I’ve been meaning in check in here more than once. I have more than one blog post in drafts. Alas, the past few months ran away from me. Granted, they have been very fruitful months. I’ve been working on grading, on supervision, on guiding two PhD supervisees towards their viva voces (both passed and will attain their doctorates once corrections are in), and preparing three others for the PhD thesis submission process. Also, two of my Masters supervisees have also passed and will be graduating this year, as will five of my final year undergraduate supervisees.
After I did most of my teaching/supervision duties, I focused on my own research because it’s been a shorter semester break than previous years and I felt the need to maximize on that time. I’ve been working on my articles, my monograph, and the Star Wars book collection (essays written by my PhD supervisees based on my Masters popular culture course that they audited and various Star Wars-related workshops I held so they could complete their essays) as well as stuff for my Environmental Humanities research grant. It’s been an engrossing but very intellectually rewarding time although long hours at the desk resulted in somewhat more chronic pain than I’ve experienced in the past year or so.
On the fiction-writing front, I’ve been making slow and steady progress on Rosemirror and have started moving sections over to Gardenwitch (Book 3!!). I’ve also been working on a space opera heist that graduated from short story to novelette to now, a novella. Sometimes, it’s inevitable. And I’ve been working on a Malaysiana SF short story for a revision request I received from a publication.
There have also been two fiction acceptances and one poetry acceptance since I last posted. Along with two academic article acceptances.
When I’ve not been doing all these things I’ve been engrossed in healing my mind through doing tactile and analogue things. Like embroidery! And analogue journalling. These are the pursuits that have actually been helping me with all of the other intellectual/creative work that I need to do. It calms me down and somehow helps me be more organized in the things I do. It makes me feel more cognitively agile. I’ve nearly finished the embroidery pattern I started in August now and I cannot overestimate how soothing it’s been. Likewise, the art I’ve been doing both in my journals and on random pieces of paper have been returning to me pieces of myself that I’ve lost. And the pieces of me an increasingly sloppified world want to take away.
I actually wanted to write a post about how fraught authorship is in 2026 when we are stuck in-between two forces that serve the same evil but it became too painful to contemplate, given the recent news. The ones that shill a so-called artificial intelligence, and the ones who start accusing anyone marginalised and of colour of not authoring their own works. It’s not a new story. It’s an old one, and a painful one. I remember being interrogated at the age of 15 because of an environmental justice poem I wrote. The teacher was sure I’d plagiarised it because there’s no way a fat and awkward kid could have written something with such precise rhymes. And when my first SF short story was published in Clarkesworld, you wouldn’t believe the amount of people who implied editors ghost-wrote it. Some of those same people may then wonder why I walked away from them. Wouldn’t you?
Today, more and more of us who stick to our pro-human, human-authored guns have been or are going to be gaslit and continuously accused of using tools we’re vocal against using. I don’t know what the answer is or how we protect and defend ourselves in what seems like a world that is losing its grip even more than usual. I just know that we must keep strong, steer the course and find comfort in physical things. Like making washi tape borders on handwritten journals and filling those pages with thoughts, reflections and plans. Like embroidery or whatever else one can do with one’s hands. Like just inhaling and exhaling. Like knowing that even though so many of us find more meaningful connections in this world of ones and zeroes than we can ever find in our physical spaces, those physical spaces must now serve as our last defense. And so, I have found strength, beauty and succour in an analogue life. I have finished TWO journals this year, that’s how much I’ve been writing. My hands are perpetually ink-stained. And last night, I finally was able to write a poem about this new existential threat to all creatives and what it means to me, personally. I have no solutions for you, I can just tell you what works for me. This life is still beautiful and we can write. If not on these screens, on paper.
Till the next blog post,
xx
Anita