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Important context 1: I like my boss a lot, but he has an extremely dry sense of humor, and he believes in his heart that I am normal enough to understand when he's being funny. Usually I am, but he does not comprehend that I am also at all times a roiling sea of anxiety masked by extreme competence and Adderall.

Important context 2: At this job I have only ever had positive performance reviews. I set my own goals and as long as I hit them he makes vague encouraging noises and leaves me alone. For the past three years my performance reviews have been a 15 minute video call where he tells me how much of a raise I'm getting.

Boss: Hey, can I book your performance review for tomorrow?

Me: Sure, I'm open, book for whenever.

Boss: Gotcha. We need about three hours, you think?

Me, internally: I know he's joking I know he's joking I know he's joking but what if he's not what if I'm being fired what if he found out I write romance novels on company time

Me, externally: Oh, I think we should just book out the whole day.

Him: Oh, good idea!

And then he sent me a 15-minute meeting request and I was able to start breathing again.

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Hi Sam! While I continue to reread the Shivadhverse on repeat, I also managed to get my girlfriend hooked on it. She took home Volume I of the omnibus a week and a half ago and begged me last night to let her borrow Volume II, since she'd apparently stayed up until four in the morning multiple nights reading the first volume because she needed to know what happened next. I warned her it's just as addictive, and wished her luck getting sleep.

Oh, that's awesome! I'm so glad you've both been enjoying the stories. The "Stayed up all night to find out what happens next" sentiment is always wonderful to hear about one's own books :)

I am still badgering slowly away on Chicken Salad War -- and the one after that is about half-done so should go quickly. And at some point soon I need to drop a new short story, I have one nearly done about Michaelis and Jes taking some of the young royalty to Galia for Pride...

Also, apologies for the very late response and general apologies to people who have sent asks in the last two months or so and not gotten a reply -- I have a massive inbox backlog at the moment and I'm attempting to work through it. Many more belated replies in the coming days!

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Polk loves cuddling with her sister.

Dearborn's feelings are more complicated.

[ID: a photo of Polk the tabby and Dearborn the Tortie, sitting on a blanket over my lap; Polk is sitting up contemplatively, while Dearborn, lying on her side, is being whapped across the face by Polk's tail.]

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I'm home! The show was fun -- it's kid oriented but not as kid-focused as many I've seen. Mostly instrumental piano music and dance, which I can take or leave, but also lots of puppetry and acrobatics, so overall very entertaining.

Although some dickhead was checking his texts with the brightness all the way up for about half the performance, so I regret to report I cannot yet set people on fire with my mind.

Taking Prowly out to a Halloween show at the Harold Washington! (It's running Thursday and Friday as well, details at the link.)

[ID: Prowly the resin Halloween owl is pictured in front of a stage with audience seating; some of the stage decorations include papel picado flags and decorated calavera skulls, symbols associated with Dia de los Muertos.]

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Taking Prowly out to a Halloween show at the Harold Washington! (It's running Thursday and Friday as well, details at the link.)

[ID: Prowly the resin Halloween owl is pictured in front of a stage with audience seating; some of the stage decorations include papel picado flags and decorated calavera skulls, symbols associated with Dia de los Muertos.]

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they dont want us to know this but the real cure to the agonies is to engage in shenanigans. tomfoolery even 

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Last time I was in Texas I got to raid the epic Lego stash my mum kept from our childhood, since they're trying to declutter and anything I didn't want was going to a buyback pilot program Lego is running. Most of it is from the 80s and 90s, nothing from after about 2005, and as far as we've seen none of them have much secondary market value, so I came home with roughly four gallons of old bricks. I'm in the process of washing them now -- a brief soak in a bucket of soapy warm water, a rinse in cold water, and air drying. Pictured above is about a gallon of assorted pieces, spread out to dry. The only real place to do this is the kitchen, so between the wash bucket, drying trays, and bags of unwashed Lego, my kitchen looks real weird right now.

My next step is a simple inventory, and then I'm hoping to build....something, using as many bricks as I can to make a single model. There are some websites that will help but I'm hoping to get a sense of the possible and then design my own.

Mind you, I'm considering inviting friends over to have a sorting party. I know a lot of people who have The Neurodivergent Love Of Sorting Things. (I am employing my own neurodivergence to design the inventory spreadsheet.)

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Can you believe it's already year six of me running the holiday card program?

Pickings for Worst Card are a little slim this year because the company improved their filtering function, so I can now filter out most "Christmas" cards and also any cards that aren't fold-over (ie, postcards and such). You can also filter by theme and "color tone" so I was able to filter to my company's color scheme, which my boss always likes to see.

