CW: CSA.
I got my first period when I was nine years old. All the adults I knew and trusted promptly told me I was a woman now, and could be a mommy. I was NINE. My Little Pony and Friends was my favorite show. I had a crush on Scott Grimes in CRITTERS.
I am UNBELIEVABLY fucking tired of "my sincerely held religious belief means that I cannot do my job." Jobs, it turns out, are not generally assigned. CHOICES WERE MADE. You went to pharmacy school. You applied to be a county clerk. You had OPTIONS.
Hey remember when I wrote a trilogy about a world-altering pandemic and some people got mad at me and didn't vote for me in the Hugos because "it wasn't realistic for the CDC to be evil"?
Because I remember that. I remember it every night when I try to sleep.
Hey, folks, I know when I post something on Twitter that it can be re-shared without context, and that's okay, but if you re-tweet anything but the first tweet, please quote tweet and add the content warning? No one should enter this in the middle.
I was not a woman. I was a CHILD. I was NINE. And suddenly my grandmother, who knew I never wanted to be a mommy (I had been clear on that topic since I was around five) was saying I could have babies of my own. NINE.
Having a period means "physically capable of pregnancy." It doesn't mean "capable of, or likely to be, consenting to sex." And yet nine and ten and eleven year olds are being assaulted, usually by trusted adults in their homes, every day.
Something I'm finding very useful for convincing people COVID-19 isn't some kind of government overreach or liberal hoax: I look at them calmly and say "Walt Disney World is closed."
But I told her everything he'd done, and he wound up going to prison; turns out when the pre-internet nine-year-old can accurately describe sex acts and draw male genitalia, the jury listens, even if the kid is currently having a massive mental breakdown.
I was also, at the time, the plaything of a pedarast who had maintained almost sole possession of me since I was three years old. I was not a virgin. I was, again, NINE.
I had a whole plan to cease existing if a baby happened, because a baby would be the end. We didn't have room for a baby. I'd have to move out. Which, hey, I'd get away from my stepfather, but again, NINE. I was ready to die if he got me pregnant.
So here I am, being sexually abused by a man who told me on a regular basis that a) no one would ever believe me, b) if I told anyone, he would kill my baby sisters, c) he would kill my mother, d) and no one would believe me anyway.
And I do mean "broke." I had what the state of California would later deem a complete psychotic break from the removal of the pressure I'd been under; it was about three/four years before I could be considered "sane" again.
If he'd managed to get me pregnant, I might not have been able to escape having his child. I was too terrified and too broken to tell anyone, and "you can be a mommy now" didn't mean anyone told me the signs of conception.
And suddenly, the people I have TRIED to tell and been ignored by, thus reinforcing his "no one will believe you" statement to the point of inalienable truth, are telling me hey, you can have a baby! A man can put his penis in you and make a baby!
A man was putting his penis in me on a regular basis, without my consent. Making a baby had never been a part of the fear involved in this process. Suddenly, he can make a baby. Without my permission. And since no one would believe me about anything...
NINE.
I got lucky, if luck can be said to have anything to do with my situation. He hit my mother, and she filed for divorce. And when I saw him driving away and she told me I needed a new house key, because she'd changed the locks, I broke.
For those missing context:
My Little Pony, generation one, is very important to me. My mother was a drug abuser when I was young, and my relatives learned fast not to give me Christmas money, as it would be taken. So they gave me Ponies.
I miss my Gramma. She tried so hard to protect me. She did everything she could. And in the end, most of what she could do was little plastic horses, but those have saved me, over and over again.
I just miss her.
No, lady who somehow got my phone number calling my house to ask if I'll sell it to you, I am NOT the rude one when I point out that unsolicited spam calls carry an automatic federal fine. You CANNOT turn this around on me.
Some people seem to exist in a world where bathrooms are just this unrelenting bacchanal of people displaying whatever genitalia they happen to have, waving it freely in the breeze like the happiest of genital-waving creatures. I have never been to this world.
Me saying "I do not want someone who genuinely believes my gender makes me inferior to men to make the law of the land where I live" is not anti-Catholic or anti-religious. It's anti-oppression.
On the topic of "sell your nice things to not be poor," the people saying this almost never realize how little you can actually get for selling their nice things. Oh, SOME things you can get good value for, but not the bulk of them.
I do not care for this thing where, when people who have survived trauma have traumatized responses, we get painted as "too sensitive" and "fragile snowflakes."
