Archive

Hello, friend.

This week, I've experienced something rare for me: the joy of missing out. I don't have the energy to run myself ragged now like I did five or ten years ago trying to experience all the things, but generally, if I have the option to do something, I want to do it. If time and resources allow it, why not?

I haven't worked that way this month, and I kind of love it. I'm working under the assumption that this is temporary, so it can be lovely like so many temporary things. Last year, I went to Burning Man for the first time. I've lived on the west coast for a thousand years and had wondered, and finally situation + money + time + preparation aligned, and I did it. While I was there, I realized that it would either be the thing I liked most that I never did again or the thing I hated the most that I would eagerly repeat. Knowing me, I leaned toward the latter and signed up with the camp I'd been at last year when the call went out this spring. It was well organized and full of people I really liked, so it seemed like a good bet.

Hello friend,

I'm alive. And those people whose continued survival I learn about via text, these far-flung family and friends, they're alive too.

There have been times in recent months when this was less guaranteed than usual. I'm still in that time. It's a kind of stressful I didn't understand until this year. If you don't understand it today, I hope you never do. If you do understand it, hello! Sorry you're in this club too, but at least the company is nice. A little hollow in the eyes, perhaps a little jumpy when the phone makes a sound, but generally good to coexist with.

In all this, I am more aware than I've ever been of how energy gets siphoned off. I have days where everyday choices are too much to bear. I love choices! I love menus, I love internet window shopping, I love assembling the options for my weekly meal box. And lately, there are some days where it's not only unpleasant. Instead, it becomes impossible.

Hello, friend.

I’ve written stories since I was tiny. I remember looking at my toes poking out of the bubbles in the bath when I was really young, pre-kindergarten, and imagining each one as a person with its own name and life and story. It’s what my brain does. It’s why I went to college for it.

But for years and years, I said that I didn’t create while tired, angry, sad, or otherwise upset. The dishes have to be done, I said, and the floor swept, and nothing terrible happening. That’s when I can write.

I’m not sure now if that was never true or if it just stopped being true by mid-2020.

Hello friend,

I rolled the dice in August and managed to come through safely. First, I went to Las Vegas to speak at the Diana Initiative and go to DEF CON. With few exceptions, I only go to conferences with, at the very least, a mask mandate, so the dice were a little weighted on that bet. After, I was reminded how one unfortunate effect of my vivid imagination is a whole host of psychosomatic symptoms as I incubate at home, waiting to see what went wrong. I imagined myself into sore throats, questionable aches, and phantom itching as I waited. But I was fine! The PCR gods freed me, and I walked among people again.

Well, sort of.

Two weeks later, I went to Burning Man for the first time.

Hello friend,

It is 1000 Words of Summer time, and I'm having a really hard time with it. Don't worry, this doesn't mean I'm defeated or sad. Instead, it's that getting to a thousand words each day has ended up surprisingly grueling, seeing me writing into my late-night hours more than once. This is ok if it's fun and gliding, if I already finished what I wanted that day and am continuing for the pleasure of it; less so if it's 2:30 am and I'm staring at a 774-word count for the day, wondering where the hell those last 226 words might come from.

A thousand words is my usual daily goal for fiction things, though I don't stick with it when it's punishing. I like a thousand words, but a recent long, exciting, difficult conference day meant 300 words was better, so I wrote 300 words and called that a heroic effort. But I'm a former honor student who can't resist a challenge that supports my goals, so I'm doing 1000 Words of Summer, except it means I'm drafting when I actually want to be revising.

Hello, friend.

I've found myself having to assert my identity as a writer in a new way, and it brings about feelings.

Titles and business cards have always held a lot of meaning for me because words always have too. As I got older and navigated the professional world as a weird woman who rarely had any interest in doing the expected, being described accurately became increasingly important. Before I moved into tech, I fought for the title of content strategist; when my employer wouldn't give it to me, for reasons they never could adequately explain, I found it elsewhere. Later, the term engineer became very important. Software engineer and site reliability engineer and security engineer, one after the other, all chasing legitimacy since I don't and likely will never have a computer science degree.