But...you can't filter out everything. Including Christmas...teeth.

It's clearly meant specifically for dental office mailings, but even if I got this from my thematically-appropriate dentist, I would...I would look askance at a tooth dressed like a reindeer.

[ID: A holiday card reading "Happy Holidays" up top and "From all of us at A Acorn Dental" at the bottom; underneath the top text are three cartoon molars done in a sort of chibi-kawaii style, complete with smiling face and rosy cheeks. One is dressed like santa, one has reindeer horns and a red nose, and one is wrapped like a present, with only its face visible. Eerie.]

Welp I found the actual worst holiday card to send in 2020, short of an image of the COVID virus made up to look like a snowflake. 

[Description: on an American Flag background, an image of a black and white cat in a cop hat, cuddling a badge. In huge meme-style lettering it says “PUT YOUR PAWS UP!” up top and “HAPPY HOLIDAYS” below.]

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Prowly is dangerously flammable.

[ID: Prowly the resin Halloween owl is seated on a steel bench in a dimy lit concrete room. Above him is a sign reading "DANGER: flammable, keep flames and heat away". I had to go into the building parking garage to check on my bike in storage and it's still creepy as hell.]

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End of an era! Thank you for all your years of helping the fannish community seek and send help. Unrelated: just tried a philly cheesesteak Pringle and it was Not Good. I have never actually eaten a philly cheesesteak because I don't like red meat, so maybe you'd find it edible? I got "chemical" more than "meaty" tbh.

Yeah, usually the "meat" flavored chips are really "steak seasoning" flavored -- a bit of spice, a bit of smoke, a bit of pepper. And Pringles have a particularly poor track record with flavored chips, I think because they tend to have a stronger innate potato flavor than most chips.

I do kinda want a cheesesteak now, though. Might have to stop living on pasta with red sauce and buy a big chuck roast and braise it for Italian Beef and live on that for a while instead.

(I take vitamins, it's fine.)

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https://www.wired.com/story/therapy-broken-mental-health-challenges/

I came across this (old) article and it made me think of what you shared about your therapy experience. Would you say your therapy experience worked? It almost feels like you were telling us about how you were A/B testing your way through it.

Yeah, I remember reading that article at some point either before therapy or early on. I don't remember what I thought overall but I do remember being astonished that people expected therapy to help them in six sessions, and that most people report improvement in only 15-20. Not because I think either of those things are unrealistic based on any kind of evidence, but because that's not the expectation I was ever handed when I was in therapy. I was in therapy for nine years as a kid, until I turned eighteen and could legally refuse to go. Not for anything I did, like it wasn't a court order, I was simply put into therapy and wasn't allowed to leave by the adults in my life.

The thing is, because it was mandatory, because at least one of those therapists broke ethical constraints, and because across nine years and three separate therapists nobody caught my ADHD, I have a more complicated relationship to therapy than a lot of people. I still catch myself thinking of things I can't tell my therapist because then she'll have leverage on me. Which is absurd, but it took me a long time to start saying those things to her. I am difficult and private and smart enough to make that a real problem, so it's been a slow process for me.

I also think that article is complicated, because it makes a lot of good points but it also seems at times to confuse therapy itself with the abusive nature of the American healthcare system. So while it's a useful article particularly when it speaks to marginalized peoples' experiences, it may discourage people who could benefit from therapy from doing the work to find a therapist. It's a good article to learn from, but I wouldn't advise people to decide for or against therapy based on it.

(My thoughts on my own therapy under the cut)

I'm still in therapy. It's difficult to measure results. I think I handle interpersonal stress better than I used to, but I haven't been able to find much to help with some of the emotional volatility I experience, and while I've set some good boundaries with family, the process of doing that was and continues to be stressful and upsetting, in some ways harder than simply not having them, so I'm still assessing that. Part of the problem for me is that I don't find cognitive-behavioral therapy useful for what I need, and while I understand there are differences, like 90% of all therapeutic systems boil back down to those techniques. Reality checking, visualizing, physical stimulus responses, mindfulness, as I said once to Therapist, "It's CBT all the way down." I don't respond to many of them and others I was already doing, so *shrug emoji*

At that point, when I realized there was no system that was going to help with my specific problems -- in part because the problems are ADHD related in a way that you can't train your way out of -- we also agreed it was time to try medication. Which felt like a failure, but I know that realistically I looked at the situation as it is, assessed my options, and made an appropriate choice, which is after all what therapy is often about.

So I've been on Clonidine for a couple of weeks. And it's doing fuck-all so far, but it's the lowest dose and there are other options too, so it's an ongoing process.

