Desire, played very sexily by Mason Alexander Park, summons their sister Despair to talk with them about their plans for Dream. This is my least favorite thing: As in the comics, Despair is a fat lady, which is an exhausting and shitty depiction; here she has a northern accent and a cardigan, and it’s all just… crappy! I don’t know what to say! The show contains virtually no other fat characters or people from the north, so this is really a Choice. Anyway, Desire and Despair have a little chat about how they (mostly Desire) want to ruin Dream’s life. They’ve made efforts in the past, Desire reveals (Nada and Roderick Burgess), but now there is a “dream vortex,” a woman called Rose.

The aforementioned Rose is packing for a trip with the assistance of her friend Lyta and her roommate whose name I immediately forget. She’s trying to find Jed, who was placed in foster care sometime after their parting in 2015, but she doesn’t have the money to pay for a private investigator. Right now a London foundation has offered her a bunch of money to come do an oral history interview. We learn that Rose’s mother is really the one the foundation wanted, but she passed away before she could make the trip. Lyta, who is grieving her late husband Hector, is coming with instead. On the plane, she dreams of Hector. She is… not a good actress.

Back in the Dreaming, Lucienne has done a census and come up with a count of the entities that are still missing: a shape-changing nightmare called Gault, our old pal the Corinthian (well, we knew that one), and the previously very reliable Fiddler’s Green. Dream is surprised and upset by this last one. Lucienne also shares that there are rumors in the Dreaming of a dream vortex, which she advises Dream to investigate. He’s like, oh yeah, there is a vortex, yep, she could definitely destroy the Dreaming, but I’m not bothered. Really, Dream. Really. At Lucienne’s request, he sends Matthew to surveil Rose in the waking world so they’ll at least be keeping track of what’s going on with her.

Rose and Lyta arrive at a care home for the elderly, where they meet Unity Kincaid. Remember her? We are familiar with her! Way way back in the mists of time, she fell victim to the sleepy sickness that resulted from Dream being kidnapped by the Burgesses, and now she appears to be, like, sixty. This is not how time works! Are we meant to understand that she didn’t age normally because of reasons? She tells how in her dreams, she met a man with golden eyes and had a baby with him, and when she woke up she learned that she really did have a child, who grew up in turn to have a daughter of her own. This was Rose’s mother, Miranda, which makes this woman Rose’s great-grandmother.

By chance, Rose walks into a room and encounters the three Fates. Because she does not know who they are, she doesn’t use her questions in the most useful way. They tell her to “beware dreams and houses” and express regret that she didn’t ask questions that would have allowed them to share more intel on the Corinthian, Jed, and Morpheus. Look. I will say this. They do not really answer the questions she asks, so much as criticize her question choices, and I truly feel that if they had wanted to share the intel, they could have found a way to do it within the context of her questions. For instance, she says “How do you know my name?” to which a quite cromulent answer would have been, “The Dream Lord, Morpheus, is looking for a woman called Rose Walker who is a dream vortex, which means that other supernatural beings also know who you are.” See? Information conveyed! Fuckin Fates.

When Rose tells Unity that she’s looking for her brother Jed, Unity proposes to fund the search and pay Rose a salary to go down to Cape Kennedy, Florida, and find Jed. This brings us most gloriously to John Cameron Mitchell, John Cameron Mitchell, like, this is the attention to detail that I have come to expect from the Sandman casting people. He plays Hal, the owner of the Florida B&B where Rose and Lyta will be staying. Other B&B residents including two creepy Goth spider ladies, a white bread couple called Barbie and Ken, and Stephen Fry. They go to speak with Jed’s caseworker, who can’t release any information about Jed and his foster family. This sucks. The B&B crowd cheers Rose up by taking her to lovely Hal’s lovely drag show — again, can’t say enough about the choice to cast John Cameron Mitchell in this role. She also meets Stephen Fry (his character’s name is Gilbert, but we’re not going to worry about that) when he helps her fight off some would-be muggers in an alley.

At a diner in Alabama, three convention organizers are trying to identify and recruit a guest of honor. One of them is fat, so there you go, one other fat character. And guess what! He’s a serial killer! Ha ha I hate it here. They all know that they want to recruit the Corinthian, and the woman proposes they do copycat murders. For fun! As the two dudes discuss the pros and cons of this plan, the woman goes to the bathroom, murders the waiter, and takes his eyes out, just like the Corinthian would do. The Corinthian bones, but does not murder, Rose’s roommate. Yay? His cover story is that he wants Rose to work for him, so that together they can put his old boss out of business. He gets a news alert about the eye murders and shows up at the diner to threaten the convention organizers. Except for, you know how sometimes you’ll be all geared up to be angry at/murder some people, and then it turns out they’re your biggest fans and even though you’re still mad, it’s hard not to be flattered when people are so hyped about your work? You know? And then you accept their invitation to keynote at their conference without even inquiring whether they’re offering to cover your lodging and transportation and give you a per diem for meals?

(Actually: Does the Corinthian need to eat? Can the Corinthian eat? We know he can bone people’s roommates without them noticing anything weird about him, so I presume he can also eat if he wants to, but doesn’t have to?)

Dream and Lucienne realize that Rose’s brother’s connection with the Dreaming has, somehow, been severed. His last nightmare, prior to vanishing from the Dreaming, was of Gault, the missing nightmare. As they’re talking about what to do, Rose walks into the Dreaming all like “Hi. What?” To close things out, we flash on Jed trying to escape from his abusive foster father. His foster mother almost agrees that the two of them will flee, but then the foster father drives up all intimidating and puts Jed in the trunk of his car. I hate this. It’s a white foster family and a Black child. Anyway.

Despite the strong casting, this episode feels really lifeless. It’s so nearly a beat-for-beat redoing of the comic, with loads of exposition painstakingly delivered among the various characters. I generally approve the decision for Lyta to be integrated into Rose’s life, rather than existing in her own separate plotline, but the actress who plays Lyta is so (sorry!!) stiff and uninteresting that I struggled to stay engaged any time she was on screen. Can I get a remake of the episode where John Cameron Mitchell wanders around the Dreaming having a pleasant chat with Lucienne? I realize it wouldn’t advance the plot, but it would cluster my favorite characters from the episode together, and I think that would be nice.

The post Sandman, Episode 7: The Doll’s House appeared first on Reading the End.

There are going to be oblique and explicit spoilers in this post, so do not read it if you mind being spoiled! Also, please hop into the comments to chat with me about the conversation God and Harrow have in chapter 14, because I have… some ideas about it.

“I didn’t think this was the time for dirty talk, but I can roll with it,” [Ianthe] said. “Choke me, Daddy.” (p. 16)

It’s a meme!

“Each time, the news that you have not spent your life in acquiring martial virtues comes as a little less of a shock to me. But have a go. Surprise me. My body is ready.” (p. 21)

(thanks to dreadhorse actually for this one!)

“My body is ready” is also a meme! I am most familiar with it with the gif of Snape, but your mileage may very.

[Ianthe] said, “Well, I tried, and therefore no one should criticize me,” before ducking through the arch to the foyer beyond (p. 16-17).

I guess theoretically this is a reference to an SNL skit Dan Radcliffe was in, but as an extremely online person myself, I am prepared to state with optimistic confidence that it’s mainly just a reference to the relevant reaction gif.

“And what has a soul?”

You weren’t going to last the distance. The questions were beginning to sound stupid, or sophistic. The Body watched you with careful, filmy eyes. “Anything with a thalergetic complexity significant enough to… have a soul. So, humanity.”

The Emperor drummed his fingertips atop the plain coffin, and he said, a little whimsically: “Why have we not an immortal soul? I would give gladly all the hundreds of years that I have to live, to be a human being only for one day.” (p.40)

This is one of the ones I had to look up! The italicized bits are from “The Little Mermaid,” by Hans Christian Anderson, and it occurs during a conversation the little mermaid is having with her grandmother, in which the grandmother tells her how she could get a soul, which mermaids don’t currently have:

“Only if a human loved you so much that you meant more to him than father and mother. If he were to love you with all his heart and soul and let the priest place his right hand in yours as a promise to be faithful and true here and in all eternity — then his soul would glide in your body and you, too, would obtain a share of human happiness. He would give you a soul and yet keep his own. But that can never happen.”

I don’t really have any conclusions to draw from this, but it’s thematically interesting!

“And just as when a soul is ripped untimely from a human being, when a soul is so rudely taken from a planet–” (p. 42)

Macbeth shout-out? I’m unsure. However, “Macduff was from his mother’s womb untimely ripped” is a line that occurs when our hero thinks he’s completely safe, and then someone he’s written off as a threat kills him dead.

“What’s more, now we are about to embark on what promises to be a truly beautiful friendship, with me the lone fruitful thing in your salted field, et cetera, so I’ll thank you to not embark on the I have been hard done by act.” (p. 63)

Never don’t have a Casablanca reference if life offers you the opportunity to have a Casablanca reference!

She hoped he never finished it. She hoped there was never world enough or time. (p. 71)

“Had we but world enough and time” is the first and most famous line of Andrew Marvell’s poem “To His Coy Mistress.”

“And you, you Ninth House child, are not remotely qualified to fight an outside predator. You are like a little baby.” (p.98)

ETA: Will Sargent notes that this is a reference to the Layers of Irony meme. Check out the comments for additional suspected video game references by Will — I haven’t included them in the list because they are in games so I can’t verify them and they aren’t specific page-numbered textual references to identify. Which is very annoying for me! I apologize for not being a video games person and being unable to check these. My failings are many.

