General Election 2019

 You’re no use to me like this! - The Seventh Doctor

The dust has settled and the adrenaline is starting to fade. It is time to reflect. This cannot be remembered as just screams of outrage.

I haven’t felt such visceral anger since I realized nazis know where I live and were threatening my family. It’s as if all at once you are knocked to the ground and battered by the realization that your enemy is so much more dangerous than you thought they were. I am not a soldier or a politician. I am a man who gives a shit about the suffering of others and this result has left me so very very angry and depressed. I can’t fight this. I can’t stop this. There is nothing I personally can do to stop this.

The public have spoken and what they have said is alarming and depressing. I still believe in everything Jeremy Corbyn has fought for. I despise the centrists and I am so angry that the smug rich shits are smugly calling time on these moderate left wing values. We need these policies so much and I hate that so many are so stupid,. bigoted and selfish as to vote against it.

Ultimately though my rage can go nowhere and can do nothing. I am a volcano boiling away steam meaninglessly. I am a utilitarian. That’s why I stand by Corbyn’s policies. That’s why neoliberalism and conservatives baffle and anger me so. They stand in the way of all I see as logical and reasonable. Utilitarian Morality believes in the greatest good for the greatest majority. That same utilitarianism speaks to me now. I am no use to any cause I believe in, to anyone I believe in if I send myself mad raging at things I cannot change. Life has to continue. My strength will be needed for the times to come. I am not talking about any melodramatic political rhetoric either.

I have been so angry today that I have barely slept and have given myself RSI furiously playing Fallout 4 to distract myself from this. I am making myself ill achieving nothing. I have been telling myself over and over today that “I can’t do it.” That I can’t change what has happened. That is of course true but I can still live. I can still provide what little solace and support to those around me as I do bring. I can live and live as well as I can so that I am able to help those I care about. I am not the Doctor and I am not the Sole Survivor - as the player character of Fallout 4 is called - I can’t topple evil regimes or bring people together. I am not that important but I do mean something to a few people and those people would be the worse for my absense so I must continue. I must let myself be.

We may not be able to do anything about the terrible monsters we face now but we can try to keep living in hopes that together we can do something to stop the monsters later.

Toxic Masculinity

Toxic Masculinity
Or
Why Being Good Matters To Me

by
Alexander Gordon Jahans

I keep revisiting the guilt over that damned fanfic in my mind. I wake up at night thinking about it and wishing I could apologise. Wishing I could make it right. Everything I write seems to evolve into a reprocessing of my grief and guilt about writing it. Why? At the very time that was going down I was being diagnosed with Kallman’s Syndrome, suffering from depression and nazis, literal goddamned nazis were sending stuff to my house. Even my own father was taking his frustration at being divorced out on me. Yet it’s the fucking fanfic I keep coming back to.

Let me be clear, I am not a saint. At school I was bullied relentlessly and my own desperate frustration and anger caused me to have anger issues that would sometimes cause me to explode at others. In hindsight my naive crushing on women was perhaps expressed so awkwardly at college and university that while I know my actions never harmed anyone they may well have freaked people out. They didn’t know who I was and what I was capable of after all. So I have regrets, serious regrets, but it’s the fanfic that haunts me and I don’t know why. Why this thing? Why is this what causes me so many sleepless nights?

I think it’s because the fanfic is the clearest instance I can think of where my actions caused harm and I knew at the time that the inclusion of THE problematic scene was risky. This is like living with low level anxiety your whole life and one time you ignored it and things went disastrously wrong. Except did it really go disastrously wrong. The fallout certainly feels it but I have no proof that anyone was harmed by what I wrote. Indeed the person who most saw things wrong with what I wrote seemed an impenetrable strong personality that gave no fucks and just decided it was a messed up thing to have written that indicated things about my character. That’s the key though. The thing I wrote was stupid and I felt that was possible at the time and these people proved it then effectively decided that it was proof I was unsafe to be around. That I was unworthy and not a good man.

I regret many things about how I handled those events but I absolutely do not regret championing the cause of trans and/or non-binary people who want a safe space. People deserve to feel safe and if that means shutting me out then so be it. Safe spaces are important even if they are denied to me. I think though that it is the implication that I am unsafe, that I am not a good man that burns with me.

