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Marriage Resistance is the First Clue

Posted by Heather Rose Jones

http://alpennia.com/blog/marriage-resistance-first-clue

Friday, June 20, 2025 - 07:00

The Lesbian Historic Motif Project

In reading current sapphic historical romance, a common motif is for the central characters to provide an early clue to their sexuality by resisting or rejecting the idea of marriage to a man. (Goodness knows, I've used that motif myself in Daughter of Mystery!) But is that historically accurate? No one generalization will hold for all times and places, but when examining the lives of Charity and Sylvia and the several other women that Charity had relationshps with, a common thread is an active disinterest in marriage, to the point where people who knew them had concluded that they'd end up "spinsters" entirely separate from any awareness of their romantic interest in women.

Now one might point out that, in a society with compulsory heterosexuality, a woman who is open to the idea of relationships with men is likely to go ahead and get married, even if she also has desires for women. And there are always women who resist heterosexual marriage for philosophical or health reasons. So a strict one-to-one connection between marriage resistance and sapphic desire isn't accurate. And I sometimes think the motif gets overused in fiction. But it isn't exactly wrong.

When I glanced at the calendar the other day and realized OMG I need a podcast topic for this Saturday, it was easy to decide that I'd write up a mini-bio of Charity and Sylvia this month. Usually, even when my essay research focuses around a specific publication or researcher, I have multiple sources to use, but this isn't the case for C&S. Pretty much there's just Cleves' book, so I'll introduce the topic with a lot more emphasis that I'm basically just doing a book report.

Major category:

LHMP

Tags:

LHMP

LHMP #491d Cleves 2014 Charity & Sylvia Chapter 5 & 6

About LHMP

Full citation:

Cleves, Rachel Hope. 2014. Charity & Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America. Oxford University Press, Oxford. ISBN 978-0-19-933542-8

Chapter 5 & 6

Chapter 5: So Many Friends 1799

Teaching brought Charity into contact with many like-minded young women. “Like-minded” included some women who were specifically attracted to teaching because they had little interest in marriage and whose primary romantic interests were with other women. In addition to their intellectual connections, it was normal for women friends to shar a bed and to openly record their enjoyment of embraces and kisses. Such women also recorded dreams of setting up housekeeping with an intimate friend. More rarely, private writings survive that describe genital sex and orgasm. Intimate friendships had a wide range of expressions and cannot be generalized.

Passionate friendships between single female teachers were unremarkable. Charity’s sister used the potential for one such relationship with a friend of hers to encourage Charity to join her household. Surviving documents trace a series of attachments for Charity. Their correspondence and poems express a strong physicality—wishes to embrace, to share a bed, expressions of longing and physical excitement. The peripatetic lives of teachers also meant these relationships were disrupted by separations and jealousies, again expressed in letters.

Social concerns about such relationships were not typically associated with their sexual potential, as sex and romance were not automatically considered to be linked. But if intimate same-sex friendships appeared to interfere with marriage prospects, it could be a source of concern.

In Charity’s case, concern seemed to revolve around a certain behavioral masculinity in her interactions with other women, combined with a stated disinterest in marriage. But the particulars of what generated gossip about her are difficult to identify due to the vague language used to describe the situation. Charity recorded suffering from malicious gossip, but did not give specifics. Talk was sufficient in some cases to induce Charity to move to a different community.

In some cases, initial friendships were ruptured when Charity initiated something more like courtship when the degree of feeling was not reciprocated. Eventually, only one of her previous intimates remained in correspondence with her.

Chapter 6: Discontent and Indifferent 1800

Sylvia pursued education past what was typical for a woman—or even a man—in her economic situation. Her location in rural Vermont meant reduced opportunities for advanced schooling, though she followed with interest news of academies for girls opening elsewhere. Despite some recovery in finances when the family moved to Vermont, there was no money to send Sylvia away to school.

Sylvia’s family approved of her ambitions, despite not always understanding them and not being able to do more to support them. Schooling provided a reason for Sylvia’s indifference to marriage, which her family commented on. She sought out female friends, but the pickings among unmarried women were few and not sustainable. Her family sometimes warned her against the dangers of “unsuitable” friendships. This may have come, in part, from her sister Polly, who was acquainted with Charity back in Massachusetts and may have had her in mind as a cautionary tale.

By 1804, when Sylvia was 20, comments in correspondence suggested that the family was accepting that Sylvia’s single state might be permanent, and she was urged to look forward to being a companion to her aging mother. Unlike Charity, Sylvia’s disinterest in marriage didn’t extend to refusing to learn domestic skills.

Time period:

Place:

Misc tags:

emotional /romantic bonds between women

love poetry

marriage resistance

romantic friendship

Event / person:

Charity Bryant & Sylvia Drake

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http://alpennia.com/blog/marriage-resistance-first-clue

Entry tags:

northumberland

Elizabeth I's most expensive project

We looked at the tide tables, and checked plans, and decided that yesterday was the day to visit Berwick, so that's what we did, leaving the island late morning, as soon as the causeway opened. At the last minute we decided to park up by the Barracks, which we have not visited recently. We didn't visit them yesterday either, as they are undergoing transformation into a thriving cultural hub, but on our way there we had passed the Visitor Centre. This turned out to be a converted church, which you enter, through a welcoming café and postcards space: the main body of the church contains a magnificently random display of Stuff, local regimental memorabilia, Finds of all ages fished out of the Tweed, a banner stitched by volunteers to commemmorate the thousandth anniversary of the Tweed being designated as the border between England and Scotland (not that it is, in Berwick, but never mind). Upstairs in the gallery there is a video Berwick, a town like no other: I might have snarked, because surely no town is quite like any other? But it was quite entertaining, and full of information, and we learned that the ramparts of Berwick were the greatest expenditure of Elizabeth's reign, and that Berwick has massive ice houses (for storing the ice which allowed fresh salmon to be shipped to London, and that the Parish church was one of only two built under the Protectorate...

I'd like better references for that assertion: this article calls it "a rare example" and this Guardian article muses that "Neither Cromwell nor his captains went in for church building, which is odd given the religious nature of the Commonwealth..." One way and another, we thought the church would be worth a visit. It is surrounded by greenery, shaded by trees and nestled into those expensive ramparts, so there was no way I could photograph the exterior, but fortunately there is a clear image of the church itself at the centre of this stained glass window:

nstalled to celebrate the millennium, the most recent addition to an interior which originally had no coloured glass at all, plain within as it was plain without. The window design, by Ann Sotheran majors on a Celtic knot motif, flanked by those two Celtic saints, Columa (standing on the island of Iona) and Aidan (on the more distinctive outline of Lindisfarne).

We headed into the town in search of lunch, and found a café which appears to be called Thistle Do Nicely, but don't be put off, it did indeed do nicely. By the time we had lunched, our parking was about to run out, so we agreed that

durham_rambler should relocate to the other car park, while I meandered down the hill. I thought I was being very abstemious, visiting only one gift shop plus a branch of W.H.Smith which was having a clearance sale (I bought some pens and a newspaper) but by the time I reached Bridge Street he was not sitting on the convenient bench, checking his e-mails, he was pacing up and down the street waiting for me. We had time for a quick visit to the Green Shop and to Slightly Foxed (one of those really lovely bookshops from which I nevertheless find it difficult to buy anything) and then came home via Majestic (for wine, disappointing but not disastrous) and Morrison (for surprisingly good bread).

