I tried to write this like a normal review. I promise. I can share that document with anyone who wants to see it. But it felt hollow, circling what I wanted to say without showing it.

I wasn’t thinking about the book linearly, so I can’t describe it that way. So… I’m writing a tribute to this book the only way I know how, in its own language.

The Witness

Nearly everyone knows of this puzzle game, and those who enjoy it nonetheless agree on its pretentiousness. But, have you ever been wandering through the woods, and you suddenly connect three different ideas at the same time?

The Witness is full of those calm moments, with puzzles that are designed to teach you how to solve them. And, while exploring the shady trees section of the island, looking at the way the light hit the panels, I had one of the moments I had heard others describe: The game designer speaking through the environment.

“What do you do when something blocks the sunlight? You find what’s blocking it.”

I solved the puzzle, moving to the next one. But there was nothing showing the pattern.

How do you solve this one? You find what’s blocking the light.

And suddenly the reality of the world opens up and you start looking. And you see the shadow on the tree you dismissed before.

This was one of the first times I felt like I fully heard authorial intent, because this game is supposed to make you hear it. It teaches you how. Instead of looking at “what this objectively means” you look at “What are they trying to say? What are they drawing my attention to?”

Affectivity

Walking into my lab meeting, this book clutched under my arm, led to a “No WAY!”. He pulled out a copy of Flights. Same cover, same edition.

“Oh my gosh! Do you like it? It’s awesome so far.” I asked, ready to start comparing notes.

“Not really, I had to read it for one of my classes in less than a week. Not sure I really got it.”

“Oh… I had to read a chapter last semester. I loved it so much I bought the damn thing.”

“Have you gotten to the part about plastination of dead bodies? It gets really weird, if it hasn’t already.”

“No, haven’t gotten there yet.”

Roadmap

The next week, I had read about those scenes, bouncing from chapters on sanitary pads to Wikipedia to an old legend of a man who thought he could hold on through youth by keeping children near him. A woman wanders into a museum of wax figures to look at models of female anatomy. Things had begun falling into place. Between the letters begging a family member’s body be removed from museum display, to the man holding too tightly to delusions of immortality, I remembered one of the first vignettes.

I remembered the rats refusing to run in the mazes designed for them, the woman refusing to stay confined to an address.

And, this.

I saw these connections, and wondered. But I didn’t realize, yet, that Tokarczuk was leaving these breadcrumbs intentionally, a map of focal points alongside the physical ones printed in seemingly random places throughout the story. Change, knowledge, and authority.

I tried to explain this to my friend at the next lab meeting. “She’s listing all these things that are changing and contrasting them with all these people trying to hold on too hard. She’s talking about change and condemning plastination. The bodies. The kids.”

The friend who had read the book for class thought about that for a moment, and said he hadn’t interpreted it that way, but then, he hadn’t really made anything of the book to begin with.

Shadows

I probably had to reread that first page a dozen times before I realized it wasn’t supposed to make sense. It was unconnected from everything around it. It was painting a picture of only a single moment, that might or might not make sense later, but was sure as hell important regardless.

Then, she started talking about psychology, discussing diagnoses that don’t exist and never have. Tokarczuk was a psychology student, she knows this. Which means she had something other than psychology in mind when she was talking about a psychological attraction to things that refuse to conform to typicality.

Her narrator says she was never able to become a writer. She was too unable to distill things into words, too obsessed with understanding her own mind, and unable to write things in universal generalities, so she became a researcher instead.

Because Olga Tokarczuk did become a writer, this also cannot be what she meant.

Synchronicity

I was so excited walking into class that day, ready to talk to people about the confusing, brilliant, personal, and emotional work that this is, talking about how I was finding a copy in full so I could finish it the next free moment I had.

And then the professor asked for a show of hands on how many people had hated it, and fully 80% of the class raised their hands. He said he was always nervous introducing this book, knowing people wouldn’t know what to make of it.

It was hard to grasp how something that had become my new obsession by the tenth page, could mean such annoyance to everything else.

Cain’s Jawbone

You know the challenge: put the pages in order to untangle the whole story from the fragments.

I put many hours of research into the project, researching plagues and covering the walls of my room with stacks of the papers, sticky notes and lines covering everything.

I never managed to put it in order, but the act of trying too was meditative. I remember hours passing at the task without my notice, but the way the pieces connected remained stubbornly inscrutable.

The Coastline Paradox

It’s impossible to perfectly measure something with an irregular shape. To build a model that could do so, the model would have to be as large as the thing itself.

The Problem

Most people reading this book are required to, forced to compress this book into a week, to write a discussion post about postmodernism and non-linear storytelling. So everyone misses Tokarczuk telling you, implicitly, how to read her book. We miss every time she tells us that some ideas are too complex to be told in the mediums we are used to.

We miss why Tokarczuk did all of this: not to challenge genre conventions, but because the themes she presents are too nuanced to be held in a single narrative, and the way she thinks about them, herself, is probably constellationary. And she was able to share that constellation with the rest of us, in moments that somehow began to feel like a whole, like getting to peer inside someone’s mind and hear what they were saying underneath the words. And that’s why AI will never take the place of human writers. Because this is a map of implicit connections that can’t be accurately described with words, only with snapshots, unconnected ideas, and experiences. Someone needs to connect those into a picture using their own understanding, otherwise they don’t mean anything.

Archives

In an essay about the historical books library, I wrote about hearing people’s intentions through the marks they had left on the paper. The real issue, of course, is that we can’t know the history of ownership from an ambiguous stain on the flyleaf.

The conclusion I came to was that it didn’t matter what had happened. The story did.

The Garden

The last two-hundred pages of this book were read in a single sitting, watching people wander by through a greenhouse. I remember the moment the woman was flying home, after wondering why anyone ever bothered to return home if all they were going to find was ghosts. Even this description is not exact. What was actually described was more implicit. She simply asked why on earth someone would go home, because it only provides proof that one existed. Then she remembers an exhibit of plastinated bodies, and thinks about future generations keeping loved ones on display instead of letting them go. Thinking about the memories she was trying to leave behind, the old lover she had just left.

The scene about the ghosts comes later, about how people love to travel because, soon enough, you start to feel the ghosts that call everywhere home.

Fractures

The ending draws that final connection:

Why encourage us to keep writing, then? This doesn’t make sense. The whole story is about change, the problems of preservation. Trying to hold on to what won’t be controlled. Things are supposed to change, to transform.

This is the theme we are set up to believe. Tokarczuk starts out that way. With the human bodies in the museum preventing a family from getting closure, with the young man’s creepy actions as he clung to youth, with the shedding of old memories that allow the biologist to move on after doing the impossible.

It doesn’t make any sense for who to suddenly endorse a form of stagnation. But she has, throughout the whole book. It’s one of the only things that stays constant, actually. Why?

Tokarczuk has trained the reader, by this point, to think back to why this could be. And suddenly, a constellation I hadn’t realized was there came into focus.

“Description is destruction”

That moment where that biologist remembers the memory of the dog getting hair on her leg in a flash, but not what became before or after–refusing to put it in order.

Kunicki going crazy, not because he tried to make sense of something, but because the experience didn’t fit into a container that he could label. Because some of the moments, the transitions between good times, were missing, and couldn’t tolerate that ambiguity.

Tokarczuk hadn’t been telling us to avoid preservation. She shows what happens when people depend on it. When they rely too much on order and labeling and familiarity.

That’s why writing is the weapon against plastination. Because writing isn’t a form of preservation, it’s a form of interpretation and destruction. And Flights takes that idea to its logical conclusion: a non-linear narrative that doesn’t give a damn if things are told completely or in order. It just keeps the moments that fit together in brilliant ways that will never make sense without reading them all. Without piecing together, as Tokarczuk puts it, the “links between objects, their network of reflections”.

Maybe that’s why it’s stuck with me. Because it doesn’t make sense, and yet, it does.

Fantasy

The real reason, I think, might be more personal.

I’ve been trying to write a novel that I, for the life of me, cannot make fit into a box. Not in the “it’s breaking a trope” way but in the “the structures I know of can’t tell the story I want to tell.” At the same time, I’ve been grappling with why I love a very specific subgenre of books, and have issues with a lot of older stuff, and newer stuff, but for different reasons. Trying to articulate what the invisible rule my brain uses to judge books is exhausting. But this book manages to be everything I love in a story without even having a plot. It’s philosophical and ambiguous, but not one sentence felt empty.

And maybe the fact that not everyone liked it gave me some hope, too. That not everyone likes this, but there are people writing it. So someone must. That writing a book that doesn’t make sense from the outside isn’t self-serving, that it just doesn’t work for everyone. Because if I was the only one who liked the implicit connections in a constellationary novel, maybe my own writing wasn’t doomed after all.

Some people say there was that one book that made them fall in love with reading again as an adult. Flights is that book for me. Not because it got me back into reading (I never stopped) but because reading had been feeling like a slog all through college, like a task to be accomplished. This is the book that made it feel like a puzzle to be unraveled again.

Flashbacks

By the end of this book, I understood the deep irony of copying down passages from this into my commonplace book, trying to make sense of them. Preserving them because I couldn’t let the moments go.

But, here’s the thing. This book has stuck with me for weeks, now. I keep experiencing moments of it as flashes. The biologist flying home, thinking about what she is leaving behind. The moment Eryk finds a book that “fits him like comfortable clothing”. Karen returning to Greece and finding that it has changed into something else, and so the tour guide suggests they imagine it as it used to be.

Even as I write these words, I’m remembering lines from it: about the need for endlessly selecting what matters to us, focusing on the one painting in the museum for reasons we can’t explain.

It makes sense that a book written in flashes would be remembered the same way.

But what’s harder to explain is how I knew after those first ten pages that this is how it would end, remembering it when a connection I couldn’t quite name emerged, or for no reason at all. Much of what I’ve written here is in flux. Much of it is interpreted now, from memory, rather than in the moment I’ve decided to say I understood it.

I wish I had a more fitting way to end this review. Something about the pieces weaving into a puzzle ring and the human brain always thinking of things in constellations, however much we try to simplify and make our thoughts linear.

But I don’t have one, because that’s not what this book is about.

Someday, I’m going to cut this book apart, and lay the pages out on my wall the way I did years ago with Cain’s jawbone. I will connect everything with red string and notes trying to put the connections into words that aren’t designed to be held in that way, because they’re designed to be felt.

I’ll try to write an essay on what made this book meaningful, but come away only with the image of a botanist, looking out and her childhood city, and wondering why the time has come that she can finally feel the ghosts.

Image Credit: Thumbnail

Image Credit: The Witness

Undoubtedly, these games live in my early memories for a multitude of reasons, this being only one. I have returned to them several times over my life: for their famously difficult puzzles, creative concept, cryptic narrative, and the atmosphere that is just the right amount of isolation. During one of these, I became fascinated by the choices the player makes, always balancing trust and skepticism, evidence and past actions against redemption and second chances. Recently, I returned to the games again, for a totally different reason. And I think this blog is the best place to articulate this tangled, messy, narrative of colonialism, family ties, and hard truths.

Unlike many other pieces on this blog, my intent here is to write this for people who have no outside knowledge of Myst. There will be some puzzle spoilers (including references to the final puzzle in Myst III: Exile, but I will aim to keep other solutions out of this. However, the character arcs and choices of the games and the books will be covered in depth. I truly believe these games can be enjoyed even knowing their endings, but I will leave that discretion to the reader.

Content Warnings: mentions of Murder, Euthanasia (briefly), Religious Abuse, 90s Racism.

Myst

The Myst Saga, for those unfamiliar, takes place across five official Myst games, one spin-off game (URU), and three books. I will be covering everything in the order it was released. The intent of this essay is to untangle the Miller brothers’ themes, and their evolution from 1993-2006. At the time of writing, I have not played the 2020s re-releases of these games or read spoilers. It is possible (perhaps even likely) that content in these remakes conflicts with some of the conclusions I draw here. That is an issue for another day.

Most fans’ introduction to these games begins with the first game. The Stranger (a genderless self-insert for the player) finds a book abandoned. Inside, a fly-by image of a small island plays, showing features like a half-sunken ship, an enormous gear, a forest, an observatory, and a mechanical tree. The player touches this image, and links to Myst Island, exploring these structures, finding it abandoned. They find clues written on notes and in journals chronicling Atrus’s journeys to other worlds. Atrus is a D’ni: a nearly extinct race who possess the ability to write links to other worlds. In his journals, Atrus lays out his experiences with the inhabitants of these other islands, and the areas he claims for his family, particularly his sons, Sirrus and Achenar, in each of the worlds. Within the library, these two sons are trapped within their own books, and returning their pages allows them to share more information with you, each blaming the other for the ruins of civilizations you find as you link to the worlds Atrus documented as full of life. In these ages, torture devices, manipulative notes, and a general sense of unease leads the player to mistrust both of the brothers—if they have been paying attention, finding the hidden spaces and documenting what they see. Eventually, the good ending allows the player to free Atrus from the prison the brothers have trapped him in, and begin the events of Riven. While freeing the brothers is technically an option, doing so prevents the continuation of the story and feels inherently wrong. Your best option is to free Atrus.

When I was younger, I didn’t catch all the nuances of this story. I was playing this game for the puzzles. My focus wasn’t drawn to the language Atrus uses in his journals; the way he describes other ages as places for his sons to live, passing the burden of their care to their native inhabitants to allow himself more freedom. I also didn’t fully process that Atrus left his sons, with their obvious instabilities, alone on these worlds, and Atrus never once bothered to visit to see what they were doing. Because nowhere in Atrus’s journals are there descriptions of Achenar’s torture chambers or Sirrus’s stolen items. He just left them, unsupervised on these worlds, seeing them as harmless places to roam free. Upon finding out that his sons have committed atrocities (in essence, genocides on every island they established living quarters in), he is horrified, and blames himself, but fails to address the underlying problem behind the tragedies.

This is something the game fails to articulate. The message up until this point has been “don’t murder innocent people” rather than “don’t do colonialism”. Atrus is still very much a colonizer, as shown through his Channelwood journal:

“I saw a group of monkey-like people heading in my direction. [...] After staring at me for a short time, they fell to their knees and began what appeared to be some sort of ceremonial worship. I tried to speak to them, but they did not understand my language. [..] Sirrus has suggested that I allow him and his brother to stay. Though the idea unsettles me, I know the boys are growing up rapidly. The hospitality of these creatures is such that I could think of no better place to leave them for a short while, so I will consent to their request.”

It is important to note that I do not detect any irony within these words, any self awareness of the parallels they were creating with history. I also do not believe they had, at this point in the story, planned to flesh out the narratives, showing Atrus as anything other than the hero whose only failure was to supervise his children. Atrus is motivated by discovery, but the writers don’t address here that curiosity does not inherently make him a hero. It makes him a Crusoe-type figure who records the lands of others with a sort of superiority. And this is your protagonist. Your only option is to free this man, befriend him, and move forward into the next game.

Interlude: What This Essay Is About

Atrus is cast as the hero. A tragic one who made a mistake, but ultimately, the only one you can trust. Rand Miller plays both Atrus and Achenar, and Robyn Miller plays Sirrus. The writers of the story have inserted themselves into the narrative as characters. But the brothers were the villains, making identification with them unlikely. I argue that Rand Miller, in his writing of this story, came to identify as Atrus. Atrus’s words, especially as the series progresses, are spoken directly to the audience, and the world of D’ni as a whole is very much a way for him to come to terms with the problems of our own.

The Miller Brothers appear to have set out to write an allegory about writing, but ended up grappling with the colonialist undertones of the world they created. The world of Myst evolves not because it was planned to be a vast arc about coming to terms with being on the wrong side of history, but because the brothers seemingly wrote their own evolving worldview–and regrets–into the work.

The Book Of Atrus

This book tells the story of Atrus’s father, Gehn, his grandmother, Anna, and his childhood in a desert cleft in New Mexico. His father abandoned him as a child to be raised by Anna, who tells him the stories of the D’ni being wiped out by some sort of grave mistake that led to a plague. Gehn returns, pulling Atrus away from the cleft, and travels with him to the ruined D’ni city. Along the way, he reveals Anna was responsible for freeing Veovis, a D’ni man who would release the plague on their society out of some sort of undefined anger toward their social system. Gehn portrays this, with disgust, as a lower-class uprising that destroyed their society. He says this uprising created enough chaos for Veovis to release the plague, though we will learn later, in The Book of Ti’ana, that this characterization is wildly inaccurate.

At first glance, it seems to appear that the D’ni are an allegory for groups who have been colonized throughout history. The very few surviving D’ni, and the effort Anna puts into quietly preserving the stories and language from her old home seems to support this interpretation.

However, as the story progresses, it becomes clear that the conflict is not between the D’ni and other groups. No, the conflict is the philosophical one between Gehn and his son. Atrus notices everything, tries to integrate all these pieces into a cohesive whole and understand the relationships between them. This was something Anna taught him to do, and something that was very important to the philosophy of the D’ni.

“It seems you’ve considered everything, Atrus. You’ve tried to see the whole [...]. You’ve looked at the problem from many angles and considered how the pieces fit together. You’ve asked all the questions that need to be asked and come up with the answers. [...] Always consider the whole, Atrus. Always look at the interrelatedness of things, and remember the “whole” of one thing is always just a part of something else, something larger.”

-Anna, the Book of Atrus.

This sort of holistic thinking is something Gehn seems to lack entirely. He becomes frustrated at Atrus for asking seemingly irrelevant questions. This dichotomy also manifests through a more tangible conflict: their views on writing. In other words, Myst has always been heavily meta-textual. A text about the act of writing, and the moral dilemmas underneath it.

Gehn sees the act of writing as creation, but his worlds are anything but sacred. He combs through other books and rips phrases from them, stitching together whole passages from previously written worlds without fully understanding their meaning. As a result, his worlds are often unstable, as he tore the descriptions of their soils, structures, or atmospheres from the words of others. The act of writing for him is simply one of creating another populated world to rule. Gehn scoffs at embellishment, crossing out words Atrus uses to describe a specific type of flower that reminds him of his home in the cleft. His worldview, one of ownership and “mass production”, functions as a clear allegory for colonialism in its most extreme form.

Atrus, on the other hand, follows the old D’ni beliefs: Writing establishes a link to another world. Every possible world already exists, somewhere in space or time, and writing is an act of discovery, not creation. He builds his worlds through his own imagination, trying to gain a mystery of language so that he can share the worlds he sees and visit them. As a result, he believes that the D’ni are not gods. In other words, Atrus is a writer, with a deep sense of respect for the craft, while Gehn is not.

But what bothers me about Atrus is that he is still, very much, the lesser of two evils in this situation. Look at how he views the D’ni:

“For all [Gehn’s] bluster about making D’ni great again, he had forgotten precisely what it was that had made the D’ni extraordinary. The reason why their empire had lasted for so long. It was not their power, nor the fact that they had once ruled a million worlds, it was their restraint, their astonishing humility.”

-The Book of Atrus

This “astonishing humility” is the belief that oneself is not a literal god who created all civilizations in existence.

In a world that claims to unequivocally condemn colonialism as the ultimate evil, Atrus’s beliefs are not as distant from Gehn’s as one may like to believe. He is not a sociopath by any definition, but when it benefits him, he is perfectly willing to do the same things as Gehn. An early example of this is Atrus threatening the inhabitants of the 37th age with Gehn’s name. This scene is never fully addressed. As the readers, we know that Atrus knows what he is threatening. Gehn kills people who disagree with him. Often publicly, in especially horrifying ways.

“When a Guild member of Riven spoke against him,“He had us…sacrifice the man. [...] fed him to the sea. [..] He threatened us. All of us. Gave us a warning. ‘Question me again and I shall destroy your world. For just as I made it, I can unmake it! Look to the Great Tree. I shall leave my sign upon it.”

Another fissure.”

-The Book of Atrus.

Gehn took the symbol of the old Rivenese belief system, centering around the sacred Great Tree, and left a split in it big enough for a person to walk through.

This is what Atrus is invoking when he threatens the inhabitants of the age with his father’s intervention. Something he knows is totally unforgivable is totally okay to threaten when he needs information. He knew what that threat meant. And he threatened them with Gehn’s rage anyway.

Unlike Gehn, he may not demand ceremonial worship, may not use fear as a means of control to maintain power over other societies. He may try to generally help where he can, analysing the soil and using the power of writing to tweak the microorganisms in it so more food can grow. But this has always been driven as much by his curiosity toward minute details as his desire to help others. He is fixing the soil because he is curious if he can fix it, in addition to any altruism.

However, though I do not believe it intentional, Atrus is a heavily unreliable narrator. Despite claiming condemnation of Gehn’s cultural superiority, he does the same. His future wife, in Riven, introduces herself as “Katran.” He mispronounces it “Catherine” and refuses to change it, to the point that even many years after their marriage, he still refers to her as Catherine. The whole thing is played as a joke. But the end result of this interaction is that a woman sacrifices her real name for the sake of a man’s convenience, never acknowledged again. And given Atrus’s role in capturing Gehn, preventing his coercive marriage to Katran, and his promise to help stabilize the world that Gehn has continued to destroy across many years, it is very difficult to see this as Katran having a real choice in this name change.

