Part 1.

Can we stipulate that people die?

In any negotiation, one must define one’s terms. The day after Bros #1 & #2, Paul and Nick, went to visit Aunts Susie and Millie, which reception was hostile to begin with, to ask about liquidating Mom’s portion of the house, and got a very hostile response, then left in a state of gasted flabbers, we tried again.

This time it involved a phone, Nick, me, and Mom in a hospital room. We called. Nick was doing the talking, and he asked the profound question and current familial meme that should be the first go-to in any situation where one is tempted to prolong the suffering of a loved one (including animals) because you can’t let go and you’re just that fucking selfish. Yes. Yes, you are.

Can we stipulate that people die?

It took them way too long to answer that question, which, for a 79-year-old and an 83-year-old, is pretty damned weird. It also creates a philosophical/theological quandary:

If you believe in a loving God and a pretty awesome afterlife even before Judgment Day, why are you afraid of dying?

Do you not believe what you profess to believe?

Where is your faith?

There’s one dead giveaway your content was written by ChatGPT. It’s not the tone, it’s not the phrasing, it’s the em dash.

No normal, non-seasoned writer writes like that.

Sure, there are people who definitely use it. But 99.9999% of the population has never even heard of an em dash before. Let alone use it in their content.

Go die in a fire.

“What does it matter what I think as long as I’m polite and kind to the person?”

“Because it’s not real. It’s not genuine. It’s performative.”

Yes, I was being judgy. I reserve the right to be judgy. We’re all judgy. You can call it “discerning,” “discriminating,” “pattern recognition,” “resentment,” “outrage,” or “vile mean girl,” but we all do it. We may or may not relay our opinions to anyone, but we have them—about things, people, thoughts, beliefs, matters of taste, and behavior. The only difference between your judgment and my judgment is that you don’t agree with me. Humans being humans, you feel you have the moral high ground because of course you do. I guarantee if we agreed, we’d be sitting on the couch gleefully reinforcing our mutual opinion and possibly spilling hot tea.

So I looked at this person who objected to my judgment, completely confused.

“Politeness is performative. That is its entire point.”

The discussion had to end there for external reasons, we never got back to it, and then life intruded in a way that made it irrelevant, but the only real requirement in life is to be kind. If you can’t manage that, be polite. If you can’t manage that, walk away.

But if you are pushed to engagement, go big or go home.

Look, figuring out how to get what you want is the easy part. Figuring out what you want is the hard part.

I thunk up this bit of wisdom for Magdalene (The Great Mormon Novel) when I was rasslin’ with this concept way back in 2011. A perusal of my hard drive tells me I’ve been cogitating on this since at least 1998.

Here’s the backstory:¹

I have a Vomit Book. It’s where I dump my brain. I stand at the threshold of my brain and look at its Neckbeard Nest-ness and take a deep breath. Then I start to my right and go around the folds of my gray matter picking up the trash. Then I go back and do a rough sort of like with like. After that I refine.

I fill up a TOPS JEN Action Planner.² It takes however long it takes. I’m on Book 14 since 2011. Before that, I used AT-A-GLANCE DayMinder Executive Weekly/Monthly Planner from 1999 through 2008. I scanned those and Vomit Books 1-4, then destroyed them.

So, I just write. Dump. Vomit. I tried mind-mapping for a while. That didn’t work. When I’m overwhelmed, I just write words, words that come to mind like the die in a Magic 8 Ball. There is no point. I’m just taking out the trash.

I use it for everything: narrative, to-do, dun-did, wins, losses, health/medical, affirmations/quotes, kids. It’s all color coded,³ I also have a template to copy/paste typewritten thoughts, then print, cut, and tape it into the book.

When I get to the end of one Vomit Book, I go back and read what I wrote, and, in the fresh Vomit Book, I recap. I distill sticking points in black, and note my current thoughts in green.

Although a lot happened, Vomit Book 13 took 2-1/2 years. I filed it away September 1 after I recapped.

Now, I’m a creature of habit. I write the same thing year after year, and I have since 1998:

• What do I really want?
• Why am I so angry?
• What brings me joy?
• Why do I feel so hopeless?
• Why am I such a perpetual fuckup?
• Why do I eat?
• Who am I?
• What is my purpose?
• Why do I think I can have success without sacrifice?
• Why am I so lazy?
• Why do I ruminate on past events only I remember?
• Why can’t I remember the good things that happen?
• Why am I fearful of success and fulfillment?
• Do I have any goals and what are they?

