The Morning After the Election

Social injustice is like depression.

It's always there, lurking. You clear it in your immediate vicinity for awhile, but you know it's still out there affecting someone, and you know it will come back to you, and you know that it's frequently fatal. It feels like no progress is ever made.

But progress is made, so gradually that we don't notice until we compare a sufficiently distant past with the present. More people understand more about the causes and processes that create the condition than ever before, and are constantly working to improve our tools to combat it. It is more curable than it ever was, though less curable than it will be. It is more preventable than it ever was, though not as preventable as it should be. Failure happens again and again and again, but success can't happen without the risk of failure.

You can't control anyone else. You can't always control yourself. But you can do more than despair. Keep the manuscript in the mail. Take your meds (as long as you can get them). Donate if you can, march if you can, stand firm if you can. Vote in the little elections as well as the big. Speak when It wants you to shut up and die.

If you can do nothing else, choose kindness at every opportunity life gives you for cruelty. It's the only way to reduce suffering, your own and others.

Still better than a soul-sucking day job

Yesterday morning, I sat down to write a short story and realized half a page into it that it was about how office work sucks anywhere you go in the galaxy, and I couldn't face it. If I were still in the soul-sucking day job I could probably write it as a safety valve, and might even be able to make it funny.

This morning, I got a good rejection. Oh, yeah, there's such a thing. It talks about the razor-sharp writing and original premise and makes it hard to understand why it's a rejection. Do yourself a favor - don't try to parse this stuff. Put the good parts in your permanent memory, file the rejection, and move on.

Don't try to do this job if it's not what you want most in the world. Because the most successful writers I know still have days when They Just Can't and get both good and bad rejections. The more successful you are, in fact, the more rejections you get - because to be successful you have to submit a lot, and it's a buyer's market. Rejection is always more likely than acceptance, and sometimes acceptance turns to rejection when a company changes hands, an editor moves house, or a budget gets cut.

You have to be able to live off the good parts, take the rest in stride, and keep on going, for yourself.

First Query of the Year

It's in the mail. The e-mail. Whatever. And - we'll see.

I believe in Len's story so hard and so much, a part of me is convinced each time I send it out that the person on the other end will see what I see and realize what potential is there, to change the whole game.

And I also find myself believing that, if it once again doesn't happen, that something I did or didn't say or do is at fault. The story is great, so I must be screwing up, right?

Well, maybe. Or maybe the agent just signed somebody else with a transgender western. (We can only hope.) Or maybe she has so many clients she decided to stop taking queries five minutes before mine showed up. Or -

There are a thousand reasons to turn down a query, only one, maybe two, to accept it.

It's hard to remember that when you wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night, suddenly certain that what you said in the third paragraph gave entirely the wrong impression and guaranteed rejection. But it's true, whether we remember it or not.

And regardless of whether I screw up or not - I'm the only one who can sell this story, because I was the only one who could write it. So it is my duty to the story to keep it in the mail.

I Should Write a Tribute.

I can't.

Elaine died.

Death sucks.

I am useless at this and shaky and I'm about to cry some more, so I direct you to the post I made when she had her stroke.

I'm afraid that's all I can do right now.

Feasibility, Shmeasability

Yesterday I worked on the WIP, where again I'm having to write stuff from a point of view not the protagonist's, in order to figure out exactly what is really going on and how the villain will behave next. And I realize that I'm not going to be able to do it as originally envisioned - an awful lot of what makes me uncomfortable in this story is only worked out properly, and the assumptions behind the world are only illuminated properly, if these alternative points of view are included.

Which discourages me, because alternative points of view make everything more complex and, therefore, tougher to sell.

So, while I was being discouraged anyway, after I finished I decided to tackle the problem of whether it is even possible to translate the creative tangle of the Widespot material from a gaming context to a novelistic context. Leaving aside for the moment the knotty problem (which, if solved, will make everything else fall into place, I think) of the two alien characters, I asked myself what, if this were a modern realistic novel, would be the key peculiarity of the neighborhood, and what leaped out at me was the biracial couples. Almost everything about the setting and the characterization screams "mid-20th century south," one of the biracial couples is young and overtly political, and the other is specifically said in the family biography to have moved to Widespot because of its isolation, "to get away from parental disapproval," and in Homer's personal bio "because his folks objected to his doing right by Beulah."