You see at university I went by Gordon Jones to distance myself from my family and my bad experiences art school but when I entered my final year of university I took up the name I had in school as a reminder to myself that I could survive no matter how bad it got. Alex Jahans the boy had survived more than a decade of relentless bullying and I knew I would need that strength when university ended. Becoming Alex Jahans again was a promise to myself that I would survive because it would be tough and I needed that strength so much because I had no idea just how much shit was waiting for me as university ended. The problem is that implicit within that promise was the idea that Alex Jahans is good, pacifist, he does no harm.

You see at school I was bullied by everyone and then I would get home and my father would scare the hell out of me with his shouting. Let me tell you the word ‘Sugar’ is goddamned terrifying when your dad is towering over at you and bellowing at the top of his lungs as he is literally foaming at the mouth with rage over some stupid bullshit. I defined myself as a pacifist and better than other people because I had to be.

The last few years have seen me come to terms with the fact that my memory works such that I can see through the cycle of my father’s abusive behaviour where my sister can’t. She sees the latest bridge of abuse to get past. I see every bridge my father has ever forced me to cross. I am not blind to the complexity of the situation. There are things I miss about him and he isn’t wholly evil and sometimes his actions are understandable. They aren’t justifiable. They aren’t normal. They definitely are not good or acceptable but sometimes I understand how desperation, frustration and anger has driven him to such actions. The problem is that none of the good of my father is worth a damn while his pattern of abusive behavior remains. He is a dangerous man and the bogeyman me and my mother define ourselves against.

One of the quiet joys of recent years has been watching how my mother has bloomed and developed into a different more rounded, happy and productive individual without my dad there to stifle her dreams, confidence and desire to improve things around the house. I am sure that part of my improving mood can be owed to fading scars of his behaviour. Slowly the effects of him upon our lives are being assessed for their worth with the bad parts being discarded and replaced with better stuff. We are healing.

So that’s why not being a good person cuts so deeply. That’s why the possibility haunts me. That’s why it used to madden me that I had no explanation for what they accused me of. Without an explanation of what I did wrong I can’t stop doing those wrong things, I can’t become safe again, I can’t become good again. Except maybe I never can. Not to some people. After all if you knew a man murdered someone once it wouldn’t matter how reformed he was you wouldn’t feel safe around him so why should a trans person feel safe around someone who once wrote transphobic things?

Even if there was some simple explanation that I could easily work with they don’t owe me that. Victims of oppression don’t owe their oppressors compassion and explanations, even if those oppressors did so accidentally. I fucked up and this is my mess to deal with. The problem is that I still don’t know how to deal with it. That cis privilege comes with ignorance of the perspective of a transgender person. I can do research but I can never truly know how it feels to be trans and/or non-binary so now every time I am around them I have anxiety that I am going to fuck up again and cause my social life to disintegrate and I know that sometimes when I ignore my anxiety things go very badly wrong.

This incidentally is why disagreements on twitter have caused me actual panic attacks before and why I have withdrawn from it. My autism means I am playing a continual game of Russian roulette whenever I talk to people online. If you fuck up and say the wrong thing in person you can apologise and learn from the experience. You fuck up and say the wrong thing on twitter or facebook and people will be sharing screencaps of it decades later.

Maybe that’s right? Maybe it is better this way but what the fuck do you do if your past is littered with such literary landmines of stupidity? I know myself and I know what I have or have not physically done but my autism means I can never be sure what I have said will be taken how I intended it. I have had other autistic people say they would not have made the mistakes I made. Has it been codified somewhere medically that autism causes a lack of social skills but always leaves someone mentally cognizant of any and all possible ways they might unintentionally be discriminatory or bigoted so such actions are definitively due to wilful bigotry and not unintended misunderstanding?