It reads more like Katran picking her losses. Giving in to Atrus in order to do all she can to help the Rivenese and save herself. She will go by “Catherine” the rest of her life in hopes that this man will be able to stop his father. Though there are parts of this relationship that are certainly healthier, as the two gifted writers begin to exchange ideas, as it becomes clear that Katran has developed ways to bend the worlds beyond what Atrus thought possible, it remains hard to forget how their relationship began: with Atrus saving her from marriage to Gehn while being fascinated by her himself.

In the background of this narrative, Anna has followed Atrus through the tunnels of D’ni to try and save him from her son. In that process, she met Katran. Together, the two women began planning Gehn’s downfall, writing the star fissure into the world of Riven: a vast, seemingly deadly void that allows the linking books to be lost so that Gehn cannot link away. They also create the world of Myst Island, so that the three of them can escape Gehn forever. It’s an escape that feels like a last resort for them. The only way they can keep Gehn from creating even more damage, destroying more worlds, is to sacrifice one: Riven, Katran’s home world.

Atrus doesn’t seem to see it that way. As he links away to Myst, staring at Gehn as his hand hovers above the book he intends to drop into the fissure behind him, he says:

“‘Now you’ve got the justice you deserve. You can stay here in the little haven you’ve created for yourself, in your tiny island universe, and play god with your “creations”’. [...] Atrus stepped back, out over the lip of the fissure, falling, tumbling down into the great expanse of stars.”

-The Book of Atrus

He leaves Gehn behind. Knowing that the toll it will take on this world will be immeasurable. Knowing that Gehn will kill others because of this, will try to entrench himself even more firmly as a god now that one age must take the brunt of his focus. But Atrus no longer has to deal with him. He gets to continue using the art, linking to new worlds, examining new places and discovering what he can about their nature. But he doesn’t try to save Riven. This is Atrus: acknowledging his mistake in leaving his sons unsupervised, but not the inherent, structural problem with the Art itself.

The Book of Ti’ana

In this prequel to the entire series,we learn of the fall of D’ni. The real reasons why it occurred and the way the D’ni lived prior to their fall. The council, made up of the highest member of each of the upper-class guilds, governed D’ni. Each guild kept their domain secret, including the recipes for ink and linking books. The D’ni, we learn, created links to ages with abundant resources, and hauled these resources back to D’ni. They possessed an intense fear and even hate of outsiders. Anna, a human from the surface, stumbles into the caverns of D’ni, where he is immediately captured, mocked, and prevented from returning home. They fail to learn her language, so she has to learn theirs instead, which she quickly does. Eventually, she meets the man who will become Atrus’s grandfather: Aitrus1. This is also where we learn the true intensity of the D’ni superiority complex, and what really destroyed them.

You see, this civilization relied upon travel to other worlds. High class D’ni possessed private ages, for vacations and second homes. Lower class D’ni shared ages that were accessed through libraries.

Aitrus is a high-class D’ni (a guildsman) whose family possesses one age and is later given another. He tells Anna that there is no resentment among the lower D’ni classes because everyone is given access to ages, and the privilege of having a private age is not controversial enough to provoke frustration. Anna doesn’t seem to believe this, and talks about the class divides among the human race.

It seems here that Rand Miller was trying to portray D’ni as nearly utopian, where class divides existed but did not cause the same harm as our own society. But he also takes care to show the prejudice of the D’ni against outsiders, setting up the D’ni superiority complex toward other societies.

In this book, we learn the fall of D’ni was not a lower class rebellion caused by a political activist, as Gehn portrays. Instead, Anna (now Ti’ana) showed a young man named Veovis mercy, causing him to not murder Aitrus and Ti’ana when given the chance. As a result of the mercy, he also refuses to write another age for A’gaeris to rule over as a god.

A’gaeris was bitter about his punishment for destroying a linking book, and vowed to destroy D’ni, and Veovis did assist in this endeavor out of bitterness, but contrary to Gehn’s telling, Veovis was not the mastermind behind this plan. In other words, Ti’ana, an outsider, was not responsible for the destruction of D’ni.

Gehn tells a xenophobic version of the destruction of his world, and passes on this distorted version to his son, Atrus. He also doesn’t pass on the rest of the story: how his mother, the villain in his version of the story, escapes with him to the surface and raises Gehn on her own after Aitrus succumbs to the plague. Years later, after his wife, Keta, dies in childbirth, he also leaves Atrus behind, making Ti’ana either raise the boy herself or leave him to die.

But did the Miller brothers always intend for Gehn’s version to be a lie? Despite no indications of it in the first book? Was this retcon, strategy, or a combination of both as they realized the real-life events their writing parallelled?

Was this whole sprawling saga planned as a slow revelation of increasing historical awareness, or something else?

This tension–between what the authors intended and what they decided to rewrite along the way–lies at the heart of my argument.

Interlude: Trap Books

In the ending of Myst, we see that Atrus has burned the trap books housing his sons: a mechanic that left them trapped, forever, in the links between worlds, forever held in a void with no way for anyone to visit them.

In Myst IV: Revelation, we learn Atrus misrepresented the nature of these books. They were actually prison books, holding the ages of Haven and Spire, where each of the brothers built new lives, and had no communication with the outside world. They were never trapped between the ages at all.

This is widely acknowledged as a major plot inconsistency that the Millers retconned in order to allow the changes they wished to make in the larger narrative.

Riven: Gehn’s Crimes

Players who had consumed all the published lore knew the context of the D’ni civilization when they stepped into Riven. They knew the D’ni believed the greatest sin was seeing oneself as a creator of worlds. They knew Gehn suffered racist remarks for being half human during his early childhood (with one doctor even telling Ti’ana to euthanize him due to his mixed parentage). We know that Atrus suffered extreme parental abuse at Gehn’s hands and clashed with him ideologically, while also seemingly internalizing much of Gehn’s D’ni superiority.

The game opens with Atrus greeting you on K’veer, writing in the Riven descriptive book in order to stabilize the world that Gehn has destabilized over many years. Despite Atrus’s efforts, the world is collapsing. Katran has been trapped on Riven by Gehn when she came looking for Atrus prior to the events of the previous game. Your job is to free her so that she can organize the Rivenese for evacuation. You also need to trap Gehn in the trap book of Atrus’s creation, and signal him.

You are then linked to an island with no real instructions on how to do any of this, slowly reading short journal entries and solving puzzles to try and discover what context you can.

And the player should be utterly horrified when they see what Gehn has done to Riven.

Gehn has turned the Wahrks, large fish-like creatures that consume humans, into symbols of his religious authority. He builds statues of them, demands offerings, and builds special gallows in the center of the Rivenese village to feed people to them. It’s a horrifying image. He has turned this native animal of Riven into a complex system of religious abuse. He has built stained glass windows depicting religious imagery with him as Riven’s god into temples. He teaches children to pray to him in school, with board games of men being fed to Wahrks used to teach them numbers. He has placed crystal viewers everywhere to watch the Rivenese from his literal throne room. He has chopped down the Great Tree to make more books. And when a child of Riven sees you, they run fearfully back home to sound an alarm, and all refuse to answer the door.

And the game does not reconcile that Atrus trapped him here, knowing this was likely, knowing Gehn would subjugate a whole civilization and try to impose D’ni culture forcefully upon them.

Atrus did all this, and his last thought before linking away wasn’t of what he was doing to Riven. It was how he had finally beat his father.

The Rivenese are fighting back, however. The rebel Moiety have built a network with Katran’s help on the age of Tay, guarded by some of the hardest puzzles known to humankind. You have to implicitly learn the D’ni number system, recognize shapes and sounds, and understand the origin of a half dozen artifacts through context scattered across a few separate journals, or you aren’t getting in.

I think it is beautiful that it is built in such a way that only people who understand the context of the Rivenese environment and refuse to overlook any part of it will be able to solve it. Which is why Gehn never does.

The canonical ending for this game involves freeing Katran and capturing Gehn. Doing so allows Katran to evacuate the Rivenese from the crumbling age into that of Tay, the rebel age, saving them but likely losing much of their culture, not to mention all of the beauty of the world and its creatures. For the best option in the narrative, it’s not… good. But you helped save their lives! You got rid of a tyrant! The game doesn’t dwell on the negatives. The star fissure–the supposedly deadly void that Gehn has occasionally used as a method of execution–swallows you, as Atrus links away, seemingly betraying you and leaving you to die in a crumbling world.

Or it seemed that way to me until his dialogue overlayed the stranger’s view of Riven growing smaller as they fell.

The Star Fissure

Do you remember the book you found in the beginning of Myst? That book is the same one Atrus let fall into the fissure to trap Gehn on Riven. The fact that the Stranger found it? It means something in the fissure must function as a link, back to wherever you came from.

The star fissure was a way to get you home.

I love this part of the ending. It’s so clever, and part of me will always be filled with awe as I see the stars swirling around the player and Atrus’s voice narrating solemnly “The ending can never truly be written.” My appreciation has only grown as I have read about the canonical origins of the star fissure, shaped by the writerly philosophies of Katran and Anna, and Katran’s trademark tendency to push the boundaries of what could be written into existence. Reading about her worlds that inverted water around certain points to create impossible ecosystems.

But none of that changes that the best possible ending to this supposedly hopeful game is the destruction of the land the Rivenese lived on. They endured Gehn’s rule, but Atrus sees the age as doomed, so he stabilizes it just long enough to save the people, before telling you to literally collapse one of the five islands into the fissure. As a signal.

There is a violence in this act that the writers seem unwilling to acknowledge.

So you can imagine my surprise when I read The Book of D’ni, and found out the book is about the denial of colonialism and rights violations.

The Book of D’ni

The Book of D’ni covers a lot of ground. It deals with Atrus’s trauma2, his attempts to extricate his father’s influence from his own psyche; the fallout of the D’ni plague and attempts to recover the few survivors to rebuild, and the discovered existence of Terahnee the age sealed beneath a building in a chamber designed to prevent even air from escaping. The founders of D’ni wanted this one to stay hidden, but given Atrus’s nature, his group links there anyway.

They emerge into an idyllic world where food is seemingly abundant, and they are almost immediately welcomed as guests. Almost. The first person to notice them covers his eyes as asks if he can see them. They confusedly answer “yes”, and all seems normal, so they dismiss the strange occurrence.

The latter half of this book shows the D’ni learning about Terahnee. Both groups come to the conclusion that at some point in their shared history, one of the groups split off from the other, but they share common ancestry. Terahnee is what D’ni could have been: a world where there is no low class, where the scale ranges from “Comfortable, but works for others” to “Wealthy beyond reason”. Amidst all of this, Atrus realizes that he has never once seen the table be cleared or the food brought, and concludes their hosts must be so polite that they were doing it discreetly.

Of course, one can probably guess the reveal of this story. The Terahnee kept slaves. Who they refuse to “see”, covering their eyes if one is present. They were never mentioned to the D’ni because they never asked. And several chapters of this story are spent showing the D’ni grapple with this realization, that this supposed paradise is built on something no one wanted to see.

“This whole world is a lie.” - Atrus

“You want to give them eyes, Atrus, but what if they do not want to see?” -Katran

“Looking around him now, he saw not a world of splendor, but a world built on his father’s dark design; a world where the false notion of blood had so blinded [them] that they saw their fellow men as beasts — that was, when they designed to see them at all.” -Atrus

And, perhaps most strikingly, the dialogue of Eedrah, a young man who has stayed silent while knowing of the Relyimah slaves:

“It was my silence, the silence of people like me, that permitted it to continue, to carry on unchallenged. It was up to us, who saw, to do something. But we didn’t. For thousands of years, we just accepted it.”

“You didn’t create Terahnee, Eedrah.”

“No. That’s true. I merely used it, like everyone else.”

What follows is some of the most horrifying descriptions of anything in the Myst series. It is not my place to judge whether describing violence as graphically as possible is the best way to tell these stories: fictional ones, but clearly based on real experiences and history that may not be theirs to tell. This is not my place to judge, but it feels wrong to leave it unmentioned.

The rest of this book is sloppy, there is no way around that fact. There is a plot involving another plague the D’ni brought that kills off the high class of Terahnee and helps destabilize the society enough for the Relyimah to overthrow them and build a new one. The main problem with that being that the production of this book was so rushed that none of the plot threads truly make sense in their respective context. And the writing also seems like it was unedited here, in the final few chapters. There are real-life reasons for this, involving deadlines, that have been confirmed by the creators.

I read the reviews going into this. I expected it to be terrible, unreadable, and fully unfinished. There were a bunch of comments complaining about Katran’s role. While I agree to some extent, she is also portrayed as more brilliant and creative and wiser than Atrus. She is the one who does the chemical tests to make sure the air won’t poison them. She is the scientist who writes worlds and calls out Atrus’s simplistic worldview. Yes, the world is extremely male-centric. The society is patriarchal. Atrus took away her name, and never acknowledged this crime again. Katran and Ti’ana don’t get screen time together and instead work from the background.

And yet… this book was written in the 90s, by two men who were obviously trying really hard to come to terms with the colonialist society they had created without fully grasping its implications or how popular it would become. And Katran’s portrayal is still miles ahead of Marvel, ten years after the release of this book.

Katran may not have been perfect, but, perhaps unintentionally, the Miller brothers made her do almost everything truly heroic in the series. She rescues a civilization that Atrus seemed willing to destroy in his sacrifice play. She and Anna wrote the world that saved Atrus from his father. And she understood the rules of writing at a level far beyond any of the men within this whole saga. In a story about the failure of society to interrogate its worst flaws, patriarchy is part of that structure. And yet, there is a layer of sexism underneath that which remains unacknowledged.

Metafiction & Myst III: Exile

Here is where this structure needs to break slightly. Because, in the beginning of this essay, I said that the Myst series is metatextual. I said Atrus is a self-insert. And now, I need to expand this claim.

Metafiction is a form of storytelling where the focus is not on the immersive nature of a story, but on self-referentiality, commentary, and often, writing itself. And finally, after reading through all the Myst content, I realize how skillfully this was set up.

Most people play the Myst games out of order. Some play just one or two for the puzzles, some people just read the books, some people just look into the lore. But you truly need all of the information to understand what I believe the Miller Brothers intended. And that makes it tragic that most people don’t understand that metaphor because they don’t see the whole. They very thing Atrus, despite all his flaws, is commended for doing.

Myst is the story of the Miller brothers, their journey with writing, coming to terms with their own colonial histories, and acquiring fame only to realize they neglected their moral responsibilities. Let’s look at these games again. But instead of realizing Atrus has been the villain all along, through our context of historical events and understanding. Let’s just look at what the text implies.

Throughout the Book of Atrus and the Book of Ti’ana, the awe of D’ni society toward writers is abundantly clear.

Read this, and tell me now that the world of D’ni is not a world invented as a sort of fantasy for writers: self-indulgent and arrogant:

“Though the writers claimed no special privileges, nor has a greater voice than any other on the council, it was held to be the most prestigious of the Eighteen [guilds], and its members had a sense of that. To be a writer, that was the dream of many a D’ni boy.”

-Myst, The Book of Ti’ana

“Writing–D’ni writing–is not merely an art, it is a science. The science of precise description. When we begin, there is nothing. It is…uncreated. But as soon as the first character is completed, the last stroke set upon the page, then a link is set up to a newly created world, a bridge established. The D’ni called it Terokh Jeruth, The Great Tree of Possibility3. Common men but dream and wake. We, however, can live our dreams.”

-Myst, The Book of Atrus

A whole subplot in The Book of Atrus is Gehn’s tendency to abbreviate and Atrus’s tendency to embellish. He comes up with beautiful phrases, waxing poetically about these gorgeous blue flowers from his home. Gehn criticises this description: “embellishment, that’s all they are” and crosses them out, much to Atrus’s dismay. It may not be a coincidence that the biggest critique I read about the Myst books is their over-description.

Atrus constantly grapples with the physics of the world he is writing. How does one build an environment a civilization could feasibly survive in? How does one address a plot hole without breaking the world and needing to create a new one? How do you bend the laws of physics without devolving into unclear dream logic?

If I had to guess, these are the questions Rand Miller intended to answer. As much as I maintain that he is not the right person to grapple with these questions, I truly do not believe he intended to be. I think he set out to write an allegory about writing, and the inevitable complexity—the worlds in question being made real—created the ethical dilemmas that Rand Miller didn’t intend—not unlike Atrus, with his shortsightedness allowing the brothers to roam freely in the first game.

Myst III: Exile tells the story of the Releeshan Book. Atrus has been working on a new age for the D’ni, after his revelation from The Book of D’ni that they cannot rebuild their society in the ruins of the old one. This new age, Releeshan, is stolen by Saavedro, and placed as the reward for Atrus following him and completing a set of puzzles in these lesson ages. Atrus’s journal reveals his central struggle with writing Releeshan: not knowing which elements to make dominant in his new world.

“Writing Ages is a science - a precisely structured equation of words. Every equation needs as it’s foundation an underlying concept around which the Age can develop. In the past, I have written my Books around whatever idea intrigued me most at the time. [...] I know our history as a people, and the paths we have followed to arrive here. Today I must write a Book which will link to an Age that will allow us to continue on our way, growing ever stronger as one people. What underlaying concept must this new Age reflect that will best allow our civilization to thrive?”

“Tomorrow I will link back to Myst, and from there revisit several of my Ages. Perhaps in my old worlds, I will discover new ideas”

“I no longer need to worry about which underlying concept - energy, nature, or dynamic forces - I should make prevalent in the Age. Rather, I must strive to include them all.”

So, Atrus’s journal tells the story of a writer who does not know which main concept his world should grow around. Should it be a nature world? A dessert world? Something mechanical? Should he write it with Katran, or by himself?

Then that writer decides to include them all.

Then, Rand and Robyn Miller write the Myst series. A world of island worlds, some natural, some mechanical, some deserted, some in ruins, some beautiful, some boring, some captivating. They write them all into a single world, making looks the portals between the world. Why choose only one world to tell a story? Why not include them all?

He was writing about himself.

In the character literally written in his voice, Rand Miller was writing about himself.

Two Men Trying to Understand Colonialism

It seems here, to me, that the Miller brothers were trying. Maybe not fully succeeding, but doing everything in their power to address the flaws of their old work, to realize their mistakes, to do better. Not to undo it, but to write their own evolving understanding into the arc of the series.

Through this story, the player learns that Atrus may still not understand everything his sons did when he allowed them free roam of ages. They tortured this man, destroying Narayan’s life-giving world tree, not unlike Gehn did to Riven. Saavedro, a man whose home world of Narayan was eviscerated by Sirrus and Achenar. He has been trapped on an island, alone in a lesson age, his family likely dead for the past two decades.

In the end, the player discovers that the tree is still alive, and Saavedro’s family could be, too. But Saavedro has threatened the destruction of the Releeshan Book.

Your final choice as the player is whether you free him. And whether you can convince him to give you the book back. The canon answer, of course, is to allow Saavedro to return home. Twenty years older, his psyche irreversibly damaged. To a world he hasn’t seen in twenty years. Atrus’s final monologue has me conflicted.

“Old wrongs have been righted. We cannot escape the past. Nor can we rewrite it, hoping to escape our pain. The best we can hope for is to continue to learn.”

-Myst III: Exile

We may not be able to fix Saavedro’s past. But we do the best we can.

I do not consider the ending of Saavedro’s exile to be a wrong righted: losing twenty years is a debt that can never be repaid, and Atrus seems to make no effort to try.

But maybe… the Millers were writing this about themselves, their attempts to reckon with the history they created. The clumsy, awkward, systems of linking and ethics that they probably never intended to address. The one they keep trying to improve through all of these iterations.

In Myst IV, Atrus challenges us to determine if the brothers we assumed were killed at the end of the first game are worthy of rejoining the family, after their crimes. We see Achenar grappling with the death and destruction he caused, and he dies redeeming himself, saving his sister Yeesha’s life in the process. It’s as if, in this game, for the first time, the pure unfiltered brutality of what these brothers did hits Achenar. Sirrus remains unwilling to confront it, and he too dies at this game’s conclusion.

New Beginnings: Myst V: End of Ages

Myst V deals with the ending of the art and Atrus’s daughter, Yeesha, unearthing that vast, disturbing, history of the D’ni. She discovers that D’ni, like the Terahnee, kept slaves. In the former case, the Bahro. Her quest in URU fails to free them, and that responsibility is passed to the player in Myst V: End of Ages.

And in this game, the D’ni are finally cast as the villains. And I’ve heard people complain about the heavy-handedness of this metaphor, how explicit and uncomfortable this one-eighty is. But the truth is… it only feels like one because the games have given the D’ni a pass for so long—because they are not the worst characters in the story. Because Rand Miller wasn’t ready to confront that the civilization, as he wrote it, was full of colonizers who took advantage of everyone around them.

—

Interlude: Intentionality & Awareness

In the Book of Ti’ana, our most detailed glimpse of the D’ni civilization, the Bahro are never mentioned. Maybe Aitrus, grandfather of Atrus, simply was too high class to be aware of their existence, in the same way we often do not understand the level of exploitation in our own society. This works within the story. But no hints are ever given to this, no hidden lines that the reader recognizes that escape Aitrus. No–the Bahro were added later.

And they feel like Rand Miller’s way of saying “The D’ni were hiding something wrong, too.” A final acknowledgement that there was something that even he, the writer, didn’t see.

