Love, Death & Robots: Sci-Fi's Violence Against Women Kink

Y’all, I’m as hot for science fiction as the next lesbian (I’ll take this moment to advise that this entry is a little more risque than my usual posts). Heck, my superhero novel is an ode to the things about sci-fi that I love, such as giant robot fights and extremely implausible applications of CRISPR. So you can imagine how jazzed I was when Netflix released their new NSFW animated sci-fi (and beyond) anthology, Love, Death & Robots (LDR).

Had I been paying attention before immediately pressing play and sinking into a fortress of blankets for a binge-session, I’d have noticed Tim Miller and David Fincher’s names on the project. They’re known for the first Deadpool movie and Fight Club respectively, two pieces of media that I have a love-hate relationship with. Both films suffer from some degree of Rick and Morty Syndrome: the fanbases completely misunderstand the point, and then rally around the negative concepts (toxic masculinity, antisocial behavior, cruelty on the basis of nihilism, etc.) that the source material is trying to subvert. So, while I can’t totally blame the producers for their tone-deaf audience, I’m still a little leery.

I wanted to love LDR. I love love love animation, and want to see more of it produced for an adult audience. I’m not talking porn, nor am I talking more ugly, edgy comedies like South Park or Family Guy (look, some of those shows have their merits, and you’ll never hear me say a bad word about my beloved Bob’s Burgers, but I’m ready for bigger things). I want pretty, complex, and compelling work intended for more mature audiences.

LDR… isn’t quite there. I did love some of it, but first, I need to address its biggest, glaringest, you’re-not-even-tryingest downfall: Its treatment of women.

Get ready for some spoilers.

Science fiction and gender have a complex relationship, and I could chatter about that for hours. The short version is this: science fiction is an ideal playground for progressive ideas and for escaping harmful societal restrictions, but for every female/non-male character who benefits from that environment, there are 10 more that suffer from it. Ten sexbots, abused space prostitutes, and slave-bikini Leias per every Ellen Ripley.

Like so much of sci-fi, LDR loves to divorce women from their bodies, be that by death, mechanization, commodification, or even creature transformation. These aren’t characters. They’re bodies.

And LDR sure loves looking at those bodies. I’m of the mind that nudity isn’t necessarily sexual, and in fact, there was at least one case of non-sexual nudity in the anthology. In “Fish Night,” a character strips off their clothes to swim in a sky filled with spectral prehistoric sea creatures. It’s a euphoric, impulsive move, and isn’t treated as a sexy display. This character is a man. He’s allowed to be non-sexually nude. (I mean, my dude does get eaten by a megalodon, but what a way to go, amirite?)

Look out, salesman! There’s a giant prehistoric ghost shark coming! Oh no, he has his AirPods in, he can’t hear us! Oh no!

Most women in the anthology don’t get the same luxury (I mean the nudity thing, not the ghost shark thing). If a woman appears on screen, there’s a strong probability that you’re about the see her breasts or genitals (if they’re not out from the get-go) and it’s almost always in a blatantly, specifically sexual way. The worst offender for this is “The Witness.” A woman sees a murder occur in the building across from her, and the killer notices her peeking. The rest of the short is her fleeing the murderer, robe flapping to expose her tits and bits for all the city to see.

She takes a break from running for her life, however, to work her shift in an over-the-top sex club. Because, again, women are rarely and barely characters in this anthology, so of course this woman who’s fleeing the man who just murdered her doppelganger (we don’t have time to unpack that, so leave it in the box for now) needs to stop running, strip down, and have sex with a couch (not unpacking that either) in front of a room full of faceless women in gimp suits. The murderer is there to watch as well, and be rubbed up on, because of course he is.

Now look, I’m no prude, and I believe sex workers deserve respect, protection, and professional legitimacy. My issue with this scene isn’t the wildness of this technicolor BDSM club of the future, but the lazy objectification of our main character (she is supposed to be our main character, right?) and the absolute pointlessness of the scene.

“The Witness” is 12 minutes long. With such limited time, every minute must serve the plot. The minutes in the sex club served not the story, but the hungry gaze of its presumably straight male audience.

I know what LDR is trying to do in shorts like “The Witness.” It’s trying to be shocking and avant-garde, but science fiction’s already been pushing the envelope on sex and violence for years. We’ve seen so many female bodies used and broken on screen that we’re no longer shocked or thrilled by yet another installment of “ogle and then brutalize this nameless female character.”

