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Erika Hammerschmidt
Blogs from 2023
Newer
It's OK
2023/01/14
First posted here on Tumblr.
So many posts saying things like "it's ok to say no... it's ok to leave a situation when it's overwhelming for you... it's ok to take time to grieve, to do self care, to heal...."
And this is all very helpful for people who have not yet figured out how to be ok with themselves for doing these things.
But for those of us who have, it feels kinda like victim blaming, since right now we're all working on getting our bosses / families / other daily obligations to be ok with these things.
There is also an intermediate level, when we have become accepting of these things in ourselves, BUT we still have an inflated, perhaps unrealistic fear of how likely other people are to reject our own needs for these things.
At this level, others still view it as "low self-esteem," and focus all their attempted "help" on their assumption that we're still blaming ourselves... when really we're still trying to figure out exactly HOW hostile the outside world is toward us.
My many viewpoints
2023/01/26
I made this particular list of links in reply to someone asking for my autistic viewpoint on... things in general. If you want to get a detailed idea of who I am, this list is a place you can start. I will keep adding to it as time goes on.
These are all posts on my website, but some of them originated as Twitter or other social media posts. So they have a very inconsistent writing style, going back and forth between the casual, unpunctuated and uncapitalized vernacular expected on social media and the formal-essay language that I tend to slip into when I'm on a topic long enough.
Still working on the best way to organize these thoughts. They are so varied-- even though they all relate to my autistic viewpoint in different ways.
I've had very little success at connecting with what I see as mainstream online culture-- at least in regard to my cerebral, intellectual essays. The only times I've managed a large amount of engagement with any post have been the times when I could express my thoughts as a short, catchy, amusing soundbite, small enough to fit in a single post on Twitter.
I'm not sure what to do with this information. It doesn't necessarily mean that I must despair of current generations ever understanding my more complex thoughts... I HAVE seen posts expressing such complex thoughts go viral, especially on Tumblr, but they're written in casual, comical styles very different from how I usually write on those topics.
It's not that I'm incapable of casual and comic writing style. I'm capable of many different styles, but one thing I know needs to happen in my website revisions... is that I need to consolidate the style into something a bit more consistent between posts.
Anyway.
Things about me as an autistic person:
(I have learned how much less society actually knows about social rules than I was taught)
(I am much, much better with metaphors than people might assume)
(when I'm with other nerds and neurodivergents, we have the BEST conversations)
(I am aware of autistic culture and subculture and I have my own specific opinions on the widespread views within such culture)
(and my analysis of social rules and widespread viewpoints is deeply tied to my fascination with linguistics)
(I have an unusual view on the usefulness of empathy)
(I have a mind so very analytical that it is extremely hard to practice therapy on me)
(I frequently get more analytical about experiences than my therapists do)
(I think analytically about laws and rules, a LOT)
(When I try to live by a rule, my analytical thoughts can cause trouble at the fuzzy edges of the rule, or end up taking it to a logical conclusion that is really bad for everyone)
(I think analytically about the ways I think)
(My view of free will is unusually analytical)
(I think about places in an unusual sort of way)
(I am very frustrated by the fact that my very high self-esteem keeps getting mistaken for low self-esteem)
(my emotions and my conscience are very separate and function in wholly different ways)
(I have an absolutely fascinating intersection of scientific thought and creativity)
BOTTLE TREES AND CRYSTAL WRAPS
(I am overflowing constantly with ideas and inventions and creative projects! I want to try absolutely everything, and I am so pissed off that I'm not immortal and independently wealthy.)
(I sometimes face complex struggles involving relationships and my total lack of respect for certain types of illogical social rules.)
(I think a LOT about hypothetical alternate events and how they relate to the very definition of "me")
(I have some very unusual fears)
THE EYE-CONTACT SIMULATOR FOR NEUROTYPICALS
EYE-CONTACT SIMULATOR FOLLOWUP
(I have a much more complex understanding of theory of mind than most people think I do)
(In fact I exercise so many levels of my theory of mind that I treat conversations like chess games where I'm making plans a dozen moves ahead, which can be absolutely debilitating)
(I have a sort of superpower at making connections.)
("I can take any two completely unrelated concepts and find a connection between them within seconds. In a worse world I'd invent the most convincing conspiracy theory. In a better world I'd invent a Unified Theory of Everything. In this world I use it only for puns.")
Writing Wonders
2023/02/01
First posted here on Mastodon.
I've been participating in an activity on Mastodon called Writing Wonders, which is run by @AmeliaKayne@writing.exchange, @AlinaLeonova@wandering.shop and @BranwenOShea@writing.exchange on Mastodon.
It's mainly geared towards WIPs (works in progress), which I like because it can help writers figure out things they don't even know yet about the stories they're still writing.
I don't have time or energy to do this every month, but I did February and found it a very enjoyable way to enrich my brainstorming process and connect with other writers and readers. In this set of answers, my WIP is the sequel "Dual Laud," and the MC (main character) is usually Gabria.
February #WritingWonders
#WritingWonders 1: Introduce yourself & tell us a fun fact about your WIP.
I'm Erika Hammerschmidt of the Kea's Flight, Landing & Migration trilogy. My WIP is a 4th book: Gabria Laud's side of the Landing/Migration arc.
Fun fact: This is the first book of mine without surprise twists.
It's about how Gabria (sort of) faked her death. This, and how it happens, isn't a surprise. The reader will figure it out long before it's explicit. I'm trying to let the setting and characters carry the story.
#WritingWonders 2: If your MC had a theme song, what would it be?
Ravel's Bolero.
Has no words, but it's about changing the same thing, bit by bit, until it's unrecognizable... like Gabria's growth and the increasing chaos of her life.
Gabria isn't musical, but if she were to play Bolero, she'd do it by learning a dozen instruments and playing them all with a loop pedal. Badly, and in secret. Not sure if her tendency to try and do big things by herself is her worst weakness or best strength.
#WritingWonders 3. What is your MC's pet peeve? Does it come up in your WIP?
I'll have to think about it! I've shown Gabria furious before (when she failed to win Draz's admiration by means of a programmed pigeon and the embezzlement of a starship's supply of dietary sugars).
She's changed, and now her reaction to such a thing would just be misery.