So, run with that - what's the earliest either of them could have gotten legally married, assuming Widespot to be in Texas? I look up anti-miscegenation laws and find that they weren't declared unconstitutional until 1967, which is later than I expected, but then I'm an optimist. (And alas, yes, Texas was one of the laggards that didn't strike the laws down till forced to.) Homer and Beulah, however, could have run off and lived together earlier than 1967, when Beulah got pregnant with Mary; so let's say the Beeches, who I can easily see marrying partly as a political statement, married in 1967. When the neighborhood starts they have a teen-age daughter, so the earliest year it can be set is - 1981. And working out the relative ages, Mary and Penny would have been born in 1960. A year before me.

Which shouldn't, actually, surprise me...

What it means, though, is that this would not be a YA story. It was always problematic, anyway, because in the neighborhood Mary and Penny - who are the characters I want to explore in book form - are both full adults. However, they are remarkably innocent, inexperienced adults, both by nature and by upbringing, and anyway a lot of what interests me is their shared childhood, so it has always seemed probable, and natural, that the book would skew young. But there is no way I am taking characters roughly the same age as me, and working out big chunks of their life experience, coincident in time with my own life experiences, and maintaining the immediacy of the YA viewpoint. Whatever I do, I doubt I'll be able to avoid the "remembered in tranquility" attitude, accessing the specific places in my brain I would need to access.

And I hate adult realism, for the most part. When I read books marketed to adults, they're almost always genre, and genre is almost always "really YA" in my private classification system. Which doesn't mean I can't write adult realism, or New Adult, or however the industry would categorize this; but does mean I'll be handicapped when it comes to marketing it. As if I weren't bad enough at that for YA and MG.

Besides, it has to be multi-POV. That's a given. I can't possibly pare the Widespot material, whatever it turns out to be, down to "Mary's Story" or "Penny's Story." It has to be the community's story, with Penny and Mary as flagship characters at most. And here I am back where I started, exhausted from fighting my tendency to write stuff that is just too damn hard for me to sell.

And it was time to quit anyway, so I went and caught up on my tumbler dashboard, where the agents-and-editors wishlist pops up with this gem of hope: I'm on the lookout for YA, NA, or Adult that alternates POVs like a boss. Character development, perspective, & voice.

Hurray! I'll send her - um - I'll send her - um.

Dadgum it.

I've been fighting this tendency so long, I don't actually have anything like that ready to go right now...No, wait, maybe Astral Palace will do. I need to look at her accepted genres.

And that, brothers and sisters, is why exhausting your strength fighting your native tendencies is a bad idea. When the opportunity arises, you want to be ready to jump on it.

The Difference Between Fiction and Real Life

If it happened in a story, dropping a three-pound handweight on my foot would have had an aesthetic purpose.

It'd be symbolically or thematically appropriate; it would coincide and resonate with some other element of my life; it would be some sort of message or warning or trigger or - it would have meant something.

But because I live in real life and not in a story, it just means I had to spend two days with a baggie full of ice on my foot. Do you know how difficult it is to accomplish anything with a baggie of ice on your foot? Even intellectual work - "Yeah, since I'm sitting here anyway just open the damn file and focus, that's all I have to - oh, for crying out loud it fell out of the towel again better not leak all over the cables - Ow ow ow - oh, look, the color's really starting to come in now..."

We like narrative because it's structured and tidy, and isn't as full of irrelevant bits and distractions as real life. This is satisfying on a primal level; so satisfying, that people make up meanings for their real lives, in the teeth of the evidence, and try to structure Life so that it makes some kind of sense. Which leads to cruel absurdities like the theory that natural disasters are divine punishments for trivial manufactured "sins," or that bad things happen to us because we "deserve" them.

That's the big problem with "realism" as a genre. A truly realistic story would not be satisfying because it would have to be structureless, full of arbitrary boring meaningless crap that would anger the audience. If they wanted real life they wouldn't be reading the story, now, would they? Do not, ever, get so carried away with creating a slice of life that you forget to provide the primary pleasure of narrative.

All the writing advice you get about killing your darlings, not putting in anything that doesn't contribute to the effect, Chekov's gun on the mantelpiece - that's what it boils down to. Even stuff that's interesting or humorous or beautiful in itself, if it doesn't advance the story, interferes with the narrative tidiness and has to go. You can get away with more in a loosely-structured domestic novel than in a tightly-plotted thriller or a short story, but if you push the limits too far you lose the audience. It'll get bored or it'll get mad. One or the other.