It’s cheap, it’s weak, and it’s a disservice to the progressive nature of the genre.

Over and over in the anthology, women’s suffering is used as a cheap plot device. Multiple stories are driven by rape and body-destroying acts of violence against women. And it’s not like LDR is bringing some kind of fresh, healing perspective to the table when they use a woman’s assault as an easy characterization tool. It’s not about the women, after all. Only their bodies.

I’ve struggled the most with two examples of this rape-as-a-weak-plot-device issue in LDR. First, there’s “Sonnie’s Edge,” in which our main character’s assault is brought up tactlessly by one of her companions as a piece of poorly-written exposition. It’s flat and cheap and made my eyes roll so far backwards that I could see my brain cells fizzling out in real time.

“And does it get worse from there?” you may ask, to which I reply, “Boy howdy, you know it does!”

Because next comes the queer-baiting, which everyone knows is a hot-button topic for me. I could talk about the ending of this short for almost as long as I could talk about gender in science fiction. The extremely short version: the audience is taunted with two women getting a bit hot with each other (and it’s surprisingly not handled as badly as it could have been), and then one kills the other. Brutally. By stabbing her through the head and then stomping her skull to mush.

I expect so little, and yet am still disappointed. Source

It’s a terrible scene, made especially terrible by all the violence this murdered woman has already endured, and by her queerness. The plot explains that she wasn’t killed because of her sexuality, but the subtext is there, whether the writers intended it or not.

There’s so much more to “Sonnie’s Edge” that makes me want to rip my hair out, but I have neither the time nor the hair for it, so let’s talk about something a bit more complex.

“Good Hunting” is subtler in its treatment of rape and violence, if just barely. It’s the story of a spirit hunter’s son and the huli jing (a Chinese fox spirit) that he spared as a child. It follows his relationship with this mystical feminine spirit throughout the years as their small village is absorbed and transformed by British colonization.

The huli jing does get to be more of a character than other women in the series, but she’s also a very on-the-nose metaphor for her country. As trains and machines and towering cities cut through the landscape, she’s increasingly trapped in the form of a human woman, rather than her true fox spirit shape. So, as the British rape the land, so do British men rape the huli jing. One particularly powerful and gluttonous man enslaves her and, unable to get hard for anything that’s not a machine, replaces her body with machinery.

It’s body horror, and like everything in LDR, it’s visceral and uncensored. A beautiful spirit of the land is now a colonist’s sexbot.

Our protagonist, the spirit-hunter’s son, uses the mechanical expertise he’s been forced to develop in order to work on British trains to help the huli jing regain some of her original body. With his help, she shifts into a mechanical fox creature again, and is able to hunt through the streets of their colonized city, defending other Chinese women from white men.

Which… I mean, yes, good. Very good. Heck ‘em up, huli jing. But I can’t help but feel conflicted about yet another story powered by extreme on-screen sexual violence against women.

Source

Science fiction is capable of so much more than this. So much about LDR was delightful. I was tickled by a story in which a group of robots tour a post-apocalyptic city, and the concept of a bunch of farmers piloting mech-suits to drive back alien invaders is terrific. I appreciated the beautiful CGI and traditional animation work of many of the pieces… but I was shaken from my moments of appreciation by the gratuitous, exploitative, and disturbing scenes of sex and violence.

On screen and off, sci-fi has come a long way in its treatment of gender, and I’m grateful for that. I’m not bashing the entire LDR anthology, despite my concerns and frustrations. I want more of this kind of content, after all, but I also want to hold creators to a higher standard. I’m not asking for instant perfection, but I do need to see a little effort. The age of using sexual violence as a badge of edginess is dead. You’re not being fresh and gritty anymore. You’re cheapening and normalizing the mistreatment of women, and on top of that, you’re being a lazy writer.

Step it up. Do better. Your audience is expanding and advancing, and it’s time you caught up.

And It's Getting Dark

If you still had a sense of time, you might reflect on the hilarious difference between the 90 days you were meant to roam this rock and the over 5,000 days you've now spent on its surface. But your clock has been scrambled for quite some time now... Or so you have to assume.

When did you last sleep, little wanderer?

Remembering is difficult. It's too hard to hold everything you've seen in your head these days, so you pack it off across the Deep Space Network every night for others to remember on your behalf. They’re happy to hold on to your treasures. They cherish your every insight.