Heck there is another complexity to this that sometimes I have called women out for bigoted statements and they have called me sexist for daring to say a negative thing to a woman. How the fuck do I take that? What is the response to that? I am an autistic person with Kallman’s Syndrome and Growth Hormone Deficiency who has been bullied, abused and stalked by nazis. Surely I have a right, a duty, to call people out for being bigoted? At the same time I am a cis white man who likes women and was raised under the patriarchy so I am privileged and probably have some latent sexism, racism and heteronormativity to fight against.

This isn’t easy. Which is why I think the deconstructivist era of the 90s sticks with me. I don’t get to pretend I am definitively a good guy anymore. I have a black mark against my name and I have to live with that and the possibility that I might fuck up again. Women get to have golden age superheroes who are beacons of hope and love. Cis white men have to live with the complexity of being part of the patriarchy whether we like it or not and how we fight against that toxicity within ourselves and within our communities.

Right I’m going to get some tea.

Acceptance

Acceptance. It was my yearly theme. The thing I knew I had to work on this year. There are problems in my life, things I can’t change, they prevent me living a life I wish I had. I am alive and I have happiness in this life but with this happiness is always frustration at my inability to make things better. So this year I resolved to leave that frustration behind. There are still problems that I have to deal with as and when they come up, little things I need to work on but that’s fine. It’s the things I can’t change that hurt the most.

So much of growing up as a cis boy is to do with the myth of the heroic knight slaying monsters. Goodies defeating baddies. There is something ironic about a nation of boys with daddy issues growing up watching stories about heroes with Daddy issues. At university I wrote that TV raised me and my lecturers could not fathom what it meant. My parents weren’t neglectful about the physical stuff, not generally, but everything I learned that made me I learned from TV.

This is why I think it has been so hard for me to realize the extent of the complexity of the world. I grew up on narratives about heroes and villains. About monsters and victims. I grew up a victim of bullying and abuse therefore I could not be culpable of bad acts and did not have to examine myself because I had to be in the right as others had hurt me. That’s why I had that anti-feminist phase at university. The feminists hurt my feelings therefore I was the victim and they were the bullies, therefore all feminism was bad. The possibility that good people could do bad or stupid things, that bad people could have elements of decency or even that individuals could be complex and not so easily defined or predicted wasn’t within me.

Oh I thought it was. I thought I understood. I knew to be careful about not being violent myself in school. I said pointedly that I judge actions, not people, back before the shattered facebook group disintegrated. I thought I was so smart. When that group disintegrated I was scarred because how it broke apart left me irrevocably confronted with the fact that people are not so easily predictable. I felt hurt and betrayed by people who acted out against me for reasons they clearly thought were just and how things spiralled from then outside my control leaving me with no place to go. Someone had to be the bad guy and over the last few years I have oscillated back and forth because if I’m the bad guy then surely I should be dead. That is what happens to bad guys in fiction. Or they were oversensitive and cruel traitors in which case they were the bad guy so fuck what they think.

I was so convinced I was the victim after school and then I got bullied in college and university, nazis stalked me online and my own father gave me nightmares. I defined myself as the man who is moral in the face of abuse. I could not be wrong. I could not have acted immorally. I still don’t think that - knowing what I did then - that I acted immorally. Yet I demonstrably made the wrong decisions as enough people left me that they were presumably negatively affected and considered my actions immoral. They don’t write stories about the heroes offending people because of their ignorance online. I had no frame work for how to deal with this.

In a way this situation is typical of the problems I faced. A complex mess where I was hurt but I had no idea of how to proceed. My very apologising led my nazi stalkers to target the victim of my terrible writing. What little action I could do made things worse. I am still apologising to the air years later because of the negative consequences my writing caused. There is something bitterly, horrifically, ironic about how an incident where people accused me of being transphobic has led me to literally be anxious and afraid of trans and non-binary people. The person I wrote a 50k fanfic to I now avoid for fear of the memories and regret.

The reason I actually wrote a magic potion to make the body fit how you perceived yourself was because around the time I wrote that fanfic I had been diagnosed with Kallman’s Syndrome and had just been beginning treatment. I am a cis man with tits who needs regular painful testosterone injections. I have been misgendered and I know how deeply that cuts. I also have what the medical community has helpfully termed a micropenis. It’s like they named it for maximum stigma. I would gladly drink a potion made from shit, piss, vomit and jizz if it meant my body looked like it’s supposed to and worked like it’s supposed to.