Yeesha eventually takes it upon herself to resolve this atrocity, in the same way our own world passes on the responsibility to be better to its new generations. For us to recognize our world a little more clearly. And when even she fails, she has cleared the way enough for the player to complete the task, freeing the Bahro from their centuries of bondage to the D’ni.

There’s a quote that I read differently through this lens. It’s from the Book of D’ni. Atrus is older and somewhat wiser, and he and Katran have returned to the D’ni cavern ruined by plague.

“‘It must be difficult for you, coming back here.’

‘I was only a child,’ he answered, his eyes looking past her toward the great twist in the rock on the far side of the cavern. ‘I didn’t understand just how much he had twisted things in my mind. I had to unlearn so much that he taught me. I thought I’d thrown him off, but his shadow is everywhere here. [...]’

‘Then maybe that’s why you’re here. To throw off his shadow.’”

Atrus trying to throw off the shadow of the embodiment of colonialism, his father? Trying again, and always falling short? Feeling that failure more keenly each time he returns to this world?

This isn’t about Atrus throwing off Gehn’s shadow. It reads like Rand Miller trying to shake off something else.

The Ending.

I read these books and played these games out of order, across many different stages of my life, revisiting them in childhood and only getting the chance to read the final book in adulthood. I’ve played the games for many different reasons with many different people, written essays on small facets of these games for classes and explanations. I imagine the same is true for the Millers’: writing a new frame around Atrus after each release, complicating this already nuanced character. He may remain curious and holistic and brilliant, but remains startlingly unaffected by the true depth of the suffering around him, apologetic toward its worst parts.

But the world around him changes, forcing him to acknowledge what he has done. Forcing him to finally recognize that he had internalized much of Gehn’s worldview, that he, even in his holism, doesn’t see everything. He grows into an old man full of regret, and Yeesha takes over the role that he couldn’t.

I genuinely believe that the Miller brothers did not know what they were creating in the beginning. That they believed they were telling a story–their own story–about writing. About learning to build worlds, shaping them so they don’t collapse under their weight. Inevitably, when one tells the story of those lands being real rather than imagined, real-life ethics get in the way. And parallels emerge, quickly, that they realized, slowly, they were unequipped to handle. So they messed up. They wrote Atrus straight into the self-congratulatory white-savior trope. Then tried to correct it, clumsily and imperfectly, slowly growing more and more tired as they realized their errors in each installment. Moving from the simplicity of Myst to slow reveals of exploitation and prejudice across the books. They frame Gehn as a symbol of cultural superiority and then have the character defeat him. They tried to patch up their mistakes through acknowledgment in the third and fourth games, and let Atrus grow tired in the final game, letting the new generation handle the struggle. And, even in the end, they still struggled. With how to portray women, with adding more crimes to the D’ni to make even the people who refused to see the parallels in the beginning understand what D’ni was the whole time.

In case it is not abundantly clear, I do not believe the brothers planned any of this from the beginning. Their world building is messy. Trap and prison books are retconned and explained, the ages of the characters is difficult to follow, and it is hard to argue that the Bahro existed in total invisible secrecy for all of Aitrus’s life, and the Millers chose to save that reveal for years back when the games were being written one by one.

Maybe the alternative is better: trying to rewrite the world a bit at a time as they grew more aware of what they were creating.

I’ve been trying to stitch together this story into a coherent whole. It feels like it is constantly being amended, reckoning with its own history, rewritten to make it closer to the truth the brothers were trying to say, as they seemed to take on greater responsibility for that act of creation. They messed up substantially along the way, kept retconning and rebuilding and writing in new characters to carry the torch. Made Atrus, in the end, a regretful old man who realizes he has failed to fully grapple with D’ni’s legacy. Who is still unable to see beyond the limits of the culture in which he was raised.

Maybe for that reason it has always felt unfinished to me, contradictory, unstable, and constantly changing with the mind of its creator, like one of Gehn’s fractured ages. Maybe that’s fitting for a franchise whose most famous quote is “The ending has not yet been written.”

The ending of the Myst series will probably always remain so. But I think perhaps we can learn from the way this series was always–always–trying to get closer to something we might never reach, and the Millers certainly couldn’t. To keep writing, keep improving, even when what we write might only match what we believe for a little while.

Image Credit: Fallen Tree by Alexandre Calame

This whole process has taught me so much. It has the potential to spiral into a rant about self-discovery, commonplace books, motivation, inspiration, community, and about a million other things, but I wanted to share a few here. The thoughts I keep coming back to. In hopes that it might keep someone else from making at least one of the mistakes I did.

Writing starts with wanting to tell a story. Nothing else.

I grew up hearing about authors who had a single movement of whole casts of characters spring to life, and suddenly a story needs to be told. The problem with that narrative is people can end up expecting it. Waiting for that first seed of the full story to suddenly appear before the writing can begin.

The truth, at least for most, is probably less satisfying. Most writers start out with the wish to write a book. Because they love fantasy worlds. Because writing has given them fulfillment in other ways. Because they have something to say that matters. But I don’t think anyone has a sudden epiphany of how everything fits together, where the story starts and where it all ends.

In other words, I think the act of deciding to tell a story is the first, most important part of this process. It will likely precede stagnant time where you will have bits and pieces that you are struggling to assemble.

The issue is, even after deciding early in life that writing a novel was on the horizon, it always kind of stayed there. I went through years of that, wondering if the piece that would make it all work would ever come to me.

Near the beginning of undergrad, having made almost no progress, I made the decision that I needed to start writing regularly now or I never would. Now was the time. These few weeks were agonizing, filled with words that never felt right on paper and knowing that I couldn’t share a world with others that I couldn’t even see myself.

But the urgency to be a writer now did what I think happens to everyone. An idea came to me walking home one day, about how the world should work. It came from merging a line from the book Just Mercy with a few conversations with friends of friends, and behold, the concept of the three metatapisi3 worlds was born. There was no beginning-to-end narrative structure, just an interesting idea to explore. But at last, I had a foothold. I think this is when the story really began.

The internal decision that you are going to tell a story someday shapes what you pay attention to. Everything you encounter from then on becomes a potential puzzle piece to integrate into the world. But I think it only works when there is some sense of urgency. Not “I want to write a novel someday” but “I am a writer”. I wasted years waiting to understand something-the fictional world-that the process of writing, itself, teaches you.

You need to make the decision for it to be a work in progress, not a work in the future. And that is going to mean some level of agonizing commitment, at least for awhile, that feels slow, pointless, and unproductive, like trying to populate an empty world with stick figures. But eventually, something will click.

Telling things in order is for essays.

I’ve been told most of my life that the way to write a story is to just keep writing what happens next. After spending a solid chunk of the last couple months trying to teach myself how to write a novel, I actually disagree, especially in the early stages of a project.

Because writing feels less about what happens next, and more about what you want to find out next. The goal should be answering the unanswered questions that you, the writer, are trying to understand about the world you create. And usually, each of those questions requires research, plotting, aimless hikes, and maybe a little internal screaming. When you answer that question, you write it down4 and move on to the next one until your world stops feeling like a toddler duct-taped pictures from magazines together.

When I first told myself it was time to sit down and write the fantasy novel I had in the back of my mind for years, I only had the ending planned. The world was empty, the characters populating it were vague and indistinct, and I didn’t know where to begin. So I followed the advice, and just tried to start writing. It fizzled quickly because the world was empty. It wasn’t any more real to me than it was to anyone reading the words that vaguely described “a forest”.

I didn’t know that the only way to make a fictional world less empty was to just keep asking yourself questions about it.

Not that I would have known back then, which questions to ask. Much less how long each one would take to answer. It gets easier to ask questions the farther along you get. The things about the world its writer does not understand grow more complicated and less generic the longer this process continues. Stumbling across a plot hole exposes your inconsistent logic and the process of filling it raises more questions.

And then, you solve the next one.

In other words, this speech may be as applicable to writing as it is to escaping Mars.

There is a point at which this strategy becomes much less helpful, but in the beginning, knowing that I was looking for answers to questions no sane person would ask would have saved so much time.

If you don’t resemble your characters now, you will.

I started out writing characters, guarding intensely against giving any of them any interests or patterns or arcs that resemble my own. But there are two issues with this. The first is that you can only write what you know. Creating distance between the dynamics of your characters and people you know, trying to make sure you write things into the mouths of protagonists that run against anything you would ever say, trying to make sure their passions are as distant from yours as you can make them. It typically won’t work, and if it does, it just means inherently that you are writing further away from what you cared to say. Don’t write yourself, but writing is always going to be deeply personal. You have something you want to write for a reason. Even worse than trying to avoid making characters share any traits with yourself is trying to avoid any parallels with people you know. Listen, you have to get character quirks from somewhere, and your own life is one of the few things not subject to copyright. No one else has access to it. If you ignore this incredibly useful store of information, you are just going to end up rewriting Lord of the Rings. Instead of doing this, try to think of obscure people who you don’t interact with anymore. Chances are, the character of them in your mind is largely a fabrication anyway. But even doing this, I think many people are always going to be a little uncomfortable when a character’s voice begins to resemble their own (even if their beliefs do not) or when a snippet of conversation or conflict you experienced makes it into the draft. But I think the fear of this was disproportionate when taking into account what writing is.

I’m not saying to make a character a self insert. I’m saying it’s pointless to try and outrun the feeling of referentiality, because writing is an active role, filled with research and deciding which rabbit holes to explore. And you do not remain unchanged throughout the process of trying to build a person from scratch.

When I began writing one of my characters, I wrote down their interests. I thought it would be interesting to make one of the characters communicate through the Victorian Language of Flowers. I spent a long time researching it, trying to develop ideas for how it could be used in the story and develop some familiarity so I didn’t introduce unintentional meanings. And guess what? Now half my friends know me as the person who talks in the Victorian Language of Flowers.

That’s what happens when you create traits for a character. The research you do and the time you spend writing in their voice affects you.

So embrace it. It’s going to happen either way.

Writing is like fumbling through a pitch-dark house, finding corners by feel. But nothing compares to that feeling of finally finding a light switch.

Anne Lamott once said you only have to be able to see two or three feet in front of you. There was a time when I needed to hear that to know that I didn’t need all the answers to the story before writing.

Now, I’m not so sure I agree. I think what you need to know before writing is much more complicated for many people.

I think some know the feeling they are trying to create without being able to see those three feet in front of them, as long as they know the direction they are traveling.

To me, writing feels more like stumbling through a dark house and tripping over random stuff on the floor that needs to be cleaned up, without you knowing what it is. You know that the house needs these rooms when it’s complete, it needs a bedroom and a bathroom and hallways. You know the colors everything is supposed to be, and you may know that the living room has a painting of a crocus on the wall that’s broken in half. But you don’t know where the chairs are or where the doorway leads, you only know the feeling it gives you.

For the life of things, you don’t know where on earth those light switches are either. Every once in a while your hand will hit one, and you’ll see a huge part of the story fall into place. It might not be right, but you can paint the walls and rearrange the furniture later. Now you know what you are working with, even if most of the time you are just running your hand along the walls in the dark, one shuffling step at a time, writing dialogue that sounds dry and generic, fishing for details you know will come to the surface eventually.

Before your second draft, learn from Marie Kondo

Believe it or not, I’m not talking about getting rid of anything that doesn’t spark joy, that, at least for me, is a recipe for deleting tens of thousands of words. No, I mean I was mentally unprepared for how little I know about my own work. The whole idea of tidying up your stuff is taking everything out of drawers and hidden spaces that you have not interacted with recently; with things you probably forgot you put in there.

There’s so much in a story that you forget was shoved into a closet. Motivations that don’t make sense in the story’s larger context, visual details that spark the wrong emotion for that scene, motifs that you realize were written for a different character.

This feeling is so much like the one of slowly digging through the back of my closet, finding old papers and art supplies in the wrong bins, forgotten cards from loved ones and sweaters that need repair before they can be worn again. A high word count might not mean everything is good, but chances are, there are pieces worth rescuing, if only you can find the location to which they belong.

Don’t write a time travel story that will collapse under its own weight on the first try. Worlds collapsing should remain events in your story, not a description of your writing process.

Just wanted to add this in. It’s not based on a real example.

Sometimes, you must allow yourself to start over.

There is an orange folder somewhere with the terrible first attempt by a ten year old that will never see the light of day. There is another draft in my google drive from high school, somehow equally terrible. And each word I added only made me dislike it more. The latter sat there forever, because advice given to new writers lays out the cardinal sin: never start over.

I ended up starting over, and it’s the only reason I’ve gotten this far. By realizing the others were false starts, I was able to finally see what it needed to be.

There is hope in this process. Each step has made the story feel a little more “right”. Even if it feels painfully slow, progress, aggravatingly, tends to behave that way. Trust yourself to know when starting over is the right choice. You know more than any instruction book when that is.

Writing Involves a Certain Amount of Self-Deception

You have to tell yourself it is going to be a good first draft, while holding the knowledge in your mind that it won’t be, because telling yourself that you are writing junk as a beginner makes it feel like progress will never happen. It will.

It does get easier. Writing starts with wanting to tell a story, but it ends with having a story you need to tell.

I don’t think developing a fictional world is ever over, and I still don’t know everything my characters will get up to. But, finally, after laying out this outline, the world and the story have started to feel weird to me. This step feels different than previous ones somehow. I am writing the story for other people now, because I finally understand what I’m trying to say. I’m trying to describe a world that now feels real to me, in the same way others’ work does.

And that’s a milestone that gave me a bigger shock than reaching my word count. But that only happened after writing so much where I was narrating something that didn’t exist yet. And that exploration has to happen through structures and advice and processes that don’t work until suddenly something just…does.

That’s what writing is. It’s not about telling stories. As much as I didn’t like the Rose Field, I do agree with Philip Pullman on one thing5. Writing isn’t making things up. It’s a way of seeing, and in some ways, trying to see the story you know is already there.

Because when a piece fits, it just feels right.

Closing

Writing a novel has been one of the most impactful experiences of my life. If you take nothing else away from this post, it’s that the writing process is always daunting, but always worth it. I look forward to seeing where this second draft goes, because I highly doubt the simplicity laid out here is going to remain true.

Thanks, all, and keep writing.

Image; Crested Titmouse by Robert Havell, Jr.

I really, really wanted to like this. I’ve been waiting for this book to come out for six years, which should be kept in mind and probably plays a part in this feeling like a letdown. But… also sometimes a book is just a disappointment. Mild spoilery type things in here, but honestly there isn’t much to spoil. Let me try and get my thoughts in order here, and I promise, I will try everything in my power to not compare him to Victoria Forester.

This book is 672 pages. The previous one is pretty similar. For context, his first trilogy averaged less than 500 pages. At no point in those 672 pages does Pullman manage to complete one of this themes or close a storyline he began. However, he does manage to muddle his own internal logic considerably, and in my view shows a disrespect for his own source material. This rant will attempt to explain these problems.

But first…I love this world. I think Pullman is one of the most thoughtful and creative writers out there. It also helps immensely that this feels more personal than His Dark Materials. This is why I kept reading. because it reads like advice for writers and creative people, and also somehow like a lesson he learned about abandoning what he sees as the important parts of spirituality (imagination, seeing layers of meaning, morality, etc) and linking this mindset to the creative process of writing. This idea has so much potential. Done right, I would have enjoyed this concept greatly, even if I didn’t agree with all of it.

BUT LITERALLY WHAT IN THE AUTHORITY’S NAME ARE HALF THESE POVS? Nothing with the magisterium is new here. You all remember when we were young and would get angry at having to read Jason’s POV in HOO? Imagine that but a million times more intense. Like 80% of these are boring and seem to be here exclusively to build tension to get back to Malcom, Pan, and Lyra’s troubles.

Did we genuinely need ^%&*#& Bonneville’s POV in here? The hyena guy’s son who we learned to hate in Le Belle Savage? His whole POV can be summed up by “He is going against the norm of reading the alethiometer. He is a total a**hat, but also rather clever while being horrible to everyone. Also he’s Lyra’s half sister.” What does this storyline add? What does them being related add? I swear this book rivals some freaking soap operas with the anticlimactic-ness of their reveals. It literally went “same mom”>”Siblings”>”Awkwardly sitting together”. Nothing else. No reckoning with blood not always being a bond worth keeping, no discussions of the alethiometer mechanism or reveal what prompted him to create this new method.

I don’t think I’ve ever had such a moment of setting my book down, sighing, and internally knowing: “He doesn’t know what he’s doing anymore, does he?” Which sucks. I love Philip Pullman’s work. And it’s still in his voice, but it feels unfinished. The lack of plotting in this series made me wonder if he bothered to reread his own work before beginning work on this one, because there is so little respect for it… It makes me sad. Is this really the same writer that developed a system of mythology for witches? And designed his books around a painting, combined with Paradise Lost? Philip Pullman, what happened?

The Secret Commonwealth set up all these things that, logically, felt like they needed to be addressed. There’s no more books. So there was supposed to be closure. This was supposed to wrap up all of Lyra’s adventures. This book fails to do that.

There are a few side stories that appear to be written from an omniscient narrator (ie, Mustafa Bey’s murder and the effects). This was written well, but I felt like I was missing context. It may have been talking more about UK politics, because Pullman is usually pretty clear in his parallels and this felt “old person suspicious of capitalism regulation”. Which doesn’t line up at all with what we see later, where the universal solvent is capitalism: the force that tears everyone apart. This felt inconsistent to me. I would give it a pass. He may be drawing connections to events I haven't lived through, or people in the UK I don’t know of. BUT. I don’t think that’s the case. Because even emotional beats to do with basic character arcs (that really shouldn’t need historical context to work) don’t land either. And there is no excuse for those, because many of them A) blatantly contradict each other and his past work or B) are just never addressed.

Pan left Lyra in this book to find her imagination. In HDM, it was heavily repeated that Lyra the little girl was a very unimaginative child and so was not easily frightened. However, she was able to make up stories (lies) to get people to help her. Basically, Lyra has always been somewhat of a manipulator, which was arguably her main flaw. But she uses it to her advantage to save Iorek, which is where she gets the name “Silvertongue” from. It’s this two-sided ability, but the point is that she makes herself believe these lies, which is what gives them their power. The book calls this “a lack of imagination”, but hints it’s also an indicator of intelligence. There is nuance here. In the final book of that series, one of the rebel angels, Xaphania, visits and tells Lyra that the ability to traverse worlds without the knife is rooted in imagination. But “imagination does not mean making things up. It is a way of seeing.” This definition of imagination is internally consistent. Lyra was not imaginative just because she could make things up. Her development of imagination lies in her future. Maybe it is the key to regaining her ability to read the alethiometer*. Maybe that’s how she returns to Will. But either way, that is the path ahead of her. And the series ends with her commitment to develop her imagination.

This new series cheapens this closure so much it makes me angry. It starts out promising**.The second book hints at all these elements of imagination that Lyra was missing. There is this scene with the boat communities that talk about the power of mythology, about how reason and imagination are supposed to mix, and how part of imagination is being able to integrate perspectives into a coherent whole. This is interesting. I found myself highlighting stuff here. It feels like Pullman is trying to articulate what he has learned about this “way of seeing the world” and assigning it the label of “imagination”.

But then the term becomes inconsistent. An angel arrives out of the blue, and for essentially one scene, talks to Lyra. The purpose of this angel seems to be retconning the ending of His Dark Materials out of existence. The angel says that they lied about imagination to Lyra before and now imagination actually is, in fact, just “making things up”, saying they sugarcoated this “hard truth” for Lyra or whatever. You know, after she just split her soul in half, was forced to leave her lover, rewrote the order of existence, and fixed the afterlife, she definitely couldn’t handle that the definition of imagination was the simple one. So the angel lied to her. ****

Sure, Philip Pullman. I’m sure that’s always what that moment was supposed to be. Even if we cast it through the lens of “Well maybe he is trying to add what he learned about the world since then” that still doesn’t work because of what happens next.

The angel says something to the effect of “Pan left to find an ability you never lost, because you are still a liar.” And Lyra retorts something like “Actually all angels are wrong, but the lie you told me originally was true and the thing you made up is actually the truth. So imagination is a way of seeing the connections between things, like you said to me (as a lie) when I was eleven.”*****

Um, I’m sorry what? Where is this logic coming from? Why are the angels suddenly manipulative liars instead of complicated being able to understand humanity? Nothing about this makes sense.

Ok. I need to slow down and give more actual examples of this inconsistency, yes? Let’s do so.

-If angels are limited in some ways, great. HOW. You can’t say that all the angels are manipulative and evil. The logic of Pullman’s world does not allow that type of simplicity. And the whole idea that angels are inherently bad ALSO messes up Pullman’s other theme about embracing the mythical side of understanding as a part of human existence.
To put it another way, You can’t have one series saying that the authority is bad, because it limits human autonomy and freedom for the sake of control, have a second series saying that the spiritual realm can’t be fully ignored as it is a part of human creativity, than retcon all the other angels as manipulators working for said Authority. These angels then no longer represent anything, which in itself also conflicts with his whole “everything is a metaphor” monologue later. These themes don’t mix, and a skillful writer should know better.

He tried to do so much, he ended up saying nothing.