Outside of frustration with trying to fix problems that I honestly don't think anything but medication will fix, therapy's ok. If nothing else the expectation of it helps me identify actual problems in my life. And like most people I enjoy talking about myself but I also have a lot of struggle around asking for that kind of indulgence from friends, so doing that for an hour in a structured transactional kind of way is easier for me.

Ultimately, there's no real one-size solution that's called "Therapy", so whether or not I have found it useful isn't really material to whether someone else would. Some people use it as maintenance stress-relief, some people need to do deep emotional work, some people are in crisis and need an objective commentator. Sometimes you move from one need to another. Right now I'm in a liminal space because we're trying something new, so it's tough to say. But I'm finding it worth the cost in time, energy, and money, so I'll keep on until I don't anymore.

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Hey Sam! I was going to check your website for links to your books but I couldn't find the link in your Tumblr header. Did that get moved? Am I silly and just can't see it bc I'm on mobile? Thank you for everything!

I don't even know how the damn headers work, I won't lie :D It looks like somehow some of the links in the header got dropped off, so it's definitely not you. I'll try and fix that if I can, but in the meantime, you can get to my website here!

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[ID: an image of aslan the lion from the live-action film, captioned "I was there in the general area but looking at something else when it was written". I felt this one in my soul.]

being on tumblr for a long time but never reading homestuck like

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Radio Free Monday

Good morning everyone, and welcome to Radio Free Monday!

As a general announcement to Dreamwidth and a reminder to Tumblr, I will be discontinuing Radio Free Monday in the new year; this isn't in reaction to any one thing, it's just time. The guide to fundraising will remain, and feel free to link to it, but please ease off on linking folks to the form, which will go silent after December. Thanks for understanding.

Ways to Give:

thefaeriesfyre linked to a sibling, Joy, who lost everything in Hurricane Milton and is trying to recover; you can read more and support the fundraiser here.

Mariposagal linked to a fundraiser for Kaileigh (Kaicfox on TikTok) who is raising funds to get a biposy for masses in their partner Al's (nofearshakesqueer on tiktok) nose; there is a concern they may be cancerous but they can't afford the biopsy. There's an explainer tiktok here that you can leave on loop to help. Kaileigh is a Shakespeare scholar who makes videos about Shakespeare's plays, and also has a patreon you can subscribe to for Shakespeare content; you can hire them to write curriculum at Kaileighfox.com, or give directly at Paypal or to Kaileigh-Fox on Venmo.

Recurring Needs:

loversdoom is raising funds for an assessment to get help with mental health so she can be treated and remain in school, where she has a safe place to live and basic psychiatric support. You can read more, reblog, and find giving information here or give via paypal here.

onedollopofsourcream is fundraising to help support a large family including young children during a difficult time; they particularly need funds for needed medication (including insulin), and hopefully eventually to get out of an abusive living situation. You can read more, reblog, and find giving information here.

memprime linked to a fundraiser for a friend, virtualalternative, who needs help with cat vet bills after their cat had several blockages; you can read more, reblog, and find giving information here.

And this has been Radio Free Monday! Thank you for your time. You can post items for my attention at the Radio Free Monday submissions form. If you're new to fundraising, you may want to check out my guide to fundraising here.

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Prowly and I went to a party and made friends...his was more dramatic than mine.

[ID: Prowly the resin Halloween owl is seated on a friend's bookshelf, hanging out with a very elegant raven figurine in a purple shawl.]

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I want a black t-shirt styled like a metal band tee, with skulls and purple flames and shit and dramatic gothic font text on the front that says

YOU MUST SUFFER ME TODAY

and on the back it reads

I MUST SUFFER ME FOREVER

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When I was a child, they used to run public service announcements on television telling people to turn their handles "in" for safety, with an animated short of a little pot getting bright red from the heat.

I was just barely old enough to understand stove safety in terms of "stove get hot" but not quite old enough to understand "child should not grab handle", so I thought there was some kind of locking mechanism where if you turned the handle a certain way, the pan couldn't tip over. I used to try to "lock" cold pans to the (inactive) stove by turning the handle as far inward as I could, but eventually I decided you had to be a grownup to make the lock work.

Probably for the best I didn't develop a theory that the pan had to be hot to lock it...

I say this with love and on the verge of a nervous breakdown from watching beginner cooks who don't know better yet: ALWAYS turn your pot and pan handles in so they aren't hanging over the edge of the stove

even if you don't have children or pets who might hit or grab the handles, it just takes one moment of it catching on your shirt or your hip bumping it in passing to send a bunch of hot food and oil right at you