Some words about the WGA strike, as a writer who isn't even a WGA member. (I write books, mostly, and often they get optioned by Hollywood, which always makes me happy.) The work of making these narratives? It's a lot of work, with constant notes, nopes, furies, & wildnesses. 🧵 It's not easy to make a TV story, super-long novel-style, as many of the current tv shows are. Massive plot lines, huge character arcs over many episodes, good dialogue, hopefully, a giant story that makes sense, on tight tight deadlines.

Soft coup is the phrase you're looking for. This doesn't look like what you maybe think of, when you think of a coup, but it is an attempt at a conspiracy-based soft coup. Before the election even happened, Trump announced his intent to do this, & began the conspiracy himself. And yes, Republicans supporting this are doing it because of Georgia. They want to keep their power over the Senate, and Georgia is where the possibility is. If they blow Georgia up, they keep the Senate.

In houses where a whole party has been having a fascist tantrum, it's not a reach across the aisle and forgive them scenario. It's a time out and figure out your shit scenario. Like, usually it's been a situation where the Republican Party is across the aisle from the Dems. But not at the moment. It's a wide, wide aisle, full of fascist lava and people (including women) who think it's great to remove the rights of everyone but straight white men.

Damn, I feel better. Years of a whole large part of my brain, no matter what I did to dissuade it, being hypervigilant and watching Trump's every move, trying to predict his whims, impulse evils, and urges toward random catastrophic proclamations.

I have a public service announcement about keto pizza. I probably don't need to say more, but I will say, that if your household, unaware, innocent, buys the Foster Farms Brand, you should know...

THAT.
THE.
DOUGH.
IS.
MADE.
OUT.
OF.
CHICKEN. I can say more. I can say that, when summoned for a bite of the horror, in an attempt to diagnose why it was so horrible, I looked at the ingredients and screamed. As far as I can tell, this "pizza" is puréed chicken random bits mixed with egg edge. It's rubbery, like sponge.

When you switch your schedule to NightWriter, due to a daytime baby, it makes you feel like you're 22 again. That is, IF you get an afternoon nap while the baby has his afternoon nap. But for real. I feel like a 22-year-old inside a wrongful bedtent, typing all night. Also, NightWriter is a TV show I would watch, even though it'd be super boring. KITT would be replying to my horror heap of unreplied emails.

I have a lot to say on this topic, yep.

https://twitter.com/noirista/status/1314258912938352640

Basically, calling powerful women "monsters" goes way back. If you fear a woman's intellect & power, & want leave to come after her, you're gonna dehumanize her by calling her "monster" instead of "warrior." Monster, epic-wise, means she can be destroyed, & you can get hero cred.

Yes. The idea that default white supremacy is a logical response to being the "abandoned" working class, when it's actually a carefully-nurtured program coming from the top of American privilege, is propaganda that's been useful to a lot of candidates over the years. 👇

https://twitter.com/Karnythia/status/1313582280678440960

It's all a means of aiming white anger at the wrong "oppressors" - people of color & immigrants - while supremacist villains steal resources, bolster inequity, & insist reparations are theft from those whose narratives of work have been repositioned as narratives of agony.

Just the level of lies about people "supporting abortion past the point of birth" from this filthy president. Past the point of birth? "Very late term"? EASILY IDENTIFIABLE 17th-cent witchhunter rhetoric, using the baby-sacrifice trope, which is to say, it's a Q-anon dog whistle. This guy has been claiming he's been witch-hunted for years now, when of course he's actually the Cotton Mather in the room.

The angry white people I keep seeing on camera claiming they can’t breathe if they wear a mask to protect others, make me think they’re trying to draw a parallel between themselves & Black men put in chokeholds by police. There is no parallel. These mask refusers aren’t victims. But it’s a pretty classic propaganda technique, adopting language used by an oppressed group to describe the rationale behind your own abusive behavior. To go into a grocery store & shout that you can’t breathe, because grocery workers are oppressing you, is ten kinds of fucked.

The DOJ's push for the power to indefinitely detain people during times of crisis reminds me of other times the American government has done things like this. It's storytime, folks. Let's drop back in time to the gay 1890's, which weren't gay for everyone. In the period from roughly 1870-1900, a number of states passed Tramp Acts, which basically made it illegal to be homeless. If you were a man traveling without visible means of support, you could be arrested and sentenced to between 6 months and three years of hard labor.

