non-humans

Writing non-human characters who are similar to me is easier and less anxiety-inducing than writing human characters who are similar to me, because the latter are read as "really inhuman for a human being" but the former are read as "surprisingly human for a non-human".

Humans with mostly inhuman qualities and just a shred of humanity are scary. Non-humans with mostly inhuman qualities and just a shred of humanity are fascinating.

My Best

Between the hours of 10:30 AM and 12:30 PM today, I was happy. Not only was I happy, I was at my Best.

Do you want to know what my Best is? And I capitalize "Best" because it's very very good, very important, very rare. My Best is when I see the good in everything and the magic in the mundane and always have something nice to say about something. It's when I can interact with people without a struggle, like I'm personally interested in them. Which, on a cognitive level, I am. Not that I emotionally care about them, of course I don't and of course I can't, but I'm certainly interested in them cognitively because every human being is amazing. My Best is when I believe that every human being is amazing.

My grandpa and I were out to lunch at one point during those hours and he looked at the window we were seated by and said, "We got a nice view." And I'm sure he meant "this is a pretty big window and you can see a lot of stuff out of it", but I looked out and realized it was an amazing view.

It was a little cloudy out and we could see the street and a stoplight, a pharmacy on one corner, a shoe store on another, and in the distance, a series of apartments. A sidewalk, people walking past. And I thought wasn't it amazing you could see so many people in one place and see the places where they do things and live their lives? The places they go out of necessity, the places they call home? The stoplight was a place where people took a pause in the flow of their action. Or if the light was green, they cruised through and their flow didn't break, at least then. Seeing people going places. It was the now and the future and the moment, and action and motion, all in a human context. We were seeing tiny flashes of other people's lives, and when we were done here, we'd get in a car and we'd go on our own life and become like the people at the stoplights, moving where we'd move. 

And wasn't that amazing, to see people doing that sort of thing, the sort of thing we do? Taking a moment to be detached observers of the world we too inhabit? Like we were taking a break from doing and moving and we got the best seat in the house, where we could see others doing and moving themselves? That was amazing.

I also interacted with a person with little difficulty. The waitress we had was nice and one of the first thing she did was ask me what was on the pin I was wearing. (It's the letters "Ah", written like an element on the periodic table, with the phrase "the element of surprise" written on it. She thought that was clever.) She said nice things to us and we said nice things to her. She thought my drawing was good (I drew two musicians I like while I was waiting for our food and she joked, "When I have an art assignment, I'm coming to you." People I know from school make that joke, too.) Her name was Daisy. When she came to take our money, I told her I liked her and she was a good person, probably. She said the same of me. She said she works there on Sundays "if you want to see me again". Not sure if this was an actual "I want to see you again" or the sort of thing friendly people say (I've known enough friendly people to know that they say stuff like that - not even in an insincere way, it's just because that's the sort of thing they'd think to say). But it was nice. I liked that.

And that's what my Best is like. My Best is where I'm at ease with the world I'm in and where I see everything for what it is and decide that what it is is incredible and fascinating and amazing just by virtue of it being what it is. What things do and how we use places and how people do things. It's incredible. A miracle really.

It's 1:47 PM right now and I'm still feeling that way. I'm still at my Best and everything is still a bit of a miracle.

Publications

So I knew that today, my poem was going to be up on Leaves of Ink. However, when I checked my e-mail this morning, it turns out that some more poems of mine are going to appear in The Rusty Nail at an as-of-now unspecified date! Today is a good day for my writing.

in the middle of the ocean

I was writing my novel and I put in a metaphor involving the ocean. (Specifically, it was going off the "no man is an island" saying and suggesting that maybe people are islands, albeit islands that drift through the oceans and occasionally bump into each other, like people interacting with one another.)

I delved into that metaphor and had the narrator imagine if it were literal because that's the kind of thing he'd do and I figured it'd be a good metaphor to explore. And then I was suddenly struck with the realization that it would be absolutely terrifying to be in the middle of the open sea. Like that's what I thought of, being underwater in the middle of the ocean. I mean imagine you were underwater and could still breathe or something but you were in the literal middle of the ocean, like you couldn't see the surface or the bottom and you were just in the middle of that vast expanse of water that covers most of the globe.

This is the stuff that gave me nightmares as a kid and gives me nightmares sometimes now.

Compliments

I just realized that one of the biggest compliments I can pay something (a book, a movie, etc.) Is, "That messed me up."

Like when I say that something "messed me up", what I mean is that it made me feel a profound degree of surprise or confusion or amazement or fear that I am not used to feeling. Like it was very affecting. Which makes sense but it's still kind of strange.

I wonder if there's any noticeably percentage of people who think "messed-up" is a compliment or if it's just me.

Some acceptances.

I have some good news. I currently have two pieces of work forthcoming this year. One of them ("Belief in a Sky", a poem) is set to appear in Leaves of Ink (an online publication with a really neat name) on October 17, and the other ("Those with Faith, Their Reward (A Triptych)", a flash fiction piece) is going to be in Smashed Cat Magazine (another online publication with a really neat name) on December 12.

Rest assured I will post links to both upon their publication. For now, I'm just going to revel in the subsequent excitement and feelings of success, which is what I imagine most people would do if they were in my shoes.

I'm happy for my endeavors and to whoever's reading this, I wish you the best in your endeavors, too.

I write science fiction

I write science fiction because that's the only genre where "people like me" are portrayed positively.

And when I say "people like me", I mean "individuals who feel removed from humanity and everything that 'humanity' entails". It's usually because they're literal aliens and I'm only a metaphorical alien but I can relate to their situation.

And in science fiction, they're portrayed positively. Humans like me in fiction tend to be treated very negatively. Albert Camus's The Stranger. Hannibal Lecter. That kind of thing.

I guess it's a form of keeping my sanity. Because if I tried to venture into types of writing where the only people who reminded me of myself for meaningful reasons get labelled as sociopaths, it would mess me up even more than I'm already messed up.