D. was cooking, and there were guests, and it was all very convivial. And tonight we eat at the Crown and Anchor, with even more guests and ridiculously early. We'll see how that goes.

The Big Idea: Jane Mondrup

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/06/20/the-big-idea-jane-mondrup/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56149

Sometimes when you look in the mirror, it can feel like you don’t even recognize yourself. This might be doubly true if you’re looking at a perfect copy of yourself that thinks you’re the copy, not them. Author Jane Mondrup brings us such a conundrum in her new novel, Zoi. Follow along in her Big Idea to see how evolution is just the beginning.

JANE MONDRUP:

An endosymbiosis involving humans and set in space—that is, in very few words, the big idea of my science fiction novel Zoi.

Symbiosis is a close relationship between two life forms, often (though not necessarily) to the degree of mutual dependency. Endosymbiosis is when one of those life forms gets integrated into the other, living inside it.

One very important endosymbiosis, which happened around two billion years ago, provided the conditions for the evolutionary jump from the simple life forms—the procaryotes (bacteria and archaea)—to the much more complex eucaryotic cell, of which we and our multi-cellular relatives are made. This is a whole little world in itself, full of internal structures and mobile elements, all with specific functions.

To furnish its lavish lifestyle, the eucaryotic cell needs energy—lots of energy—and that energy is provided by an organelle called the mitochondrion. And the really interesting thing is that this extremely important element didn’t develop inside the cell but was originally an independent organism; a small procaryote that somehow ended up inside a larger procaryote, managing to survive in there and become an integrated part of its host and all its descendants. These proto-mitochondrial lodgers were the kind who not only pay the rent and keep their room in order but start refurbishing the whole place, in this case developing a small hut into a veritable castle.

Not being a biologist, I heard about the origin of the mitochondrion on a podcast, the 2016 episode of Radiolab titled Cellmates, and found it endlessly fascinating. My subconscious started working on it, until it surfaced again in the shape of a dream vision of two identical women drifting apart. I knew it was a cell division, happening in space. Like proto-mitochondria, the women (originally one person) had become part of a larger organism and was now included in its procreation.

There was a story here, but what story exactly? And how could I tell it?

That’s often how a story begins for me, with a situation I either have to work from or get to. Making up what feels like a plausible background for this (usually quite strange) situation will send me in all kinds of interesting directions. In this case, I had to invent a creature fitting the picture, a cell-like, space-dwelling species that I decided to call zoi, based on the Greek word zoion (living being).

The zois, I figured, had not developed an immune defense, but the opposite. In space, life would be very rare. You wouldn’t have to defend yourself against parasitic intruders, and the chance encounters with other organisms would represent an evolutionary opportunity.

Whenever the zois came across another life form, they would invite it in, immediately discern its basic needs and start to accommodate them. Some needs would either be impossible or very costly to meet, and it would be more rational to solve the problem the other way around, helping the life forms it had engulfed with adapting to their new environment. Changing them.

This was the unsettling situation the woman (I named her Amira) was in—residing inside a living creature, experiencing changes to her body, and then starting to grow a double. It seemed very scary indeed, and my story could easily be a classic SF horror, ending in some terrible conclusion. But that wasn’t what interested me.

The horror elements were there, and I absolutely planned to harness them for emotional impact, but the horror ending didn’t fit my dream vision. The women in it had looked desperately sad. They obviously had a very close relationship which was now broken up. There was regret too, a hint of unsettled conflicts. But no enmity.

When a cell divides, the two resulting cells aren’t parent and offspring, but equally newborn. I saw the two Amiras in the same way, not as a human being with an inhuman clone, but a set of identical twins—one person becoming two. While the double grew, there was only one consciousness. Then, the two woke up with identical memories, both convinced of being the original. That would be a difficult situation, and very interesting to explore.

Amira would be part of a small crew of astronauts, the first to leave the solar system inside a zoi. They would know some but not all of the consequences, and they would react to them in different ways. The impact of these differences on their relationships to each other would be another backbone of the story.

Even before the cloning began, the astronauts were undergoing physical changes, starting with adaptation to the lack of gravity. In zero g, humans quickly start to lose bone and muscle mass, which is why astronauts on space stations have to do a lot of exercise. The zoi would recognize the deterioration as something that needed correction. This would be the first of many adjustments helping the mutual adaptation along.

Just like the bodily transitions and upheavals of a normal human life, such changes would have consequences for mood and physical well-being. This parallel allowed me to draw on concrete experiences with puberty, pregnancy, illness, menopause, and aging. These are all processes involving bodily reactions outside our control, influencing or even determining our thoughts and actions.

I have a lot of themes in Zoi, but they are all related to the big idea: becoming part of another life form, and what that would entail. My aim has been to write something both visionary and tangible, based in science but easily understandable, equally comprising ideas and emotions. If you find this essay concepts interesting, there’s a good probability that you will like the story. I hope you will read it.

Author socials: Website|Instagram|Facebook|Bluesky

Read an excerpt.

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/06/20/the-big-idea-jane-mondrup/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56149

We’re Seeing Art

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/06/20/were-seeing-art/

And it’s giving us a lot to think about.

Venice continues to be lovely and also at this moment rather warm and sweaty. After a morning of seeing art we’ve retreated back to the air conditioning of our hotel room. We’ll go back out again when we’re not so darn sticky.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/06/20/were-seeing-art/

Current Music: Isaac Dunbar, "American High"

I'm man enough to be a party girl and dance all night, the American high

For Juneteenth, we left stones at Pomp's Wall on Grove Street and poured out a jigger of Medford rum for the man who built it, whose name on his bricklaying has outlasted the house in which he was enslaved.

WERS has been showcasing Black artists all day, which meant I switched it on and got the back-to-back fireworks of Koko Taylor's "Wang Dang Doodle" (1965) and Richie Havens' "Motherless Child" (1969).

Especially because I left the house yesterday at a quarter to eight in the morning and after four appointments and two visits returned home at a quarter to eight in the evening, I appreciate a known benefactor sending me five pounds of peaches and apricots from Frog Hollow Farm. They taste like the height of summer.

When Life Looks Like a Movie Set

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/06/19/when-life-looks-like-a-movie-set/

The little island town of Burano, which for all the world looks just like someone set designed the place. Cute tiny colorful homes set next to a canal? Check! You half expect Popeye to show up, singing a sea shanty. But it is, indeed, real. And apparently it’s against the law to change the house colors without permission. The things you learn.

We’re still on vacation. It’s still lovely.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/06/19/when-life-looks-like-a-movie-set/

Entry tags:

I'm back.

Please forgive mush-mindedness; I'm three days out of the hospital and it's taking time for the simplest thoughts to come back on line.

Scintillation was wonderful, as always. And so was Fourth Street Fantasy Convention--what little I saw of it. No fault whatsoever to the con. All fault is due to the trash human in front of me in a very crowded assisted seating area, who coughed and hacked for the entire eight hour ride, refusing to put on a mask. "It's not a rule! And masks are all political anyway!"

By the next night I had a high temp, joints with ice picks stabbing them, skin like the worst sunburn ever. So I missed a lot, but managed to get to some programming including my panels. And I almost made it, tho by then I hadn't eaten for four days, and drunk only sips of water, which tasted terrible, like rusty pipes.

I was moderating my last panel, and I thought it was going okay when we opened to Qs from the audience and I realized that everyone was curiously black-and-white, then the next thing I knew, I was lying on the ground, surrounded by voices.

