a mixed bag of people who care and people who don’t, all living together — what a mess

There can be… a certain self-centeredness in the way people determine which literature is valuable — paths of least resistance at the expense of freshness & vitality. There are behaviors that poison creativity, and we should be aware of them.

I'm not hung up on trying to prove I'm purer than other people, or that I'm "good," because goodness is something we create in concert with other people. It's about what we *do* and *make* and how all of that doing and making actually impacts other people living in the world.

bro there’s a gofundme to crowdfund attorney fees for a preschooler who was kidnapped by our federal government and shipped across state lines and his senator is posting about high school hockey while every other elected official is debating whether to give a zillion more dollars to the kidnappers

I feel such a rush of relief when people don’t pretend other people’s contributions are disposable. Goodness, are we not tired?

@lyszflo.bsky.social and @jdridges.bsky.social's first post as poetry coeditors is live on Patreon. If you're intrigued, do read to learn about their plans for the column Anathema | In Verse: www.patreon.com/posts/happy-...

I will never accept indirectness as a communication norm, because it’s dysfunctional 🤷🏾‍♀️ Sometimes a sensitive topic may need to be communicated more gently, but expecting someone, especially someone you don’t know well, to intuit something without communicating it directly is deranged.

@lyszflo.bsky.social @jdridges.bsky.social

The book community is working together to fund an African small press to translate two novels. #BookSky We need to close this. And we're in reach! Very grateful for your help. We can do this! Still needed: $740 (USD) Last donation/purchase: 9:27p EST / 04:27 SAST ($20)

Lonely at the top doesn’t mean people shouldn’t be confident or ambitious in ultimately harmless ways, it means a pedestal cannot hold many people. Thankfully pedestals are not the only structures that can be built.

Part of what I’ve perceived in the broader fiction landscape is an overwhelming lack of joy. Maybe joy in the branding, but not joy in the words, sentences and ideas. And too many people who don’t see how beautiful an essay can be.

finding some solace in feminist spec fic from decades past

Some of the rancid things people say & do in the name of ‘being a team player’ have had a major impact on my worldview. I think political theory is incomplete without emotional theory. We need different social structures for sure, but we need to think about the formation of cruelty, too.

I'm going to get real about writing for a minute. I'm not looking for advice. I understand the realities of publishing and that there's no guaranteed route to success as a writer. I do not need to hear any of that. And I really don't need to hear one more person tell me to just write for myself.

Sometimes people begin thinking too abstractly, and so I must remind them that I am a person.

Everyone should be thinking critically about their control issues tbh, and how they might be attached to the idea that people shouldn’t be able to leave them or find alternatives even if their needs are very unmet. These control issues are systemic.

Manipulative people by design or strategy Like to convince you that having an appropriate response to awful treatment is “not smart” / “unhealed” as a method of control. People who voted for someone who expressed they thought you were subhuman Don’t actually deserve unlimited grace

It’s funny that even now, with everything we know, there’s still a retreat towards treating racism as somehow uniquely unbelievable.

Worded another way, a hyper-individualistic culture is antisocial. A hyper-repressive culture is antisocial. It is not only individuals who are capable of being antisocial. A group of people, even a large group of people, can be antisocial, together.

Many are weaponizing methodological individualism. It removes the social relations from the equation, thereby circumventing the social sciences. “Social” requires at least two conspecifics, though, and MI takes the contrarian stance. Framing around the free agent, or an anti-social stance.

i got my first ever story published in a literary magazine and think it would be cool if people wanted to read it! bsky.app/profile/j-al...

My heart’s the same, but my aim has changed

have you ever felt like public health is an overreach? do me a favor and look up tertiary syphilis or, alternately, the concept of "shitting yourself to death", which used to be something that happened with medium regularity

I like to incorporate elements of black party culture into my fiction, and there’s only so much explaining I’m willing to do about that. I enjoy fic outside of my immediate cultural context without authors needing to plead their case, and it seems fair to expect the same openness of mind in return.

they know grievance is a great motivator

D’Angelo has spoken against his sex icon image. He was pushed into that by the label and hated when he was on tour and ladies were treating him like a stripper. I hope in his passing we can celebrate his incredible musicality and dedication to the craft. 🌚

Turns out your assumptions about what republican group chats are like is correct www.politico.com/news/2025/10...

I want social structures that make sense, and last. Which means I want social structures that don’t require hazing and ring kissing and conditioning and repression to function, which is what most of this world’s social infrastructure requires.

My goodness, Baldwin could had written this last week.

Those LLMs are absolutely more real to them than we are

a certain kind of liberal has a cycle of being confidently wrong, coming to the right conclusion way too late, forgetting all the people who told them they were wrong in the first place, never reflecting on it or learning any humility, and then being confidently wrong again to start the cycle anew

And these posts never come with a mea culpa like "I should have listened to the people I brushed off as hysterical" bsky.app/profile/chan...

I lowkey have things to say about people considering dystopia and alternative realities less speculative than other speculative tropes

My cat knows not to mess with the tablecloth, but he did it anyway and tore a big hole in the fabric, which he then stuck his head through. Of course he got stuck and ended up panicking, and twisting the cloth tighter around himself, and the only way out was with my help. Seems like a metaphor.

anything taken by force will not be had with ease

I am feeling a need to be more uncompromising. Too many people have not been told No enough, and despite the clearly negative ramifications of their behavior, they continue it.

You can’t fix autism because autistic people are not broken.

It’s such a task to maintain your sense of self when you’re dealing with people who have actually lost their damn minds

When I first started reading black literature, I was so in love with it that I hadn’t fully considered how many people either don’t know it or don’t truly enjoy it. Sometimes I sense a hint of hostility towards it, or a desire to discipline it — even from people who consider themselves well-read.

The sciences understand ‘culture’ as a constructed environment in which life grows.

Formulas aren’t useful everywhere — gotta be careful about applying formulas in a way that smothers potential. That seems to be one of the great trials of Western culture.

John Lee Hooker with a diagram of the evolution of the Blues.

Motherfuckers begging to say shit suddenly ain't got shit to say. Sad.

My mom often says (translated from Twi) “we are meant to do some of it, not all of it”

I think I’ve got to officially see my short fiction as secondary to the novel project — if a story lands somewhere, cool, but my mind should be immersed in the novel

You may notice patterns in who is quick to assume anything they haven’t heard of must not exist

It’s terrifying, how often people only do something if an authority tells them to — no curiosity