Author: sonyablanck

I have been thinking a lot about gender lately, in part because many of my friends and acquaintances have now come out as nonbinary, an identity which earlier in my life I may have chosen to embrace. (Back in my day, ‘genderqueer’ was the preferred moniker, and pansexual was only just becoming a thing. But I digress.)

My feelings about gender are conflicted, both as someone who previously considered myself to be genderqueer and who now identifies as a gender nonconforming woman, and as someone whose first marriage was, as it turns out, to a transwoman. But my experiences have led me to draw a few conclusions, some of which are, on the surface, contradictory:

1. I believe that how someone identifies should be respected, whatever their biological sex and wherever they may or may not be in their transition. This includes respecting pronouns as well as granting access to single-sex spaces with the same caveats applicable to the cisgender people also using those spaces – eg, there are laws against assault and privacy invasion which also apply to cisgender people, and these shouldn’t be weaponised against transgender and nonbinary people.
2. However, I also believe that gender identity is an interaction between an individual and the culture in which they reside, and that feelings of dysphoria experienced by many trans/NB people result from cultural restrictions associated with their assigned gender.
3. Additionally, I view gender identity as only tangentially related to the body dysmorphia which compels people to transition medically – for me, it is unfortunate that such stigma surrounds the term ‘transsexual’, because from my perspective the process of medical transition treats a distinct medical condition wherein the brain is hardwired to respond to hormones not sufficiently produced by the body. This condition and its ramifications differs significantly from the social transition undertaken by trans/NB people who choose not to medically transition, and while one could argue that medical transition represents the far end of the entire transgender spectrum, to lump it in with other trans/NB identities risks either needlessly medicalising trans/NB people who do not require medical transition, or – more dangerously – trivialising trans/NB people who desperately require it in order to continue living.

The easiest way for me to illustrate point 3 is with the vastly differing experiences of my ex-partner and me. When I was younger, I identified as genderqueer, in part because of my androgynous gender expression and in part because I felt a kind of ‘male-ness’ in how I interacted with others, particularly women. However, I never felt a powerful urge to medically transition, and in fact experienced significantly less dysphoria once I discontinued hormonal contraception, which as it turns out was exacerbating any gender dysphoria I felt. Sometimes I still think about the what-ifs of medical transition, and am actually somewhat grateful that I have a nice female body which could in no way, shape, or form pass as male because of its almost childlike proportions. I can’t imagine how difficult it must be for those whose body dysmorphia compels them to medically transition despite being unable to pass as their correct gender.

My experience as a butch-presenting, gender nonconforming – dare I say, cissexual rather than cisgender – woman, differs greatly from my ex-partner’s experience. When she came out to me as transgender, I was shocked but not surprised – she had always been a feminine man, something I loved about her, and indeed took greatly after her mother in personality and mannerisms, but I had never considered that her ‘female-ness’ was any different to my ‘male-ness’, or that her dysphoria was any deeper than my own. Having said that, there was never any question in my mind that she needed to transition, or that I could or should somehow deter her from the process.

As I supported her through her medical transition, I was lauded by many heterosexual, cisgender friends and acquaintances for supporting her quest to ‘live her truth’. While I knew they meant well, the phrase rankled – her need to transition wasn’t based in some vague notion of wanting to live ‘authentically’, or present as her ‘real self’. Her need to transition was based in the need to live – period. Had she not been allowed to medically transition, my ex-partner would have died. It was never about ‘living her truth’ – it was about living at all.

And this brings me to point 2, which is the concept of gender as a culturally-negotiated phenomenon only tangentially related to medical transition. Lacking that essential dysphoric urge to medically transition, my ex-partner could have identified and presented however she wanted, within the growing number of gender roles afforded by Western society. However, her medical transition was distinct from her social transition, and was a necessary mitigation to actually keep her alive. Could she have socially transitioned without medically transitioning? Yes, but in her case, she needed – and was fortunately granted – timely access to life-saving medical treatment.