Little is resolved. The closing lines even seem to imply that imagination is “just telling stories” which conflicts what she said before. So which is it? It can be both, but then you need to IMPLY that rather than having this intense conviction back and forth where one viewpoint is supported and the other is condemned.

He also sets up this romance between Malcolm and Lyra that I can’t decide whether to like or not, and apparently Pan can’t either, because he mentions he thinks Lyra liked Malcolm in one conversation than says she doesn’t in another. This would be cool if there were another book, but do not set up this weird age gap relationship, associate one with silver and one with gold, and make them sleep together in the cold, and then do not close that arc? Just say it's not happening, Pullman, my god. Don’t base your whole plot around it then do nothing.

The book sets up a romance (or a conflict based on Malcom’s feelings toward Lyra) and then doesn’t close it.

The book sets up a conflict with the misunderstanding of the angels, then doesn’t bring them back.

It sets up a way for Lyra to traverse the worlds without getting her imagination back*** , then doesn’t address her relationship with Will (who she explicitly states she never got over).

It sets up a reimagined understanding of the specters… and doesn’t address it.

It sets up capitalism as a symbolic antagonist… then never mentions this understanding again.

It sets up these themes, over and over, of the collapse of stability. Lyra’s world, the economy, etc. Then doesn’t close it. No acceptance or condemnation of change. No context added to it. Nothing.

The book sets up “wait weren’t all the world opening’s closed by the angels” as a contradiction, acknowledged by the characters, and then says the angels are liars, while also saying their motive has always been to PREVENT these openings. So did they close them or not? Either way, this is inconsistent, either motivationally, or factually.

It sets up a male scientist taking credit for another’s discovery, and the renaming of this field, to a common female name… ROSE… but does not mention the name of the scientist from whom it was stolen. He criticizes forgetting the scientist (who it seems like is supposed to parallel Rosalind Franklin) and then canonically also does nothing to credit them. Instead of finding this in-universe forgotten scientist, they just take the name away from the man, and name it something totally arbitrary because this entitled 20 yr old says to.

It sets up Lyra and Malcom fixing the alethiometer, and Lyra learning to read it better, regaining her old ability possibly now that she understands more about the world… and doesn’t DO THAT.

It feels like he ran out of time with this book. Maybe he would have had time for developing some of this important stuff if he didn’t pause every two pages to have some nameless asshole from the magisterium give a supervillain monologue about the dangers of imagination. There are no words for how annoying these sections were.

There is always the possibility I am not appreciating something, or not smart enough to understand the nuance or whatever. But at the moment, I swear this is like me when I start an essay too close to a deadline and finally say “screw it. Tired of editing. Good enough I guess”. But Philip Pullman has said he has struggled with writing this last chapter for years now*******. He’s been rewriting it for YEARS. AND THIS IS WHAT HE CAME UP WITH?
“Imagination+Mythology=Dust?” News flash. You already established that. You actually had a much more nuanced way of explaining Dust that still involves imagination, and you appear to have abandoned that in your question to retcon your old work out of existence.

Basically, there were two options that would have worked better. He could have trimmed heavily, ideally all the random POVs, and filled up two books. Not three. Or he could have addressed these vast, mythical, architectural questions that he introduces but fails to answer, and written either three very dense books or added a fourth one. Screw Pullman’s internal sense of symmetry. This was not supposed to be a trilogy just because the first series was.

Philip Pullman defined a good chunk of my childhood and worldview. His conception of an afterlife is one of the most beautiful things in literature in my opinion. There are a few moments that made me wonder if he let fame go to his head and stopped believing in what he used to. Little things. His handling of Lyra’s SA and the views on murder feel …wrong? Inconsistent? It feels like he has lost something. I hope he finds it and continues using his Twitter to bash JK Rowling. But honestly, after reading this, part of me fears the worst.
————
*Combined with study and hard work, the other acts that are said to generate dust, which this series never revisits

**Not completely. If she never had an imagination, why is Pan so sad she lost it? One could argue that what she had was RESPECT FOR the idea of imagination, but this was always clumsy, and even reading this better, early part of The secret commonwealth, I could tell some of the internal logic was breaking down. It just wasn’t until later that it became totally unusable.

***I still don’t love this method of travel after the first series condemned that as releasing specters. We never get a conclusion as to whether the angel was lying about this too, or just misunderstanding the understanding of imagination. If it’s the latter, this unravels Pullman’s whole thing about the angels understanding both the evil of authority and the power of human consciousness, both of which were established by Xaphania, a character we had no reason to mistrust.

**** I guess you could argue making the definition more complicated was to create a carrot-on-a-stick to distract Lyra to make her accept the openings being closed. If she has a vague hope of seeing Will again that requires an ability she does not yet possess, then she won’t have a shouting match with an angel and also won’t know it was a lie until many years in the future. But this feels like heavy extrapolation, and it is Pullman's job to confirm that better, either by fleshing out what the motives of these damn angels are, or having Lyra work this out and have her confront that her separation from Will was based on a false hope. Either of these would have been more interesting than the owl guy anticlimatically revealing he was Lyra’s uncle or whatever.

*****Ok, I actually did like her little monologue about dreams. But this does nothing to negate the fact that this exchange ruins the whole story in a lot of ways.

******* And we know this wasn’t what he had in mind when writing HDM. He intended for Lyra to get back to Will. He says so, explicitly, in his “lantern slides” in the collected edition.

image: ‘“The Soul”’ from Orbis Sensualium Pictus (1705) | Public Domain Image Archive

Because, what they don’t tell you about college is how it feels going back to the place you grew up.

The first time, it feels like home. You’ve missed everyone, and can’t believe you survived without these routines for a month.

Three months later, it still feels like home.

The time comes a year later when it doesn’t. Not because you don’t feel safe there, but because it’s begun to feel like your past and not your future. You still rush to check the plants for life like you always have, but you know that some old relationships faded out while you were gone. People built new routines. You don’t know whether the dishes go in the dishwasher right away anymore or if they are supposed to soak first. There is an unfinished project sitting on your desk that you forgot about from months ago. Your family has built a new routine around sameness in the same way yours has become chaos. The pace of life is different here, and you know it can’t last, even if the slowness is the change you crave from being at school. You know, given time, it wouldn’t feel right to stay. You would want to go home again.

Wandering through the towns you have called your home throughout the years feels like wandering through old chapters. Like watching the past instead of remembering it.

You see, sometime throughout the past few years, the pull toward Madison has become stronger than toward the life you lived before. You can feel the most safe in the world in the bedroom of your childhood, if indeed one is lucky enough to have that place to go back to, ice crusting the windows on your first snow day as you curl up in bed, the somehow comforting noises of the trains in the distance or the garbage truck telling you the week is over.

But the density of memories at school is different. Every block in your hometown may hold childhood memories, but every step at school somehow holds something even more vivid. Every bench has held a quiet conversation or a sunset or a few pages of reading or a scribbled poem. Every streetcorner has heard the stolen last minutes of a conversation before you say goodnight to your friends. Every path has seen you get lost a few times before you found your way to class or the restaurant you thought was further down State. Every place’s first visit is within your memory, and seeing it again puts you right back to the moment of its discovery. That forest path back home may have seen you run away from your problems once or twice. But the paths here saw you do the same with people you love. On the phone. After rough exams and through homesickness.

Your memories here are stronger because you didn’t know the way when you arrived - every new corner to explore was a choice and an adventure.

And every new year, a new place to live in the city. New experiences. New roommates. New quiet nooks and grocery shops, new writing spots and routines.

My professor asked a question two years ago:

What is an archive?

How do we store knowledge, memory?

This is my answer to that question.

They are here.

College does something to the vividness of memories that makes every moment impossible to forget. And for that, I could not be more grateful.

That was the question repeating in my mind as I biked the once overwhelming, but now almost-too-short stretch of highway.

Every year, there’s an organized bike ride connected to the local music festival. And this year, it was not the challenge it had always been.

When I was younger, I used to lose my breath trying to go up the hills. This isn’t inherently strange. There’s usually at least one person at a time struggling on a few particular sections of the route. And I make the questionable choice every year of riding my big, chunky, hybrid, Giant instead of the road bikes that most people (wisely) use for these events. That being said, it always felt like the people who did this event leaned much more athletic than I did.

It was especially noticeable the first two years of the race. It was only after when I would be asked if I was changing gears when I was supposed to.

“Yeah, I’m making it harder so I can make it over the hill. Been doing that the whole time so I don’t slide backwards.”

My dad went silent as he processed two years of Bike to the Beat memories, now with the context of my impressively flawed reasoning.

It was slightly easier to get up hills after that.

But you want to know what? Not as much as I would have expected.

I never trained for this “race”. Not that a bike ride where you stop every eight miles or so for tasty food and live music is much of a race, but my younger self certainly thought of it as one. Especially when it felt like I was slowing everyone down, as seemingly each person on the track passed us with their classic “Midwest nice” attitude. Including many small children and a few people on recumbent tricycles, blasting Imagine Dragons on their bike-mounted speakers.

We held off doing the longer 30-mile route, until something made us just decide to do it on a whim one year. It was one of the most exhausting workouts of my life. My muscles were cramping so badly that I was wondering if I was dehydrated, or somehow deficient in magnesium, both of which I would try and resolve for the next year.

Except the next year was exhausting too. It was hot. My legs still refused to move for those last few miles even when I asked them nicely. My hands still chafed the handlebars, and I still had to stop a few times on the larger hills, though unlike my first year, I didn’t have to stop and awkwardly walk the whole thing up the hill. It still felt like a backslide, but there were reasons why I should have lent myself a little more grace than I did.

Besides, it was probably silly to expect progress when I hadn’t really been trying to improve my biking stamina. I hadn’t been training for this race.

I had no reason to expect significant improvement.

But I didn’t have a reason the next year either, when inexplicably, I got better anyway.

It was the first year I felt like I wasn’t struggling with it more than anyone else. That little hill that had looked so insurmountable as a child didn’t even really feel like a hill anymore. I wondered how I had ever struggled with that particular thing.

My brain looked for all sorts of justifications for this shift. What factors had changed? What had cracked the code?

I went through a period where I was being weird and wondering if I was maybe somehow deficient in sodium, so I drank water with salt in it the morning of the race. Was that it? Was it something psychological, something that wasn’t there anymore, rather than something that was? Were the unrelated cardio workouts I had been doing (with depressing irregularity) enough to cause such a drastic shift? Was it the walking from class to class for a year?

You get the idea. I was ready to replicate everything I had done in hopes of keeping the progress.

Except I didn’t. Doing the event this year was a spur of the moment decision. It just happened to work due to a combination of lucky scheduling, sheer determination on the part of my family, and willingness to shove all my stuff into a car for move-out eight hours before the race.

So I didn’t prepare. I didn’t get good sleep before the race. I did it exhausted and burned out, and had really fallen off the whole “doing high intensity cardio” thing in favor of trying to write more.

But this was the best Bike to the Beat I’ve had. There may have been a shift last year, but this one felt even bigger. And I think there was one factor that led to that. And it was, in my mind, totally unrelated to the Bike to the Beat quest.

I had been trying to overcome my aversion to weightlifting, actually using machines instead of free weights. Not so much to achieve any specific goal, but because I know it’s a healthy thing to do. But because I had no specific goal, I also hadn’t been doing it with extensive regularity.

Now, here is the spot where I feel like most blog posts, or people who get to their points faster and with more clarity than I have ever been able to, would usually wax poetic about the virtues of SMART goals or habit trackers. The Atomic Habits readers would talk about changing your life over time through consistency rather than big shifts. They would focus on how change only happens through sheer force of will and making yourself get out of bed to do the boring thing even when you don’t feel like it. About tracking your progress so you don’t lose motivation. Or maybe how you need to schedule things on a Monday, Wednesday, Friday, basis and hold yourself accountable for that.

But… I actually don’t think that’s true. No disapproval if you have found those things to work. But so much of life is about figuring out what works for you.

And those things don’t work for me. Rules and routines just don’t. Tracking progress doesn’t, either because of the pressure or the forced nature of it. Believe me, I’ve tried. And I’ve been trying to be gentler with myself about that fact, about realizing that it all matters even when my progress doesn’t follow any sort of system.

I hadn’t been setting out to improve my Bike to the Beat experience when I started walking to the gym once in a while to clumsily use the machines. But that was the main result I got from it.

I finished that Bike to the Beat without stopping on any hills for the first time. And we passed many people, only being passed by those weirdos on those electric bikes, not actually pedaling, but still blasting music that sounded like it was selected for a high school dance in 2017.

Next year, I’m going to do the longest route.

Progress happens whether you expect it to or not. Even if your current task feels unconnected to everything else. Whether you make yourself practice and improve consistently, or just have it floating there in the back of your mind, and act on it when you can.

Maybe that sounds like a cop-out to some people. And that’s fine. But I also think it’s true.

Lately, I’ve just been realizing all the side quests that I thought I had quietly given up on have been falling into place, even as I've been simultaneously trying to be kinder to myself about letting them go.

One of those is drawing. I gave myself permission to shelve the idea of being an artist when I began to prioritize writing, telling myself I can get better at anything, but trying to get better at all the hobbies was unsustainable and making me feel like I was failing. I thought I had closed the chapter labeled “drawing”. I may have been doing some digital flower art, for a project I will discuss in a second, but sitting on my bed for hours with a sketchbook? I was prepared to be done with that in favor of “prioritizing” what I felt was “more important”.

But a recent experience reminded me how much I missed it. It was the perfect environment to not be hard on myself for my art, to just do it for fun, without judgment.

And I didn’t realize it in the moment. That somewhere along the line, I had stopped needing to grid my drawings before sketching them. That I no longer needed to copy photos exactly as I saw them, how I could combine some shapes together from memory and could, at least to an extent, feel where the shape was wrong and where it didn’t need to be fixed.

Now, is it probably closer to the jump between middle school art to high school art? Not this big, dramatic thing I’m turning it into? Of course. I’m still no artist. But it means something to me. So I’m going to take it.

So why did that happen? I hadn’t drawn in my sketchbook in a year. I hadn’t done an ungridded work for much longer than that.

Now, I’m back to where I was at that Bike to the Beat. What caused that sudden improvement? Was it the flower doodles that had slowly replaced my notetaking in stats? Was it about learning to look at things, and actually see them, see how the lines of plants connect in a way I had been trying to use as a mindfulness strategy?

I was drawing because I wanted to now, not because I was set on improving by practicing every day. Was that the reason? Was the positivity and love of the thing itself the real secret?

Now, we move to writing. Because everything about this blog circles back there.

And for most of the summer, I’ve been stuck on it. I told myself I would write every day, or a few times a week, that I’d spend every free morning at a coffee shop, typing away until I finished putting the world in my head on paper.

That hasn’t happened. Because, rather predictably, I started a side quest.

I wrote an essay on flowers. One that is, (checks notes and sighs), nearly 25,000 words long. It’s possibly the most personal thing I’ve ever written, and with one exception (you already know who you are) no eyes are ever going to see it but my own.

And that fact makes it feel somehow unproductive. But there are a few things that have made internal criticism a little quieter.

The first is that I’ve had the most underrated theme of any media living rent free in my head lately. It’s the overarching theme of Queen’s Gambit. And it has to do with how you approach your passion.

Near the end of her arc, Beth starts to wonder what the endgame (pun intended) is. “If you're a World Champion at sixteen, what will you do with the rest of your life?”

It should theoretically not be a difficult question to answer. Because in the end, you are supposed to love the thing you are doing. Maybe not every second of the difficult parts, but it’s supposed to give you joy in a way nothing else can.

I was reminded of that when I let myself have a break. When I joined a writing group at the local library, and coming back affirmed that I missed the world I was creating.

The second, in continuing my trend of being inspired by things Scott Niswander says, is that it is okay to not follow the artistic path you feel like you should. That it isn’t linear, and it’s okay to let your goal still be further in the future than you want.

The last is that I’m trying to be less critical about my own writing, and the path I’m taking to get there. And catching myself being critical is getting easier.

There was a day recently when I was yelling at myself for “wasting” the whole summer writing an essay about flowers and doing digital illustrations of them.

But you want the truth? Despite my own criticism… I think it was time well spent. It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t leisure time to turn my brain off. But It may have been the final piece that helped to improve the art I thought I had abandoned. I still find myself thinking about it more than anything else I’ve written, and it feels like it connects to every piece of poetry and fiction I’ve worked on. It feels like it ties everything together in a way that’s difficult to explain.

And that means there’s another voice behind the one that won’t stop whining at me to finish my novel. It’s quieter than the critical one, because I’m still working on that journey in a hundred ways I realize and a million ways I’m sure I don’t.

It says “Maybe this essay, and not your novel, is the story you needed to tell.”

I still hope to keep working on my novel. It’s still going to happen someday, I think I can promise that much. But I’ve accepted that the path to getting there is not going to be the linear one I always visualized when I was a kid, and hoped for even years after.

But the final bit of hope I wanted to add to this post? I’ve found myself figuring out what was holding me back from saying the theme of the novel after writing the essay. I think writing it forced me to resolve some of the conflicting themes in it, and realize what I was really trying to say. I think writing the novel will get easier. And I think the 25,000 word essay about flower drawings was a necessary step to getting there, even though after a decade of trying to write this thing it feels comedic to need that.

So, to the person reading this. If you are ever feeling stuck, like you haven't figured how to get better at whatever the thing^TM is for you. I want you to try and remember this:

You are getting better at things you aren’t focused on, without realizing it, because everything is connected, and nothing is linear.

Inconsistent, silent, progress, toward a vague goal is not a failure. It’s how most change happens.

And finally, that if you are truly feeling like you aren’t moving forward on what matters?

Maybe it’s because there’s another story that needs to be told first.

I knew going into Spiritfarer that it's about death, but seeing the reviews of the supposedly excellent writing, I decided that wrecking my emotional state was worth it. I was prepared for things to be a little heartbreaking. I expected the plot twist to be that my character was not immortal, but one of the spirits in the afterlife. The goal is to care for the spirits: to bring them food, fulfill their requests, add comforting items and memories to their homes, and bring them to the door when they ask to move on. It’s a heartbreaking premise, even with no other information.

But immediately, you notice that the spirits seem to recognize you. One of them refers to you as her best friend. Two of them refer to you as “niece”. As you interact with the spirits of the boat, they share, in brief lines and tiny epiphanies, memories that surface from their lives. Stella’s familiarity means each memory they share is a double edged sword, revealing not only the story of the spirit, but hers as well. These interactions leave a sense that Stella was widely admired during her life, but also leaves you with more questions. Who exactly is she, and how did she arrive here? Why is she a human, while the others are animals? Why does she know so many of these spirits, and why are there some she doesn’t seem to? These questions linger even as it becomes abundantly clear that Gwen, your best friend in the shape of a deer, is suffering, and you can’t seem to help her. Stella is left helpless as Gwen stops revisiting childhood memories, finally asking for the Everdoor.

The game is set up so Gwen is always the first to leave. And, although her speech is heartbreaking, it’s also sudden and doesn’t wrap up anything about her story. It fulfills an arc that was never introduced, while not fully addressing her traumatic relationship with her father. It’s just rambling, half-baked thoughts that feel like an attempt at closure, while simultaneously feeling like she failed to articulate the heart of what she wanted to say.

Soon after, Summer, your aunt, departs. With words just as unsatisfying as Gwen’s. Your uncle Atul simply disappears one day, without asking to go to the door. It will only hit you later what “going through the Everdoor on your own” means.

Despite the gorgeous art, music, and dialogue, I became annoyed with this game. The spirits were leaving so quickly. It seemed I was failing to help them with their unfinished business. Was there a timer I was missing? Were they all getting the bad ending because I wasn’t moving fast enough? Why wasn’t their dialogue giving any real answers, or catharsis, in the end?

I thought, in the beginning, that the writing was just sloppy. I thought scripts were meant to close out their stories with a neat little bow, giving closure to the complicated lives these characters led. And I grew frustrated that they weren’t, thinking it was a deficiency that the writing was making me feel things… let’s say other than acceptance.

Thinking back on how Summer asked you to pursue dragons and care for them by chipping off the poisoned growths, it sounds strange to say I didn’t grasp the intended metaphor behind it. But it wasn’t until she tells Stella that she was never able to beat the dragons, and asks to go to the Everdoor, that you realize the dragons represented her cancer.

It suddenly, overwhelmingly, made sense why the dialogue in these characters' last moments do not give the player closure.

The spirits aren’t trying to resolve unfinished business. Summer expressed regret that she couldn’t stay with you longer, saying she had so much left to teach you. That’s not resolution; she just ran out of time. The same is true for many of the others.

***

Every few spirits, shards of Stella’s memories appear: confused, ambiguous moments from her life. Gwen and Stella laughing. Someone who might be her aunt dying in a hospital. Hades appears alongside them. The first time, he says that Stella “has found him” seemingly confirming your assumptions. Stella is dead.

But the second time he appears? He reminds Stella of her life as a palliative care nurse, showing her memories of caring for patients, struggling with moves, and crying alone in a forest. Implicitly, we learn that the spirits who do not recognize Stella were her patients, ones who shaped her life in some way. The first person in her care to pass on. The bickering couple who she came to see as her grandparents.

Each time a spirit leaves, a flower is left behind in their house, and you realize the flowers that have begun spreading over Stella’s bed are a ticking clock. Eventually, she will have to leave too.