Occasionally, there’s something new, like menopause and how it changed me in fundamental ways. With my mom’s ordeal earlier this year, a new thought entered my brain: I am useful, but not valuable.

September 1, when I recapped the previous Vomit Book and retired it, started out no differently. Same colors, same format, same complaints, but this time I did something new. I noted things that I wanted to explore further because I had new, tiny, vague epiphanies, the first of which was “What do I really want?”

I’ve been asking that question for at least 27 years, and I finally realized that that is the wrong question, and of all the questions I’ve been asking, I had never distilled my despair to its essence and defined my terms first:

• purpose
• fulfillment
• success

where I had to determine what I thought I should want/think/feel versus what habits I actually have. You don’t work to change habits you don’t really care about. You keep the habit because it does something for you.

PURPOSE

Useful, but not valuable.

My church teaches that one’s purpose is to serve others. You know what? I don’t like serving others. It stresses me out and I get zero joy out of it. In fact, I resent it, the work, the time, the effort. I get panicky and then once I’m alone, I melt down. Or I can throw money at it. I’m okay with that.

I don’t have a purpose. Never have had a purpose. No calling, no life’s work.⁴ I could take that as a sign that I should try harder, but that only makes me flagellate myself more.

Then it occurred to me: Do I have to have a purpose? Is having a purpose something I thought I should find? How many people actually have a purpose? How many people just go about their lives trying to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table? How many people go to high-paying jobs, slog through the day, go home, and mow the lawn with the occasional vacation here and there ad infinitum?

FULFILLMENT

I had noted that I was fearful of this. I don’t remember feeling this way, but I wrote it down in early 2023, so I did a deep dive on that. After some thought, I was surprised to learn that what fulfills me is so simple:

• listening to music that speaks to me
• looking at pretty things
• making pretty things
• making pretty ebooks out of complex print design
• listening to AI-generated stories read by AI-generated voices while I work
• laying down thousands of words in one long writing session
• walking in the grass in spring
• putting things in order (e.g., filing, computer file reorganization)
• solving problems (e.g., computer issues, plot/characterization blocks, WordPress, HTML/CSS)⁶

That’s it. That’s what I enjoy doing. When I drifted away from what I thought I should want, which were grandiose ambitions, vestiges of a time I wanted to earn my parents’ approval and only recently realized I was never going to get it, to contemplate what I look forward to doing, I … changed.⁷

It took me a minute to figure out I’m already fulfilled. I’m in my happy place when I’m doing whatever I would be doing anyway.

SUCCESS

Most people define this as winning and/or having a lot of money. When one wins, one is usually competing against something else. Except … I don’t like competing. It’s too much effort and risk and not enough payoff. I’m a sore loser and I do want to win, but winning doesn’t do anything for me. No dopamine hit, no feeling of fulfillment or success because what’s the purpose?

Money is a tool. Or, as Giselle puts it in The Proviso:

Money doesn’t solve anything. It just makes surviving less difficult.

It dawned on me that I don’t really care about money. It never occurred to me that the only thing I want money for is my basic needs, take-out, some inexpensive wants,⁸ an emergency fund, and maybe to be able to take off on a road trip at a moment’s notice. In short, not to be in survival mode in perpetuity.⁹

So this is where we get into the weeds of should want versus really want, and again, this is a vestige of what I thought my dad and/or the world viewed as success.¹⁰

I had to redefine success for myself, which was what my teenage and young adult self really wanted:

• to be a published author
• to get married
• to have children

Thus, by that measure, I’ve succeeded.¹¹

But you see, I never looked beyond those things.

• What happens after I get The Call?¹²
• What happens after the wedding?
• What happens after I see the positive pregnancy test?

It’s been 15 days now since I started looking at my life in a whole new way, and I feel free. Free of the burdens of expectations I don’t even know if others held. Free of expectations I thought I should fulfill or thought I wanted to fulfill. Free of expectations going forward. Free to enjoy puttering around. Free to have a job and not a career, and enjoy just having a job that pays for my basic needs. Free to know happiness.

I’m not going to ask myself why it took me so long. I’m just going to enjoy it.

One of my earliest memories is my dad holding my coat out for me as a gentleman should, and saying, “I can do it myself!” with all the irritation a three-year-old (or thereabouts) can muster. His feelings were hurt and he got mad and punished me with the silent treatment.¹

Then later, maybe I was about ten or so, because reasons, he was calmly discussing my attitude, which concerned him: “Elizabeth,² no man is an island.”