I actually looked into penis enlargement and with current technology and medical experience you basically have to choose: Do you want a functional dick that feels everything or do you want a pretty, normal sized dick? So I’m sticking with what nature gave me.

I am not trans or non-binary (probably) but I have been misgendered and I do experience what I think is dysphoria. My experience is different. I wasn’t assigned the wrong gender at birth. I was assigned the right gender, my pituitary gland just didn’t work right so my body got confused and decided to present me with a feminine physique. The testosterone injections have massively helped course correct things but they can’t fix everything and I am still left with the mental scars.

Then there is the economic issue. So many of us are trained to think of disability in big simple obvious ways. Can you get up the stairs or can’t you? Can you walk? Can you physically do stuff? The thing I have realized is that my autism and low energy from Growth Hormone Deficiency (Another problem due to a bust pituitary gland.) have left me intellectually able to do some stuff but not psychologically able to do other stuff. It seems counter intuitive. I went to college and university. I clearly can do intellectual work to some degree. The problem is that college and university want to accommodate you ability to get the work done. Jobs aren’t. I just cannot compete in the current work environment because I can’t do phone calls, I can’t stick to schedules and I suck at bureaucracy and social skills. These are things I cannot do due to my disabilities. I am thus stuck on Universal Credit, unable to claim disability pay, unable to get a job.

If you have read any of these paragraphs and are thinking to yourself “Yes but what if...” then understand that such questions have been plaguing me for years. This is my life now. It may be fragile and it may be temporary but this is it and I think as the year draws to a close that I am accepting it at last and finding peace.

Bloggage 12 07 2019

Bloggage
12/07/2019

By
Alexander Gordon Jahans

I have had family round. It’s been great. Sometimes hard but great. Yesterday I slept near non stop, only waking briefly to use the toilet, let the cat in or out, take my meds, eat something and watch something to overwrite the still fresh and seemingly so important memories. I wondered why I slept so damned much but now I get it.

I am autistic and it is part of me but because it is an inextricable part of who I am I forget it’s there. Autism is like walking around with lime green skin that appears perfectly normal to you. You only notice that you have it because of how people react to you.

Socialising is hard for me. Social skills have to be consciously remembered and they are different for each person. With family round I have been very social and that has come at a cost. I was famished constantly while they were round but the last two days my appetite has been near non-existent. I thought it was a bug until I remembered I was like this before family stopped by to visit. My body was so consistently tired from the strain of fitting in that it raided energy where it could.

I do not regret the choices I made. I love my family. I love those I consider family. I know the choices I made to be present for them and I know they were not ungracious or selfish about it. We had a lovely time but that time is over now and real life resumes.

I am not yet at the stage of doing 5 mile walks every day, not least because of the heat and I fear my body shall require me to rest more yet, but I am better. I have rested and I am starting to piece my life and normality back together. My brain abhors routine but such stability as I have is being put back together.

I can’t go from nothing to normal in an instant. I need to let myself rest as much as my body feels necessary given that family time has clearly exerted a cost but I will start walking again. Short distances every few days at first but I will build up that muscle. Once my psyche has recovered from the social strain I need to reread the fiction I was working on and get back to the writing mindset. It won’t be easy. I know it won’t be easy. I will do it though.

I have reached the surface after a long time in the depths of socializing and I am happy to breathe clearly again in the light of a new day. Things will be okay.

A Good Day

A Good Day

A bloggage
By
Alexander Gordon Jahans

The last 5 months have been hard for varied reasons I can’t talk about. Those hard days are not quite over but the end is in sight.

To be present I have been playing pokemon. A game I can pause and quit quickly but is engaging enough I don’t go stir crazy. I completed Sapphire and FireRed then completed the Kantodex in LeafGreen and have now started on completing the Hoenndex in Emerald. I have been climbing mountains of my youth to tread water during these hard times.

My diet and lifestyle has been shit due to stress and I have not walked as often as I like to. It has made me anxious and fractious. Gorging on cheap food to keep my inner demons at bay because my family needs me.