You probably think you know an author who gets away with it, but it's an illusion. Even the great stream-of-consciousness works, the ones that swim in and out of your eyes as you read and make you feel like you're living in somebody else's head - take a step back and look at them. Mrs. Dalloway is as rigidly-structured as any Agatha Christie plot. It's just that the structure is cleverly designed to look structureless.

Personally I'm not very clever and have to do this largely by writing the story and then taking things out. And sometimes it's real hard to tell where to draw the line. Yeah, I can (and did) take out most of Len's food appreciation remarks in the lesbian western. I can convey the fact that Len's appetite is enormous without describing every meal she ate. That's pretty straightforward. But that bit where she gets lost on first coming into San Antonio - is the level of humorous detail I go in for there the right one for illustrating thematically how she has to feel her way through her life as a man, with the directions she gets from other people mostly confusing her? Or do I keep it because, as a San Antonian, I find it all so hilariously familiar?

I think it's the former, because every time I contemplate taking it out I feel like the manuscript has a big hole in it that can't be bridged by a sentence about nobody in San Antonio being able to give decent directions and what is up with the dang river? But will an audience feel that way?

(Will an audience ever get a chance to find out? She wonders, sighing and returning to the agent search.)

Nice While it Lasted

Writing straight through seems to be done by now. It looks as if it's time to write a scene no one else will ever see from the villain's point of view. The one where she starts scrambling madly. Because it's not enough to know what her plans were, now that it's clear that not one of her plans has survived collision with other people's secrets. In a lot of ways, I'm finding, she's working as much in the dark as the protagonist. Pelin's memory loss wasn't even a contingency plan. It was the inspiration of a moment.

This all means that time is critical to her and that all the unwise moves she's been making publicly have been valiant attempts to keep her balls in the air long enough for them to come down in the correct order. This means I have to shorten the timeline - the pressure on her is enormous.

I wonder if this means I need to expand to her POV?

Part of me hopes not, because I've done a fair amount of alternating POV in my life and I want this to be different.

Part of me hopes so, because I'm writing a lot more words than can fit in the final book just to figure out the plot.

Not the time to decide that.

Spreading the joyous news, and an observation

First of all, the really important thing: We're getting one more Diana Wynne Jones book after all! She wasn't finished and hadn't left any notes but there was enough of it that her sister gave it a shot. And then apparently started channeling her or something; we'll see.

Excuse me while I jump up and down some more.

Okay, I'm back. And I have sent out another query today.

I could probably get more queries out there if I didn't stress over each and every one, changing the pitch and the synopsis and the query and the everything every single time, so that the process at minimum takes two days.

But the thing is, the synopsis and the pitch get better, very gradually, over time.

As I move on to agents that are more and more long shots...

Life is rough, so let's not think about that. Let's think about getting a new Diana Wynne Jones book in 2014!!!

Progress

Yesterday was a good day on many fronts. I felt like myself, kept an ordinary schedule, and finished those slacks, making several notes that will make the next pair easier and even better-fitting.I did things, I learned things, I ate properly, I barely felt dizzy at all.

Today I'm reverting a bit. But I'm still getting a little something done on a couple of projects. Plus, writing this post. Small as it is, it's more than I did last week.

If you show up every day, eventually, you get stuff done.

It's a surprisingly easy principle to forget. So this is your latest reminder.

Excuse me, I'm going to go be productive while I've got the chance.

(Later)
In an unprecedented move, I put the zipper in on the first try! Yay me!

I then tore the fabric while taking the basting stitches out.

So time to add a tag: Life is rough. ;D

(Don't worry; it's not a big tear, so I did my vague imitation of darning on it and nobody who isn't looking close will notice. And nobody will look close. I'd have given up sewing long ago if I couldn't assure myself that nobody will close! Books are different. I want somebody to look close at those.)

Idea Garage Sale: Scaling The Walls of Perception

Once in awhile I just have to face defeat.

My particular brand of Health Crap involves what I can only think of as an altered state. I experience the world at one remove, my thought processes slow down, and sometimes I get stuck with contradictory sensory input. For instance, one day not long ago I ate lunch at a table that I could clearly see was tilted at about 20 degrees, though my sense of touch, and the fact that my plate stayed put, indicated that it was level. Other times, I can feel myself drifting to left or right while walking, though I'm lined up visually on floor tiles or some other objectively straight indicator and know I'm adhering to a straight line. (You can imagine how difficult it is to sew like this; those slacks still aren't finished!)

