Beta Readers Welcome!

Want to read a book that's still in-progress and provide feedback that may or may not be incorporated into the finished project? Want to just read some long-form fiction from me? You're in luck!

I've been working on what I've affectionately been calling "The Novel" for four-ish years now, and I've gotten a good ways through it, but keep stalling out. I
n an interest in providing outside accountability, I've started sharing chapters of it on Royal Road - the first chapter is up now, and the goal is to put a new chapter up every two weeks on Wednesdays. Feedback is always welcome!

And with that, we get ready to close out 2024. My goal for this year was to start sharing my writing publicly, so I think I can say that I made it, hooray! May we all have a much calmer 2025 in which nothing exciting happens. It's time for boring, no?

QWERTY contemplates what to destroy first in the new year

Calm Your Mind with Needle and Thread

 I was fortunate enough to be able to host a workshop at GeekGirlCon last weekend, which went extremely well. My friend Erin was in town for the convention and was kind enough to co-host the workshop with me, which worked wonderfully because she was able to answer some questions that I didn't know how to answer, and also keep us on time (she's a professor, so she's experienced with dealing with classrooms full of people).

I thought it would be a good idea, for my own benefit if nothing else, to document the first part of the workshop, which was a talk about embroidery and mental health. I've made the PowerPoint and list of resources available on a separate page of this blog (here).

I don't know about you, but the last few years have not been especially kind to my mental or emotional health. I discovered early on in the pandemic that going back to something I learned when I was a child, cross stitch, was something that could help ease my anxiety and give me something to focus on rather than the craziness of the world. Being me, the first thing I thought to do was to do some research and see if this was something that other people had encountered, which led, eventually, to do this workshop!

So, a little bit on the history of embroidery in general. The first known embroidery (as in, sewing done purely for decorative purposes, rather than to strengthen seams or repair damage) has been dated back to 500 AD in Egypt. Around 1100 AD, we have the Bayeux Tapestry, a monstrous (around 230 foot long) embroidery illustrating the Norman Conquest of England, culminating in the Battle of Hastings in 1066 AD. Sometime between 1100 and 1492 AD, counted cross stitch (the kind of cross stitch that is commonly done today) was invented.

Around 1400 AD, we have the first English reference to blackwork embroidery in Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. Blackwork was a type of embroidery that was and is commonly referred to as "Spanish work" because it's associated with Catherine of Aragon, but it predates her in England by at least 100 years. Finally, in 1524 AD, the first known counted cross stitch pattern book was published in England, which leads eventually to things like all the patterns you can find online today!

I've been throwing around a couple of types of embroidery, so let's do some definitions. Cross stitch is a type of embroidery made of (surprise!) crossed stitches, meaning there is a stitch going in one direction, following by a second stitch on top of the first going in the opposite direction. It's usually done on an even-weave fabric like Aida. "Even-weave" means that the threads of the fabric are evenly spaced, leaving a consistent grid of holes for the stitches to go into. Cross stitch pieces are usually done with just the one kind of stitch, though sometimes other stitches are added for detail (such as backstitching for outlines).

Blackwork embroidery is embroidery done with a single thread, usually forming geometric or floral patterns. It's historically been done with a single color (black or red, leading to "blackwork" or "redwork") on an even-weave fabric, and done with a single type of stitch. The pattern is usually symmetrical, and was frequently used as a decorative edging or border on clothing.

• 

Embroidery was used as a form of occupational therapy starting in World War I, when soldiers came back from the front unable to take up the jobs that they had had before the war due to what we now call PTSD. The Royal School of Needlework in the United Kingdom began a school in which they taught ex-servicemen how to embroider, giving them a sense of purpose and something upon which to focus, as well as something they could see as an accomplishment when they finished a piece. Through the Royal School, the wealthy of the UK and the church commissioned works made by the ex-servicemen, thus allowing them to provide money for their families. (This information, along with a lot of other great info about embroidery across history, can be found in Clare Hunter's book Threads of Life: A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle. I highly recommend it.)