Many people both within and outside of the gender-variant community wish to de-medicalise the experience of being transgender, nonbinary, or otherwise gender nonconforming. While I agree that immediately placing gender-variant people into a medical silo is unnecessary, I feel it’s important to question how gender variance which requires no medical intervention differs from dysphoria requiring cross-sex hormones and surgery. And the difference comes down to how one views gender itself.

In Western culture dominated by late-stage capitalism, the wants and needs of the individual surpass all other considerations. Gender is therefore regarded – erroneously, in my opinion – as an entirely personal matter, to be decided and declared by the individual. Additionally, gender expression – how one ‘performs’ gender – is seen as distinct from gender identity, which is defined as how one regards oneself, without any consideration for how one presents to the outside world.

However, divorcing gender expression entirely from gender identity not only removes the element of cultural negotiation from one’s self-perception, but also leaves a void where any coherent definition of gender identity ought to be. So is gender identity based upon biological sex? Often, but not always: transpeople who medically transition have a gender identity opposite to their birth sex; nonbinary people have a gender identity not at all contingent upon their birth sex; and intersex people often have a male or female gender identity despite having both sexual characteristics. But if gender identity doesn’t correlate with biological sex, then how does it relate to gender expression? Without the recognition of cultural factors in declaring and shaping gender, we’re stuck with an unsatisfactory parsing of what it means to think of yourself as a man, or a woman, or gender-variant. Gender becomes an algebraic function with three variables: solve for X.

In Judaism, six gender identities are discussed in the Talmud. These are male; female; androgynos, which corresponds to the modern-day understanding of intersex; tumtum, which is someone whose sexual characteristics are ‘hidden’ – this is a somewhat more complicated identity than nonbinary, although it maps reasonably well; ay’lonit, which is a woman who doesn’t develop at puberty and is infertile – perhaps corresponding to transmen; and saris, which is basically a male eunuch and corresponds most closely with transwomen.

These identities are formed as a combination between sexual and cultural characteristics, and each role is associated with different laws and cultural morés. For example, the Talmud extensively discusses whether androgynos and tumtum people are obligated to observe male commandments, female commandments, or both, with some rabbis arguing that because of their ambiguous sexual characteristics, these gender-variant people should adhere to the stricter interpretations of the commandments for both men and women. An easy example of this is that, within Judaism, women are not obligated to observe time-bound commandments – in other words, commandments contingent upon being performed at a certain time. But because androgynos could be classed as both men and women, and because tumtum could be either men or women, they would be obligated to keep these time-bound commandments.

For me, this points to the importance of maintaining culture which both welcomes and examines gender-variant identities – a culture which finds a role, a place, for everyone. For example, I know several people who become dysphoric if addressed with the wrong pronouns, and while this is understandable and every effort must be made to respect how people identify and present, I can’t help but wonder whether Western cultural expectations surrounding the gender roles with which those pronouns are associated play a part in generating this dysphoria. Is a nonbinary person misgendered as a ‘she’ reacting strongly because they don’t ‘feel’ like a woman, or because the idea of being a ‘woman’ within the confines of Western cultural parameters is upsetting to them? At what point does presenting as – ‘performing’ – one, both, or neither gender become a fundamental expression of identity such that external perception of being a particular gender has the ability to affirm or wound it?

Funnily enough, some of my staunchest allies while my ex-partner pursued her medical transition were members of the Asian, and specifically Pakistani, community. Within the subcontinent, the gender identity of hijra – someone born male who transitions to female – is well-known. I remember visiting the home of one of my children’s school friends, and his mother told me that all of the Pakistani mothers at the school knew I was married to the hijra. She said, ‘In Pakistan we are told to respect the hijra, because they are following their heart.’ The hijra is not an unproblematic role to have in Asian society as they face the same hostility and violence as transwomen elsewhere, but it is a gender role which has existed since the time of the Kama Sutra, in which it is referenced, and is enshrined and protected in Indian and Pakistani law.