More spirits leave through the door. When the ninth one leaves, Hades reveals an image of Stella on her deathbed. You were set up to believe she is coming to terms with that after her death, trying to move on. But that is not the case.

Stella is not dead, but she’s dying, and this game is a way of giving her, not the spirits of the boat, closure.

And that makes every single piece of this intentionally ambiguous game fall into place.

Those flowers that appear after the spirits leave? We mistakenly believe they represent the personalities of the deceased. Gwen’s flower is an Asphodel, used to symbolize regret. Gwen had many regrets that she told you about on the boat. Her relationship with her father, her smoking that eventually led to the lung cancer that killed her, the way she boxed herself off from relationships at every turn.

But, given some of the later flowers spirits carry, I am fairly sure: That flower was not about Gwen’s regret, because this isn’t Gwen’s story. Elena carries cypress, a symbol of death, because that’s what Stella remembers her for: the only one to willingly let go when the time came. Astrid’s mallow flower wasn’t about her being a romantic, she represented to Stella the dangers of being consumed by love. The two mafia brothers who appear on the boat later aren’t represented by their frankly frustrating personalities, but by a heliotrope: devotion between siblings. Buck, a teenager who passed on before Stella was born is shown with rue flowers, representing sorrow. The spirit is one of the most cheerful in the game. The sorrow wasn’t his: it was Stella’s for the life he never got to live, and the fact she never got to meet him.

Hades tells Stella: “You've opened your heart to the suffering of others, and, in return, their spark [..] shapes your fate. Every spirit a reminder. [...] What do they teach you? Their struggles, their drama? [...] Are they saying their farewells, or are you saying yours?”

This whole time, the goal has never been resolving unfinished business, or even as the marketing portrayed it, saying goodbye. This is a game about coming to terms with the roles people have played in your life: what others’ stories mean to you, what they teach you, and the emotions they leave behind.

Now, did I, crying after taking several of the spirits through the door, write a 12,000 word journal entry about what flower every person in my life would be? Possibly. Because, unsurprisingly, this game is very, very good at one particular thing: making you feel emotions. The spirits are designed, intentionally, to remind you of people in your life. Not every character will land. Take Elena: Stern, demanding, arrogant, and slightly manipulative, but ultimately she sees herself as having students’ best interests at heart.

Reddit is full of people who can’t stand this spirit, but others who say they are reminded fondly of an old teacher or coach. I’m not one of those people. But what’s interesting is how the proportion of people who claim each spirit as their favorite is roughly equal. Because of the variety of personalities represented, statistically, at least a few are likely to hit close to home. Even if the spirits people most wanted to “drop kick through the Everdoor” were not so evenly distributed, *cough cough mafia brothers cough cough*.

Now, Gwen, Summer, Atul, Beverly, Alice, and Buck all reminded me of specific people. But Gustav? The owl spirit art curator, with extremely specific mannerisms and habits? I spent damn near the whole game with him, letting other spirits go but refusing to complete his last quest.

Everyone who plays this game supposedly has this happened for one character. And that’s because this game is really good at getting you to feel the emotions associated with each individual. A few of the characters suffer from memory loss. Beverly, a small bird, starts repeating dialogue over and over, making it impossible to feed her. It genuinely made me scared that I had broken the game, especially when the game made her dialogue repeat on a loop for days on end when you try to talk to her. Did I do something wrong here? How am I supposed to take care of her?

The point isn’t for it to be realistic. It just makes you feel that tiny slice of fear and helplessness, of not being able to care for this person who needs you.

But more than just your interactions with spirits, reminders of the people Stella has lost are everywhere.

The buildings you created for each spirit, unique and full of their personality? They have to stay. You can add onto the boat, making it bigger, shifting the ever growing pile of buildings from departed spirits to make space, but you can’t get rid of them. You are forced to carry their homes with you forever, along with their beds covered in the flowers they left behind.

The small buildings are just a little too wide or tall to fit like tetris pieces between the larger structures, making them impossible to stack neatly. You end up with a sloppy, asymmetrical mess by the end of the game.

You want to be able to make this neat? Find the ideal way to put these buildings together, so they fit like they are supposed to? The game says. Too bad. Life is messy. And your boat is going to be too.

Moreover, anytime you sail through an area with certain characteristics, you are forced to interact with their house to pass through it. For example, the meteor shower that Giovanni warned you about. You have to climb up this rickety stack of buildings connected by ladders to knock on the door, seeing the couch his wife made him sleep on outside, covered in borage, his spirit flower. You are reminded of his affectionate dialogue about risking one's life for the little moments, and the music shifts. Music that is very distinctive, emotional, and consistent with the mood the spirit gave off.

It was moments like this that shocked me more than taking spirits to the door. It’s such a skillful metaphor for remembering old relationships, whether the person is dead or simply not there anymore. Carrying a boat slowly filling with homes of people you used to know while stumbling across reminders of them everywhere. There is a quest early in the game with the spirit Summer, who brings you up a mountainside to practice mindfulness. The dialogue is very poignant here, discussing her family trauma and eventual diagnosis, and how she coped. She tells you whenever you come across rock formations tied with ribbons, to meditate near them.

You stumble across many such formations within the game, but you cannot interact with them. It feels like a mechanic in the game that was never added, but I now realize how purposeful that was. Every time you pass by one of these rocks you are forced to remember that conversation with Summer, and feel sad that she is both gone, and that you are not doing as she asked. As you progress further in the game, you can hardly do anything without reminding yourself of one of the spirits. While Gwen was a passenger, she aggressively talked down shop owners who were trying to scam Stella. You pass one of these shops on nearly every island. The garden on the boat Summer asked you to build? You can play music there on your guitar, from sheet music she gave you. After you play for a minute, another track joins in, symbolizing that Stella is hearing the memory of her aunt playing alongside her even after she is gone. You end up with four of a spirit’s favorite meal in your inventory. They suddenly ask to leave, and you can’t bring yourself to just give it to another passenger.

You are not allowed to forget them. This story isn’t about death; it’s about memory. The residue that others have left in her life, even strangers. Hell, Buck never even knew Stella. She never had to say goodbye to him. He was just a story from her sister, and he still made it onto this boat.

Having come this far, Stella seems to come to a resolution: if she can’t have saved everyone, done everything loved ones asked of her, she’s damn well still going to leave the world better than she found it.

So begins the longest quest series in the game. You arrive at Overbrook, a rainy hospital, with dozens of spirits wandering aimlessly, a mysterious spirit locked in a tower, and an overwhelmed nurse who keeps asking you to help find missing patients. He also buillies the spirit in the tower, Daria, prompting Stella to sneak past him to hear her story, returning several times. You begin to communicate with her by playing music, and the rain, and the music, gets lighter each time you do. You track down new employees for the hospital, and the rain finally stops. The patients who were getting sick after eating the food and being neglected are suddenly taken care of. Overbrook becomes painted in splashes of color, and Daria is finally able to show you what her world is like with her synesthesia and hallucinations.

Playing guitar for her reveals shifting platforms that you have to climb. The only way to learn the rules is to jump through the sides of the screen and hope you land safely.

Want to see what her world is like? The game asks. You have to learn the rules with her. She wasn’t taught and you won’t be either. It’s risky and you might fall. But imagine how she has felt.

All of this is happening while Daria tells you about her life and feeling like she has always been sinking, but you were the only one who celebrated how she saw the world and wanted to explore it with her.

Now, is this Stella reminding herself of the good she did in her life? I think so. The wiki says Stella smuggled in art supplies for Daria and that kindness resulted in her being able to live outside Overbrook. But you aren’t told this explicitly. All you really know is that you helped her, and Overbrook is no longer purely a place of desolation.

So, this game is really, really good at getting you emotionally invested in stories. Why does that matter? Well, I think humans intuitively know why well-written, emotional experiences matter, but the game actually addresses this within the story itself.

To explain, I need to return now to my favorite spirit, Gustav. It's easy to miss, but he can be seen as a self-insert character for the creators of this game. His story revolves around how he wished he could have created art to remind people of how little time we have, an early misdirection to make you believe you are resolving unfinished business. But he does ask to leave once you have built an enormous clock for everyone to see. His final speech is about the power of art, lamenting how so much of human creations are for the sake of usefulness.

“And so it seems the only hope humanity has for transcendence is through art. Meaningfulness pulled from our chaotic minds. Not for utility. But for its own sake. And after the artist has been long gone, turned to dust, the art remains.”

Spiritfarer created a metaphor for itself, within itself. The clock you create for Gustav? It’s a metaphor for this game. Art for art’s own sake, maybe meant to be a reminder of limited time, or impermanence, or cooperation, or something else. But mostly just creating meaning because it matters aside from any utility.

So, I am going to say something obvious here, but something I admit I forgot for a while: games can be art. I came away from this more inspired than I have been in a long time. Games can force people into actual decisions and responsibility in ways that other media can’t. I don’t think I understood that until I started playing games like Pentiment, the Witness, and the Myst series with a more critical eye, and started trying to analyze them like I was in a high school poetry class. Those moments of understanding matter: the tiny details, the metaphors, the experience the creators want the audience to have.

For me, this game has been a reminder: You only see intentions when you bother to look for them, and you never stop being reminded of the people who shaped you.

I don’t think I understood that until the end of high school, when I began to understand my uncle for who he is.

This blog post is a letter of appreciation to what family members can teach us, and the impact you can have on others without knowing it.

It was my first trip to visit my grandpa with only my dad. It was a month after the thing happened. And my dad, knowing this, wanted us to go to Universal Studios — somewhere I had loved as a younger child — and revisit old memories.

Even though we had visited before, this time was different. My relatives treated it as a celebration. It was Mardi Gras, and that meant we had to plan every step for maximum efficiency: who would go where at what time, what we just had to see, and what we didn’t. They would reveal their top-secret formula for the best spot to watch the parade, looking at street corners and calculating angles, standing where thrown beads would be most likely to fall. We were going to take shortcuts through ride buildings because riding the Jimmy-Fallon Experience was faster than walking the path around the building. And when we were done, we were going to throw our beads at the bead tree and add to the ever-growing sculpture.

On that car ride, I vividly remember how excited they were. And how it gave me, still a kid, even though that was ending, permission to feel the same. They wanted it to be an adventure. By acting like it was, it became one.

My dad called them “the experts”. But being adults with a concerning amount of theme park knowledge wasn’t the point. They weren’t faking the enthusiasm — that is very real, and will always be part of who they are — but that isn’t mutually exclusive with it being for my benefit, something I failed to recognize at the time.

But I failed to reciprocate. Not because I didn’t want to. But because I was scared. I didn’t know how to be that way, even as a kid, even less so as a teenager. Have that unequivocal enthusiasm, to see every experience as a celebration and change the energy level in a room.

But neither did anyone else in the family. My aunt and uncle were the exception. To make things that were special feel special was something seemingly only they possessed, a gift they had.

It hit me that day how exhausting that must be. And I realized that they weren’t mind-readers, they couldn’t see that how they acted really did make people feel differently. Really did make them happier. They also couldn’t have known how much. Because I still remember the rest of that day.

Do you ever get just a total sense of awe, mixed with a sort of nostalgia, over something that you’ve experienced several times before? Does it ever just hit you? Like you could just be in that moment forever, like you are experiencing something for the first time. The closest I can get to describe it is like “being a tourist in your hometown” but even that doesn’t precisely hit what I am trying to say.

Regardless, something was different. If I ever find a way of articulating that feeling of personal wonder, I’ll let you know.

Thinking back to that day, it must have seemed to them like the rest of us were unenthusiastic or wished they would stop, when nothing could have been further from the truth. They made everything better just by being there. I wish I could have found a non-awkward way to say that.

The thing is, I think most of us have been there. Seeing others express enthusiasm, but being too self-conscious to mirror it ourselves, afraid of judgment. Or we don’t know exactly how they do that. Or think that our energy levels are too low, so we let everyone else carry the weight of the interaction.

You acted less enthusiastic than you were so you wouldn’t stand out in a crowd.

It also took me a bit to understand that this is where alcohol comes in for a lot of people. Because I don’t think people can tolerate that feeling very well. That feeling that everyone is looking at you, even when they aren’t.

Remember my post about humans not recognizing what makes us happy? The class that made that point wanted us to see that for ourselves. They asked us, “How many of you think it would be fun right now, if we all just stopped for a few minutes and had a dance party?”

Guess what? A lecture hall of several hundred 19–22-year-olds expressed zero enthusiasm. Almost no one raised their hands.

They made us do the dance party anyway.

And most of us just stood there, awkwardly. Myself included. But a few people did dance, and slowly, others joined in. Despite my unexplainable embarrassment, yeah, it was fun. It may have been the first time I felt the remotest bit connected to others in the class. I think the people sitting in front of me said it best: “I hate myself for saying this, but that was actually really fun, what the heck?”

Point. Made.

The summer after my high school graduation, my aunt and uncle made this whole plan for us to run around New York City.

But it wasn’t just a trip. My uncle made it clear that the reason he was doing it was because he understood the power of travel to change the way you see the world. Every part of the trip was intended to be something more. I got the feeling it was intended to be a journey. He told me about how exploring changes your whole sense of self-confidence, gives you new perspectives and stories and things you could never learn just by reading about them.

But he told me one other thing. To be honest, I can’t remember if he directly said it, or it was implied, or a combination thereof. But I remember that it was that trip when I understood how that enthusiasm he carries is a choice.

It’s been a choice he’s been making the whole time, because it makes other people happy. Not some special gift he has, that others lack. A choice he makes every day.

It took me too long to understand that.

I’ve been trying to be better about that. Because I want to be that person for others.

I think the closest I’ve gotten is at role-playing dinner parties. Events that are the epitome of social awkwardness in every regard. It's a room full of introverted nerds with social anxiety who just want to feel like they are Sherlock Holmes, solving a murder. Speaking as a less-introverted-than-I-used-to-be nerd who loves trying to solve mysteries, and invited friends fitting those same demographics to come with me, I feel qualified to say this.

Want me to let you know what makes those parties fun? I will let you in on a little secret. Those little pieces of paper don’t mean anything. You have to make up a character. You have to decide to act in front of people. You have to do that even though it's freaking scary, because otherwise the event doesn’t exist.

I realized the first time I went to one of these things how few people understood that. Or how few people were willing to do it. The first time, I dressed as the journalist. I had no clue what I was doing, just went around trying to awkwardly find the photographer, a character who would understand so little about their backstory I would accuse them of being the murderer in front of everyone because they kept changing their alibi. Turns out they just didn’t understand the concept of the character sheet.

I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t have a plan. But as soon as I stopped caring, I had a blast. I met a ton of new people. And I will remember that first party as possibly my most memorable experience of freshman year. I waited eagerly for next year's event.

The next time, I knew what I was doing. The instant I got into the Fantasy-Ren Faire themed party, I started mobilizing the merchant class to overthrow the aristocracy. This was loosely related to something in my character sheet, about the merchant class being taken advantage of, or something. Insert relevant political commentary here. But… that wasn’t the point. The point was I forced myself to talk to people, every molecule of my social anxiety and self-awareness screaming for me to not approach that stranger, speaking in a terrible, butchered renaissance accent. My goal was to find the most extroverted merchant to take over for me, so we could at least get the story going.

I successfully got everyone riled up, and I was relieved that the story was going and everyone was finally in character. I tried to talk the mine-foreman into giving a speech, as one of the WUD writers has hinted we were supposed to do.

Unfortunately, my faked enthusiasm worked a little too well. He nominated me to do it.

I had not signed up to give a speech to a crowd but I did, and I slowly relaxed into the role. I spent the next half hour of the party running a fake political campaign to gain support, running against the landlord and (checks notes) the drunk? I had secret negotiations with the merchants (resulting in one of the writers smiling and telling their friends “this is unscripted. I love it”). I signed a treaty with the elven embassy (to some laughter, as it was on a napkin) in exchange for making policies against elf-racism. I worked with my newfound allies to solve the murder of the heir to show the corrupt nature of the privateer guild. It ended with me winning a fake election.

It was a weird day. But I had an absolute blast.

But the other people, who were trying really hard to stay in character, who were interacting and laughing and pretending to fall down drunk, or giving that extra bit into their accent, or who were making up extra side plots or character quirks? Those are the people that made it fun for me. If anyone one of them somehow finds this (which they won’t) I want to say thank you to the friends I met on that day, for teaching me how to be that person.

And for helping me overthrow the aristocracy.

There’s a reason I’m telling this story, beyond wanting to preserve the absolutely bonkers memory that it is. The friends I brought with me? They told me afterward it seemed like I was in my element. That talking to that many people, acting hyper-extraverted and motivated, seemed natural to me. They didn’t see how much of that was a choice. How tired I was, how I got home and collapsed in exhaustion when that was done.

My uncle had rubbed off on me.

You want to know the kicker? I was…annoyed at the people who didn’t participate more. The people who sat back and did nothing made me feel a million times more awkward with my dumb Renaissance accent. But I couldn’t blame them. I literally still am that person. I was just able to temporarily step out of it for a few hours.

When you express your enthusiasm for what you love — be it “immature” or quirky or vulnerable — you give permission for others to do the same. But you also give permission for yourself to feel joy without regard for what others think. It may make you tired or anxious or feel awkward, but it gets easier each time you try.

But that tiny part of myself? That isn’t from me. That’s from my uncle.

You don’t always know how you impacted others. How something you said to them, or your way of seeing the world, lives inside them now. Largely because we are bad at showing it, or we forget. People, as a general rule, are bad at saying how they feel. We worry too much about the vulnerability associated with it. Saying to someone, “I still think of a small memory with you when I stand at a crossroads”.

There are a whole slew of people who are those role models for me. I suspect few of them know it.

It stands to reason, you might be that person for someone else.

image credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/74574203@N03/6847488089

25%: "It only took like 150 pages for all the context to be laid out. This reminds me of Lord of the Rings but not as dense, which is nice. If it stays this good I think it deserves five stars. I'm not the huge fan of the perspective switching, I feel like having 4 stories taking place in four completely different locations is a little annoying. But I might be able to tell where it's going so not going to complain"

40%: "This is the 2nd book to make me randomly start crying in a while. What just happened in the last three chapters??!! It was like nothing, nothing, nothing, then everything happens to every single character".”

Final Review: There are a lot of things I need to say about this. First of all, the writing style is completely different and unique from any other fantasy I know of. It's descriptive without dragging things out excessively, it's emotional and never feels forced like the page count is being inflated. That's saying a lot. Much shorter novels have fallen into the pointless detail trap of including maps and vast lists of characters that I never look at because it contributes nothing to the story. That's not the case here. I referenced these pretty close to every chapter.

I'm going to sandwich what I didn't super love about it in between the compliments because, honestly, I've been reading the last several hundred pages of this all afternoon, so obviously it's very good, and I don't want my relatively minor annoyances to define what I want to say about it. Any book that makes me compulsively Google explanations of an ending to confirm that I interpreted a piece of symbolism/metaphor correctly basically gets a five-star rating automatically.

First off, there is a lot here. With this excellent amount of world building, I wish that there had been a little more nuance with the themes? Like some of them are done really well, Tane's arc in particular. When she was writing about the different religions and everything it was a missed opportunity. It's a little hard for me to articulate exactly why, but it came across as over simplified, while at the same time having one of the religions sort of... debunk the other ones? I'm not quite sure what to think of that, but I guess I can appreciate the feel-good fantasy moments that are done later.

But the characters... I liked them for the most part, but it kind of fell into the trap of making the main characters the least interesting. There are four narrators. Two of them have clear motivations and back stories. The other two are likable, but kind of feel like and afterthought, which they really shouldn't. It's still a lot better than many cases if this though; it's more something I noticed after I finished the book. Maybe it's the contrast and some people are just so well developed that the other characters came across as a little simplistic. Honestly, it's pretty minor.

Honestly, this book reads a little bit like a mystery. You slowly uncover the answers to the contradiction presented at the beginning, specifically, the founding mythology of the world. The pacing is pretty good overall, especially after the first hundred or so pages. Are there slow things that feel unnecessary at the time? Yeah, but what makes good fantasy is those details coming back later.

This is fantasy for people who like to immerse themselves in excellent world building. There's nothing really wrong with it. It's just a little bit of a feeling that something less generic could have been done with the themes, a little more with a few of the characters. Honestly still 5/5.

2025

The Best of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and David Davies

To literally no one's surprise, my feelings on this are complicated. This book has been sitting in my TBR stack literally since middle school, because for some reason, my brain refuses to comprehend sentences written before 1950. Which is of course, silly, but the weird sense of frustration at not being able to LIKE these honestly was sad. I wanted to love these stories. I grew up listening to family members discussing the Speckled Band, grew up reading so many mysteries that owe their structure to these stories. But my brain refused to focus on them to the point where I could actually enjoy them. So, basically, I wrote 36 pages about the TV series, rewatched it multiple times, joined the Sherlock Subreddit, listen to dozens of hours of Sherlock and Co, learned to draw Sherlock's coat, visited London specifically to see St. Bart's, and wrote three essays on this show for college assignments, before just sitting myself down to read the source material. Because I have a really dumb problem where reading for leisure is supposed to be easy, and I didn't consider them easy, because I tripped over a sentence one time and put them in the "not for fun" pile.