Here's where perceptions get kind of surreal. I slowly became aware that someone was stroking my arm. I've always known that Marissa L has an infinite capacity for genuine empathy, but I understood it was real. That empathy convey through the slow, reassuring touch, even though when she murmured "non-responsive."

Oh dear. I was not doing my bit! Worse, I'd totally spoiled the panel, yet here I was having somehow floated gently to the ground. I had to get up! Return to my room. Rest! Apologize to everyone for my dumbass move! Yet it felt so much better to lie there, and let trusted voices do whatever they were doing. So reassuring.

I knew those voices. I trusted them. Marissa, who seemed genuinely pleased that I was responsive after all, but she kept up her reassuring touch. (I do know the difference. I've had to drop my head between my knees a few times at distressing moments, and this one specific time, a person I'd known since college kept pawing me, the angle changing in the direction of their voice, as if they were busy looking around the room)

Then E Bear asked for my phone code, and I knew that voice, it's Bear, of course she must need my phone. I trust Bear. Then came the questions as I began to rouse a bit. Scott L, long-serving firefighter and fully trained EMP started what my spouse (who was a volunteer fireman for 20 years, and worked alongside EMTs) called the litany. Scott's strong, clear voice foghorned something much like, "Sherwood, I hate to do this to you, but what asshole is currently infesting the White House?"

And I laughed. I don't know if the laughter got past my lips, but it's strange how humor--laughter--can rouse one. I muttered, "Yesterday was NO KINGS DAY."

Then it seemed they wanted to send me off to emergency services; there was talk, then a fourth trusted voice, belonging to Beth F, insisted that it was not a good idea to be sending me off without anyone knowing where. She informed the company that she was a Registered Nurse and this was SOP, or the like. Beth's on the team, I thought.

Shortly thereafter they got my wreck of a bod onto the conveyance and I was in for an ambulance ride. It was beautiful teamwork--cons these days have security teams, and here I was proof that their protocols were functioning swiftly and smoothly, which would permit them to pivot straight back to con stuff.

While I was in for a wad of tests. So many tests. I soon had two IVS going, one in each elbow.

Presently the doc came in and said that I had an acute case of influenza, compounded by severe dehydration. Beth F heroically came to spring me, and saw me to my room, promising me a backup call the following morning.

Another perceptual eddy: I thought, wrongly, I'd wafted quietly and softly to the floor. Maybe even discreetly. Ha Ha. When I stripped out of my influenza clothes I discovered gigantic bruises in weird places--the entire top of one foot is discolored, another baseball-sized bruise on one calf, and so one. I began to suspect that I had catapulted myself whammo-flat with all the grace of a stevedore hauling a sack of spuds.

The following days I slept and slept, forcing a few bites of salad and oatmeal. I have zero stamina, must work on that, but at least I am home, and I guess all that unwanted experience can sink into the subconscious quagmire.

Entry tags:

bookses precious

What a Fish Looks like, by Syr Hayati Beker

Review copy provided by the publisher.

One of my friends likes to say, "it's never too late to have a messy breakup," and that could be one of the thesis statements of this book. Jay and Seb are having an epically messy breakup...also the world is literally ending in environmental collapse and at least one of them will probably leave the planet for another planet whose traits are not well known.

Also it's a mosaic novel whose framing device is a book of fairytales.

Jazz hands.

So there's Red Riding Hood here, but also Antigone, there's the Snow Queen, but it's not snow, there's a kaleidoscope of animal ghosts and human passions, queer theater techs and cleverly named collectives. This book features a lot of fun elements wrapped in with deeply, horrifyingly unfun environmental consequences.

Entry tags:

bookses precious

Books read, early June

Isa Arsén, The Unbecoming of Margaret Wolf. Look, when a character tells you that their favorite Shakespearean character (as an actress) is Lady Macbeth and then another major character says their favorite play is Titus Andronicus--whose favorite play is Titus Andronicus? I demanded when I first got to that part. And then the book went on and OH NO OH GOD OH NO. Anyway, from the beginning you will get a clear sense that this is a setting that will tear people to shreds (1950s theater world!) and that some of the people in question will assist their milieu in their own destruction. Be forewarned on that. For me the prose voice made all the difference in the world, for you it might not make enough difference to be worth that shape of book if you're really not in a good place for it. This book goes hard, but uh...not any more pleasantly than my first sentence there would lead you to expect.

Andrea Barrett, Dust and Light: On the Art of Fact in Fiction. I was a little disappointed in this, I think because I was expecting more/broader theory. It was in a lot of places a process case study, which is interesting too, and I'm not sorry I read it, I was just expecting something grander, I think.

Agatha Christie, Hickory Dickory Dock and Peril at End House. These sure were mysteries by Agatha Christie.

Justene Hill Edwards, Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman's Bank. Very straightforwardly does what it says on the tin. A thing we should all know happened, in terms of Black Americans and finance, this book gets in and gets out and does what it needs to do.

Kate Elliott, The Witch Roads. Discussed elsewhere.

Margaret Frazer, The Witch's Tale. Kindle. This is one of the short stories, and it was clearly something Frazer needed to say about justice and community, and it got in and said it and got out. For heaven's sake do not start here, this is a series story that's leaning heavily on you already caring about this place and these people and not spending many of its quite few words in introducing them to you.

Max Gladstone, Last Exit. Reread. This book made me cry four times on the reread. I knew it was coming, I knew what was going to happen, I had not forgotten many (on some cellular level: any) of the details, and yet, dammit, Gladstone, ya did it to me again. With my own connivance this time. Anyway gosh this is good, this is doing all sorts of things with power and community and priorities and old friendships and adulthood and, the reason I read it: American road trips. Oh, and weather! I read it for my road trip panel, it also related to my weather panel, frankly I brought it up during a couple of other panels as well. This booook.

Reginald Hill, On Beulah Height. Reread. Back to back reread bangers, although this one only made me cry once. I am not a big crier over books. Such a good series mystery, by which I mean that it works as a mystery but also, and more crucially, as a novel about some people you've already had a chance to know, so you know what their reactions mean even when they're not in your home register. (Or, if you're from Yorkshire, even if they are.)

Jordan Ifueko, The Maid and the Crocodile. Magical and fun and full of textured worldbuilding and clear character motivation, I really liked this.

Sarah Kay, A Little Daylight Left. The sort of deeply gripping volume of poetry that makes me add everything else the poet has written to my reading list.

Nnedi Okorafor, One Way Witch. A prequel, a mother's story, which is not something we see often. Interesting, not long.

Rebecca Roanhorse, Trail of Lightning. Reread. Also reread for my road trip panel, also pertained to my weather panel--are there any road trip novels that's not true for? Is a road trip in part a way to make modern people vulnerable to smaller-scale weather forces? In any case, I liked the ragged edges here, I liked the things she tied up neatly but also the things she refused to.

Sean Stewart, Galveston. Reread. To my relief, this holds up 25 years after I first read it: storms of magic, layers of history, weird alternate worlds overlapping with this one, hurrah.

Greg van Eekhout, Cog. Reread. A charming and delightful sto

The Big Idea: Auston Habershaw

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/06/19/the-big-idea-auston-habershaw/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56136

There’s magic to be found everywhere you look, even in a mall! At least, such is the case in author Auston Habershaw’s newest novel, If Wishes Were Retail. Come along in his Big Idea to see how this idea initially set up shop in his brain.

