Real Neat Blog

The creator of a wonderful blog I follow, Dear Kitty, has kindly nominated my blog, S. E. Wigget, for the Real Neat Blog Award. Thanks for doing this! You’re a lot more tech savvy than I am and have a more prolific blog, accessible here: https://dearkitty1.wordpress.com/

The ‘rules’ of the Real Neat Blog Award are: (feel free not to act upon them if you don’t have time; or don’t accept awards; etc.):

1. Put the award logo on your blog.
2. Answer 7 questions asked by the person who nominated you.
3. Thank the people who nominated you, linking to their blogs.
4. Nominate any number of bloggers  you like, linking to their blogs.
5. Let them know you nominated them (by commenting on their blog etc.)

The questions are:

1. How do you advertise your blog to others?

I share links to it on Facebook and Twitter, and I share the link when I’m querying literary agents.

2. How long do you spend blogging per week?

It varies drastically. Sometimes I spend several hours in one day adding numerous blog posts and back-dating some of them. Sometimes I spend about one hour blogging and do so several days in one week. Other weeks, I don’t blog at all, which could be a good sign, if it means I’m more focused on my fiction writing.

3. How many posts do you post per week, on average?

Between one and four.

4. Which of your posts is your favorite so far?

I’m partial to my dream descriptions in general, or posts in which I’m writing about the process of writing.

5. Why did you choose to create the blog you did?

When I was studying publishing in grad school seven years ago, I learned about blogs as a tool for promoting your writing, so I decided to create a blog for that purpose. Basically, I read that authors are expected to have blogs nowadays, so I went ahead and created this one.

6. Are pictures or words more important to you? Or are they equally important?

The words are more important on my blog. On Instagram, it’s the reverse.

 

My nominees are:

1. Dear Kitty. Some blog https://dearkitty1.wordpress.com/
2. Ebony Astor, Carolyn Petit, and Anita Sarkeesian: Feminist Frequency https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/528422403
3. Thought Catalog, https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/38584051
4. Siggy, The Asexual Agenda https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/2954560
5. Shannon Bolithoe: A Writing Life https://wordpress.com/read/blogs/99692140/posts/22900
6. Krista and Dawlyn, Little Blind Book Finds https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/67105973
7. Equal Justice Society, https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/32750249
8. Everyday Feminism, https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/9305223
9. Sewcialists, https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/15530208
10. Simply Syd: A Guide to Black Girl Magic, https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/41786612

Dream of Tiny Sea Monsters

I dreamed I was in the apartment at the back of my house, specifically the kitchenette, and I wanted drinking water. I was by the sink with a clear pitcher, and a mouse came out of nowhere and startled me. It charged at my feet—while I hastily backed away from it—before the rodent disappeared under the kitchen counter/sink. Maybe it was a small rat. I kept expecting to see it come up out of the sink’s drain.

I picked up the clear pitcher and filled it with tap water…only to notice creepy things swimming in the water, like giant slugs and small sea monsters or eels. One long one wiggling around in the water especially creeped me out. I dumped the water into the sink and poured again, in hopes that the sea monsters would clear away; it’s like how you turn on a faucet and rust comes out at first, but after a bit the water is clear. I saw another round of sea monsters, this time fewer and all small and yellow.

Gun Control Letter

Dear Senator,

My sixteen-year-old nephew goes to high school in Phoenix, a city where open-carry is legal. I don’t want his school to be the next one where some self-entitled jerk with toxic masculinity, poor anger management skills, and a gun barges in and kills a bunch of kids. The purpose of school is education, not sudden and violent death.

The disastrous combination of anger and weapons, not mental illness, Muslims, brown people, or any other scapegoat, is what kills… when uncontrolled and accompanied by weapons. Males in our society (unlike females) are taught that anger is the one emotion they’re allowed to express—uninhibited. They’re taught that they’re entitled to take this anger out on others however they want, even if that means beating their family or committing mass murder.

Meanwhile, creeps with toxic masculinity have easy access to guns, including military assault weapons, thanks to politicians such as Donald Dump and Paul Ryan, accept huge funds from the NRA. The NRA has bought the government.

Making it easy for these jerks, some of whom are white supremacists, to access weapons isn’t okay. It’s past time this insane and backward country bans assault weapons and stops selling weapons to anyone who has money and wishes to buy them. Regular shootings don’t happen in other countries, because they have something called gun control, not greedy and empathy-less patriarchal politicians financially supported by the NRA.