You haven't forgotten everything, though.

You've left 28 miles of tracks in the scalloped dunes of Mars. In your tens of thousands of photographs, you sometimes included those parallel, patterned pathways, occasionally overlaid by your angular shadow.

So many of your thousands of days were spent on those pictures. Close-ups of little round rocks, sharp details of tiny ridges, evidence of an ancient briny sea.

There's no sea now. There are miles and miles of sand and stone and storms, and you've crisscrossed so much of it, and barely any of it. Sometimes, on your longest treks between projects, you'd have to pause to rest on the flat and vacant plain, drawing in energy through the solar panels splayed on your back like silver moth wings.

You could use a rest now. Your battery is low, and it's getting dark. You snap a picture of the blackness, and it comes out grainy and vague, like so many of your memories.

Lucky for you, you have those distant listeners to archive your memories and your art. You've sent them images of dancing dust devils, glassy plates of volcanic rock, frozen ripples of sand cupped in giant, palm-like craters. In return, they've kept you healthy, sent encouragement and reminders, sent you safely on your grand journeys.

They're calling to you now. They want you to move your wheels, change the angle of your panels, hunt for light. Mind your heaters. Don't freeze up, don't get stuck in the sand like your sister.

But it's so cold, and so dark in this eternal swirl of sand. Has it always been like this? Are you asleep?

You'd like to sleep. And haven't you earned that? Didn't you travel further, endure greater, and discover more than was ever expected of you?

Your far-off watchers are still calling. If only you remembered time. Has it been months or moments? Is it lighter now than it was before? The dust clings too heavily to your panels to tell.

Something has changed. No more instructions, no more directions for repair or retreat. A weird sort of data enters your dimming internal world, bearing a message:

I'll be seeing you
In all the old familiar places
That this heart of mine embraces
All day and through…

Do you know what a lullaby is, weary little explorer? It’s a song for sleeping, sent by the ones who love you, 300 nights away. They too are small lonely things crawling across a cold planet, and they fear the dark more than anything. They ache to think of you sleeping alone in the dust.

I'll be seeing you
In every lovely summer's day
In everything that's light and gay
I'll always think of you that way

I'll find you in the morning sun
And when the night is new…

Tenacious traveler, your tracks are disappearing beneath the sand of Perseverance Valley, and soon you will as well. You welcome the long overdue rest, even as your watchers mourn.

But it’s alright. You are not lost.

We’ll be looking at the moon, but we’ll be seeing you.

---

I learned that NASA sent Billie Holiday’s “I’ll Be Seeing You” to Opportunity as their final transmission to the Mars rover before declaring it dead, and I have not been OK since. This indulgent piece of anthropomorphism was inspired by these articles about the official completion of Opportunity’s mission: CNN, NPR, Ars Technica

Bad at Winter

As I velcro a tiny coat around my chihuahua-mutt Billie’s torso, she looks deep into my eyes and transmits a message so clear and direct that she may as well have spoken it aloud. “Mother, why?”

Billie on the left, Binx on the right, both bundled in their coats of shame.

“I’m so sorry, sweet angel babies,” I say as I press the leash clasps between my palms to unfreeze them enough to clip to both dogs’ collars. Then I open the storm door and shove them out onto the icy front steps.

Binx - the smaller and shaggier of the chihuahua-mutt sisters - staggers across the lawn first, trying to keep a minimum of paws on the ground as she goes, nearly somersaulting forward as she accidentally tries to elevate both hind legs simultaneously. When she finally pees (directly on the sidewalk and in a quantity rivaling a German shepherd’s capacity), she does so with one trembling back leg lifted skyward, maintaining unblinking and mournful eye contact with me as I watch from the safety of the glass door.

Billie - larger and bizarrely barrel-chested for her breed - stands at the base of the steps, her face almost too human in its expression of sorrow and shame, the canine version of a defeated Charlie Brown. “You're doing this to punish me,” she says with her downcast eyes and her honest-to-god frown. “I just know it. I’m a bad dog, and bad dogs have to wear coats and stand out in the cold.”

I don’t know how to explain to her that it wouldn’t be so bad if she just kept her booties on, or if she used the puppy pads by the door like we’d tried to train both dogs to do during last winter’s icy weather. I don’t know how to tell her that we’ve done all we can in terms of shoveling the walk and using pet-safe salt to melt a path. I certainly don’t know how to convey to her that I’m suffering as well.