For context, I didn't read books during the semester. I read 3-5 scientific papers a day, including weekends, and many of those were so incredibly frustrating (looking at you, biology paper on the effects Covid has on NK cells) that I just couldn't bring myself to do more. But apparently, it did something to my brain, and now they are an easy read. What the actual &$#@. Why did I ever avoid reading these? I got so much more out of them then I expected and fully intend to read the other 36 stories and novels. I am convinced Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is a genius, even if not all his stories are equally good.

Some highlights:

-The Speckled Band is extremely well paced, and I will return to it next time I need a reminder of how plotting drama works.

-Arthur Conan Doyle had a lot of thoughts on social justice that were ahead of his time. Some of the things he said reminded me a bit of Mary Shelley. I liked his judgment calls in letting people get away when he felt it was morally correct to do so (ie, in the Blue Carbuncle). He says something in here that is essentially hinting at the idea of recidivism being increased through harsh punishment. So, he was ahead of his time at least in that way.

-The Silver Blaze has one of the coolest details in it, and I never realized that's where we get the idea of "The dog did not bark."

-Sherlock kept a commonplace book and I am unreasonably happy to learn this
-The 500 times I heard a line from the TV show these stories, even though the reference is working opposite the intended direction.

-The story about Charles Agustus Milverton not even being a mystery, but a decision to commit burglary. A woman shows up, shoots Milverton, and leaves. That's it. There's nothing to solve here.

-John poisoning himself with Sherlock and nearly dying before saying "It is my greatest honor and privilege to help you." My point being that anytime the show A) shows John risking his life for Sherlock or B) shows Sherlock doing something stupid and life-threating to himself or others for a tenuous reason, it is actually showing an extreme level of loyalty to the source material.

So, all of that is a really long way of saying, I love these stories now. Not all of them equally, but Holmes is a famous character for a reason. He is not Benedict Cumberbatch, but I can appreciate this guy for who he is. My mixed feelings come from not reading these sooner, and not having the patience to appreciate them for what they were, even if I am glad to be a fan of Holmes as well as Sherlock now.

Alone on The Water, MadLori

Feeling extremely strange about listing a fanfiction as a “book” but this is on Goodreads, so it should go here, I guess. First Sherlock Fanfiction I have read (not counting a 1k word one I had to read for an assignment). A fellow Sherlockian informed me that it is considered a rite of passage for true fans. It’s not long, so I spared the time. The writing itself is actually quite good. I’m just not a JohnLock person, so having the plot be “Sherlock gets cancer” is… maybe I’m not the target demographic. Sherlock is just too explicitly uninterested in John (even if the opposite isn’t true). That being said, it was cute.

But I am also still thinking about it three days later, so here we are. This doesn’t get a rating. It gets a “well I guess I read Fanfic now technically”. And I have just given my opinions on a contentious debate on the internet. Oh well. The quasi-serious nature of this blog was good while it lasted, I guess.

The Secret Commonwealth, Philip Pullman

This was a re-read because I needed to refresh my memory before the third book. I forgot how much I enjoy Philip Pullman's work. If he sometimes a little heavy handed, sure, but I love this world. I love that his book is now criticizing both religion and Ayn Rand at the same time, and I love his mediations on the nature of imagination and the integration of perspectives. This book is everything I love in storytelling. I can't wait to see what comes next in the Rose Field.

And yes, I see the age gap. We all see the age gap. I truly just want to ignore it and hope something retcons it out of existence like Lyra's lack of imagination, which was very clearly established in the golden compass. What is Pan even trying to get back? Who knows!

Myst: The Book of Ti’ana, Rand Miller and David Wingrove

Adding the extra letter to Aitrus’s name is not doing what the authors think it is to separate him from Atrus. These are the same person.

I was so excited to find this in the bookstore after searching for five years. It’s also the first book I’ve had time to read this semester, and I did also read 3/4 of it today, in a very Myst-like building, I may add. Let me get a few random thoughts down with not context because quite frankly I think more people need to read these/play the games. I want to have more people to discuss them with because there is a lot here: politically, socially, and philosophically, even if the writing is.... not the best.

First off, not sure how to feel about the 37-year age gap. I know Dn’i mature at one third the speed, but a 55 yr old and 18 year old just hits something badly. THAT BEING SAID: the 55 year old is written like he is a young adult. I got very strong “just out of high school” vibes from this middle-aged weirdo, and technically if they had been the same age Aitrus would not have been a Dn’i adult, making it debatably worse. A Dn’i 18 year old is supposedly as mature as someone “hardly out of infancy”. So, they really wrote themselves into a corner with this 300 year lifespan nonsense. They were not trying to be creepy. They were, however, inconsistent, because if they gave at 1/3 the speed of humans then why are they sending four-year-olds (who would then be the equivalent of 16-month-olds, who aren’t even speaking in full sentences yet) to boarding school? If they age at 1/3 the speed, why are these 16-month-olds cognitively developed enough to be racist toward their classmate? This whole system makes no sense. But 18 times 3 is 55, which is too coincidental, so this one time... I will ignore it. Aitrus is 18 by human standards. The exact same age as Ti’ana. Let’s go with that.

I did my final project on this series in one of my classes. We had to talk about something in the context of metafiction, and.. uh... holy crap. I stand by my analysis. This is so much writing commentary. The writers being the most revered in society? Writing worlds is just putting on paper what already exists? Writers struggling to work together? I thought my commentary on Atrus’s two page Exile journal for that project was reaching a bit, but it was NOT. Jeez Rand Miller, I’m so sorry people didn’t realize that everything you write is explicitly a personal existential crisis.

I heard this was the last good female representation in the Myst series. It is a very male world, but Ti’ana is actually a well written character. It’s not a literary masterpiece, but she does manage to kick everyone’s ass intellectually, so they tried. I hear Katherine/Katran is not given the same courtesy, so I will let you know if this changes after reading III. I think I will re-read the book of Atrus, because I loved returning to this world. So many gaps were filled in, and the colonialism metaphor is... done better than I lot I have seen? Like it’s more nuanced. I do wish the existence of the Bahro was mentioned, but the point could very well be that people who aren’t elite don’t always know what is going on, exploitation wise. There should realistically be hints if they wanted to be a theme, so this probably wasn’t their intention? But it is a plausible in universe explanation.

My point is, this book is surprisingly good. And it mentions the existence of the writer’s guild, which was a nice surprise. The above is confusing, which was the intention. Go play the games or read these. It really is worth it, because Myst is an underrated fantasy universe and people should discuss it more (even if the writers made some pretty intense mistakes in their early works portraying colonialism).

Somewhere Beyond the Sea, T. J. Klune

I have mixed feelings about this. T. J. Klune’s work is always so wholesome, but takes a while to pull you in. I liked it, but no one at the library can decide if these go in the kids section or not; I think the intention is for it to be both? But I’m not sure because the tone is so “I need serotonin, help” that if I’m not in the mood for cute things it can be annoying. But I am glad Klune exists. He is the best at this exact genre. It’s just a genre that I personally like in small doses, like half of one of his books every 6 months.

The Queen’s Gambit, Walter Tevis

I love the series this book spawned. Unfortunately, by extension, I kind of have to love this book too, because it's exactly the same. Beth's internal dialogue is said in paragraphs by other people in the show sometimes, there is one relationship that is hinted at in the show and doesn't happen here, but apart from that, there is really only one glaring difference.

This book has an extremely problematic scene that was cut from the show for very obvious reasons, and it's right near the beginning. Like, people are right in being mad about this one. I thought this book was recent, but it was actually published in the eighties, which makes sense given how this scene was handled. My god there was no reason to have this in here. There are other ways to give a character a tragic backstory, and I think the show handled that better.

Actually, ignore what I said about the one glaring difference. The only time you will catch me saying the adaptation was better is with this book. It develops the themes more (and the theme is actually quite a nuanced one I haven't seen in a story since, actually, and quite frankly how it applies to writing is something I needed to hear), it handles Beth's relationships and growth better, she is still restrained but has emotions.

The book is good. A quick read. The datedness shows. Do not read if you have certain types of trauma, because other reviews have said there should be a trigger warning (I agree).

But really? Just go watch the series. There's nothing in here that was really missed.

The Fifth Season, NK Jemisin

10%: Damn. Just..... This book. I think I'm in love with it already. The first page is... Nevermind. Not even going to try. Having emotions. Gotta keep reading. Please read this book because I want to be able to talk about it with people when I'm done.

40%:Has gone from "intricate fantasy full of social commentary" to "intricate fantasy full of social commentary THAT WILL GIVE ME NIGHTMARES " NK Jemisin... You are a genius but... Please don't make me cry over the fate of any more children (note: I am aware that it is supposed to be uncomfortable to read, that's the point. I'm not stupid, I just cry easily).

Review: Ok... so. I love this. It's NK Jemisin at the most extreme versions of everything she does, from original, immersive, worlds that aren't built on classic fantasy creatures, and honestly, are all the better for that; to complex problems rooted in societal structures and culture; to heart-wrenching traumas that shape the characters (often downplayed) reactions to future events in believable ways. her worlds always feel so grounded in ways that are hard to describe, so driven by the systems that her characters lived through, like the effects of growing up in the Fulcrum, or, in Dreamblood, the effects of living within the society with rigid gender expectations. There are other people who have explained why her writing is just so popular, especially the way multiple POVs interact with each other in the last hundred pages or so (I haven't seen an exception to this rule yet, and its honestly cool every time).

I'm going to focus for a minute on something I don't think people talk about enough though: Jemisin's authors notes. These are... works in their own right. The Great Cities series ended in her talking about her love of NYC and all the experiences she's had there. Dreamblood ended in her having a Q & A about the CONCEPT OF RELIGION, with some of the most interesting things I've ever heard people say on the topic.

But this author's note was about how "It takes a village to keep a writer from losing her shit, okay?" and her self-doubt about scrapping this whole masterpiece. It was very healing and relatable.

Thanks for giving everyone this fantasy world. If I eventually can learn to write 1/4 as well as this, I will be happy.

Grendel, John Gardner

I speed read this because of *gasp* another recommendation. I knew what it was going in so not sure why I thought I would like it. It's super well written, it's just in a style that I'm not a huge fan of (this person uses more run on sentences than I do, which is really saying something because Grammarly hates me. There were some really cool lines in here though, and I did appreciate what I think the intention was. I just didn't feel like putting sufficient thought into this one to actually appreciate every detail.

Bullets for Macbeth, Marvin Kaye

Someone handed this to me and said "sounds like your type of thing" They weren't wrong...

What a long weird way to force people to listen to your Macbeth fanfiction...

Jokes aside, I called the answer halfway through and watched the main character wander around talking to all these different people to come to a very overcomplicated theory instead of following the far more interesting route of having them solve it through the literary puzzle route. I do not care about these people, I just want to hear your weird fan theory as to who the murderer is. I haven't read Macbeth and have no intention to, but I did really like the concept of this, but reading from the perspective of the one who solved it through historical speculation would have been so much more interesting than watching someone stumble accidentally across a file that gets him the good information. Also he's creepy and I don't like him, although this book was written in the 70s I guess.

Leviathan Wakes, James S.A. Corey

Reading the long list of things people have recommended to me has led to a strange mix of genres. This isn't my thing, but not because it’s bad. I think it had potential for me to like it but there are a lot of tropes I'm not a fan of. Glad I read it. There was a lot of good writing in here. I'm just going to go read something more introspective now.

Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body, Rebekah Taussig

This book is freaking awesome. I like the personal, conversational tone and the thoughtfulness of the questions posed. The UW libraries have tons of free copies of this. It’s nuanced and so interesting; I literally finished it in four days (which is fast for me). More people should read it please.

Stories of Your Life and Others, Ted Chiang

These are really, really good. These aren’t even so much stories as thought experiments. Heck, some of them don’t even have dialogue. I originally read “Stories of Your Life” after watching Arrival and had been meaning to come back to read the rest of them. Please be aware that these aren’t happy stories, though. If you read them, be in a state where you won’t mind a little existential dread. I mean, one of these is literally about a math-based existential crisis. AND IT HIT ME. I don’t know if any other author could do this. Some of these concepts are the weirdest shit you can possibly imagine (one of them gave me brave New World vibes) but the execution is so thoughtful. I particularly liked “Understand” and of course “Stories of Your Life”, but “Liking What You See” was interesting as well, mostly because a story that accurately explains prosopagnosia is a first. Actually, all these stories are very science (including linguistics, math, etc.) and history heavy, which makes them all interesting. Usually, I get the feeling that authors talking about psychology just did a quick Google search, but each one of these stories feels EXTREMELY well researched. That gives me a lot of joy, because I hate yelling at a book for oversimplifying diagnoses or, I don’t know, not debunking old inaccurate linguistics tales. These stories are neat explorations and feel like everything sci-fi is supposed to be.

The Hidden lives of Owls, Leigh Calvez

This book covers a lot. It touches on why humans may have such a fascination with owls, how they have become symbolic of environmentalism and conservation due to their widespread habitats, and the author's personal mission to discover the “message” behind the journey these birds took her on.

I expected this book to make me want to go owling. It’s on my bucket list.

What I wasn’t expecting was for it to smack me in the face with a very important moral dilemma, one I’m not sure I have my own answer to.

When do we harm one species for the sake of saving another from extinction, and when is it our place to interfere?

For context, a large chunk of the book talks about owl-against-owl predation. Barred owls, and Great-Horned owls, are known to take out other types. Barred owls in particular have a negative effect on smaller Spotted owls.

The problem, the book points out, is that humans have messed up spotted owl habitats to such an extent that they are a threatened species. And the other issue is that we don’t really understand how Barred owls arrived in the Northwest US. Barred owls are adaptable and intelligent and honestly really cool creatures. It is possible that they aren’t so much invasive as just naturally expanding their range. Of course, it is also possible that they were introduced by humans, and the book stresses that it is hard to know for sure. But that doesn’t make the struggles of the Spotted owls any less.

The book pulls in ideas from Aldo Leopold and wonders if we might be making a mistake in trying to save one species by killing off another. There are some really good quotes along the way, alongside anecdotes about how mean people can be to ecologists (the part about spotted owl conservationists receiving death threats by loggers is super depressing) and some fascinating history.

This book is good. The final point about owls representing transformation didn’t land for me, but I enjoyed this. Four stars.

The World We Make, N.K. Jemisin

I take back everything I said about the first one (The City We Became). This is applicable to everyone. This book was heavy on psychology, speculative physics, politics, and belief in humanity. I loved it. I am now seriously temped to write a fanfiction, something I have *technically* never done before. I want to write about what the avatar of Madison, WI would use as constructs. It’s fairly straightforward, and feels like a good one to study to practice dialogue and character dynamics, because my god do I love some of the characters in here. I love how this one was very much about Padmini, because she is the only one who understands shit in this universe for some reason. I loved getting to see her exploring Atlantis. Yes, this book has ATLANTIS. And it also couldn’t be more obvious how much Jemisin loves her city, and wants to see the world be better. It’s not subtle. The antagonist shouting “Make New York Great Again” was never supposed to be.

Basically, this story made me want to write for the sake of writing. And I love it for that.

Evicted, Matthew Desmond

Okay, well that one is going to stick with me. It's not an easy read (emotionally) but damn it's an important one. The last chapter describing the vision of the project is beautiful, and I loved how Desmond would periodically draw attention to a problem, then add in a sidenote about how some political action/law had shaped that issue. I kind of wish that was done more, to be honest. My other thing I wish was different was the organization: this might be my fault for picking this up between my classes, but I wish the chapters told each person's story sequentially instead of skipping around. I think it would have been emotionally impactful (not that it needed any more of that) and a bit easier to follow, especially when the interactions between the people is so crucial to understanding the system Desmond describes. It feels weird for it to be so close to home. Everyone should read this. It's a real motivator and a reminder of just how broken our housing system is.

The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern

I haven't been able to get through 200+ pages in a day for awhile, but the second half of The Night Circus accomplished that. It has replaced Myst III as the fictional world I would most like to visit.

Reading this filled me with so much awe… How? How did she plot this so neatly and do nonlinear storytelling in a way that genuinely makes sense? How are the descriptions of things that should have been honestly boring, so vivid? A tent filled with snow has no business being this immersive.

This one is going to stick with me. It’s going in my favorites. It is going to be studied. And it is going to give me an existential crisis, because not one sentence I write will ever be as good as the worst ones in here.

The Testaments, Margaret Atwood

I needed this book right now. It’s so good, and I'm not even sure why I think that. It was different in every possible way from the Handmaid's Tale. Looking at other reviews reveals many complaints over how hopeful this book is, and how the Handmaid's Tale was haunting and had a pervasive sense of helplessness, and those are the only things that made it good. I can agree with that to some extent, but come on. Society needs a hopeful book about women working together to resist a government that doesn't respect female autonomy and runs on distorted religious principles. Stop complaining about this book not leaving you with a sense of dread like its predecessor did. Not everyone needs that right now.

Seriously though, I listened to this on audiobook and I think I need to get a copy of it to write in. It's one of those books I just need to own so I can reread it.

The City We Became, N.K. Jemisin

Okay.... This is maybe the weirdest thing I've ever read, but I'm not a New Yorker, the the target audience of this felt like New Yorkers. It's cute, and I did find myself smiling and laughing a lot, but I liked her other stuff better. It's a concept that really hard to pull off and I think she succeeded, and it's just not my thing.

The Shadowed Sun, N.K. Jemisin

It feels good to enjoy fantasy again. It's well written, starts out a little slow, but by page 200 I couldn't stop reading.

I love the world building in this series, much more based around culture than geography or magical rules. That's what happens when a psych major writes a book I guess. They focus on different things. I think that might be why I kinda dislike Tolkien. His writing has almost none of that. His world building is all linguistics and names and generations of genealogy, and geography. But there's no culture, there's no themes being explored that interest me. Took me long enough to realize that I guess.

These books are just so thoughtful. While I think I liked the other one better, maybe because I felt it had more to say, I don't think the sequel was unnecessary. It was a joy to return to this world and see where all the characters ended up. And damn, I did not see where this whole thing was going.

2024

A Christmas Cornucopia, Mark Forsyth

Some parts of this haven't aged well but this is still the ultimate comfort read; it doesn't feel like the holidays until I read it.

To the people who asked what a Christmas book was: it's this. This is a Christmas book.

The Silent Patient, Alex Michaelides

Needed something to make me not hate reading. I was 16 books behind on my yearly goal. I was going to give it four stars for it's inaccuracy in certain topics but for reasons you'll understand if you read it, that aspect doesn't bother me as much by the end. Loved the twist. If nothing else, it got me out of a reading slump.

How Minds Change, David McRaney

“Thought provoking, but only until about halfway through. It seemed to kind of loose steam around then and started bringing in psych topics that were only distantly related to what was being discussed. The first few chapters are something I'm going to have to think on though. Overall, really interesting. But every visual graphic in this thing feels like a joke.”

Edit: I tried to talk to a friend about politics using the tips here for being nonconfrontational, and it ended with me realizing I didn’t actually want to continue talking with said friend. Use these strategies with caution. Did have many good quotes though. I think there was a podcast that made the same point as this book, but more clearly (I am attempting to track it down and will link it here if I can find it). Strong-tie bonds change minds, not weak ones.

The Killing Moon, N.K. Jemisin

Ok, this was really good. I haven't finished a book this quickly in a while. This feels like what Priory of the Orange Tree was trying to be. Except I think this writing is more skillful and the story is better planned. Jemisin is more intentional in what she’s trying to say. When I complained about Priory not following through on the themes it presented, this is what I was looking for.

In addition, this book is weird and entertaining. I love it.

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, J.R.R Tolkien

I will post my full review alongside the Silmarillion one. But here were my thoughts while reading:

Fellowship of the Ring: “I know this is a lot of people's thing, and I really can appreciate it, but even reading the Silmarillion first didn't magically make me actually enjoy it for the most part. That not to say I dislike it, it's just not my thing. I had the most fun reading the chapters on Tom Bombadil and trying to figure out his whole deal. Sigh. On to Two Towers...”

The Two Towers:

70.0% "I still don't like it”

89.29% "About thirty pages of this to go and I'm still having an existential crisis over why I'm not getting anything out of this. Like I understand it and I get what it’s trying to do, but why are so many views like "it's about the power of hope and resilience"? No it's not, most of the characters have no personality and nothing related to emotional impact is really brought up (aside from a few scenes.) What am I missing?"

Review: “I liked the last few chapters but I would literally rather stare at a screen with writers block than read this. I've written 12,000 words of my own writing putting off reading the last two chapters of this, which is vaguely upsetting.”

The House of the Cerulean Sea, T.J. Klune

TJ Klune is very much someone who has his own style of writing. It’s not my favorite, but it’s really good. It’s comforting and hopeful, and sometimes I need that. But it can also feel a bit like a drag sometimes, because there isn’t enough tension moving the story forward, and the style can sometimes feel a little young. The highlight of both of his books I’ve read is the last hundred-ish pages, where the characters he’s built up your investment in are suddenly struggling with very emotional problems. I like it, but even after two books it felt formulaic. I would give Under the Whispering Door a read first, I think, and see if you like this style more than I do.