Motherfucker, I have been through the fires of hell. I did not melt there. I am allowed to flinch now.
So I have started blocking people who tell me illegally downloading my work is a net positive for me, or who call me things like "ideas landlord" for wanting to be compensated for my work. Like...what?
If it's starting to feel like we're out here going "NO NO SECOND CHANCES BURN THEM ALL" about harassers in genre, it's because we've been giving them second chances, whether we wanted to or not, for DECADES.
Watching LOKI makes me want a D&D game where the GM works up a character background, and then lets everyone pick the point of deviation. So we're all playing different versions of the same character.
I normally give this PSA earlier in the month, but it's been a lot this year, so: Today is Easter. If you celebrate the holiday, you may have done so by bringing lilies into your home. If you have cats, this can kill them. Lilies are cat killers.
I don't really "do" Christmas. I'm not Christian, and it's not a thing for me. But it mattered to me when I was nine years old and I got my Paradise Estate, and tomorrow, I get my Paradise Estate. On Christmas.
If COVID-19 were a liberal hoax or if the lockdowns were overreach, Disney would be baying for an end to social distancing. The fact that they're not proves that this is real. Follow the money, and the money says the optics of Animal Kingdom killing Grandma are really bad.
Just saw someone claim that "As a Christian conservative" it's difficult to wear a mask. Does Jesus give you asthma? Does voting to fuck the poor hurt your lungs? I do not understand.
The Paradise Estate was like $300 in 1987 money, and Grandma didn't have a lot. She paid that sucker off $5 at a time at the Pleasant Hill Toys R Us, and she did it all to watch me have that Christmas moment grandparents pray to get to witness.
And then I realized: Christmas morning is when you get the Paradise Estate. Until then, you guard the box with your life. But on Christmas, you get to open the big box, and you get to have the single largest playset made for any 1980s toy line.
PETA makes me so angry.
Tweeting any sort of gore is a way to traumatize people. It doesn't create vegans out of nothing; it is an upsetting, triggering method of flexing moral superiority, like showing porn to children to make them go "ew, gross."
Do people really, honestly think we're unaware?
For a while, when people told me I was fat, I would look shocked and ask when that happened. They almost always replied that I shouldn't be rude. If they were giving me new information, how was I being rude?
Authors don't dislike being tagged in negative reviews because we can't take criticism. We dislike it because you're coming into our virtual living rooms to call us assholes when the social contract says we can't reply.
CW: CSA, for safety's sake, more than content.
When I was nine, going on ten, my testimony and physical evidence put my then-stepfather in prison for child sexual assault.
Well, this past July, I finally got lucky enough to find one, fully intact, and win the auction. I have a Paradise Estate, boxed up and waiting for me. And for the longest time, I couldn't figure out why I didn't want to open it.
It is currently "rubbing your cats down with a cool wet washcloth and them not objecting in the slightest" degrees in the Seattle area. In case you wondered how we're all handling this.
This is Not A Good Day for many of us, for a lot of truly excellent reasons. So I have a request: if you're here on Twitter, please show me your cats. Give us a psychic cleanser of a thread, so we can keep going through the difficult parts ahead.
Why is "but it could CHANGE THEIR BODIES FOREVER" an acceptable argument when it's about giving trans kids access to medical care, but not when it's about children dancing ballet or playing football?
One thing that seems to get lost a lot in the discussion of risk taking and public health and airborne disease is the difference between "my body, my choice" and "your body, my choice."
Fun questions I've been asked today: If science is so great, why didn't we have any warning about COVID-19? Delivered with the smug "gotcha" of someone who knows for a fact that they've just won.
Except, my dude. We did.
I have not yet seen BARBIE, but I have been exposed to the basic plot summary, and my question for the people saying that BARBIE has forgotten its core audience is...were you ever a child who played with Barbies?
Apparently I am not done trying to kill this horse with my bare claws tonight, so:
One of the arguments I see about not calling out first-time harassers, or younger harassers, or god forbid, talented harassers, is "what if we lose their work?"
All right, y'all: we're going to take a moment to talk about my last retweet. Specifically Sarah saying "Every time I talk about writing fanfiction, I get hatemail." I am not tagging her in because I don't want to dogpile her mentions.
Buckle in. It's going to be long one.
