Spicy Takes on Nomadland: Romanticization by Omission

After watching Nomadland on Saturday night, my husband and I complained extensively. We'd heard a lot about the film, had our suspicions about it, and were upset to find our suspicions confirmed. I found myself Googling "nomadland amazon" feeling I'd either lost touch with reality, or director Chloé Zhao had. I read some articles, then figured I should move on with my evening. Even after meditating and writing, however the movie was still on my mind, and I sat down at around midnight to stay up far past my bedtime to write notes on what I thought was wrong with the movie. As soon as I got up in the morning, Tim and I were back to complaining about it.

The tl;dr is that this movie really rubbed me the wrong way. I want to talk about why.

A note before we start: It's been a long time since I've written anything even vaguely essay-ish, so bear with my rust. This was also written while I was in pain, and inevitably edited while I was in pain. Hopefully, my muddling will still make clear why I think Nomadland has an empty heart, only serving as a status quo balm for systemically-inflicted wounds.

Yep, the Amazon Thing

When I was Googling the film's relationship with Amazon, conspiracy theories along the lines of "Amazon gave Zhao money like the army does for Marvel," churned through my head. Instead, I found this article which revealed what should've been obvious from the start: why would Amazon pay for propaganda when someone is willing to do it for them for free? According to Frances McDormand, all they had to do was call and ask.

This article also includes the apparently typoed quote from Zhao: "I don’t make films about politics. I like to to [sic] present you the reality of the lives people live, and I like for you to take away your own interpretations."

I laughed out loud when I read this. Zhao's portrayal of Amazon was so conciliatory I wanted to puke: a manager starts the day off with safety tips; Fern awkwardly fills and tapes up a box, taking her time; Fern walks at a leisurely pace past her friend, Linda May, at her work station and jokes with her.

According to this Vulture article, this is a far cry from how Amazon was covered in the book on which this film was based. The book depicted extensive criticism of Amazon by some of the same people who appeared in the movie. I still feel like my brain is melting when I return to the article and double check that, yes, the Linda May who cheerily works with Fern in the movie is the same Linda May who "experienced dizziness during her shifts at the Amazon warehouse that landed her in the emergency room and got a repetitive motion injury from using her scanner gun." Like, really? This same woman who went on record calling Amazon "probably the biggest slave owner in the world," was portrayed in this film as having been saved from suicide by van life?

We've all heard the horror stories coming out of Amazon warehouses. This is the reality, not the sanitized version that Zhao presents, either willingly, or as the result of manipulation by Amazon. The moment Zhao portrayed this cozy picture of life as a gig worker at Amazon -- a gig worker who doesn't get benefits, mind you -- she departed drastically from reality, and undermined her every assertion that she's trying to let you make your own conclusions.

This depiction reinforces the status quo. According to this depiction, Amazon is fine; actually, it's a good resource for the houseless retirees. Fern says it's "Great money," even though this film is set in 2011, before Amazon established a $15 minimum wage (which is still not enough, but that's beside the point). If Amazon is perfectly fine and not held to account, then why would we expect that of any of the other forces at work in the van dwellers' lives? These scenes, which take place early in the movie, set the tone for the rest of the film: a background stream of false working class solidarity that fails to hold systemic problems and capitalistic powers to account.

Positioning by Omission

If this film isn't depicting reality, then what is it depicting? According to Zhao, "If you look deeply, the issue of elder care as a casualty of capitalism is on every frame. It’s just, yes, there’s the beautiful sunset behind it." So actually, scratch what she said in the other article; we are to believe Nomadland is deeply critical of capitalism, specifically of its treatment of elders.

However, the film has already failed to live up to this assertion by failing to depict Amazon's abuse of elders. Such omissions permeate the film, letting the capitalistic factors that led to these peoples' daily reality off the hook.

The story we are given is this: Fern, who is in her 60s (and based off McDormand's romantic dream of what she wanted to be at age 65), lost her husband, then her town. The latter, which is a true story, was the result of the closing of the United States Gypsum Corporation plant there due to lack of demand. Thus we find Fern living in a van, doing gig work, such as for Amazon, but also for a rock shop, a camp, a restaurant for tourists, and a beet farm. She encounters other van dwellers who talk about their backstories. She encounters various struggles. A loose plot is constructed out of her relationship with a man named Dave, who is obviously sweet on her and who tries to convince her to stay with his family. The settled life doesn't suit her, however -- for reasons elaborated better in other reviews of this movie, living "nomadically" suits her lasting grief over her husband's death. She returns to her van and drives off into the beautiful American landscape.

I'll address my criticisms of Zhao's omissions and how they position the viewer in roughly chronological order.

First, the abandonment of Empire, Nevada. The situation is explained in a series of of titlecards at the beginning of the film, which harshly present the dissolution of the town, but also give the USG Corporation a justification in explaining the lack of demand. Especially with the context of the later Amazon scenes, it reads to me like an "oh well," of capitalism, just one of those things that happens in the background of someone's life and there's no need to be mad about it. The USG Corporation is never mentioned again, and we find out later in the film that Fern and her husband, Beau, actually loved living in the company town.

While I don't know about the specifics of life in Empire, company towns historically have a horrible track record -- but the film doesn't address that. Either Empire wasn't like other company towns, or Fern liked it there despite that -- but all we hear about is the nice view from her house. Is the USG Corporation not to blame for monopolizing workers' labor opportunities in the middle of nowhere, and then abandoning them without any lasting aide? Surely it is, but the movie is about interested in that as it is in the horrifying working conditions in Amazon warehouses in real life; namely, not at all.

Moving on to the van-dwellers' backstories. Linda Mays talks about how she retired and found that her social security savings amounted to a pittance which couldn't sustain her. She wanted to kill herself, but couldn't do it because of her dogs, and so joined the van movement. The question of how social security failed her is ignored and quickly forgotten. It isn't presented as a failure of elder care in America because, according to everything the movie shows us, Linda May is happy now, and living in a van saved her from suicide. Again, the injuries and injustices suffered by the real life people shown in this movie are ignored, despite appearing in the Nomadland book.