X-Men: Grand Design, Ed Piskor

I'm torn before being obsessed with how cute it is, and the decent artwork, and being annoyed, as it's mildly incoherent.

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Marie Kondo

The Goodreads reviews of this crack me up, and I refuse to try and write something better. That being said, I like the ideas here.

The Crane Husband, Kelly Barnhill

I like to pretend this book doesn’t exist. It put me in a weird mood for days. It’s so haunting. Very similar feeling after reading “Of Mice and Men”. Books don’t often mess with me. But this one did.

A Monster Calls, Patrick Ness

We've covered this before. If a book makes me cry, it gets five stars by default. The scene, in whether onscreen of in writing, makes me sob every single time.

The Silmarillion, J.R.R and Christopher Tolkien

*I wrote a long, rambling essay about Tolkien after finishing this, which I will post at some point. But here were my thoughts while reading this absolute monstrosity that people joke about constantly.

27%: "This book.... I'm going to have so many thoughts. This is my third attempt to read this. Why are there literally 800+ names in the index? Does every mountain, river, and god need a name in six different languages? I really appreciate this for what it is but my gosh."

39%: "I read this for close to three hours. Want to know how many pages I finished? 29. Six minutes per page. Referencing the appendix probably five times, the map maybe twice, each page. Ohh my gosh. This is the most mentally exhausting book I've ever read, and I just finished my paradise lost rant."

54.0% "So now human names are in the mix too and I have three more family trees to keep track of. Tolkien appears to have given up trying to present the names in a comprehensible way and just goes "the sons of Hador were Galdor and Gundor; and the sons of Galdor were Hurin and Huor; and the son of Hurin was Turin the bane if Glaurung; the son of Huor was Tuor, father of Earendil the blessed. "Repeat this pattern times four. "

54.0% "The word limit cut me off. I would just like to add that Finwe's sons have major issues. STOP CHALLENGING THE GOD OF CHAOS (or whatever Morgoth is) TO SINGLE COMBAT. YOU ALL KEEP DYING THIS WAY. SERIOUSLY. STOP."

62.0% "Oh my gosh I just read the chapter on Beren and Luthien. And honestly it almost made the thousands of years of elf history/context worth it. Ok, just wow. I didn't think I'd ever read a combination of the stories of Perseus, Snow White, Rapunzel, Thor Ragnarok, the golden fleece, and Orpheus and Eurydice. Like what just happened. That was 27 pages of pure chaos and I need to discuss it. Please read."

86.0% "I just spent over an hour trying to figure out if I'm doing the math right that Aragorn and Arwen are actually related and Arwen is 81% elf but also kind of not? And basically this book is giving me a migraine. And also that Earendil got to just sort of ride a ship around carrying a silmaril forever I guess? Literally WTF."

94.0% "Spoilers, I guess. Atlantis just happened and the world is round now.Also, another real quote “There was lady inzilbeth, and her mother was lindorie, sister if Earendil, the Lord of Andunie in the days of Ar-Sakalthor father of Ar-gimilzor. ""

Frankenstein, Mary Shelley

50% "After paradise lost, I was expecting this to be terrible... What? This has no right to be heartwarming tale about grief and social justice. WTF this might be my new favorite classic.

But also... Only halfway done. And the professor said it brings in themes from paradise lost. So that opinion might change."

Review: “It wasn't what I was expecting and that's a good thing. I really enjoyed the style and I think it is my favorite classic from this time period. Honestly, if I had known it was this good I would have read it much sooner. More complicated morality debates than I expected.”

Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice, Adam Benforado

“Read this book. It covers literally everything and is one of the most interesting and thought provoking pieces of nonfiction I've read, and while it may give you an existential crisis that's a good thing. I needed a quick read in between Silmarillion chapters, and this was it, which is why I read 170 pages of this today. The fact I was able to do that is because it maybe doesn't go as in depth with history as I would like, but it definitely accomplished it's goal of being accessible.” Benforado gives actual solutions to issues too, most of which genuinely sound realistic.

Paradise Lost, John Milton

Assigned for class, but Philip Pullman says everyone should read this, so I am glad I did. That being said, I’m a bad person, so I gave it two stars.

16%: "Sigh. I just want to read my other stuff."

83%: "At this point, I'm just finishing it out of spite. Technically the last three chapters weren't assigned. Everything about this book makes me angry. And yes, I am aware it's a religious poem from the 1600s but still."

Review: I have such mixed feelings. It’s long winded for no reason. There was no reason that this needed to be a poem without any punctuation. Seriously, even quotation marks would be a huge help. It made me mad for so many reasons (and yes, I'm aware it's the 1600s):

-Milton understands nothing whatsoever about botany/gardening and pretends he does for some reason. It pisses me off more than it should, but him describing Eve as going around making the droopy flowers stand up straight might be the most entertaining part of the book somehow.

-People try to make this into something it's not. Philip Pullman has a point about this being the opposite of Lord of the Rings, in that it focuses on making the reader have emotions instead of focusing on irrelevant world building. But guess what? Stories are supposed to have BOTH of those things. The plot doesn’t make sense here, it’s only dramatic emotion. Which is fine… but this isn’t the perfect piece of literature people want this to be. Milton's logic is stupid and inconsistent, so I can't even sort of enjoy the story. Even the introduction acknowledged this.

-Intense sexism. Like way worse than you think it is, even for the 1600s.

-So much of "obey the authority" being repeated. It doesn't age well. Like it makes me want to listen to the people who say he wanted the devil to be the hero.

The analysis is more interesting than the book. What people make out of this can be interesting. That being said, I'm off to reread His Dark Materials and/or The Handmaid's tale to get the bad taste of this book out of my mouth.

Murtagh, Christopher Paolini

Relived another series from my childhood. I wondered when I was younger of Murtagh and Nasuada were going to have a relationship. That childhood theory was answered. I listened to this as an audiobook while working and it honestly wasn’t bad, for a unnecessary sequel. I forgot how violent these are though my gosh. Better than I would have expected.

Before the Coffee Gets Cold, Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Ok, it was obviously adorable, but it didn't resonate with me personally in the same way I think it did with others. I really liked the ending though.

Epic: Legends of Fantasy

1% update: "We shall see if I manage to start reading before bed again or if that stops being a thing. Record not great so far"

13%: "First story complete. It was slightly above average."

55%: "Some of these stories are great, and I still think about them. Some of these authors are people whose writing I want to read in the future. The one I am on is not one of those. I am reading this one page at a time and still getting bored. It's not the only one like this, but it's getting annoying ."

57%: "Finally got through the last seven pages of this one. The author's note clarifies that this is adapted from the historical legend of the founding of Kyiv, Russia. What did I just read."

71%: "Ok, those last two were good."

Final review: Some were amazing, some I hated. That last one was a rough way to end it. But I got a book recommendation out of it so I'm happy. I went into it looking for a new series to get into. I'm ready to get this excessively violent book out my house now.

*This is the first thing I read by NK Jemisin and her short story is easily the best one in here.

Big Tree, Brian Selznick

Oh my gosh this is adorable.

Reason for reading: "My brother picked this up for some obscure reason involving Illumination entertainment or Steven Spielberg or something. It's the first new book he's read in months, and now we have a little book club.”

2023

Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott

I want to buy a nice hardcover copy of this at some point because I can tell I am going to be referencing it in the future. This book is amazing and made me piss off my roommate by laughing hysterically every two minutes. This book is going to be one of those things that sticks with you, especially if you have ever thought about writing. Also, my professor mentioned it in class and I pulled it out while he was talking.

The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative, Florence Williams

It succeeds at doing what it sets out to do: remind us of the health benefits of nature and why all humans should be outside more. Enjoyed it. half of it was assigned for class but finished it on my own.

The Chalice of the Gods, Rick Riordan

I was reading this while reading the Silmarillion. I think it gave me actual whiplash. “You'll notice that there are no updates on this. That's because I needed a comfort read that I could finish in one day because I have no time. Honestly it wasn't great, but it's also my childhood so...”

The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood

"I needed an audiobook to listen to while knitting/scrapbooking. This is how I am going to read classics now." It grew on me, worth a read if you don’t mind ending with a feeling of dread.

The Priory of the Orange Tree, Samantha Shannon

I wrote an actual review of this one. Five stars.

Piranesi, Susanna Clark

I love this book so much. Please read it. I can’t say anything else. It’s just so perfect.

Medea, Euripides

For school. I enjoyed it! Love Greek Mythology.

My Side of the Mountain, Jean Craighead George

Every once in awhile I find a book in a pile that I bought years ago and have to read before I can get rid of it. This was one of those. Pretty much your standard 1950s kids book. Was a nice little comfort read though.

Educated, Tara Westover.

My favorite book. An absolutely amazing read. Can’t do justice to just how quickly I finished this. I need a copy to annotate.

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, Susan Cain

The personality difference between now and when I read this is interesting, but everyone should read this (at least some of it, there were some chapters in the middle that felt like filler). Introverts are cool. The world we’ve designed favors extroverts.

Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

For school. I honestly liked reading essays about how the world imagined here might be more similar to our own than 1984. I kind of agree. 1984 gets all the attention, but this is worth a read too.

Hamlet, William Shakespeare

I happen to be one of the people who thinks Shakespeare was great for his time but not as applicable to modern audiences, but this was great. I was lukewarm on Romeo and Juliet, strongly disliked Julius Caesar, but this gets five stars from me. It’s popular for a reason.

Jessica Jones, Vol. 3: Return of the Purple Man

This feels like as good a time as any to mention that I get comics for free through my library on my phone, and their selection of other stuff is limited. I often read a comic while waiting places, and this one was a little bit of a disappointment. Three stars.

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

It’s very good, just not my style. I feel like a traitor for saying this but I think I enjoyed the movie more, after being forced to watch it for the first time recently. Also writing notes to people instead of talking to them in person makes me feel called out. Good story, just made me remember why I don’t like things that are only romance.

Under the Whispering Door, T.J. Klune

Made me cry. Assholes.

A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin

Finally getting into the ones where I posted reviews. “This is some of the best writing I have ever encountered. It's poetic and beautiful and I can see the inspiration it gave to nearly every YA fantasy that came after it. But here's the thing: my enjoyment of it was only a 3/5. I went into it expecting something different, and I'm not sure exactly what that was. Maybe it's something with pacing or predictability, but if it was predictable it is only because a lot of the elements from here inspired 4-5 different modern stories that I can list just off the top of my head. This novel was amazing, but I was bored half the time, and it deserved someone better than me who can appreciate what it actually is: a stunningly beautiful story with world building and descriptions that are on par with something more like Lord of the Rings.”

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke

Okay, this is another one that I need to revisit. I think Susanna Clarke might be my favorite writer in terms of style and world building. But it’s a LOT. You need to put a lot of energy it to get everything. There’s too much here for a single read.

I have the Raven King prophecy framed in calligraphy with a custom seal that I bought framed on my wall. I loved it. It just took longer to get through than it should have for how much I loved it, if that makes sense.

The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton

It was good, but I think I would have resonated with it more if I read it like 5 years ago.

The Invisible Man, H.G. Wells

I had a reason for reading this, but it was convoluted. I didn’t enjoy it. I didn’t get anything out of it. Kind of felt like a waste of time.

A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry

For school. To my surprise, I actually really liked it. Well written, clear, made me feel emotions. I hadn’t heard of it before so I think it’s underrated.

When She Reigns, Jodi Meadows

I couldn’t stop reading the dumb little YA series now, I’m not allowed to. Glad I finished it, nice to see a protagonist with anxiety represented.

This Is How You Lose the Time War, Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone

I’ve now read this twice. The first time because a friend said I seemed like someone who might like things that are “written pretentiously”, and the second for class. I understood it better the second time, and I think it will probably become a comfort read at some point. Really well-written, fun. Would recommend. She also called it sci-fi though, but I disagree. It’s romance. I was tricked. And honestly, I’m not even mad about it.

Jessica Jones: Alias, Vol. 1-4, Brian Michael Bendis

Off to a strong start with a bunch of comics. Honestly though I did enjoy these. Less super hero, more political commentary and stories about overcoming trauma. #2 got five stars in my opinion, the other volumes were 2-4 stars.

2022

A Separate Peace, John Knowles

This one read for school, it was okay, but I have no urge to ever read it again.

X-Men 3: The Last Stand, Chris Claremont

Overall, I remember enjoying it. Was it well written? …

Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson

This one genuinely changed my life, and is in the top three books I think about on a regular basis. A line from it inspired the novel I’m working on substantially, and this reminded me of the importance of personal stories in driving social change. It falls in the same vein as Evicted, meaning not a fun read, but a very important one. Five stars obviously.

Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer

Another one from school, I might read the other book about their family dynamics at some point.

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

I think I enjoyed what it tried to do, the themes, etc. But I didn’t enjoy reading most of it. I think I like that I read it, in retrospect. The character of Gatsby is an interesting one.

The Secret Commonwealth, Philip Pullman

Need to read this one again before the third book comes out. I remember really enjoying it. Philip Pullman was seemingly trying to make sure people knew he was only criticizing organized religion rather than belief. That part was interesting.

Time and Again, Jack Finney

I enjoyed this one, but it did fall apart a little by the end in my opinion. The concept was really interesting and the beginning hooks you instantly. Four stars.

2021

La Belle Sauvage, Philip Pullman

Gotta reread this one before the third one comes out.

Vote Loki, Christopher Hastings

I thought this was a good metaphor for Trump’s election when I read it, but the solution they used to solve the issue (asking for detailed policy plans to reveal ignorance) didn’t super work this time around, although it felt logical at the time. Sigh.

Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck

This book left me with some not good emotions. It wasn’t sad in a cathartic way, it was just uncomfortable.

The Martian, Andy Weir

I didn’t expect cannibalism to be a plan after watching the very upbeat movie, but I still loved this.

1984, George Orwell

Don’t do what I did and finish this book right before bed. Not a fun read. A good one though.

Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro

I just have this rated as five stars, with no review. I think it destroyed me emotionally if I remember correctly. Another one I need to read again. Excellent coming of age story.

Loki: The God Who Fell to Earth, Daniel Kibblesmith

I was being extremely generous calling all these political comics I read that year books. This was a recommendation from a coworker. I had fun reading it, even when in comic form Loki is an interesting character. I enjoyed this.

Lyra's Oxford, Philip Pullman

I didn’t rate this, didn’t write a review, and have no memory of reading it, so it must have been great.

As She Ascends, Jodi Meadows

I started this series in elementary school and I’m not allowed to just not finish something. Creative little fantasy world. This one does live in my head as an example of world-building that is creative without being too complex. Loved it at the time, especially when I was younger.

His Dark Material Trilogy, Philip Pullman

It was a reread and I enjoyed it much more than I did when I was like, 12. Still some of the best fantasy out there. I need to read again and write an actual review at some point.

The Book of Atrus, Rand Miller.

I enjoyed this but I am so obsessed with the games that I don’t know how I could dislike it. A good read, but only if you are a fan of the overall Myst universe.

2020 and before:

My really questionable documentation system means not everything was recorded, reviews, thoughts, dates read, etc. Some significant ones:

The Fork, the Witch, and the Worm, Chrispher Paolini

His sister is a better writer than he is, but the stories here are all wonderful though. I have a quote from this on my wall. “We all have a Vermund we cannot best.”

Animal Farm, George Orwell

I hate how people misinterpret this. Please do your research on this one.

X-Men Obsession Era

X-Men Classic: The Complete Collection, Vol. 1, Chris Claremont

These were amazing. There’s a story in here about Storm saving an author who is struggling with a creative crisis. There’s a story about Nightcrawler comforting a kid with a terminal illness while Jean might be dying there, too. There’s a story about what happened when Jean was on that shuttle, and her choice to take the phoenix force to save her friends. And her conversation with LITERAL DEATH afterwards. Heartwarming and skillful are not labels I typically apply to comics, but these are amazing. Extremely underrated, too.

X-Men: The Dark Phoenix Saga, Chris Claremont

Got me into comics. This was so cool in middle school. Probably helps to have been the same age as the POV character.

Essential X-Men 1-5, Chris Claremont et al. (Uncanny X-Men #1-198)

Includes Days of Future Past and many others. These are printed in black and white on really fragile newspaper, the only affordable way to get ahold of many comics. It felt like I was reprogramming how my eyes over across the page while reading these.

X-Men Red Vol 1-2, Tom Taylor

Comics were always political.

All-New X-Men (2012-2015) #1, Brian Michael Bendis

The artwork in here is stunning. Like I wish I could have a poster of that page where Jean gets all her memories back.

Assigned Reading

Speak, Laurie Halse Anderson

Life As We Knew It, Susan Beth Pfeffer

Defined My Childhood (below age 14)

Honestly, some of these deserve their own essays. These are comfort reads that made me fall in love with reading as a child. They deserve a spot on this list.

Harry Potter series

Although I will not touch these again indefinitely given the circumstances.

Cosmic, Frank Cottrell Boyce

I just love this. The writing gives me emotions.

The DaVinci Code and other Dan Brown stories

Middle school was exactly the right age to read these.

Everything, Everything, Nicola Yoon

Spoiler: still one of the best depictions of parental abuse, this one sticks with you.

The Girl Who Could Fly (Piper McCloud, #1), Victoria Forester

Was at one point, my favorite book. There's so much here. Every kid should have to read this. I think they would grow up with more empathy if they did. If I ever write a children’s novel, I want it to do for someone else what this book did for me. Then, of course, childhood me waited for years for the next one only for it to be utter and complete shit.

The Magic Thief 1-4, Sarah Prineas

I can’t tell you how many times I reread this series on car rides, cabin trips, flights. A childhood classic that more people need to know about.

How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and His Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain, Gregory Berns

While not a children’s book, that’s when I listened to it on audiobook. Prepare to be emotionally destroyed. Also not a bad introduction for kids to the scientific method if they can handle the emotional moments.

Matilda, Roald Dahl

Another comfort read.

Anything by Rick Riordan

His writing deserves an essay. Makes me want to write middle grade or YA just because of how much it impacted me.

The Tale of Despereaux, Kate DiCamillo

Please if you haven’t read this, do so. It’s a kids book. But it’s also more than that.

Holes, Louis Sachar

Part of the reason I like complex mystery plots. This books was so satisfying to read and watch everything come together.

City of Ember Series, Jeanne DuPrau

I just remember it being cute.

The Giver, Lois Lowry

I think it traumatized me, but I still loved it. May have started the “emotions make us human” subgenre of sci-fi. I’m probably wrong.

The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster

Feels like the child equivalent of Piranesi. I love imaginative fantasy worlds about appreciating life. Also I reverence this on a regular basis because one of the traps Milo falls into feels like certain parts of college.

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH

Another one I must have read a dozen times.

Eragon 1-4, Chrisopher Paolini

A valuable steppingstone to more complicated things. I don’t care how dumb these are; the magic system is so cool. I hate the violence but I also don’t care because they are my middle school years.

Anything by Margaret Peterson Haddix

I don’t even know what to say. So much simplified philosophy in these. So many ethical dilemmas. So much complexity that’s absent from a lot of children’s literature. Excessively complicated time travel. She wasn’t afraid to talk about utilitarianism, war, abusive dynamics, corrupt systems, and politics. She may have written simply, but she never talked down to the children reading her stories. I will always remember these. I started writing ideas for my book (in elementary school) while reading The Missing Children. It’s probably going to show.

Finally, anything by Brandon Mull

Oh boy. This one is hard. These were some of my first books. I think Candy Shop War may have been close to the first. Fablehaven. Beyonders. Five Kingdoms. While none of these would hold up for adult readers, these gave me so much joy at the time. Every world is so creative. I can’t express how many hours of entertainment these gave me, how many times I pulled one of these from the shelf, how hard it was to get rid of them when I knew I would never touch them again.

“Oh, perfect” we say. “I finally have time to do that creative thing I’ve been putting off”. Maybe it’s finishing the layout of a scrapbook page, or finishing up a book, or organizing a space more effectively. Maybe it’s sorting through papers or finishing up a knitting project. But soon enough, you have a list of “optional” things that feels more overwhelming than actually having tasks that you need to do. It doesn’t matter if knitting or finishing up that game were fulfilling things to do with free time, as soon as all your time needs to be dedicated to them, that changes.

I’ve had this problem since I was 14. I once became lethargic over a winter break because, while not bored, exactly, I didn’t have a plan. Writing wasn’t in the picture in the way it is now. I was just going for short walks and trying to convince myself to spend another hour reading, something I never had enough time to do.

My family went together to the bookstore one evening, and in a weird burst of questionable decision-making, I bought a math workbook. Not because I had to. Not because I felt like this would be the most productive use of my time. I picked it up because of a dumb, spontaneous intuition, that maybe the novelty of trying to teach myself something new would break me out of this weird mood that shouldn’t define what was supposed to be a break.

It did. I sat down, and just focused on trying to find something I didn’t know how to do. I ended up spending several hours struggling with permutations and combinations, trying to figure out where the formulas came from and why they worked. If someone had told me to do this “for fun”, I probably would have looked at them like they were weird. But I think the novelty tricked my brain into being happier, for whatever reason. I suddenly had energy to actually do things.

My family noticed, too. I think they came to the conclusion that I just needed an activity to keep me busy or I would go insane.

