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Princeps’ Fury by Jim Butcher

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I thought I had read this book a long time ago; turns out I was definitely mistaken, or at least I’d forgotten how great it was! This book really deepened the Codex Alera lore and did a great job “zooming out” on the rest of the world outside of Alera. It’s got military tactics, sea voyages, and cleverness aplenty. I highly enjoyed it!



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I can’t stop thinking about this article in The Atlantic about a group of women who met online and became friends in an Internet forum, eventually meeting in real-life and staying friends.

I miss that kind of internet. I missed the MySpace phase, but had both a blogger and a LiveJournal–under pseudonyms, of course. I loved that they were journals, and it felt sort of secretive and powerful that they were also available for real people to read. But eventually real people I knew were reading those, and an element of self-censorship. At least one college friend forgot he had told people about his online journal and made some awkward confessions with bad ramifications.

But then I found my way to semi-private Internet forums. There, I could be myself (or not), and talk about the things weighing on my heart. I could be honest. And the forum was moderated, which, although it led to a good amount of complaining, meant that overall the conversation was positive. People were friendly. Relationships were forged. It was a place to connect–while staying safe and protected. You only had to reveal as much as you wished.

The downside was that others looked down on you for having internet friends. You couldn’t go around telling people you spent all your time talking to strangers. You’d just tell the real-world people in your life, “a friend of mine…”, leaving out the pertinent detail that you don’t know this friend’s real name, location, or face. You know them by an affectionate but goofy-sounding username.

I even got so far as making a friend in another country. He invited me over–and I visited him in England.

(I told my friends he was a pen pal, which is about 80% true.)

But that kind of community doesn’t seem to exist now. Or, at least, if it does, I’m not part of it. Facebook and Google, and to a lesser degree, Twitter, are the big behemoths in the Internet, and they decided to make the push for transparency. Real names became the mandate (once, when I forgot my password, Facebook required that I upload a copy of my drivers’ license in order to unlock my damned account.)

But with that kind of transparency comes a loss. There are things you don’t want to broadcast to your whole network. So you self-censor, show less than everything. In a world where everything you say it shown to everyone you really know, you say less and less of the whole truth.

Sure, transparency in social media seemed like it would be good, but in lieu of the ability to wear our masks, we have made our lives look like the masks. I’ve made and kept far fewer friends with those kind of deep connections since the transparent social media era–even as my friends list and Twitter followers burgeoned.

I miss those small, safe pockets of unfamiliarity.

I think I have to admit it to myself. I’m burned out. NaNoWriMo this year felt more like drudgery than fun; I haven’t felt like returning to the keyboard since. Even scrolling through the high-drama world of writer-Twitter has been exhausting lately. I’ve started and yet not finished two books since January (in my defense, both are over 1,000 pages long–Brandon Sanderson is not a brief fella).

I’ve been thinking a lot about this article: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation. At first, I read it with derision: my generation has been blamed and exorcised for so many things, I went in jaded. And the small things don’t hit me. I don’t have a problem crossing things off my list–in fact, today, I sat down to write this, but also a) cleaned the dog’s poo outside, b) printed a return shipping label, c) checked on missing info for my taxes, d) started a photobook, and e) found the article so I could link it here.

But how I feel about all those tasks? Ugh. Right on the money. I’m exhausted but I feel like I can’t stop, either.

After reading that article, I realized I have had 9 jobs in 10 years. NINE. All white-collar (a thing that is rare and lucky). Some simultaneously. Lots of overlap. Lots of hustle. Plus I wrote and published two books in there as well. That’s nine jobs of at least three months of getting to know the office culture, of scrounging for vacation time (and the money to go on one), plus trying to suss out whether they’re being fair with raises (spoiler: the last one wasn’t), trying to meet people, trying to keep up appearances while making ends meet. That’s… that’s a lot. In 10 years, I’ve only been unemployed for a total of two months–which, granted, I’m lucky for that as well, but that’s another sign of the relentlessness.

I think my train may finally have run out of fuel.

But of course it can’t. It still can’t. It’s not like I can just tell the IRS I’m too burned out to do my taxes. So all the “must-dos” still get done, but all the things that feed my spirit, that make me feel good, dissipate into the ether. I’m emotionally starved. No wonder I can’t produce.

Of course, I feel bad for not producing, too. So many cutesy stupid memes out there say to be a “real” writer, you MUST write every day. Well, I haven’t written anything for myself in three months. I’ve done a helluva lot of writing for money, but that is a totally different beast. So IF you must write every day, and I haven’t for three months…well, I guess I’m not a writer right now. And that’s another thing to feel guilty about, on my emotional prisoner’s rations.