The other backstories we hear hint at similar systemic failings -- a veteran with PTSD (just one though!), a husband who dies before getting to experience his retirement, a diagnosis of brain cancer the victim may have been unable to pay to get treated, and so on. 

All these tragedies are outweighed by a lot of talk about how van life is liberating, you get to go see the beautiful US of A, etc. Why, you'd think that, despite the hardships of van life (there's shots of seminars where van dwellers laugh about bucket toilets and "that knock on the door" that precedes the enforcement of anti-homeless laws), capitalism's failure to care for its elders resulted in a good thing actually, thank you so much for the opportunity!

This is backed up by the arc between Fern and Dave. As it turns out, Dave can go to the hospital without the bills ever becoming relevant, the reason being that actually, he had a place to all along, a family to go live with. He just didn't want to because of his strained relationship with his son. When Fern tries out sedentary life, she doesn't like it, and returns to her van. In both cases, the choice to live in a van is just that: a choice. 

I suppose the people turning up at the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous are likely to be the sort of people enjoying the lifestyle, and not necessarily the people living in parking lots in Colorado Springs living off food from Dollar Tree. Still, this narrow view of the supposed quintessence of van life, and the handwaving of malignant capitalistic forces in peoples' pasts would make you think that most people live the van life voluntarily, or at least love living it involuntarily.

And why wouldn't they love living it? So far as we see, it's actually not that bad for 60-80 year olds to be working in the gig economy. Unlike real life, no one gets injured. Fern has a "knee issue" but this comes up when she has to sit on the ground for a chat, not when she's shoveling beets or treading the concrete floors of the Amazon warehouse. As a disabled person, I watched the whole movie with a hovering anxiety for the characters' well-being in these harsh work conditions, but that never came to fruition. 

The Risks of Romanticization

One review I read said in the byline that Nomadland "risks romanticizing a harsh life in the gig economy," but otherwise praised the film. No, I'd say Nomadland outright romanticizes that harsh life because it barely portrays the harshness of that life. Another review ends with the line "Maybe we should hit the road," -- a lesson I don't think we'd get from a film that didn't gloss over the gnarlier details of capitalistic exploitation of van-dwelling workers.

Okay, it's just a movie, and, as Youtuber Shonalika put it, no movie can say everything that needs to be said. Van life obviously works for some people, and there's nothing wrong with that. But, romanticizing van life in such a one-sided way is a dangerous way to address those vague gestures towards "elder care as a casualty of capitalism." It might sound to some like a decent reason not to worry too much about the failure of elder care because, check it, these elders are fine! Yet there's a reason the people in this movie are majority white and comparatively able-bodied -- van life is not a reasonable proposition for whole subsets of the population.

This is a dangerous mentality of individual solutions to systemic problems. This mentality seeps into other parts of Nomadland. For example, when Fern is at a get together with her sister's friends (?), she criticizes them for being real estate agents, holding them individually accountable for what she feels are problems with their trade. The emphasis, as I heard it, was on what they, these two men do, and they should stop doing it. (Also, according to Fern, the big problem with real estate is that people are duped into buying houses they can't afford, which I suppose is a problem, though no mention of things like racist practices or the unaffordability of housing to begin with, but whatever).

Not every story has to deal with systemic solutions, but if you're going to depict a systemically oppressed group, maybe don't romanticize the individual solutions so hard.

G*psies and Pioneers

There's a bit of tone-deaf language in this film that I'd like to bring up.

First is the use of a the word "g*psy" in a song during which Fern and Dave dance. According to another review I generally agree with, Bob Wells, the organizer of the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous, is all too willing to use that word on his website to describe van life. The use of that slur during a song no doubt is meant to draw the comparison to the life led by van-dwellers, but, as this article helpfully states, "In depicting 'Gypsy' ways as a lifestyle choice for carefree travelers and adventurers, the real system of oppression is also erased."

I'm not qualified to speak more on that particular subject. I will now indulge in a brief moment of speculation. I've been vigorously avoiding the word "nomad" through this entire post because, since watching the movie, I've been wondering at its political implications. Nomadism describes a way of life for some cultures, cultures which, by my understanding, are generally oppressed by sedentary societies. Is it indelicate to use this term to describe the lifestyle, voluntary or not, of a predominately white subculture? I have no idea, but I have my misgivings, and would love to learn more.

The other bit of language I want to complain about is the quote which was used in trailers for the film -- Dolly, Fern's sister, defending Fern's choices by saying, "What the nomads are doing is not that different than what the pioneers did." This pronouncement is so unspecific as to be totally baffling to me. I suppose it's about the legend of pioneers as explorers, or something, though that's an odd assertion when, according to the film, van dwellers spend a lot of time at campgrounds set aside for that purpose.

Given that this line as obviously scripted, it absolutely baffles me how it passed through so many hands without any noticing its egregious failing which is that...we all know what the pioneers did, right? I guess we're just gonna forget about the genocide of native peoples for the sake of this comparison, which is weirdly favorable? It's a line that buys wholesale into a white myth of America, the idea that what the pioneers did was explore an empty land, rather than ravaging a populated one.

Conclusion

I tried to see what people would like about this movie; I swear, I did. Frances McDormand is a good actress. There's some moments of real humor in the movie. There's also some moments of real "oh shit" tragedy, even if that tragedy is barely explored. The landscapes are pretty, sure, though I think they do most of the heavy lifting where cinematography feels lacking to me, an unprofessional observer. (Even so, my impression of them after the fact is mostly of hills and stones rendered in mostly gray. If the USA has so many beautiful landscapes to offer, why not make them, you know, colorful?) I have no issues with a movie that doesn't have much of a plot or conventional structure (I liked the third season of Twin Peaks after all). None of that is my real beef with Nomadland.

