The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
That’s how many office referrals I wrote today. Ten in one class. Ten, in one class, before I could even get class started.
I may take tomorrow off.
I may also shut down my YouTube channel, but that’s a whole other conversation. I’ve been realizing more and more lately that it’s not fun any longer, but that might just be general depression and anhedonia, and maybe I shouldn’t delete 500 videos until I figure out which it is.
I’m exhausted and crabby and no one needs that right now. Gonna go curl up with a book.
I cannot calendar. I don’t know if you can calendar, and I feel like I used to be able to calendar to some degree of accuracy or another, but I have lost the ability. I don’t know how long things take, I don’t know how long ago things happened, and it is generally impossible for me to keep track of such minor details as holidays, birthdays and dates that my son might have off of school that I don’t, where we need to provide some sort of child care for him, since it turns out that you really can’t just drop them off at school on days off.
And! For once! This deficiency has finally worked out for me, as I discovered today that April 1, which is not this Friday but is instead next Friday, and was previously thought of as the last day of school before Spring Break, is an asynchronous e-learning day. Did I know this? I did not. It’s even the day after Parent-Teacher conferences, so our district did something sensible and I didn’t even notice!
What that means is that this morning I thought I had to survive ten school days until Spring Break, and now, magically, I have survived one day and I only need to survive for eight more! Because days with no students do not count.
Woohoo!
Everybody’s all excited about working remotely right now, and while I’ve temporarily hit pause on the job search for another couple of weeks, the large majority of the positions I applied to were remote jobs. Some were in easily-reached locations like Indianapolis and Chicago, where if there were occasional days I needed to be in the office it wouldn’t represent a massive hardship, but the rest of those could be, well, anywhere. I didn’t apply to anything literally outside the country but I pretty much spanned the full width of it in those first few weeks.
So far I’ve been called for zero (0) interviews, which is … a little discouraging! One site let me know a human being had looked at my profile a couple of times, and I had somewhat high hopes for that, and LinkedIn has connected me to a couple of headhunter types who sent me messages about stuff I was either wildly unqualified for in one case or not interested in in another, but there have been no callbacks for anything. And it literally just hit me today: the disadvantage to the job searcher who is looking for remote work is that every remote job is a de facto nationwide search. I still have vestiges of that former honors kid’s confidence, right, that I’m good at a lot of things, better than most people, and that therefore I should just naturally float to the top of any applicant pool. But when you’re getting 5-600 applicants for a job (and I’ve seen jobs with way more than that) and they could come from anywhere? I have really nothing that’s going to stand out against that type of a search. Sure, I’m good, and I’ll be good at whatever job I happen to be applying for, but what I’m not is especially unique. There’s lots of middle-aged white dudes with a couple of Master’s degrees and an award or two. And even if I want to be super arrogant and say that I’m more qualified for Position X than 90% of humanity (or even if that’s an accurate assessment of my abilities!) when you’re looking at the entire country as your potential applicant pool that 10% is a lot of Goddamned people.
I may need to shift my focus here a bit, is what I’m saying. There’s no reason not to apply for these jobs, but I can’t count on finding something just by throwing a lot of CVs at remote jobs, and I may want someone with a little more experience in this to look at my résumé. I have a job this fall regardless, but I don’t want it, and it would be better for everyone involved if I was able to get something else. But I need to find a way to tighten up the pool of folk I’m competing with for these jobs, or I need to find a way to stand out against the big searches, or preferably both. I think I’m going to turn my personal website back on and see if that helps; maybe I’ll work on it tonight in between Elden Ring, grading, and planning for next week. Ten school days to Spring Break. I can do this.
I’m rereading The Return of the King right now, for the who-the-hell-knowsth time, probably somewhere between thirty and fifty. My current “reading copies” (I have a lot of different editions of this series) are the ones that came out along with the movies, and all three feature scenes from the films on the covers.
(I never really loved Viggo Mortensen’s casting as Aragorn, but in general I have very few complaints about the films, and I very well might end up taking a weekend to watch through the extended editions if I ever finish playing Elden Ring.)
Anyway, it just hit me tonight, as I moved into Book Six, the halfway point of ROTK, where Sam and Frodo finally reach Mount Doom: I have completely lost the versions of these books that existed in my head before the movies came out. And these are books that I read for the first time in second grade, and– again– reread repeatedly and religiously over my life between then and Fellowship hitting movie screens in a year long enough ago that I don’t want to look it up.
I had mental pictures of these characters once. All of them. Probably pretty detailed ones, too. Now, granted, they were probably at least a little influenced by Ralph Bakshi’s animated version of The Fellowship of the Ring, particularly Boromir, who will forever be a thickly-bearded Viking in my head. But they were there, and they didn’t particularly look like Elijah Wood or Sean Bean, and now they’re gone. Similarly to every other filmed adaptation I’ve ever seen of a book I read first– it’s fascinating and more than a little sad how completely and utterly watching a movie, even a movie you didn’t particularly enjoy, will just erase the ideas you had in your head of what everything looked like when everything was created in your head.
(Okay, probably not Dune. Nothing from Dune is rewriting anything. But still.)
I don’t have any larger point to make about all of this, but it was kind of a striking realization so I wanted to get it written down before I lost it.
The following are all true facts about my reading of G.R. Macallister’s Scorpica:
This is an interesting one, y’all. Scorpica is a close relative of the recent microgenre known as “All of the XXX are gone,” where XXX is filled by, usually, an entire gender. I can think of a handful of examples– and, in fact, I have another on my TBR shelf right now— of this broad plot being used, and, well, it can be a tricky thing to write, at least partially because trans people exist, and one of the questions people might reasonably ask right away is whether you as an author are aware that trans people exist, and how you treat them within your book where all the wimminz went away, or whether you even acknowledge that they exist, can at the very least put your book at a disadvantage right away.