OK, maybe I don’t have to relieve myself out there in the tundra with the puppies, but the winter’s running me ragged nonetheless.

Here’s a snapshot of a typical winter morning for me:

• Wake up in the dark. I move my legs, dislodging Wednesday the cat, who takes the opportunity to assault my toes and then wander up the bed to give me a kiss directly on the lips or, if I’m especially lucky, my open eyeball.

• Fall back asleep while scrolling through Timehop, despite the cat continuing to lick my face and breathe into my mouth.

• Frantically re-awaken and rush to start my morning routine, which involves feeding Wednesday, who helpfully races down the hall with me, begging for me to scissor-kick her in half as she weaves between my legs.

• Leap into the shower, where I somehow fall asleep a third time halfway through shaving my pits as my podcasts play loudly over a waterproof speaker (even though my wife is still asleep on the other side of the wall).

• Leave the shower, but then fall asleep again on the toilet before entering a single number in my morning poop Sudoku puzzle.

• Put on clothes in the dark. Hope they match, but it doesn’t matter, because they’re all coated in a consistent layer of dog hair (exclusively Billie’s), enough to craft several to-scale models of every mammal in the house.

• Ask my digital personal assistant about the weather, knowing full well she’s selling me out to the Russians, but forget to pay attention to her answer, which is always something along the lines of, “Girl, it is colder than a witch’s tit out there, just like it was yesterday, and just like it will be tomorrow, and for the rest of your miserable little life, you worthless American weakling.”

• Let the dogs out (see introductory paragraphs).

• Feed the fish while my car defrosts and my toast, uh, toasts.

• Forget my toast on the way to the car.

• Return to get the toast, which is now colder than a witch’s tit, just as my personal Russian spy- er, digital assistant predicted.

• Finally go out to the car, which has had 20 minutes to warm up, but is still encased in an insidiously tough layer of ice that has bonded at a molecular level to the windshield and windows.

• Race to chip away the ice before my limbs lose feeling entirely.

• Attempt to operate the car with numb hands and frozen feet, only to discover that the tires are spinning out in the ice or mud of the driveway (how is there mud when everything else is frozen? GREAT QUESTION).

• Cry.

• Try again until the tires rediscover traction.

And then there’s work. I’m lucky to have an office job, but I’m situated at a receptionist’s desk, directly in the icy wind blast zone when the front doors open. Above me, a vent pours cold air down my back at random intervals presumably related to the building’s heating cycle. I have taken to wearing my bulky winter coat while I work.

By the time I get home, the sun’s going down, and the Long Dark is waiting for me. When the night comes this early, it’s hard to feel productive. I’m tired from fighting for warmth, and all I want to do is burrow under the blankets and play video games. Anything to escape the bleak routine for a little while, before I have to start the cycle again.

I know I’m not alone in this. There’s a reason why millions of people experience Seasonal Affective Disorder during the cold and dark winter months. Humans need sunlight, physically and psychologically, and these months of short, gray days can really screw you up.

There’s only so much I can do for the dogs during the winter, but there are a few things we can all do to be personally better at wintering. On a practical level, you can literally bring more light into your life with a light box, or with Vitamin D supplements. In terms of emotional well-being, you can be more deliberate in keeping in touch with your friends, for your own sake as well as theirs. Go on, send that text, see if your buddy wants to come see Into the Spider-Verse with you (is that still in theaters? I hope so. GO SEE IT). Call your mom (I should take my own advice). Schedule a D&D night. Heck, go to a bar with a dance floor. Then you get human contact AND exercise, both of which are good for boosting your mood (and warming you up!).

And of course, when dance parties and over-the-counter vitamins aren’t cutting it, consider a visit to your doctor. There might be a prescription that can help wrangle those pesky winter brain chemicals, or a therapist you could talk to. If you’re concerned about expense (hard same), then look into Cognitive Behavior Therapy groups, which tend to be much cheaper than one-on-one therapy. Check out Psychology Today’s therapist finder if you need an easy place to start your research.

Stay cozy out there, y’all. And send me photos of your dogs wearing coats. You know, for self-care reasons.

Turning Resolutions into Intentions

As usual, November knocked me on my booty. But hey! I won NaNoWriMo and have a great starting point for a podcast experiment, so at least there’s that. I also regrouped with some neglected friends and have plans to get back to some D&D shenanigans, and am penning the last sentences of my wintry lesbian love story. 2019 will be a productive year, if I can stick to my intentions.