But "pet peeve" suggests a smaller anger, and I haven't discovered what makes Gabria moderately annoyed. Adding this to my to-do list.
#WritingWonders 4. What point of view are you writing in? Is there a reason you chose this POV?
First person. Always found that the easiest way to write. Not sure why.
Book 1 was first person from Kea's viewpoint, plus a few scenes showing the antagonist's perspective. Books 2 and 3 expanded more, and Kea's first-person got interspersed with lots of third (fourth, fifth, etc.) people.
But I don't think this WIP needs other views besides Gabria's. It's framed as basically a sort of journal.
#WritingWonders Day 5. Is your MC into sports? If so, what's their favorite one?
Oh gosh no. Gabria's a computer nerd, and also too clumsy to be good at any sport.
She doesn't even like competition, because she sees it as a form of conflict, and conflict is scary.
Her goals tend to be built around getting other people to either like her or be totally unaware of her... in Gabria's mind, that's the only way to be safe. Competing against people doesn't fit into that plan.
#WritingWonders Day 6. Is your MC's space they live in neat or messy?
I would imagine that Gabria can make a godawful mess of her space when she's focused on a project.
But then she restores it to impeccable neatness immediately afterwards, before anyone else can see it.
(All my characters are author-inserts in specific ways. This is one of the me-traits in Gabria.)
#WritingWonders 7. Does weather or climate play a role in your book?
Not yet. All scenes so far have happened inside a building. It's been interesting to see how much visual sparkliness and alien worldbuilding I can do without leaving the Tesselact headquarters...
But she will go outside later, and yes, weather may affect her mission. The climate isn't harsh; the planet has been terraformed and is mostly pleasant, but a storm at the wrong time could definitely throw off her plans.
#WritingWonders 8. Are you an underwriter or an overwriter?
You mean, do I write too much or too little? Ha, opinions vary. Some say I overdo world-building. I do exactly the amount of it I like.
I did write too little of Kea's Flight, at first. Revisions took several years to grow it from 100-something pages to over 500.
Then I did the opposite on the sequel-- it was over 1000 pages, which I had to break up into Kea's Landing and Kea's Migration! Still kinda reads like one book.
(I tend toward the latter. This WIP was originally going to be just a short story in the Keaverse. I figured out pretty quickly that it couldn't fit in that format.)
#WritingWonders 9. Is your antagonist an inside person or outdoor person?
Not sure yet! The main antagonist is Captain Petro, the man in charge at the Tesselact building where Gabria is. I'll keep this in mind as I write his scenes.
Off the cuff I'd say indoor person, since the story so far is all indoors, and Tesselact employees spend little if any time elsewhere.
But it'd be interesting if he has outdoor hobbies, and mentions them to lord it over his underlings who barely get to go out...
#WritingWonders Day 10. How are mental health issues handled in your world?
OMG, I have a whole blog post about this!
https://erikahammerschmidt.com/blog2022/index.html#20220913b
But that's only a small slice of it, from Gabria's experience.
The full answer is: In a whole lot of different, dysfunctional ways!
All the MCs got rejected as embryos when genetic tests showed predispositions to mental disorders. Raised by robots and convicts on the Flying Dustbin, a starship built to remove them from Earth, without much plan after that... yeah, they've got lots of baggage around mental health.
By the time of the WIP, they've found a planet already occupied by two feuding human colonies, Arna and Ferudy, which handle mental (and other) health in opposite ways.
Gabria is undercover in Arna, helping out the rebellion.
Arna is a conformist, eugenicist corporate hellscape. They idolize the world that exiled Kea's people, and take the same ideas to extremes. If you're abnormal, physically or mentally, you're cured. If you can't afford a cure, you don't live.
Then there's Ferudy, which is as obsessed with diversity as Arna with conformity. They have universal basic income and free healthcare that's used for self-expression, changing bodies in creative ways. They go around doing (and being) whatever the heck they want.
Any therapy is very focused on patient goals. They have no concept of mental problems in the sense of impairments to "fitting in." Society's supposed to accept you as you are, unless you're doing harm.
(At least, that's how it works in theory. "Kea's Landing" shows Kea digging deeper, finding some hidden prejudices under the pretty surface.)
Then there's Gaudi, the city built by people from Kea's ship. They're allied with Ferudy and on a road to being more like them... though not everyone in Gaudi accepts that.
#WritingWonders 11. In the realm of pets, is your MC a three-legged demon person or a fluffy tribble person?
Ha! For Kea, both (in book 3 she has an adorable fluffball parakeet that's also a venomous trained killer).
Gabria doesn't have a pet. If she did, it'd be a robot she built and programmed. Or more likely a simulated virtual-reality pet. She HAS been known to program surprise pigeons into people's VR sims to send them messages.
(As for attitude and looks, it'd lean toward "demon.")
#WritingWonders Day 12. Are there any themes that pop up a lot in your writing?
Oh, so many!
The flowing nebulousness of definitions-- especially definitions of values, freedom, choice, rules, selves, identities.
The value of weirdness, in people and ideas and viewpoints. The breaking of assumptions about How Things Always Work.
The relativity of pretty much everything. The interconnectedness of pretty much everything.
Creative people making weird things.
Puns.
#WritingWonders 13. Describe your MC's hair. How do they style it?
Ha. Gabria doesn't style her hair. Or give a damn about her clothes or skin or anything.
For all her obsession with praise from other people, she's never internalized a desire for beauty. She wants people to praise her mind, her skills.
She isn't very aware of the value of outward appearance in winning friends. If she thinks about how she looks, it's the overall impression: "Do I look strong? Confident?"
(No. She doesn't.)
#WritingWonders Day 14. On a typical day, what kind of jewelry or accessories does your MC wear?
I'd say none, since she's so uninterested in visual appearance...
Unless maybe she has something that serves as a device she can use. I guess she might have improvised some little tool that aids in computer hacking but just looks like a decorative pendant.
That's definitely the kind of thing she would do. Another detail for my idea list.
#WritingWonders 15. Describe your MC's mood like a weather forecast.
"As that confrontation with Petro comes in fast over the horizon, we can expect to see storms around midday tomorrow. Too early to tell what form they'll be taking; other years in similar climate we saw anything from ice-cold revenge to a rain of tears, even a firestorm that blew her all the way to the enemy side! Now that is unlikely this year, but with the climate change in Gabria's mind these days it's hard to be sure!"