Given my contention that weird phenomena are real phenomena rendered weird by the limitations of our perceptions, I ought to be able to do something literary with such gross changes in sensory processing, so intimately observed. Because the focus of my attention must shift to minutiae which are normally handled by autonomous systems, at such times it should, theoretically, be possible to perceive things continually happening, but normally overlooked. But what?

That's the sticking point. Since my experience of this state is a constant exercise in frustration, blocking me from getting anything done, it's hard for me to rephrase the situation to myself as an opportunity to see the normally unseen, or to imagine anything worth seeing. I'm too eager to get my normal perceptions back to dwell imaginatively in vertigo land for any longer than my body forces me to live here.

I am way too close to this idea to do more than to recognize that there must be one around.

Either danger, or wonder, must live at this fringe of reality in order to engage the character and the reader. I lean toward danger because I can't appreciate wonder when I don't dare turn my head lest it fall off or go spinning uncontrollably out the door. But it has to be a slow danger, because quick ones require head-turning. The involvement of weird angles implies some incomprehensible Lovecraftian horror, but it ought to be more small-scale than that. Something frightening, or glorious, or both, on a personal scale.

What about it? Anybody got a notion what it might be?

Synopses Suck

Just by their nature, they suck. If I could tell the story well in two double-spaced pages, it wouldn't be a novel, now would it?

The constant fight against the instinct to write well and be interesting, as opposed to merely getting across all the plot points, is agonizing. I have to break it up with frequent tab-overs to the net. Like this one.

I have actually bumped potential publishers down the submission list just for requiring a synopsis. But there's no putting this one off any longer. So, back I go.

/whine.

Don't Ask Me, I Just Notice Things

Isn't it odd, how few people take an accurate view of their own activities?

"I'm not a writer," One says. "I only keep a journal, and a couple of blogs, one for knitting and one for my game...and a couple of newsgroups I'm a regular on." Exclusive of e-mail contacts and writing memos at work, this "not writing" she does adds up to a production of about 10,000 words per week. One is a writer; One is writing. What she's not doing is striving after publication, and what do you want to bet that's because she thinks she's not a writer, not because her writing isn't publishable?

"I'm a writer," Two says. "I go to all the conferences and subscribe to all the blogs and I can't find an agent." But if you ask to see what Two has written, she won't show you anything. Instead she'll talk about the 15-volume paranormal romance/family saga she has planned. Two is not a writer. Two has a hobby of attending writing conferences and reading writing blogs, but in actual writing she produces maybe seven hundred words a year. She types out more than that, but mostly they're a rechurning and rearranging of words she's already written. She repeats herself a lot. If she does have a work in progress, it has been the same work at the same approximate level of progress for the last 15 years.

It does not puzzle me that people have an ideal image in their head of what a real writer (or artist, or seamstress, or knitter, or parent, or...) is, and can't bring themselves to think of themselves in those terms if they don't match the ideal image - which, face it, nobody does. That's why it's called an ideal. We all do this. For some of us ideals are goals we strive for and for some of us they're impossible cloud castles whose impossibility both oppresses us and frees us from the labor of trying to reach them.

It's the other class of people, the ones who assume that they've met the ideal by fiat; that by labeling themselves as a writer (or artist, or ...) and socializing with writers and talking about writing, they've become a writer and the actual work is doing itself somehow. I don't understand either how they think this is going to work, or how they can maintain their belief in the assumed identity in the face of all the stuff that they don't do.

Fortunately there's a middle ground of people who can see themselves clearly and adapt their behavior accordingly. But it's hard to get there, and harder to stay. The evolutionary benefit of this behavior is not obvious to me; though it's true that, in a social setting, there are certain ideal identities that, if assumed and imposed with sufficient force on the people around you, do provide a distinct advantage. A lot of politics through history has boiled down to people with delusions of competence taking credit for the actions of blind chance or of uncharismatic people with real competence. But in daily life it's annoying as heck and ought to make us more likely to starve or be murdered by someone who is frustrated by our continual failure to produce anything solid.

People are weird. In the end, we just have to live with that.

