Allegra Sloman's blog

Sprouting in Israel.

I’ve been told today to be ‘bold and dangerous’ in my writing. I do not feel this advice.

Romance is powerfully rooted in autonomic processes. oNe wishes it were not so, but it is. The idea that there’d be a professional class of person setting courtship fashions while trying to navigate the vagaries of the human sexual response under medieval Catholicism amuses me, but along with lots of other worthy contributions to letters, that’s what troubadours were. And in the west we’re stuck with it and the cultural knock-ons, and I vacillate wildly between loving a lot of it and wanting to wring its neck and gut it and singe it in preparation for the soup pot.

When I’m writing fanfic, I’m addressing romance as a way of approaching pair-bonding (unless I’m writing specifically polyamorous fic) and writing it the way I want people to behave. yanno…. Like fucking adults who occasionally lose their phones or drop the groceries. I try not to write more trouble than people need, and to write the characters as if they all have some expectation of, and agency in, making their own situations better, sometimes by taking an overt and possibly impolite interest in someone else’s troubles as a substitute for dealing with their own as an emotional way station to their own self-regulation.

For that is the dream, the magical reset button of romance. Not that love will last forever, that part’s easy. The renewal of romance is in how you can see yourself again, young and overwhelmed and sappy, but also that this love brings with it your idea of yourself as contented and working with another person on your self-improvement. These are all mental states far beyond the sexual arousal (in most although not all cases) that gets you to pair bonding (because pair bonding without sexual behaviour is also a lasting component of human life, and takes a lot of different forms.) My point is that romance is complicated, and if you want it to look like all of human life on this planet, rather than taking, for example, whiteness or being able bodied for granted, it gets more complicated still. The functioning pair bond implies a mutual commitment to self-improvement as a joint project, and when two individuals work hard on that, something more beautiful than romance occurs. They are stabilizing the world for everyone around them.

I could say more, but I’m happy with what I’m thinking.

“Good writing is clear. Talented writing is energetic. Good writing avoids errors. Talented writing makes things happen in the reader’s mind – vividly, forcefully – that good writing, which stops with clarity and logic, doesn’t.” – Samuel Delaney

quoted by Isabel Yap on twitter

My apologies; I had a secretly busy day, at least for me.

I worked on a couple of tunes. I’m supposed to be doing that but nothing bit at me hard except a lament about the little gate in the bible, the needle’s eye that the rich man will have trouble with. I will sit with that a while.

Did several loads of laundry.

Cooked up some extra veggies to put in the noodle and tofu dish already in the fridge.

Went to breakfast with Katie.

Went for a brief walk with Jeff.

Watched a bunch of stuff but happily, Giri/Haji, several episodes.

Wrote some fanfic 1300 words actually.

I’m enjoying Ragnarok but I could use without them fridging the young lesbian in the first frickin’ episode

Holy crap.

Paul and I took advantage of the relative warmth and glorious sunshine to go for a walk in Oakalla yesterday.

Jeff and I watched “Harriet” and really enjoyed it. Fellow abolitionist Thomas Garrett said of her, “I never met any person of any color who had more confidence in the voice of God.” They certainly made much of her visions in the movie, but it was used to good effect.

Absolutely loved the most recent Supernatural ep “The Heroes’ Journey” for more reasons than I can count. Anything that includes tap dancing though….

the trip north was entirely uneventful, but on the way since Paul’s girlfriend lost her phone (meh, it happens) and since he already has a Yankee phone he left it at her place, so I got to sit outside her apartment building in Greenwood and contemplate the furrows and circuitous paths of my life for a while since Paul had to stop and pet cats and call her at work, of course, so I did not say a word about how long it took

Weather was fucking gorgeous in Seattle and grim in Vancouver. TWO herons on the road inbound.

I feel full of music, which is useful for FAWM.

HOTM 55277 (worked on ‘sproing’ instructions and actually sent copies to Jeri Lynn and Jeff C since he’s actually read MMCo and Jeri Lynn was much entertained by my description of the sproing).

TAKAYA HAS BEEN RELOCATED yay

Roger Waters This Is Not A Drill tour in Vancouver September 14 2020 any interest

Yeah, the cat’s outta the bag and this is what our health minister says. The first guy who was sick in Canada has given it to his wife. Incubation before symptoms was about 8 days in her case, although I hope to drill down and get more accurate notions of when her exposure started from newspaper accounts.

opinion, the gov of Can should ban travel from China for three weeks, which is the likely to break the incubation lag and do nothing but run down contacts until we stop getting infections from locally infected folks, BUT NO. AND I’M AWARE that I was just in a hotel for 4 days that was across the street from where the first case appeared in the US.

and the CDC says this.

OOOOOOOKAY NOW there’s a ‘warning’ about ‘nonessential’ travel. even so.

In the words of a beloved Canadian TV character, something’s fucky.

Corona Beer company really having a shitty January according to google searches