You found yourself saying, “Someone’s crying, Lord,” but he just made a nonsense sound beneath his breath, a mumbled word that you didn’t recognise. (p.104)

Is this a “Kumbaya” reference?? Feels like it.

You said, “A Seventh House flaw. A fatal longing for the picturesque.” (p.155)

When I tell you I screamed. This is from The Secret History, my beloved The Secret History!

Does such a thing as “the fatal flaw,” that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn’t. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.”

It’s the first paragraph of the first chapter of The Secret History. Bless Tamsyn Muir.

“Blood of Eden,” he’d said slowly.

“Who is Eden?”

“Someone they left to die,” said God wearily. “How sharper than the serpent’s tooth, et cetera… Harrow, if you bother to remember anything from my ramblings, please remember this: once you turn your back on something, you have no right to act as though you own it.” (p. 159)

The line from King Lear is: “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child!”

I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS ABOUT THIS. Who’s the thankless child in this scenario? Is Eden the parent, and Blood of Eden is the thankless child to Eden? Is Eden the thankless child of God?

“We’re puppies, you and I: I with my lame paw, and you with three legs missing insisting you can make it on your own. And God help us both, because we are surrounded by wolves.” (p.170)

ETA: ten_tangents notes that this is a reference to Li’l Brudder, the name of a one-legged puppy that Strong Bad uses to make people cry.

“Here, I’m going to pretend to read this one off my tablet, when in fact it’s been with me for over ten thousand years. Here’s my favorite part…”

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee. (p. 196)

“Annabel Lee” is a beautiful, lulling, creepy poem by Edgar Allan Poe about a dead girl in a tomb. It notably contains the line “And neither the angels in Heaven above / Nor the demons down under the sea [!!!!] / Can ever dissever my soul from the soul [!] / of the beautiful Annabel Lee.”

ETA: Long after writing this post, I remembered that in Nabokov’s Lolita, Humbert Humbert refers to his first love (a girl he knew in adolescence, who died of typhus) as Annabel Leigh. In the book, he claims that his sexual and romantic interest in young girls is a result of his love for Annabel and the trauma of her early death. If Tamsyn Muir is doing this allusion on purpose, it’s very fucking effective. I got an absolute shiver when I thought of it. John is so sinister.

(Here’s something Humbert says about Annabel, presented without comment: “That frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other’s soul and flesh.”)

“It is a drawing of the letter S,” said the deep, solemn voice from over her shoulder, and she realized she had stopped midstride. “The letter in question is constructed from six short marks stacked vertically three by three. There are two triangles on the top and bottom, which, along with some diagonal strokes, form a calligraphic S.” (p. 205)

Okay, I can’t swear to it, but I think this is a reference to that weird letter S you used to doodle on all your homework pages. I don’t actually know how to google for that item, so I have just done one and photographed it. You’ll know exactly what I’m talking about once you see it.

“Never mind that. Was he actually…?” (Here she made an evil gesture with her hands, which you took a moment to comprehend. “You know. Waxing necrolagnic? Committing the love that cannot speak its name?” (p. 216-17)

Ugh this is a reference to that poem by Oscar Wilde’s horrible boyfriend Bosie, ugh. You can read it if you want. Fuckin Bosie.

Then she said: “Children as fists! Infants as gestures! Yuck! Pfaugh! I live in the worst of all possible worlds!” (p. 257)

Leibniz, a philosopher, came up with the idea that we live in the best of all possible worlds, ipso facto, because if God is able to create anything, and God chose to create this specific universe, then God did so because this specific universe is the best of all possible worlds. It’s a very well things could be worse solution to the problem of evil. Thanks for nothing, Leibniz. YES I INCLUDE CALCULUS IN THAT.

(Ugh, no, fine, okay, thanks for calculus I guess, Leibniz.)

ETA: Jeanne and Sparrow both identified that Voltaire’s Candide (which I haven’t read!) makes fun of the concept of “the best of all possible worlds,” and suggested that this passage aligns the Lyctors with the kind of naivete and ignorance of broader context that Voltaire is critiquing in Candide.

[Augustine] looked at you, and relieved your mind by not kissing you anywhere; he simply raised his eyebrows and said, “And so the crow can be a swan!” (p.267)

Romeo and Juliet reference — Benvolio says to Romeo, “Compare her face with some that I will show, / And I will make thee think thy swan a crow.”

PS Augustine is so rude!

“Just believe me when I say that when I want Ortus to go, he’ll be giddy-gone.” (This did not make much sense to you, as a joke.) (p. 268)

This isn’t a reference to anything, but since I missed the joke on the first two readings of Harrow, I wanted to flag it for y’all. He’s not saying Ortus, he’s saying Gideon. When I want Gideon to go, he’ll be giddy-gone. Get it? Ha!

“Stop drawing this out! Tell me!”

He cleared his throat and said: “Dios apate, minor.” (p. 269)

I resent Dios apate for being Greek and not Latin, which meant I had to google it instead of knowing it in my very bones. Anyway, it means “deception of God” and it’s a reference to a thing that happens in Book XIV of the Iliad, where Hera sneakily gets various gods to help her seduce Zeus until he falls asleep, giving Poseidon the opening he needs to help the Greeks succeed in battle against the Trojans. Amusingly she performs the seduction on Mount Ida! (Ianthe is the Princess of Ida, in case anyone has forgotten that detail.)

“The Cohort took the rest of him away. And I don’t know where they have put him.” (p. 306)

This is a call-out to the Gospel of, ironically, John (John 20), and the saddest line in it or, possibly, any other book. It’s so fucking desolate. The line actually occurs twice: Mary Magdalene first notices that Jesus’s body is gone from the tomb (the rock has been rolled away, incidentally) and tells the other disciples:

Then she runneth, and cometh to Simon Peter, and to the other disciple, whom Jesus loved, and saith unto them, They have taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre, and we know not where they have laid him.

Then the disciples all go home, except for Mary Magdalene, who hangs around the tomb crying. Then these two angels show up, and the line occurs a second time, but sadder:

And they say unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? She saith unto them, Because they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him.

Oh, Camilla.

“It’s a Resurrection Beast, honey! Thank you! Next!!” (p. 335)

The Ariana Grande song!

ETA: Finn has pointed out that the number of exclamation points after “Next!!” make it near-certain that this is a reference to “Next!!” lady. Even better, honestly.

These next two are on the same page, which I think is truly and magnificently emblematic of the high/low culture shit that Tamsyn Muir pulls.

And I reignited the central star, and I called it Dominicus. As a reminder. Dominus illuminatio mea et salus mea, quem timebo? God is my light. (p. 344)

Being Catholic, I of course do not know Bible things, but I do know Latin and church songs! This translates: “The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom will I fear?” and it’s the first line of Psalm 27.

On the previous page, God actually says the whole thing in English: “I am your salvation and your light. Who should I fear?” And incidentally, in the climactic scene, Augustine calls it back: He tells God about a time when Mercy said, “What is God afraid of?”

(It’s Alecto, right? He’s scared of Alecto?)

I have capital-T Thoughts about John’s use of Dominus rather than Deus — Dominus has connotations of lordship and ownership that Deus really doesn’t, and Dominicus, the name of the sun of the Nine Houses, means something like “belonging to the Lord.” Soooooo if this is a reminder, it’s an pretty creepy one! He named Dominicus as a reminder to the Nine Houses that their sun belongs to him. Eurgh.

ETA: Sparrow adds to this that Dominus illuminatio mea is the motto of Oxford.

THEN ON THE SAME PAGE:

So I’m shut in here — walled in, really — to prevent the Nine Houses becoming none houses, with left grief. (p. 344)

I’m so mad at this one. Mad at myself, really, for knowing it. I regret everything that has led me to this moment. This is a meme about pizza from Domino’s, and truly, my life has been misspent that I know this. She rhymed beef and grief. I want to quit the gym.

“[A.L.] stood for a couple of things. A joke, mostly. I often called her Annabel Lee. Annie Laurie. When I first met her I just called her First, One. She had a real name, but I buried it with her, and nobody says it anymore.” (p. 345)

“Annie Laurie” is a Scottish ballad about a beautiful girl. John is just… really extremely fucking sinister.

The Heralds of Number Seven — the ghost of a swiftly murdered planet in the demesne of Dominicus — arrived that evening, around forty-three minutes before the habitation lights were due to go off. (p.357)

Lunula points out that “a swiftly murdered planet” is surely a reference to Madeleine L’Engle’s book A Swiftly Tilting Planet, which is one of the sequel books to A Wrinkle in Time.

“Continue that sentence,” she said, “and I’ll make it to the pain.” (p. 369)

A reference of course to The Princess Bride, amongst the greatest pieces of art in our time.

Poor Ortus doesn’t really deserve Harrow’s wrath.

I’m not sure if or how best to gloss chapters 40-42, but they’re all making reference to popular AU (alternate universe) premises in fanfic. Chapter 40 is doing the AU where the two main characters switch jobs (so if it were Supernatural, you might have an AU where Dean’s the angel and Cas is the hunter, etc.). Chapter 41 looks like a royalty AU situation. Chapter 42 is of course a coffee shop AU, and Gideon is the barista (BARI star).

I’d read any of those fics.

“If I forget you, let my right hand be forgotten,” her mouth was saying. “Add more also, if aught but death part me and thee.” (p. 380)

That first part is from Psalms 137 (which is about weeping by the river): “If I forget you, Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill.”

