The Future of this Blog (Part 2)

 I am going to try to resurrect this blog. I need to have more confidence that I do have a unique voice. My publishing contract should be evidence of that. The post I made a few weeks ago seemed to nuke my readership and I obviously need to get them back or attract new readers.

I will write about politics but I cannot write anything about Charlie Kirk because I want to keep my job. Apparently this is career-death so as  I have nothing positive to say about the man, I will be silent.

I do notice a pattern though of disaffected Republicans going after right wing demagogues and then being branded as "extreme leftists." Which is very, very annoying. But predictable. 

And people murdered by the state have been smeared. Also predictable.

My frenemy, Dr. Silverman, found an old video of me warning about the separation of church and state collapsing and criticizing the "illegal war" (Iraq). I told him how right I was. There is hardly separation of church and state left, and there is another illegal war (Iran)! He called me "Cassandra," which I am.

In 2007-2011 I wrote a novel predicting, basically, MAGA. It was a "first' novel. Not fit for publication. It had a lot of old ideas I have discarded. Ideologies I shed. But it was quite predictive. It predicted Occupy. It predicted billionaires in the president's inner circle. It predicted the rounding up and killing of immigrants.

I will continue to make predictions.

A Note on Israel-Palestine

On October 7th, I cried all day. I cried for the Israeli victims, and I cried for what I knew would be the future Gazan victims of an asymmetrical war that risked turning into a genocide.

That was my first week at my current job. I cried every day, reading the news, as the death toll in Gaza mounted

I am a Jew. A secular Jew, humanist, atheist, but a Jew nonetheless.

I have never been to Israel-Palestine. Here is why:

When I was 9, my parents made me attend Hebrew School on Sundays at the Jewish Community Center. I didn't want to go and was very resistant. Didn't want to spend time with kids who made fun of me on Sundays. Didn't want to learn Hebrew.

My teacher, a young guy closer to my age than my parents', showed us a video of himself as a teen, planting trees in the desert.

"Trees in the desert."

I didn't know those trees were being planted over bulldozed Palestinian homes, but I knew Israel was a place of conflict, and no one was dying over trees. I didn't trust this Hebrew school teacher, and when I did learn about the conflict there, as a slightly older kid, my sympathies were with the Palestinians.

I refused Birthright because I didn't want to go to a country where I had more rights than someone who was born there. 

I believe in a one-state solution. A secular. pluralistic state. This is the position of most of If Now Now, the Jewish peace and anti-occupation organization I belong to. 

At least until we can have a no-state solution. That would be my ultimate preference.

I believe Jews and Arabs both have a claim and a right to the land. Government doesn't. You should be able to live anywhere you want. You shouldn't be able to enforce a government. Governments don't have rights. People do.

And people are not their governments. Hamas is a terroristic organization, and the IDF practices state terrorism. But there are civilians on both sides who only want peace and equity.

I hope for peace. I hope to visit Israel-Palestine one day. But I cannot under these circumstances. If that means I never do, then so be it. I am disgusted by Israeli Apartheid. My dad says Israel was founded by trauma victims. That may be true. They seem to have not learned from the past.

Never Again. Never Fucking Again.

Update on the Tantalus II Trilogy (6/13/20206)

 

An update on the Tantalus II Trilogy and my professional life...

I am anticipating getting the editors' notes in July. I am taking another week off work on the week of my birthday to work on the novels.

It is extremely exciting.

In the meantime, I also have been given permission by the state board of social workers to register for the LCSW exam! So next comes study and a practice test.

This too is extremely exciting.

These things are within my grasp.

The Tantalus II Trilogy will see bookshelves probably next year.

And my life will totally change.

I  have also updated the links page of this blog to include my author profile at Roan and Weatherford.

In the meantime, enjoy these AI generated pictures of ships and characters.

Future of this Blog

I started this post a month ago and never finished it.

I didn't get beyond one sentence: I will be honest- I do not particularly like blogging.

In conclusion:

I prefer writing fiction. I don't like to present myself as anything like a "talking head" or an "internet personality." I despise especially the latter and have not the enthusiasm for presenting as one that it would require to succeed. Advice I get goes "You have to have a blog" as practically a prerequisite for getting published.

But I've got a contract and my novels are in the editing process. So I will get published regardless of whether or not I make another blog post. Which I will do, to promote the book, but I should explain the factors that have led to this blog being rather inactive rather than the firebrand that was promised in the beginning.

The things I would want to say on a blog, that I once could say, now have much more serious consequences, such as loss of job or federal surveillance, or court convictions. The Right Wing is extremely litigious. I don't want to lose my job (where I help a lot of people who otherwise don't have support) or by surveilled or imprisoned by the Trump Government for speaking truths that are equally as personal as they are political. I also work in a rumor mill (E.G. a hospital) where everyone finds out everything about everyone else. My job puts me in a very visible position in which I need to avoid the appearance of being "political" at all. And while my writing is certainly "political" or at least, politically charged, I prefer writing fiction because I can speak less like a know-it-all through different characters with different perspectives (which is how all three of my novels are written, with alternating perspectives).

As stated, I dislike internet personalities and social media. What social media presence I do have is going to be handled by a third party for the remainder of my career as a writer. This third party is my sister and her girlfriend. They have a head for doing that and not getting dragged down into the muck, which is an ability I lack.

It's not that I will never make another blog post again. I will plug the books. I will plug appearances. I will continue to attempt to use this blog to gain publicity for my written work. But there are a lot of reasons why I haven't been using it to go on rants about current events, and these reasons are far from apathy. I care deeply about the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, about racial and gender injustice under Trump's regime, about the dystopian rise of LLMs, the dystopian rise of Christian Nationalism, and other aspects of the "whole" material struggle for liberation. But I don't feel motivated to rant online.