If I was able to keep that same sense of enthusiasm for learning a new thing that I had when I was fourteen, I would swear at my computer many fewer times a day. Learning permutations ended up paying off, too. None of my teachers covered it, so I ended up being the only one at my school to solve that math team problem four years later. I don’t think those things we teach ourselves because we want to ever really go to waste. I think it's the stuff people tell us to learn that usually ends up being forgotten.

My first year of college, I was supposed to interview another die-hard fan of Sherlock for a folklore class. I couldn’t find one, and in desperation, I turned to Reddit. Someone agreed to zoom me, and talk about their fan pilgrimage to Sherlock filming sites, literally the most random topic I could have possibly chosen. I was wary of meeting a stranger, even over zoom, concerned I was making poor life choices. Unsurprisingly, it turned out fine. My roommate was sitting there for the first half, watching the interviewee enthusiastically discuss Sherlockian fan culture and the community around it. That assignment was supposed to take 15 minutes. We ended up talking for well over an hour, and I couldn’t stop grinning like an idiot the whole time.

When I met up with my roommate later, she said, “Sounds like you made a new friend.”

This past summer, I had been filling out job applications since spring break, to every place within biking distance due to my transportation limitations. It was a month into the summer, with no replies, no interviews. That weird, lethargic, antsy feeling was back. I needed a project. But I had already sewn a set of costumes for the renaissance faire, started a scrapbook, rearranged my books, knitted for an absurdly long time, organized every photo ever taken of my family on to a jump drive, and started a T-shirt quilt. The thought of starting another project just for the sake of starting one was more paralyzing than anything. And the thought of cutting up more T-shirts was equally agitating (don’t try to do this. It will not end with a cute project you can show off. It will end with you realizing you don’t actually know what fusible interfacing is, and also that somehow no one in your family owns an iron and now you have 20 mutilated T-shirts sitting in your closet).

I was sitting there, vaguely aware that I should probably read another book or try to call another friend. Or just sit outside. But walking the same trail down to the river and back, the same place I’d been walking the last month, was equally annoying.

My garden at my old home had been completely eviscerated by the neighbors who went a little crazy with a weed whacker, and I was still mourning the years of work creating that space that had now gone to waste. And hoping to find a way to build something new in its place.

So I resorted to scrolling on my phone, looking at pictures of plants on Facebook marketplace, hoping maybe one of the neighbors was giving away cuttings of herbs or something I could add to my planter box. There was nothing nearby.

But there was an ad for a plant sale three miles away and another a mile from that was an ad for irises on the curb. I stared at that, wondering how weird this summer was going to get. But I made the decision to go. I shared my location with my dad, shoved a bunch of plastic bags into my backpack, put Google maps on, and held the phone on a bag mounted between my handlebars.

Then I biked three miles away toward an area I had never been to to pick up irises from a stranger on the internet.

It was a weird feeling, biking somewhere new with a goal in mind. I never went in this direction, largely because there was no reason to. But it was new. I got to get lost in a new city and tried to figure out why Google maps was malfunctioning as it was getting kind of dark. I got to see the area where some of my classmates had grown up. I got to dodge around potholes and see a new neighborhood. Then, I got to meet a nice, older woman who was happy that her overcrowded irises, which she said had been multiplying at an astounding rate, could go to someone who could use them. She was giving away something that had probably taken her hours of labor to dig up just to make someone happy. That act gave me a lot of hope for people.

I thanked her for the irises, packed into plastic bags mounted on my handlebars, and rode away, trying to overcome the feeling of the bike having more weight near the front. The bags clashed against the front tire whenever I tried to turn. It was challenging. And it was also a mile to the next house, and it was getting dark.

When I arrived, a woman emerged from her home, smiling and holding a binder with pictures of all the plants she was selling. She led me around to her backyard, which was filled with pots from the greenhouse, huge clumps of hostas and cranesbill and the most gorgeous daylilies I had seen in a long time. I ended up talking about our shared love of gardening, only buying what plants I could fit in my backpack: a gallon pot of white and purple irises that looked like something out of a magazine and a tiny pot of hardy geranium I hoped would cover the ground of my new garden before winter came, with its tiny, purple-pink buds. I rode off with 20 lbs of irises weighing down the front of my bike, a giant pot of dirt and a fragile little wisp of another plant I prayed wouldn’t be crushed next to it, the enormous iris waving out through the zipped opening of my pack behind my head like a flag. I rode home slowly, ignoring the weird looks I got from people passing me in their cars. One individual shouted out his car window to text his number with where I found the plants. I pedaled away from him as fast as I could, because when I pointed in the direction I had come from, he made no move to turn that direction down the street.

I got to pedal up a hill carrying my prizes and coasted into the driveway, waving at my bemused neighbors as I deposited the haul next to the garden. I spent the next hour planting each iris in the ground, forming the circle of the new garden. A new beginning. For some reason, the weird, restless feeling went away after this.

The problem was, I was now addicted to buying plants from strangers off Facebook Marketplace.

I went again the next day, this time, to pick up tall orange daylilies from a curb in that same city. The same thing happened. I made the decision to go, I packed up my stuff. I carried plastic grocery bags with me, along with my garden gloves. I picked up the plants, mounted them awkwardly off my handlebars, and smiled at the people who slowed down in their cars, wondering why an adult was biking around town with what appeared to be freshly dug, possibly stolen plants, bouncing in front of her. I struggled to correct the angle of the handlebars as I turned, never managing to position the plants exactly evenly.

Throughout the next month, I biked all over my town and the cities surrounding it. I met a woman in a park across some railroad tracks, where I slipped her $3 in cash for a bag of daylily tubers, and we both rode off on our bikes in opposite directions like it never happened. I felt like I was participating in the world’s most harmless drug deal.

I biked back to the plant sale women’s house, who seemed happy to recognize a return customer. I found a man who lived a few blocks away who eventually started advertising spiderwort and Japanese anemone plants from his backyard.

I complimented the enormous, masterful garden of the woman who lived in the house behind my own. She emerged one day, having quietly observed my exploits on a bike and offered to help me find the right fertilizer for my collection. She ended up gifting me a bag of worm castings and talking to me for hours about local plant societies and trips to greenhouses all around the state.

The neighbors who I had greeted when I first arrived and offered some old, outdoor toys for their kids (that probably would have been better suited to Goodwill) also came to talk to me, saying they had extra canna bulbs that they intended to throw away, but would love if I could use them. I drove to a woman's house during a time with car access and paid her for some of her clippings, columbine and daisies and purple penstemon and phlox. And a few more, whole names she got wrong (her “balloon flower” was actually harebell, and her “popcorn plant” was creeping buttercup) but the type of plants didn’t reduce my joy. I was able to experience a moment of connection and bond over how amazing her garden looked. Even if I would likely never see her again. I complimented another woman's coreopsis after nearly knocking on the door to the wrong house, and added more color to the growing circle.

Things kind of reached their peak when I set my alarm for 7 am to make an 8 am plant sale where they promised peonies, and everything else, from sea holly to alliums. I planned for the half hour bike ride down a road where people had a tendency to ignore stop signs and arrived to find a half dozen people flocking to this house. I snagged a gorgeous peony and wandered around the enormous yard filled with nursery pots. I chatted with the population of mostly older folks and discussed favorite plants, gushing over how amazing it was to meet other plant people. People asked what I was doing there, and I got to summarize my story about the chopped alliums and tulips that scarred the yard of my old home and my attempts to rebuild it. They told me about their love of peonies and debated over which hostas would make the best backdrop for their bulb garden. Finally, I lugged the 2 gallon pot to the front and paid for it.

“Do you need any help?” asked the women running the sale. “I saw you pull up here on a bike. How are you getting this home?”

I smiled, and whipped out a plastic bag. “It’s okay. I’ve got this. I’ve been doing this all summer.”

She laughed and nodded. I mounted the peony carefully between my handlebars and rode off, and planted the peony in the spot I had been planning for it for days.

I didn’t know at the time why this brought me so much joy. I thought it was about spending time outside and being around plants, two things I had sorely missed.

We all have that feeling of being “stuck” sometimes. But novelty helps. Go ride your bike to a random spot you haven't been before. Grab that math workbook for fun, rather than for learning’s sake. Try to learn how to sew and mess it up horrifically. Decide to hop on that bus and go look at that one weird spot in town you miss. Go read a book somewhere new. Just find some excuse to change things up in a purposeful way.

It took me a lot longer to understand the second-half of the equation, why meeting that stranger on Reddit and facebook-marketplacing around multiple cities stuck with me in a different way than the workbook or scrapbooking. But my psychology class explained it pretty well.

Basically, we all kind of suck at knowing what will make us happy. When a person is asked which situation would leave them in a better mood from their bus ride, talking to a stranger or sitting alone, nearly everyone reports they would feel better sitting alone. But talking to the stranger makes them feel better anyway.

That’s essentially what those experiences were. That’s also why my favorite memory from my first trip outside the US wasn’t any of the fancy places or landmarks we visited, although those were amazing in their own way. My favorite moment was asking for directions in this really shitty children’s aquarium where they filmed a scene from Sherlock. I asked one of the staff, about my age, where that tank was, and while she didn’t know, she freaked out, packed up her presentation she was in the middle of giving, and ran off to tell her coworkers of what I had said. Later, she found me at the tank, thanking me for telling her that it had been under her nose the whole time she had worked here. I’m never going to see that person again, but they are responsible for the best moment of that amazing, weird, nerdy trip.

That summer of plant-hunting was special because I got to explore my new hometown and discover where all the plant people lived. I had an excuse to have little adventures, often inexpensive or free, rather than handing over money to Target. Something about having the confidence, too, to bike past a dozen cars with a garbage bag full of black-eyed susans was fulfilling in its own way.

It made the new place feel more like home, and took away the edge that had come with leaving my college town (and the friends that lived there) for the first extended period of time. I now had a garden built on the kindness of a half dozen literal strangers.

We all encounter these people who aren’t destined to stay in our lives for very long, maybe only a few minutes. But you are supposed to make those connections, too. Time with people isn’t valuable because it lasts forever; it’s valuable because connection matters in and of itself. Build little bits of community where you can. Try not to forget what really makes you happy, you all.

And if you get the chance to, create a garden from the kindness of strangers.

I can’t handle violence in media very well, and I have never been able to figure out precisely why. When someone pulls out a weapon, I usually turn away; when a movie becomes too graphic, I pause→ Settings→ Audio→ English Descriptive Audio, then walk away and listen to the monotone voice describe the decapitation, instead of watching it myself.

But this isn’t a post about my weird psychological quirk. It’s about the show I endured watching through the violence, purely because the plotting, themes, and characters are all well written and, like the violence I don’t watch on screen, contain much more detail than can be easily described in this analysis. It also means that if the individual reading this has not watched the show in its entirety, the remainder of this will be needlessly confusing as well as full of spoilers.

In Jessica Jones, a central idea, presented implicitly in seasons one and two as well as basically shoving it down the audience's throat in Season Three, is the idea that becoming desensitized to violence and emotionally unfazed by it, is the primary catalyst for one becoming the villain. Well, it’s not the only thing – the harms of shame and the equally negative effects of losing one's sense of guilt are also enforced – but it’s one of the drivers behind Alisa’s actions, as well being the primary reason Trish becomes the villain she swore to protect others from. In season one, we see her nearly collapse at the sight of a deceased acquaintance, by season three she has seen so much death that she is able to beat an individual brutally without feeling any guilt, sadness, or other emotion that would remind her to right the scales. The characters in Jessica Jones who become desensitized to the death and destruction surrounding them inevitably become the villains. There are no exceptions to this rule within this series. The writers are seemingly willing to die on the hill that what makes Jessica human as the others fall is that she still feels guilt and grief when the hundredth person dies in front of her.

So… Jessica Jones is a show about avoiding desensitization. So what? It’s a superhero show. People die in superhero shows, especially adult ones intent on being “gritty” and “dark”. How is a superhero show intent on expressing this theme supposed to avoid condemning its audiences to the same fate as the characters whose fall to villain hood it documents?*

Well, the latter would be a problem if Jessica Jones was actually a superhero show (it’s not). It’s not even really what it advertises: A Film Noir Story. As many others have mentioned, it’s horror. This is important, because in superhero stories, the action–and therefore to some extent the violence – are the point. In gritty action shows like Daredevil, it is too easy to forget what we are watching, even with his rambling about morality. Jessica Jones has relatively few fights, and those fights are not where the violence, ever present in this show, lies. The violence we see is almost always an aftermath, a crime scene, either in the literal sense of the word, or more figuratively. So, great. Jessica Jones avoids glorifying violence by not presenting the actions leading up to it; the violence is done by characters other than the protagonist, except in self-defense, and we don’t get the adrenaline rush of watching humans get beat up for entertainment. Huzzah.

Except there’s something wrong with that argument. Because even in Jessica Jones, it is easy to become dissociated. To watch the scenes of horrific violence with a sense of calm, and it's even a little difficult to remember who the villain is, as Jessica ushers the serial killer Salinger out of the hospital to protect him.

But… I actually think that’s, at least partially, by design. We may become dissociated from the violence. So many people die that it starts to feel unexceptional.

In other words, it starts to mirror real life.

But Jessica Jones tries to set itself apart from other shows, not only in how it presents the violence itself, but in how the characters react to it. We may be used to seeing shock in characters with injured loved ones, but what is different in Jessica Jones is characters we do not care about – heroes and villains alike – are treated as if their deaths are tragedies. Not collateral damage. Not accidents. Not a necessary evil. A tragedy. Not only a tragedy, but a life-altering event that no one escapes from unscathed.

That seems obvious. Many people know that intuitively. But while the Avengers evacuate crowds and those left behind are not put on their conscience (at least not immediately or personally), and Echo and Daredevil have action sequences showcasing huge body counts of “bad guys”, some of which we know must have lethal injuries, the camera swoops past them, forcing us to focus on the choreography. Jessica Jones takes a more personal approach. It's conscious and intentional. No one shields you from the innocent forced to stab themselves in the head, the friend who was forced to cut his own throat. These characters have been through Hell, but they still react each time they see someone has died. The writers lean hard into this idea: taking a life has a cost, carried both by the individual and society. No one seems unfazed by the crumpled body of Jerry Hogarth’s wife.

And that makes it disturbing.

So, great, Jessica Jones fulfills its goal of making violence disturbing and wrong, successfully preventing the audience from becoming the monsters it condemns. Cool, so what? Reader, if anyone made it this far; I am now, and only now, getting to my point.

Following these themes logically: Jessica Jones only gets to remain a hero if she saves her sister and prevents her from taking a life. Logically, it also means Jessica is not allowed to kill Trish. Doing so would make her (shocker) not a hero. But this show also needs to remain true to the ideas it develops throughout the rest of the series, ideas about what separates regular people from monsters like Kilgrave or Salinger, even after Jessica herself has taken three lives (for those confused as to why she is the protagonist: one was under mind control, one was accident, and one was in defense of her sister).

When asked what that line between those types of people is made of, the show answers: guilt, human connection, and continued emotional responses to harm of any kind, keep us human. Lose one of those, and that’s when you become a monster.

Kilgrave might have been seeking out human connection in his own perverted way, but he doesn’t feel guilt for his actions, and violence has never bothered him.

And Alisa was balancing right on the edge. She had a human connection. For a long time, she even had guilt, but violence itself never seemed to faze her.

Trish lost her sense of guilt, became desensitized enough where only violence to close loved ones mattered, and was going to abandon Jessica. She has broken all three of the show's rules.

So how do you reconcile those themes, by the finale? How can Jessica protect her friend from becoming a monster, avoid the taboo of hurting another, and still avoid seeing violence as inevitable? How do you honor the relationship that keeps Jessica human?

On one path you have Trish continuing her actions as a monster. In the other, you have Jessica stopping her, severing the tie with the person she swore to protect and the relationship that has kept her human. Jessica has abandoned a human connection for the sake of utilitarianism, a journey that didn’t end well for other characters. The show then ends on both our heroes walking a path it unequivocally condemns.

This is where the scales stand while Salinger still lives. From the audience’s perspective, they seem to have written themselves into a corner.

If Jessica Jones were the show critics claim it is, the nihilistic, hopeless universe that people seem to take issue with–or a lesser show–they might have ended here: Jessica stops Trish, but the decision to harm her friend causes sadness. There. Jessica remains human because she still feels guilt. But Trish doesn’t. The character we have grown to love still feels no remorse for her actions. She is a monster, the same as the others Jessica failed to save.

But the issue with that solution? Doing so breaks one of the show's own rules, the rule against committing harm (with any justification) against the relationships that keep us human. So, Jessica has inherently become like Kilgrave. Still, I can picture a world in which they went with this decision; I doubt audiences would have noticed.

But instead, the show calls any of those options completely unacceptable.

The brilliant change up happens when Jessica is finally abducted by Salinger. The lead up to this moment ensures both Jessica, and the audience, know the cost of her plan to get evidence against him. We saw the faces that I don’t care to describe here. He saw what happened to Trish’s mother. And when Jessica returns, we gain confirmation that she didn’t get through unscathed, as she wordlessly hands the photo to Trish.

She sacrificed her own story to save her.

Because Salinger exposed Jessica’s worst fear: becoming like Trish Walker, who sees herself as a hero but isn’t one, reminiscent of that costumed moment in the first season. Wearing a mask and seeing yourself as a hero is much more likely to obscure your vision than protect you.

By knowing she would come out the other side broken, without her story to protect her, she IS the hero. While the show condemns harming one life for the sake of another, self-sacrifice is fair game.

Still don’t see how this moment manages to reconcile the themes it struggled with since the beginning?

It’s because Jessica didn’t make her choice between two versions of letting Trish go. She didn’t look at two options and choose the lesser evil. She instead finds a choice that upholds the three criteria for maintaining her and Trish’s humanity: Guilt, human connection, and not being desensitized. She made the same choice she always has: sacrifice herself to save Trish. If the show had ended with Jessica dragging Trish to the raft, the show would be saying the ends justify the means, the opposite of what the show has enforced since the beginning. But it doesn’t.

Jessica saves Trish in the end. Because Jessica caused emotional harm to herself, Trish feels guilt, and accepts Jessica’s actions, maintaining their connection. They are both still human in the eyes of the show.

It literally takes the trolley problem, stares it down, and chooses the same option as The Good Place, of all things. It chose the solution to the Trolley Problem that saves everyone. Everyone except oneself.

Given what I said in the first words of this essay, people have asked me how I can possibly enjoy a show this dark and hopeless.

Because it’s not. Jessica Jones is about many things: the fight between good and evil in ourselves, accepting others for who they are, and confronting topics that are taboo or just uncomfortable. But ultimately, amid all of that, it's about the power of choice and autonomy.

And about what keeps us human.

*For the record, I actually think the act of seeing violence in media, fictional or otherwise, is much more complicated than this. There is a really good video essay about this topic by Scott Niswander, talking about Logan, a movie I have no intention of seeing.

This essay has been through around three different versions, and I don’t know why I keep coming back to it. This version is actually shorter, and much more comprehensible, then the document I thought I was done editing after a week of revisions several months ago. Since I am going to need to learn to edit properly at some point, I decided pull it out and post it here. Is it the polar opposite tone of my first post? Yes. Is it a little weird? Yes. Do I regret it?

…

You remember the place: the sounds, the sight

Same trees, same smell, same land, same light

Returning again to the place that someday is lost

In summer, in winter, the ground covered in frost

You come back once again later, only to find

The world as you left it–the world left that behind

Emerging into the clearing, that's when you see

The land as it was is not the shape it should be

The trees growing back not the same kind they were

Gone now is the scent of the ferns and the fir

No more great spruce trees, towering toward the sky

Just an endless path of aspen, not yet five feet high

You remember the dogs running ahead, the flick of a tail

Over that beech, that elm, the log once lay upon the trail

You are lost in a place your whole life you have known

You can't follow memory’s path, you must make your own

The paths you walked when you were young are still here

Not at all how you remembered them over the years

Over there was that hill you were once helped to climb

The berries are gone now. That clearing-

that day-

lost to time.

I wrote this four years ago, in the back of a physics class, in small fragments on the back of my notes.

It is based on a real place, as you can probably imagine. Walking through that place I had known since childhood was an unsettling experience that stuck with me for months. I eventually decided it would make a wonderful essay. I always intended it to be a metaphor for returning to normal life after lockdowns. Obviously, that wasn’t what it became.

Earlier that week, I was forwarded a link to submit entries to the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poet’s contest. Suffering from an existential crisis about never allowing anyone to read my work, I emailed the form back and largely forgot about it.

It got third place. I had never expected to be seriously considered for anything, even a student contest with only a few hundred entries.

I say this now, because it feels right to start this blog here. It wasn’t the project that forced me to find my voice as a writer. That is something different that I might put here eventually.

But this is the poem that reminded me why I love writing. Would it surprise you to learn that this poem wasn’t as much about those moments in the forest as I thought it was? Would it surprise you to learn it’s begun to mean something completely different to its writer a year after I finalized it? My scribbled, silly, contrived, poem from the back of a boring lecture?

I have to remind myself of that sometimes, while I’m writing my book, and I wonder if I should just stop (47,000 words in) because it’s never going to be anything worth keeping.

I need this story as a reminder: sometimes, our failures really are just in our heads.