The second bit is from Ruth, when Ruth is vowing never to leave Naomi: “Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the LORD do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me.” It’s also a callback to the last thing Gideon says to Harrow before dying at the end of Gideon the Ninth.

“It was the morning of the third day in a universe without her cavalier; it was the morning of the third day.” (p. 399)

Oh Harrow, oh honey.

Obvi this is a reference to Jesus, who was resurrected on the third day.

She opened her mouth to ask her dead second cavalier a question about her dead first cavalier — a pattern that was starting to look less like tragedy and more like carelessness — but downstairs, Abigail was [talking]. (p. 403)

This is a reference to a famous line from Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, where Lady Bracknell says to Jack, “To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.” (h/t to Sparrow for this one!)

“What is the plan, Pent?”

“Why, to let ghosts bury ghosts,” she said. (p. 403)

I am not sure about this one, and usually when I have not felt fairly sure, I’ve left it alone. But there’s at least a definite echo here of Luke 9, where Jesus says, “Let the dead bury their dead; but go thou and preach the kingdom of God.”

ETA: On page 311 of Gideon the Ninth, when Harrow is forbidding Gideon to see Dulcinea on the grounds that she’s going to die no matter what Gideon does, she says, “Let the dead reclaim the dead.” Make of this what you will!

Again, let me say: sorry. It was not my thumb to let them bite off. I admit completely that this was my bad, but these motherfuckers had a hunger that only thumbs could satisfy. (p.405)

I went into a weird research rabbit hole trying to figure this one out. I KNEW IT WAS A THING and I was right; I just couldn’t figure out what the thing was. But I eventually figured it out, for I am persistent. It’s a reference to this thing called “Llamas with Hats” that for some reason exists. Here’s the relevant bit. It’s very cursed.

“Call me by my full name, or don’t name me at all. I’ll be damned if I pass up the chance to hear you speak the words.”

The Emperor of the Nine Houses sighed.

“Commander Awake Remembrance of These Valiant Dead,” he said.

“All of it.”…

“Awake Remembrance of These Valiant Dead Kia Hua Ko Te Pai Snap Back to Reality Oops There Goes Gravity,” he recited, all in one breath. “Correct?” (p. 465)

“Awake remembrance of these valiant dead,” is a line from the first act of Henry V, when the men of the church are trying to convince Henry V that he has a claim to the throne of France and should definitely go to war with them. Henry V is one of those plays where you’re always like “wait, so then did Shakespeare like war / beating up women / anti-Semitism or is he critiquing it?” and the answer is always, unsatisfyingly, probably both.

Kia hua ko te pai is a line from the Māori version of the New Zealand national anthem.

“Snap back to reality oops there goes gravity” is — as my friend Julia told me! — a line from the Eminem song “Lose Yourself.”

“Mercymorn the First, Augustine the First, meet Commander Wake Me Up Inside, sincerest apologies if I got that wrong,” said the Emperor. (p. 468)

“Wake me up inside” is from the Evanescence song “Bring Me to Life.” As with the none pizza left beef joke, I somehow regret knowing this one more than I regret most of my knowledge. I think it’s because in those cases, I just deeply wish my brain had chosen to allot that space to something better — but no, here comes Evanescence in my head all like Save me from the noooothiiiiiiing I’ve beco-o-ome! Bah.

Augustine said, “The eyes have it, John.” (p.480)

This is such a silly play on the ayes have it that I am including it here, I found it extremely charming.

Mercy turned around to Augustine. She was not weeping now.

“It is finished,” she said.

This is again from the Gospel of John. John 19:30 says: “When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost.”

He murmured, “You said there was no forgiveness.”

“‘I pardon him, as God shall pardon me,'” said the Emperor. (p. 491)

That’s a line from the end of Richard II, where Henry Bolingbroke, who will shortly become Henry IV (of Henry IV Part I and Henry IV Part II fame), agrees to pardon someone who has rebelled against his kingship. He does so because the guy’s mother begged for his life. Then he executed everybody else who was involved in the rebellion

If you are like wow I have never read Richard II and maybe I want to but eh maybe not, can I point you toward the Andre Holland radio play version recently released by WNYC and the Public Theater?

“Yes, well, jail for Mother,’ I said. (p. 498)

This is a reference to a Patricia Lockwood tweet that went sufficiently viral that she did a whole interview on Vulture about it.

Hooooo boy that was a thing I just spent a whole bunch of time on, wasn’t it? I’m embarrassed for myself and you should all be embarrassed with me, but this is what quarantine has done to me apparently.

The post Harrow the Ninth, Glossed appeared first on Reading the End.

Docile is set in a near-future alt-America where, according to its author, racism does not exist. It is about debt slavery in the city of Baltimore,¹ yet it never talks about or engages with historical American slavery. As a white southerner who is keenly aware of how hard our country works to conceal and minimize American slavery, American racism, and the continued impact of both on Black communities, I believe that this premise is doing the work of white supremacy, despite what I am sure are the good intentions of its white author. I would encourage folks to check out what queer Black critics have said about the book here, here, and here.

And now, the transcript!

(tw for talk of slavery, rape, and abuse)

NKJ: Oh, we’re live.

KMS: We’re live.

NKJ: It seems to have worked, yay!

KMS: Yay, let’s go for more than 40 seconds this time.

NKJ: That would be nice. That would be really nice. Hi folks, thank you for joining us. As you can see, we’re actually doing this today and hopefully, we’ll actually last for a bit. So just as a general thing, I’m N.K. Jemisin.

KMS: I’m K.M. Szpara.

NKJ: Okay. And we’re going to talk a little bit about this, but this is actually part of a little series I’m trying to do to highlight other authors who have books coming out during the pandemic because it’s a scary time to have a book coming out, let me tell you. But anyway we’re going to get right into it. Kellan has a reading that you wanted to do, or did you want to introduce and such first? It’s up to you.

KMS: Sure, let’s introduce.

NKJ: We could probably do that.

KMS: Yeah.

NKJ: So I’m N.K. Jemisin. I have written many books. My latest one is The City We Became, which is out now from Orbit, and which came out literally two weeks ago on the day that they declared lockdown in New York City. Woohoo! I just finished a virtual book tour because I was not allowed to go on my regular one. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to possibly infect people or myself. So that was fun. And I have won awards and things, so that’s me.

KMS: I am K.M. Szpara, but you’re welcome to call me Kellan, not that I think we can directly talk. That’s okay! My pronouns are he/him. I’m a queer and trans author of also some short science fiction that was nominated for the Hugo and Nebula. And I just turned in my second book which is called First Become Ashes and we will have covers soon. I am very excited! It looks beautiful next to Docile.

NKJ: Congratulations on turning in a book, oh my gosh.

KMS: Thank you, that was really hard. Everyone’s like, “you’re just sitting on your couch, you have so much time to work” and I’m like, “I can’t even do anything except for play Animal Crossing right now.” That’s the hardest brain function that I have. So yeah, I think we both just finished big things so we deserve to relax.

NKJ: Yeah, I’m there. And belated apologies, my own pronouns are she/her, I should have said that in the beginning.

KMS: So I have two little short things I am going to read. If you’ve read the book, you know them. If you haven’t read the book, they will not spoil anything. I think it’s not too much of a spoiler to say that Elisha refuses Dociline, that’s the drug that helps people forget what’s happening to them and also makes them more eager to serve.

NKJ: Is Piper in your lap?

KMS: Piper’s in my lap. This is my dog, Piper. She knocked my computer over before we started, so hope that doesn’t happen again.

I’m going to first do a little reading from Alex’s point of view. He is a trillionaire and Elisha signs a contract with him. This is his interview with Elisha.

(KMS reads two scenes. The first is the interview scene, the second is the scene where Elisha refuses Dociline)

NKJ: This is my first time running a Crowdcast event that has not fallen apart, so my apologies in advance if it takes me a second to do things. Now we’re going to segue to a little bit of back and forth. I had some questions that I wanted to ask basically as soon as I finished Docile. Doe-cile, not Duh-cile?

KMS: I say Duh-cile, not Doe-cile but as soon as it was asked of me for the audiobook I started googling “how do you pronounce docile?” There are three or four different ways and of course, Lee Harris who is British and works for Tor.com says “doe-cile” so I’ve now heard solidly three ways to pronounce the work and I don’t care. I say Duh-cile.

NKJ: I don’t know where I picked up Doe-cile from. Maybe I have British friends or something? So I noticed in the poll that 14 percent of the people who are here have not yet finished the book or are still reading the book, and it looks like 29 percent haven’t read it at all but are still curious. For basically that chunk of you, my next question is going to be a spoiler. So you can please turn off your audio for a period and then Kellan, what do you want to do?

KMS: I will give the thumbs up and will hold it for ten seconds. I’ll give the thumbs up when I’m done with the spoilers. I will try not to do spoilers throughout but if I do, I will say so in advance.

NKJ: Okay, so audio off. So my first question is, let’s start with the end of the book. I had capital F feelings about Alex and Elisha ending up in a proto, possible relationship state instead of a no-contact forever state. To me, Alex is given a redemption arc that he makes steps towards earning but that, honestly, I don’t think he can ever possibly earn back. And I found myself frustrated that Elisha was so forgiving. So why did you decide on this ending?

