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Unlocking a Patreon Story for all to read: The Emporer and His Totally Amazing, Awesome Clothes
Jul. 31st, 2025 09:33 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
tobiasbuckell_feedDuring 2016-2020, I wrote a few stories in my Patreon reacting to the events around me. I decided to unlock one of them that I read at events that folks have been asking where they can point people to it. I decided to just unlock it here, as it’s not included in any of my other collections.
The story is The Emperor and His Totally Amazing, Awesome Clothes and can be found at the link, here’s the opening scene. If you enjoy it, spread the link around, consider supporting the website via Patreon here at the link.
I don’t want to say that Hans Christian Anderson didn’t tell the whole story. Hans was a noble collector of tales handed down from generation to generation all throughout the countryside. But one has to understand some of the complications with the narrative as it’s been picked up and remembered.
There are many claims to the truth of this story, and, as a scribe, it is my duty to head out and collect them. After spending several weeks canvassing the countryside, I submit this report to you in earnest.
We begin with the initial core story that you may well be familiar with, and it is this:
Many years ago, there was an emperor so vain and fond of new clothes that he spent all his money being well dressed. One day two swindlers came to town and let it be known that they could weave the greatest fabric in all the world. In fact, it was so fine that only those people who were stupid or unworthy of their positions could not see it.
The emperor, dazzled by the idea of dressing in the finest thread in all the world, allowed the swindlers, who pretended to weave the cloth but were really holding empty air, to trick him into making him a fine new outfit.
Then he paraded himself through town, as his courtiers and officers held empty air, pretending it was the train of his gown.
It was a child that pointed at the emperor—a child cloaked in the innocence of their age—who cried out, “that man has no clothes on!”
That’s roughly what everyone remembers, and to tell the story again, it seems like the spell is broken. The high, unworldly clarion call of the child pierces the entire sham and shatters it. The emperor is shamed, and tries to carry on down the street, but knows the truth of it all.
But that’s not how the real world works, is it?
Passing through a shifting world, ghostlike
Jul. 31st, 2025 09:20 pmtobiasbuckell_feedI was excited when I last updated the blog in May. The semester was over, and I looked forward to jumping into two very large projects. One is personal, the other the current novel.
Things did not go as planned. The utter exhaustion I was working under was not apparent, but as I tried to get back into the things I love to do, it became more apparent. I started therapy when we found out Emily had cancer, because I knew I was running on empty and would need help, and that’s been helpful, but as my friends pointed out, we took a lot of hits this year in health. On top of that, our university underwent some dramatic turns (announcing financial issues, then a merger, and then the ending of the merger and return to independence, the resignation of our university president) and all of that taking place within an atmosphere of oppressive state moves against all education creating more stress about the nature of the job, as well as the fact that I’m not a US citizen and now am living in a hostile state.
It’s a lot.
So, I’ve written a number of chapters of In Empire’s Shadow, but the other project took up all my free energy.
And I can’t talk about it.
Yet.
What I’m up to will become clear in about 2-3 weeks, and I’ll be able to talk. I’ve been keeping my head down, waiting for clarity and a decision that has to be made by an institution before I can reveal. I can’t talk about it yet, and it is the thing taking up all my waking hours and working time.
That’s hard.
But things could, in just a couple of weeks, become radically different and I’ll be able to share.
In the meantime, every day I wake up feeling the weight of the news that seeps through no matter how I try to filter or keep it carefuly corralled to certain times of day, as we need to get on.
I’m functioning in terms of cooking, cleaning, brushing my teeth, but the levels of dissociation that I hit sometimes are new levels because I have read history, and I suspect there’s so much worse to come before the better.
I’ve turned down a lot of travel and speaking gigs to keep my risk minimal, but that hits the pocket book. Before Covid, I was making decent money from the speaking and teaching workshops circuit, all that money went away. It’s one of the reasons I pivoted to teaching university, but that feels teneous as a career in the US now.
I’ve gone through many of the stages of grief this summer. Grief for a future I thought I was headed toward that no longer seems to exist. Grief for all the human beings I already see suffering, and the ones I know will be suffering once hospitals close, medicare is shut off after the midterms, more pollution is dumped, more public land sold, less science developed, medical miracles dying on the vine as NHS funding lies in limbo.
Unnecessary and cruel suffering that didn’t have to happen.
As a young man, having lived through a chaotic childhood with hardships and political turmoil, I developed a cynical and misanthropic view of the world. I operated on a warm level as a person, but in the privacy of my head, I viewed humanity as idiots who repeatedly punched themselves in the face due illiteracy and ignorance.
I spent my 30s working hard to become empathic, kind, and patient with humanity. It was work I was so proud of, changing how I saw people at their most fundamental because wise people, the people I wanted the world to be full of, grew that within themselves.
But reader, I confess to finding it a struggle when I see the ribs of a child starving to death in Gaza and videos of people smashing food headed for that child.
I find it hard when I see people laughing about the hospitals that will close, or cheering ICE on.
I’m gobsmacked to see Republicans now wavering on whether they’re against pedophila because their golden calf is telling them there’s nothing to see.
And my childhood self rises again, and it says “see? I told you that work in your 30s was a waste. The world is a dark place full of monsters that pretend to be human.”
That isn’t how I want to see the world. I wanted to see it full of promise, potential, and dynamic vigor. I wanted to see it like Dr. Who: humans being humans, flawed, yes, but ultimately, with some help, good and worth saving.
I’m trying.
Not coincidentally we’ve been watching a lot of Dr. Who as a family. And it lands on me that this escapism, the hope, the fun, the vision of a better view of humanity, this is how fiction helps us navigate hard times.
There’s a reason the facists are coming for literature and art again.
I’m just an author. So I’m going to step back into my books and try to write something that maybe will help someone else like me escape for a bit.
And maybe, if I’m lucky, it’ll be this current book.
Maybe.
Right now, it’s something I’m clinging to. A place I can go and get away from it all.