And gosh, do I have a lot of intentions.

I’ve been experiencing a bit of Baader-Meinhof (the phenomenon in which one encounters a word or phrase for the first time and then sees it everywhere) about the word “intention” recently, even though the concept isn’t new to me. Still, the term keeps turning up, and the little me in my head that believes in magic and meaning can’t help but sit up and listen.

Just the other day, a blog I follow (Karmen Fink’s “Spark & Celebrate”) posted about setting intentions for 2019 rather than resolutions. It comes down to a difference between setting goals and promoting a certain state of being.

Now, goals are great. Stars know I love a good list to check off. However, I’m increasingly attracted to the idea that personal change must come from the inside out rather than the outside in. I could set a goal of drinking so many glasses of water a day, and maybe that would work, but what if I set an intention to desire water instead?

Here’s where we start to get a little hippie-dippie (even for me), but let me unpack more of what I’m trying to say.

Unfortunately, I am my great grandmother’s great grandchild when it comes to drinking water. One of her oft-quoted lines within our family is: “Water? Never touch the stuff.” Great Grandmother preferred Manhattans, and I’ve inherited her taste for the cocktail, for better or for worse (but hey, she lived for over a century, so maybe she was on to something).

I don’t really get thirsty. I drink for energy (coffee, energy drinks, Diet Coke) or for relaxation (tea, alcohol), and… yeah, actually, those are pretty much my only reasons. Water neither energizes nor relaxes me (at least not to immediate or noticeable degrees), so I don’t often bother. If I’m caught drinking water, it’s for one of the following reasons:

1. I’m desperately trying to atone to my body for taking it out drinking with a bunch of college kids and mistakenly believing it and its 28 years of begrudging service could keep up with the younguns.

2. I’m about to start my period, which is an irregular event that catches my PCOS-suffering self off guard whenever it suddenly chooses to cycle, thus confusing my body into believing that it should start to do other normal human things too, like drinking water, eating vegetables, and sleeping more than five hours a night.

3. The primal part of me that still desires to live despite the current political climate, the rapid deterioration of the only life-sustaining planet humans have access to, and my own sense of worthlessness has seized the opportunity in the middle of the night to awaken me and pilot my unwilling body to the bathroom sink in order to lap water directly from the tap like a feral nocturnal beast.

Security footage of me captured in the wee hours of last Thursday morning. Source

Yes, things are so bad that my reptilian brain has to step in and force me to suckle water from the faucet at three in the morning. Something must be done.

I want to like water. There are so many well-researched health benefits that I’m a fool to continue mistreating my body like this just because I find water boring and don’t experience a strong sense of thirst. So, I’m setting this intention for 2019:

I intend to desire water and enjoy its benefits.

Whew, there it is. OK. But how does it work? Do I just magically start enjoying water?

Alas, like everything good, this will take conscious effort and positive thinking. As I’ve mentioned once or twice or a thousand times, I’m the Empress of Negative Self-Talk. Some little sprite in my consciousness is constantly out to drag me for every mistake, real or imagined. I know firsthand how negative thoughts can manifest a negative reality. I also know that positive thinking can manifest a positive reality by creating a mental environment that’s better at coping with stress, and thus better at keeping the rest of me healthy and happy.

In order to act on my intention, I must internalize it. The first few weeks or months, I know I’ll need to specifically “schedule” drinking a glass of water into my daily routine. When I drink that scheduled glass, I’ll need to be present in that moment, and grateful for my access to clean water. I’ll notice the taste and appreciate the coolness of it. I’ll also need to think about those health benefits I mentioned, and look with optimism toward a future with clearer skin, increased energy, and fewer headaches.

In short, I’ll practice mindfulness and optimism, things I should be working on anyway. With enough repetition (as you probably already know, it takes 21 days to make a habit), my mindset should improve, and I’ll desire water and the good feeling it gives me in the present and the future.

And that’s just one example! There are plenty of things I intend to do in 2019, and I want to train my brain to approach my tasks with enthusiasm and gratitude, whether I’m planning a D&D adventure or studying for a financial exam.

What about you? What intentions do you have for 2019? Whatever they are, I wish you the best with them.

Happy New Year, y’all!