Lately I have had a week of reprieve. Not a total reprieve because I had to get a testosterone injection done yesterday but I have had time to recover. It feels like slowly coming up to the surface from a deep dive, the pressure easing off day by day and I just took my first lungful of fresh air at the surface. I know events will send me back down again soon but for now the sun is shining and I can breathe easily.


I listened to the audiobook of World War Z during the last 5 years of chaos and darkness and have found myself relistening to it at another hard point within these trying times too. As a scarred survivor of abuse and embarrassing diagnoses I found applicable stories within that fiction that have helped me in these times. One passage in particular has struck me. When the survivors retook the American continent from the zombies they started the crack up and lose it. The people who survived the Z war were hardened people who could take this grotesque world but what made them lose it was realising that they were home and victory, normality, was in sight. When terror is all you know peace holds a nightmarish quality all its own. Like a non-newtonian liquid melting away when it stop being struck.

I feel that tension today. After 5 months of particularly bad poverty and utter shit happening there is peace and relative plenty. I can relax for the first time in so long. I will not panic about the change or allow myself to melt under this reprieve from stress though. I am going to listen to Cortex and go for a walk. today is a good day.

bloggage 26 04 2019

So I got Instagram and it’s cool. I follow pretty people and I’ve made friends there. It’s nice. I am a seasoned veteran of the evils of social media at this point so I don’t experience the depression that others do but when there exists a site that asks you to take photos of your food, and your friends want to see photos of your food it forces you to have a photographic record of what you are consuming and really see what is happening.

I have never been thin and I have had people call me on my diet my whole life, I have to shrug it off. It is hard to ignore though that my diet has been getting worse and I have been eating more and fattier food. Bollocks to how much I weigh. Bollocks to my BMI. I can see before my eyes that my diet has gotten worse. Cheese toasties have become buttered cheese toasties, have become buttered cheese toasties with peanut butter sandwiches to soak it up.

What’s more is I’m not going out. My infamous walks haven’t happened for nearly 4 months now. I am getting fractious.

On top of that my sleep is worse than usual because I have had a run of 4 bad months in terms of money. When money is tight I have to prioritise diet coke because I need that to function during the day (if you think I should quit tell someone who likes coffee to quit) thus come the time when I should be switching over to something non-caffeinated I can’t so the sleep is worse and worse.

Why has this happened? Because an extravert I know is in the middle of their own problems and when they have problems I have problems. I hate talking, just being in the same room as someone is draining, they have to talk. If no one is around they will talk to themselves. Especially when stressed or anxious. As they have been these last four months. There has been all kinds of nonsense because they are impulsive and anxious and need to be reminded of boundaries and privacy and it has been so very very draining.

Add to that illness from bugs in January and February, the perils of buying shoes on Amazon in march and my TV dying in April and it has been one blasted thing after another, leaving me broke month after month, my patience wearing thinner and thinner. Something has to give. So I gave up the walking. I couldn’t afford the energy expense. So my diet increased, my self loathing and self destructive tendencies coming out in a desire for comfort food on poverty budget. (If you think cheese is luxury food get your head examined)

Now stuff that I can’t tell you about is happenning. Stuff that looks set to destroy my energy even further.

Thank fuck for letsplays, pokemon games and diet coke.

Writer's Block

Writer's Block

How To Fight It
By
Alexander Gordon Jahans

So, what are my qualifications to talk about this?

Well I’ve been writing on and off for myself since 2009, producing short stories, scripts and novel length pieces of prose. Most of them haven’t seen the light of day, some have been deleted and none have ever been sold or won awards. I did do a BTec in Media and TV Production and got a 2:1 at Creative and Professional Writing and Film Studies but this isn’t about the quality of my writing. This is about the advice I have regarding the great demon that tortures writers, the eponymous block. To that end it is relevant that you know I am now too disabled to work and write as often as I can because it provides escapism and a sense of purpose. When I have not been able to write I have noticed my mood is affected and the dark days come more often. I have to fight writer’s block because when I don’t make progress in my writing I feel it.

Defining Writer’s Block.