Another world. One where, although the odds are stacked against them, if they can stand together and believe there’s something better on the other side of the journey, we can make it there together.
It’s what I’ve got, right now.
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Bujold impersonator is still scamming
Jul. 30th, 2025 04:55 pmlois_mcmaster_bujold_feedA person with the email loismcmasterb@gmail.com is out there pretending to be me. This not my email, and This Is Not Me.
This appears to be the same scammer who was impersonating me on X/Twitter and Mastodon a while back. Apparently their protocol is to engage the person in some conversation, and then try to sell them some kind of writing/editing scam.
Pass the warning along...
Ta, L.
posted by Lois McMaster Bujold on July, 30
Extracts Relevant to American History
Jul. 30th, 2025 10:15 pmalpennia_feed
This publication is wildly out of order in the numbering system for logistical reasons. Specifically: It had a lot of primary source quotations which I was mining for my vocabulary project, which took quite a while to process. It didn't make sense to read through it to create a blog entry then come back to process the vocabulary. But in order to create the entries in the vocabulary database, I needed to assign it a LHMP publication number. So I've been posting a bunch of later numbers while working my way thorugh the data entry for this one. More details than you wanted to know! I still have a large backlog of earlier material to process for the vocabulary project. (The hazard of adding sub-tasks to the Project.) But it's more practical to make sure I process the current publications as I post them.
Katz, Jonathan. 1978. Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. Avon Books, New York. ISBN 0-380-40550-4
This is a collection of excerpts from historic sources related to homosexuality in America. As with other publications of this sort, I’m mostly going to be cataloging the items of interest. Although it’s a very thick little paperback, the lesbian content is sparse. In fact, Katz notes, “In the present volume, Lesbian-related material is dispersed unequally within the parts, and not always readily identifiable by title—thus difficult to locate at a glance. For this reason, a female sign [i.e., the “Venus” symbol] is here placed beside the title of each text containing the most substantial references to women-loving women.” While this tagging doesn’t cover all the lesbian-related material, it provides me with a convenient way of skimming the rest.
The material is organized in thematic groups, and then chronologically within each group.
Trouble: 1566-1966
- John Cotton (1636) – A proposed law for Massachusetts that would have included sex between women under the anti-sodomy law.
- William Bradford (1642) – A history of Plymouth Plantation that includes references to an outbreak of “wickedness” including sexual sins of a wide range of types.
- New Haven Colony (1655) – A law code that included female homosexuality among crimes punishable by death.
- Moreau de St. Mery (1793-98) – A French diplomat living in Philadelphia comments on lesbian relations there.
- Irving C. Rosse (1892) – A paper read to a medical society that detailed a variety of “perversions” prevalent in Washington D.C. It includes a reference to the availability of French lesbian literature, as well as two instances of lesbianism he became aware of through his practice.
- F.L. Sim (1892) – An “expert witness” report submitted in defense of accused lesbian murderer Alice Mitchell.
- Bertrand Russell (1896) – A description of Bryn Mawr president Carey Thomas and her interpersonal conflicts with her “friend” Miss Gwinn.
- Allan McLane Hamilton (1896) – A legal opinion in the context of relatives arguing that homosexuals were mentally incompetent to manage their own property, in order to gain control of that property.
- East Hampton Star (1897) – A news article about a female famer who “dislikes men and dogs” and had several times attacked men who trespassed on her property.
Treatment: 1884-1974
- James G. Kiernan (1884) – Case history of a young woman who engaged in “mutual masturbation” with women, treatment by cold baths, and eventual resolution by marrying the brother of one of her female lovers in order to “secure her companionship”.
- F.E. Daniel (1893) – Argument for “asexualization” (castration or removal of the ovaries) as a sentence for sexual crimes (including masturbation). The article notes that in one institution the practice was ended due to public outcry.
- Havelock Ellis (1895) – An argument that it is not possible to “cure” homosexuality and that abstinence is the best possible outcome, but that the associated “nervous disorders” alleged to result from homosexuality can be treated.
Passing Women 1782-1920
(For this section, rather than listing by the author of the text, I’ll list by the names(s) of the subject unless not provided.)
- Deborah Sampson/Robert Shurtleff (1782-1797) – Dressed as a man to enlist in the Continental army, fought in several battles, physical sex discovered during a hospital stay, honorably discharged, married a man and had several children. The subject of a fictionalized biography by Herman Mann which includes descriptions of some romantic (but non-sexual) encounters with women. (That is, whether or not the encounters happened, they were felt to be an essential element of a “passing woman narrative.”)
- Lucy Ann Lobdell (1829-91) – Excerpts from Lobdell’s 1855 autobiography from an era before Lobdell was living as a man. Also excerpts from the medical report regarding Lobdell’s insanity much later in life.
- Mary East/James How (1863) – it’s misleading to include this in a book on American history. The incident occurred in England in the early 18th century. This excerpt is from a later publication collecting up several incidents of passing women.
- Philip H. Sheridan (author) (1863) – Description of an incident in the American Civil War involving two female cross-dressing soldiers who had “an intimacy.”
- Anonymous doctor (author) (1867) – An article published in London but that makes reference to the United States, discussing gender transgression.
- Ellen Coit Brown (1879-82) – Description of an incident of female cross-dressing (not by the author) while attending Cornell University.
- Anne Morris/Frank Blunt (1894) – The sentencing for theft of an assigned-female person living as a man, who had also married a woman.
Native Americans: 1528-1976
- Francisco de Pareja (1595-1616) – Examples of questions asked by a priest during confession. Pareja was translating the Spanish version into a Native American language (Timucuan). Questions include topics of homosexuality for both men and women.
- Claude E. Schaeffer (1811) – An account of a female “berdache” in the Kutenai tribe in Montana. (In 1966 Schaeffer published an account of this person drawn from both English written sources and Kutenai oral sources. With care, it could provide a useful basis for details on this cultural practice.)