KMS: Sure. So when we made up the AO3 tags for this book we called Elisha “Sweet Cinnamon Roll of Steel.” He is, unlike many characters, a very kind person generally. But that aside, when people talk about redemption arcs, most people are pretty over redemption arcs. But for me, there’s not really such a thing as an arc that has an ending. I don’t think that Alex has reached an endpoint. I think that people, all people, are flawed and make mistakes and are constantly reevaluating and putting themselves on the path of… path of “redemption” is not a great word because I don’t think people can be redeemed.

(NKJ says something inaudible)

KMS: I’m going to pull an L. Ron Hubbard real fast, I need money. I would never do that.

KMS: I don’t think that Alex is redeemed. I don’t think that anyone is redeemed. My goal is for him to take the mental, emotional and when I say physical steps, I mean taking actions, like forsaking his family and moving on without his money and working towards helping the cause of people who have been affected by Dociline and sort of like giving Elisha space when asked for, learning how to respect boundaries. Lots of stuff sort of sets him on the path of… for lack of a better word, redemption, even though I still don’t like that. People get to change. I think people get to change. We all fuck up (there’s going to be cursing on this live stream).

NKJ: We’re fucking cursing around here.

KMS: People fuck up and he’s born into a system where all the people around him show him one thing and reinforce his worldview so he has no motivation to expose himself to people who make him feel bad.

NKJ: Home training.

KMS: Yeah. I remember growing up and there are things that I picked up from my environments, school, family functions, friends, television, whatever, that made me think things that I’m not proud of now but I work hard to flush those things out both with physical actions and emotionally all the time. I don’t think of Alex as redeeming himself. Elisha making that choice, that aspect of it… at some point, you have to let people make their own decisions. So many people so fast went at Elisha and were like you can’t see him, you can’t be in love with him, everything you think is fake, you don’t like the piano just because you think you do, just because it was given to you, you can’t use those clothes. And like, he’s got this full personality assembled for him by someone else and now he ‘s told none of it is real and it’s so traumatic for him! Do you have to go against everything you believe just to — hello cats!

NKJ: Sorry.

KMS: My dog is now sitting in the next room yipping like I’m going to go pay attention to her.

I mean at a certain point, Elisha is like, I have to be allowed to choose what I want in the moment and that means for me at the end (me as in Elisha) that I am allowed to acknowledge that I do care about Alex without calling it a romantic relationship. So he decides to maintain a semblance of contact and to do so in a way that is productive for them both, meaning working for the betterment of people who have been affected by Dociline. There are two ends of it. There’s Alex trying to learn and figure himself into a new helpful and productive better person. And there’s also Elisha being like, look there are some things that I like that I don’t want to get rid of or maybe I want to get rid of them in the future but let me figure that out. Other people can’t figure that out for you. It’s like someone telling you, in terms that maybe most of our audience might understand… you know, this book, you revised it a million times, maybe you should just put it aside. You’re going to give that book up when you want to give that book up, but not before. That’s a really hard decision. He in his own time will make his own decision and that’s why there’s not a sequel. If anyone didn’t know that surprise, there will not be a sequel.

NKJ: That’s what fanfic is for.

KMS: Yeah, you know. You can make fanfic. Don’t link me to it but I will know it is there in my heart. You can make fan art though and link me to that. Especially the sexy fan art.

KMS: That’s why I wrote this book. So people will make sexy fanart!

NKJ: That’s the best reason to be a writer these days (laughing).

KMS: My real reason to become a writer… It’s so that I will become super famous and that Hanson, my favorite band from the ’90s, reads my book and falls in love with me. That’s it. That’s the secret.

NKJ: Okay. all right. I mean, I was a hip hop kid in the ’90s. But you know, go for what you know. Oh, we should signal that the spoiler question is done.

KMS: Spoiler is done.

NKJ: I have another question, which is… When you decided to write this novel did you worry about whether you’d find an agent or a publisher and did you have any trouble with either, or did they snap it up and beat down the door to give you a contract?

KMS: I was definitely worried. When I started writing I sort of learned what fantasy and science fiction looked like from… I knew a couple of other writers but I wasn’t plugged into the community until at least 2012. Not even then. Even after I published my first story, maybe not even until 2013 or so. I didn’t even know what a Hugo or a Nebula was. I wasn’t raised on it; I was raised on fanfiction. And there’s like twenty Anne Rice books behind me on the shelf.

I had started writing, “Oh they kiss at the end of a book.” And I was like okay, but what if they dry hump a little in the middle? People are like, “Unresolved sexual tension is the only way you can do it,” and I was like, “But what if they did do it very early on?” So I thought no one is going to want to publish this book that is basically all queer characters and there’s just so much fucking in it. And a lot of it is.. I’m going to use… I tend to use AO3 tags when I talk about the content of this book. There is a warning on the back cover that says this book has a frank depiction of rape and assault and abuse. That’s true but… When I say dubcon and noncon, I mean those in the phrases of Elisha the character trying to figure out what those various sexual encounters mean to him. So he doubts whether he consents or not, so that’s why I call it that sometimes. So I was not sure anyone would want that. I didn’t know if you could publish anything with that much sex in it. That was most of the reason I was nervous.

It took me about a year to get an agent but that’s because agents are busy people and not for any real reason. Honestly, the advice I’d heard from all my friends who’d published so far was “Start working on your next project immediately, don’t think about it when you go on sub” and that’s something I really learned and is one of the only bits of advice I would strongly give to people trying to make a career out of writing. Making a professional career out of writing is learning to fall in love over and over again with your next project which is very hard. I had already fallen in love with a second book which is now going to be my third book. It’s about vampires.

NKJ: Nice.

KMS: So I had already fallen in love with the next book. I was like “No one is going to buy this, I’m ready, it’s fine.” And then it was maybe two or three weeks and my agent was like “So we have a phone call with an editor,” and that shocked the hell out of me. I don’t think I ever got the experience of being on submission because it happened very fast.

NKJ: That’s a good sign though.

KMS: It was very good and really alleviated a lot of stress. We would get rejections on other ones and I was like “That’s fine we almost have an offer, I think, so I’m feeling good.” And I love working with my editor. I work with Carl Engle-Laird at Tor.com publishing and he gets my stuff and has said that anything you can throw at me, I can handle or I will look up. Which is great because my next book is heavy sadomasochism and chastity play. The one after that is a lot of vampire blood and kink.

(overlapping talk)

NKJ: I just added a new poll during the time that you were talking. The new poll is “Are you a fanfic person? Are you into it? Are you not?” We’ve got twenty-one votes already, all of them are “woohoo yes”. None are “ew no”, none are “what’s fanfic.” All right then, we’ve got lots of fanfic readers in here.

KMS: I am very lucky that I wrote almost all my fanfic in journals and they’re all over here on my shelf. They are my journals from when I was a child, so unless someone breaks into my house and scans them…

NKJ: They will never see the light of day.

KMS: It’s mostly me making out with Hanson.

NKJ: I didn’t even discover fanfic until I was in grad school and I’m super grateful for that. No one will ever see the stories that I wrote as a teenager. Nope. People ask, “Can you give me your papers after you’re done?” Nope. Fuck that.

KMS: As a strong fan of a band, I’m always a little like, I want all your unreleased songs. I want to hear everything you’ve ever made, it’s perfect. But as a writer… I do not let anyone look at anything that has not been through a professional editor.

NKJ: Nope, nope. “We want to see how you developed as a writer.” No, you don’t get to see that. It’s not your business. Mind your business.

Next question, why was it a choice for you to avoid the use of the word slavery for what is so obviously indentured servitude at the bare minimum and effectively, because debt is inherited and passed down and Elisha’s family’s case, it is effectively chattel slavery. So why did you decide to avoid the use of this word and other words that clearly establish what’s happening here?

KMS: Sure. Not everyone avoids the word. Not a tangent but an inclusive is that the word “rape” only appears a couple of times. For me, “slavery” and “rape” are both very strong words that are specific namers of intense traumas and not everyone in the world of Docile has that vocabulary. The people that are making the rules are… we either have Alex’s point of view or Elisha’s point of view. Alex’s point of view is so full of that “people of means.” Okay for the record, I coined “people of means” in my book and then someone in real life said it.

NKJ: You did it first.

KMS: And I was like, “No this is not the kind of thing I want coming true.” So people like Alex are saying things like, “I’m a patron.”

NKJ: “This is a business relationship.”

KMS: “This is a Docile.” When you are in the ruling class and you make up this language, it’s harder for people to realize what’s happening to them. It’s harder for people to name their specific traumas. It’s sort of part of the bow that’s wrapped around the nefariousness of the Docile system. In fact, even words like “debtor” are very rarely spoken except when couched in like, “Ohh, a debtor.” So I think that the Empower Maryland folks will say “debt slavery” and they also use the word “rape.” So only the people who have sort of “seen beyond the veil” so to say. When I talk about people learning and growing and starting to see the systems that they are a part of, only the people at Empower Maryland have progressed to the point where they can name specific things.

NKJ: Sorry to poke in. I love that most of the Empower Maryland people we meet seem to be people of color. That to me, that’s where we meet at least one other prominent black character. I would hope that in the future that when slavery returns that people like me would be at the front lines of breaking that shit down. But you know. We will see, I suppose.

KMS: Yeah. I think when we had a brief conversation before the live stream… It’s like, well, we always want to see ourselves in the roles of the protagonists and the revolutionaries but it was really important for me that people not only see themselves in Empower Maryland and in Elisha. I wanted them to see themselves in Alex too. I know people that are like Alex’s parents. I know people who are like Jess, who continues to work at Bishop Labs making Dociline even though she was a Docile herself. And one of the things we talked about beforehand is that… I did browse the questions and I just want to pop down. I’m gonna answer some of these that are related. One of them says some discussion about how race is handled in the speculative world of Docile so I’m just going to answer that now real quick since it’s tied into it.