I am sick of films that present themselves as some sort of realistic neutral when they're actually implicitly propping up a dangerous status quo. There's just enough lip service paid to social issues and working class sympathy for it to seem revolutionary -- enough, apparently, for one reviewer to insist that "Zhao’s film is one of the most fervently anti-capitalist films to break into the American mainstream in a long, long time." (That made me laugh, for obvious reasons, but also, I guess Sorry to Bother You and Parasite didn't count?) This bare minimum of lip service, however, gives way to a focus on the general theme of grief and a comforting sadness, a feeling that everything will be fine, these people are fine, it's all fine.

All that space given to aimless depression and shots of the landscape could've been used to say something. But there's a reason the Nomadland is currently a frontrunner in the Oscars, and it isn't because it had lots to say.

Tortoising Along

 You hear that? That's my distant shrieking because it's suddenly not-so-suddenly March now and I ought to make another blog post.

February felt like it lasted forever, mostly because it was so cold. It feels like I spent most of the month either obsessing over Pathologic 2 or up late at night, after Tim has gone to bed, trying to motivate myself towards some concrete, productive activity while chronically unable to maintain my body heat and wondering if spring actually will ever come, or if by some weird paranormal phenomena, it'll be like this forever. 

Then again, if I think back again on my last blog post, that was like...two weeks ago? Right? All these things I've been meaning to do I last engaged with approximately two weeks ago, right? I haven't been meaning to get back to my acrylic painting for more than a whole month, right???

My therapist tells me I'm not the only one: a lot of people are struggling with motivation right now. So I'm not the only one feeling incredibly disinclined to any movement of any sort, physically or metaphorically. Evidently it's an effect of a history-changing crisis persisting for over a year now.

Still, I'm trying! It's an uncoordinated, unplanned sort of trying, like a fish eating whatever bits of food float in front of its face.

The Worldbuilding Project

I meant to write a blog post after I was done the worldbuilding task I've been working on, but evidently that's going to be a while longer. I posted previously about my new concept for how to approach worldbuilding individual cultures. Well, I've been following through with this for the culture where the story of my supposed fantasy novel series starts, and it's been working surprisingly well! The one thing is I've had to add a fair bit to it, because I realized, mostly through doing research, that there were some areas I missed. Here's what it looks like for the moment:

1. ENVIRONMENT

Lifezones

Resources

2. POPULATIONS

[So, a rundown of the different beings that live in the area.]

3. RESPONSE TO THE ENVIRONMENT

Summary of Environmental Challenges

Addressing These Challenges

Food

Fire

Shelter

Clothing

3. SOCIETY

Values

Religion

Hierarchy

Law

4. LIFE IN SOCIETY

Birth

Growth

Sex

Health

Death

5. CULTURE

Music

Intoxicants

Leisure

Art

War

I'm not 100% the lifezones thing will always be there, it was just necessary because this particular area is a canyon, and similar enough to the Grand Canyon that I researched that to get a grasp on how the area would look. Turns out the Grand Canyon area consists of a bunch of diverse lifezones, and this needs to be accounted for in understanding the challenges of the environment.

Then as I was doing my research on the Grand Canyon I realized the specific challenges it presents and began to think of how a society might adapt to these challenges, so I decided to have a place to put a concise summary of these challenges and responses. This made a framework to reference as I moved on.

Lastly, I added the culture section because I realized that there were facets that didn't fit anywhere in particular. I figure that part is the mostly likely to experience growth. I know that a section about timekeeping needs to go in the skeleton somewhere, but I haven't decided yet where to put it.

All in all, my method worked for me! Investigating the climate and challenges of the area did generate a lot of ideas, and things have been flowing naturally from there. There are some blank spots, mostly because of the interconnectedness of any world: the area was once under a colonialist power, which left a lot of marks on the culture, and there are aspects of trade with other areas that need to be considered. The other big blank spot has to do with how sewage is handled because...I have no idea. I don't know what to do there. It may not matter to the reader, but I'd like to know!

I have also been researching the Havasupai of the Grand Canyon, mostly as a point of comparison, juggling two books which, though written by white men, were apparently approved and acclaimed by the Havasupai. The books in question are I Am the Grand Canyon and Havasupai Habitat. They've both been immensely informative and excellent reads beyond just their usefulness .

I don't want to culturally appropriate, of course, but it's been crucial to learn how actual people handle this kind of environment in real life, and how that might shape your philosophy. It was a pleasant surprise when my hypotheses about how people would adapt to the environment were correct, and equally pleasant to find circumstances where I was wrong. The last thing I'd want to do is get the wrong end of the stick and mischaracterize what life in any given environment would be like.

Ultimately, the culture I'm winding up with is vastly different from the Havasupai. Even so, my dream is to have a section at the back of this theoretical book, should it ever get published, where I can list my research and inspirations, so that people can seek context without thinking I invented certain food items or whatever when I was actually inspired by the real world and by real people.

(If anyone thinks my approach is problematic, I would love to hear about it. I strive to be respectful, but what do I know? I'm always willing to learn.)

Other Writing Tasks

The worldbuilding is what I've been spending a lot of time on for the past month or so. I'm still persisting with my crap manuscript from NaNoWriMo. Apparently, I stopped at exactly 88,000 words last night, go figure. Ideally that would be like...where the book is done. And I'm only maybe halfway through the story, or a little more...oops. I keep remembering things that I ought to have put in, such as maintaining that so-and-so is good at a certain kind of magic. Eventually, I'll learn to do this better. I've already got ideas on how to do it better.

I've been continuing with the short story game, but slowly. Editing feels insurmountable some days, I suppose because of the continual overwhelm. I've been stuck on at least three new stories, unsure what should come next, so I'm letting those ideas ferment.

Haven't been up to much else worth discussing, but I am writing six days a week without fail! I'm also drawing a lot and keeping up with my reading. Struggling with the meditation, though. 

The hope is writing will get a little easier when the weather warms up and I can sit out in the sun to write and my feet aren't cold all the time. We're getting there, slowly but surely.