The Accidental Parrot’s Writing Style

I began mentally composing something to blog that sounded a bit too much in the style of Phoebe Robinson, author of You Can’t Touch my Hair, a hilarious essay collection I just read. Of course, I don’t mean to imply that I’m as skilled at writing humor as she is or that many people understand my humor; it’s simply that I caught myself mentally writing something subconsciously similar.

I’ve occasionally noticed an odd tendency of mine: if I’ve been reading something by Oscar Wilde, I can write a bit like Oscar Wilde and tend to have witty thoughts that sound like something he would have said or written. And then there was the time I wrote a gothic novel after and during reading gothic novels, and I accidentally wrote the first draft in a style much like that of the eighteenth-century novelist Anne Radcliffe, something few modern readers would appreciate. (I’m typing these words in Baskerville Old Face, which was fashionable in Anne Radcliffe’s day.)

Time Travel Can Be Confusing

In the middle of January, it sank into my consciousness that this is the year 2018. It is already one hundred years since the year 1918. I could swear it was only yesterday when Prince Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, but here it is over a hundred years since then!

I Googled “end WWI” and learned that the end of World War I was November 11, 2018. I wonder if many people will comment on that in social media or if there’ll be an article or blog about it.

I have a Folkwear pattern for an Armistice blouse, in addition to numerous other 1910s-style clothing patterns, so hopefully I’ll have made at least one outfit from that era, including of course the Armistice blouse. I’ve been feeling like dressing like a suffragist, which is why I have these patterns (and fabric) accumulating of late, never mind that I have trouble completing projects and tend to procrastinate a great deal.

Fire them All

These are the bodies of two letters I just wrote to my senators and representative:

 

The second in charge of the EPA (formerly the Environmental Protection Agency, now the Environmental Persecution Agenda) has a history of lobbying for, not against, the coal industry. Um, dystopia much?! How is it that Dump gets away with invariably hiring monsters who are the extreme opposite of people who are qualified for the job? They all need to be fired. Dump’s undermining of the United States by hiring these people is further proof that he has no respect for our country and doesn’t belong in the White House but in prison.

This hater of planet Earth, Andrew Wheeler, is a bully who’s on the side of corporate polluters, not someone who should be working for the EPA.

The foxes are watching the hen house.

Andrew Wheeler clearly needs to be fired.

# 

Jeff Sessions doesn’t give the hair on a donkey’s chin for justice and should therefore be fired from his position of Attorney General. There’s nothing “general” about what he represents. He doesn’t even hide the fact that he’s a white supremacist! Sure, this is common since the disastrous November 2016 election, but he’s in the position of Attorney General of the country formerly known as the United States. He’s overtly xenophobic, racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and transphobic. The ACLU and over 2,000 lawyers have filed bar complaints in Alabama against this bigot, who has the power to do a great deal of harm to people who don’t have his privileges. Do your part in not allowing bigots like Jeff Sessions be normalized, and do what you can to get him fired.

Valentine

When I was an undergraduate, on Valentine’s Day I was once in a little office with two or three other students, and we were all collating papers for something that escapes my memory. We may have, in addition to sorting the papers into a certain order, folding them and slipping them into envelopes and then sealing said envelopes; certainly, I’ve done that kind of volunteer work for nonprofits.

Since it was Valentine’s Day, the other students were sad that they didn’t have dates. Much as I’ve always loved romantic nineteenth-century literature, even back then I was happy to be single, but I kept that to myself.

We agreed that having chocolate would be a great consolation. One, maybe two, of us went to a supermarket and came back with a gallon of the most hedonistic chocolate ice cream they could find, probably Rocky Road.

About twenty-five years later, this month I was at a supermarket and spotted Coconut Bliss non-dairy ice cream for sale and bought myself not one but two pints of Chocolate Fudge Brownie (and finished one pint before Valentine’s Day). Thus, I’m continuing a tradition of pretending to feel lonely on Valentine’s Day, so I can indulge in my chocolate addiction.

Meanwhile, the anniversary of my dad’s birthday is coming up on February 16th. That only occurred to me yesterday. Bereavement anniversaries bring… things… up. “Things” often meaning a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes. Memories are another thing. I shouldn’t suppress grief but should mindfully observe it, or so I tell myself. Still, I might do something self-indulgent that day, such as watch a movie or attend a ghost convention.

Empathy-less Fools Wallowing in their Privileges

I read multiple books at a time and am currently reading the anti-rape book Asking for It by Kate Harding and the book So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo. Both books bring up something I find bizarre about our society: large numbers of human beings are victim-blamers and dismissive and disbelieving of victims/survivors of things like rape and police brutality… because these vast numbers of citizens believe that this reality is essentially just and kind.