Between 2020 and 2022, researchers studied the effects of embroidery as art therapy for adolescent girls who had recently been hospitalized for mental and emotional health crises. The researchers discovered a few key aspects of embroidery that helped in the kind of art therapy being provided, specifically:

• Repetition
• Structure
• Simplicity
• Artistic Voice
• Sense of Value

Regarding the first three points, you can see these in the rhythm developed by the stitches worked in the same way every time, particularly with cross stitch and blackwork. This kind of rhythm can be very meditative and calming. Also, having the structure of working off of a given pattern can be useful in reducing anxiety by giving a plan of action. Finally, designs can be as simple or as complex as you want, allowing for some freedom in how much detail you want to go into.

On the last two points, the artistic voice can be found in the way a stitcher can choose whatever colors they want when doing a project. There's nothing saying that you have to follow a pattern exactly if you don't want to. Something that has appeared historically is that oppressed people frequently used embroidery as a way of saying things that, due to their status in society, they were unable to say outright - for example, women in prison in the 1800s were given embroidery to do to keep them calm and quiet, and they would use the opportunity to tell their stories or express their complaints about their situation. 

Finally, there's the sense of accomplishment. You finished a thing! You can look at something you've stitched, hold it in your hand, and see something that you've created. The way that I started working on blackwork embroidery was through the publisher Peppermint Purple, who was doing a stitch-a-long in 2020. Every week, she would provide a small square design for free. You could do the square by itself, or put them all together over the course of the year into one big project. The weekly designs were small enough that they could be done in just a couple of hours, and in the end, there was a completed thing. The hit of dopamine was exactly what I needed in 2020 to help move me along, and fortunately, the publisher has continued the stitch-a-longs every year.

From here, in the workshop, we went into the different kinds of materials used in cross stitch and blackwork, including passing around some samples of Aida and even-weave fabric and DMC and Anchor floss. After that, we did a practical demonstration of cross stitch and blackwork embroidery, using the patterns I included in the kits (and that are on the page I linked to above). Erin had this nifty projector camera that we set up to show our hands up close so the people could see what the stitches looked like clearly.

Overall, I really enjoyed giving this workshop, and I would happily do it again. Thank you, GeekGirlCon, for giving me the space to share what I learned!

When did you start writing?

Last week, during a community call with the In Surreal Life crew (that's the poetry fellowship I've been taking part in all month), I was asked the question "When did you start writing (or other art form if you primarily do that as your creative outlet)? What got you excited about it?" I'm actually pretty pleased with my answer to the question, and since the call was recorded, I was able to transcribe the answer here:

So, I don't remember learning how to read. As far as I can tell, there were just always books in the house, and they were all mine. I mean, technically they were my mom's and my dad's and my brother's, but they were mine. And I just always had them, and they just were always there. And we'd go to the library and there were books there, and we'd go to the bookstore, and there were books there and I had no idea where they came from, they were just there. And at some point, I don't remember exactly when, I was pretty little, I know I must have asked my father where the books came from. And my father was like the dad in Calvin and Hobbes so his response was, "It was magic." Which, totally, small kid brain, totally tracked. At some point, I realized that the magic was that a human being put words on a page, and those words turned into the books that eventually showed up in the libraries and the bookstores. And once my mind got over being blown by this fact, that people were what made books, and then I realized that it was any people, that anybody could be the person who put the words on the page that made the books, well then that was it, I was done, that was gonna be what I was gonna do. And so I couldn't have been much more than about six or seven, I think. I think that's about when I wrote my first stories, and it kinda hasn't stopped since then. I didn't start getting into poetry seriously until just the last year, when poetry started kinda falling off my pen whether I meant it to or not. But yeah, once I realized that books came from people, and I could be one of the people books could come from, I was done.

The poetry fellowship has been fantastic, and it has been a LOT. Turns out that writing a poem a day can bring up a lot of emotions for a person, and certain prompts can make it obvious that there might be somethings I need to work through. Still, I've loved getting my brain to visit poetry land, and thinking about language and writing in a different way than I do when writing fiction. It does mean that I've been spending more time trying to find just the right word, but now it's not just the word that means exactly what I want it to say, but also that it sounds/reads the way that I want it to. I'm making the words do a lot more work these days, I tell you.

Here, have a draft of a poem:

“You call this home?” she sneers
As she steps into my softest space.
“Doesn’t look like much. You should have
Done more with the place by now.”

