Sailor Moon Says!

Story time: I started a book about 23 hours ago and just finished it. Also in that time I slept for 10 hours, spent time with family, was at work, etc. Anyway, I enjoyed the book (Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda). But it felt like it flew by, so after I finished I looked up the word count because what are pages? Pages are meaningless. I only function in word counts anymore.

The estimate I found was 58,580. My immediate reaction was “oh, that’s why. That’s nothing!” But what a shitty response. Because no. That’s not nothing. That’s a whole. Damn. Book. An entire novel! And Fic authors regularly bust out 30k, 50k, 100k, 150k words. AND THEY DO IT FOR FREE. WHILE WORKING AND LIVING THEIR LIVES.

30k fic = Animal Farm by George Orwell

50k fic = The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

75k fic = Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger

100k fic = To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

150k fic = The Two Towers by JRR Tolkien

200k fic = Moby Dick by Herman Melville

250k fic = Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by JK Rowling

300k fic = A Feast for Crows by George RR Martin

350k fic = Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

So if you’re feeling a bit downcast because you can’t write that 50 chapter epic or your latest WIP is “only” 2k and it still took you ages - that’s amazing. Seriously. Not everyone is naturally wordy or prolific. And you can say a ton with just a few hundred or thousand words.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory = 30k fic

Of Mice and Men = 30k fic

Breakfast At Tiffany’s = 24k fic

For those writers who discredit themselves because they feel they aren’t writing the novels that others might, you’re still writing a novella, my dears. You’re still putting time, effort, and passion into something. Well done.

I can’t find a word count online. But DuckDuckGo tells me that in English, you get an average of 500 words per page.

So it’s about 1500 words, give or take. I cry every fucking time I read it, and I have read it many times.

Novels and novellas and fanfics of that length are great. But if you’re the shorter type—

—know that part of my heart stands forever on an empty hill in a fictitious city in California in the year 2026, crying for a fictitious child who never caught a ball, and it has been crying on that hill for over twenty years.

If you’re a fanfic writer, how many fics do you have that are longer than that? If you’re a reader, how many 2K fics can you read in a day? In a week? How many, for either case, are simple yet eloquent character studies? Examinations or ruminations on a particular facet of a character or story?

“WHAT THE FUCK STAY AWAY FROM THE ROCKS.”

Xoxo

-Designer

Several of my sister's friends died in the Towers. For one of them, it was her first day back at work. Her new twin babies were in the daycare. They didn't make it out either. My sister herself worked in DC, two blocks from the Pentagon, and saw the plane hit.

(This is why I reject the "it was a missile" conspiracy theory, incidentally. There is an answering machine message permanently burned into my brain, every word, that I pray isn't the last thing I remember before I die: my sister's terrified, screaming voice, screaming for our mother. "Mom, where the hell are you? I just watched a plane hit the Pentagon, we're under attack! Where are--" and we didn't hear from her again for a week.)

(I know what fucking hit the Pentagon. I know my personal superhero saw it happen. I know for seven days I couldn't breathe, not even daring to think of what might have happened to her. The phone grid collapsed, if you're wondering. If you're not old enough to remember, so many people were calling each other to get confirmation and check in on each other that the entire eastern seaboard basically lost its phone system for several days. Officials had to beg people to stay off the internet and stop making phone calls to allow enough of the grid to limp along that they might, maybe, MAYBE, by some miracle, be able to rescue people with cell phones who were buried under the wreckage and could call 911.)

My mom called it "my generation's Kennedy assassination." Ask any American alive and conscious in 1963 where they were when they heard about Kennedy. They'll know. Ask any Gen Xer about Challenger. They'll know, too. And us Millennials?

I was homeschooled at the time, and my mom and I were both night people, so my school hours ran weird.

I learned by waking up. By running to get my mom, telling her my sister was on the answering machine and sounded upset. By refusing to let her brush me off, because my sister sounded more than normal-upset. By going with my mother to the answering machine and listening to the message and hearing the fear in her voice when she said "turn on the news" and sent me to the living room as she tried to call my sister back.

I did as instructed. I had just enough time to call "there's another one" before I watched the first tower fall live on national television.