So a couple of things. One for me is near future which is a sub-genre, marketing term. I always call it alt-near future. So that for me is… I’m not a futurist. I’m not a historian. I’m not an economist. I don’t think I’m predicting an exact future. When I write near future it is an alt-timeline or like a pocket universe where I have sort of picked the aspects of history that move forward versus those that don’t in order to tell the story that I want. So it’s not an exact near future, and when that happens I think that writers can often choose to go all in or go all out with including isms and phobias. And I think that people are sort of torn about… I don’t mean torn as if there’s a correct answer. But I think that people have differing opinions about whether they want to see those in fiction. Some people are like “I’m tired of homophobia. You’re inventing a world. Can you just not have it?” But I don’t think that you can do just one thing or another. So a world with no homophobia but racism feels like a bad world to me. So I didn’t try to put any systemic or interpersonal racism into my world. I am white and fallible so it is possible that there are aspects that leaked but it was my goal to have it set in a world where racism is not necessarily a founding part of society going forward.

And then I just tried to populate the world with a well balanced, diverse array of identities including race. For example, if Docile were made into a movie then it’s not a movie that could be anonymously cast, so to say. I very particularly tried to… for example Elisha couldn’t be a woman or black or trans even because the power balances would bring in a host of different dynamics that I did not think were my lane to play with or my story to tell. I just tried to sort of place people such that it highlighted the themes that I wanted to highlight and not to inadvertently bring up any additional negative connotations. I definitely put a lot more people of color in the Empower Maryland group though. I tried to make sure… there’s a lot of different class stuff going on so it was all about me trying to make sure that the things I wanted to highlight were highlighted without stepping out of my lane. And I think then that’s it for that question.

NKJ: Okay.

KMS: I did think though… I wrote down the questions and I think we skipped one that I would love… nope we didn’t. Pain, pleasure, and consent are next.

NKJ: I’m looking at just how many audience questions we have and I had a couple more questions myself but do you want to segue into doing audience questions?

KMS: Sure.

NKJ: In that case, I’m going to reduce myself so that you get the full bandwidth. If you mention the names of the person of the question you are answering I will highlight the question so it’s easier for you to see while you’re answering and will move it to the answered column.

KMS: I’m looking at the full list of questions here. Since it’s Sunday I can go a little bit over. The top next one says “please tell us about your next book.” I will do this very briefly because we haven’t had the big cover reveal yet. That’s Nino Cipri, hi, Nino. My next book is about a guy named Metalarc who is raised in a cult to believe that he has magic powers and that when he turns twenty-five he will save humanity from monsters and that his home is corrupt. When he is almost twenty-five, his partner goes out into the world first, because he is older, and betrays the cult to the outsider authorities, who send in a SWAT team and break up the cult immediately and tell them that magic is not real, monsters are not real and that everything they learned is a lie. So Metalarc doesn’t accept this. He meets a cute cosplaying nerd named Calvin who desperately wants to believe that magic is real and has a car, and the two of them go on a very gay kinky road trip to learn about themselves and discover if magic is real or if monsters are real, and do it in the woods. Yeah, that’s what my next book is about. I’m very excited.

And the one after that… I mentioned the vampires. My story that was nominated for the Hugo and Nebula, “Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time”, is about a gay trans guy who is pissing outside the gay bar because he’s too afraid to use the men’s room inside when he’s bitten by a vampire. And his body turns differently than a cis person’s body because it plays on the vampire tropes of like, “Oh you become so beautiful and your body heals” and what does that mean for someone who is medically altering their body and has gender issues? But it is eight weeks later when he is back at work. He is a real brat and it is very fun. I can’t wait to write that voice again.

This question I am very excited about, from Nicole. “I would really like to hear more about Dutch. I think the role(s) he played in the narrative are fascinating and dissonant, and I’d love to hear more about your thought process as you constructed his arc.”

This is going to have some spoilers in it. If you don’t want to hear about Dutch, now would be the time to mute your audio. I will give the thumbs up when I finish. So Dutch is one of two of Alex’s best friends. He was a Docile when he was younger and he was a Bishop Labs Docile and his contract was with Bishop Laboratories not with Alex directly. And Alex was also a child. Since Alex was raised in a bubble he didn’t have this concept that this other kid wasn’t just there to play with him for fun or of his own free will. So after Dutch’s term, he got a job there because everyone liked him and that’s how nepotism and similar works. Dutch is someone who readers either vehemently hate or deeply love and I really like the juxtaposition between him and Jess.

Jess is Dutch’s other best friend who was in the same situation and also raised as a Docile in Bishop Labs. She continues to work at Bishop Laboratories developing Dociline. She says she thought that it could use the point of view and influence of somebody who was a Docile. She wanted somebody who had the experience to have their hands in it still, and that’s her sort of mission. But Dutch actually has been working for the activism group Empower Maryland the whole time, and he does not tell Alex. This is a secret and he doesn’t tell Elisha either. He donates most of his salary, which is billions of dollars, to their organization and that helps buy people out of debt. He is doing actual work behind the scenes that he does not tell anyone about. As the book progresses he helps Elisha kind of fervently. Not with a gentle hand. He’s not a nice person. In fact, he works very hard to put up an asshole-ish front so that people will not suspect him. He has a scene that is infamous with Elisha where they are at a party and he tells Elisha to suck his dick and then Elisha doesn’t want him to… I’m sorry this is getting so explicit but that’s the book… he doesn’t want Dutch to come on his face so he’s like “oh my God” and backs up and Dutch scolds him and embarrasses him publicly for it.

People are pretty much… the people who won’t forgive Dutch, that’s where it is for them. They say he sexually assaults Elisha and that’s the line. They don’t necessarily care or find him “redeemable” for the work that he does behind the scenes for Empower Maryland. But also those same people are just cool with Jess who is actively making Dociline, a product that is going to be given to people, and I think that is so interesting because who is helping people and who isn’t? When you go “undercover” like that, what are you willing to do for the good of more debtors vs this one person? I don’t know, I love almost everyone that I’ve created, but it’s different sorts of love. My editor is in the comments saying he’s the head of the Dutch hating club. I love Dutch.

NKJ: I’m just going to poke in though and say there’s a difference between what Dutch does, which is nonconsensual, and what Jess does, where at least people have the ability to refuse Dociline.

KMS: Yeah, absolutely.

NKJ: For me, that’s the line, but I’m going to go back on mute now because we get better bandwidth when I do.

KMS: Sure. I mean I think it’s everyone’s right to have whatever feelings they want. I know I wrote a book that has characters who do things so to say and people are going to have strong opinions about them. That’s fine. You are totally allowed to have yours. The author is dead, etc.

So let’s see. Next question. Right, okay this next question is about Alex’s chapter being the last point of view. I thought about that while I was writing it too. Do I give Alex the last point of view? I gave Elisha the first point of view. It’s really Elisha’s actions that set the story off. So I gave Alex the last point of view. I think that he sort of makes huge huge changes throughout the book and I was interested in seeing what his emotional resolve was there. I think we know where Elisha is and “where’s Alex” is sort of a check-in I wanted to have. Not all of the answers to these questions are super deep. It’s one of those things where it’s like, do you want to end a book four times in a row? Do you now want to show what happened to every single person?

For me, it’s not important… and this sort of applies to other characters as well as a mild tangent… I’m not somebody that thinks that every character needs to get their just deserts on the page. You can judge them. That is where it stands. We live in a world where people get away with things, where the rich sue the poor, where they’re still working through their issues. I sort of set people down on a path where I think you have made some changes inside and I want you to go from here and see what happens and that is sort of like you can extrapolate that. I want to give people something to think about. I’m not laying judgment on everyone. Alex gets the last point of view because I wanted to show the path he had set himself on. And I think that we have sort of seen where Elisha was going. We know he has a long way ahead of him to heal and Alex has a lot to make up for, not that I think he can. But you can only ever keep going forward and trying. That is the answer to that one. I see there’s a long discussion in there [the comments] that I will leave between everyone.

There’s a question about whether a character doubted the effects of Dociline. “Whenever a character doubted the effects of Dociline on Elisha’s mother, I kept thinking about cisgender women who take birth control hormones and how, when they say there are symptoms, nobody believes them because of a lack of ‘medical evidence’ (but who is doing the testing?). Could you talk about the resonances of this ‘medical doubt’ problem between Docile and the real world?”

Sure. So I am not a cisgender woman. I have taken birth control in the past. But this for me, my sort of latch onto this is (oh shoot I forgot to come out of the spoiler! Oh well I’m not talking about it anymore. The chat seems like it is carrying on this kind of thing. I am very sorry. I am not spoiling anything anymore.)

So medical doubt. My tie to this personally is being a trans person, and you have to get through a number of gatekeepers and prove yourself, and often people will say “oh let’s try all these other things before we decide you’re trans and see if those will fix you first” or whatever. This is a gatekeeper issue. So Alex will say like “No, she can’t possibly feel any side effects” but that’s because he always has worked with people initially and that is more sort of an emotional tie to his family. That is a threat to his family, that Dociline wouldn’t work. He is saying how dare you imply that what my family does is a lie. In the real world, I think it’s different than that. It’s also outsiders judging people who are trying to be honest about their side effects or their emotional or physical health. It is an issue. I don’t know that I have much more to say on it than that. I’m not a healthcare expert.