Not a hair out of place, dressed to the nines,
She looks like the me of what-if,
The me on the other side of the flipped coin.
She’s all the potential I used to have.

She has the career, few details but many dollars;
Her name is know, respected, in specific circles.
Ma never worries if she can pay her bills - 
Mirror Me has everything under control.

There’s nothing soft about her, no curves, only edges.
Her sharp eyes sweep over the controlled chaos of my mind.
Her mask is a hardened shell, the cracks ignored
In favor of “keeping it together.”

I lead her to the good chair, let her release the burden
Of being upright and at attention for a moment.
I sense the pain in her spine as it slowly releases
The tension the muscles constantly strain under.

“This is home,” I reply.
“It’s not much, but it’s everything.”

And in conclusion, cat!

Nef is grumpy, which is kind of her standard face these days since we brought QWERTY home.

Convention Wrap-Up and In Surreal Life

It's hard to believe it's only been a week since the Flights of Foundry convention - it feels simultaneously like it was forever ago and just yesterday. It was a marvelous convention, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in a more literary-focused convention that's both international and online.

One of the biggest discoveries for me was the world of speculative poetry. The last few months, my writing has tended toward poetry, at least in part, and I have no idea why. If you had told me even five years ago that I would be regularly writing poetry, I would have thought you were nuts. High school and the need to analyze the bejeesus out of every word of every poem pretty well ruined any appreciation for poetry that I had for a long time, and it wasn't until I started realizing how much poetry is meant to be performed (thanks, Shakespeare, for a big part of that realization) that I started letting myself be interested again.

Speculative poetry is a space I hadn't really explored before, so when I saw that Flights of Foundry had a challenge to write a poem for each day of the convention, I figured I would give it a shot. I also managed to get into an intro to speculative poetry workshop run by Dawn Vogel, and a couple of co-working and open mic sessions (basically, everything on the poetry track of the convention). It was wonderful! Combining the speculative aspects of my fiction (sci fi, fantasy, etc.) with the lyrical language of poetry was a lot of fun and something I look forward to exploring further. Here's an example of what I came up with (be kind, it's a very first draft):

Light travels at speed, vanishing as quickly as it appears.
In a blink, the mystery of the dark drops away.
The unknown becomes known.

The flash reveals multitudes no one reckoned could exist.
What man thought was empty space was neither.
The abyss is strikingly full.

Millions of eyes (or eye-like structures) turn to the source of the light.
They had also assumed they were alone in the dark.
The sky now knows the others exist.

Since October 1st, I've been taking part in In Surreal Life, a poetry workshop/fellowship that has me working on a new poem every day, with a small group that I'm meeting with to go over critiques of a specific poem once a week. It is stretching my brain and my soul in ways I was NOT expecting, and putting me in a different kind of poetry community than I would have found on my own. I have no idea how I even found it, to be honest, but when I read up on the program and saw that there were scholarship spots available, I figured, "why not? Worst that can happen is I get rejected." Somehow, I got accepted! The mind, she boggles.

The community is wonderful, and I'm definitely learning a lot. I still hesitate to call myself a poet, but I've definitely written more poetry than prose over the last week and change, so there may be something to that. It isn't easy, and it's bringing up a lot of feelings that had been comfortably tucked away, so that's something to deal with. Still, I'm glad I'm doing it. (We'll see if I'm still saying that at the end of the month.)

In conclusion, the convention was wonderful, my presentation went over well, and I've finding a lot to love in poetry. Here, have a cat!

Wanna Hear Me Talk?

I mentioned in my last post, but now I'm doing the official promotional thing. I'm going to be doing a couple of presentations at the Flights of Foundry convention next weekend! Specifically, I'll be doing a game demo for Rolling Realms on Saturday, September 28 at 1pm Pacific. On Sunday, September 29 at 3pm Pacific, I'll be doing a panel presentation on copyright and public domain basics; finally, also on Sunday, September 29 at 5pm, I'll be on a panel sharing my handwork (specifically my crochet, cross stitch, and blackwork) with a few other fantastic people.

This is my first time doing this kind of presentation, and so I'm a wee bit nervous. Still, I'm super excited, and the fact that it's all online means that I'll at least be in my home, and the cats may or may not make an appearance on camera.