Who the hell are these naive and callous victim-blaming idiots? Can anyone over the age of twelve live in this reality and have such assumptions?

Maybe these are all extremely sheltered and wealthy, white, able-bodied, cisgender males who have no mental illness (because people with such a clueless outlook must skip through life with major privileges) and who have only been close to people who share approximately the same privileges as they. They have very little empathy and absolutely none for underdogs, so they’re extremely not empaths (indeed, some are probably narcissists/sociopaths). They smugly wallow in their privilege and are extremely closed-minded and must not read much nonfiction or pay attention to others.

How can this reality contain such a vast number of humans who fit that description? Well, what I’ve just described does remind me of maddening white males who wallow in their privileges and take them for granted; I’ve had many a disturbing conversation with the likes of them. Furthermore, anyone who grows up female in this society is conditioned to be afraid of potential attackers at all times—try to avoid going out after dark, carry pepper spray, that sort of thing. So I can’t see how anyone female who has lived in this reality all her life and is over the age of four could possibly be one of these naive and near-empathy-less citizens who believe that most rape victims are lying about it and that there’s no such thing as systemic racism.

I certainly wouldn’t want any of these willfully ignorant fools in a jury or for a judge. Oh, yeah, that phrase “willfully ignorant”: perhaps that’s a clue as to how these people function.

Maybe they just spent almost their entire life in a totally different quantum reality, one that really is very fair and just, and where karma has almost immediate consequences, and just yesterday they crossed through a magic portal into this grim reality. I’d love to cross to the other side of that portal and live in a kind and just world! But it wouldn’t transform me into a willfully ignorant, callous, and victim-blaming… sociopath.

Even as a writer and reader of fantasy fiction, I don’t harbor delusions that this reality is a kind and just world. This country needs to wake up and have a great deal more empathy and compassion and be educated and aware about the very real and systemic misogyny and racism embedded in this society.

One of Those Disturbing Dreams

I dreamed that The Worst Frenemy in the Galaxy and I were still close, but suddenly she was giving me the silent treatment. I was confused and extremely worried, because I figured she must be in worse health than usual.

Since I was unable to get in contact with her otherwise, I went to her workplace. It looked like a post office. On the outside, it was a drab sand-colored stone building with a large gravel parking lot, and it appeared to be far from any other building. Inside, there was a long counter with several employees behind it, helping customers. Her station was the first one; I stood before it and waited for her.

She came out from the back and had purple shadows under her eyes and a very hurt expression–how she looked when I blew up at her on the desert in reaction to her cussing me out.

I talked to her as I often did when I was worried about her health (despite her continually accusing me of being aloof and not caring)—asking how she was doing and all. Other people were present, so maybe that was why she didn’t say much; or that combined with manipulation. I asked if her health was worse than usual, and she nodded, but she didn’t explain. I was genuinely showing concern, and this had to be obvious to her, but she kept that facial expression, the look you’d expect someone to give you if you killed their loved one. She gave monosyllabic responses. I finally said, “Well… get better. I’ll see you later,” or something like that, and left.

I had a sense at the end of the dream that that would be the last time I saw her, and back in the dessert-like parking lot, I felt some degree of relief.

 

I’ve been reading The Wizard of Oz and Other Narcissists and journaling in response; so maybe that’s enough for this dream. And I stopped at the post office recently.

What kind of accent?

I just listened to a recording of a meditation led by Joseph Goldstein. He has an accent, I think a Boston accent. He does not have a “Jewish accent.”

I recently recalled two separate incidents in which gentiles at work (not the same workplace or even in the same state) used a peculiar phrase: “a Jewish accent.” On each occasion, I felt shocked and stared at them, and each time they misinterpreted the look on my face. Apparently, it never occurred to them that I might be descended from Jews, since they seemed to assume that I had no idea what they meant by “Jewish accent,” and the first one actually had the nerve to explain it to me.

What they each really meant was a Jew with a New York accent. Do they seriously think that all American Jews live in New York City? It’s true these people in my workplace didn’t keep quiet about being Xians, but did it never occur to them that they might have a Jewish or partially-Jewish coworker?

I wish that in both those situations I had said, “Do you mean a Yiddish accent? Do you mean a Jew with a New York accent? My Jewish grandmother had an accent that was a highly educated cross between Alabama and the east coast. My great-grandmother, who immigrated from Poland, had a Yiddish accent.”