I’m going to go to the next question because I don’t have a ton more to say on that except listen to people when they tell you things. I wanted to answer this one. “Both Alex and Elisha’s families are… something. Can you talk a bit about the role family structures/roles/obligations play in the world of Docile?”

Yeah. So Alex’s family is a generational piece of shit. His grandmother invented Dociline. His father perpetuates it and in fact has a very specific vision of what it should be going forward. Even Alex, he thinks he’s doing a good thing by trying to make Dociline a new, nicer version. His dad doesn’t even like that. He’s very beholden to what his grandmother laid down and his dad after her, and when you have that much influence and power it necessarily bleeds into the interpersonal.

I don’t read a lot or watch a lot of this… whenever you see the trope of the king and the king’s lover. There’s always a power imbalance. You’re never going to get out of that. That’s not an exact one-to-one with family but his dad also has the power to take everything away or to totally push him out or to ruin him or commit him to a facility or all kinds of things and Alex, I think, doesn’t realize all that at first but it does become obvious to him how much of himself he’s derived from the toxicity of his family line and part of his character arc is learning to push against that.

Elisha’s family is also not great. His sister is great. I like his sister. His dad and mom are not legally married. Getting married… the family structure is such that when you get married your debt gets tied to that other person legally so a lot of people who have a lot of debt are not getting married because then you pass both parents’ debt down to your kids so his parents are not legally married. His dad is kind of a mess. His wife/Elisha’s mother, Abigail, served a term as a Docile and it affected her such that she acts like a Docile still, taking instructions, repeatedly doing things over and over again. The dad is grappling with this specific loss. There’s just sort of an echo of his wife there, and there’s no sense that this will ever be fixed or that there will be some kind of medical breakthrough that will help people who have been on Dociline (rather than fixed, I don’t really like that word). He is sort of grieving and he considers sending out Elisha’s sister in the beginning and that’s why Elisha goes himself. He’s like, she is not going, not my little sister.

He carries this weight of expectation from his family that he will perform being a Docile a certain way. He gets to go home to visit, that’s part of Docile rights. So when he goes home sometimes his father (I guess mild spoiler) sees that Elisha doesn’t hate everything and isn’t mad and actually seems to like his patron and that is unacceptable. Instead of treating it with the care of noticing that someone is… this is how they’re suffering, by having incorporated that training so much that they’re brainwashed. Instead of handling that with care his father is outraged and can’t handle it, can’t handle more people that are becoming docile all the time around him.

Everyone’s family mostly sucks except for Abby, who is Elisha’s sister who… there’s one little scene with her and Alex but I will not spoil it. I will just say it happens. I will leave that question there.

NKJ: Let me just point out we’re at time.

KMS: We’re at time. Let me just answer the newest top question, if that’s okay with everyone. Are you good?

NKJ: I’m fine.

KMS: Okay. “Can you talk some about how Dutch and Opal, because they’re hiding their identities and intentions, have sex/assault Elisha under false terms (he thinks he’s having sex with a Docile but that’s not the case)? When I read it they seemed relatively unapologetic about it, and I’d like to hear your thoughts about the writing of the situation.”

I think that asker means Dutch and Onyx, but Opal is also a character. There are Dutch, Onyx, and Opal and they are… there’s no way this is not a spoiler. I don’t know how to answer this without giving a spoiler. They are not on Dociline. Dutch, who is working with Empower Maryland, also is in a relationship, a poly relationship, with Opal and Onyx separately. They live together, the three of them. And none of them are on Dociline. They are basically undercover to get information about trillionaires and Dociline and to help Empower Maryland. At one of the parties… There used to be so many party scenes, my agent and editor were like “Maybe not five, maybe just one and a half.” So at one of the party scenes, I already mentioned earlier how basically Alex is like “Go suck Dutch’s dick” which is quite a shitty thing to say. Afterward, they are like “Go play with the other Dociles” and Elisha has a moment where he’s like… “I’m going to have sex with one of these Dociles who is on Dociline and I don’t know how I feel about that. Am I better than the trillionaires who are doing the same thing to me and do I have a choice?” It’s one of those impossible positions that you put people in.

No, those are not their real names. They are like fake names because all the Dociles except for Elisha have fake names like “Billiard” or “Fluffy” or stuff like that. So Elisha… when I say “has sex”, I mean engages in sexual activity, whatever your thought about the word is. So they do that. And he feels angst about it because he is a good person or trying to be one and doesn’t think that he should be having sex with someone who is under the influence of a drug. But of course, he sort of slips deeper and deeper under the thrall of Alex’s training and becomes subsumed in him and later (still a spoiler) when he has escaped off to Empower Maryland, he sees Dutch and Onyx and is like, “Wait you’re not on Dociline.” And they’re like, “No.” And Onyx is unapologetic about this. He says something like, “I’m sorry that I had to do that you specifically but (I can’t remember exactly what happens) but something like I’m not sorry for going undercover into this space where I’m doing things like this.”

I wanted to show a lot of different people’s… I wanted to show varying takes. I don’t think that characters make just the right choices all the time, for whatever that means to you, and Elisha is really put off by this and they eventually have sort of a friendship and still a spoiler, they actually do eventually negotiate Elisha’s first crack at consensual sex. So I think I hit most of it. He’s just sort of unapologetic. Dutch is sort of “I’m doing this.” Sort of like YOLO-ing through this. He gives up some stuff during a deposition later on. They have their eyes on a prize and sometimes people do shitty things. There’s not a lot of people making wholesome choices in this book.

So yes. We are over time. I hope that I’ve even scratched the surface. I wanted to write a book that raised a lot of questions. I don’t think I’ve written an open and close on things. I think I am providing a vehicle for discussion. I think it’s good to think about whether certain characters are good or bad or whether you would do the same thing and the extremes that people are willing to go to. I don’t think it’s realistic to think people make the right and righteous choices all the time. It’s important for me to populate the world with people like that. For example when you think about stories where a very rich person is like “I’ll give up everything to be with you” to their new lover… I’m like, would you though? I tried to be really honest with myself about a lot of this stuff. Like, if someone said to me “you need to give all your money to x because of y reason” I’d be like “okay but all my money?” (I don’t have trillions of dollars!) but realistically leaving your family behind is very hard even if you think they’re wrong. Leaving the comfort of everything you’ve known growing up is very hard. These aren’t steps people take lightly. That’s why a lot of questions go unanswered in the book because this stuff takes more time than 104,300 words. Not everything is fully processed or worked out to a total ending, but that is on purpose because I don’t think it can be. I think we are well over.

NKJ: It’s your time, but yeah.

KMS: Good questions.

NKJ: Yeah there were great questions. I didn’t even get to do most of mine but that’s fine. It was a good conversation, bottom line. All right. The video will be available in a few minutes. Just come back to this URL if you want to watch the session over again. That’s all I’ve got.

KMS: Yeah, same. My dog is standing on the steps over there looking at me like, “Excuse me. It’s my time now.”

NKJ: Many thanks to those of you who showed up to ask questions and participate.

KMS: Thank you so much, everyone, it was so wonderful and thanks to Nora for reaching out to me because we’ve all been stuck in our bubbles. Be safe everyone!

NKJ: Kay. Bye!

The post Transcript of NK Jemisin’s interview of KM Szpara, Author of Docile appeared first on Reading the End.

Anyway, as you’ll have noticed, it’s now 2020. Which means it’s Emily Hale letters time RIGHT NOW. And “the TS Eliot batshittery” to which Whiskey Jenny was referring is the concurrent release, by Harvard, of a letter by TS Eliot that he asked to have released in concert with the release of his letters to Emily Hale. You may read it here. I translate select portions of it for you below.

It has come to my ears that [Emily Hale] has added, or is preparing to add, some sort of commentary of her own. It therefore seems to me necessary to place on record my own picture of the background of this correspondence, and my present attitude towards it.

This is the second sentence of the statement. I clasped my hands to my heart in the purest joy when I read it. Please never lose sight of the fact that TS Eliot is writing this entire statement for an audience of The Future. He died in 1965. When alive, he got anxious about what Emily Hale would say about him to The Future, and he wanted to make sure that the Future would receive his spin on his own words that he wrote with his hands. He doesn’t even know if Emily Hale is going to talk about him, at this point. He just thinks she maybe might. He is writing this statement to rebut his own letters.

I wish the statement by myself to be made public as soon as the letters to Miss Hale are made public. (I make clear a little further on what I mean by the term “make public”).

TS Eliot then spends 400 words carefully stipulating that he wants this statement to be made public if anyone anywhere gains access to the letters, or any portion of any one of the letters, or if Emily Hale ever talks about the letters, or if Emily Hale’s statements about the letters ever become public. He wants to ensure that no matter what else the chilly future may bring, nobody will read those fucking letters without reading his rebuttal of them. At this point, I was having to pause in my reading of these letters to wipe away tears of joy. “It’s like looking at the sun,” I said to Whiskey Jenny. “I can only glance at it for a moment.”

It is painful for me to have to write the following lines.

Is it? IS IT? Because it seems like you want nothing more than to write the following lines, my good sir.

During the course of my correspondence with Emily Hale, between 1932 and 1947, I liked to think that my letters to her would be preserved and made public after we were dead – fifty years after. I was however, disagreeably surprised when she informed me that she was handing the letters over to Princeton University during our lifetime – actually in the year 1956.