In fact, Western colonialism can be rightly blamed for the erasure of gender-variant roles in colonised cultures, and thus for the increased threat of violence experienced globally by many gender-variant people. I have detailed two cultures wherein gender variance is recognised, but there are many indigenous cultures which recognised and honoured gender variance. Indeed, gender-variant people often held ceremonial roles, becoming shamans and medicine-people. Gender variance had a cultural place, a role, which was steamrolled by Christian European dominance.

We are now in a postcolonial era, an era where indigenous cultures are being rediscovered and reconvened. In the West itself, spaces previously governed by Christian values are now governed by a tenuous secularism, which struggles to classify and understand cultural phenomena suppressed for hundreds of years by its colonial predecessors. Gender variance initially emerged as a medical phenomenon, studied by doctors; now it is also a social one, studied by psychologists and anthropologists. But unless gender can be rightly understood and situated as a negotiated cultural phenomenon, gender-variant people will constantly deal with pushback from the last vestiges of a secular-Christian culture in which they have no defined role, by people unable to create or expand cultural institutions to accommodate them.

This is a prose poem that I wrote for inclusion in a zine that I’m actually somewhat hesitant to publish, because it examines my feelings on growing up white in the American South and I worry about sounding whiny. But I’m generally happy with this poem, out of all of them.

I always knew we were getting close to Clarksdale when I saw the kudzu vines out the car window. Green, no matter the season; a green wall that stretched for miles down the highway. ‘The vine that ate the South,’ my mother said as we drove through the colonised landscape.

When Gran and Grandpa were both still alive, we stayed in their farmhouse at the edge of town, amongst their magnolias that always seemed to be blooming, their pecan trees lined up and yielding, in autumn, their rich nuts. None of my aunts stayed in Mississippi, only crazy Cousin Jane, who taught me how to taste the notes in Theakston’s Old Peculiar when I was ten. My mom and Jane burnt down a barn once. Mom was six, teaching a five-year-old Jane to smoke.

You could never take Cousin Jane anywhere. At Thanksgiving one year, in Gran’s dining room, picking at macaroni and collard greens, surrounded by family that had fled to other cities, she spoke loudly about a relative who had ‘an unfortunate taste for dark meat.’ My sister and I thought she was talking about turkey. It was our last Thanksgiving in Clarksdale.

As my sister and I grew older, our mother’s old porcelain dolls – pert-lipped belles called Mary-Jane and Martha-Ann – and strolls around the homestead were no longer enough to occupy us. We’d wait in the car during shopping trips to Save-a-Lot; one time we saw a cinema – in Clarksdale! – but Mom wouldn’t take us because it was ‘the black movie theatre’, and that mattered for some inscrutable reason.

Eventually my mother and aunts talked Grandpa into selling the farm that he had inherited from his father, and his father before him, back to John Clark, who though he refused to keep slaves married a plantation belle. (The spirit of the hungry kudzu vine, inescapable, always there.) Gran and Grandpa moved to assisted living, and we moved to the Best Western on State Street, one of many roadside inns off the 49 on the crossroads between Abe’s Barbecue and the 322.

Clarksdale was a collection of old buildings between which we were shuttled in cars. The Blues Museum. Ground Zero. St George’s Episcopal Church. Madidi’s, where elderly whites were seated adjacent to black tourists and served by smiling black waiters, like plantation belles. It made me uncomfortable, and I wondered, as I still do sometimes, how much of Clarksdale I never got to see because of this Venn diagram of white and black that had imprinted itself into the fabric of my mother’s life.

One time she made my sister and I be pages in a debutante ball. The Clarksdale page girls stuck together in a stuck-up clique of magnolia skin and heavy makeup; my sister, the exotically half-Jewish beauty from Texas, got hit on a lot; and I, with my skinny arms and pixie haircut, got sideways Southern looks for headbanging to a Nirvana song at a party. Mom stuck us in stupid green dresses that, after the debutante ball, we rolled down the hotel hall in, sullying them because we never had to wear them ever, ever again.

I took my guitar to Grandpa’s funeral. After the church service at St George’s, my cousin and I sat outside the reception playing, and I thought about Robert Johnson sat at the crossroads strumming his guitar until the tall dark man came and tuned it for him. I wondered who would come for me at the crossroads. Not Papa Legba; not even the Devil; maybe just the spirit, the hungry grasping spirit, of the kudzu vine.