#WritingWonders 16. What is found near your MC's bed?
Not much, but definitely a device for taking notes of ideas she thinks of, and a device for contacting anyone she needs to reach.
In Arna she doesn't have the "hand-comp" all the MCs grew up with... basically a smartphone that showed up in the earliest 2005-era drafts of book 1, before smartphones were much of a thing, because back then I was an early-adopter geek who had a Handspring Visor.
But she'd improvise something like it.
#WritingWonders 17. Name one small gesture that is guaranteed to make your MC smile.
Compliments. Any kind, from anyone.
Perhaps this is an urge to be liked in order to feel good about her own value.
Or perhaps she feels just fine about her own value, but has a deep distrust of everyone else's intentions toward her, and praise helps reassure her that others don't hate her and want to ruin her life.
It's unclear which. Perhaps even the distinction itself is fuzzy.
(In retrospect I realize the name Gabria Laud could be symbolic: Laud means praise, while Gabria, similar to the angel name Gabriel, could allude to the winged messenger she used in her first meeting with Kea.)
(BUT, this was not planned. Her placeholder name was Audrey Vincent until the late editing stages when I was in a car and for some reason I read "Dual Airbag" backward and thought "That sounds like a name! I'm gonna use it in the book.")
#WritingWonders 18. Name a taste & texture that evoke joy in your MC.
Sugar.
(There weren't many tastes on the Flying Dustbin, but Gabria managed to find her favorite. Now she's tried much more varied cuisine, but she'll still eat sugar plain.)
That sweet tooth was involved in meeting Kea in book 1.
In the WIP there's an intoxicating drink that evokes joy for anyone who tastes it, by causing hallucinations of whatever they like best. For Gabria, the taste of sugar is among its first effects.
It's interesting to see other people's posts listing both a taste and a non-food-related texture... I'm sure that's more in line with the intent of the question, and it's somehow very characteristic of me that I never considered this and just assumed "taste and texture" both referred to a food.
(For me, the enjoyment of any food item is about equal parts taste and texture, if not skewed towards texture).
(As for sugar, granulated is my, and probably Gabria's, preferred texture. Especially the coarsely granulated raw sugar.)
#WritingWonders 19. What does your MC hide from others?
From Kea and Draz, in books 1 and 2, she hid big dangerous projects (like sabotaging the food preparation system and the heating system and the election) until after they'd been done.
Her confidence is high enough to be very sure she's doing the right thing sometimes, even if no one else agrees. But her fear of other people's reactions is so strong that the only way she feels safe revealing her decisions is as a "fait accompli."
From everyone back home in Gaudi, in this WIP, she hid the fact that she was going to Arna.
From Stacy Baker, whom she followed, and from the Captain and his associates who questioned her when she arrived, she hid the reasons WHY she came to Arna.
Her world is shaken when, in Arna, she begins to build friendships where she's not able to hide things.
#WritingWonders 20. How self-confident is your MC on a scale from 1-10?
OMG, complicated! Both 1 and 10, by different scales.
Her apparent low self-esteem, her craving for praise, her misery when she doesn't get it, was pretty much her main trait in book 1.
But I'm using her to work through my own discovery that, well... narcissistically high self-esteem, combined with strong self-preservation instinct and a pessimistic view of the rest of society... can look a LOT like low self-esteem.
(This is another whole blog post of mine, from a rather dark time a while ago... although that one's not directly about Gabria or this WIP.)
https://erikahammerschmidt.com/blog2022/index.html#20220928
#WritingWonders 21. What does your MC struggle with?
Social skills. Understanding why people do things. Standing up straight. Running without falling over. Taking criticism without crying.
Facing conflict. She won't fight back against anyone directly. She'll do it in secret ways so she won't have to argue about it. (Often comes across as betrayal. Draz and Kea's hyperempathy is the main reason this hasn't ruined her friendship with them.)
#WritingWonders 22. What is your MC good at?
Hacks, workarounds, secret hiding places... finding loopholes and exploits in systems.
Her first big triumph, in this WIP, combines the computer-hacking side of this skill with her very first real success in manipulating the views of a human enemy.
#WritingWonders 23. Does your MC sleep well? Why/why not?
She is far, far too anxious to have an easy time sleeping.
But she's got plenty of resourcefulness and capacity to learn and grow. I'm sure she invents tactics to use when insomnia comes along. She's got a whole arsenal of home remedies, breathing and meditation techniques, pillows and blankets of her own design.
(They're all in a rapid, cut-throat arms race with her anxieties. But they're ahead, by a hair.)
#WritingWonders Day 24. What about your world would surprise a stranger?
That the alien creatures in the story aren't actually extraterrestrial. They're all evolved and engineered descendants of Earth life.
There's life from other planets, but humans don't interact with it much more than humans today interact with life on the bottom of the sea. Like deep-sea life, of course it's fascinating... but studying it takes so much work, and brings so little profit.
(The feeling seems to be mutual.)
#WritingWonders 25. How many languages do your characters speak?
Kea's first language is stagnated English, kept in place for centuries by dictators who were also grammar fascists. She knows bits of Spanish and German from books, and she invented the Chess Language. She learns the evolved English of Arna (Ferudy's evolved English is hard to learn without brain implants, but she'll get there.)
Gabria only knows stagnated English. She's lucky her Arna captors/friends studied it so they could talk to her.
#WritingWonders Day 26. Have you invented or found any unusual sayings or manners for your world-building?
In book 1, the characters had complex rules and etiquette around their board games, because the games were a secret language to hide their communication from surveillance.
In books 2 and 3 and this WIP, I've run wild with Arna and Ferudy's culture. "Berry" is an Arna term of endearment, "Fland" is a Ferud swearword... And some characters just have their OWN strange sayings or manners.
#WritingWonders 27. What scenes were the most difficult for you to write? Why?
In-between scenes are always the biggest chore for me. I write in the order I'm inspired to, starting with scenes that are basically a writing-demon possessing me.
The demon makes it effortless. I look back and say "HOW did I make all these ideas fit so well together? I swear I wasn't thinking about it?"
The parts I have to write, to join up the demon-written parts, are the ones I feel the least urge to.