AUSTON HABERSHAW:

When I graduated from college, I had a really clear idea of what I wanted to do with my life: I wanted to be a novelist. I’d already written a novel during college (I will never inflict it upon anyone, I promise) and I figured, if I worked hard and focused on my goals, I’d be a professional author making a comfortable salary by the time I was 25.

I’ll pause here for your peals of laughter.

…

Done yet? No?

…(checks watch)…

Okay, okay—the point here is that I needed to get a job in order to pursue my dreams. For that period of time (my early-mid twenties), the idea was to get a job that wouldn’t occupy much of my attention so that I could focus the balance of my efforts towards writing. That’s how I wound up doing a lot of odd jobs and minimum wage gigs. I was a coffee barista, a restaurant server, a lifeguard, a swim instructor, a theme park performer (I dressed as a pirate), an SAT tutor, a hotel bellhop, and so on and so forth. I spent most of my time broke and barely able to pay rent and in the evenings I bashed my head against a keyboard until words came out and I published exactly nothing. I was exhausted, usually hungry, but still chasing that dream.

And that, right there, is where If Wishes Were Retail comes from. Everybody’s got a dream, right? And the world just gets in the way, you know? Money, opportunity, luck, health, family—the list of obstacles to “making it” are endless, or so it seems. Enter the genie.

I mean, everybody’s thought about it, right? If you could get 3 wishes, what would they be? We ask ourselves that, over and over, because just about no one is content with the state of their lives. There’s always some mountaintop we have yet to reach, and the only way we feel we’ll ever get there is, essentially, an act of God. A lottery ticket. A mysterious stranger, offering us a deal for our soul. A genie in a lamp. Rare, mythical things; unheard of strokes of fortune. We all recognize that is never going to happen to us. The world just doesn’t work that way.

But what if it did? Say we have a genie and he’s just there, you know? In public, doing his thing. Anyone can just walk up and make a wish. Now, of course, the genie has goals of his own and dreams he’d like to see realized, so he’s charging money for wishes. Cash. Walk up to him with a stack of twenties and plonk it down and BAM, you could have the life you’ve always wanted. What would you wish for? How much would you spend?

When preparing to write this book, I asked people I met those two questions. I would say “what if you could make a wish, but it cost money? What’s the wish? What would you pay?” This was a fascinating experiment. First off, a lot of people wouldn’t wish at all. They assumed the genie was malevolent and they wouldn’t get what they paid for. Second, people would make outrageously powerful wishes (World peace! A cure for all cancers! My own private moon!) and then offer some piddling sum, like ten bucks or something. “What’s it matter,” they’d say. “It doesn’t require any effort on the part of the genie! What does he care?” Everyone agreed, though, that the money—having to pay for a wish—sort of ruined the “magic” of it all. Money got in the way of their dreams.

I wanna repeat that last bit: money got in the way of their dreams. Ya THINK? Could, possibly, money and the way our economic system works interfere with people’s ability to achieve happiness and satisfaction in their lives? NO, SURELY NOT. Everyone, we live in capitalism, the fairest and most beautiful-est system ever, where the only thing that stands between you and complete material and spiritual satisfaction is hard work! Just work hard, and everything will work out! I have been informed by my lawyers that this is entirely 100% accurate with no loopholes or conditions whatsoever.

Hang on, someone is handing me a note…

…oh.

Oh no.

And, not only, does our capitalist system make it difficult to achieve our dreams, it also just so happens that we, fallible mortal creatures that we are, are incorrect about what we want! We wish for stupid, selfish things! We seek self-destructive ends! So, like, even assuming you manage to run the gauntlet of 21st century late-stage capitalism to somehow, maybe hack your way to the top of the artisanal bagel shop market only to realize you hate it and are miserable anyway. And that, friends, is a super-common problem that not even a genie can fix! How’s the genie supposed to know that you would hate being a fashion mogul? And even if he knew, would you listen to him if he told you?

I wrote this book to reflect upon the ways in which our grind-mentality, sleep-when-you’re-dead, coffee-is-for-closers culture has led us astray. Our society has created essentially infinite obstacles in an unending labyrinth that we have been told leads to happiness and fulfillment and we expend such massive amounts of energy seeking these things only to miss sight of all the things we could have that are right in front of us. It’s tragic sometimes, but it’s also funny and absurd and just, like, life you know? What are you gonna do, not be human?

Anyway, I wrote a book about this. It’s funny and it has a genie in a failing mall seen from the point of view of a teenager with big dreams, just like I was. Just like maybe you were or even are. Here’s hoping it’s exactly what you want and exactly what you’re willing to pay.

If Wishes Were Retail: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s

Author socials: Website|Bluesky|Facebook

Read an excerpt.

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/06/19/the-big-idea-auston-habershaw/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56136

lift every voice and sing

Posted by Wil

https://wilwheaton.net/2025/06/lift-every-voice-and-sing/

https://wilwheaton.net/?p=9592

Lift every voice and sing,
‘Til earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on ’til victory is won.

I did not know about Juneteenth until I was in my 40s. I recall how embarrassed and ashamed I felt, but it just wasn’t taught to me in school, and America doesn’t exactly go out of her way to teach privileged white kids like me about the horrors our ancestors inflicted on generations of human beings. Hopefully, that has changed.

In the extremely unlikely event you are hearing about this for the first time: “Juneteenth, officially Juneteenth National Independence Day, is a federal holiday in the United States. It is celebrated annually on June 19 to commemorate the ending of slavery in the United States. The holiday’s name, first used in the 1890s, is a portmanteau of the words June and nineteenth, referring to June 19, 1865, the day when Major General Gordon Granger ordered the final enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas at the end of the American Civil War.”

As the institutions and corporations that influence so much of American culture draw shamefully away from celebrating and honoring marginalized communities, including communities of color, it falls (as it always does) to us, the people, to step up and use our collective voice to speak out so our friends, neighbors, and fellow humans who do not have the same privilege that so many of us have are seen and heard.

Here’s LeVar Burton reading the Black National Anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Google put this on their doodle a few years ago. ~~Today, there is nothing. Shameful.~~ My bad. My VPN autoconnected to the UK, and when I reset it to the US, I see that Google is honoring Juneteenth. I regret the error.

Watch on YouTube

https://wilwheaton.net/2025/06/lift-every-voice-and-sing/

https://wilwheaton.net/?p=9592

Everything New is Old Again

Posted by Heather Rose Jones

http://alpennia.com/blog/everything-new-old-again

Thursday, June 19, 2025 - 08:00

The Lesbian Historic Motif Project

I started some comments to put in this blog section of the post, then realized they fit better into the "Introduction" part of the publication record. So I'm left with nothing of substance to say here. Some day I should post a blog showing the underlying data structure of the Project so that this sort of thing makes sense to readers. (Assuming anyone cares.)

Major category:

LHMP

Tags:

LHMP

LHMP #491c Cleves 2014 Charity & Sylvia Chapter 3 & 4

About LHMP

Full citation:

Cleves, Rachel Hope. 2014. Charity & Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America. Oxford University Press, Oxford. ISBN 978-0-19-933542-8

Chapter 3 & 4

I have become fascinated with the cyclicity of historical trends--not necessarily the "big stuff" like wars and forms of government, but the way certain concepts and reactions cycle over and over again, in different forms, but with similar shapes and consequence-chains. We see this in Valerie Traub's idea of "cycles of salience" where specific manifestations of female homoeroticism have dominated social awareness at different times. We see this in the "waves" of feminism, which began long before "first wave" feminism, where women agitate against the specific injustices of their time, make progress to address those injustices, then are hit by backlash that recurs in similar forms, time and time again.