It's easy to say "politics don't belong in genre fiction" when your existence can be viewed as apolitical: when writing a story with someone Exactly Like You is accepted, applauded, and not greeted with cries of "self-insert" or "Mary Sue."
Thomas is smart enough that he knows when D&D is coming, because I clean up the dining room table. Thomas is also smart enough to WANT D&D, because it means he gets to see people he likes.
...Thomas just brought me my dice bag.
Let's talk about today's harsh writing advice: the idea that other writers are your competition. This is a variant on a piece of "known wisdom" that women are fed from birth, the idea that when it comes to girls "there can be only one."
Next TERF who calls me a dude because there's no way a cis woman could be defending trans women's right to exist is getting the kind of description of my last period that I normally reserve for my gyno.
I was the poor kid with the most Ponies in my whole school. I had bigger herds than some of the spoiled kids whose parents bought them anything they wanted, because that was ALL I had. I was focused. I would tell relatives WHICH Ponies I wanted, and I wanted them ALL.
So a lot of people want to know why COVID-19 is such a big deal, even as death rates are climbing and ICUs are overwhelmed. After all, diseases have always existed, right? So why is this one the crisis?
Big thanks to the kindly veterinarian who emailed to tell me that if my cats ate me, they probably wouldn't be euthanized, just kept until the shelter could be sure they weren't going to crap human prions on someone's floor, and then adopted out.
I survived school because they fed me. There was no food in my home, and what money we got went to my baby sisters; shitty pressed lunch meat, industrial ketchup, and the cheapest bread money could buy didn't SPOIL me, it SAVED me.
I am going to be doing my first in-person signing in the US in September.
Am I an asshole if I say "no mask, no signature"? I'm immunocompromised, and while I'm willing to take reasonable risks again, the keyword there is "reasonable."
A lot of the "think of the children" bills that say things like "exposing children to queer identities is inappropriate and should be left to the parents" are very clearly coming from a place where children are not real people.
Saying "your marriage makes me uncomfortable, so I don't want you to have it anymore" is profoundly UNKIND, and violates my sincerely held religious beliefs. So how come someone else's beliefs beat mine? Can you prove they believe more strongly? I've read the Bible.
I? Did not get options. There was not a career fair for organs at my school. My uterus, and my hormonal dependence on the chemicals it produces, were assigned to me, not chosen. I did not select my neurochemistry or my sexual orientation from a fun list of suggestions.
Disney is bigger than many governments. Disney can shift world legislation. Disney is responsible for the nightmare that is modern copyright law. And Walt Disney World is closed.
Okay, I guess we're having this conversation again. "Why does character X need to announce their sexuality! It has nothing to do with the book?"
Multiple reasons, John.
Mom: Your sister says you have a social media "brand." What does that mean?
Me: It means I show the world a curated version of myself.
Mom: You posted pictures of yourself with a banana slug. Everywhere.
Me: I curate for a very distinctive audience.
I lost all my Ponies when Mom stopped paying for our storage unit, when I was sixteen, and that included my Paradise Estate. I've been trying to rebuild it ever since.
I have friends with cats. I have an emotional investment in these cats. They are not posting sufficient cat pictures for my emotional needs.
Please fix, friends.
Also, a little tired here of one specific set (Christian) of sincerely held religious beliefs (Christianity) somehow being better than all the others, when this is supposedly a nation (Christian) without an official (Christian) religion.
The current D&D explosion has got to be a great boon to independent artists. Much like the furry community, gamers are creating their own content, and if you want to see that content realized, you need to pay someone to draw it. That's amazing!
We supposedly have big Dem donors saying, anonymously, that if Warren gets the nomination, they'll back Trump instead. And to them I say...you were never on our side. If this is when you take your ball and go home, you were NEVER on our side.
With Nanowrimo about to kick off, and people getting excited/stressed/worked up about it, I want to take a moment to remind you of one thing:
You do not have to.
There is nothing wrong with you if you love and are invested in something that was created by someone who questions your humanity. Knowing that about them may change how you view that work in the future, but the error was never yours.
I am so confused by people who either read or watched Marie Kondo, and took away the message "this woman doesn't want you to own things." No. She just wants you to love and appreciate the things you own.
Okay: Twitter's algorithm decided to boost yesterday's Very Heavy thread, and my mentions are currently a trauma fountain. I'd like to change that.
PLEASE SHOW ME YOUR CATS (or dogs or goats or birds or whatever). JUST PET PICS FOREVER.