(When I outline a story, I begin by laying out a skeleton. I write down summaries of plot points as I think of them, and then decide how to arrange them.
Then I flesh it out. But, like the skeleton, the flesh isn't constructed from beginning to end. I come up with substantial parts first, and gradually add fluffy bits in between them, until I'm polishing it with cosmetic details.
In a way, it's an exact reversal of the decomposition of a dead body. I guess that's why it's called composition.)
#WritingWonders Day 28. Share a snippet of a scene that you really like and explain why.
I've been writing so very many scenes I love! Hard to choose.
(I'm not the type of writer who kills darlings. If they're VERY out of place, I save them for another story, but mostly I find good spots for them.)
Anyway, here's the scene that establishes where Gabria is. I like it for the mixture of worldbuilding and characterization.
Wear or Carry
2023/02/01
Whether you have the same or different words for things can affect how you think about their differences and similarities.
For example, I can't stop thinking about how perfect Commander Worf's speech patterns are for the way he thinks and acts, ever since I realized his name sounds like Whorf--
hahahah just kidding. Actually I was only sorta offhandedly thinking about how that idea of linguistic not-really-determinism applies to the word "wear" and the word "carry."
It's only in the time since I started thinking about German and Spanish having the same word for "wear" and "carry" that I've even really considered how much of a spectrum "wearing" vs "carrying" is:
(CARRYING)
- armfuls of stuff
- box full of stuff
- suitcase
- purse
(I draw the line about here, but not everyone does; I've seen people say "wear a purse" or "carry a backpack")
- backpack
- fanny pack
- clothes with things in the pockets
- clothes with no pockets
(WEARING)
I think the distinction has something to do with how hard you have to work to keep stuff from falling off you? The more securely the thing is held onto you, the more "wearing" it is?
But... that doesn't work for hats, which can literally blow away in the wind...
I guess there's also an element of "Is the purpose to cover a part of your body, or is it for you to transport something?"
(And yet, "wearing" a backpack or fanny pack is an exception to that, too... arrrgh.)
You'd Buy a Ball
2023/02/12
"One coincidental warning? You'd buy a ball before you'd lie!"
This is a line that appeared in my brain when I woke up, one morning a long time ago. I have no idea what it means. I don't remember it even being part of a dream.
What's a "coincidental warning"? A warning that only coincidentally happened to be true? Like if I said "Bring your umbrella, there's gonna be a flash flood" and I was totally making it up just to mess with you, but then there actually was a flash flood?
Is the quote, perhaps, something you'd say to call me out for doing that?
Doesn't quite sound like it. In fact, that first part-- "One coincidental warning?" --sounds like you're ragging on me for not doing it more often!
And the last bit sounds like you're also ragging on me for not telling outright lies. You're laughing about how I'm such a goody-two-shoes that I can't bring myself to state anything I know is untrue... the closest I can get is to make a prediction without evidence, which still turns out to be true anyway.
You're mocking me, it seems, for being capable of no dishonesty more extreme than "one coincidental warning."
And then, there's the most perplexing bit, in the middle: I'm apparently so incapable of dishonesty that I'd find it easier to "buy a ball" than to lie.
This purchase of "a ball" is presented as a hyperbolically unlikely thing to do-- following the same sort of syntax as "you'd chew off your own leg before you'd apologize!" -- and yet there is zero clue to why it would be so unlikely.
Or even what sort of ball we're talking about. Football? Tennis ball? Testicle? Fancy dance party?
I guess I'm going to go with "dodgeball of prophecy," like in the Tumblr meme... because
1. we're on the topic of making predictions that accidentally turn out to be true, and
2. this bizarre subconscious-generated piece of gibberish came to me before the dodgeball of prophecy was a meme.... so it was, I suppose, a little bit prophetic in itself.
don't like sand
2023/02/15
It's horribly frustrating to see the bad decisions being made at every level of society and feel like there's nothing that reasonable people can do to change it, and that things will keep getting worse for everyone, especially the poor and disabled and every marginalized group.
There are things that help my mental health (pills, meditation, creative projects and social time with friends) but all of them seem to work only by causing me to think less about the bad things in the world-- which feels a bit like denial.
Then again... when the phrase "head in the sand" comes up in my thoughts, I try to remind myself that ostriches don't actually do that to hide. If you do see an ostrich sticking its head in a hole in the ground, it's probably just looking for food or tending its eggs. Just doing some self-care, looking out for its own health and nourishment or its own family. If that prevents it from seeing the outside world for a while, that's a side effect of focusing on its own life for a bit.
Maybe there's a lesson in that, maybe not. But sometimes self-care, and care for those closest to us, is all we can do.
Let That Be Your Last Cardinal Sin
2023/03/02
First posted here on Mastodon.
I'd watch a StarTrek TOS episode based on this.
"Captain, the tricorder readings show genetic similarity to bilateral gynandromorph cardinals on Earth."
"So, all this rampant sexism in their society is based on, what? Left-female-right-male versus left-male-right-female?"
"Indeed, there are parallels to the black-and-white-skinned inhabitants of the planets Ariannus and Cheron, whom you helped to reconcile their differences during our mission on stardate 5730.2..."
"Yep. Just like that. You'll have to smack some sense into 'em, Jim."
"There's no right way to hit a woman, Bones--"
"Guess you'll have to be careful what side you aim for then."
*...Blink...*
2023/03/10
I remember a certain evening, years ago, that I spent scrolling through Tumblr: a site that is best known as a hive of fanatical fandom and overwhelming social justice discourse, but which has always had the lesser-known attraction of being a hotbed of weird, creative imaginings and insights. At its best, Tumblr is a place where any midnight expression of "what if?" can attract a swarm of "yes, and?" until entire, epic works of speculative fiction have been born from the crowd's communal murmurings.
But sometimes I encounter a type of "what if?" that makes my whole brain just... blink, hard.
The type that causes me to think something along the lines of, "I did not know there were people capable of having a thought so utterly different from what seems obvious to me."