Every single one of you reading this is now only two degrees of separation from multiple 9/11 victims, and I am crying. It's been 25 years and I can still hear the answering machine. I can still hear the screaming in the background.

I know exactly where I was. My brain is Swiss cheese from a multitude of neurological problems and I struggle to remember where I set the mail when I walk in the house, but I can still remember the nightgown I was wearing when I heard my sister scream "where the hell are you." It was pink. My grandma made it.

Most of us are in that same boat.

When we think of 9/11, it's not the jingoism and capitalism that followed. It's seeing the fire. It's watching, helplessly, as we saw things falling down the sides of the Towers on live television and realized those were jumpers. It's the voices of news anchors desperately trying to stay professional and failing because they didn't know any more than the rest of us and were just as terrified.

I've heard a lot of Zoomers say it was American privilege that made us so afraid. It wasn't. It was that we didn't know what was happening, or why; it was that we didn't know how many planes had been hijacked or where they might come down. I watched news coverage that day obsessively and at one point up to seven hijackings were reported, meaning three planes still in the air. I know one turned out to be a radar glitch. I'm not sure about the other two, but the number bounced around for awhile until it was finally four confirmed.

It was that we had friends, family, loved ones, in the vicinity of the planes. If we didn't, we knew somebody who knew somebody. Flight 93 was originally reported with a different crash location that would have put it in the town of the only friend I had at the time. It was paralyzing. That's why it became such effective propaganda.

And the Republicans have video of a "Democratic" influencer saying we deserved it?

When I was a cub reporter, I ran into a couple of older lesbians. They were married. One walked off, but one looked at me and one of my coworkers, both decades younger than anyone else on that patio, both trying to figure out what it meant to be queer in a post-Trump-2016-election world, and told us her story.

She used to work for the Pentagon, in the computers (if I remember right, and it's been almost 10 years). She worked on classified material. And she was a lesbian.

That last part is important because it's 2001 and Don't Ask, Don't Tell is still law of the military.

She was working in the Pentagon and she couldn't go home because of how crucial her work was. She couldn't even use internal phones to call home because the lines were monitored, and calling her partner would have outed them both.

It was a week before she could be spared long enough to leave the building, go across the street and call home from a payphone over there.

A week where her wife didn't know if she was dead or alive, but knew she'd been in the Pentagon when it was hit.

Before that night, I had never even met a queer woman who was old enough to retire.

She looked at me and my coworker and told us "you will never know what we went through".

And she's right. For all that I've suffered, for all that I lived under the fear of conversion camps and being made homeless by my parents, for all that I had a friend who should have been at Pulse that awful night, for all the times I've had to sit and listen while my own rights were debated in front of me, I have never been forced to wait a week to tell the woman I loved I was still alive because calling home on an office line could be the end of my career.

I told her "no, but we can honor it".

She kissed me on the cheek, drank some of her wine and walked off to spend more time with her friends.

I've never forgotten her.

I have my own memories of 9/11 and the time around it; I was only in first grade, but I remember that day and the days after, seeing the footage on TV, growing up with an awareness of the event and seeing more footage every year on the anniversary, hearing that a former classmate's dad had been sent over to Afghanistan.

I know "Remember 9/11" and "Never Forget" feel like jingoistic slogans, but there is so much about the world we live in that was set in place by 9/11. If there was any American optimism, any global optimism that was floating around in the early 2000s and the start of the new millennium, 9/11 and the rise of global terrorism was what killed it; there has been a marked change in American culture in the 25 years since, and everyone over the age of 30 can most likely remember that world.

It was real.

It's why I can't really stand Gen Z making fun of it for more than a joke or two, and why it took me aback so much when I heard a couple of European colleagues tell me they thought 9/11 was a staged job and that all of the bodies of people who died weren't actually killed that day.

yes, India made legal gender change impossible but my friends have always gendered me correctly and stick to it even when it confuses other people and my friend's little sibling calls me older brother in Kannada yes, India made legal gender change impossible but my dog learned my new name quicker than the humans and she runs to give me a kiss when she's told to without being confused about who's being referred to

yes, India made legal gender change impossible but I can feel the Adam's apple growing in my throat and my muscles getting stronger, and my smile more real and I'm growing a beard, and I talk more freely

don't be afraid. don't be afraid. go to work. go out to eat. don't be afraid.