I, too, assume that all of my correspondence will be preserved and made public after I am dead. But not until then! Nobody must quote me until I am all the way dead, even though I do assume that everyone will want to heavily quote me. I am very, very fascinating.

She took this step, it is true, before she knew that I was going to get married. Nevertheless, it seemed to me that her disposing of the letters in that way at that time threw some light upon the kind of interest which she took, or had come to take, in these letters. The Aspern Papers in reverse.

“The Aspern Papers in reverse” killed me stone fucking dead. For those who are not familiar with this just-okay work by Apparent Novelist Henry James, it’s a novella about a guy who’s trying to gain access to some letters that a famous poet wrote to his one-time paramour Juliana, who is now an old lady. Juliana is a jerk. She is only interesting because she once banged a famous poet. The narrator is also a jerk. He is willing to do extremely sketchy things to gain access to these letters in which he has a prurient interest.

It’s such a nasty swipe at Emily Hale! Casting her as both the unpleasant woman whose only relevance is that a famous guy used to put his dick in her, and the unpleasant narrator who will do anything to gain access to the famous guy’s thoughts. T.S Eliot believed that The Future would read this remark and be like “wow, yeah, the only person relevant in this story is Famous Poet TS Eliot, everyone else is an unsympathetic and exhausting satellite to that guy.” Oh, TS Eliot. What an act of faith you have committed.

To explain my sudden marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood would require a good many words, and yet the explanation would probably remain unintelligible. I was still, as I came to believe a year later, in love with Miss Hale.

I hope that Vivienne Haigh-Wood is in heaven having every, every champagne drink. IT SOUNDS LIKE SHE REALLY DESERVES IT.

My meeting with Pound changed my life.

Ezra Pound was a fascist. I just feel like it’s important to never not mention this. Lest you fear that I am employing humorous hyperbole, Ezra Pound was a fascist in the sense that he produced a whole bunch of propaganda against the Allies during World War II. He was a fascist.

[Vivienne] persuaded herself (also under the influence of Pound) that she would save the poet by keeping him in England. To her, the marriage brought no happiness: the last seven years of her life were spent in a mental home. To me, it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land. And it saved me from marrying Emily Hale.

Does Vivienne Haigh-Wood exist? Is she a person with her own thoughts about her own life? No, she is only a minor character in the life of TS Eliot, Poet.

Emily Hale would have killed the poet in me; Vivienne nearly was the death of me, but she kept the poet alive. In retrospect, the nightmare agony of my seventeen years with Vivienne seems to me preferable to the dull misery of the mediocre teacher of philosophy which would have been the alternative.

Like in case anyone is wondering why I fucking hate the whole thing of women as muses and supports for Great Men, it’s this. This reason. Because here’s so, so many words of TS Eliot assuming that every woman he ever came into contact with only cared about supporting him, a Great Man, and it’s such a vile and instrumental way of thinking about one’s fellow humans that I feel physically sick. I am so mad at TS Eliot that I want to read Strong Poison, a book in which a guy exactly like this gets arsenic-murdered as he VERY RICHLY DESERVES.

Upon the death of Vivienne in the winter of 1947, I suddenly realised that I was not in love with Emily Hale.

Yeah, so, reading between the lines, TS Eliot badgered Emily Hale for years until she was worn down and thought she might maybe be into him? And then when she was no longer Uninterested or Unavailable, he lost interest. TS Eliot. You have to have to have to recognize that writing this letter makes you look like the most humiliating cliche of a person doing romance.

I don’t want to be too extreme about this, and I know TS Eliot could not have predicted the advent of XO Jane personal essays and like online dating that makes it very obvious very quickly how dysfunctionally most humans approach the world of dating, and how easy it is to perceive patterns in that dysfunction, but ohmygod this is just all so predictable and cliche and I feel like as a Self-Appointed Great Man TS Eliot should strive to have a more interesting and original interior life. I’m so embarrassed for him.

From 1947 on, I realised more and more how little Emily Hale and I had in common. I had already observed that she was not a lover of poetry, certainly that she was not much interested in my poetry; I had already been worried by what seemed to me evidence of insensitiveness and bad taste.

This is the point at which my soul left my body and I ascended to an astral plane. Just in, like, self-defense. He fell out of love with her because he realized she had bad taste, and the way he realized she had bad taste was that she didn’t like his pomes. And he said that out loud and went to some trouble to ensure that the entire world would hear him say it.

She may have loved me according to her capacity for love; yet I think that her uncle’s opinions (her uncle by marriage, a dear old man, but wooly-minded) meant more to her than mine.

“She thought someone else was smarter than me. How ridiculous!”

I could never make her understand that it was improper for her, a Unitarian, to communicate in an Anglican church: the fact that it shocked me that she should do so made no impression upon her. I cannot help thinking that if she had truly loved me she would have respected my feelings if not my theology. She adopted a similar attitude with regard to the Christian and Catholic view of divorce.

“She refused to obey me when I issued gentle lectures on morality.”

I might mention at this point that I never at any time had any sexual relations with Emily Hale.

“PS we never fucked.”

Not that I ever thought that what Emily Hale was getting out of this relationship was wild and amazing sex, because I assume that most women in The Old Days were having terrible sex,¹ but oh my God, Emily Hale, I can’t believe you were putting up with this and you weren’t even getting laid. Bless your heart, you poor patient baby.

But I came to see that my love for Emily was the love of a ghost for a ghost, and that the letters I had been writing to her were the letters of an hallucinated man, a man vainly trying to pretend to himself that he was the same man that he had been in 1914.

This is actually kind of relatable. I acknowledge that it is horribly embarrassing to know that evidence of Past You is just, like, out there. That’s rough. I can understand wanting to make the point that you are no longer That Person and you are now Present You and it’s different. If only there were a way to do it without viciously slagging off your past romantic partners. I dunno. Maybe the youth of today can shed some light on this matter, considering that every moment of their lives is on the internet forever. I bet they will do a better job, overall, than TS Eliot.

The world with my beloved wife Valerie has been a good world such as I have never known before. At the age of 68 the world was transformed for me, and I was transformed by Valerie.

That’s nice. I still feel sorry for poor Valerie.

May we all rest in peace

T. S. Eliot

MAY WE ALL REST IN PEACE. The most petulant mic drop I can actually imagine.

I have never, never, never been so happy. This is the stupidest and most petty act of word-doing that I have seen in all my born days, and it was perpetrated upon us by TS Eliot. He thought issuing this statement would be less embarrassing than just letting us read the letters and draw our own conclusions. When people mentioned TS Eliot, I used to think “great poet, shame about the racism and anti-Semitism,” but now I think “the most tragic OKCupid reviewer of all time, also wrote some poems.” A LEGACY.

The post T. S. Eliot’s Statement about Emily Hale, Annotated appeared first on Reading the End.

Dear Pru and Waldorph,

Thank you for making the Ride or Die podcast. One of my weird I’m-in-this-now-and-I’m-going-to-stick-to-it projects for 2019 was to finish shows that I’d begun and then wandered away from,¹ including the absolute fucking idiocy that is Supernatural. (I should stipulate that I never intended to watch all fifteen seasons, as that would be Too Much. I solicited friend opinions and watched to the furthest point any of them claimed it was still good, which was the end of Season 8.) While it’s been a minute since I watched the actual episodes y’all discuss on the podcast, it was nevertheless a huge pleasure to have a Supernatural-related paratext to occupy my podcast-listening, particularly one whose hosts clearly have the same bitter affinity to this dumb fucking show that I have. I resent having emotions about the stupid Winchesters. Fuck this show.

Y’all make me laugh and your podcast was such a fun companion for me this year while I was watching the longest show of our time and bitching to my Supernatural friends about how obviously gay it was for Castiel to tearfully beat up Dean in an alley. Thank you.

Kind regards,
Jenny

The post Thank You, Pru and Waldorph appeared first on Reading the End.

Dear Yoon Ha Lee,

Thank you for the matchless gift of Kel Cheris and Shuos Jedao. They are the quintessential match-up of stern stoicism and absolute ferality, and I fucking live for their uneasy alliance/?friend?ship? (Would we call them friends? I cannot decide. Uneasy allies, anyway!)

I often find it a challenge to read books with a lot of worldbuilding, but I’m so glad that my pal Renay evangelized enough that I picked up Nicefox Gambit a few years back,¹ because it has brought me so much joy. This month, I finally picked up Hexarchate Stories, and while everything in it was terrific, I felt the most exquisite happiness reading “Glass Cannon.” Evidently my heart had been longing for more content in which Cheris finds Jedao maddening and they do murdery adventures together. When my family goes fake-camping (like, in cabins and shit) later this year, I am planning to bring the whole Machineries of Empire series on that trip and do a big reread. I am indescribably excited about that prospect.

Thank you once again for writing these books and creating these characters. I love them so much.

Kind regards,
Jenny

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Knives Out begins with the housekeeper finding the body of wealthy crime writer Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer), then skips forward to after the funeral, when a private detective named Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig, doing… something with a Southern accent) shows up with the cops to conduct another round of questioning in regards to Harlan’s apparent suicide. Because Harlan died on the night of his birthday party, everyone in the family was present: His oldest daughter and business mogul Linda (Jamie Lee Curtis), her husband Richard (Don Johnson), and their son Ransom (Chris Evans); his daughter-in-law Joni (Toni Collette) and her daughter Meg (Katherine Langford); his youngest son, Walt (Michael Shannon), who runs his publishing company, and his wife Donna (Riki Lindholme) and shitty teenage son Jacob (Jaeden Martell). Also present were Harlan’s very elderly mother, the housekeeper who found his body, and his home health aide, Marta (Ana de Armas). And that’s it, those are all the suspects. Phew.