Today's chapters from Charity and Sylvia touch on one of those cycles: the "generation gap" (my label, not the author's). Some sort of social or political disruption occurs that leads a younger generation to have sufficiently different understandings of society that disrupts the idea of learning from and following the lead of the older generation. I'm not talking about a constant background radiation of "kids these days!" but the points at which a generation has literally grown up in an entirely different world from their parents, affecting expectations and assumptions. For Charity and Sylvia, that disruption was the American Revolution, not only due to the physical and economic hardship, but because of embracing the principles that you didn't have to accept "the way things are." That you can make drastic changes in your relationship to authority structures. Authority structures like family hierarchies.

One of the pervasive threads in this book--and an aspect of history that can be hard for modern people to grasp entirely--was the essential interconnectedness of communities. For queer people, that interconnectedness has often been a threat: the need to hide or conform in order to not lose that essential economic stability the community and family provide. The quintessential American archetype of the independent loner who rejects society's demands has always been mostly an illusion. When Sylvia's brother struck out for the "wilds" of Vermont, his success was not that of an independent loner, but of someone who identified key social structures and wove himself into them. (Marrying the boss's daughter has always been a useful strategy.) and when he achieved that success, his first thought was to pull in the loosened strands of his family and weave them back into cloth again.

Charity's family was badly disrupted by autocratic and controling parents, with the result that their children took any opportunity to get out from under their thumb. (A "generation gap" that might have been harder to implement without the general atmosphere of liberatoin.) But those threads were still tangled. Charity's professional life was made possible by the anchors of various siblings who hosted her during her teaching years, allowing her to move between communities while still being tied to them. On the other side, for a single woman to be able to make a living as a teacher was made possible by significant attitude shifts regarding public education that emerged out of the Enlightenment and the disruption of Colonial era attitudes toward the relationship between government and the public good.

Did Charity and Sylvia come to the conclusion that their fantasy of a female "marriage" was possible because of those disruptions to social patterns? It's always hard to distinguish the larger patterns from the particular cases. In several places, Cleves draws parallels between Charity & Sylvia and the similar relationshps of Ponsonby & Butler and Lister & Walker. Yes, they lived in a similar era, but their socio-political contexts were quite different. To what extent is it reasonable to consider them part of a larger pattern of queer possibility and to what extent is the urge toward queer partnerships a constant with individual cases popping into visibility for random reasons and then given undue weight because of that visibility?

Ok, I'm starting to ramble now. But since one of the goals of the Project is to identify larger patterns in history that can help root characters and stories into the particularity of a time and place, these questions are always on my mind.

# # #

Chapter 3: O the Example! 1787

The Revolution had inspired something of a “generation gap” as younger people took seriously the ideals of liberty and independence and were less inclined to reflexively bow to parental and employer authority. Another legacy of the Revolution was the valorization of intimate same-sex friendships among both men and women. These friendships had the potential to displace the familial bonds that had previously been the essential basis for economic success. Such friendships had the same potential as m/f relationships for both joy and tragic break-ups. One of Charity’s brothers suffered greatly from the destruction of one such friendship, which may have affected some of her ambivalence about intimate relationships.

Another of her brothers also had an intimate friendship with that same man, and there was conflict between the brothers over contrasting loyalties. [Note: Although the author doesn’t make the connection at this point, these close same-sex friendships may have been a model for Charity’s own socializing later. Also note: I’m using “intimate friendship” in the sense of a highly particular, intensely emotional bond, without necessarily implying an erotic component.]

Resistance to parental attempts to dictate their lives led to most of Charity’s siblings eventually distancing themselves from their father and step-mother. Her sisters struggled harder to find a path other than marriage. One had poetic aspirations, but chose marriage at 20. Another married even younger. Both moved away from the family neighborhood at marriage. That left Charity as the only child at home at age 15. Charity clashed regularly with her stepmother, perhaps over her distaste for the endless housework, preferring literary activities. These gave her a common focus for close friendships with other young women in the community.

At age 20, after a conflict with her father, he threw Charity out of the house and she went to live with one of her married sisters. In the next decade, Charity moved between several communities, living with relatives, and formed a number of close friendships with women who were drawn by her intellect and bold spirit. But the admiration she attracted also sparked gossip and tension within those communities.

Chapter 4: Mistress of a School 1797

Charity worked as a school teacher, which fit well with her skills and interests, though she had a low opinion of many of her students. Like several of her siblings, she was a poet. At first, she boarded with her sister Anna. After some problems with gossip (more on which later), and a minor medical crisis, she moved back in with her parents until that became untenable. Then she went to live with a brother in western Massachusetts, where she resumed teaching. Then back to join Anna in a different locations. Despite these various moves and occasional breaks from teaching, the profession gave her freedom and economic independence, if not a very substantial income.

Post-revolutionary America encouraged general education, creating new employment opportunities for educated women (as they could be paid less than male teachers). Young female teachers often wrote about their “liberty” from parental oversight and restrictions (and the expectation of domestic labor if they remained at home).

Charity became a prolific letter writer, as well as a poet, often describing her life in dramatic and sentimental terms, as if narrating a novel.

She often wrote poems as gifts to friends, and was considered talented. She and her correspondents sometimes had pet names for each other used in their letters.

In her writing, Charity praised the virtues of modesty and sincerity, though she didn’t always recognize her own failings in those areas. Others viewed her pride and self-confidence as deviating from feminine ideals.

Time period:

18th c

19th c

Place:

USA

Event / person:

Charity Bryant & Sylvia Drake

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http://alpennia.com/blog/everything-new-old-again

it picks me up, puts me down

Posted by Wil

https://wilwheaton.net/2025/06/it-picks-me-up-puts-me-down/

https://wilwheaton.net/?p=9583

I’ve been open and unashamed about my mental health struggles and triumphs, always willing to talk about my CPTSD, always willing to supportively listen when someone chooses to share their experience with me.

I make this choice every day, because I am doing my best to be the person I need in the world. I need people who are kind and compassionate, who are willing to share their struggles and victories in a way that validates my own experiences. I make this choice so that maybe I can be the person I need, for someone I will never meet, the way people like Jenny Lawson, or Gabe and Tycho from Penny Arcade were for me, when I was beginning my healing journey.

It’s in that spirit that I’m writing today. This is sort of a general update on how that journey is going, and a look at where I am, with some thoughts on how I got here.

So, broadly and generally speaking, I’m doing great! I mean, everything in the whole world is terrible, but the little bit of reality that’s being rendered around me at any given moment is pretty great. I’m healthy and safe, my family is healthy and safe, I have all the work I need, I have time and space for activities.

But … the chaos, cruelty, rage, and unpredictability coming out of the White House is identical to what I experienced growing up¹ and holy shit has that activated a lot of stuff for my body to remember.

For the two weeks or so that preceded Sunday, I woke up to intense anxiety every morning, before I was even fully awake and aware of anything. It was really unpleasant, but at least I knew that it was nervous system dysregulation², and I have a lot of skills I can use to help my nervous system get back into a parasympathetic, resting, state. I’m grateful that I know what to do, but my god did I wish I didn’t have to do it every morning at the start of my day.³

Then, Sunday, I woke up like Frodo in Rivendell, and I have, every morning since. I don’t feel tight and clenched in my chest. I haven’t sweat through my pajamas and woken up shivering. I have had peace and warmth and gentle calm.

