a lot of meaty stuff for JanuAUry. And now it's JanuAUry! My first one, Fantabulosa, went up today - set in Edwardian London, Ed is the most renowned female impersonator and Stede also kind of wants to go on the stage. Next up is the Ladyhawke AU!! I rewatched Ladyhawke today to try to find a piece of dialogue to use as a title and unfortunately there are literally no memorable lines in the entire thing? I'm making graphics for each fic - you can see the Fantabulosa one here on BlueSky.

I have very slowly got most of a pocket done in my wool skirt, but then I realized that I actually left spaces for TWO pockets! I have to do another pocket!! 😩 And the seamstress who relined my coat said very definitively that she won't do finishing for my sewing projects because she also hates doing buttonholes.

Felt very weird this afternoon. Not sick, but ... on Tumblr I described it as a slow-rolled panic attack, because that's the closest I can get to describing it. It just sort of hit me, how sad it's going to be to leave Oneonta and my house, I love them both, and all because of a Skinny Bitch who views herself as downtrodden because she sometimes can't make everyone do everything she wants, and takes it out on me.

Edit: Huh, had an interesting thought in the shower. Our most recent conflict is about (I think) me not handling a recent donation by the official procedure, but for the past ... year, maybe two? we have not been handling any donations and purchases by the rules. And I say "we" but I mean the curators. But I'm the only safe target, so she rips me to shreds with the curators instead of making the point that we need to get back on track as a group.

In accordance with superstition, I'm trying to spend the day being productive. Well, I'm planning to spend the day being productive:

- working on my wool skirt that only has vertical seams done
- playing piano
- finishing(?) my exchange fic
- continuing the restructuring of my Ladyhawke AU fic

Was going to try not to spend money (again, in line with superstition) but Mrs. Depew had a sale, so I bought some more Haslam books. But I'm basically at the point where I will never need to buy a Haslam book again because I have all of the ones with dresses that will suit me, so in a sense this is just sensible, maybe even beneficial as I can now shut the door on buying them.

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Well, I have done excellently at playing piano. Finished the back opening of the skirt, too.

Did not finish the fest fic, didn't really think I would. But I did finish the first section and it's also long enough to hit the minimum, so no worries.

Sent a FB message to a different local tailor to see if she would do the finishing on sewing projects for me so I can maybe move ahead on a few things. If all goes well I may progress to "so, can I give you a pattern and fabric and have you make it for me?" And then possibly to "so, can I give you a hand-scaled pattern ... ?"

I've been making muslin sleeves to sew to quilts for an exhibition I curated, which will be on the walls for about two weeks. Ironically it has already taken me more than two weeks to do these sleeves and they're not even done, let alone sewn to the quilts. Though they're at least to the point where I just need to sew the long seams (I cut them across the grain and then pieced them when needed, so I could take advantage of selvages, so there was a lot of other sewing. And of course the ironing) and then of course attach them to the quilts.

Have been going through a bit of a whatever-fraction-life-crisis lately, worried that I'm wasting my life, never finish any impressive projects, oh my god my job is so pathetic (this was the major spur to the crisis, a collections colleague is leaving, which I was going to take as an opportunity to ask to be director of collections since their successor would probably need more direction, but she told me that the president is planning to give the recently-promoted, 30(?)yo associate curator another promotion to be THE curator and also be in charge of collections) and I started contemplating going off as a freelancer. But then I also started wondering about trying to get the 18thc pattern book published again, because now Regency Women's Dress has earned out its advance, and in looking into my inbox to see who said what about it, I found that the fashion editor at Bloomsbury Academic had actually discussed some major revisions to my proposal with me to make it a more substantial and scholarly book, and was awaiting a revised version AGES AGO but then I got sidetracked with musicals and fucking covid and COMPLETELY FORGOT ABOUT IT. So uh ... I'm going to try to work on that. Deeply embarrassing, though.

(It is helpful, at least, when I go through these crises now, to be able to say "this is emotional dysregulation" and such. Rather than thinking either that the world is ending or being able to correctly attribute it to my perception but then just going "oh I'm broken and messed up and stupid I guess.")

(Emotional dysregulation gets the self-mocking Tamaki Suoh icon.)

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Turning the heel of the second sock. Taking a break right now to write this.

JanuAUry fic statuses: 1900s female impersonators - DONE; Ladyhawke AU - basically done but I need to go back and fill in a few holes; advice columns based on AITA post - DONE (short and silly); Regency f/f AU version of the dinner with Mary and Anne - in progress; f/f 1930s burlesque AU - outlined but not started; diary fic based on AITA post - still not sure if I'm even going to write it tbh; AU where Ed came to find Stede in the forest - DONE

I've been using the new DW update page, and tbh I like it. Not much different but just a bit more modern.