I always thought I’d go back when Gran died, but by the time she passed I lived not in Texas but across the sea, and I couldn’t go to her send-off at St George’s, didn’t see my Southern diaspora family return to mourn their one remaining link to the place, take a final circuit to the Blues Museum, Ground Zero, Madidi’s, and then depart, possibly forever. Will I see Clarksdale again? Do I want to see it again? Or will I always, always feel hungry, grasping, invading a place that isn’t mine?

Shalom, poor and scornful Gen Z readers! It is I, your adoptive older-millennial Jewish mum-of-two-and-counting, come to bestow my hard-won economic wisdom upon you!

I know exactly what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, ‘Why on Earth would I take career advice from a broke-ass millennial who doesn’t even have a TikTok?’ (…Okay, I don’t actually know what you’re thinking, because I am hopelessly out of touch. Humour me, just like you do your boomer grandparents.)

Well, children. As someone who’s been skiving for pretty much my entire post-2008-crash career despite a relatively decent CV and a not insignificant amount of higher education, I feel I am uniquely qualified (let’s just pretend like I didn’t lapse into job-application-speak there) to offer you advice on this New Economy(TM).

So, first question: what is this New Economy in which we find ourselves?

Great question. The New Economy can be summarised as follows:

• There is no such thing as a stable job anymore, anywhere, ever. It doesn’t matter how smart you are, how highly-qualified or skilled, what financial obligations you have. Your job is basically your industry’s version of Deliveroo, and if you don’t like it, you will get sacked and management will find somebody even more miserable and desperate for your shitty job to take your place.
• Oh, you’re an unattached white twentysomething and Daddy knows the CEO? The above doesn’t apply.

The median wage in 2020 for both full- and part-time workers in the UK was around £30,000pa. Now don’t get too excited – that means that half of workers in this country make below £30,000 per year, and while that sum looks like a lot from, say, Lincoln or Newcastle, it won’t get you jack shit in London or Oxford, or for that matter any city where rent eats up well over half your pay packet.

And let me tell you what life’s like when you make over £30,000 per year, from the brief halcyon (not really) days when I made a decent wage. The benefits and/or tax credits you’d come to rely on to make up for the laughable salary you previously earned? All gone, now pay full council tax to your do-nothing council and rent to your absent landlord, please. And those debts you accrued whilst on a nothing wage? All the debt collectors now have their hands out from the minute you poke your head above the £30k parapet, pay up! Oh now you lost your extremely demanding job due to stress burnout, I guess it’s Universal Credit time for you, enjoy that benefit cap in an expensive non-London area!

Am I bitter? Ha-ha! Yes.

So with my hard-won experience in this glorious New Economy in mind, I would like to share with you, Gen-Z reader, the same career advice I will be giving my children when they approach employment age.

1. DO NOT GO TO UNI. NO. NO NO NO.
   • All you are doing is throwing money at a glorified degree mill with absolutely fuck-all guarantee that there’s any kind of decent job at the end of it for you. This applies even up to Masters-level study. And if you’re really so deluded that you think a doctorate is going to streamline you into the good wages, well, I know a looot of postdocs and burnouts who would like a word with you.
   • If you are going to commit the monumental folly of higher education, make sure that a) your parents can foot the bill without the expectation of a worthwhile job at the end of it (‘Expand your mind, honey!’), or b) you have a genuine desire to enter a profession which has a BA as prerequisite, such as – and please pardon the Jewish trope – a doctor or lawyer. And if this sub-bullet point applies to you, then you really don’t need my career advice.
2. You really wanna make money in the New Economy? Learn a trade.
   • If you’re Ashkenazi like me, then your great-grandparents probably emigrated out of the shtetl on the strength of their trade. Mine were tailors and picture-frame-makers when they passed through Ellis Island. Not that tailors and picture-frame-makers would have much luck in the New Economy, but you know who’s making money right now? Plumbers. Electricians. Hairdressers, if you don’t mind the local competition. If you don’t mind working as an apprentice for a bit, you’ll be qualified for a decent job at the end of it – and one where you could probably freelance if you wanted.
   • NB: THIS DOES NOT APPLY TO CODING. Software engineering is going to be a barely-above-minimum-wage job in twenty years, as it proliferates like malware across every damn industry. It doesn’t hurt to know a little code, but DO NOT bank on software engineering as a trade. NO.
3. Oh, you’re a creative like me? There are three options for you to make it in the arts:
   • Have rich parents.
   • Get a dull, menial job that doesn’t eat at too much of your mind. Admin is a great one – fast typing, learning your way around MS Office and copying machines, occasionally bumming cigarettes off the jaded boomers/Gen-Xers who have been trudging round this office for a solid 20 years, lucky bastards.
   • Learn your way around the welfare state. The government can damn well pay you to make your magnum opus. Think about it as a trade-off: the state gives you money, and you don’t commit any major crimes to speak of. Win-win!