Scorpica doesn’t quite do that, as the issue here is that, in a fantasy world simply known as the Five Queendoms, female babies suddenly stop being born. Nothing happens to anyone who is currently alive, but the book goes fifteen years with no female infants being born anywhere in the Queendoms. The Queendoms themselves, as you might already suspect, are matriarchies, and the book employs a rotating POV among several characters scattered among at least most of the five countries, although most of the characters are at least tangentially connected to Scorpica, one of the five.
In a first for any work of fantasy I’ve ever read, the book starts off with not one but two babies being born, and it hit me while I was reading that I can’t really think of any detailed narrative descriptions of what giving birth is like that were 1) set in fictional worlds and 2) written by a woman. Macallister excels at describing how her characters are feeling, and her description of both the births is … harrowing, even though both of them end up going well. As the book goes on, and the nature of the problem becomes clear, it’s interesting to see how the different cultures represented in the Queendoms react to what becomes known as the Drought. The Scorpicans are presented as a very martial, Not Amazons type of culture, and it seems like they’re the most thoroughly matriarchal as well. I don’t know how many books are planned in this series, and it’ll be interesting to see if the next one shifts the focus from the mostly Scorpican characters to new characters from somewhere else.
And, well, this is sort of where I start having issues with the book. You all know how into worldbuilding I am. Give me a setting that I think is cool and I’m willing to overlook a lot, but if you get me into a place where I start nitpicking your worldbuilding your book and I may not end up getting along all that well. And the interesting thing here is that I do have a whole lot of questions about how this world works, but I liked it anyway, where I feel like this exact setting in the hands of a less talented author would have me writing a post with a whole lot of sarcastic bullet points ending in unanswered questions.
One thing I would definitely like to have seen, and I’m honestly surprised to be typing this, because as a straight white guy I’m not used to having to worry about representation: I need y’all to realize that this is not just a book about five queendoms and five matriarchal societies, this is a book where narratively speaking men barely even exist. The Scorpicae may literally be an all-female country; there is talk about sending male babies to something called the “Orphan House,” and as the Drought drags on they actually start taking unwanted female children from other countries. There are no male PoV characters, but there are also virtually no male minor characters. One PoV character ends up in a little gang of bandits for a while that has a pair of male twins in it, and there’s one dude who ends up fathering a child for one character who gets some dialogue while she’s deciding to let him impregnate her. That’s about it, and you’re never going to see him again afterwards. Several characters mention being married to men but their husbands play no role in the story.
Everyone– everyone, everyone, everyone— is at least a little bit bisexual, by the way. It’s the default, to the point where it’s generally barely worth commenting on.
At any rate, I’d like to have seen maybe one male character, if only because I really don’t know how men exist in the Queendoms. They’re treated as afterthoughts if not actually chattel in Scorpica, and there’s talk that one of the other Queendoms is considering raising their role in society late in the book, but by and large we don’t have any real idea what their lives are like, or even answers to questions like what fatherhood looks like in this world. Like, do none of the men in the Queendoms have any idea if they have children or not? Is this sort of like a societal flip-flop where men occupy low-status occupations? Are they cooking and cleaning and having dinner on the table when their wives get home? I don’t know!
(And, to make this clear, I have no problem with the idea that all of the PoV characters are women in and of itself, but in a book that is explicitly about a society that handles gender very differently from how we do, I think wondering about the male perspective on all this is fair. And while we might get into it in later books, it’s simply not there in this one.)
So, yeah: I’m in for the sequel, and I’m glad that the publicist put this on my radar, because I’d have missed it otherwise. There are definitely some flaws and big open questions here (and it’s worth pointing out that while Greer Macallister is an established author, this is her first foray into epic fantasy) and I ended up four-starring it on GR, but it’s absolutely something that I want to see more of. There’s a great sudden left turn at the end of the book– not quite a cliffhanger, I think, but the book sets you up to believe one thing is going to be happening through the series and then yanks the rug out from underneath you at the end, and I’m really curious to see where this goes next. If the notion of an explicitly feminist epic fantasy floats your boat, you should absolutely give Scorpica a look.
Less than 24 hours elapsed between me telling the Internet that I Had a Plan for next year and that plan falling completely apart. You may consider any optimism expressed in yesterday’s post to be fully null and void. This has been another week of no prep periods; our science teacher has been out all week and I’ve picked up her 7th and 8th hours every day this week, a feat I will not be repeating tomorrow as this has meant that I’ve had to spend three periods a day for most of a week with certain of my lovelies and I have had more than enough of them for a little while. Two more weeks until Spring Break. I can do this.
(stares)
(eats dinner)
(returns, stares)
I clearly need to start reading books faster or reviewing music or something, because I have been shit for useful content around here lately. I was expecting Elden Ring to eat my life and so far that has performed entirely according to expectations, but the fact that I’m sitting here racking my brain and I can’t even come up with a vaguely entertaining story to tell about the last few days is kind of telling. “Tired” is like 90% of my personality nowadays apparently; the rest is comic books, video games and toys.
I think– I think— I may have a plan for next year that improves my current job situation in certain ways without upending every single thing I’m trying to do with my life. Some dominos have to fall into place– namely, getting hired for a couple of things– but I have reason to believe my chances for said things are at least higher than average and therefore I ought to be okay, and at any rate I’m going to find out pretty soon, which is better than every other job opportunity I have going right now. If this doesn’t pan out, I go back to full-scale job hunting over Spring Break. Let’s hope.
…and I’ve been sitting here staring at the screen for twenty minutes, so apparently that’s all I’ve got for today? I mean, it’s a plan. That’s something, right?
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