I’m tired. I want to go on a retreat away from everything. I want to sit in a hammock for a week and have someone else come in and automate all the things on my to-do list so they vanish on their own.

I don’t know how to make all this work, and some days I’m really tired from trying.

…NINE jobs in 10 years. That’s ridiculous!

I very quietly went on strike from Facebook recently. The news reported—for what feels like the 400th time but may officially only be the third major incident—that Facebook “accidentally” gave away private information. Not that the platform was hacked; that they “oops” let companies have access to photos, posts, and even direct messages that people had posted. Vast, unknowable amounts of information, and I’m supposed to believe that no one at Facebook realized it might be a bad thing to let companies have anything but a free-for-all. The company chafes at allowing users to actually control their privacy, then when we do, it “oops” gives it away. For millions of users.

So I just quietly stopped checking it. I didn’t say anything, just moved the app to a hard-to-reach folder on my phone to break myself of the habit, and stopped going (I’ve already stopped using the desktop site as the phone merges with my hand or at least my pocket, and I had never glommed on to the Messenger app).

I am an administrator on two groups, so I am unable to delete or otherwise hamper my personal account—Facebook doesn’t allow that, must keep your personal one going if you want any other kind of account at all. So I’m just going dark.

I figure I can’t stem the tide of the information that they already have on me, but at least I can stop feeding the habit.

(Sidenote: I have a friend who never got on Facebook, who is now gloating that she was right all along. But Facebook probably has a “shadow profile” for her anyway, as her friends have talked about her and posted pictures of her. She hasn’t stopped them from knowing about her or leaking her information, as she thinks…but at least she has helped stem the tide.)

But while I think this is the right decision, I’m frustrated, too. I joined Facebook when it was college-student-exclusive and called “TheFacebook.” It was a touchstoen and a great way to meet people. It was a way to keep in touch. Facebook is very good at two things that seem to be otherwise lacking in our increasingly digital-exclusive world: maintaining distant or passive social connections and organizing groups. Both things are proving hard even with Facebook’s influence, and may be treacherously hard without it.

For example, my cousins have never been very well-connected with me, but through Facebook I could see when they went on trips, or had new achievements in their lives. I could cheer them on from a distance, send a reassuring “like” or wish them happy birthday. Now, I’ll have to rely on that old-school technique: waiting for my mom to tell me a half-remembered snippet months later. It’s not a great swap.

I miss the old internet. Back before we all realized how cruel people could be, before countries had really gotten the hang of spreading lies and misinformation to harm other countries, before shitposting and cruel groups proliferated, it feels like there was this golden era of interest groups. I made genuine friends over some forums; sometimes we crossed over and sent real gifts. I even went to London and stayed for a week with a friend I otherwise knew exclusively through an internet forum (he is a dear man, and I am forever grateful he let me disrupt his life for a week!).

It doesn’t feel as likely for that to happen now. Several of those types of forums have closed forever, and the replacements—Facebook/Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, Reddit—all seem far more surface-dwelling. The user bases are wide and so not very deep.

And here I am pulling away from those replacements, too. Will I be the only one still in the non-digital space, trying to meet people, connect, arrange groups? Sometimes it feels that way. But I don’t want to be complicit in the wholesale theft of the information that is integral to who I am. So I have no choice but to leave the door open only the slightest of cracks, and do my best to muddle through.

Artsy and creative people are often told to get out there, march to their own drum, be an original and true to themselves, no matter what. To be artistic is, in some ways, to be “extra.”

But if you are in marching band and just break out your own snare and march around to your own drumbeat, what will happen? You’ll run over the clarinets, get crushed by the sousaphones, and kicked out of marching band.

Sure, wearing a cape to school might be the right flair in a teen rom-com, but in real life you’re going to be sitting by yourself at the nerd table.

Being extra is only a good thing in narrowly defined channels, and people who are different are way more likely to be mocked for it than praised. It’s not something to aspire to.

So it creates a paradox. Creatives are told that this outward show of creativity is a requirement for being who they are, but anyone with any awareness will also learn that standing out from the crowd in this way will just make you a target.

At least, that’s how I reacted. I kept to my richer inner creativity but worked hard to blend in. And I think I’m worse for it now; I’m too offbeat to be totally straight laced and too normal to be part of the weirdos. No mans land of not fitting in.

There are some people I’ve met in creative circles who lean in to the kookiness, some in ways that make me wonder if they aren’t also faking–that they think “creative” doesn’t exist unless it is outwardly odd. That also doesn’t make sense to me.

How much weird is part of the creative package? Is it just a matter of finding the crowd in which your drumbeat matches?