In another area of my life, phases and worlds away, I put myself to the business of being a serious cartoonist. I've written a number of zines and three quarters of a graphic novel, three of four planned issues, and in that phase of my life, my business cards said "doer of things and maker of stuff." A friend visited me recently and mentioned that era of cards as we talked about searching for our next identities, professional and not, as we get older. "When I saw that, I knew you were seeking," he said. It was, as it still always is, startling to be seen accurately. I grew up thinking I could be invisible and came to prefer it, and reminders that I am not and cannot be remain a surprise, even after so much time.

Hello, friend.

I like to set intentions for the year with what I do on New Year's Day. This year, I did a dance class and started work on a new first draft of a novel. I don't know yet if it'll go anywhere, but it felt incredibly affirming to listen to the little what-ifs that surfaced in my brain and just start typing. I think that's the biggest gift I've gotten creatively in the last couple of years: the freedom to pour myself into new ideas and the connected freedom to walk away. Writing 20,000 words on something and realizing I don't want to see it to the end isn't a defeat, because it's wonderful to realize this isn't an all-the-way idea before investing any more energy than is needed. I suppose that's my philosophy of relationships too: the end of a relationship isn't the worst thing. Wasting time is, and people being hurt when they didn't have to be, and contorting yourself into unnatural shapes to try to keep something alive that shouldn't be sustained. Walking away from creative projects is amazing in the way of realizing anything isn't working. Congratulations: you're free.

I did the London Writers' Hour 100-Day challenge for the last, oh, 100 days of last year. I centered my project around revision and completed second drafts of two book-length stories. The first one felt more difficult because it required more cutting, restructuring, changes of timeline, flashbacks, and other backflips of writing that I'm still wrapping my head around. However, it was the second one that felt like weights around the ankles. I enjoyed revising it; it's a story I have a great affection for, so it felt like hanging out with people I like, which is something I don't get enough of these days. I dutifully went through my post-its, I looked severely at every scene for parts to omit, I revised and refined relationships and arcs.

Hello, friend.

I usually spend the last week of the year thinking about how I've spent my time and how I'd like to approach next year. To put it in a certain kind of business parlance, I write out what I want to stop, what I want to keep doing, and what I want to do more of. 2020 was the year of ecstatic drafting, just writing and discovering and deepening this power that had always existed to some extent but which grew in ways I never could've predicted during those early, particularly terrible pandemic months. With nothing to do except be sad while trying in vain not to be sad, my story brain picked up the slack and gave me sanctuary.

(Pictures are from my early-December trip to the holiday lights event at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. It was wonderful and strange.)

The wild writing continued in 2021, but it manifested differently, primarily in that I've spent this year trying to learn to revise effectively. I haven't arrived at the One Perfect Method for Novel Revision, but I made some great progress. Earlier this month, I finished the second draft of something I initially finished in early spring, and it was the biggest revision I've ever tried: flashbacks and perspective shifts and cutting out parts that led to the story but didn't need to be there in a more complete version. I covered the wall behind my kitchen table in multicolored post-its as I rearranged chunks of time. It became a physical presence in my house and something I really enjoyed looking at: behold this physical manifestation of the alternate reality that lives in my head.

Hello, friend!

This morning’s email didn’t go out in quite the form I intended. If you check out the updated archived version, you’ll get to see a picture from Seattle’s Zoolights and some more complete thoughts than were contained in this morning’s inbox version.

If you’re in the US, I hope you have a wonderful holiday weekend. If you’re not, I hope your Thursday treats you gently.

xx breanne

Hello again!

I write to you from the darkness, but you're probably reading this in the darkness if you're in the northern hemisphere, so I suppose that suits. I dislike how short the days are at this time of year, but I also just... stay up as late as I always do, so really, I'm playing myself. In the world of writerly things, I switched from mostly writing to mostly editing about a month and a half ago. One novel is now firmly in second-draft territory, and I'm spending the rest of the LWH 100 Days project doing the post-it-driven revision method I learned from a class with Cari Luna on the novel I finished during last year's NaNoWriMo.