- Pierre-Jean de Smet (1841) – Account of a Snake woman who dreamed that she was a man and afterward began living as a man and was accepted as such.
- George Devereux (ca. 1850-1895) – An account published in 1937 of gender crossing among the Mohave, filtered through a Freudian lens.
- Edwin T. Denig (1855-56) – An account of a Crow woman who took on a male role, including taking four wives, and became a chief, but did not dress as a man.
Resistance: 1859-1972
- Dr. K. (1897) – From a footnote included in editions of texts by Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds, attributed to a Dr. K., said to be a female physician in America. Some comments on female homosexuality.
- Miss S. (1897) – A brief statement by an American lesbian included with her case history in Sexual Inversion by Ellis and Symonds.
Love: 1779-1932
- Margaret Fuller (1823-50) – A memoir and discussion by Fuller about a crush she experienced on an older woman at age 13, as well as various comments by her and her associates on her romantic relations with women.
- Sarh Edgarton & Luella J.B. Case (1839-46) – Excerpts from letters between the two “documenting an ardent, loving friendship, filled with vague yearnings.”
- Mabel Ganson Dodge Luhan & Violet Shillito (1879-1900) – Memoirs by Luhan (multiply married and hostess of a feminist salon) about various erotic encounters in her girlhood, primarily involving fondling the breasts of other girls.
- Willa Cather (1895) – A discussion of women poets, including Sappho, though the discussion of her as a love poet makes no reference to loving women.
View From a Hotel Window, 7/30/25: Indianapolis
Jul. 30th, 2025 08:11 pmscalziwhatever_feed
And boy, if the state capitol wrapped in scaffolding isn’t a metaphor for something, I don’t know what is.
Anyway, hello, here I am in Indianapolis for GenCon, where I am a Guest of Honor for the convention’s writers symposium. For the next several days I will be on panels, dispensing what passes as my wisdom on the subject of writing and publishing. Oh boy! If you’re here, come say hello. If you’re not here, maybe wait to say hello until I am in your vicinity.
— JS
Ray’s Bucktown Bed & Breakfast: An Eclectic, Artsy Space In The Suburbs
Jul. 30th, 2025 03:38 pmscalziwhatever_feed
When I went to Chicago last week, it was just for one day and one night, and then the ol’ five hour drive back to Ohio. So, I needed a place to stay for just one night, and specifically not downtown. My mom was actually the one who found Ray’s Bucktown Bed & Breakfast, an eleven bird-named-bedroom bed and breakfast with the most eclectic decor this side of the Mississippi.
My mom and I had a great stay, and I wanted to share the avian affiliated B&B with y’all in case you’re ever in Chicago and need a totally bomb dot com place to stay.
We stayed in the Cuckoo Room, which is one of the only rooms where the bathroom is not attached, and is actually right across the hall from the bedroom portion. They make sure to put up a sign on your bathroom that says it is specifically for the Cuckoo Room, and not for public use, and your room key is also the key to the bathroom if you want to lock it just in case. The bathroom being separate actually did not bother us at all, even when I went to shower and whatnot I wasn’t concerned about it not being attached to the bedroom area.
I was really impressed how clean the bedroom and bathroom were, and especially the shower looked really nice and clean.
I liked that there were plenty of towels, a bath mat you could lay out, and the shampoo, conditioner, and body wash in the shower for you to use. There were also robes and sandals in the room for you to use.
As for the rest of the wild, maze-like estate, there were multiple communal spaces with couches, comfy chairs, books, board games, and even a rooftop patio with tons of plants if you needed a bit of sunshine and fresh air. Plus, so much cool art on the walls. And a little library!
Apparently, there’s even an orange cat that is sometimes on the patio. I did not see him, but I wish I had! The patio is also 420 friendly, if that’s your vibe.
Aside from the communal space to sit and relax, you’re also free to go into the kitchen anytime and fill the carafe from your room with filtered water, get a cup o’ joe, or grab a free snack from the snack station. I actually appreciated that they had some pretty decent snacks and not just like, one type of granola bar.
As you can see, I wasn’t kidding about the exorbitant amount of art and knick-knacks. Here’s some particularly interesting pieces I took note of:
(I thought it was covered in teeth when I saw it from across the room.)
(I wanted to touch these sooo bad but I looked with my eyes and not my hands.)
(What is keeping them up there??)
(This piece is actually HUGE.)
And finally, this blackboard menu from a restaurant that closed down in 1997.
You can’t beat those pre-00’s prices.
So, now that you’ve seen the “bed” part of the B&B experience, let’s talk about the “breakfast” part.
Breakfast is made to order, with a real lil’ menu!
Everything on the menu is included in the cost of your stay, so no need to bring your wallet down from your room. Aside from what you see on the menu, there’s also pastries and fresh fruit in the kitchen you can help yourself to.
I ordered the herbed goat omelette, with a chicken apple gouda sausage.
(I know it looks like there’s a hair on my orange slice, but it was absolutely not a hair, I promise.)
The omelette was totally stuffed with goat cheese and herbs and was super yummy, and the chicken apple gouda sausage was quite possibly the best sausage I’ve ever had. It was so flavorful and juicy and had chunks of apple in it, it was seriously so good.
Aside from the hot food cooked for me, I also had some cantaloupe, pineapple, grapes, and a pastry.
My mom got the B&B pancakes, which are blueberry and banana pancakes with real maple syrup, and they were flippin’ delicious. They were packed full of blueberries, and the bananas were actually caramelized. I had more than my fair share of her pancakes, plus I tried a bite of her overnight oats which I also really enjoyed.
Aside from the breakfast, there’s plenty of other great amenities that make staying here really worth it. You can request a garage parking spot so you don’t have to use the street parking, there’s a steam room and a sauna, and the place is dog friendly (extra twenty bucks for a dog)!
The management and staff were all super friendly, and even referred to me by name.