Costcochondritis

 Well, basically out of nowhere, I decided to jump back into the short story submissions game, for as long as my mental health can take it at least. The thing that broke me out of my inactivity in the area was watching 1917, which poignantly reminded me of my vaguely WWI inspired story. It's like the realization, Oh, yeah, I'm sitting on like four short stories in various states of finality! Dang! hit me in the face. It came roughly alongside that it's probably not worth it to belabor the editing to the extent I have been, lest I edit any sense of naturalness out of my prose, probably. I feel like I can't tell the difference between good and bad in my writing any more, unless the bad is there in huge, grating quantities, so I guess I just have to hope it is any good.

So, just got the first rejection letter for the short story mentioned above and immediately re-submitted it elsewhere, then stared at the dark kitchen window for a while, dissociating for some reason. I'm trying Action and Commitment Therapy, which is all about not tuning in to the radio station of blithering self-hating BS that is always occupying at least part of my brain's wavelengths. It's been helping, I think, and it's a big reason why I'm writing this blog post. It's deliciously tempting to go off and hate myself right now, play Skyrim and watch crappy anime until it's suddenly 3 AM and my body is totally mummified with pain, but am I feeling that for any good reason? No, not really, I should expect like a thousand more rejection letters before I get any foothold here, and all I can do is be myself and do my best. So, best to do the directly opposite thing to my self hate, which is write a little however I can, such as by updating my blog. Then, go to bed.

I guess the most interesting personal development in my currently quite restricted life is I seem to have randomly developed costochondritis (which I am forever pronouncing incorrectly), an inflammation of the cartilage attaching ribs to sternum. Apparently it's super common for people with fibromyalgia to develop it, which makes intuitive sense to me, despite the fact that no one knows what fibromyalgia really is.

I bring it up not to complain, but because it's all been so weirdly hilarious to me. At first I thought I was having more pre-cordial catch moments then usual, then it settled into all this stinging pain at the center of my chest, clearly coming from my ribcage. Tim and I had to go to Costco that evening (we went super late to avoid people) and I remember trying to put together the shopping list, eat dinner, etc., and laughing a lot at how ridiculous the pain was, this melodrama of my body, which stacks on misfortunes like the plot of a Lemony Snicket book.

(A note on the pain, too -- it's not that it's ridiculously painful. I'd put it at like a 6 on the pain scale most times, though that first night it got quite intense. It's a perfect example of something I've been contemplating lately, which is how the quality of pain is so different from its number. This weird, 20-needles-in-my-cartilage-feeling is so hilariously awful, but simultaneously kind of pleasantly distracting, spicy, and fun compared to the dull ache that runs down my legs sometimes, which, while only being at like a 4 or 5, can wear me down over the course of a day like coarse sandpaper. I have no idea if this makes sense, it gets so hard to write about pain when you're in pain.)

Well, we went to Costco, I felt like my chest wanted to pop open like a cabinet, I took muscle relaxers and ibuprofen at bed time and since then the pain is generally not constant. It just flares up randomly, often making me laugh. The best part is that since I discovered what it probably after we came back Costco, it's Costcochondritis!

Okay, time to stop rambling about pain and remember this is a writing blog.

Other than the short story thing, I've started in on my worldbuilding project, using the template I posted below. Well, mostly using it. I've found a couple more categories were necessary, including who lives in an area. I also came up with the cool idea of listing the challenges an environment presents, then listing how they are addressed. So I'm doing this for a canyon/plateau area in my story, which necessitated a lot of research into the Grand Canyon, since that's the only canyon anyone cares enough about to provide much information on. I enjoyed that, I just have to move over a small hump now of deciding what domesticated plants are in the area. I might make up one or two, just because I can.

I've continued adding to my NaNoWriMo manuscript. It's hilariously bad, so the less said about it the better. We'll all look back on it some day and laugh.

I'm trying to let myself be bad at things. I picked up acrylic paints today and took another shot at a painting I hadn't been able to make work ages ago. The whole process felt god awful but I think the result is fine, at the very least. Maybe I will put up a picture if the finished result looks any good.

The actually good-looking thing I've been working on is a series of creatures I'm calling gnomes. I'm considering making them into stickers and selling them. I couldn't expect to turn a profit really, but it would be fun.

I made myself an elaborate New Years' resolution, which involves keeping up my writing quota from last year (writing 6x a week at least), adding in reading 5x a week, drawing 3x a week, and working my way up to meditating 3x a week for 10 minutes or more at a time.

As a result, I'm moving through books a little faster. I finished Settlers: Mythology of the White Proletariat before the 2020 ended, actually, and absolutely loved it. All I'll say about it for now is that white people should really read it, even if it hurts. Sure can't hurt as much as the pain of people who have been oppressed by a settler colonialist state for centuries.

I started something much lighter after this: Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women, which is a piecemeal history of entertainers through Western history. So far I've read about the titular learned pigs, as well as horses of knowledge, people who would write with their feet, Matthew Buckinger, Malini, and so on. It's fun, but Ricky Jay is using some terribly outdated language in some places, which is unpleasant and jarring. Even though the author doesn't seem to be deliberately contemplating it, this book has me thinking about how often these entertainments are people commodifying/being commodified for their disability/different ability. I've definitely deeper thoughts about this, but most of them while trying to sleep. Maybe I will come back with more some day.

I also started reading Roots of Strategy, which is a collection of historical war manuals. I'm reading Vegetius at the moment. It's dreadfully boring, but necessary stuff to know for worldbuilding purposes, as well as the fact that I plan on writing about war a whole bunch.

I finished The Fellowship of the Ring and am on The Two Towers. I haven't much to say about it except that I just read the scene where Grima Wormtongue gets thrown out, and there's this hilarious moment where I guess he just lies on the floor for a while.

Tim and I got some Christmas money from a relative, so I used my portion of it to order myself a little perfume (Womanity, which is a cisnormative name for a perfume that smells like vagina, Seminalis, which smells like semen, and Stercus, which smells like feces. Team with the theme.), and three books, all non-fiction. I'm excited about all of them. There's Tommy Boys, Male Lesbians and Ancestral Wives which is about lesbian practices in Africa (unfortunately written by white women, but I'll take what I can get). I also got a copy of I Am The Grand Canyon, which is about the Havusupai people, and a copy of Regine Pernoud's Joan of Arc. I'll probably read the Grand Canyon one first, but I so badly just want to read them all at once some how.