And the thing is, I didn’t know when this would happen, but I knew that it would. This sort of nervous system freakout thing tends to happen when I’ve been working hard to reprocess one or more specific traumas, and I’m really close to closing a circle on my imaginary trauma healing watch. It’s like my body doesn’t realize, yet, that I’m safe and I’m now, and it needs to be gently coaxed out of dysregulation.

I’ve closed a few metaphorical circles over the years since I started EMDR and IFS therapy, and I have had some version of this experience each time. When it does, I imagine a drawing of my body, like from one of those old Disney SCIENCE IS FUN cartoons. In some places, there is fear and anxiety.⁴ In others, confusion⁵. Depending on how old I am in the drawing, there’s anger and resentment⁶. And all around these memories, connected to each of them, is sadness and loss. Over time, as I’ve worked so hard to heal from the abuse of my emotionally immature, toxic parents, those pieces I see in the drawing have faded away, eventually joining together in lingering loss and sadness.

And honestly, I’m okay with that. It’s okay to feel sad. It’s okay to acknowledge the loss. I hasten to clarify that this took literal years of work. When I first began to see all the sadness, it was like looking into infinity. When I first felt the enormity and profundity of the loss, it was free falling into an abyss. There were a lot of stops and starts as I learned how to regulate it, how to reprocess it in a way that wasn’t overwhelming.

Again, not easy. Again, years. Again, worth it.

Now, listen, I am not a doctor and I have no professional experience or education. I’m just sharing my experience. But if you see something familiar, I encourage you to look into what nervous system dysregulation is, and learn some of the techniques we use to calm our bodies down when they aren’t on the same page as our mind, our soul, our Self.

A few resources I value include

Dr. Nicole LePera, the Holistic Psychologist
The book The Body Keeps The Score
The book Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents
The YouTube channel Therapy in a Nutshell
EFT Tapping. This is the weirdest thing ever. When I first heard about it, I thought it was bullshit. I don’t know why or how it works, but it’s been PROFOUND for me in many cases. YouTube has some good follow-along guides, but a fuckton of grifter wellness woo woo bullshit. Just use good judgment and common sense. Like, you aren’t tapping your way to riches, guys.

There’s a somatic component to emotional healing and trauma recovery that I didn’t expect. It’s only recently that my emotional self and my physical self have started to work in harmony, and that wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t know that the somatic part existed. It’s taken such a long time, and though the work is ongoing, I hope that someone who needs to know that they aren’t alone sees this. I hope this helps on your own healing journey.

Thanks for reading my blog. If you would like to get these updates in your email, here’s a thing:

Take care of yourselves, friends, and take care of each other.

My father’s rage, my mother’s fear, and the tension between them was so thick in the air, it was suffocating. I never knew what was coming down the hallway, or through the front door. Would dad be mean to me, or would he just ignore me? Would mom and dad fight so ferociously that it ends with my mom kicking another hole in another cabinet? We’re running out of towels to hang over the ones that are already there. I’m going to put headphones on and turn them up as loud as they can go because that’s the only way to escape the yelling and arguing that vibrates through the walls into my bedroom. ︎
For decades, I had panic attacks every night when I was falling asleep. More often than not, I had night terrors, these vaguely remembered nightmares that had no images or other senses associated with them, just pure terror. When it was really bad, they happened more than once a night and the only reason I stayed asleep was after I’d cried myself to sleep in exhaustion. Trying to escape them was a big part of my alcohol abuse. I’m so grateful that doesn’t happen anymore. ︎
And it still kind of lingered with me throughout the day, you know? It was a lot. ︎
Oh, imagine that Professor Duck guy, giving a lecture at a chalkboard. ︎
Why is he so mean to me? Why won’t she just let me be a kid? Why won’t they love me like they love my brother and sister? ︎
Or, there was. The healing ring I am most proud of closing, the one that was the key to closing so many others, was this one. When I realized that my anger was no longer a shield that protected me, but something else entirely that only caused me pain, it was astonishingly easy to find it, coax it out, validate it, and send it on its way. There isn’t any anger in my drawing now. Where it used to be is something that is almost indifference. ︎

https://wilwheaton.net/2025/06/it-picks-me-up-puts-me-down/

https://wilwheaton.net/?p=9583

Tukey

https://xkcd.com/3104/

Mixology Monday At Salar

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/06/18/mixology-monday-at-salar/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56115

If you’ve been reading my posts for a bit, you may remember me doing a piece or two over my favorite restaurant, Salar. The posts I’ve done have been featuring their wonderful monthly wine dinners they host, but today I’m here to talk about one of their other monthly events I enjoy: Salar’s Mixology Monday!

This was the second Mixology Monday I’ve attended, the theme of this one being “Blended Beverages.” Listen, I’m a basic white girl, you already know I love a fun, blended bevvie. What I dislike, though, is the sound of a blender, especially if I’m dining at a fine establishment. It totally ruins the vibes and detracts from the classy aura of a really nice restaurant.

Fortunately, our lovely mixologist for the evening feels the exact same way, and the event was held on the secluded back patio of the restaurant so we wouldn’t disturb other guests. Salar’s back patio is my favorite patio in Dayton. It has a beautiful pergola, pretty string lights, and tons of plants that make it feel vibrant and lush.

Check out the mixologist’s setup:

A bar-station set up on one of the patio's tables. There's several different bottles of liquor, a bucket of lemons and limes, fresh herbs and sliced berries, and a thing of tajin and black volcanic salt for rimming glasses.

I thought it was odd there was a dish of poppyseeds, but upon closer inspection it was black lava salt for rimming the glass. My (silly) mistake!

Since Salar is a Peruvian restaurant, I started off with a blended Pisco Sour, which I was informed is the national drink of Peru.

My blended pisco sour, frozen and icy with four drops of bitters on top.

This was so light and refreshing, the fact it was all icy and frozen only added to that refreshing-ness. She actually let me mix this myself, which was fun.

One of my favorite things about Salar is that when you dine here, their version of “bread for the table” is housemade pita and hummus, which was served at this event, as well:

A white bowl holding some triangular pieces of pita, and there's a smaller black bowl in the middle containing the hummus, which is green in color due to the herbs they use in it. It sits atop a bed of spinach.

Their hummus is so unique, it’s super herbaceous and fresh tasting, and their pita is perfectly golden brown and crisp. I love that they start you off with something so fun compared to just regular bread and butter (not that I don’t also love good bread and butter).

Unlike their monthly wine dinners, where everyone is served their own plate per course, the Mixology Mondays have a smaller crowd (only about ten people) and are more casual in tone, so the food is served family style on larger platters that get passed around, and you just take however much you want and put it on your own plate.

Here’s some roasted veggies we were served:

A big white bowl full of roasted squash, roasted bell pepper, green beans, mushrooms, all that good stuff.

There was also a salad with grilled chicken, elote, and some kind of really yummy green dressing over top, but I failed to get a picture of that one. I do, however, have a picture of the tofu dish the kitchen made for someone with dietary restrictions, and that looked tasty:

A small grey plate with some salad, topped with two giant chunks of tofu that are dark orange in color, probably have been marinated and grilled the same way the chicken was.

Actually, I now notice that the salad the tofu is sitting on top of is definitely the same salad mix that the one with chicken had, so just imagine that salad but with chicken on top instead and that’s what I had.

Of course, gotta get our second bev going:

A super cute pineapple shaped glass filled with a reddish pink liquid. The drink is topped with a blackberry and a raspberry, plus a pineapple frond for garnish.