I'm not even talking about thoughts like "30-year-olds should not have any type of conversation with 20-year-olds because that makes them pedophiles," or "that story is homophobic because the characters I wanted to be gay were not explicitly portrayed as gay and I won't change my mind unless the author officially comes out as gay," or even "wow, I really want to have sex with that fictional character who's just a cartoon triangle with eyes." Those sorts of ideas (also prevalent on Tumblr) at least have sort of basic building blocks of thought behind them that I can, on some level, acknowledge-- even if I can't see the actual arrangement of those blocks as anything but nonsense.
No, I'm thinking of a more primal divide in logic... and, on this particular occasion I'm remembering, it took the form of an observation about a story trope. Specifically, the trope of body-swapping-- where two or more fictional characters find their minds magically inhabiting each other's physical forms, and have to deal with each other's whole different life challenges (leading up to some heartwarming conclusion where they admit to a new understanding and respect for each other).
A person on Tumblr... whose name and background I never found out, remembering, in my embarrassing Tumblrina fashion, only the gist of the quote, and remaining oblivious to the source... this person had said something to the effect of, "The craziest part of swapping bodies with someone else would be having different taste buds and tasting all the foods differently."
My brain, at that moment, just... blinked. Hard.
I mean... okay? I suppose maybe it's possible that everyone experiences tastes differently. You can't take any two people at random and prove beyond doubt that cheese, for example, tastes the same to both of them-- any more than you can prove that the color blue looks the same to them. Maybe it doesn't. It's a speculation. Possible, in theory, but unprovable and unfalsifiable... except for the outliers who express similarities between different tastes or colors that give away the difference in their experience (for instance, those for whom red looks the same as green, or those for whom cilantro tastes like soap).
There's no reason to believe that tasting differently is any sort of universal human thing. So why, exactly, would this person treat it as an obvious given?
And why (I asked myself, as I read through hundreds of agreeing replies; the thing had gone viral) would so many other people... actually relate to this idea?
The replies, taken together bit by bit, eventually gave me my answer. They had a common thread: the assumption-- as if it were obvious-- that, well, people must all have different taste buds that taste foods differently, because, well... people like and dislike different foods.
That was where I could, again, do nothing but a hard blink that jostled me to the core.
It was one of those moments that shakes the foundations of my theory of mind... a moment of: Wait, how? How do people think this? How did this thought persist for even a second in a human mind without being dissolved by a single line of reasoning?
Did someone's mind seriously decide that there are Inherently Good and Inherently Bad ways for things to taste? That if I like cheese, then cheese must taste Inherently Good to me because of how my own tongue works? And someone else, who does not like cheese, must therefore have a physically different tongue that delivers an entirely different, Inherently Bad taste from the same food?
Did they apply this to other senses too? Did they interpret "people having different favorite colors" as proof that people must, in fact, all see colors differently? Did it feel self-evident to them, for example, that blue is an Objectively Good color, and the only reason that weirdo over there could ever prefer yellow is that yellow must literally look like blue to him, and vice versa?
Had they not once had the experience of learning to like a food (or color) that they had previously disliked? Did they convince themselves, in defiance of their own memories, that this experience involved a physical change in how their body perceived it? Had it, in fact, for them as they remember it, involved a physical change?
In that kind of moment... my feeling of being a creature from another planet, surrounded by Earth life that's alien beyond my comprehension, is very stark.
It's not only a Tumblr thing. I had the same feeling when I encountered the idea-- nonsensical, but somehow actually well-established in Western philosophy-- that it's impossible to have thoughts without words. How could that belief survive a minute inside a rational brain? Is there any human who's never had a moment of struggling to put a thought into words? Wouldn't that single common experience prove, beyond doubt, that a thought exists before it's in words? And how could a person ever learn different meanings for a word, or different words for a meaning, without becoming aware of "a meaning" as something separable from the word that symbolizes it?
But this sort of dissonance is a thing that comes up especially often on Tumblr. In another case, someone posted (as though it were an obvious fact) that humans today have "evolved" to be "more attractive" than they were thousands of years ago, because of course "the more attractive ones reproduced the most." And again, it took many cycles of going viral before any comments that disagreed with this post got any traction at all.
For this one, I feel like blaming the English language-- and all other human languages I know-- for having a word for "beautiful," an adjective describing one whose appearance is admired by others. It tricks the mind, I suspect, into imagining that beauty is an actual feature of the person or thing that's misleadingly described as "beautiful".
Beauty is, of course, not located there at all. Beauty is someone else's reaction-- a reaction which is (as we repeat to ourselves in the well-known proverb that we seldom actually think about) "in the eye of the beholder." People's appearances may have changed over the centuries, but, if we present-day beholders find the present-day average more attractive, that's wholly in our own eyes and minds.
There is, I think, a rather common tendency to see "the ideal" as an objectively true, unchanging fact. To think (not in the joking way I used to assume such statements were meant, but literally, without irony) that a person could be "objectively beautiful," a movie "objectively good," a food "objectively delicious."
And to look at the breathtaking diversity of human desires, thousands of which hold an "ideal" that has no attraction for you personally-- and to take away from that experience nothing but "wow, a lot of people are wrong."
I've thought about this, and written about it, many times in many forms. But today I'm propelled to write about it again, because I've just seen this made-up objectivity go beyond "the ideal taste" or "the ideal appearance" to include the ideal TEMPERATURE.
And not even for humans. For Vulcans, the fictional species in Star Trek.
Until the past few years, it was commonly accepted in Star Trek fan discussions (and fan fiction) that Vulcans have a higher body temperature than humans. After all, that was how they were described in the novelizations of the movies (starting with The Wrath of Khan, if memory serves). And, though I don't remember any movies or episodes outright mentioning Vulcan body temperature, the Original Series showed that they came from a hot desert planet-- hot enough for a human to have actual trouble surviving if he's exerting himself too much.
Now, if they've spent their entire history on this hot world, they'd of course have to be very well suited to it. And there aren't many different ways to be well-suited to a hot climate. I can think of only two, offhand. One is to be exothermic, like reptiles (capable of changing to match the heat outside and staying healthy at a wide range of body temperatures, just slower at the colder end of the spectrum). And the other is to be healthiest at a high temperature. That is, to be born with a body that wants and needs to keep itself around the same level of warmth all the time, and sets that ideal temperature close to the average heat of your habitat-- so it doesn't take much effort to keep you that way.
But lately I've seen a sudden increase in the number of fans who assume that Vulcans have a colder-than-human body temperature.