I am doing what I can by trying to be the best social worker I can be (which is harder than it sounds).

Really, my day-to-day is patient-centered and while mental health is a worthy subject I will consider using this blog to discuss, most of what I deal with is covered under HIPAA and I am not able to talk about it. I also don't particularly want to get into the weeds of why things are done and how they are done at the hospital where I work, for the same reasons I don't want to, for example, make a post telling how I really feel about Charlie Kirk's assassination, for example. That falls into the job "Not wanting to lose my job" category.

And if that makes me a bad anarchist, I don't really care, because I am just trying to be the best social worker I can be, and that requires a lot of personal sacrifice. Key word there is "personal," so that's a no-go area for blogging, too, I guess.

I guess there's just not much I would want to blog about these days. There are enough other voices out there already speaking truth to power about the things I care passionately about. 

Lately, I've been listening to a lot of WHYY at work. My officemate John seems to appreciate it. That's the public broadcast news station in the Philly area. I am mourning the loss of Knowledge Fight from my life, as the Knowledge Fighters Dan and Jordan have hung up their gloves and ended their podcast. I listen to a lot of podcasts generally. Mostly comedy podcasts. I am trying to maintain a healthy media diet.

Blogs are not part of that healthy media diet. Any more than Twitter (which I refuse to call "X"), facebook, or whatever is big now. I don't really see a return to form for this blog. It's not an intentional toning down. Just, a redirection of energy.

I have published several stories on Patreon!

 Please visit my Patreon Website: https://www.patreon.com/c/TheSpeculativeAnarchist. I have published several stories there including "The Playground."

I have also posted- only for paid members- a preview of the first chapter of the first novel of the Tantalus II Trilogy, "Rentkids."

All these stories take place within the Tantalus II universe, in other corners of the Local Group of galaxies- Milky Way, Triangulum, Andromeda. Several of them are "extraplanetary post-apocalyptic." 

The page is currently under review to ensure it meets Patron's guidelines but I am sure this is just a formality, my account was inactive due to non-use for a long time and I have resurrected it like a zombie.

For free, several stories are available, or for only $1 a month you can get all the stories.

In other news, I have recently submitted a short story, "The Education of a Starfarer," to about 8 different publications (that allow simultaneous submissions) and look forward to hearing back about it. This story serves as a window into the universe of my novel series. It follows the struggle of a young woman to survive on a hostile planet after her father is killed on a gun running mission.

The above story will not be available on Patreon at this time, however. 

Update on the Tantalus II Trilogy

 Before the big snowstorm two weeks ago, I submitted all three novels in the Tantalus II trilogy to Roan & Weatherford before going into work Saturday night, sleeping in my office, working a therapy shift Sunday, and sleeping overnight again, finally going home Monday. Both hardcore things. My patients were enheartened by my solidarity. One of them genuinely wanted to know if my camping cot was comfortable enough.

I realized after the first night that I was sleeping in a room I had once been assaulted in. But I think I have dealt with my trauma from that, what trauma I had. A man whose life I was trying to save attacked me and left me with a nasty and painful concussion. I still see him, he still uses our services. But I have resigned to the fact we will  discharge him badly each time and not send him to a higher level of care as I tried to do.

Anyway, I am #3 on the queue for development, so I expect I will be hearing soon from R&W about what changes they want made or what questions they have. It is exciting, feels like a major milestone.

In the meantime, I am working on my next longform piece. I have several candidates- shorter pieces I can expand, as well as one concept which is unwritten as yet but for which I have begun to develop characters. It is a military virtual reality simulation scenario involving characters belonging to different rank structures within the Rigelian Expeditionary Forces, Rigel exerting an influence over Tantalus II in the trilogy. This novel would more thoroughly explore the Rigelian military that used to rule Tantalus II.

#3. Won't be a long wait before I get feedback. I am very good at accepting feedback that is critical in my process and incorporating recommended changes. I think the publisher will find me easy to work with. 

I am still not in love with blogging. I suppose I prefer to speak through my characters, more comfortable with them having contrasting perspectives that I am in offering my own perspective these days, especially when that perspective tends to be a kind of monolithic perpetual outrage.

There's nothing I could say about the fascist regime in charge of this country that hasn't already been said more eloquently by others. Nothing I needs clarification by me, a relatively privileged member of society. I would prefer to let the voices of groups like Palestinians, Trans and Nonbinary persons and Undocumented persons speak for themselves. I am a member of If Not Now, a Jewish anti-occupation group, but if you can tell from my last couple of posts, I am not engaging much with politics online these days. I maintain my anarchist political beliefs but I find online engagement about politics to be valueless and unpractical. As I also find most social media.

I couldn't even tolerate the relentless Karens in r/socialwork (and neither could my clinical supervisor) so don't expect to see me on social media soon. When the book comes out I will do an Amazon Author Central profile page, going by R&W's recommendations.

Space Rock (Music)

 When I was a young kid, my dad was best buddies with Dan Octavius of the Memphis Mobile Radio Show (link). Dan would make me mixtapes with outer space themes, and this was how I learned about bands like ZZ Top, Pink Floyd, the Kicks, the Byrds and Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. Even today these are songs I enjoy. Dan Octavius always had a spacey element to his persona, he is a true old school hippie and a music buff who spreads joy and good grooves. Check out his website and his podcast.

A couple of the old goldies Dan Octavius left me with: 

Supersonic Rocket Ship (The Kinks)

Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun (Pink Floyd)

Beautiful Zelda (Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band)

Hey Mr. Spaceman (The Byrds)

Planet of Women (ZZ Top)

Space is the Place (Sun Ra)