Well, I should go the heck to sleep. I feel a little less randomly and pointlessly defeated. With any luck, I'll be back at it again at Krispy Kreme tomorrow.

Scrabble Score: 348-235

 I meant to have just a couple days to recover from NaNoWriMo, then stressful things happened, so I meant to give myself time to recover, then stressful things kept happening, and then half the month had disappeared. I wouldn't want to get into a lot of it, but the most accessible event which typifies the kind of events we've been dealing with was our water heater broke, which revealed other issues with our plumbing and the whole thing cost us almost $2k. SO THAT WAS FUN!!!

Still, despite all this expensiveness, Tim and I were able to retreat to a cabin, partially because we'd already paid for it, so what can you do. It was up in the mountains, and we mostly spent the time stewing in the hot tub, watching the wind sweep snow off the roof and carry crows across the sky.

Of course, there was a Scrabble board at the cabin, and so Tim and I started playing and simply had to get ourselves a set after that. So I've been spending a fair bit of time doing that, and am currently writing this while Tim takes his turns.

I'm trying not to feel too bad about the general lack of productivity. I figure this extended executive dysfunction is a sign of my needing recovery. There's been a little movement regardless -- a little actual writing here and there, then some administrative stuff.

One thing that happened is that, as we'd been planning for ages, Tim and I got ourselves a printer for Christmas. As soon as we set it up, I printed out all my plot outlines, character development sheets, and worldbuilding. The thick wad of what I printed (double-sided, mind you) is below. I've written a lot of that since quarantine started, so honestly, not bad. I sure have quite a bit to show for all this.

This is just a step in what I've been realizing is a sort of arms race against my own brain. As detailed in my last post, fibromyalgia has affected my memory (and the question is, how much is some inherent quality of fibromyalgia and how much is just the effect of being in pain 24/7?). Having all this information stored in Google Docs, which is woefully clunky, and which I must navigate on a tiny Chromebook screen, really didn't help. So, hopefully this helps. Plus, it'll be much easier to edit the plots this way. Something about screen cast this glowing obfuscation over everything. I much prefer to go in with a red pen.

(Hah! I just won our game of Scrabble by over 100 points! I've normally been losing terribly).

Another step I'm taking is I made myself a pretty collaged notebook for my worldbuilding (I may put up a picture another time), and I'm going to start consolidating worldbuilding information in there. I started by diving into the miserably technical work of figuring out What's The Deal With These Two Moons?! I'm not so great at like, math theory, so I tend to wind up spending a lot of time building extensive charts when there's probably an easier way to do it. Whatever, I don't have the money (FOR SOME REASON!!) to pay to consult someone at this stage, so I just hope I'm doing a decent enough job.

Where the worldbuilding notebook goes from here, I don't know. I don't know if I want it to be structured, or just me compiling notions that are scattered across my various notebooks across the years. It probably would be good to start worldbuilding cultures in a organized fashion.

I did actually come up with a potential template for worldbuilding which caters to my ground-up approach. It only covers part of what would be necessary, but I think the results would give me something to work with.

As I've gotten older and more tired, I have been less of a vision-first kind of person and prefer to "procedurally generate" things. Throw together the plate tectonics and from there the pieces fall where they may, from ocean currents to the movements of people and the growth of their cultures.

I was contemplating it one night and came up with something like this:

1. ENVIRONMENT

2. RESPONSE TO THE ENVIRONMENT

Shelter, Food, Water, Fire, Protection

3. SOCIETY

Values, Religion, Law, Hierarchy

4. LIFE IN SOCIETY

Life, Birth, Growth, Death

Now, this is by no means meant to suggest that ALL aspects of society are a direct result of environment. But some of them are, which is how I'd like to construct things. If anyone has any thoughts on this, I'd love to hear them. I'm contemplating running it across a worldbuilding group I'm in on Facebook, but the mansplaining there can be a lot sometimes (seriously, the group is like 80% white men, a lot of whom are into military sci fi. Yikes!!)

Well, dinner will be ready soon, and I'm one hungry hippo. Be well, y'all!

NaNoWriMo: What I Learned

 Well, I did NaNoWriMo, all 50k words (in fact, I hit that goal 2 days early), wrote 1,667 words a day, every day for the month of November etc. Here's my badges from the website to prove it, though the one for hitting par every single day didn't light up. Very annoying, considering I did hit par every single day. I think I misentered a number somewhere along the way, smh.

That one irksome detail aside, I guess I'd say I'm pretty proud of myself, to the extent that I'm capable of -- namely, in the I'm-A-Black-Hole way where I say I'm proud of myself to remind me to feel anything about it because I otherwise have no feelings about it whatsoever because I'm weirdly dissociated from my own accomplishments.

I decided pretty early on -- I don't remember if it was before I started writing, or shortly after I started -- that what I was working on was lower even than a rough draft. It is a document that I hope shall never see human eyes, unless I somehow become famous and want to show aspiring writers just how bad of a job I did.

In any case, the reason for this decision is that I'm in a weird stage in the process in general -- I have plot outlines into Book 3, but my worldbuilding is fairly minimal and sketchy and partly reliant on things I came up with when I was 16-17 years old, so basic things like how dragons fight and what people eat where just aren't there. So this became a dry run, an experiment to find out what I didn't know I needed to know.

The result? I have 50,000 words of me faffing about somewhere along the lines of my plot outline, but winding up nowhere near as far into the story as I would've liked...literally I'm less than 50% through the plot outline. I forgot to emphasize certain important character traits, the language is fairly bland, there's filler words everywhere, the themes I want to be there just aren't there at all, certain important objects and concepts appear when I need them rather than being mentioned when they should've been, my exposition is skimpy and what there is of it is a mess, and I don't know if I really like where I started the story or not. Even so, I plan to continue working on this mess of a dry run of a rough draft, and see where it takes me.