Tough morning

The synopsis is down to one page.

It stinks.

That's to be expected. If I can get Len's voice into the synopsis and query, I should be good to start sending out the query - just in time for everybody to go on Christmas vacation. Life is rough.

And it makes no sense. Just ask Miss Thai. Damon fell back asleep this morning after I woke him up, and I didn't get him woken up again till it was too late to catch the bus. So I'm sitting at the computer doing my morning routine (e-mail, comics, blogs, etc.) with the cat in my lap while he gets ready to go. When he's ready, I tell Thai: "I have to take Daddy to work now."

"That's stupid," says Thai. "Daddy doesn't want to go to work, you don't want to take him, and I don't want to move. So sit still, and everybody'll be happy."

You can tell the world is messed up because of the frequency with which it is impossible to follow perfectly sensible advice like this from your cat.

(Of course my cat talks. I'm translating from the feline, that's all.)

Happy Birthday, Miss Alcott

Today is the birthday of one of the most significant figures in American literature, and the goddess of my idolatry, Louisa May Alcott.

Though often scorned at her own valuation, as a producer of "moral pap for the young," it only takes a small amount of historical acumen to realize how radical she was at her time; and only a little more social self-awareness to realize that in many ways, American society is still more conservative than her. Witness the reluctance of many, even most, of her modern readers to admit that

Jo was right not to marry Laurie!!!!!!

Louisa May Alcott was a hustler, writing to market, explicitly and obsessively writing for money to counteract the legacy of her idealistic and improvident father. She enjoyed catering to morbid fantasy, and did - the stories she satirized Jo for writing to make money for the illustrated papers seem mild compared to the drug use and sexual power games in the pseudononymous stories Madeleine B. Stern first unearthed for us back in the 70s - but the work that survives is unrelentingly realistic in ways that made (and still make) the public uncomfortable, to the point that many of us whitewash these things out of our reading.

Marriage is not the climax and happy-ever-after of life; it is the opening of a whole new can of worms. Too much candy will make you sick and too much ease will make you useless. Sexual attraction will not overcome other incompatibilities in the long term. Peer pressure will lead you to do stupid and even wicked things. It is possible to hate your little sister murderously and love her at the same time. Life is unfair. You have to deal with the world you're in, not the world you want, and the person you are, not the person you dream of being. You won't get it if you don't work for it and you may not get it even then.

Happiness is hard work.

But it beats the alternative.

Two Frustrations

I was going to turn my blog black for American Censorship Day, but the html Blogger gives me to work with is so mind-bogglingly in need of a good proofreader I chickened out of figuring out where to put the necessary code string. So that's one.

The second is, yesterday I figured out what the problem is with fixing the pacing in the lesbian Western.

It's already paced the way I like it!

The thing is, I wrote this book so I could go back in time, in company with Len, and have a good long visit in Central Texas in Spring 1865. I like all the looking around at the landscape and observation of her surroundings and savoring of food she does. Len is a person who enjoys everything there is to enjoy as much as she can while she can, and she and I are happy for it to be so.

So a lot of what I need to take out is stuff she and I, the people telling the story, care about; but can't expect the audience to.

Yeah, I'll get rid of it. Len and I are both realists and we'll be in the minority on this issue. But the more concentrated, action-oriented story I'm aiming for is one I personally will enjoy less than the one I've got. So that takes a lot of the fun out of revising.

Idea Garage Sale: This Thing About Dwarves

(Note the technically incorrect plural. If it's good enough for Tolkien, it's good enough for me. The man wrote the Oxford English Dictionary, for crying out loud.)

I've always liked dwarves. My first favorite movie was Disney's Snow White. Elves and fairies lost a lot of appeal for me when they got human-sized in pop culture. I like how a dwarf is a dwarf whatever book you go to - short, hairy, set in their ways, pragmatic, slightly cranky, craftsmen. The word "dour" crops up when fantasy writers and gamers are describing dwarves, but in fact they are often comic characters - sometimes because the guy with no sense of humor is the funniest guy in the room, and sometimes because his sense of humor doesn't jibe with other people's, but does with mine. Gimli is the only non-hobbit member of the Fellowship of the Ring who cracks jokes, but he only makes them with a grumpy face and at times of tension release. "Here's a pretty hobbit skin to wrap an elfin princeling in!" "Where did you come by the weed, you villains?" He's also the one who initiated the grim kill-counting game with Legolas at Helm's Deep. I wonder how many stoic middle-aged enlisted men Tolkien knew in service? I'm certain they informed the writing on this character.