And there you have it, authentic Jewish-mum advice for attempting to make money ‘in this economy’ (a phrase I have heard since 2008 and which I fucking hate). I don’t think I’ll ever make any real money again, but you might have a shot. Courage, and bonne chance! I’m going back to sleep.

Let’s make a change from moaning about how demotivated winter makes me! How about we talk about food.

I have always been very food-motivated – before emigrating from America, my favourite holiday was Thanksgiving solely because of the food, and though I enjoyed the opportunity to make fancy food for British Christmas, it wasn’t until I became an observant Jew that I found the holiday replacement I craved. And let’s face it, Shabbat is such a fun holiday to observe when you love food, because it happens every single week!

Since moving to the seaside from a town that’s nowhere near the sea – come to think of it, this is the first time I’ve properly lived by the sea – my perspective on food has shifted dramatically in a relatively short space of time. When I moved here, I was in theory ostrovegan but in practice just vegan because you try getting decent shellfish when you’re nowhere near the ocean. I’d been vegan since 2013, nearly 8 years, and while my morality had mellowed since the first heady days, my perspective was entrenched.

Well, now I have 30 eggs in my fridge. Lol.

In all seriousness, being happy and near the ocean let me step back and re-evaluate my ethical stance, and I came to realise that I didn’t actually object to animal husbandry. What I truly objected to was the commodification and large-scale exploitation of animals in factory farms – not animals in the kinds of symbiotic relationships with human beings which we’ve nurtured for millennia.

In fact, I sometimes felt discomfort around some vegans’ absolutist stances, particularly regarding the food webs of indigenous cultures. Much as I would not, personally, wish to club a seal, who was I to tell an Inuk to desist from hunting one of the few food sources available to him in the Arctic? Would I even go so far as to accost a Maasai warrior for subsisting on cow’s blood, when cows have been culturally revered and reared for thousands of years?

My perspective shifted, to question what it was about the indigenous diet that appealed to me, and I came to the conclusion that what I actually sought was to encourage right relation with animals – healthy, symbiotic, mutually beneficial relationships that can be traced and accounted for.

With that in mind, I found a local honey supplier who spring harvests, and I found a nearby free-range smallholding which delivers 30(!) eggs per week (or, like, every other week, because I would really have to work to use 30 eggs in a week!). Seeing as I’m by the sea, I have my eye on sustainable fisheries that sell fish caught within 20 miles of my town…but we’re not quite there, yet.

Having said that, learning how to cook eggs again has been a journey in and of itself! So I’ll wait on the cod for now. I’m just happy to have articulated, to myself and now here, my desire for relationality and symbiosis with the animal world. Aligning myself with a more indigenous perspective on food has been immensely satisfying, and has helped grow my sense of place, of belonging somewhere.

I can see the sea outside my bedroom bay window, the best view in the house. Lately I’ve been frustrated that the cold weather prevents me from sea-bathing (although some do it even in winter, the show-offs).