So! If you're interested in what's looking to be a fabulous online convention (that's FREE!), come join us next weekend!

Is This the Other Shoe?

 You know how we always talk about waiting for the other shoe to fall? Basically, when things are going well, we're waiting for the negative things to come and balance the scales, because it's not possible for things to go TOO well - something's going to bring us back down to Earth.

Well, lately things have been going pretty well. I've been asked to do a panel at the Flights of Foundry convention at the end of the month, talking about copyright and public domain basics. The convention is being put together using the things that the attendees say they can bring to the table, and so I had said that I could talk about copyright, and I could also demo a board game. They've asked me to do both! I can't say that I expected them to take me up on that offer, but here we are!

I'm also doing a workshop at GeekGirlCon in November, talking about how embroidery can help improve your mental health and teaching the basics of cross stitch and blackwork. In this case, I had suggested the panel and said that I wanted to do it, so it's not as much of a surprise, but I still wasn't expecting them to say yes.

These are things that involve a lot of work, but they're things that make me excited (and nervous) and happy. It's an overall upswing, and I want to say I'm waiting for the downswing. But...maybe this is the upswing that's making up for the earlier downswing for this year? We've had a rough couple of months, so maybe this time, the other shoe dropping isn't a bad thing.

I'm working to maintaining my optimism, but there's still that little bit that's waiting...

Not Like That

The last few months, I've been spending every Sunday morning writing with Mary Robinette Kowal's Make Me Write Zoom group. It's been really useful to have a dedicated time to focus on writing, and I've made some real progress on the novel I've been working on for *mumble* years now. I've also, for reasons unknown, started drafting poetry. I've submitted a few things for publication and gathered up the rejections, but I'm working on sharing some of it a little more. This one...I've been fighting with some stuff, and this one came easily to me, though it hurts a little to read now. So, obviously, I must share the pain!

Not Like That

Ask for what you deserve, they say,
Don’t expect people to just give you things.
You teach people how to treat you.
Advocate for yourself!

Fine. I deserve respect, I deserve kindness,
I deserve to be paid what my work is worth.
I want to be treated the way I treat others;
I have the right to expect these things.

Well, no, not like that, they say.
You go above and beyond for everyone.
You can’t expect people to just help you out.
You need to pull your own weight!

Fine. I will act my wage, doing the bare minimum,
Refuse to go beyond the basics.
I will focus on myself, my family, my home,
And everyone else can do the same.

Well, no, not like that, they say.
You’re too nice a person to let people struggle.
You need to help out where ever you can.
You can’t expect people to go it alone!

Fine. Let me ask you one thing, I’ve never known:
If I’m to help others, to support those in need,
To be a rock for others to steer by,
Then who helps me?

You do, of course. It’s all up to you. 

Therapy This Week

 Would you look at that - I have returned once more! It’s been a minute, and there has been too much, so let me sum up. The important bits for the purpose of this post is that I have been diagnosed with bipolar II (AKA, all the lows, not quite the highs) and autism in the last two years, so I’ve been working with a therapist to try and figure out what that all means for me now. Also, my Daisy-cat passed away suddenly a couple of months ago, and we recently welcomed a new member of the family, QWERTY. 

He’s living up to his name on a regular basis, but I got a keyboard cover to protect my laptop (or rather, to keep him from doing more new and exciting things to my laptop), and it’s been working out pretty well so far.

So! I’m working with Mar Rodriguez with Holistic Child and Family, and they are MARVELOUS. I highly recommend the practice, though they do currently have a 4+ month waitlist. In my opinion, totally worth the wait. Mar is fantastic, and working with a therapist who is also neurodivergent and is able to understand some of the difficulties that entails has been so validating, and it’s really helped me start to get a handle on what that means for me.

I’m realizing that it helps me a lot to talk things out after therapy to kind of synthesize things for myself, make sure I understand what we talked about. Unfortunately, that’s not really a thing most people are comfortable hearing about, either because mental health is still stigmatized, or because people just don’t want to go that deep with someone (or both). So naturally, I figured the next-best thing would be to babble on digital paper into the void of the internet. At least this way, I don’t have to see people get disinterested or uncomfortable and click away, so that’s useful for me.

