YL wants to translate some of my poems; I have to get a set together for him. Or, I've done this but I am stalling on sending it. It's hard, painful, to go through EVERYTHING and find so little.
SC asked for a 'crime' story ages ago for her journal, so I gave her the garden story, The Trappers, it's called at the moment. But she wants the story changed. The protagonist changes gender and then nothing is 'done' with that. I don't want to change it. I told her I couldn't, and I can't, so maybe she won't publish it now. She wants the officers to notice the gender change, to confirm that it is real. Why would I want to confirm that it is real? It is important but only important in exactly what it does. It gives the protagonist a particular proximity to the 'child'. Gender there is a function, not a condition. Or it's just one of the things that happens. It's not the meaning of the story, and I don't want the story to explain it or be explained by it.
There's the long, dead essay from a couple of years ago, rejected after months of work and now too outdated to use anywhere. A couple of dead conference papers. I said I'd turn one into an article, and as soon as I said that I locked up on everything. Soft Shroud too, which I loved, and now feels like a tangled, unsolvable problem, a mess. I can't speak, I can't be understood because I have some kind of speech impediment, whatever I say. This feels like what they call circling the drain. Self-pity in the ranks (there will be no self-pity in the ranks)
Woke in the night up against that wall and I decided that I had to jettison that agreement for the article just to get my spirit back. Yes, I can do that. Permission granted. It's me, my life, my own. And then the key turned in the lock - if you were to keep going with the article, here's what you should read, do, say... it needn't be a big deal, it is something you do, just what you do normally alongside everything else you do, not what is done to you, not a prison....
So I'm walking to the garden shop now, to think and to buy an orchid.
SC asked for a 'crime' story ages ago for her journal, so I gave her the garden story, The Trappers, it's called at the moment. But she wants the story changed. The protagonist changes gender and then nothing is 'done' with that. I don't want to change it. I told her I couldn't, and I can't, so maybe she won't publish it now. She wants the officers to notice the gender change, to confirm that it is real. Why would I want to confirm that it is real? It is important but only important in exactly what it does. It gives the protagonist a particular proximity to the 'child'. Gender there is a function, not a condition. Or it's just one of the things that happens. It's not the meaning of the story, and I don't want the story to explain it or be explained by it.
There's the long, dead essay from a couple of years ago, rejected after months of work and now too outdated to use anywhere. A couple of dead conference papers. I said I'd turn one into an article, and as soon as I said that I locked up on everything. Soft Shroud too, which I loved, and now feels like a tangled, unsolvable problem, a mess. I can't speak, I can't be understood because I have some kind of speech impediment, whatever I say. This feels like what they call circling the drain. Self-pity in the ranks (there will be no self-pity in the ranks)
Woke in the night up against that wall and I decided that I had to jettison that agreement for the article just to get my spirit back. Yes, I can do that. Permission granted. It's me, my life, my own. And then the key turned in the lock - if you were to keep going with the article, here's what you should read, do, say... it needn't be a big deal, it is something you do, just what you do normally alongside everything else you do, not what is done to you, not a prison....
So I'm walking to the garden shop now, to think and to buy an orchid.
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