A quickish post as the year draws to a close, including thoughts on Carrie Fisher
I don't know whether this'll be my last post of 2016. In case it is, happy New Year to all of you; to paraphrase someone I retweeted a few hours ago (Scalzi?), at least we know that Australia and New Zealand, at least, survived 2016. (And probably other places by now!)
I usually do a few year-end memes, but I don't seem to be getting to that. (I'll at least try to make a list of my published-in-2016 manga adaptations, if only in the name of also updating my professional credits list over on Wordpress, but that likely won't happen today.) 2016 was what it was: a horrifying trashfire in so many ways, albeit one with many good things interspersed on a personal level for lots of people (thankfully!).
On the personal level, I survived the year. No major changes happened in my personal or professional or fannish life. I didn't write nearly as much as I'd hoped, never mind as much as I wanted to. I met a handful of lovely new people both online and in person. Claudia and Jinksy continue to be utter joys for both me and
scruloose. I have purple hair for the first time.
Tonight there will be ramen.
After Carrie Fisher died, I tweeted, half-seriously, that I was tempted to get a "what would Carrie Fisher do?" tattoo. The thought feels a bit fake-geek to me, because I didn't grow up on Star Wars and have no fannish attachment to it, and my awareness of Carrie Fisher was as vague as it is for most actors/celebrities until really quite recently.
The press tour for The Force Awakens was probably the first time I ever saw her speak at all, and I was immediately taken with her. There was an ebook sale on Shockaholic, so I read that (and quickly discovered that the book has an expectation that you know something about her life already, whether by reading her previous memoir or not, but I enjoyed it immensely anyway). But she was such a force (pardon the pun, as everyone says, because you can't really help referring to her that way)--such a strong personality, and creative and and brilliant and accomplished and inspirational on a multitude of levels, and forthright and funny and compassionate and brash. She lived through some truly awful stuff while constantly under the spotlight, and she wrestled dreadful brainweasels all of her life and shared her stories and tactics, and she was irreverent and honest and...the list goes on.
I'm not at all sure whether such a tattoo is truly anywhere in my future--certainly not immediately--but it's a possibility, because damn, that woman was a role model in so many ways. Pretty sure she's my hero of the year, even as it took her from us.
The world is colder without her, as it is without the many other luminous creative voices we lost in 2016.
My feelings about 2017 are nebulous. I don't have resolutions or goals set. I want to write more. I want to be more, to do better at wrestling my own brainweasels, and to be kinder and stronger. I want to do a better job of reaching out to people, and of being a support for people who need it.
As far as I can tell, the main advantage we have in 2017 that so many of us didn't in 2016 is that we see it coming, at least in terms of how things are likely to trend with the change in power in the US. (I don't know yet how that's most likely to affect Canada, never mind countries I don't live in or next to, but I doubt it'll be good for anyone. [I still feel weird and somewhat icky about how much my political focus is on the US, but there's no denying that what happens there gets all over everything.])
Originally posted at http://umadoshi.dreamwidth.org/754772.html. Comment here if you like, or comment there using OpenID. Comments at DW:
I usually do a few year-end memes, but I don't seem to be getting to that. (I'll at least try to make a list of my published-in-2016 manga adaptations, if only in the name of also updating my professional credits list over on Wordpress, but that likely won't happen today.) 2016 was what it was: a horrifying trashfire in so many ways, albeit one with many good things interspersed on a personal level for lots of people (thankfully!).
On the personal level, I survived the year. No major changes happened in my personal or professional or fannish life. I didn't write nearly as much as I'd hoped, never mind as much as I wanted to. I met a handful of lovely new people both online and in person. Claudia and Jinksy continue to be utter joys for both me and
scruloose. I have purple hair for the first time.
Tonight there will be ramen.
After Carrie Fisher died, I tweeted, half-seriously, that I was tempted to get a "what would Carrie Fisher do?" tattoo. The thought feels a bit fake-geek to me, because I didn't grow up on Star Wars and have no fannish attachment to it, and my awareness of Carrie Fisher was as vague as it is for most actors/celebrities until really quite recently.
The press tour for The Force Awakens was probably the first time I ever saw her speak at all, and I was immediately taken with her. There was an ebook sale on Shockaholic, so I read that (and quickly discovered that the book has an expectation that you know something about her life already, whether by reading her previous memoir or not, but I enjoyed it immensely anyway). But she was such a force (pardon the pun, as everyone says, because you can't really help referring to her that way)--such a strong personality, and creative and and brilliant and accomplished and inspirational on a multitude of levels, and forthright and funny and compassionate and brash. She lived through some truly awful stuff while constantly under the spotlight, and she wrestled dreadful brainweasels all of her life and shared her stories and tactics, and she was irreverent and honest and...the list goes on.
I'm not at all sure whether such a tattoo is truly anywhere in my future--certainly not immediately--but it's a possibility, because damn, that woman was a role model in so many ways. Pretty sure she's my hero of the year, even as it took her from us.
The world is colder without her, as it is without the many other luminous creative voices we lost in 2016.
My feelings about 2017 are nebulous. I don't have resolutions or goals set. I want to write more. I want to be more, to do better at wrestling my own brainweasels, and to be kinder and stronger. I want to do a better job of reaching out to people, and of being a support for people who need it.
As far as I can tell, the main advantage we have in 2017 that so many of us didn't in 2016 is that we see it coming, at least in terms of how things are likely to trend with the change in power in the US. (I don't know yet how that's most likely to affect Canada, never mind countries I don't live in or next to, but I doubt it'll be good for anyone. [I still feel weird and somewhat icky about how much my political focus is on the US, but there's no denying that what happens there gets all over everything.])
Originally posted at http://umadoshi.dreamwidth.org/754772.html. Comment here if you like, or comment there using OpenID. Comments at DW: