a shadow of a magnitude

hello dokutahs

all of which is preface to me being kind of a mean little hater and saying that some romance novels have this very distinctive style that I call Heckin Valid that's soooo annoying because you can Tell the authors are coming from a place of really well-meaning but pretty shallow 2010s internet-style #diversity rhetoric. some of the hallmarks of Heckin Valid style, to me, include:

main characters have Identities that they often feel the need to mention often and frequently Explain, even in their own internal narration.

there is often a Trans Friend. if the Trans Friend cannot be readily identified by using they/them pronouns, their trans status will either be dropped gracelessly in the narration OR the Trans Friend will verbally identify as such by saying something akin to "now, speaking as your Trans Friend..."

this may also be done with a Fat Friend. the Fat Friend is almost universally a woman, and it will always be emphasized that she is Very Beautiful because it is important to remember that fat women can be hot.

the narration is very invested in identifying the racial identity of every non-white character, regardless of how minor they are.

before engaging in sex the main couple will dutifully report to each other that they have both recently gotten tested for STIs and do not have any.

Romance has always been a genre concerned first and foremost with what women want, and that has always involved transgressive fantasies. A lot of people don't understand that the violent mafia boss kidnapping you is actually a power fantasy because ultimately you are so beautiful and sexy that he falls to his knees for you (😏) and if you don't understand that, you can't understand what romance does for its readers (really recommend Catherine Roach's 'Getting a Good Man to Love' as a starter on this subject and I'm happy to talk more about this separately).

But right now romance is more visible than it's ever been because of online communities like BookTok that, crucially, have your face attached to your reading preferences, and authors are more accessible than ever on Twitter and we're seeing the impact of purity culture/moral panics about sex beyond religious communities, and it all gets tangled up. You're allowed to be horny on main now but it has to be the correct level of horny. You can talk about the "spicy" books you've read which are basically vanilla compared to the bodice rippers your grandma hid under her bed but you will be called a porn addict for it. On the heterosexual side, your book has to look transgressive enough that you can use the shock for marketing but not so transgressive that it looks like abuse apologia; queer romance has to be intersectional and use the right terminology and model good relationships so nobody can accuse you of perpetuating harmful or toxic stereotypes.

I can't even blame (especially queer, mostly female) authors for wanting to position themselves like this because it's good to be mindful of the politics of your writing! And it's totally possible to communicate your values in a way that comes across as natural, but that takes skill and you have to rely on your readers' ability to pick up what you're laying down, which they demonstrably do not have.

Your brain is an incredibly energy-intensive organ. It makes up approximately 2% of your total body mass, but at rest it's using 22% of your total energy intake. The only thing that uses the same percentage of energy is all of your skeletal muscle (which is about 40% of your total body mass), with the liver (about 2.6% of your total mass) close behind at 21% (Aragon et al, 2017).

And that's how much energy it's using at rest.

That's the baseline.

So if you're doing lots of intellectual labour, your brain - which already has disproportionately huge energy demand - is going to use even more energy to keep up with the work. That's why you feel so wiped/drained/like you're out of spell slots after high intellectual demand - because your brain is an organ, and you've just done a lot of high-energy work with a high-energy organ.

the snake was not a liar. texture is like, super important to me and raw eggs are very Texture so i had another one, and then another one, and then another one, and eventually i ran out of eggs.

i had like, fifteen raw eggs.

i didnt really know how to explain this momentary madness to my wife, so my Plan was to put all the eggshells into a grocey bag, and then throw that grocery bag in the dumpster, and if she never noticed that would be Excellent and if she noticed immediately i could lie and say that the eggs went bad.

except i cant lie very good, and of course with murphys law being such, i got salmonella.

so i threw up a lot and my wife asked me what poisoned me so and i tried very hard to dodge the question but i was oozing shame like oil from a room temperature cheese and eventaully i gave in and told her everything and to her enormous credit she was more flabbergasted than actually upset. she did make me promise to not eat any more raw eggs, which i have stuck to, and she gives me weird looks during nature documentaries now as if desire was the only thing keeping me from eating thousands of pounds of krill anyway i made a joke earlier about being able to eat my age in eggs and my sister in law in law made a drawing to comemorate the moment and also because it was my birthday. she's excellent. thank you 10000000% @cintailed. you should all visit her page and admire her work.