Will I ever get tired of living by the sea? No, in short. The way the light plays on the water, how the sun sometimes bounces off and makes it look like crinkly silver foil, the way that sometimes a pale, cloudy sky contrasts with the brooding dark grey-blue of the sea and you can see the white crests of the waves. The sea can change colour minute to minute, hour to hour, depending on the sky above it – on a cloudy day, of which there are several, shafts of light descend to the water like angelic rays from Heaven, and sometimes when the sun sets the sky over the sea goes golden, and pink, and then a deep red.

The sunny days are, of course, nice as well. I find there are several different textures that a clear blue sky brings out of the sea. With the right light, the waves light up with dazzling sparkles that dance even after you close your eyes.

February gets me restless. When I was younger, it was always the month I would feel at my most crazy. Each year it gets significantly easier – January has, I believe, superseded February for most frustrating month – yet for such a short month, it drags.

It’s mostly the fact that winter has taken the pleasure and fun from the outdoors for about four months now, and as the days begin to lengthen I long to take leisurely strolls to the seaside again, like I did when I first moved here, and get ice cream from a stall, and sit on a bench as a cool sea breeze ruffles me on a warm day. What can I say, summer’s more my bag.

But now, all I can do is wrap up warm, hunch my shoulders and dash to and from the shops, or dispatch willing housemates to brave the icy winds on my behalf. And sit at the bay window in my bedroom, looking wistfully at the sea.

I slept until about half past one in the afternoon today. Yesterday, I slept until noon.

I’m going to go ahead and award myself decent parent points for having baked a carrot cake with the kids, but I’m now contemplating at what point it’s acceptable for me to go back to bed.

You see, I’m having to cut drastically down on coffee, for reasons. I was given two cups of fool’s coffee (ie decaf) today, but they weren’t enough to take away the caffeine withdrawal headache. Fortunately I had paracetamol to hand.

In the room next to mine two children, who were supposed to be hunkering down on homework, were instead shouting at Roblox games. This is by design – their new school sets them an inordinate amount of lockdown homework compared to their previous one, and last week I finally wrote to their teachers informing them, in the kindest possible way, that they can stuff that homework somewhere unmentionable. Response so far has been muted, and amount of homework done limited. But no longer will I breathe down their necks all damn day like some crazed, exhausted dragon, running on caffeine and fumes alone.

Now I’ve written my Wednesday post, and I am going to go back to bed. Stuff it.

Well for a start, I’m literally writing this on the day before Tu B’Shevat, which is one of the lesser-known but very cool Jewish holidays with a rather uncreative name denoting that it falls on the 15th (Tu) of the month of Shevat. It starts at sunset tonight, and is described as a ‘New Year for trees’. This apparently makes more sense in Israel, where mid-Shevat denotes the imminent coming of spring and the budding of trees, but in the UK, which has just been snowed all over, the timing feels like a tantalising jab.

Anyways, for the first time ever, I’ve decided to do a little seder for my family to mark the holiday. The Tu B’Shevat seder was first undertaken by Rav Isaac Luria, a 16th-century Ottoman rabbi who founded the Lurianic school of Kabbalah. Within it, you’re meant to first eat fruit and nuts with an inedible outer shell; then fruits with an inedible stone; and finally fruits that can be eaten whole, with a final fourth course consisting of just smell. I like this, because smell is how HaShem and the spirits are meant to eat, marking a unification with this highest realm.

I like adding new traditions to my routine, returning to a path that my late grandparents left when they renounced Judaism during the interwar period. But I am conscious of the fact that, like an archaeologist, I approach and integrate these traditions from the outside in – it may be my heritage, but it’s also one I have to dig for.

When I first started keeping Shabbat, I used electric candles, turning them on at Friday sunset and off on Saturday night. At the time it felt like I couldn’t do much else – establishing routine during a chaotic period superseded other considerations. As life settled, I switched to real candles; began integrating an ancestor offering, with the kiddush wine and challah portion that would in times past have gone to the kohen; held my first Pesach seder. But at times I still felt cut off from the friends I made at synagogue, alienated through a broken line of observance, an abandoned lineage.