I am astonished that anybody has managed to talk about this movie without spoilers — although a number of reviewers have done so very gracefully — because there’s very little it’s possible to say without spoiling something. Even the genre designation of murder mystery, while true, creates a set of expectations about the movie’s focus that turns out to be absolutely wrong. The unspoilery version of this review is that Knives Out is a classic Agatha Christie-ish murder mystery in a way that few murder mystery movies, including the Agatha Christie film Murder on the Orient Express,¹ manage to be. There are clues about infidelity, clues about architecture, clues about timing, a satisfying answer to the question of whodunnit, and more Chekhov’s guns than you can shake a stick at. If you like Agatha Christie or the movie Clue, I recommend Knives Out to your attention.

Great. Great. Now let’s get into spoilers. I am going to talk about plot elements from the entire movie. If you want to see the movie and not know what’s coming and whodunnit, do not read on!

I thought Knives Out would be a classic murder mystery, and it super is not. The first bit is, and the last bit is, but everything in between is a story of someone who has done something bad, and they are trying not to get caught. Better yet, we want them not to get caught.² Marta and Harlan adored each other, and she’s the one who killed him, by accidentally giving him 100ccs of the wrong medicine (morphine instead of heart medication or whatever). In the few minutes after Harlan realized he was going to die, he concocted a plan to ensure Marta’s safety, which included cutting his own throat. Now all Marta has to do is not get caught — a tricky thing to manage given that she throws up any time she tries to tell a lie.

You’re rooting for Marta because she’s a good egg, because she adored Harlan and he clearly loved her too, because she has big earnest eyes and ratty white sneakers, and perhaps most especially because every other person in Harlan’s orbit was the absolute living worst. If you’ve seen people talking about this movie’s Eat the Rich ethos, please know that they are telling the truest truths. The exposition-heavy start of the movie, when the cops and Daniel Craig are dragging stories out of the family members, manages to stay magnetically interesting exactly because these people are so hideous.

As in Get Out, a movie with which Knives Out shares some themes, the family’s hideousness isn’t dramatic or exaggerated. It’s just that they can’t stop telling on themselves, even when they’re doing their best to project an image of virtue and tolerance. They insist that Marta is part of the family, but it becomes clear that they also barred her from attending the funeral. They tell small, irrelevant lies to make themselves look like better sons and daughters to Harlan. In an elegant piece of foreshadowing, Michael Shannon looms over Marta to ensure her that they’re going to “take care of her” now that Harlan has died. But you know perfectly well he doesn’t mean it. He’ll promise everything as long as Marta wants nothing; at any moment, he’ll turn into John Dashwood. You feel lingering dread for Marta long before you know what she did — she’s poor and they’re rich, they’re white and she’s brown, and she will never be safe with them because she is a matter of near-total irrelevance to them.

All of this makes for very effective satire. Rian Johnson lays it on at exactly the right thickness, and the first third of the movie is genuinely funny for its needle-sharp digs at the corrupting power of wealth and privilege. For every character that sits down and gets interrogated, there’s a moment that makes you go, “Oh, I know exactly what kind of an asshole you are.” Maybe you don’t know these people in the ultra-rich versions of Knives Out, but you know these people and their shitty rude little comments, and you’ve probably spent a few years wishing they’d step on a Lego.

The richness of Johnson’s screenwriting is matched by the lushness of the set. Rarely have I seen a movie³ whose set spoke so loudly to who these people are, or participated quite so fully in the movie’s plot. When the camera comes to rest on a prop, it’s just as likely to be setting the scene as preparing you for the prop to become hugely important later on. To take a fairly unimportant example, one scene opens with an establishing shot of some magnets being used to attach papers to a magnetic surface, and closes with Marta using one of those magnets to get herself out of a tricky situation.

The brilliance of the “waiting to get caught” story is the way it puts narrative expectation into conflict with itself. When we enter a story — any story — we’re set up to root for the person whose viewpoint we share, Marta’s in this case. When we enter a whodunnit, we want the person who done it to get caught. Rian Johnson has here used a counterweight trebuchet to lob suspense audience-ward, and I was here for it. At several points in the movie, my friends and I leaned over each other to hiss How is this movie still happening so much? Yet for all its density, Knives Out never flags in humor, suspense, or enjoyment. It’s about as close to a perfect movie as I’ve seen since Clueless.

The post Knives Out Is Extremely Good (a Hot Take) appeared first on Reading the End.

It’s also the start of the second half of the year, which is a good time to reassess goals. Looking back on the first half of 2019, I know that I have struggled — and I think a lot of people have — to keep hope alive in the face of political obstacles that often seem insurmountable. I know that I have needed the knowledge that other people are still hopeful, and still fighting. I know that there are going to be some weeks where I can get by, and other weeks where I feel like all the skin has been flayed off my body.

So this is my new goal for 2019: One day out of every week, no matter’s happening I’m going to be hopeful. I’m going to say hopeful things and make hopeful choices, and I’m going to believe that fighting for justice will have an impact. Because if there is one thing the arc of human history does teach, it’s that change is slow, and it depends on people not giving up.

This doesn’t mean I won’t be fighty on other days. I’m still going to call my elected officials when stuff comes up, and I’m still going to protest concentration camps, and all that stuff, and that will be day-of-the-week agnostic. The only change is going to be that one day out of every single week, I will believe with all my heart and with no doubt that we are going to win, and America is going to become the country I want it to be. If I have to fake it I’ll fucking fake it. This whole thing isn’t a marathon, it’s a relay, and my goal for the second half of 2019 is to carry the hope baton one day a week.

(If it goes good I may up it to two days a week! Who knows!)

I’m picking Wednesdays because Juneteenth was on a Wednesday this week (and I love Juneteenth), and also because the middle of the week seems like a good time to try for hope. I’d love it if other people wanted to pick out hope days too. And I’d extra love it if you’d drop a line in the comments and tell me how you keep yourself going when everything looks so goddamn grim.

The post On Wednesdays We Wear Hope appeared first on Reading the End.

What I Read Last Week:

A bunch of stuff! Several of my books were threatening to fall due at the library, so I had to zip through them very quickly and beat the due dates. I read My Sister, the Serial Killer, by Oyinkan Braithwaite, which I’ll post about later in the week. I also read The Night Tiger, by Yangsze Choo, which was a wonderful fairy-tale-feeling novel set in 1930s colonial Malaysia, and Bina Shah’s feminist dystopia Before She Sleeps, which predictably did not mention trans people at all, but nevertheless felt like a fresh take on a type of story I’ve seen a dozen times.

What I Am Reading Now:

Genius: Cartel. Discovering that there was more to this graphic novel, which ran in 2014 and blew my mind with its daring storytelling (I DO NOT SAY THAT LIGHTLY), made me the happiest I’ve been at the library in a while (I don’t say that lightly either). The first volume is about a girl who decides that her corner of Los Angeles is going to secede from the US. It fucking rules. This volume takes fewer risks in the sense of, like, it’s not about gang members killing cops while we root for them? But it’s still a great showcase for this character, I loved the art, I loved the symbolism, I’m about it.

Up Next:

I am not sure! I have a bunch of super great options to consider, most of them YA. Meghan Spooner’s Sherwood is supposed to be really good, even though I don’t tend to like Robin Hood stories. A Curse So Dark and Lonely, by Bridget Kimmerer, is a Beauty and the Beast retelling that likewise promises to be feminist and awesome. The Princess and the Fangirl, by Ash Poston, is a Prince and the Pauper-genre story but with fandom. HELP ME CHOOSE.

What are you reading?

The post It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? appeared first on Reading the End.

What I Read Last Week:

One of my reading resolutions for this year was to read fifteen of my own damn books, of which ten were to be nonfiction. I am killing it so far! In the past week, I finished reading Joan Aiken’s The People in the Castle (a short story collection) and Clyde Edgerton’s Walking across Egypt, a book I should have known better than to imagine I would like. I don’t like Southern fiction! When will I get it through my head that I don’t like Southern fiction!

What I Culled:

Okay, this isn’t an official section of this meme, but I’m including it because I’m pleased with myself. In addition to culling Walking across Egypt, I also got rid of a Lynn Flewelling series (The Bone Doll’s Twin et seq.) that I don’t think I’m going to reread. It was so cleansing! Getting rid of things is magical!

What I’m Reading Now:

Empire of Sand, by Tasha Suri. It’s been terrific so far, even though I am not the world’s hugest reader of secondary world fantasy (see also: culling Lynn Flewelling). I have no idea what’s coming for the protagonists (apart from, hopefully, smooching), but I am excited to find out.

Anything else you want to brag about?

I AM SUCH A FINISHER. This year I decided kind of informally that I was going to start finishing TV shows instead of being so wishy-washy about picking them up and liking them but never finishing them. It is only March, but I have already caught myself up on Jane the Virgin, One Day at a Time, and Killjoys. I am now turning my attention to The Magicians, which I am given to understand is good, actually. I remember finding the first season oddly addictive despite all the things that annoyed and upset me about it, so I am excited to go back to it. I am three episodes into season two, and I love Julia and Alice as much as ever I did in years gone by.

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