Oh, I understood what he meant immediately. It wasn’t like he hadn’t hinted at it before, but there were two problems with this advice: 1) the guy giving it thought he was an island, so WTF Dad, and 2) he really didn’t understand that from the very beginning, being offered help was saying I have no faith in you or You’re too stupid to do this yourself.³ I didn’t have words for this when I was three and I had no concept of social niceties because I was three.

Having to ask for help was even more humiliating: You were right to have no faith in me and I am too stupid to do it myself.

I started writing Dunham (that wasn’t its title back then) with a lone female pirate captain who got there on her own, and was the sole authority on her ship. She was a loner. She did everything alone. And she was a virgin because of course she was.

Anyway, life tossed me around somewhat and I started to see something: Those with power, money, or even people who just had their shit together, had support. Sometimes, lots of support. They had help along the way, from generational wealth and grooming to catching a glance of a homeless guy down on the corner that one time who gave you an approving smile and a good piece of advice. Nobody got there alone.

I spent 23 years doodling along on my lone female pirate captain who did it all on her own. But every year that passed, problems kept popping up, logical fallacies, plot holes.

How is she supposed to be educated when she just randomly plopped out of some hoo-ha with no guidance? How is she supposed to get a ship when she doesn’t have a pot to piss in and she’s “too moral” to steal?⁴ And, wait. If she’s too moral to steal, why’s she a pirate? That’s what pirates do, isn’t it? How’m I supposed to square that circle?

Meh, it’s my story, I can do what I want. I am going to shove that very big peg through that very small hole, and I’m going to do it by myself.

However, shit happened and by 1996, I’d stopped doodling on my pirate captain. It was a vestige of my past, my immaturity, my inability to bring my vision to paper because I knew I didn’t have the chops for it and had to keep writing books to acquire them.

In 2002, I got married to a wonderful man who helped me pretty much without me noticing, and by the time I did, I realized he did it out of love, not because he had no faith in my ability, intellect, or general existence. I acquired children. My interactions with other parents were … well, less than effective and pleasant. I learned. Mellowed. Maybe I softened. Learned how to pick my battles. Or maybe I was just tired of everybody’s shit and decided almost none of it was important at all.

In 2007 wrote The Proviso after an epiphany that I was going to have to chuck my idea altogether and rewrite it, which I did to my (mostly) satisfaction. Gutting all that gentleman thief, unworkable premise, stewpot thinking made my world and my writing so much better. So I very carefully opened my pirate captain files to reacquaint myself with the work. I had a vague vision, but I didn’t know how to fulfill it, and what I had already done would not work.

One day, I sat my ass down to read a romantasy wherein the main female character, a warrior commander of some military force was captured, leaving her troops in a complete mess. She had a second-in-command, but he was ineffective. This was addressed sort of, but only tangentially to point out that she was a wartime leader, but not a peacetime one. When I was younger, teens, mid-twenties, I would have felt satisfied, complete, whole. Yes, this is how it’s supposed to be. Yeah, so what if she’s not a peacetime commander? Those guys are pussies anyway.

It got me to thinking: What would happen to my pirate captain’s life’s work if something happened to her that didn’t actually kill her, and she was disabled or had to start over?

Oh, and then came the weevils.⁵ It was eye-opening. What’s this?! Pirates engage in subterfuge to win? They don’t just slug it out head-on like honorable men?⁶

My time living life, having a husband, having children got me thinking: We are a product of our time and circumstance. We do what we must. We don’t get anywhere alone.

And fuck me if I was going to allow my pirate captain to have an ineffective pussy as a second-in-command because she can’t stand to rely on someone else and lose everything she’s got if something bad happens to her.

She might be a lot of bad things, but she is not stupid.

While that is true, in general, women’s art is seen with some disdain regardless of what it is, how well it’s done, or in what cultural/societal conditions it’s made, I’ll save you the feminist rant. For now. You’re welcome.

Complaints about genre romance are generally phrased as “romance is trash,” not “I don’t like romance because I think it’s trash.” I’m told these two different phrasings make a significant difference in reaction to some people, but come on. We all know they’re exactly alike.³

While these complaints prick my soul a little, they’re valid. I’m not even going to get into the male wish-fulfillment fantasies of pulp novels and comic books: spycraft, cowboys, space captains, superheroes, anything sporting a Boris Vallejo cover, and sportsball,⁴ because a good half⁵ of what’s classified as⁶ romance is objectively trash.