What I mean to say is: I've learned a lot! I thought it would be fun to write a post about what I learned. I don't know what purpose it serves, except that of documenting posterity for my sake. I try not to have any illusions about anyone else caring about it. Well, I guess I ought to do the listicle subheading thing?

The Brain and the Page

I used to think, back when I was a teen and simultaneously full of myself while hinging the escape from my self loathing on my ability to write, that I had thought about the story enough to know how to write it well without much struggle. I didn't really hold onto that notion so much as I didn't do anything to counter it (but get off my back about it, I've had to do a lot of unlearning in other, more important areas). Truthfully, it's like drawing: you can look at the shoe you're drawing all you want, pick apart which line you'd draw where, but getting the lines to connect on the page is a completely different skill. Turning what you see in your brain into something on paper (or on a glowing screen) is a hurdle all on its own.

Honestly, I've calmed down a lot since high school. Back then when something didn't come out the way I wanted it to, I was at serious risk for a total breakdown and subsequent self-harm. I had no other means of generating self-worth, so creation felt so life or death at the time. This is what therapy is for! I have a little more faith in the long term vision of the project anymore, at least when I'm in my right mind. It's so much easier for me to recognize that this attempt benefits me the most when it's bad.

I Love Being Unemployed

I seriously think that the main reason I was able to write 1,667 words a day without any sort of mental breakdown (I seriously only had one brief mental breakdown this month, and it was unrelated to writing! Well, that's other than the election stress, ofc) was that I am currently not working. What a blessing it is! I still have other things to do, like attending to the house, the rats, and my relationships, but to have time enough to write for a few hours is honestly glorious. The excuse to write a few hours is also glorious.

The other big thing is that not working means I actually have the energy. When I was at my last job, I stumbled through the day like a zombie because I could almost never get enough sleep. I was also just so emotionally drained all the time because of that honestly fairly abusive workplace that I struggled to do anything creatively.

It can't last forever, unfortunately, and I don't look forward to the day, however distant, when I have to get a job again. But I'll do my best to use my time well.

Writing Can Make Me Happy???

I think it's something about the word count goal. Shocker, goals help people. I know, I know...I've been somewhat resistant to goals because of how they, like some many things, can lead to me attacking myself. Still, it's a small and, for an unemployed person, a fairly achievable goal.

The unexpected thing that I totally should've expected is that having that concrete goal provided a sort of work-life separation for me. I could do the work and clock out, so to speak. Of course, my therapist tried to tell me to take this approach some time ago. But I preferred, for a while, to endlessly torment myself in every single spare moment by either sitting down (or standing, as I am now, due to joint pain) to write or agonizing about how I should be sitting down to write. To be fair, I continued to try to figure out how to utilize every spare moment to some end, but there was less pressure towards it than usual.

The other thing that used to stress me out was this project, which I've had in my mind literally for sixteen years at this point, in various forms, was so amorphous I couldn't engage with it. What should I do next? What steps did I need to take? When would I finally be ready to start writing it?

Well, I tore off the band-aid and started writing it. Surprisingly, I feel better just writing it, even when it's terrible. On one level, it's nice to engage with these characters and with this world, especially seeing the ways in which I love and hate these characters and wish they would get their act together while rooting for them at the same time. On another level, finding the issues that I still need to work out is clarifying my next steps a little more.

It's also just cool knowing that I can make 1,667 words happen in a pinch, sometimes in just two or so hours. They're not always good words, but also I sometimes surprise myself.

Burnout

All that being said, by the end of the month, I was so over the 1,667 words a day. It was unpleasant and uncomfortable and I wanted a break, but I could still get into the groove most of the time. The writing gets worse when I work myself to that point.

Of course, if you know anything about me, then you know that this isn't the first time I've written every day for a month. My calendar, which I mark with symbols about the day's events, shows that much. Somehow it would still be a novelty to me when I'd take a day off, or even just a morning off, and the desire to write and think about writing came back. Wow! Go figure! I'd feel more like a dummy if I didn't know precisely where all this dysfunction came from.

The issue is that I hardly know what to do when I'm not writing, or cleaning the house, or cooking, or engaged in various "productive" activities. After dinner tonight, Tim was like "What do you want to do?" and I of course didn't know. Considered coming to my desk to work on this or some other writerly thing. Wound up starting a game of Skyrim as a hard-bitten elder butch wood elf woman named Buttons. No matter how much I hone the skill, however, chilling feels so weird.

How I will partition my work and life balance and what I do in the life part remains a mystery.

 I Have a Lot of Worldbuilding to Do

This is sort of alluded to at the beginning, but the extent of the issue is truly massive. I realized that, if I force myself to come up with some worldbuilding detail in a pinch, I will just fall back on whatever I know best -- which, due to the social programming I try daily to overcome, is Western history. Yawn. Not that everyone's mind works this way -- I hear Garth Nix, for example, worldbuilt the Abhorsen series on the fly -- but it's small wonder so much fantasy is so standard.

Still, I came up with some cool things by pantsing it, though of course I can't remember off the top of my head what they were right now. Which brings me to my last, and most personal, point.

Fibromyalgia Has Done a Number on My Brain

Even without taking into account fibromyalgia's symptom of brain fog, chronic pain has been scientifically proven to have effects on your memory. At times, this fact has been a motivation towards frenetic activity, because I know that it will only impair me more and more with time. It has, at times, felt like a race against my own inevitable deterioration. Fantasy is a genre that involves juggling a lot of made-up names and facts, which makes this prospect even more daunting.

I guess I hadn't fully realized the extent to which I am already cognitively impaired. To be fair, I was able to recreate most of the stuff from my plot outline without even looking at it, but a lot of the things I'd tell myself to remember would simply evaporate. Important points went missing, ones that I can't even access right now. I'd create someone or something, then forget it. Words and letters I meant to put in just disappear, leaving me with agrammatical nonsense. Literally at one point I made a note about the song "Ready, Able," in my notebook, and since there's no spellcheck for pen and paper, I looked back to discover that all I'd managed  to write was "Read, Abl." It's so bizarre, like someone else is blundering about in my life, making inexplicable mistakes.