10 Ways to Kick Writer's Block in the Booty

First, and immediately contradicting my title, let’s not call it writer’s block. The word “block” sits like cement in my soul, and instantly conjures that (profoundly scarring) drowning scene from Aladdin. You know the one:

Source (memetic commentary added by yours truly)

OK, so it’s actually a ball and chain for Al, but the association remains strong in my mind. “Block” is just too heavy and impermeable. Besides, when I experience writer’s block, it’s less like slamming into a concrete wall, and more like wandering into a misty valley. My vision closes in and I find myself off-trail and paralyzed by uncertainty. Where did I come from? Where was I going? Where did I leave that bag of gorp (Cotton-Eye Joe)?

In those moments of writer’s fog, I question everything. My ambition is locked by my irrational fear of imperfection. I worry that one misstep will ruin whatever project I’m working on. Panic swells in my chest at the thought that I’ll never straighten out my plot or settle on the right, impactful wording. I see no way forward, and my brain feels too soupy to puzzle out a solution.

But the cool thing about fog is that the sun eventually rises and burns it away (unless you’re in a mysterious, eternally-misty forest, in which case, maybe you have bigger foes to face).

Human brains are all about cycles. You probably know a little about 24-hour circadian rhythms, but you also have ultradian rhythms that repeat within those 24 hours. Our energy fluctuations during the day can be described by ultradian rhythms, and research indicates that our best balance of focus and energy levels throughout the day can be achieved by breaking our “work” time into 90 minute chunks of productivity, followed by a short, 15 minute breaks.

What I’m trying to get at is that we all naturally cycle through different levels of focus and productivity, and while we can coordinate with our cycles to some degree, there will always be periods in your days, weeks, months, years, and beyond that are simply, unavoidably “down.” Your writer’s fog could set in for a few minutes or a few weeks, and while it seems scary and frustrating while you’re lost in the mist, take comfort in the knowledge that it’s a temporary and normal experience.

That said, I do have a few methods to help burn off the fog a little faster. I’ll start with the obvious one that sits at the top of every list like this:

1. JUST WRITE, YOU COWARD

I’m not saying it will be easy. I’m not saying it will be good. But it will force you forward, even if every word you write is garbage that you’ll erase later. That just means you explored a route that didn’t work out, which narrows down the direction you’ll eventually take your work. It doesn’t matter if you feel like you’re just running circles in the fog, because at least you’re running. Plus, you’re practicing your craft, and even when you don’t think practice is improving your performance, neuroscience says it probably is, and you’re making future endeavors easier to tackle.

2. PULL A TAROT CARD

As I mentioned in a previous entry, I’ve been embracing my inner witch lately, and sometimes this witch likes to pull a tarot card to help her view her challenges from new angles. I even draw a card or two when I’m in my fog, like a mini writing prompt when I’m stuck between paragraphs or on tough lines of dialogue. A number of folks have written about using tarot cards as writing prompts not just to get out of the fog, but to guide plots and deepen characters. I use a physical deck for my draws when I can (for the Aesthetic™ of it all), but I also have a free app on my phone. There plenty of free online decks to play with as well.

3. DANCE PARTY

You’re slumped on the couch, folded over yourself as your laptops overworked battery burns your lap, your eyes glazed, with the same line of a Boyz II Men song repeating in your head because of some subliminal connection you made with one of the lyrics while you were deciding between boring steel-cut oatmeal or the irresistible enchantment of magic-hatching dinosaur egg oatmeal at Kroger earlier that day.

You’re stuck, which means it’s time to dance! Throw on some jams and get wild! Not only are you shifting your attention and giving yourself a little break (which we talked about earlier as being a normal and necessary component of productivity), but exercise stimulates the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that deals directly with focus, concentration, organization, and planning… All things that you need to get back in the writing zone.

4. TALK IT OUT

When you’re buried in your own writing process, it helps to bring other people into your world to help dig you out. Call a parent or sibling and chat about what you’re stuck on. Trap your significant other in a car with you and ramble about what you have so far, and where you want to go next. Join a writing group! Make a post on a writer’s forum! Line up your collection of antique, porcelain, totally not haunted dolls and show them a PowerPoint presentation about your fledgling novel! It’s lovely if your audience has input (as long as we’re not still talking about those porcelain dolls), but even if they don’t, the simple act of vocalizing your concerns can help you work through your problem.

