magistrate

Walked out of work today in time to catch the last of the lunar eclipse. This was especially notable for a couple reasons: one, I was completely unaware that this was a thing going on, and two, it had been raining all day. (I actually caught it in a brief clearing between clouds; it was framed by one large cloudbank when I saw it, and then five minutes later or so the sky was completely overcast again, and dripping.)

Beauty, beauty, beauty. It was an odd little jolt to see it, and to recognize what I was seeing, because of course the shadow of the moon and the shadow of the Earth fall on the moon differently. Enough of the moon was visible that it looked, at first glance, like a gibbous, but then the shadow was curved the wrong way. I'm so happy to have been out at just the right moment, between spates of rain; and to have had enough love for the night sky to look up; and to have enough knowledge and reasoning to look twice at what I was seeing, and to know it for what it was.


I've been in a strange state for the last while; writing a lot, and sitting in a strange Rumi-esque sort of being in love with writing, and having that familiar-to-alloromantics sort of delirious anguish about it. For a while now I've been landing solidly between 1,000 and 5,000 words of writing every day, and still never feeling like I'm getting 1,000 or 5,000 words closer to finishing anything; as though the end of these projects is receding, horizon-like, as quickly as I approach it.

I've also been sitting in an odd kind of awareness of all the multitude of authors who are more successful than me, and the ones who are more prolific than me, and the ones who are more skilled than me, and feeling distinctly average about it all. And feeling more fine than not with that averageness; there are things I can see to work on, and that means that there's a place that I can go. I don't have a feeling of "Well, what now?"; I get to hike, and I get to work, and I hope I'm still in this much delirious love with the work in a year, in a decade, in decades to come.

And it helps that a lot of the writing I'm doing is fanfic, and fanfic always seems to have a place for me, even when other things aren't panning out. I wandered into a new fandom, recently, and then immediately scoured AO3 for fiction I could nestle into, and found a great dearth of fiction that hit me just right. And so I built a nest out of the ones that did, and of parts of ones that partially did; there's one fic I found which hits every button I want it to for the first few hundred words, and then slides into something which is not my squee, but damn if I haven't re-read those first few hundred words until they're well-worn.

And there's a kind of salvation, in that, I feel. Most readers read so much more quickly than most writers write that there's a kind of ravenous space that opens. And there's a similar lesson I learned while I was an active editor for Strange Horizons: every single story I fell in love with, and bought, or supported buying, was a flawed piece, but that didn't matter. The stories still mattered to me; they were still things I cherished and wanted to share. So I, feeling distinctly average about my writing, still feel like it's probably worth setting it out there, for someone like me who will find it and need it and love it, or love part of it, even just a few hundred words of it.


I have a tendency to find the sacred in things which were never put out to be holy, and not to find the sacred in things which are hallowed as holy. I've spent my life cobbling together a spirituality out of things gleaned from video games, fantasy novels, random summer days, the movement of crows in the winter.

I'm not precisely sure why, but one of Lois McMaster Bujold's novels, The Curse of Chalion, became the most comforting bit of reading in the world to me a year or two back; I've read it probably ten times over in not a great span of time. One of the things I've been thinking about a lot recently is the funerary customs; the universe of the novels is, I think, referred to as the World of the Five Gods, and at a person's death, one God claims the person's soul unless the person refuses to go to them. (One of the Gods even has the role of the one who takes souls none of the other gods will touch – "the god of last resort, ultimate, if ambiguous, refuge for those who had made disasters of their lives."

I was thinking about the range of characters in my latest fandom. The ones who draw the most attention and affection tend to be clustered around the morally-grey-at-best end of the spectrum, which is especially interesting as the fic that I'm writing involves a fair amount of... implied divine intervention, or at least divine have-it-your-way. And the people upon which this divine attention is falling, by authorial fiat, are not the people who really deserve it, if virtue is the key to deserving.

And then I was thinking about a conversation I was having with sholio, about how Reader/Canon Character was a pairing I was seeing crop up a lot, and how one of the popular pairings seemed to be Reader/Literally The Most Awful Focus Character In The Canon. This is not a pairing I personally understand, or have any desire to. But in a grander sense, it kinda comforts me, in the same inexplicable way that Bujold's world comforts me. Like: it's okay; I don't have to write up a salvation for every character in this canon; like the Five Gods, I'm allowed to love whom I love, and others will be cared for by others.

The upshot of all of this is that I really want to see a Five Gods crossover here, which may be a thing I attempt if I ever clear my plate of any of my other projects, at all, ever.


I've been working on my meditation practice for a while now, and am beginning to feel like it's something solid. I'm doing ten minutes a day, which I plan to start growing toward fifteen, but which I am seeing noticeable benefits from.

What's interesting to me is the benefits I've seen are so pervasive but so subtle. I had a solid mediation habit sometime early last year, and lapsed, thinking that I wasn't really getting much out of it; and then I went through a period of life just sucking, and of not having any tools with which to deal with it. And then I clued in, and started meditating again, and life rapidly became the usual mix of things sucking and things not sucking and things being awesome, and I had the tools to deal with it.

What I've found is that meditation rarely seems like it's going well, or like I'm "improving" at it, or like it has a point, or whatever – at least, not when I'm on the chair with my eyes closed, watching how often I'm getting distracted. But there's a kind of halo effect around it, where I'm more apt to notice what's going on with myself, less prone to getting carried away by imaginary arguments or sneaky hate spirals, and even if I don't always manage to snap myself out of the obsessively-tabbing-to-other-browser-windows-and-rewatching-old-YouTube-videos thing that I do, I more frequently recognize it as something I'm doing, and something that I have the power to make a choice about.

The best metaphor I've found for meditation is that it's a cognitive equivalent of lifting weights. It's a workout. And the workout is frequently a struggle, but it pays for itself in the strength and endurance which it makes available outside of the workout times. I don't think it's a coincidence that my huge wordcount output has mostly tracked with the time that I started getting serious about meditation; I do't think meditation is the only contributing factor, but I think it's definitely a significant one.