Only recently, I found my grandfather’s family shtetl, in the Kaunas district of Lithuania. Both of my dad’s parents died years before I was born, and I don’t know what they would make of me. I used to think that they renounced Judaism because they were both communist, but I’ve come to the conclusion that they were merely assimilationist, cutting the anchor of Judaism to sail free in a white-passing world. But if you cut the anchor, what happens when you want to moor somewhere?

I’ve met a couple of my ancestors now, in dreams. Invariably, they tell me off for not being Jewish enough, and I never have the quickness of wit in my dreams to point out that unlike them, I haven’t spent my whole life growing up in a shtetl, surrounded by and integrated within those traditions. There again, I wonder if they realise that their way of life has been uprooted and eradicated entirely, again, as periodically happens when you’re Jewish. The shtetl that my great-grandfather left in the early 20th century is still there; only now there’s a memorial there, on the site of a mass grave where all the remaining Jews – over 700 of them – were gunned down, like cattle, by the Nazis.

Anyways I’ve got dinner mostly sorted – fruits and nuts, shelled, stoned, eaten whole; six of the seven species of Israel you’re also supposed to eat on the day (look, there are only so many uses for pearl barley); incense for afters, instead of an etrog (do you know how hard it is to source an etrog in the UK?). And carob molasses, because of the story Honi told about the man who planted a carob tree.

Honi came upon an old man planting a carob tree, and asked him why he was planting it as he would be dead by the time it bore fruit. The old man replied that he had found the trees his grandparents had planted when he was a boy, and he was now planting this carob tree for his grandchildren. Sometimes the meaning of tradition isn’t clear to those practising it at this present time; sometimes its echoes, ripples in the past and future, cannot be felt or seen, but must be intuitively known for actions taken at the present time to have meaning.

I do what I can, though the world changes, and I change with it, and my people change too. We’ll be planting trees in our garden soon, but we may move house before they bear fruit. In our old house we also left a garden – something nice for the next tenants.

I finally looked at Hive again today. This is after opening the file day before yesterday, and jotting down some notes on what I want to do with the rewrite yesterday. I added possibly half a sentence before helping my partner play-test his Troika pocket mod, which was a welcome distraction despite my never having really gotten into roleplaying games.

No, I haven’t brought myself to open the feedback from the sensitivity reading yet. Give me a few days.

Someone on Twitter recently asked whether anyone actually enjoys the writing process, and I feel compelled to state for the record that no, no I am not enjoying this writing process.

There are, granted, moments of levity and fun. When I started writing Dulcia, the novelty of writing a completely unserious, smutty Victorian-era book about Norman vampires propelled me for nearly 10,000 words, until I discovered that at this point in my life, I’m just not horny enough to write it. Hopefully I’ll rediscover the magic at some point.

There are also moments of unfettered inspiration. My poetry-writing is very much like that – I tend to edit them very little, and they come out in one freewheeling idea. But that doesn’t happen routinely, and within a novel inspiration is most often in thrall to character development, narrative, who needs to say or do what at this juncture of the book, how to demonstrate this aspect of your world-building. And it can get tedious.

Finishing my first draft of Hive felt triumphant. Commissioning and receiving feedback felt humbling. And I know that ahead of me lies a long and arduous process of editing and clarifying, rewriting characters, places and entire religions. This is necessary work, as I don’t want to submit a fatally flawed manuscript for publication, particularly when the flaw involves my unconscious and unintentional white gaze. In that sense I suppose it’s good that I’ve finally gotten over my white-woman fee-fees enough to look at the draft again. But still.

And the fact that I’m off my happy-focus herbal tinctures, for the same reason my libido’s fled from Dulcia, is going to make the slog harder.

At this point I also feel compelled to apologise for moaning about my rewrite. But look, you’re reading the weekly blog of a writer, so it’s your own damn fault for even getting this far down the post, okay. And hey, at least I didn’t spend my Wednesday post talking about the inauguration, so enjoy the distraction.

On that note I’m going to distract myself from the rewrite by cooking dinner, so if you still need to read about literally anything other than the inauguration and the reams of analysis which is accompanying it, feel free to scroll to the top and read this post again. 😉