What to do with eggplant, fennel and Swiss chard, a thread about the things in grocery stores that people for some reason, disdain.

https://twitter.com/MARIADAHVANA/status/1239736513052565504

Eggplant: chop in half, put face down in your oven, roast it at 400 or so til very soft. Meanwhile: depending on provisions, make a garlic mint yogurt sauce & a tomato ginger onion sauce. Mash it all up. Feast. This is in the Bademjan Borani category, Persian wedding eggplant.

Dear women in their early 20’s: if a man tells you, “you’re not like other girls” hear me when I tell you, this means this dude sucks. I’m listening to a guy tell a woman this, and he followed it up with “you’re satisfied with tequila and a grilled cheese.” And then I just heard a whole riff about how older women hide their true bodies by refusing to get in the pool in front of men, & this is somehow a betrayal & cruelty, & what I’m thinking is...it’d be fun to reveal one’s true form to this guy. Bat wings, talons, whippy bits bro.

Query to the writers who’ve got babies who are not/were not in daycare. How. Did. You. Write! When? Did you write? And hey, what did you write? Right now, Grim and I are still recovering from that evil virus. We both still have small coughs, and his wakes him up. Also, though historically he has slept thru the night, at present he says that rare books wake up at 4 AM for a bottle.

The thing about studying Beowulf for years and years in a wild-eyed novelist->translator fashion is that basically, everything political right now looks very Beowulfian, and I am waiting for a dragon to get up in it, but it might be 50 years. I mean, seriously, all these things are built on Beowulfian themes. Monsters are coming. Heroes are here. Build the wall. Oh no! Breached wall! Kill the monsters! And their kids! They want our gold, our blood, our bodies! We need a hero! A guy with brass balls!

This, as always from @hhavrilesky, is so damn smart, and I don’t even have a nemesis. I do have the occasional Writer I Wish I Was moment, & when I do, I force myself to remember that you have to apply for the fellowships, not just mutter. Then, oysters. thecut.com/2019/11/ask-po… For real, though, the writers I wish I was tend to be twenty to forty years older than me, so I can see the span of their career, and it looks planned. In truth, much of the time it wasn’t. It was just hard work in pursuit of paid power bills, and it added up to fierce art.

This. This is everywhere. This is a thing that people say about 13 year old girls all the time, and do you know what it means? It means badness. It doesn’t mean normal dude. But it is also horrifically common.

https://twitter.com/alyssaharad/status/1148710788988899328

In fact, I’m reminded of a large selection of grown men in my own history who did things ranging from kissing my 14 year old neck, to telling me I was an “old soul,” & “nebulous woman child,” to calling my house, knowing I was 15, speaking to my mom, & trying to ask me on a date.

On the one hand my life is 🤗 in tons of ways. On the other, I am a whirling swivet of screaming frustration who needs to change tons of things in order to not go bonkers. In other words: I’m a freelance writer who is both killing it and getting killed. This is a not-unusual freelance writer state of affairs, no matter the level, but it is still a whole situation when you never know when you’re actually gonna get paid for current projects, and you have projects in the mill that are old and done with and still haven’t paid you.

A crew of construction workers just stopped me on the street to ask the sex of my in-utero passenger. The head guy asked me to show him my hands. When I did, he said “girl!” Because I’d shown him an open hand. And according to him, girls say “gimme, gimme.” So... I showed him my left fist and swung it in his direction, and said, “if this baby is a girl, the gesture you’re looking for is this one.” The baby is XY genetically, but the kid is any gender they want to be. Also, WHY DO PEOPLE SAY THINGS LIKE THIS.

If anyone doubted that the world of pregnancy apps is a misogynist, batshit, blameful place? I just received this notification, complete with alarm bells, at week 26. Note: this app is called Flo. It’s a period tracker that switches to a pregnancy app. It’s really popular. Here, some more highlights from @flotracker’s misogynist pregnancy “Health Insights,” sent as notifications, and as though they contain actual science rather than paranoid folklore, shaming and bizarre instructions about haircuts.

I didn’t know I was pregnant until 4 weeks - & when I went to the doctor they were shocked that I knew so early. It’s only because I’m diabetic. My blood sugar went crazy. 6 weeks is early to know, & most people don’t. Periods are late. Bodies fluctuate. These bans are bullshit.

https://twitter.com/ppact/status/1119412621705404416

And yes, I’m both pro-choice and pregnant. I have the kind of body that had to see ten specialist doctors to make sure I could carry a baby without dying/going blind/having a stroke myself. It was a scary first trimester, & I wasn’t sure, for months, if I could safely do this.