Reasons cited for this include some semi-official, poorly-thought-out Star Trek publication that too many people have read. Apparently, in its entry on Vulcans, it postulated a lower body temperature based on one line from the Original Series, in which Dr. McCoy referred to Spock's blood as "green ice-water" (in the context of scolding him for being insensitive, "cold" in a clearly metaphorical sense, not intended to describe his actual temperature).
And it would be bad enough if it were just that... but one widely-shared fan post (again, on Tumblr, gods help me) also speculated that a lower body temperature made sense, not despite the Vulcans' hot planet of origin, but because of it. Because having a lower body temperature would.... help them stay cool in the heat.
How? How does a human brain think a thought like this? A thought where "the healthy temperature for a body" becomes somehow a different thing from "the temperature that a body naturally keeps itself at"... and the former, the "ideal," is set by default in the place where the speaker would want it to be for their own body-- a body that is human, on the planet Earth, irrelevant to the lifeform they are talking about?
How? How does a person's sense of the Objective, Unchanging Ideal become so immovable that they can imagine an alien born from millions of generations on a scalding desert world... and yet still be trapped in a paradigm that insists that alien's body must, for some reason, need and crave a temperature colder than its home planet-- so much colder that it expends untold energy on some physically inexplicable self-cooling mechanism, fighting constantly, wastefully, against the desert heat, to keep the body chilled below even that of a human who's barely out of Earth's last ice age?
Ah well.
Perhaps it makes other people's brains blink just as hard, when I say that I find those thoughts more baffling than the other, more stereotypical Tumblr sorts of thoughts... the ones that range from "(innocuous-seeming thing) is bigoted against (marginalized group)" to "wow, that (not even remotely human-like fictional monster) is so sexy." I think, to most people outside Tumblr, those seem weirder; harder to wrap one's mind around.
But those thoughts I can follow, at least in parts.
In the case of weird sexual attraction, it's basically the same thing as accepting that some people like foods or colors that I don't like. It doesn't harm anyone (since the monster in question is imaginary and therefore is not involved in any real sex acts, consensual or otherwise). And it doesn't require understanding a person's reasoning for why they'd feel that desire, because... it's a feeling, not a conclusion reached by reasoning.
As for the accusations of bigotry, that starts from the premise that it's wrong to portray a marginalized group in a negative light (a premise I'm in overall agreement with). The rest is just an argument for how the thing in question can be interpreted as guilty of doing that. I may not follow that argument; my mind may see holes in it, or wonder why you don't have the same belief about another thing that, to me, seems comparable. But ultimately, again, it's about feelings-- specifically a feeling of hurt, which a marginalized person is getting from a certain piece of media content.
And there's no point whatsoever in arguing that it's "unreasonable" to feel that. After all, the whole point here is that feelings are individual, subjective, and not even consciously chosen. Telling people it's unreasonable to feel offended or hurt is like telling them it's unreasonable to dislike cheese, or the color blue, or the heat of a desert.
So, I may sometimes balk at the claim that a piece of writing is "objectively bad" because it says things that hurt some people (after all, it might cause completely opposite, positive feelings in some other people of the same group!). But I will at least comprehend the argument that it's not worth risking the hurt feelings for the sake of anyone else's good feelings. I may not, in every case, agree with it, but I'll know better than to get involved in that fight.
Essentially, I accept the existence of feelings, regardless of how different they are from my own experience, how very unfamiliar they seem from my perspective. I see no point at all in asking "why," or trying to argue them away. I accept, without question, that they're there.
But in contrast, I still can't even begin to fathom a thought process that starts from the assumption that any feeling must be universal... unchanging... the same for everyone.
That is, in my mind, irreconcilable with the most self-evident facts of reality.
It's like starting from the assumption that one equals three, yes equals no, and effects happen before their causes.
I can't shake the sense that those who think this way must come from a whole different universe, where all forces of nature work differently-- all the way down to the most fundamental laws of logic.
The cornflake chicken cult
2023/03/11
So a few weeks ago I was meeting a new person (a partner of one of my roomies) and of course one of the first things she noticed about me was how I find the most random connections between the most random things.
By way of explanation, I offered my usual soundbite: "I have a superpower at making connections. In a better world I'd invent the Unified Theory of Everything. In a worse world I'd invent the most convincing conspiracy theory and start a cult. In this world I use it only for puns."
She asked for an example of what sort of conspiracy theory I might start. And my brain, for some reason, reached immediately for one I came up with around twenty years ago: the idea that there's some secret connection between Kellogg's Corn Flakes and Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Because, 1. the initials KFC and KCF are anagrams, and also 2. because the cornflakes are made from kernels of corn, and their mascot is a rooster... while the fried chicken is made from roosters and hens, and its mascot is a colonel.
I wish this superpower were somehow useful. I'm exhausted with using my normal human abilities to make money through endless drudgery. If you wanna join my conspiracy cult and pay me tons of money for my brain weirdness, feel free. We'll just sit around making weird connections all day and eating cornflakes and/or fried chicken depending on preference.
Lovecat
2023/03/13
I don't see why Lovecraft even WANTED to name his cat a racial slur for a group he regarded with bigotry and distrust.
(Or why he wouldn't want to change that name, if someone else named it.)
Did he even like his cat?
Don't you usually name pets after things you like?
But, if he HAD to go with a name based on his own irrational fear and hatred...
...come on, "octo-puss" was RIGHT THERE.
Interview
2023/03/14
First posted here on SciPulse.
Back in August 2021, I did an interview with SciPulse. Thought it might be of interest to some of you here. It's a glimpse into how my mind was working back when I put together the Kea sequels.
Dominic Walsh: Hi Erika thanks so much for agreeing to be interviewed by me. My questions are as follows:
1. What made you want to be a writer?
That I'm not sure about, because it happened before I have any actual memories. My parents tell me I was writing stories and poems (in both English and German) by the time I was four years old.
Not literary-quality stuff... more like just scribbling out a few deranged sentences about a cat eating rats, then translating "Rats! Rats! All to eat!" into "Ratten! Ratten! Alle zum Fressen!" But it's so much a part of me that I can't say it started for any particular reason.