Honestly, I think the thing I liked most about this place was just the awesome amount of little details, like when you’re about to leave, there’s a basket with SPF options for you to help yourself to. Out front, there’s a doggy water bowl, jar of treats, and bags to clean up after your dog with in case you forgot one. There’s chocolates waiting for you in your room upon arrival, and make up wipes and Q-tips in the bathroom. It just really feels like an actual home away from home, and my mom and I really enjoyed our stay.
If you’re in the Bucktown/Wicker Park/Logan Square area, I highly recommend staying at Ray’s.
Which funky art piece is your favorite? Have you heard of Ray’s B&B before? Let me know in the comments, be sure to follow them on Instagram, and have a great day!
-AMS
The Big Idea: Mia Tsai
Jul. 29th, 2025 02:19 pmscalziwhatever_feed
Memory is a funny thing. We all have them, and yet, even when we all have the general same set of memories, each of them is different from the memories of others. Author Mia Tsai has been thinking about memory a lot, and how they come to inform her novel, the very appropriately-named The Memory Hunters.
MIA TSAI:
“You can’t prove [historical event] didn’t happen. Were you there?”
What if we could say yeah, actually, I was? And then we could share the memory of being in that place and time with anyone we chose? What if there were people who could slip back into the genealogical record, pull memories from centuries past, and show definitively that something happened? And then, how would we deal with the fact that memories are not as reliable as we believe them to be, especially eyewitness accounts?
I’ve been fascinated with memory for decades. When it comes to music, I memorize repertoire quickly, and the few times I’ve had trouble with memorization have turned into crisis-inducing moments. I wondered what predisposed me and others like me to memorization and what made it difficult for others to know a piece by heart. Still, we work to memorize deeply in classical music, which means memorizing not just notes on the page, what the hands look like as they play, or what the music sounds like, but the theoretical analysis of the music and the feel of the piece in your body.
I took that fascination with me to college, where I jumped into psychology and cognitive neuroscience and learned how fallible human memory is. The brain is incredibly suggestive, and mistakes happen at every stage of the memorization process, from information gathering to memory retrieval (the infamous selective attention test, also called the invisible gorilla test, wasn’t created to test memory, but it serves as a good example of how someone can be an eyewitness yet not remember critical aspects of the situation).
So, with that knowledge as a foundation, I imagined how retrieving someone else’s memories would work. My own memories aren’t fully realized scenes from a movie; the same holds true for many people. How could someone truly understand someone else’s memories?
And if those memories could be understood, how would they be reframed and shaped as exhibits in a museum?
About ten years ago, I watched a video on Janet Stephens, the hairdresser-turned-archaeologist who now specializes in ancient Roman hairstyles. She’d interpreted the word acus not to mean a hairpin, as others thought, but a needle and thread, and it broke open her understanding of how the hairstyles were created.
In the future, with no real documentation on how to use our everyday items, like self-sticking wall hooks or decorative toothpicks (or 8-tracks, floppy disks, and manual transmissions) we might need our own Janet Stephens. How would anthropologists and archaeologists write about us in museums? This cast-iron hook I had, which was supposed to be drilled into a post and used to hang pots, an object I thought was simple enough that it could not be misconstrued as anything else—would it get misinterpreted two hundred years into the future? Would its placard in the museum read like this? OBJECT OF UNKNOWN FUNCTION, EARLY TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY. CAST IRON. Wouldn’t it make research easier if, say, an anthropologist with the ability to pull memories from DNA fragments could take specimens off said hook hundreds of years later, say yes, I was there, then write more accurately about it?
But it’s not enough to magically pull a memory and present it. Our lives are rooted in culture and context at increasingly micro levels thanks to social fragmentation, and so the people doing the memory work would also need to be well versed in the historical context of the memory. Much like how “acus” mystified archaeologists until a hairdresser came along with the right knowledge set, the memories gathered by my fantasy anthropologists would need someone to interpret them—perhaps someone living who would have a tangible, contextual connection to the memory, someone who might be looking for lost ancestral knowledge or needed a reference to how things used to be done.
None of that personal connection would have a place in a museum. Thus, I created the memory temple as well as a system of ancestor worship for the everyday things that have great personal impact but much less impact when weighed against the rest of public history. I took inspiration from Taiwanese ancestor worship as well as the practice of people going to the cemetery to speak to their loved ones. And The Memory Hunters continued to grow.
There wasn’t a part of society diving didn’t touch. In effect, the characters in the book would always be beside their ancestors except for those who had been sundered from family heirlooms or relatives. I turned that over for a bit, not really able to get my jaws around it, until one day I heard someone say she’d love to sit with her ancestors for five minutes. Suddenly, it crystallized for me so many of the book’s issues that had been hovering just out of reach. It put me back in first grade, living half a world away from the rest of my family, when we were tasked with bringing in a family tree (I could not).
The Memory Hunters takes place in a world where distance and lost knowledge can be overcome, and I think that’s the biggest speculative aspect of it.
The Memory Hunters: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s
What I Got in Murano
Jul. 28th, 2025 07:08 pmscalziwhatever_feed
When Krissy and I went to Venice, one of the trips we had scheduled was going to the nearby island of Murano and watching some of the artisans engage in their centuries-long tradition of glass-making. That in itself was quite interesting, and when it was done we were taken into the actual shops, just in case we wanted to buy, say, a $50,000 chandelier or an arty blown-glass head of Medusa going for $25,000. In fact we did not — the mere thought of owning something both that expensive and that fragile fills me with an almost holy terror — but as we wandered about both Krissy and I found (relatively) more modest-priced items we decided to take home as 30th anniversary gifts to each other. Krissy’s was a glass rum decanter, which she will get excellent use from. Mine is the item you see above.
What precisely is it? I mean, technically I think it qualifies as a bowl; you can put fruit in it, or possibly keys when you come home, or maybe those marbles you use to fill up clear vases in houses where you’re not actually supposed to touch things. But I confess I didn’t buy it to be functional; I bought it because it was pretty, and green (which is my favorite color) and because all the little square elements you can see have their reflective layer at different depths in the glass, giving the piece in real life an almost startling sense of texture. When we were wandering about the shop, I kept coming back to it, which meant this was the piece I wanted (it also happened this way several years ago when I bought a painting from an aboriginal artist while I was in Perth). For me, it’s art, not necessarily functional (Krissy’s is also art, it’s just art you can store rum in).