It's different, recording progress during edit-heavy times. There aren't any super-pleasing methods like "wrote 3,000 words" to record. I take it as a good sign, however, that I miss making those nice, detailed records. I think a newish habit may be good and stuck now.

I started keeping a writing log in February. I wish I’d done it last May, but not all realizations come when we’d like them to. It’s relatively simple (or is for me; I love an involved spreadsheet sometimes). These are the columns:

Hello again,

I attempted and completed NaNoWriMo for the first time last November. I'd considered it many times before but recognized - correctly, I would say - that most of what I'd get from it would be self-loathing that I wasn't writing like I should be. For me, there are good challenges and bad, and generally I know which is which from the outside. It's not pleasant, but it's useful.

Before 2020, NaNoWriMo would have been a bad challenge, all punishment with little likely reward. But last year, I used it to finish the first draft of the second book in the big weird universe I've half existed in for the last 17 months. It was joyful and exciting, and massively affirming after years of not writing as much as I wanted and often feeling bad about it.

But despite all that joy and affirmation, I'm not doing NaNoWriMo this year.

Hello, friend.

It’s a fine season to have multiple projects in different phases. Of course, it always is, but it’s especially true for me right now. I’m a few weeks into a new job, I’m contemplating a bunch of life changes, and it’s getting darker earlier. All of these things are somewhere between neutral and good, but they eat up energy, which means having projects that work well for different modes lets me work more consistently, even when the brain ends up in wildly different places from day to day.

I have a deliberately fun first draft, a light-hearted scifi thing that I like to think about when I take walks, which I write on in an unhurried way. It’s gradually taking on a more defined shape, but it’s taking its time doing it, and so am I. I also have a marked-up first draft in printed form on my living room table, barely contained in a hanging folder, post-its sticking out of it in every direction. It’s scary, but it’s the thing I think about the most right now.

Hello friend,

I recently had some time between jobs, and I spent two weeks of it in New York. I did this because I wanted to, broadly, and specifically because New York had become one of my Quarantine Fixations, the longed for and out of reach. (Other friends fixated on getting better at the guitar, elaborate cooking, and RPGs. Me? New York and writing.) This was, of course, reason enough for a trip.

However, I had another reason to travel: research.

Hello again.

As predicted, I'm excited, and so I'm writing a little sooner than four perfectly paced weeks after the first one. I'm still working my way through another almost-complete first draft as part of Clarion West's Write-a-thon while also picking up a revision in earnest, now that I have the space in my brain to do more complicated work again. (I recently found myself, post-its in hand, working on a short story revision at 2:30 in the morning, because I could.)

This means I spend a lot of time existing within things of my own imagining, which in turn means I've been thinking a lot about the systems of organization that have come together as I do that work, in years before That Last One We Needn't Go Into and since. In college and many years after, I kept what I called sketchbooks. They were about one-third images (I have been known to draw too) and two-thirds text, and I used them for recording and exploring. Sometimes ideas from these books became actual longer-form writing; very often, they didn’t.

When I moved in 2015, I threw out a big box of them, something I consider pretty unlike me. (For contrast, I have a box of journals that go back to when I was 12, and I consider them the most valuable thing I own.) I sometimes think about what it meant to do that: years of dreaming and thinking just chucked in the recycling bin when I was in the middle of one of the most fraught periods of my life, going from Seattle to Oakland after 11 years of happily living in the mist.

Neither of the writers are wolves, unfortunately. And one was a lot more active for a long time.

I make my living these days as a security engineer. I can write code, but more than that, I tell people safer ways to do things. I do this by looking at their code, by reviewing their designs, and by evaluating third-party software options.

(I promise it’s more interesting than it sounds.)

Sometimes, the thing I do most is writing things down. How exactly to write code more safely, what permissions to allow for a Chrome extension or a Slack app. I figure out how to do things and write them down (and then sometimes I automate them, or so I declare on my LinkedIn profile).