2. What writers, neurodiverse or otherwise, are you inspired by?
Lots of them. I've been reading since I was four, too, and I grew up in a house with lots and lots of books. Reading was most of my entertainment, back then.
Early on, my ideas of various genres were shaped by pretty old literature: Heinlein for science fiction, Agatha Christie for mystery, Lucy Maud Montgomery for romance and coming-of-age stories. By the time I started on Kea's Flight, I had branched out from that a little. I had read Snow Crash and Neuromancer and a few other works of cyberpunk.
Weirdly, I hadn't read "1984" yet... I'd somehow gotten through all of high school and college without ever having a class that assigned it. But I read it during the editing process, because friends recommended it to me when they heard the plot of Kea's Flight. Same thing happened with a few other novels, including Ender's Game.
Strangely enough, though, of all the books that were recommended to me while working on Kea's Flight, none of them inspired me nearly as much as Watership Down. I think it's because it was the author's first novel, and in many ways you can tell it was his first novel, and yet it succeeded immensely. That gave me hope and helped keep me motivated.
My favorite books are the ones with complex surprise endings, where everything fits together like a puzzle. Charles Sheffield is great at this. So is Louis Sachar, of "Holes" and the "Wayside School" series, and I don't know if he's neurodivergent but his books resonated VERY hard for me as a neurodivergent kid.
4. In your novel Kea's Flight, Draz could be considered a "stereotypical" aspie character, ie literal minded and great with computers. Yet he is the main character's love interest. How important is it that autistics see ourselves as romantic and romanceable figures?
It's very important for that to be a possibility, even though it's not always important for every one of us.
Romantic love is a huge part of human society, and when we're told that no one could ever love us that way, it can make us feel less like people. I spent a lot of my teens and young adulthood feeling that I would always be missing out on that experience.
When I met my partner around the age of 24, that did two things for me: a sudden really high boost to my self-esteem and my sense of personhood... but also a realization of how much of my happiness and fulfillment I'd assumed would come from having that kind of relationship.
Being in love can be wonderful but it doesn't fix everything. I didn't realize just how many things about my life I have to fix in other ways, until I experienced a romantic partnership and fully absorbed the reality that it's not the happily-ever-after ending you see in movies, it's a life that keeps on going after the end credits, and you keep having problems and obstacles to overcome.
Also, not all autistics want romantic love or sex, and that's okay. (One of the characters in Kea's Flight is asexual, and I hope to write about aromantic characters at some point too.)
I think it's very important to have stories that show romance as a possibility, no matter who you are. But there should also be stories that show the possibility of finding fulfillment elsewhere, either instead of romance or in addition to it.
4. How do you think we can move people's perceptions away from the "you're not autistic enough/you're too autistic to speak for neurodivergent people" false dichotomy and get them to really listen to us?
I think their perceptions can't fully move away from that until they've listened to us quite a bit. So it's difficult.
I don't know the best way to handle it. They way I tend to approach it in my life is that I don't talk about neurodivergence up front when getting to know people in person, and then later, if we get along well and they've categorized me as an interesting person they like to listen to, then I bring up that side of my life.
Often they're surprised when I tell them how much of a difficult child I was... how I had severe violent behavior problems... and how the biggest help in overcoming them was that some people were still respectful and kind and patient. Especially the ones who accepted all my weird personality quirks that DIDN'T hurt anyone, and told me I still had the right to be weird in my own ways. They would also explain how and why my behavior had harmed someone, and that the problem was harm, not abnormality. This was the kind of teaching I could absorb, even as a kid. I could never learn anything from the teachers who just said "don't do it because it's not normal."
I can only hope that hearing all this from me might help people see something more optimistic when they encounter kids like the kid I was.
But, at the same time, I realize not every autistic person has the option of approaching it that way. There's a tiny grain of truth in the "not autistic enough/ too autistic to speak for neurodivergent people" criticism. I can't speak for every autistic person. I can speak for myself.
Ideally, if someone asks me what it's like being nonverbal and/or having social impairments so severe you can't get a job, I would tell them to ask someone who's had that experience. There are neurodivergent people with that kind of experience who are still able to have blogs and post about what it's like. I'd rather try to amplify their voices.
5. What are you working on at the moment?
Too many things! My biggest obstacle to getting my projects done is that I have so many of them, from writing and drawing to sewing and making jewelry. I just want to do everything, and there's not enough time! Especially since I also have a full-time job in a pharmacy.
But as far as writing goes, I'm in the final editing stages of a sequel to Kea's Flight. Two sequels, actually. It WAS going to be one book, but it ended up over a thousand pages long, so I split it into two, Kea's Landing and Kea's Migration.
I managed to do it in a way where each one has some semblance of a shape as a story of its own, but the storyline still arcs very much between the two sequels. They show what happens when the ship gets to a planet, and finds another society already there.
It's as much about conflict within Kea's own society as it is about the planet she lands on. And it explores more of what was happening on the ship, in areas Kea and her group were less familiar with. I go into the viewpoints of some other characters whom the system would have classified as "severely disabled," some of whom have other marginalizations as well.
I've always regretted that Kea's Flight never addressed that side of things very much. But I want to do it in as sensitive a way as I can... and so the editing process has gone on very long as I've been trying to get as many different viewpoints from readers as possible.
6. How does self publishing differ from being published by a company?
Mainly, I have more freedom with self-publishing. That's the biggest difference I've seen.
Yes, a publisher can drive more sales if they have a good marketing department. But unless they're immensely successful at it, this doesn't result in more income for the author. When a book is professionally published, the publishing company takes about 90% of the proceeds, in my experience. So they'd have to have some of the greatest marketing success ever, before it would start to make up for that.
With a good editor, a publishing company can also make the book itself much more appealing. But (again in my own experience) editors who work for publishing companies have a very bizarre idea of grammar and punctuation rules, sometimes based on style manuals that are far behind actual human use of language.
I had an editor who didn't accept "Asperger's" as a shortened form of "Asperger's Syndrome." This was before Asperger's fell out of favor as a diagnosis; the editor was totally fine with mentioning the syndrome itself... they just insisted that the shortened form had to be just "Asperger." Even in a sentence like "I have Asperger." (What, I have Hans Asperger tied up in my basement?)