It feels like my mind is divided, split up into modes, and it's hard to get those memories about what needs to be done, what I just did, what happened a long time ago, to travel between those modes. One of the highest compliments I've ever received is that I have "a mind like a steel trap," but I'm having to come to terms with the fact that this is only the case sometimes, and there will be substantial portions of time when I am unable to retain something I just read, or reach basic facts like plot points, made up names, made up cultural practices, and, for some reason, especially what age my characters are supposed to be.

I have, at times in my life, felt tempted to give up. But one thing that's become clear is that even though my brain is as holey as Swiss cheese at times, I still really can write through the pain. Again, it might not be good, but again, sometimes I surprise myself.

Something I'll have to figure out, alongside the worldbuilding and how to insert exposition and themes, is how I'll overcome this. Fixing my brain is probably out of the question. I'm meditating, which theoretically should help, and maybe someday in the future I'll get to try neurofeedback. The best I can do for myself, however, is figure out my crutches. Probably put my character's ages up on the wall above my desk, along with whatever basic facts continually elude me. Good news is we're ourselves a printer this Christmas, so I'll be able to print out the probable hundreds of pages of plot outline and character histories and worldbuilding I have trapped in my Google Drive. I think that'll help a lot.

And Now -- Some Non-NaNoWriMo Miscellany!

I happened to actually finish Sei Shōnagon's Pillow Book today, so that's two things rounded off at the same time. I love the book, even if it involves Sei Shōnagon being horrible to/about poor people and being unnecessarily prissy about everything. It's such a human glimpse into a life lived long ago. My favorite part is the piece where she talks about first entering into Empress Sadako's service -- she was so relatably nervous, even though Sadako was like, 14 at the time, and Shōnagon was, I think, 35? It read like how I feel on my first day at a new job.

I have no idea what I'll read next in the realm of history/non-fiction. Most of those sorts of books that I intend to read are out in my shed and I have to work up the grit to go out in the cold and sort through them. I really wish I had a copy of The Tale of Genji to follow this up with, but I just haven't gotten around to getting one/being gifted one yet. 

I've also been in this interesting place of re-watching two shows that have been with me for a long time: Twin Peaks and Battlestar Galactica (the early 2000s reboot, naturally). My dad showed me Twin Peaks when I was in 8th grade, and my sister showed me Battlestar some months later. Somehow, Twin Peaks has never lost its shine for me, while Battlestar, with all its fun condoning of regressive and even fascist notions (the episode 'Dirty Hands' is especially bad), sometimes really galls me. Both shows and their soundtracks affected me equally, in terms of aesthetic, humor, taste, etc., but I guess Battlestar trying to make remarks on politics really falls disastrously short of the mark in places. (Farscape is better. It's consistently anti-imperialist, anti-military, and 99% of the time pro-diversity. I love it so much.)

The other thing that's been looming large in my mind lately is a friend of mine turned me onto Pathologic 2, a video game that defies usual classification. I guess it's survival horror, but cast aside all notions of being chased by monsters in the dark -- you just have to make sure you get enough food and sleep in a town that is being ravaged by plague and haunted by supernatural entities from the steppe and goodness-knows where. It's more than a bit stressful but I'm so in love with the aesthetic and story so far that I can't get it out of my mind. I had to deliberately not play any today because, the night before last, I had a haunting, plague-threatened dream about being in the world of the game, and last night, I kept waking up thinking about it and what I wanted to do next in the game.

I know a piece of media is good when it messes with my sleep. Maybe, someday, I'll be able to do that to other people.

(Note: this post was over 2,000 words long. Sorry! I promise I'll try to take an actual break tomorrow.)

It Begins

 I looked back at the last post to see how long it'd been since I'd posted, and, seeing the date September 18, I thought something like "Huh, well it's only the 1st so it's been less than a month since I remembered to attend to this. Not bad." Then I remembered that there's a whole month between September and November and it's called October. So, that's how things are going in the time department.

The writing department has been...it's hazy to remember. A good part of September was taken up with a health issue that prevented me from writing much due to intense brain fog. For a while after, I think I mostly made progress on my plot outline -- I am now outlining book 3, though I'm currently hung up on what one character should be doing while some of the more obvious stuff goes on. I finished another short story draft, and somewhere in there I spontaneously produced my first ever bit of flash fiction that I keep forgetting to edit. Then I edited another short story and put a happier ending on it. Now I just have to decide which ending to gamble on when I send it to magazines.

The actually big thing that's about to be going on is that I've decided to participate in NaNoWriMo. I do have the outlines ready after all, so I might as well try to bang out the worst draft ever in attempt to get something happening in my brain. That being said, depending on how things go, I might let it be a two month thing, for a multitude of reasons.

I honestly don't know why they chose November to be The Month, since it's basically the worst month ever, at least in the US and the northern hemisphere, especially this year, between the end of daylight savings and the election. Those are definitely two extenuating circumstances, especially the daylight savings issue because I have SAD, which instantly gets about 10 times worse when the clocks jump back. Maybe I can use writing and a world of fantasy to coast through the hours of dread-panic when the sun sets.

Also, between fibromyalgia and my mental disorder(s), I have entire days where I basically have the computing power of the potato and also other days where if I try too hard I run the risk of literally attacking myself before I even know what's happening. I guess the pain isn't an issue so much any more. I have to spend my life alternating between sitting and standing because both hurt, but I have a standing desk so that helps. I've also gotten good at ignoring it, and being on Low Dose Naltrexone has helped, along with not busting my ass in hot kitchen serving bacon to Texans.

Well, it's already getting quite late and I am finally recovered from the intense overstimulation of a busy day. Tomorrow (or technically today), It Begins. Wish me luck, imaginary readers!