Anyway, I have a vision of dwarves and their lifestyle that dates back to at least my first reading of The Hobbit, but probably predates it, as I think I read Ruth Nichols's A Walk Out of the World before then. Certainly I'd been reading Tolkien derivatives before I made it to Tolkien, and I feel like I absorbed his dwarves into an existing vision rather than adopting his and grafting details onto it. Dwarves live in mountains, obviously; they have a highly structured society centering on notions of duty; craftsmanship is one of their highest virtues; they believe in emotional restraint; their doors are tapestries (the hivelike nature of the dwarf community probably contributes to the emotional restraint, now I think of it); they love deeply, quietly, and epicly; and the tradition is that only sorrow ever came of romantic relationships between dwarves and other intelligent species.

Yes, I cast dwarves as romantic leads.

I actually tried to make a story around this core concept several times in high school, but I kept getting sidetracked by the necessity of world-building. It wormed its way in as a subplot of the dormant story I discussed here awhile back, but I haven't tried to put it at the center of the story since high school. Not because I didn't want to; but because it gradually became clear that neither high fantasy nor romance is my natural genre, and to tell this story I'd need to do both.

Which is a bummer, because you can make decent money off both those subgenres, especially when you combine them, but life is rough.

The central problem of doing it is, first to create the high fantasy world in which the dwarves and the other races are acceptable and logical, but not boring and cliched. We have enough straight Tolkien-derivatives, thank you. Once you have that world, you need the conflict - which, being high fantasy, almost has to be a macro-conflict, war famine pestilence mystical threat you know the drill - that brings the disparate couple together.

I have one really convoluted plot that starts off in a desert community with the heroine being expelled, with her old adoptive mother, during a witch hunt; and as they cross the desert the adoptive mother gets more and more senile, and finally the dwarves rescue them and that's when we find out about the princess who was spirited away when the usurper killed the rest of her family and all the signs point to our heroine who gets help from the dwarves including the improbable and forbidden male romantic lead - but in fact she's the decoy and the real princess is still in her kingdom getting old enough to ascend the throne, and sacrificing the decoy may be necessary, and...yeah, I kind of bogged down in plot there.

And then there's the one where there's some sort of interspecies war on and the heroine is a prisoner, and she Knows Something, and the political situation is such that the hero (who is her captor) is under pressure to Do Terrible Things but he won't because he's got standards, dammit, and this war is eroding the dwarves' cultural standards and this couple who have to be enemies are the pivot point on which the future of both cultures turns. Which could be pretty epic if I could, y'know, work out the specifics of what the war's about, what information the heroine has, how to get them both facing 90 degrees away from the problems they understand themselves to have at the start of the story to be facing the same direction and agreed that they have a common, totally different problem. I believe I wrote some scenes that were reasonably brilliant for a 14-year-old, but that's a low gate to get over and I trust none of them survive. Without context, a scene is meaningless, anyway.

There used to be others - romances are the easiest stories to mull over during insomniac nights in adolescence, and I was a hell of an insomniac back then - but I have mercifully forgotten most of them. I still think somebody, somewhere, could do - something moving and atmospheric and heck, just different from the human-draconic-elvish centric high fantasy we all know so well.

But I'm afraid it's not likely to be me, so - fly free, vague epic idea! Find a good place to land!

The Query Grind

You know the worst thing about agent hunting?

The way you lose faith in what, six months ago, was a book as good as any you've ever been paid for.

I am so sick of the first ten pages of The Astral Palace I could scream and it's impossible to imagine anyone else wanting to represent me based on them, either. I should start trolling with the lesbian western instead (only Damon's not reading it very fast and I begin to think I'm having pacing problems, which is a good sign - it means I should be able to go back and revise it properly instead of merely basking in Len's voice, soon).

I can't sell stuff if I don't keep it in the mail, but I can't find people to mail to when I'm hating the work, either.

This is the kind of thing that makes teen-agers eat entire gallons of ice cream and declare their lives over. Thank goodness I'm old enough to tell the difference between perception and objective reality. But I still can't match the project to a prospective taker like this.

Maybe I should give up and work on the emotion recycling story instead.