Again, it was not a $50K chandelier (which is what the one in the picture above was going for), but it also was easily the most I’ve been on a single piece of glasswork — I paid more when we had the windows in the house replaced a couple years back, but that was, like, all the windows. So I was naturally apprehensive about whether the thing would make it to the house in one piece. Fortunately, the folks we bought from have some experience with shipping glass, and work with a courier service here in the US that knows how to expedite object d’art coming from abroad. Both the bowl and decanter arrived without a scratch.
(And yes, we had to pay a tariff. I’m pretty sure we would have had to before the current administration as well, but the thing about the current administration is one can never quite tell what the tariff will be on any particular day, which is a really not great way to do things. As it turned out, we paid the tariff before this administration and the EU decided on a 15% general tariff on everything coming out of Europe, so we got a lower rate, but regardless, this is no way to run a trade relationship.)
If you go to Venice I do recommend a side trip to Murano to look at the glass and such, because it was fascinating, and also, I will warn you not to go if you’re not willing to end up spending more than you ever expected to in your life on glasswork. Is it worth it? In my case, yes; this piece is lovely and I think I will get years of enjoyment out of just simply looking at it. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to buy any more of it. One piece (plus a rum decanter) is enough, thank you.
— JS
An Experience With Soft Touch ASMR In Chicago
Jul. 28th, 2025 06:18 pmscalziwhatever_feedHave you ever wished you could just pay someone to scratch your back and play with your hair? Like a massage but lighter and softer? Well, it turns out you can, and I totally did it.
A little known fact about me is that I love ASMR. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, ASMR stands for autonomous sensory meridian response, and it basically means that when you hear or see certain things, you get a pleasant tingling sensation in the back of your brain that can even give you chills. If you’re not well versed in ASMR, you probably just think of it as that weird whispering thing people do into a microphone, or worse than that you associate it with unpleasant mouth or eating sounds.
Well, I’m happy to report not all ASMR is like that. Certainly not the kind I like, anyway. For me, I have always liked the ASMR videos of people pretending to do your makeup or skincare, where they dote on you and give you a pampering session and are a comforting presence. But I also like the ones where they actually use a real person and do things like scratch their back, tickle their arms, play with their hair, trace their face. It sounds like a strange thing to watch, but it’s really easy to imagine yourself as that person, and it’s weirdly relaxing.
And I’m certainly not alone in this, because if you look at the comments of these videos, you’ll see so many people saying things like, “I wish that were me,” “how do I get someone to do this to me,” “I wish I could just pay someone to do this for an hour.” It turns out a lot of people would love to have someone touch them nicely in a soft, comforting way! Who knew?
So, there I was, watching one of these videos on Tik Tok from Soft Touch ASMR, when I noticed that the caption of the video said that you could book an appointment with her. Someone was finally doing the thing everyone had been asking for for so long! Where in the world could this possibly be located?! California. Of course it’d be across the country from me. Tragic.
@soft.touch.asmr.spa it’s your turn to be the girl in your fave ASMR vids – book in bio to feel the tingles IRL at Soft Touch ASMR Spa
(based in LA & poppin’ up all over!) #asmrmassage #asmrspa #softtouch #asmrtok #fyp #inpersonasmr #asmrtreatment #asmrrelax #asmrbackscratching #asmrtracing #asmrhairplay #asmr #asmrtingles #asmrsleep
Then, I saw that she travels and does pop up events in other major cities. And she had one coming up in Chicago. Well, now there’s a drive I can do. Is it five hours? Yeah. Did I book an appointment anyways? Oh yeah.
Julie was so sweet and friendly, and I had an amazing experience with her. Before our session began, she asked me if there were any specific triggers I wanted her to focus on, and I mentioned I really wanted the back scratching with the claws I’ve seen in her videos:
@soft.touch.asmr.spa Could you handle the IRL tingles? Book a Soft Touch ASMR Massage & feel it yourself
(link in bio / softtouchasmr.com) Soft Touch is LA’s 1st & only ASMR Spa for gals, trans & non-binary pals
#softtouch #asmrmassage #fyp #asmrtok #asmrspa #asmrirl #asmr #asmrbackscratching
Julie gave me the most relaxing hour ever, with tons of light touches, tickly scratching all over my back, arms, and shoulders, combing my hair softly, I was seriously in heaven. I had to try really hard not to completely fall asleep and miss everything.
It was such a calming escape, I started to wish I had booked the 90 minute experience instead of the 50 minute. I really thought that by the end, I would be totally touched-out and that it maybe wouldn’t even feel good anymore, but I was completely wrong and I was dreading it being over. I also determined I needed this treatment like, every single day from here on out. It really was so nice.
So, even though it was definitely a splurge and a five hour drive away, I am so glad I went and had such a unique, relaxing, awesome experience. It was only after I went all the way to Chicago that I learned she was doing a pop-up in Indianapolis and Columbus later that week, but I wasn’t that upset about it since I love Chicago anyways and had a fun time visiting there regardless.
Would you enjoy this kind of experience? Do you like ASMR videos? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!
-AMS
Crib Sheet: A Conventional Boy
Jul. 28th, 2025 12:30 pmcharlie_stross_diary_feedA Conventional Boy is the most recent published novel in the Laundry Files as of 2025, but somewhere between the fourth and sixth in internal chronological order—it takes place at least a year after the events of The Fuller Memorandum and at least a year before the events of The Nightmare Stacks.