Now, I’ve tried to write straight-up smut because that’s where the money is and rent’s gotta get paid. The two people who read it said I’d done it very well, had my usual depth, and was very distinctly my voice. It was, in fact, some of my best work, and there’s some measure of very smart, intellectual erotica out there. But it made me feel oogey, and if my own smut could make me oogey when I was 45 and as horny as a 17-year-old boy, it’s bad. So I tucked that away in my external hard drive, never to be seen again.⁷

I even tried to write a clean (no sex) reverse harem book, because that’s a popular subsubgenre (“clean” or “wholesome” is its own thing), but the concept made me feel oogey for an entirely different reason.⁸

De gustibus non est disputandum, sure, but objective truth can be applied to some of it:

• short
• minimal plot
• no characterization
• graphic, unusual sex is its raison d’être
• badly put together because speed is the priority
• many published in a quick timeframe
• may or may not cause problems akin to other addiction problems
• may or may not be used as a replacement for real-life sex

They don’t have to be art. They just have to make money. People who read a lot⁹ will devour their favorite genres and tropes, and go looking for more like it’s meth. Dinosaur erotica obviously must have a wide audience, but nobody’s ’fessing up to reading them, much less fangirling over them outside niche fora.

Then there’s Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey.

These are hotly debated, denigrated, and defended, but, I would argue, somewhere in the middle of trash and not-trash.

I don’t know what’s special about these books, what sparked such devotion to them. I always say people choose a book for its trope (to be addressed in a later post) first and summary second, but they re-read an author for his/her voice, so I have to presume that other than the trope, something about the way Stephenie Meyer and E.L. James strung the words together spoke to them.

Or maybe it was the sex. I don’t know.

Disclaimer: I have not read any of these books except the first Twilight book, which I thought was an entertaining popcorn read, but didn’t spur me to read the rest.

Not-trash:

• long, saga-like
• some characterization, with plausible motivations
• decent construction
• thought and care put into it, even if the author wasn’t terribly skilled at it

Trash:

• cipher heroine¹⁰
• plot is to serve the sex¹¹
• sex isn’t very well written (so I’ve heard)
• caused minor to severe real-world problems akin to other addiction problems

Beyond technical and societal issues, I can’t speak to its non/trashiness because see above de gustibus non est disputandum, or, in more recent parlance, “I know it when I see it.” Even this entire post could be classed as preference, simping, and apologetics, but whatever. I know what I like, and dinosaur erotica is not it.

Although I consider myself a romance author,¹² other people don’t.¹³ However, there are a lot of people find romance contemptuous, are loud about it, and it bothers me that I’ve lumped myself in with the stuff I don’t write, don’t like, and don’t respect.

Long ago, I started telling people I write soap operas, which got the point across (“Yeah, there’s probably sex in it, but it’s a long story with lots of drama.”¹⁴), but that stopped working as soon as I said it to a twenty-something valet when he asked what I do, and he said, “What’s a soap opera?” Eh, people don’t respect those, either.

What am I looking for here, though? What is the point of this post?

Hell if I know.

Rush lyrics play a large part in The Proviso, so much so that the female counterpart of the title-ish character calls it out:¹ “Neil Peart wrote my hymns and Rush is my choir.”

Yet … as much as even the most poverty-stricken among us can get the message of “Subdivisions” thanks to ubiquitous teen TV dramas, kids who grow up in subdivisions aren’t.

Poor, I mean.

Poverty and people who think in Poor also have a large presence in The Proviso. Only one of the six leads grew up with money, and he doesn’t find money interesting or important, which is a manifestation of his privilege. The only other one who didn’t grow up poor grew up in … a subdivision. In San Diego. In the 80s. In the exact misery of the song.

Even though I referenced “Subdivisions” in The Proviso consistent with its intended message (Chapter 22 “Misfit So Alone,” Chapter 87 “Far Unlit Unknown”), I also subverted it because my heroine, the one to whom Rush speaks so deeply, lives in such abject poverty in a falling-down relic of 19th-century gothic revival in such a backwater of a town that the particular flavor of hell of growing up in a subdivision is, for her, a dream come true—or better yet, a dream she never thought to dream at all because her future is

pre-decided

Now, the subdivision she is suddenly dropped in the middle of isn’t a rich one, either. It’s old, mid-1960s, in a sprawling ranch that tries to look French provincial, a house that still has Mamie pink tile and Formica in its kitchen and bathrooms, and sits at the very back of the developed land, waiting for the day it gets razed and replaced with closely set mcmansions. There are newer houses farther away from her upgraded home, and so there’s a clubhouse with a pool.