It is always good to define terms. Someone I recently got into an argument with on twitter got angry with me for asking them to define the basic writing terms they were speaking about but it is important. One woman’s Mary Sue is another man’s Protagonist Hero. Something particularly true given I am autistic.

Writer’s Block is an inability of the creative writer to create. Simple as that. The words don’t come.

What’s interesting and important for the purposes of this piece though is that Writer’s Block itself is peculiarly vague and different for every person and at different times. The brain is a complex machine and creativity is a complex process. Writer’s Block describes a symptom that feels like a problem. The reason I think people struggle so hard to fight Writer’s Block is that they are trying to problem solve at the wrong place.

Types of Writer’s Block.

So if Writer’s Block in fact describes a symptom with multiple causes we need to outline them before we can begin to attain solutions.

Creative Block:
All things are equal but you don’t know what to write.

Energy Block:
You know what you want to write and how to write it but when you get to the writing you can’t focus and get stuff done.

Creative Insecurity:
You think you know what you want to write but every time you start to write you end up deleting everything because it’s just not good enough.

Energy Insecurity:
You can’t focus on your writing because you are tired from stressing about other things in your life.

Solutions:

Now that we have outlined some types of Writer’s Block lets discuss possible solutions.

Creative Block:
Writing is a process. It is not just output. The writer needs to take in ideas from the world around them then digest them.

If your creativity is stumped then first you need ideas. Read more, listen to audiobooks, watch letsplays, play videogames, talk to your friends and take an interest in politics. Inspiration is something you have to find in the world for yourself. It’s when you find an idea and say “I want to explore that.” When I need inspiration in a hurry I watch fanvids because they are like idea concentrate. The ideas of actors, writers, directors, editors and costume designers compressed into a few minutes with music to provide a uniting theme.

Next you need to think on those ideas. Think of it as though you have harvested the grapes from the vineyard and now you need to let them ferment before they can become wine. I find that walking while listening to music helps for me but others like showers or doing chores. Procrastinating by doing something dull like cleaning the house is actually leaving your mind free to think about your story and how the characters, setting and plot will all interact.

Then you need to flesh out what actually happens. Fermented pulped grapes are not wine before you have filtered out the pulp. This is called Pre-Writing, figuring what happens when and getting that all important starting sentence to work from. You don’t have to write anything down to Pre-Write. My process often involves doing some walking while I run through different takes on how I want to write the scene so that when I start writing I know where I’m going. That said don’t be afraid to make notes and flesh out where the story is going. I like writing long multipart stories with ensemble casts and multiple plots going on at once so sometimes it can help to first outline the plot in brief in terms what characters are doing in each scene when. That way I can go back later and focus on continuing the emotion of one set of characters arcs through their particular plots.

Energy Block:

Creativity is a complex process arising from a complex muscle that has a lot of complex tasks to perform. If you don’t think your brain has a lot of complexity to coordinate because you feel your life is dull then break down how many individual steps there are in making a cup of tea. This is why human like robots are a long way off. Our brains are fantastic machines that work hard and fast so it is normal and understandable for us to come to a task, know exactly what we want to do but be unable to fulfil it because our brains don’t have the energy.

Energy is not simple either. You can’t just write when you get up. For me I need the right mix of being fresh from waking being caffeinated by diet coke, having eaten breakfast so I have slow burn energy and nutrients with a kick from the adrenaline of exercise. I know well that sleep is hard to come by and exercise is hard to do but even pacing around the kitchen for a few minutes can help get those endorphins flowing and remember to eat and always have a drink with you. Dehydration will make you tired and if the temperature is too hot or cold for you that will drain your energy too.

Creative Insecurity:

My favourite writer, Douglas Adams, was infamously plagued by this type of Writer’s Block, to the point where many tales are told of his producers or publishers effectively locking him in a room with a computer and a deadline to force him to just get something out. One of my friends quite clearly has this type of Writer’s Block too, forever fretting that their writing isn’t good enough. Heck I’ve had a version of this too. After a fanfic I wrote caused me to lose friends I became so terrified of writing something that could be perceived negatively that I kept deleting what I wrote and worrying that it wasn’t good enough. 