They weren't killed by the slashing of the CDC. They weren't killed by the administration's demonization of masks, that brought on by the vanity of one man who didn't want his bronzer to come off. They weren't killed by an industrial food system which will only do things Right if it's forced to, if it's inspected and made to, and over which there are far fewer watchdogs than there used to be. No! Don't worry. They were killed by underlying conditions.

don't be afraid. don't be afraid. the engines must keep running. don't be afraid.

Don't think about the fact that 12% of the population, or just about the same percentage of the population that marked themselves as Black on the 2020 Census, has diabetes. Don't think about the fact that 10% of the US population, or approximately the same percentage which has blue eyes, has at least one autoimmune disease. Don't think about the fact that 6% of the adult US population, or approximately the same percentage as 'people under the age of five', has a chronic heart condition. Don't think about the fact that the CDC says that 40% of the US population is obese, and that is an "underlying condition," too. That percentage? It's about the same as every US resident between the ages of 25 and 54.

don't be afraid. don't be afraid.

"Underlying conditions" is a way to wave away responsibility, yes, but it's more than that. It's a way to put separation between the average citizen and the two people -- so far -- who have died from food infested with parasites, the two people who literally shit themselves to death because the Trump administration has fully abandoned all of its proper functions in order to strip down everything it can get its hands on and cart it away for itself. It is not enough to grift billions through American Liberty World Financial Bitcoin, Gold Shoe, And Bible-Printing Emporium. It is not enough to set up a literal "please bribe the President" ATM for foreign governments to shovel cash in via cryptocurrency. They have to grab everything they can that isn't nailed down, and to do that, they have to rip everything they can out of the walls, fire everybody they can get away with, and shuffle the money into ICE, and from their into the pockets of friends no-bid contracts.

It is not enough, and so they whisper "underlying conditions," because that tells so many Americans, "Hey. Don't be afraid. It's okay. You don't have 'underlying conditions,' right? You are good and virtuous. You have done Everything Right, and are thus blessed with Good Health. You have Worked Hard and Been Proper and thus you will not be touched by the seemingly-random hand of fucking death hiding in a bag of Kroger lettuce." It's the same voice that says, "You don't want those layabouts getting disability and cheating you out of your money, so we should make it harder," except now it's saying, "Actually, just like COVID, the only people who died were the people who were sick already, and obviously you only have underlying conditions if you weren't taking care of yourself, which you are, so don't worry! We don't actually have to do anything. This will sort itself out."

Well, it's not our fault that they came here illegally. It's not like we can reduce the actions we take to destabilize their governments, re-fund the lifesaving programs that prevented worldwide plague and famine and drought or be better global citizens. You're okay because you're a U.S. citizen, though.

Please ignore the bodies of Renee Nichole Good and Alex Pretti.

Well, it's not our fault that Black people get killed so much by police. If they want to live through a random traffic stop, a walk home, sleeping in their own bed or buying diapers at the store, they should just roll over and do what the cops say!

Please ignore the bodies of everyone who did and died anyway. And the fact that cops are not and are never supposed to be judge, jury and executioner.

Well, it's not our fault that inflation is spiraling out of control. If people wanted to be able to afford gas, food, tuition, rent, clothing and other basic necessities, they should have thought about that before they became poor!

Please ignore the pointless fucking war we started, all of the assistance programs we've cut, the tariffs we keep trying to illegally impose and all of the tax credits we hand out to those who are already at the top of the heap.

Nothing is ever their fault. It's always someone else's problem, it's always someone else's doing. The elections are rigged if they don't go their way, but honest when they do. It's always Obama's fault. Or Biden's. Or Hillary's. It's the Democrats. It's the European Union. It's the rest of the world.

It would be hilarious if it wasn't so awful. We're somehow the greatest and most powerful nation on earth... until it's time to make sure that the fucking lettuce won't kill us.