I began writing it in 2009, and it was originally going to be a long short story (a novelette—8000-16,000 words). But one thing after another got in the way, until I finally picked it up to try and finish it in 2022—at which point it ran away to 40,000 words! Which put it at the upper end of the novella length range. And then I sent it to my editor at Tor.com, who asked for some more scenes covering Derek's life in Camp Sunshine, which shoved it right over the threshold into "short novel" territory at 53,000 words. That's inconveniently short for a stand-alone novel this century (it'd have been fine in the 1950s; Asimov's original Foundation novels were fix-ups of two novellas that bulked up to roughly that length), so we made a decision to go back to the format of The Atrocity Archives—a short novel bundled with another story (or stories) and an explanatory essay. In this case, we chose two novelettes previously published on Tor.com, and an essay exploring the origins of the D&D Satanic Panic of the 1980s (which features heavily in this novel, and which seems eerily topical in the current—2020s—political climate).
(Why is it short, and not a full-sized novel? Well, I wrote it in 2022-23, the year I had COVID19 twice and badly—not hospital-grade badly, but it left me with brain fog for more than a year and I'm pretty sure it did some permanent damage. As it happens, a novella is structurally simpler than a novel (it typically needs only one or two plot strands, rather than three or more or some elaborate extras). and I need to be able to hold the structure of a story together in my head while I write it. A Conventional Boy was the most complicated thing I could have written in that condition without it being visibly defective. There are only two plot strands and some historical flashbacks, they're easily interleaved, and the main plot itself is fairly simple. When your brain is a mass of congealed porridge? Keeping it simple is good. It was accepted by Tor.com for print and ebook publication in 2023, and would normally have come out in 2024, but for business reasons was delayed until January 2025. So take this as my 2024 book, slightly delayed, and suffice to say that my next book—The Regicide Report, due out in January 2026—is back to full length again.)
So, what's it about?
I introduced a new but then-minor Laundry character called Derek the DM in The Nightmare Stacks: Derek is portly, short-sighted, middle-aged, and works in Forecasting Ops, the department of precognition (predicting the future, or trying to), a unit I introduced as a throwaway gag in the novelette Overtime (which is also part of the book). If you think about the implications for any length of time it becomes apparent that precognition is a winning tool for any kind of intelligence agency, so I had to hedge around it a bit: it turns out that Forecasting Ops are not infallible. They can be "jammed" by precognitives working for rival organizations. Focussing too closely on a precise future can actually make it less likely to come to pass. And different precognitives are less or more accurate. Derek is one of the Laundry's best forecasters, and also an invaluable operation planner—or scenario designer, as he'd call it, because he was, and is, a Dungeon Master at heart.
I figured out that Derek's back-story had to be fascinating before I even finished writing The Nightmare Stacks, and I actually planned to write A Conventional Boy next. But somehow it got away from me, and kept getting shoved back down my to-do list until Derek appeared again in The Labyrinth Index and I realized I had to get him nailed down before The Regicide Report (for reasons that will become clear when that novel comes out). So here we are.
Derek began DM'ing for his group of friends in the early 1980s, using the original AD&D rules (the last edition I played). The campaign he's been running in Camp Sunshine is based on the core AD&D rules, with his own mutant extensions: he's rewritten almost everything, because TTRPG rule books are expensive when you're either a 14 year old with a 14-yo's pocket money allowance or a trusty in a prison that pays wages of 30p an hour. So he doesn't recognize the Omphalos Corporation's LARP scenario as a cut-rate knock-off of The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan, and he didn't have the money to keep up with subsequent editions of AD&D.
Yes, there are some self-referential bits in here. As with the TTRPGs in the New Management books, they eerily prefigure events in the outside world in the Laundryverse. Derek has no idea that naming his homebrew ruleset and campaign Cult of the Black Pharaoh might be problematic until he met Iris Carpenter, Bob's treacherous manager from The Fuller Memorandum (and now Derek's boss in the camp, where she's serving out her sentence running the recreational services). Yes, the game scenario he runs at DiceCon is a garbled version of Eve's adventure in Quantum of Nightmares. (There's a reason he gets pulled into Forecasting Ops!)
DiceCon is set in Scarfolk—for further information, please re-read. Richard Littler's excellent satire of late 1970s north-west England exactly nails the ambiance I wanted for the setting, and Camp Sunshine was already set not far from there: so yes, this is a deliberate homage to Scarfolk (in parts).
And finally, Piranha Solution is real.
You can buy A Conventional Boy here (North America) or here (UK/EU).
Skin-Singer - Cover Reveal!
Jul. 27th, 2025 09:43 pmalpennia_feedThe collected skin-singer stories are now on their way to publication! I just pushed the buttons for the ebook and POD versions at Draft2Digital a few minutes ago. (I need to set up Kindle separately, so I haven't done that quite yet.) Official release date will be August 10 (assuming I did that correctly at the website).
This is my first professional (i.e., for-sale) self-published fiction, so I've been picking up a lot of new skills and experiences along the way. I worked with a fabulous cover artist: The Illustrated Page Book Design (Sarah Waites).
Next steps are to set up distribution for Kindle. (For various logistical reasons, as advised by more experienced people, everything is simpler if I do that separately from D2D.) Also look into distributing through at least one other outlet that D2D doesn't handle. Eventually I should set up a direct sale apparatus on my website, but that will take consultation with my web designers. I also plan to record it for audiobook.
Once I have buy links available, they will of course be added.
A Haywood Duet
Jul. 27th, 2025 07:09 pmalpennia_feed
Part chance and part strategy, I'm in the middle of a sequence of pairs of related articles: 2 on linguistics, 2 on Eliza Haywood, 2 on bluestockings, 2 on anatomical issues.
The other thing I'm in the middle of that I'll be posting more about in the near future is my first self-published book project. I just received the final versions of the cover art this morning and will be completing the set-up process in Draft2Digital. My target was to have the book out for Worldcon (just because it makes a useful deadline). Not sure if I'll have hardcopies in time, but the ebook will definitely be available. Oh...what's that you say? What is the book about? Well, let's save that for it's own separate post.
