Monoculture: A single, homogeneous culture without diversity or dissension.
Noun. A group or society characterized by cultural uniformity.
This is the definition of the color beige.

Tribalism, toxic ideologies, labels and authoritarianism on both sides is killing off individuality, and Social Media is the accelerant. For the sake of your muse and the quality of your creative output, get the fuck off of social media.

DeleteFacebook
DeleteInstagram
DeleteWhatsApp
DeleteMeta
DeleteTwitter

Social Media is a cancer and has destroyed individualism and is toxic as hell for artists, writers and musicians, and let me also add that the entire book publishing industry is a joke and I refuse to be a part of it.

This is my punk roots screaming, we have to get back to being all about DIY and get away from being beholden to public opinion and big, faceless corporations.

This was sent to...

When I started back up writing full time again, I hadn’t really used my writing computer for six months. When I started it up again, everything was fine for a few days, and then when I was using just the battery, I had a glitch that caused my Scrivner to close wrong. Every time I opened it, an annoying alert would pop up that I had to I had to close first before it opened. .

I saved my previous days work on a thumb drive and overwrote what was on my desktop. When I opened it up, the alert was gone. Yay. But there were all these weird card things on my folders, and after a while, I noticed whenever I made a new document, it would replicate from something I saved years ago. It was all these ghost pages popping up. Even if I made a folder, it wouldn’t let me title it, an old title bloomed into existence.

I ended up having to change everything, move the stuff from the folders, delete...

When did people start defining themselves in association with what they hate instead of what they love? Are we seeing a resurgence of Jacobin politics beginning to rear its bloody head?

The Book
Back in the saddle again, for about two weeks now and it has been glorious. I get up, hoover up my breakfast, gulp down a cup of delicious coffee my husband made for me and get to work. I check the news while I eat, and then pretty much stay off the Internet until I have dinner, read a few articles and get back to work again.

Third draft editing has been incredibly fun, I am able to find other bits of a topic that I’d put somewhere else and move it to a better location, only because now I know where everything is. One of the main themes that continuously runs through my book is SCIENCE (I love science).

For the third draft, I decided to rewrite each page from Scrivner onto a Word document. It...

This is me before the Internet and Cell Phones.

For about 10 years, I lived with around 13 people in a building in Belltown Seattle called SCUD

Here I am standing with a few of my housemates. We had all dropped acid that morning and were in the middle of painting the SCUD company car:

Below is SCUD with my first husband’s car parked in front which he named VAL. SCUD was haunted, it was built around 1900 and had rats, mice, fleas and thousands of cockroaches but it was dirt cheap ($175 a month) and it was only a few blocks from the Pike Place Market. I remember I could lay in bed and look at the ferry boats on the Sound and the Olympic Mountains from my window. My room was the one with the corner windows.

And here I am standing between two of my housemates. I remember it was such a beautiful day outside:

Music: Deja by Palmas)

Over the pandemic, I bought quite a few books that sounded so interesting, many of them published between 2014-2022 as well as a number of books published pre-internet.

One particular historical nonfiction book (published in October 2020) enraged me so much due to the breathtaking amount of bad research and misinformation, I couldn’t take it anymore and stormed downstairs, threw it in the kitchen sink and poured yesterdays coffee over it. Once it was sufficiently saturated, I ripped out all the pages and threw the entire mess in the garbage.

Of those 60 plus books, I ended up keeping only the books that were published pre-internet, and put the rest on eBay.

Last night I finished wading through a massive three-ring genealogy binder jammed full of information I had not seen before. Much of it is xerox copies of cursive writing, which meant retraining my brain to read 19th century...

Since I am still in lockdown mode from February 2020, I decided now was a good time to do a deep clean in my drawing/writing studio, my storage room and my poison boudoir.

For the last five days, I’ve been going through everything, taking inventory and moving stuff from one room to another in preparation for the book. I can’t tell you just how incredibly satisfying it is seeing everything where it should be. Knowing exactly where everything is makes working on the book so much easier, especially with the upcoming third draft.

As of this writing, I have eleven huge boxes of collectibles that will go up on either the Oddments section of the website or eBay: 19th and 20th century mortuary/funeral items, a vintage casket light, antique 1920s-1960s mortuary makeup, embalming bottles, embalming tools, embalming machine, early electric post mortem saws that look like something from the...

-Nonconformist
-Outlier
-Autodidact

We desperately need more individualism and less tribalism.

Music: For My Soul by Sublab & Azaleh

The first time I experienced “The Zone” was when I was about 9 and I discovered that when music and art collide - it was alchemy.

I kept wanting to recreate that feeling of “The Zone” and I couldn’t figure out how to get there, like in dreams when you can fly but then you can’t remember how you did it and the rest of the dream is spent trying to remember how to fly.

I used to work in dark rooms in school and work and being alone listening to college radio, I found a cassette tape of Reggae music on loop. I just remember how delicious it felt as time slipped into this cozy red cocoon and everything was focused on the process, the way my body moved, the exposure, the muffled sound of water running, there was this underlying magic of ritual: music, movement, extreme concentration, nighttime. It felt like life was limitless, ideas were endless, inspiration was bountiful. During these...

Everything is different and yet everything is the same.
I thought once we (the collective we) would come out on the other side, it would be different. And now I see so much of it is still the same.

The weather has been delightfully cold, I am still wearing sweaters and long pants and socks and slippers. For two days in April it got up to 80 and I thought oh no, again? Again? Summer is here again?

** The Book**
I was stressing so much about having too many pages, there is just so much history that is relevant to the story and really gives a sense what was going on during my subject’s lifetime.

A good example of a nonfiction book size and paper would be Barbara Tuchman’s “A Distant Mirror.” Except there are no photos in Barbara Tuchman’s book.

There are so many photos I want to use from my collection, which means whatever photos printed in the book probably won’t translate that...