The theme this week seemed to be identity, which is not an easy thing for me to pin down. Specifically, there were two parts - my identity as a disabled person, and my identity as a Christian and someone who lives to serve others. The disability piece is harder for me to claim, even though there are concrete reasons for me to take advantage of things like accessibility resources. What brought this up was flying to and from Atlanta for a training for work. Now, I have sciatica, which means that my back is frequently in a lot of pain, and walking through a huge honkin’ airport like Atlanta’s while carrying my bags is sure to aggravate it. To help with this, I use a cane when the pain is bad or when I know I’m going to need the extra support, so I was definitely using it in the airport both coming and going.

Flying out to Atlanta, my travel vibes were solidly positive. Flight was on time, the flight attendants were incredibly helpful - one even carried my bag to my seat and put it in the overhead for me when I boarded. And I did take advantage of the pre-boarding because it does take me longer to get down the aisle of an airplane with both cane and bag, so I was definitely appreciative of the extra help. It was a great start to the trip!

The flight home was not. I was in a lot of pain from five days of sitting in uncomfortable chairs (seriously, why is it impossible for churches to have comfortable seats?), and I was booking it to get to the gate because I was able to get on an earlier flight. I managed to pre-board again, and this time I asked a flight attendant if she could carry my bag back to my seat because I need the help. (Note - I don’t ask for help if I can possibly get by without it, so the fact that I was willing to ask for help was something I had been proud of.) She refused, telling me that if I couldn’t manage my bag, I needed to check it, and gave me enough attitude that I felt shamed for asking for help. It sent me into a spiral for the rest of my time on the plane, and made me feel guilty for using any of the accessibility resources I had used.

Mar reminded me of all the work disability advocates have done to get access to the resources I, and others like me, have the ability to use today, and that they wouldn’t have done that work if they didn’t want people to actually use the resources. In a way, it’s a disservice to all the work they’ve done to not at least consider using those tools when they’re available, and Mar reminded me that if people use them, it helps let the powers that be know that the resources need to keep being funded. Mar also took a minute to tell me that I hadn’t done anything wrong, which I greatly appreciated, even if there’s still a little part of me that’s not entirely convinced. After all, I asked for help, and I’m supposed to be able to pull myself up by my bootstraps and handle my own stuff - it’s the American way! (I know, I know - I’m a work in progress.)

Now onto the other thing. Part of the training event included hearing from a pastor who is trained as a therapist who works in clergy wellness (AKA keeping clergy from burning out). One of the things she mentioned was the theology of sacrifice - that in order to be a good Christian, you need to be willing to put others before yourself, to put yourself last, and to always be working in service to the Lord and your fellow man. I was raised with a pretty extreme version of this, with some added misogyny - I was raised in the Southern Baptist tradition, and women aren’t permitted to serve as clergy in that tradition. So, according to my grandmother, my aunt, and my Sunday School teachers, my role was to support the men who were leading the church, so that they could do their work. And as a child, I was to assist my parents in any way I could to keep from being a burden on them, because they had important work to do as well. It’s…a lot, looking at it laid out plainly.

Well, the clergy wellness trainer talked about this theology, and then said blatantly, “This is bad theology.” I almost felt a record scratch in my head when I heard that, because that’s not how it’s supposed to work, right? Being in service to others is the point, and you serve others by putting them before yourself, right?

Yeah. So, there’s a lot there to unpack, and I’m still working on figuring out how to still feel like I’m being a good, useful person while not always putting myself last. Mar suggested that we reframe supporting other people and helping them do their work as something I *do*, not something I *am*, and that could help. Part of it is that I’ve always had the feeling that while all the world’s a stage, I’m a stage manager, not an actor. I’m backstage making things run smoothly for the people onstage, and when a stage manager is good at their job, you don’t see them do their work - you just see the results. So there’s going to be a lot more discussion on this point, I’m pretty sure.

Well, that got longer than I anticipated. I have no idea if anyone will read this tome, but I feel a little better for having written it, so maybe that’s something? Who knows. I leave you with a picture of Nef as a reward for finishing the post. Until next time!