Ingrassia, Catherine. 2014. “’Queering’ Eliza Haywood” in Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Vol. 14, No. 4, New Approaches to Eliza Haywood: The Political Biography and Beyond: 9-24
In this article, Ingrassia challenges scholarship that views 18th century novelist Eliza Haywood’s work as depicting only heterosexual relationships and instead points out and discusses many aspects of her fiction that represent a wide spectrum of relations between women that range from the homosocial to the homoerotic. [Note: This article has a lot of literary theory jargon, which I tend to find of less interest, so I’ll mostly be focusing on the discussions of the content of Haywood’s work.]
Just because an author is working within a heteronormative framework doesn’t negate other underlying themes. Analysis that ignores those themes simply because they don’t represent the overt message of the work distorts our understanding of the era and the work. [Note: Another key factor here, though Ingrassia doesn’t state it explicitly, is how bisexual erasure works to cover up sapphic readings. As noted in the introduction to The Lesbian Premodern, there has long been a tendency to categorize a historic person as “lesbian” only in the complete absence of heterosexual relationships, while a historic man may be categorized as homosexual on the basis of any homosexual relations.] Thus same-sex intimacies in works like The British Recluse have been dismissed because they occur in a context where the two women are sharing their past betrayals by the same man. The two women admire each other from the moment they meet, then bond through a sharing of grief. In the end, they become a bonded couple living in “perfect tranquility, happy in the real friendship of each other” and shunning heterosexual relations. The details of their shared life from that point is not presented, only their attachment. This has allowed scholars to dismiss the motif as simply “female friendship,” ignoring the vast scope of experiences such a phrase contains in what Ingrassia calls a “failure of the historical imagination.”
Ingrassia observes that Haywood routinely “critique[s] and resist[s] heteronormative structures” with her characters finding ways to escape or transform those structures to exist outside of gender restrictions. The central relationship of The Rash Resolve presents a woman betrayed in a heterosexual relationship (with the aid of a female accomplice) who finds solace, safety, and emotional intimacy with a rich and beautiful widow.
In other works, Haywood emphasizes intimacies between women without the need for a precipitating event that turns them against heterosexuality. In the mosaic text of The Tea Table the connective tissue is the relations between a group of educated and literary women who support each other’s creative endeavors. In a wildly different context, The Masqueraders details the amorous adventures of a rake, whose female partners take even greater enjoyment in then sharing stories of their experiences with each other.
In The City Jilt two women who are intimate and loyal friends scheme together for financial revenge on one woman’s faithless ex, after which they (temporarily) renounce men and live together for a time until one is compelled by necessity to marry again. There are other examples of female intimacies embedded within otherwise heterosexual frameworks. In The History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy, the two title characters, engaged since childhood, are oddly indifferent to moving their marriage along, wanting a chance to enjoy the adventures of single life first. For Jenny, this consists of circulating in female spheres: living with two sisters in Bath, sharing gossip with friends (including an anecdote about the madcap adventures of a married woman which includes an “adventure in Covent-Garden—where she went in men’s cloaths—pick’d up a woman of the town, and was severely beaten by her on the discovery of her sex” in a rough acknowledgment of potential same-sex erotics, before the woman returns to her husband for enthusiastic make-up sex. She is background to the main story, but presents an illustration of imaginable possibilities.
This theme—of a secondary character illustrating wider erotic options—also occurs in The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless in an episode late in the novel in which Betsy becomes instantly fascinated by Mademoiselle de Roquelair on encountering her in a shop. “There was something in this lady that attracted her in a peculiar manner…delight in hearing her talk…longed to be of the number of her acquaintance.” She attempts such an acquaintance and is rebuffed, but later Roquelair appears at her door, late at night in dishabille, confiding that her lover—Betsy’s brother—has thrown her out and asking for assistance. An imaginative space is opened in which Betsy’s fascination is rewarded by intimate friendship, but instead Roqualair moves in, becomes the mistress of Betsy’s husband, and supplants her. But this conclusion is made possible by Betsy’s flash of desire and attraction.
Tea with Eliza Haywood
Jul. 26th, 2025 07:49 pmalpennia_feed
I've been trying to figure out how to write a podcast on Eliza Haywood without actually having to read a bunch of 18th century novels.
Ingrassia, Catherine. 1998. “Fashioning Female Authorship in Eliza Haywood’s ‘The Tea-Table’” in The Journal of Narrative Technique, vol. 28, no. 3, pp. 287–304.
I’ve been meaning to track down as much queer-aligned scholarship on Eliza Haywood as I can find, with the aim of doing a podcast on her. (Mind you, it would make sense to actually read a bunch of Haywood’s fiction for that purpose, but working my way through older literature is a bit of a slog.) Catherine Ingrassia seems to have made Haywood a focus, so her work may end up being a large part of any essay I do.
# # #
This article looks at contrasting concepts of “woman writer” and “professional author” in the 18th century, using the lens of Eliza Haywood’s writing, and specifically the discussions around writing and authorship contained in her work The Tea-Table. In the early 18th century, resistance to the idea of women as “writers” (which had influenced many women to circulate their work only in manuscript among private social circles) was shifting to resistance specifically to women as professional writers, i.e., ones who aspired to make a living at it. The feeling (other than masculine jealousy) was that for a woman to become the sort of public figure that came from professional authorship was immodest and destructive of domestic happiness.
Haywood’s 1725 The Tea-Table: or, A Conversation between some Polite Persons of Both Sexes at a Lady’s Visiting Day challenges these ideas, showing a (fictional) literary circle enthusiastically sharing and commenting on each others’ literary output. The work included a number of the metafictional works (all written by Haywood, of course). The Tea-Table was intended to be a periodical, but was not continued. Haywood not only wrote professionally, but had her own print shop and engaged in the hands-on work of publishing and distributing her work.