I absolutely love this pineapple glass it was served it, plus the pineapple toothpick and pineapple frond decoration was so cute. This drink was made with blackberries, raspberries, I honestly don’t remember what else but it was so fruity and totes delish! I felt transported to a hammock on a beach.

Even though I came alone, everyone was sat at one long table and I ended up having some great conversations with my tablemates. It was so fun chatting, sharing food, sipping our drinks, it was definitely more friendly and chill than I was expecting. Good vibes all around.

And to finish the evening, a strawberry margarita made with Mezcal, with a tajin covered lime for optimal enjoyment:

A short glass filled with pink liquid. The drink is topped with a lime wedge that is covered in tajin.

As you can probably tell, it was pretty warm out so the drinks did tend to melt kind of quickly, but they tasted just as good in liquid form as frozen form, so I can’t complain too much.

All in all, both the food and the drinks were super summery and tasty, the conversation was easy-going and fun, and it was just a pleasant way to spend a Monday evening. I look forward to the next one of these I attend.

What’s the best complimentary bread and butter you’ve had at a restaurant? Do you like pisco sours? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!

-AMS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/06/18/mixology-monday-at-salar/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56115

Building a Picture of a Queer Life

Posted by Heather Rose Jones

http://alpennia.com/blog/building-picture-queer-life

Wednesday, June 18, 2025 - 08:00

The Lesbian Historic Motif Project

Cleve's biography of Charity and Sylvia takes an approach that both makes the book more readable and requires the audience to read critically. In order to fill in the background and the silences of their lives, we get a lot of general historical details that help make sense of the decisions and actions of their families. But in order to try to contextualize their emotional lives, we also get a lot of interpolation from other lives. "Here is this thing that someone else felt; they could have felt this too." We know that this person was writing poetry about love between women in England at the same era, they might possibly have been familiar with it." Interspersed with quotations from their surviving correspondence, we also get descriptions of things they are asserted to have done, thought, and felt that are not cited to a specific source and that I interpret as being drawn from the author's imagination. I'm of two minds about this approach. One the one hand, it makes for a clearer storyline, in the same way that tv or movie presentations of people's lives fill in or omit details, or rearrange timelines, in order to present a more coherent story. But as someone who is looking for the verifiable facts of history in order to better be able to do similar extrapolations, I'd rather have a clear distinction made in my history books between fact and imagination.

Major category:

LHMP

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LHMP

LHMP #491b Cleves 2014 Charity & Sylvia Chapter 1 & 2

About LHMP

Full citation:

Cleves, Rachel Hope. 2014. Charity & Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America. Oxford University Press, Oxford. ISBN 978-0-19-933542-8

Chapter 1 & 2

Chapter 1: A Child of Melancholy 1777

Charity’s mother died of consumption shortly after Charity’s birth in 1777, in the middle of the Revolutionary War. She was the last of 10 children. Death haunted the family with three of Charity’s grandparents and her oldest brother also dying within the same 2-year period.

Charity felt the absence of her mother keenly (as documented in poems on the subject), despite never having known her. Charity was named for a “spinster” aunt, famed as a seamstress, who may have served as something of a role model. Both due to her mother’s illness during pregnancy and the lack of mother’s milk, Charity was a sickly infant and considered unlikely to survive. She was supported through it by a hired nurse who became a family friend, and by the care of a slightly older sister, Anne. Charity’s father remarried (the date of the marriage is not given here) but her stepmother evidently had little affection for her.

Chapter 2: Infantile Days 1784

Sylvia’s childhood was a contrast to Charity’s. She had a loving mother and family, neither war nor illness devastated the family, but the disruptions of the Revolution did leave them bankrupt and homeless. (In contrast, Charity’s family was well off.) Like Charity, Sylvia was the youngest of a large family.

[Note: The book often digs deeply into the historic context of the women’s lives, as with the post-war economic crisis in Massachusetts. There is also a lot of social history background to provide context for how people understood the women’s lives and affections. I’m not going to take notes on those aspects in detail, but simply stick to the outlines of the couple’s lives.]

The town Sylvia’s family lived in was poor and crime-ridden. When her grandfarther’s death meant selling off their property to settle debts, the family split up to live with or work for various relations. Because of Sylvia’s youth, she stayed with her mother and invented fantasies in her poetry of the comfortable togetherness that she had never actually known.

One of her brothers moved to Vermont for better opportunities and found trhem in plenty, marrying his employer’s daughter and becoming a land holder. This allowed him to invite the rest of the family to join him (except for the father, who died on the journey). Vermont was far less developed than Massachusetts, providing more opportunities for men, but fewer for women.

Time period:

Place:

Misc tags:

emotional /romantic bonds between women

love poetry

marriage resistance

romantic friendship

Event / person:

Charity Bryant & Sylvia Drake

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Two pleasures

I went out yesterday evening after dinner. The day had cooled, and the sun was low and golden. I walked round the harbour and along the pier, and met only two couples: we said hello to each other, and were smug that the crowds had gone and that we were still here enjoying the best of the day.

Meanwhile,

durham_rambler had discovered from FaceBook that Kate Fox was also staying on Holy Island, and had made a date to meet her this morning at the Causeway Café, which is a van that parks, as it happens, just adjacent to our garden. So we were able to scoop Kate up and bring her back here to sit in the garden and drink tea, and talk more than we have, at a guess, in the last twenty or thirty years. We are always pleased to see each other (well, I'm always pleased to see her, and when we saw her a year ago she seemed pleased to see us, but it'ms usually incidentally to doing something else, so we don't get time to chat. She had brought with her her little book On Sycamore Gap, in case, she said, she ran into someone she wanted to give one to: and she seemed as pleased to have given us a copy as we were to be given one.

So that was an evening and a morning well spent.

The Big Idea: Aimee Ogden

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/06/18/the-big-idea-aimee-ogden/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56109

Coming back to ideas with fresh eyes is always a good idea. For author Aimee Ogden, it was eight years before she revisited the story that would come to be her newest novella, Starstruck. Check out her Big Idea to see how she made this story shine.

AIMEE OGDEN:
Ten years ago, I had the Big Idea that would become Starstruck: a world where each falling star held a soul that would animate whatever plant or animal it fell on. What would happen if those stars stopped falling? And what about when something got a soul that was never supposed to have one?

I wrote a book I loved about that idea—a fantasy for YA readers—and queried it with around a hundred different agents. And I got an equivalently hundred-adjacent number of rejections. C’est la vie écrivaine; I cried, presumably ate a cookie or two about it, and buried it in my trunk of failed stories, never to be seen again.

It turned out that out of sight did not mean out of mind. Starstruck haunted me (the book itself embodied, occasionally, in the person of a friend who also cared about it a lot), until two years ago, I exhumed the story’s corpse, and I was happy to find it still had good bones. They just needed to be arranged into a different order; and there was a fair bit of carrion flesh to strip away, too, to pare it down to a novella.

I still had a magical world of falling stars. I still had the same main characters: an abandoned human child, a gentle fox, her pragmatic radish wife, and a rock with delusions of destiny. Even the climactic moment stayed almost unchanged from the original version, except for the paring back of some elements that had proved extraneous to the story.