I've also had editors who insisted on capitalizing every word that came after a colon... or replacing every instance of "whether" with "if"...or removing italics where they made sense to me and then sticking them into places they made no sense. I had one who kept trying to correct the grammar in a scene of dialogue where a speaker's grammar mistakes were an important part of the story I was trying to tell. I've had them call my sentences unclear and ask questions about what I meant, in places where the question was very clearly answered if they'd just bothered to read the previous sentence or the following one.
My own self-editing skills are very strong, and I run my self-published books past a lot of real-life readers before publication, so I don't feel I need a publishing company for the sake of editing. My self-published books have been about as successful as my professionally published ones, and the experience is far less stressful.
7. Where did the idea for your webcomic Abby and Norma come from?
For most of my life I've had a brain that generates weird insights. I'm almost always analyzing the world around me from a somewhat strange angle, and seeing unusual connections and analogies between all sorts of things. Before the term "shower thoughts" became widely used, my shower-thoughts spigot was already at a constant flow.
I think 2002 was the first year I started keeping an "insight book," a little notebook where I jotted them down. Often they would come into my head as imaginary conversations. I wanted to share them, and the only format that seemed to make sense for this was the format of a comic strip. So, around 2006, I began Abby and Norma.
I named them after the word "abnormal," of course, and made them college-age women because that was the nearest experience I could relate to, having just recently graduated from college. I made the art mostly copy-pasted, because the focus was on the dialogue, and my art skills were busy elsewhere.
It was an acquired taste, but it got a fair number of fans over the years. However, it was never successful enough to feel worth putting a ton of effort into it. And with the rise of Twitter, personal web pages got less traffic, and the market for shower thoughts got very saturated, and I couldn't really compete.
In recent years, posting a super-random thought, or even an imagined conversation, is a totally standard thing to do on Twitter. These days, if I get an insight that could have been an Abby and Norma strip, it usually ends up as a Twitter post. I'm glad that wasn't the case for the ten years or so that the comic ran, because I really am proud of a lot of what I did in it. But I also cringe at a lot of it. Those were my largely-unfiltered thoughts, and I've grown a lot since then.
8. And finally, if you could invite 5 fictional characters to dinner, who would they be and why?
I find dinner conversation counterproductive. I don't try to use the same orifice for two incompatible things at the same time. So I'll make it a potluck, and go by who would bring the best food.
Merry and Pippin from Lord of the Rings. Their contribution would be satisfying and plentiful.
Aviva from Shira Glassman's Mangoverse series. She'd make sure everyone had something they like, regardless of dietary needs.
Charlie from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, after he's taken over the factory from Willy Wonka. He'd be a better guest than Wonka would be, but he'd bring just as great a dessert.
Alexis Ferud from Kea's Landing (eventually you'll see what I'm talking about, someday.)
And... if they really want to talk during dinner, I guess their conversation would be pretty delightful too.
Slangy Brew
2023/03/17
Here's a poem semi-formed in my head right now, inspired by some thoughts about colorful figures of speech and how some of them sound like lines in a Shakespearean witches' chant.
Eye of pig and ass of rat,
Shit of bull and dog and bat,
Mix'd with feathers of a horse
Serve us sorc'rers as the source
For a potion of Complain,
Of Ridicule and of Disdain.
Knees of bee and cream of crop
Cherries pluck'd from high on top
Stirred together in the vat
With fine pyjamas of the cat
Form, under cover of the night,
A brew of Praise and of Delight....
(I'll let you know if this grows into anything.)
Crickets
2023/03/18
regular brain:
Why does "crickets" mean "no reply" when crickets are some of the noisiest insects anywhere
big brain:
Because you're not talking to crickets, you're talking to people, and when they don't say anything it becomes easy to hear any crickets that are nearby
galaxy brain:
actually this is another manifestation in our collective subconscious-- alongside the ancient genetic memory that triggered our invention of the game of cricket -- and inspired by the same distant generational trauma remembered by all lifeforms in the Galaxy, ever since the mass-murders wrought by the planet Krikkit, whose utter hatred for all life outside their world grew from their existence within a dust cloud, blissfully unaware of outer space at all until an alien ship crashed and upended their entire worldview, which had until that moment consisted entirely of an absence of contact with anyone other than themselves. This mindset is still echoed in our own subconscious, whenever our conversation partner fails to respond, leaving us in a moment of unconnected silence. Most likely this is why the insects we hear, in these lonely pauses, ended up being named crickets in the first place.
Clenched
2023/03/18
First posted here on Tumblr.
"Unclench your jaw"? You mean the solid mass of petrified muscle in which so many generations of cells have lived and died in constant rigor-mordis [from Latin mordere, to bite] that any other state of being is no longer known even in their distant racial memory? You mean the mountain of tension-verging-on-tetanus that has ground to dust a high deductible's worth of night guards, stood strong against boiling hot water bottles and made massage therapists run screaming for the hills at one touch? You say I should simply, with an effort of pure will, choose to... unclench it? You absolute genius. Why didn't I think of that.
Hand and foot
2023/03/18
On the "what if our feet looked like our hands?" axis...
"monkey" is to "human" as "blue-tongued skink" is to "Tyrannosaurus Rex."
lizard drama
2023/03/18
"No, I shall not come out until you fill this empty bowl."
Lazy lizard
2023/03/19
So, I'm getting caught up on posting some of the various things I've written, crafted, photographed and posted elsewhere so far this year.
Some of the latest are just cute lizard pictures.
I texted Elle "This is one of the 5,000 physically impossible positions that a blue tongue skink finds comfortable."
She replied: "I actually think we're always witnessing a battle between laziness and comfort"
and yknow I think she's right.
I think I'm learning a new thing about my lizard: she is VERY solar-powered.
Early in the day, when there hasn't yet been enough light to warm her up, she is lazy and slow. (She has heaters on all night, but I guess the lights that turn on in the morning are what really get her feeling awake.)
This means that until she gets going, she has to stop often to recharge... no matter which part of which crawly motion she's in the middle of.
So I think this explains why she will often lounge around for quite a while in positions that look straight-up RIDICULOUS. Like this one.
Video panning from side to side, showing the front half of a very long lizard drooping down from an elevated area of her tank, with her jaw resting on top of a large plastic tunnel on the floor. Her stubby front legs dangle in between.
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