The Tea-Table challenges the idea that a female domestic space (the “tea table”) concerns itself only with trivial gossip, instead creating a vision of a supportive female-centered community (though it doesn’t entirely exclude men, as long as they align with the interests of the women) focused on literature. Her fictional community is not simply “female centered” but is specifically one that valorizes and prioritizes connections between women across a wide range of manifestations. They comment on how society expects them to spend their time competing and criticizing other women and then reject those activities.
There are implications—those never outright admissions—of female romantic partnerships, or simply a rejection of heterosexuality, among the women. The hostess is described as having arranged her life so as to be able to avoid male bonds. She has a “long intimacy” with another member of the circle, and in the final episode of the story, she receives a letter from a long-absent female friend who will soon be returning—new which transforms her with happiness. One of the poems shared is a eulogy written by one woman on the death of her female companion. All these connections are taken as expected and usual by the women of the circle.
The narrative voice praises the beauty of women at the table, and the only positive intimate relationships in the narrative are between women, while the literature they share with each other touches on the hazards of being female in society: marital unhappiness, betrayal by men. They have carried these texts on them, not only to share, but to read for their own sake, and to receive suggestions for improvement or polishing. Their reading is a collaborative experience, repeating favorite passages, and overlapping in their commentary.
When the tea-table conversation is interrupted by the arrival of a woman who only wants to discuss fashion and gossip, the disruption and rejection is clear. And the cooperation and reciprocity of the literary sharing is specifically contrasted with the competitive air of male writers, desperate for attention.
Throughout the work, casually references and citations demonstrate Haywood’s familiarity not only with the standard literary canon, but with the publishing community of her day. Yet Haywood’s role itself—the female professional author—is not represented in The Tea-Table. Her characters are all writers, but not authors, sharing manuscript works, not published texts.
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Doesn’t she look happy? Of course she does. Her life is pretty sweet, after all, lots of love and walks and rolls in the grass. It’s good to be a pup.
Also, for those who don’t know, yes, indeed, I do officiate weddings! It’s for friends and such. I mean, I was probably going to be at the wedding anyway. Why not make myself useful.
We’ll be back on Monday. Until then, have a fabulous weekend, and if you’re in part of the US currently under a heat dome, keep yourself cool and remember to hydrate, okay? Thank you.
— JS
The Big Idea: Payton McCarty-Simas
Jul. 24th, 2025 12:36 pmscalziwhatever_feed
It may not be Halloween, but that shouldn’t stop you from learning about the history of depictions of witches throughout the decades in film and media. Author and witch-film-connoisseur Payton McCarty-Simas is here today to take you through a wild ride (on a broomstick) over feminism, horror, and women, in her new book, That Very Witch: Fear, Feminism, and the American Witch Film.
PAYTON MCCARTY-SIMAS:
More than anything else, my book, That Very Witch: Fear, Feminism, and the American Witch Film, is the product of hundreds of hours spent watching movies. I started the project that eventually became this book in college–– or, more specifically, during COVID, revisiting some of my comfort movies during lockdown. As I worked my way through more recent favorites like The Witch and Color Out of Space and old standbys like Rosemary’s Baby and George Romero’s Season of the Witch, I started noticing visual and thematic patterns. Soon, I was hooked on witch films (though as my list of favorites might suggest I always have been), and I started watching in earnest.
The big idea of That Very Witch is that, by tracing how depictions of witches evolve and change in American horror cinema over time, we can learn about the state of feminism in a given moment, essentially taking the cultural temperature in the process. I trace specific threads through the decades––namely psychedelic imagery, counterculturalism, and feminine rage among others––but each and every smaller idea relied on a huge amount of cinematic data to really put my finger on. I watched over three hundred hours of film for this project, noting different patterns and shifts from decade to decade over hundreds of pages of notes, several Letterboxd lists, and a slightly unhinged-looking conspiracy board.
While all genres move in cycles that capitalize on trends––consider the YA dystopian romance boom that followed The Hunger Games––horror is particularly trenchant given the films’ consistent popularity, relatively low budgets, and quick turnarounds. Simply put, the industry makes a lot of horror movies looking for a quick buck, and, given that profit-motive, producers are always responding to popular demand for a given subject. The terrifying proto-viral success of The Blair Witch Project gives us an explosion of found footage horror, and eventually the runaway blockbuster that was Paranormal Activity, which in turn gives us a rash of suburban hauntings, and so on. As scholars like Robin Wood have long suggested, then, horror can be viewed as an extension of our collective unconscious (in his words our “collective nightmares”), our national fears made manifest at the intersection of broad commercial incentives, personal artistic impulses, and the zeitgeist.
When it comes to witches, I noticed that in moments of high-profile feminist activism, say, the 1960s or the 2010s, witches become more popular––and more frightening––on screen. That’s not to say that witches disappear in other eras, far from it. But the characters of those depictions take on different tones and valences depending on the politics and trends of the moment, and that’s just as indicative of the politics of the age. Witches can be mall goths or hippie chicks, old women in pointy hats or teenage girls in low-rise jeans and lip gloss (or all of the above!) depending on the decade. They can be frightening or funny or fierce. But it takes a lot of hours of films, not to mention countless hours of historical research, to understand what depictions are most common when, and why.
That Very Witch: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop |Kobo|Waterstones
Author’s socials: Website|Instagram|Tumblr|Letterboxd
Read an excerpt.
Starred Review of The Shattering Peace in Library Journal + Moon Review in the Seattle Times
Jul. 23rd, 2025 08:49 pmscalziwhatever_feed
A starred review means the Library Journal found The Shattering Peace particularly noteworthy, which makes me happy. The review is here, but I’ll quote the last line: “Highly recommended for readers who love broad sweeping space operas and science fiction with a high quotient of dry humor and witty sarcasm.” I bet that’s you, isn’t it?
Also, a lovely review of When the Moon Hits Your Eye in the Seattle Times, in which the reviewer says that they admire me “for my impressive ability to make readers laugh out loud and then realize mid-chuckle that there are larger, deeper themes at play.” It’s nice when reviewers pick up on that.
— JS
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