The solution - stop panicking and just write damned thing - is far easier said than done. So I have more practical solutions. Chiefly, I think the goal is to attain a flow state. In a flow state you aren’t thinking about yourself. You are lost in the moment, focused on your task. How do you achieve that though?

Well, I use a process that is almost ritualistic in nature. There is comfort in ritual. Writing is scary, a leap into the unknown with your heart on show for all to see and snark at, but ritual is comforting. I have my favourite cardigan and my favourite dressing gown. I have places I like my favourite drink placed just so and I have my prewriting ritual so I am pumped and know what I want to write before I arrive at my desk.

This is actually important, trying to write from a blank page is hard so write something. This is part of why I like prologues in medias res but just get something down so you aren’t staring into the void and never just arrive at your word processor with no idea of what you want to write. The page is your stage and it is very easy to get performance anxiety if you walk on to the stage with no idea of what you want to perform. This might seem obvious but I think it bares stating.

Another thing I do, is I listen to music that is thematically appropriate to what I write. I have it turned down low so I can write but it stops the awkward silences when I think of what I want to write next from allowing negative thoughts to creep in because there is no awkward silence there is just the music that continues the theme I want to tell.

Energy Insecurity:

As I mentioned about I recently had a big bout of Writer’s Block because I felt anxious about whether my writing would offend people. I ended up getting a prescription for anti-anxiety meds after I deleted a half a million word story and the backups once I had completed it. It is natural and normal to not be able to focus on your writing if something else is weighing on your mind. This is why I can’t write when I am angry at somebody or when I am having a ptsd attack.

I do however have suggestions to help with this kind of Writer’s Block. Having a ritual before writing can be calming, the familiarity bringing serenity and prioviding a break from the outside world. I also use a programme called Focus Writer so I’m not distracted by anything on my computer and I have big over ear headphones so I don’t hear notifications or people calling to me. Shout ther distractions and sources of anxiety.

Anyway, I hope this helps people.

Remember a bad draft can be edited later, a non-existent draft can’t be made better.

The Naming of Things

Bloggage 3rd February 2019

Bloggage
3rd February 2019

By
Alexander Gordon Jahans

So that’s three stories up so far, two from the old continuity and one from the new series.

In case you were wondering this is is a brief timeline of events in terms of where stories can be set.

Era 1. Pre Foundation - The Nothingness before the multiverse and when it was very young. in this time the elder gods exist but they are just clouds floating through the nothingness.

Era 2. The Dark Times - The Farsh-nuke has absorbed the soul of Lucy Danse, realised he has a male identity and become obsessed with women. He convinces his best friend the Bam-Kursh that women are awesome and together they go off terrorising the multiverse. Spring-Heeled Jack joins in like the mutual friend you don’t really know who goes too far.

Era 3. Post Execution - The Seven Great Empires have caught, tried and executed the Elder Gods

Era 4. The New Dawn - The Great Farsh-nuke founds the Logicios as guardians of the Multiverse and other Elder Gods come out of hiding.

Era 5. The Corruption - The Logicios have grown decadent and seed worlds to draw out the Farsh-nukes and make them remember who they are so they will be bound by morality and they can safely use them as assets. The Septaganoids grow from a nuisance and a pest to a threat.

Era 6. The Great Septagonoid War. - The Logicios are now definitively facists but the only thing preventing the multiverse being destroyed by the deeply pedantic Septagonoids. The Sylph Liberation Front begins as a resistance movement.

Era 7. The War Of The Hundred Million Universes - The Logicios wage war on a hundred million universes in the hopes of colonising them and ensuring they have the troops to ensure they don’t lose the Great Septagonoid War. Aided by an incarnation of Lucy Danse later called the Paragon the Hundred Million Universes give the Logicios enough of a bloody nose that they are able to negotiate a peace settlement and the United Civilisations of the Multiverse begins.

Era 8. Reign of the Paragon - Lucy Dance is the Paragon of Virtue and Heir to the power of the Great Farsh-nuke. She empowers the Bam-Kursh to ply their trade as the Toy Maker if they expand the United Civilisations of the Multiverse and negotiates the fight against the Septagonoids and the cold war with the Logicios.

