Coming Up On The One-year Anniversary Of Going No-contact With My Mother, Which Happened As A Direct

Coming up on the one-year anniversary of going no-contact with my mother, which happened as a direct result of her ruining Christmas with transphobic bullshit. Hyperfocusing on making stories about queer people finding love, building found family, and caring for one another has been the only thing that's really worked for me this Time Is Goo season to avoid feeling crushed with sadness all the time.

Do not attempt to out-malicious-compliance the staff at the malicious compliance conference.

Me: I'm sad about being done with the first draft of my book.

Miriam: Write a sequel.

Me: I dunno, it's pretty self-contained. I don't know how I'd do that.

Miriam: [These two supporting characters] fall in love in [this logical follow-up situation]

Me: ...holy shit

[Less than a week later]

Me: *drawing those characters smooching*

Fucking THIS. YES.

And. Like. It's so fucking infuriating and invalidating being treated like a spicy flavor of woman.

queer cisgender women love to invite "women and nonbinary individuals" to their events bc they might be down with queer solidarity but they draw the line at trans men or random nonbinary ppl they've decided are too scary and need to be gatekept away from events

So first I spent most of last year not making any art, to the point where it becomes distressing and bad for my mental health.

Then I wrote an entire ass novel in a little less than three months. Which I put in a drawer and promised myself I wouldn't start on the second draft until January.

Except it turned out that writing was the only thing keeping my seasonal depression at bay. So then I finished outlining an entire second sort of sequel novel before Christmas.

And then husband and kid went to visit my mom (who I finally cut off last year) and I was alone most of last week.

And now I'm 11K words into a first draft of a second one.

Why am I like this.

55,000 words in!

I haven't done NaNoWriMo since I had Cara, because 50,000 words is an impossible amount of words to write in only 30 days while juggling a job and parenting responsibilities. However, yesterday I passed 55,000 words on the novel (it STILL doesn't have a name), with a bit more than 40,000 of those words having been written since October 13th.

It also puts me two thirds of the way through my outline, which is wild. I've written (and then sat on) four novels before this, but this has definitely been the quickest and easiest. No doubt because queer romance is a lot more fun to think about than all the transphobic bullshit out there right now. (Picture is the finished coloring job I did on the sketch I posted previously)