The house and neighborhood are not glamorous. They’re not even of the caliber of the Toronto subdivisions referenced in the song. She’s savvy enough to know that the house is wildly out of date, even if someone did attempt to modernize it with avocado green shag carpet and a harvest gold refrigerator, and the fact that the trust-fund guy she’s married to is fine with Walmart flat-pack furniture isn’t normal, nor should it be—but to her, the whole setup is magical.

But not overwhelming.

After all, you can take a poor country girl off the farm and plop her in a society matron’s living room, but there’s gonna be an immediate need for a therapist. The mint-ish 1960s ranch is as big a step up the socioeconomic culture scale as any mature person could handle. The mcmansion comes next.

This isn’t just about peer pressure. It’s a law of social survival. The song argues that in these kind of controlled environments, individuality isn’t just discouraged, it’s actually a liability. And that message, it became an anthem for a generation of outsiders. It speaks directly to the deep-seated adolescent fear of being different, of being rejected for not living up to the unspoken standard. —Neil Peart

So the next time “Subdivisions” comes on the radio, we can nod and give the generic middle-class North American teen his angsty due, but then remember that one person’s prison is another person’s paradise.

While I’m cleaning up my blog, I come across this little nugget: “An ebook is not a book,” and I wonder to myself, “Whose idiotic opinion was I skewering that day?”

Scifi author Graham Storrs said in the comments:

Seems to me that an e-book is a book in every way that counts. What people mean when they say ‘book’ is the content it contains.

I have no defense.

← Part 3

• Step 1: Say something snarky on Twitter.

  
   

• Step 2: Have the internet shoot up in flames around you and get a mention at Fox News.
• Step 3: Panic.

From linked blog post:

What I should’ve said

Naw, I shouldn’t have. I’ve regretted walking this back for years, since almost as soon as I posted it. Sure, I was panicked. Sure, I’d been conditioned to apologize for shit I didn’t do or that I wasn’t sorry for to soothe some hurt fee-fees. Sure, I … and and and and and

No, I wasn’t sorry then. I’m not sorry now. The internet is full of very clever and funny people, but it is also full of idiots with reading comprehension problems, deficits in reasoning, and broken sarcometers.

Fuck all y’all. I’m only sorry I back-peddled.

← Part 2

Part 4 →

Magdalene, the third book in the Dunham series, will be released on Sunday, April 24, 2011. This is the last book in the series with contemporary characters; book four, Dunham, is an historical and book five, tentatively titled Delilah, is post-apocalypse.

Delilah.

Post-apocalypse.

Polyandry.

Delilah and sisters Jezebel and Lilith, daughters of Duncan Kenard, granddaughters of Bryce and Giselle Kenard.

It, like most everything I’ve published, is an outgrowth of something I wrote in the 1990s that I wrung into the Dunham universe or cannibalized for something else in the Dunham universe.

I was all into it when I was forty and my libido was super-charged. I researched other polyandrous fiction and realized someone else did it better than I could, ever would, and mine would be seen as derivative, even though the added twist was that these people are Mormons, and given our history, i WaS gOiNg To TuRn PoLyGaMy On ItS hEaD. I don’t remember who wrote what or when. I just noted that someone else had done a good polyandrous novel, so I shelved Delilah.

It’s the late 21st century and a prototype chemical weapon is accidentally released (in Los Alamos, where else?). It was intended to kill selectively based on DNA (mitochondrial DNA?); its target was supposed to be people who trend to alpha, risk-takers, smart. It was not age-selective. Instead, it kills the weak. (Basically, it culls the US population for the best and worst, leaving not much in between.) It wipes out more than 2/3 of the US population, and what’s left are basically the barbarians. Further, it kills far more males than females. It amps up the males’ aggression and the females’ fertility. So of course, the Dunhams are barbarians anyway, but now they’re just more barbarous.

Pre-writing this post:

Then I went and re-read. Shit, I’m good. I was, even back then when I started it, in 2008. Well, of course, I’m good. I wrote the Great Mormon Novel™.

★★★

PROLOGUE

★★★

No. No, I’m not.

← Part 1

Part 3 →