Era 9. The United Civilisations versus the Logicios - The Logicios have been warn down by a ridiculously long war while the United Civilisations have grown ever stronger thanks to the Bam-Kursh. With the final end of the Great Septagonoid War came the vanishing of every Farsh-nuke and Lucy. It is up to their respective organisations to then fight it out.

Era 10. Fragile Peace. - The Logicios lost the war with only a small amount allowed to remain and form a better Logicio peace force to protect the multiverse while empire loyalists snuck off to different parts of the multiverse. Without the threat of a foe nor the charisma of a great leader to keep them united the United Civilisations quietly disbanded,

Era 11. The Ideology War. - With the Farsh-nuke gone the other Elder Gods have little interest in the ongoing state of affairs except that the Farsh-nuke’s old executioner Professor Logicity was warned of the coming ideology war and asked to back the Sylph Liberation front and what they wanted the multiverse to be. Professor Logicity turned to the Elder God he knew would be most in line with this new progressive outlook the non-binary Viorum Kaztif-tan and together they helped the leaders of the SLF found what would be called the Freedom Collective. They also resolved to create a new god to fill the role left by the Farsh-nuke, Robert Gordon Banks is the man who ends up taking on this role with Amy Hurst as his bodyguard.

The threat comes from the trillionaire Richard Raspberry and the so-called Alpha God Adam Godwinson. One Farsh-nuke survived through a loophole and was able to try and defeat their growing fascist movement through political means. He failed and became the plaything of Adam Godwinson until the Freedom Collective crushed the Raspberry Reich and freed the last Farsh-nuke.

Era 12. The Current Era -  The Freedom Collective has won and the multiverse is at peace. For now at least.

There is however one small thing. Every era that I have mentioned which has so far featured the multiverse has taken place within the same place in every universe, Earth. Once you know that life exists in one place and you live in a multiverse, just visit the same place every time why go anywhere else. We don’t just live in a multiverse of universes though. Every universe is itself a kind of inflationary multiverse, with connected pockets of different space time. Within one of these pockets gods from Era 2 got stuck and created the Mundis Turpis out of boredom.

Thus we have Era 12 B. The New Goddess - Amy Hurst is the new Goddess after the Events of the Way back and the fantasy series follows her story.

I currently have multiple stories already written for the series called Love Hurst set during Era 12 B The New Goddess, they just need to be proofread and edited though I want to rework episode 2 so it might be a while before that series is updated. I am also working on one scifi series set in the same general area  as the Mundis Turpis Stories.

I also hope to proofread more old stories from different eras, edit them and publish them but bare with me.

You can follow me on twitter @farshnuke.

New Beginnings

New Beginnings

A Bloggage

By

Alexander Gordon Jahans

How do we define the end of one chapter of a person’s life and the beginning of another? When they start or finish a course of study? When they move out? How about when they get a kid or a puppy? What about when the divide is less clear?

I have felt for the last few years that my death was a certainty and not far away. I don’t feel that any more. My life is still somewhat precarious and I am still somewhat laissez faires about the possibility of my demise but I do believe now that, all things being equal I am probably not about to die in the next few years. That is a scary thought to make external. It feels as if I am tempting the universe to prove me wrong. That fear though is a good sign.

I still have anxiety, I still have dark days when I wonder what the point is but I have accepted now that this is what my life is and what it will be for the foreseeable future so I intend to make my life, such as it is, as quantitatively good as I can, given  the limited sources and energy I have to hand.

The nazis have started their march towards defeat and late capitalism crumbles under the stream of brexit’s stupidity. There is nothing like racism to expose the evil in the world and motivate the just to fight it.

I have hope, true hope, for the first time in a long time and I have my writing. My writing that brings me so much pleasure. There will be people that hate it because it’s weird or because they consider a man writing about submissive women inherently sexist or creepy. That is going to happen and I can’t stop it but I will continue my writing because I know women are just as keen to write and read stuff about submissive women.

Anyway. Merry new year. Here’s to new beginnings.