But the original version was YA, and the story had centered around the human boy. I hadn’t read widely enough yet to expand my conception of what a lead character could or should be. Coming back to it, I knew right away that I only wanted to write about a middle-aged radish. A magical middle-aged radish with a soul, and her enormous love, and her silent, squashed-aside regrets, and her utter inability to cope with a chunk of granite that told her it had a name and a birthday and a favorite color.

If I’d been paying more attention, I probably should have known where the story’s emotional heart lay the first time around—in the original version, the final scenes take place from the radish perspective. Even before I understood this was her story, I must have sensed that the needed closure could only come from her.

Or maybe I couldn’t have known yet. Eight years is a big gap to develop and change as a writer, and to accrue emotional baggage besides. Without that time, and without the double regret of failing with and then abandoning Starstruck, it couldn’t have been the same book. And as pleased as I was with it the first time around, it’s better now for its chance for maturation, and I have more room in my well-used, middle-aged heart with which to love it. Maybe you do, too. How do you feel about radishes?

Starstruck: Publisher website

Author Socials: Website|Bluesky

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/06/18/the-big-idea-aimee-ogden/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56109

Current Music: Muna, "What I Want"

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patreon

Why don't you ever let me love you?

Allison Bunce's Ladies (2024) so beautifully photosets the crystalline haze of a sexual awakening that the thought experiment assigned by its writer-director-editor seems more extraneous than essential to its sensorily soaked seventeen-minute weekend, except for the queerness of keeping its possibilities fluid. The tagline indicates a choice, but the film itself offers something more liminal. Whatever its objectivity, what it tells the heroine is real.

It's more than irony that this blurred epiphany occurs in the none more hetero setting of a bachelorette weekend, whose all-girl rituals of cheese plates and orange wine on the patio and drunkenly endless karaoke in a rustically open-plan rental somewhere down the central coast of California are so relentlessly guy-oriented, the Bechdel–Wallace test would have booked it back up 101 after Viagra entered the chat. The goofiest, freakiest manifestation of the insistence on men are the selfie masks of the groom's face with which the bride's friends are supposed to pose as she shows off her veil in the lavender overcast of the driftwood-littered beach, but it's no less telling that as the conversation circles chronically around partners past and present, it's dudes all the way down. Even jokily, their twentysomething, swipe-right femininity admits nothing of women who love women, which leaves almost literally unspeakable the current between ginger-tousled, disenchanted Ruby (Jenna Lampe) and her lankier, longtime BFF Leila (Greer Cohen), the outsiders of this little party otherwise composed of blonde-bobbed Chloe (Ally Davis) and her flanking mini-posse of Grace (Erica Mae McNeal) and Lex (Tiara Cosme Ruiz), always ready to reassure their wannabe queen bee that she's not a bad person for marrying a landlord. "That's his passion!" They are not lovers, these friends who drove down together in Ruby's SUV. Leila has a boyfriend of three months whose lingering kiss at the door occasioned an impatiently eye-rolling horn-blare from Ruby, herself currently single after the latest in a glum history of heterosexual strike-outs: "No, seriously, like every man subconsciously stops being attracted to me as soon as I tell him that I don't want to have kids." And yet the potential thrums through their interactions, from the informality of unpacking a suitcase onto an already occupied bed to the nighttime routine of brushing their teeth side by side, one skimming her phone in bed as the other emerges from the shower and unselfconsciously drops her towel for a sleep shirt, climbing in beside her with such casual intimacy that it looks from one angle like the innocence of no chance of attraction, from another like the ease of a couple even longer established than the incoming wedding's three years. "He's just threatened by you," Leila calms the acknowledgement of antipathy between her boyfriend and her best friend. It gets a knowing little ripple of reaction from the rest of the group, but even as she explains for their tell-all curiosity, she's smiling over at her friend at the other end of the sofa, an unsarcastic united front, "Probably because he knows I love her more than him."

Given that the viewer is encouraged to stake out a position on the sex scene, it does make the most sense to me as a dream, albeit the kind that reads like a direct memo from a subconscious that has given up waiting for dawn to break over Marblehead. It's gorgeous, oblique, a showcase for the 16 mm photography of Ryan Bradford at its most delicately saturated, the leaf-flicker of sun through the wooden blinds, the rumpling of a hand under a tie-dyed shirt, a shallow-breasted kiss, a bunching of sheets, all dreamily desynched and yet precisely tactile as a fingernail crossing a navel ring: "Tell me if you want me to move my hand." Ruby's lashes lie as closed against her cheeks as her head on the pillow throughout. No wonder she looks woozy the next morning, drinking a glass of water straight from the tap as if trying to cool down from skin-buzzing incubus sex, the edge-of-waking fantasy of being done exactly as she dreamt without having to ask. "Spread your legs, then." Scrolling through their sunset selfie session, she zooms and lingers on the two of them, awkwardly voguing back to back for the camera. She stares wordlessly at Leila across the breakfast table, ἀλλ’ ἄκαν μὲν γλῶσσα ἔαγε λέπτον δ’ αὔτικα χρῶι πῦρ ὐπαδεδρόμηκεν to the life. Chloe is rhapsodizing about her Hallmark romance, but Ruby is speaking to her newly sensitized desires: "I just really hate that narrative, though. Pretending that you don't want something in the hopes that you'll get the thing that you're pretending that you don't want? Like, it just doesn't make any sense." It is just not credible to me that Leila who made such a point of honesty in relationships would pretend that nothing had happened when she checks in on her spaced-out friend with quizzical concern, snuggles right back into that same bed for an affectionate half-argument about her landlord potential. "I'm sure there are dishwasher catalogues still being produced somewhere in the world." Still, as if something of the dream had seeped out Schrödinger's between them, we remember that it was Leila who winkled her way into an embrace of the normally standoffish Ruby, who had her arms wrapped around her friend as she delivered what sure sounded like a queerplatonic proposal: "Look, if we both end up single because we both don't want kids, at least we'll have each other. We can have our own wedding." The last shots of the film find them almost in abstract, eyes meeting in the rear view mirror, elbows resting on the center console as the telephone poles and the blue-scaled Pacific flick by. It promises nothing and feels like a possibility. Perhaps it was not only Ruby's dream.

I can't know for certain, of course, and it seems to matter to the filmmaker that I should not know, but even if all that has changed is Ruby's own awareness, it's worth devoting this immersive hangout of a short film to. The meditative score by Karsten Osterby sounds at once chill and expectant, at times almost drowning the dialogue as if zoning the audience out into Ruby. The visible grain and occasional flaw in the film keep it haptically grounded, a memento of Polaroids instead of digitally-filtered socials. For every philosophizing moment like "Do you ever have those dreams where you wake up and you go about your day and get ready and everything feels normal, but then you wake up and you're still in bed, so you're like, 'Oh, was I sleeping or was that real?'" there's the ouchily familiar beat where Ruby and Leila realize simultaneously that neither of them knows the name of Chloe's fiancé, just the fact that he's a landlord. Whatever, it's an exquisite counterweight to heteronormativity, a leaf-light of queerness at the most marital-industrial of times. I found it on Vimeo and it's on YouTube, too. This catalogue brought to you by my single backers at Patreon.

Today in “Look at This Dork”

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/06/18/today-in-look-at-this-dork/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56102

Someone is a little too excited to be on the Scalzi Bridge, with the Scalzi Church in the background to the left, about to have dinner at the Ai Scalzi restaurant. It was an all Scalzi day yesterday, you see. And it was all lovely, even if the dork pictured above clearly was not at all cool about it. Shine on, silly dork!

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/06/18/today-in-look-at-this-dork/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56102