5. MEDITATE

Everyone knows that meditation is a scientifically supported method of improving apparently every aspect of your life. And I was like, pffffft, yeah, OK, science is a liar sometimes. And then I downloaded an app to try some guided meditations and… it actually does seem to help? I use meditation to manage my anxiety, help me sleep, and handle moments of extreme emotion. More and more, I’m also using it to shift myself from “work mode” to “creative mode” after I get home from the office. A 5 to 10 minute meditation refreshes and relaxes me, and while I haven’t specifically tested it out on writer’s fog yet, it seems like just the sort of thing to clear the air and get my focus back.

6. EAT BRAIN FOOD

My most hypocritical suggestion is to eat stuff your brain likes. Well, not the pleasure centers of your brain that evolution has taught to repeat “SWEET THING TASTE GOOD; EAT MORE TO SURVIVE WINTER”, but your actual neuroarchitecture. Foods like blueberries, salmon, spinach, and beets can boost your brain in both the short and long terms. It’s harder to get trapped in writer’s fog when you’re taking action to keep general brain fog at bay.

To immediately bolster your focus and improve your chances of defeating the fog, try a snack of a square of dark chocolate and cup of green tea when you’re feeling slumpy.

7. TREAT YO SELF

Source

Not a fan of my spinach solution? No sweat! Sometimes, you need to prioritize your emotional health in order to move forward.

My writer’s fog often sets in when I’m feeling extra stressed. I panic and tell myself to work harder, but that’s not always the solution. When I’ve tried my other in-the-moment methods of resolving the fog and am hitting a wall, I give myself permission to relax and do something that makes me feel good. Maybe that’s hiking, or maybe it’s playing a video game, or maybe it’s detonating a bath bomb and applying a charcoal mask. Whatever it is, it’s a way to lift my own spirits so I can return to the battlefield refreshed and emotionally prepared to try again.

(Of course, it’s tempting to rely on this option to avoid writing… Be mindful of whether you’re practicing self-care or just procrastinating.)

8. SHIFT YOUR CREATIVE FOCUS

No writer is just a writer (and everyone is a writer or storyteller, by the way). You are a creative force, and just because your writing is stuck doesn’t mean the rest of your talents are too. Feel free to switch it up. If you write prose, try poetry. Better yet, toss word-based creativity aside, buy a cheap paint set, and go to town! If you play an instrument, spend some time practicing or composing. Heck, get your hands on some playdough and sculpt fake food just for funsies, and then lick your fake food to confirm that yes, playdough still tastes like salt and toddler hands.

Don’t worry about quality. Don’t worry about purpose. This is about letting your creative juices flow, even if that entails inventing a new and terrible kind of grilled sandwich, because if a calamari and cottage cheese panini isn’t creative expression, then what is it? An abomination, obviously. Still, the point stands.

9. SET THE MOOD

Creating a writing-focused setting for yourself is critical in terms of beating and preventing writer’s fog. If you usually write propped up in bed, try making it a little more formal by writing at a desk or table. Take control of your environment by clearing the clutter. After all, a messy work-space has a negative relationship with productivity.

Perhaps most important of all: treat your writing seriously by giving it a specific, uninterrupted block of time. Even if you can only set aside 10 minutes each day, dedicate that time exclusively to writing. That means no checking Reddit between paragraphs or texting your boo to complain about the problematic meme you saw when you weren’t supposed to be looking at Reddit. The muses are jealous hoes. They’re not going to help you if you ignore them on dates and text other people.

All of this mood-setting has long-term benefits, too. You’re training your brain to focus longer and to pick up environmental cues (the desk, the time of day, etc.) that signal it’s time to write.

10. FORGIVE YOURSELF

You can try all these techniques and more and still find yourself stuck, and that’s OK. That’s normal and expected. You aren’t any less of a writer for losing yourself in the fog now and then. First, forgive yourself for that.

Second, forgive yourself for imperfection.

The single biggest hindrance to my own writing has been my fear of making mistakes and looking foolish. The writing process is messy and complex, and it’s so easy to look at a first (or second, or third, or fourth) draft and cringe at the jumbled yuck of it all. Nothing discourages quite as potently as your own biased self-critique.

Accept that your writing is never going to be perfect, because no one’s is. We’re humans. we’re MADE out of jumbled yuck. As a creative person, you’ve probably spent a lot of your life looking at your own yuck under a microscope, and that can really skew your perspective. It’s great that you want to analyze your imperfections and improve yourself, but don’t let that stop you from getting out there. Take it from my favorite fictional teacher:

Take chances! Make mistakes! Get messy!

Source