And, for the sake of making my blog pretty, here's a random doodle as portrayed by my super high quality phone camera:

Look Out the Window

It's been a while since my last post. Truth is, I haven't been well enough for this outward projection of personality, mentally or physically. Of course, looking back on it, it's hard to piece together what was happening and why. Today I've felt like I exited it a little, at least for a day, so I've tried to make the most of that momentum because, as I've been graphing my emotions (something my therapist has me doing, to determine if there's any pathology to it all), the probable outcome is I won't feel as great in a day or two.

One of the things that went down is we recently had to put down one of our beloved rats, Dorothea. It was a relatively unexpected event, such that I woke up last Saturday expecting a relatively chill day, then next thing I knew, I had to call the vet and turned up to have her euthanized an hour later. She'd been sick for a long while, but her condition deteriorated rapidly overnight -- that's sometimes how rats are. But, the night before, she'd cuddled me for an hour while I watched a movie, puddling under my touch. It's a high compliment from a rat who wouldn't let any humans touch her when we got her. She knew she was reaching the end of her rope before I did.

Here's a picture of her from when she was well, looking out the window of my writing shed.

Perhaps I am merely projecting, but I think she liked windows. When we first got her, we set her cage by the window and she'd often sleep facing it. Because she had a minor case of bumblefoot, I had to apply Blu Kote to her feet twice a day and sit with her in the bath tub -- partially so she wouldn't stain the carpet, but also because she actually deigned to cuddle with me so long as we were there. This is how I have spent the past six months with her, with the window open just above us. I hope she liked listening to the birds and passing cars in the day and the crickets and clicking katydids at night. 

Writing Progress and Some Thoughts on Editing

So I've spent most of this time editing short stories I've already written. I'm having trouble gaining any foothold on writing any short story ideas, even though they're there. Surely it'll come eventually.

In July or so (who knows what time is any more?), I spent an exorbitant amount of time -- like two days' worth of just sitting there for hours -- fine-combing through one story. It started out as an effort to pick out filler words then just evolved from there. I totally messed up my back doing it but I suppose I learned  and speculated over some valuable things, eg.

• Weak language is often marked by equivocating. Imagery is more vivid if you just decide what on earth you are trying to say and edit out any wishy-washiness.
• I abuse the word "that" and it's so often a junk word that means nothing. Also, doing a word search for "that" will ruin "that" for you forever. It sounds so awful and weird and...brown?
• So many words are junk and trash and can be avoided.
• All that being said, I began to speculate about whether filler words could be used with impact. Like, if you reserve them, hold them back, then use them in the right place, they could have their own special effect, like any word. I'm not sure -- I was a bit delirious at that point.
• Hours deep into this process, I began to seriously question things like why "light bulb" isn't one word -- please, for the sake of my word count? Also, what if "maybe" were a verb? 
• Language melted and I had a sort of Tetris effect where I tried to talk with utmost verbal efficiency. Hyperfocus is a necessity sometimes, one of those ADHD super powers, but it definitely comes with a toll afterwards.
• Drafting is just the awkward process of trying to fumble thoughts into words and editing is how you make it seem effortless.

All this editing couldn't produce a story that I felt fine with it, for reasons I don't want to get into. I'm honestly considering trunking it. I put a lot of work into that particular story so it's been something of a blow. I got a diversity read on it and everything, because I was drawing from Chinese history and don't want to do anything wrong. I'm still glad I got the diversity read because I learned a lot -- it's just a bummer, I guess. That story feels un-wrangle-able anymore. Perhaps it's just a problem of my perception, but I currently can't imagine anyone wanting to publish it.

That's okay, though. Writing pieces that you trunk is all part of the process.

I turned my attention to another short story, but couldn't produce the same hyperfocused editing. To be fair, I didn't try drinking gingko tea, which generally casts that spell for me, but I was afraid to. I couldn't engage for long out of fear of myself. Then a bunch of stuff happened and I was forced to let myself take a break.

That's the actually tough part: letting myself stop, letting myself put aside some ideas indefinitely.

Books

Since I was feeling well today, I finally got around to doing some Goodreads reviews, which are mostly fun as practices in expression. A good excuse to get some words out in a low stakes situation.

Since I last discussed books, I've finished two of the ones on my list. One of them was Investigating Farscape. I'm so glad I got that book. It's made re-watching Farscape with Tim even more fun, even though the chapter on linguistics mostly went over my head. Still, there was some cool stuff I managed to vaguely get from it, like language as the only true shared and created experience which in turn shapes perceptions of reality...or something. It's a book I'll definitely revisit, maybe next time I re-watch Farscape...which might be sooner than I'd re-watch any other show. We've just started season 4 and I'm already trying to comprehend the notion that I won't be watching Farscape at some point in the future. I truly am a hopeless case.

The other book I finished is Emma. I honestly hated it up right until the end, then hated it even more after the end. The long and short of it is that I don't know much how of the silliness of these ridiculous rich people was actually intended as a joke -- I don't think much of it. That just rubs me the wrong way. I have yet to be sold on Austen qua progressive or revolutionary figure. At the end of the day, it seems to me she was pretty status quo. Viewed from the present, she is extremely status quo.

This leaves me feeling skeptical of at least portions of the Jane Austen fandom. Of course, no fandom is a monolith, and I definitely heard a good episode of something (Rough Translation?) about Pakistani Janeites. Sometimes, however, it feels like the obsession centers on the idyllic and uninterrupted whiteness of it all, as well as the fantasy of wealth and propriety. I can see the draw of her humor, the subtle social navigating, the happy endings -- but I personally struggle with the rest of the baggage.

That's all a nice segue into the book I recently started: Settlers: Mythology of the White Proletariat by J. Sakai. Tim's parents got it for him for his birthday, at his request, but he wanted to start on a different book (George Clinton's autobiography) so I snatched up this one. It feels like a good time to read this.

My understanding of it thus far is that it as book investigating the mythology and hidden motivations of white/American-European society. In the introduction, Sakai describes the book as "a reconnaissance into enemy territory." I am enjoying it so far, even if it tends towards dense (a bit difficult with my fogginess as of late). The book boasts such titles as "The Heart of Whiteness" and "'Klass, Kulture & Kommunity.'" Honestly, I am here for it and I hope it tears my face off.