What We Owe Our Fans: The Emotional Contract of Storytelling

 

[Warning: This essay contains spoilers for The Last of Us and Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire, as well as Mass Effect. I’m talking about endings here, so if you see a thing, just kind of assume spoilers are on the table. Also, yes this is late, but it’s also like twice as long as my usual posts, and I’ve been thinking about it for weeks, so them’s the breaks.]

Ending a story is hard. Hell, getting a series off the ground is hard. Of the three series I’ve started – The Nightmare Cycle, The Memory Bearers, and The Meaning Wars – only one is complete.

(I still have plans to finish the first two, but quite frankly, book 2 for The Nightmare Cycle took ten years to write…and when I was finished last year, I decided I wasn’t happy with it, and that it needs a complete rewrite. The good news is, I’m a much faster writer than I used to be, so that’s part of my plan for 2026 and 2027; to finish The Nightmare Cycle. The Memory Bearers takes place in the same world, and will involve consequences from The Nightmare Cycle, so that’s why I haven’t been able to continue and finish that series yet, either!

That and, you know, the whole “adjusting to parenthood and scheduling” thing. And the hyperfixation committee decreeing exactly what I’m allowed to focus on, and when. Wheee. But I digress severely.)

Series are hard, yo

I’m going to focus mostly on books, because that’s my primary artistic storytelling medium, but I will reference other narratives to reinforce my point, which I think is broadly applicable to most narrative mediums, including a lot of nonfiction.

There are a lot of authors out there with series that have been started, get one book deep, and then – either due to personal reasons or publishing company-imposed limitations – don’t get to finish. (I’m looking at you, company that won’t let Seanan McGuire/Mira Grant release the sequel to Into the Drowning Deep!)

However, when some authors get big enough, like George R R Martin or Patrick Rothfuss, they can set their own schedules.

Now, I wrote an analysis of A Song of Ice and Fire’s failure to launch some years ago, but the example has certainly stuck in my mind.

The thing that led to my disgruntlement, touched on there, is the issue of the Red Wedding. Now, at the start of the book series, we get a rather hamfisted foreshadowing that Ned Stark is gonna bite it. His death felt entirely fair and unsurprising. Again, intense foreshadowing.

Book 1 starts with a family sundered, and emotionally, that should mean that the end of the series brings all of the family members back together, damaged but surviving, to recuperate together. That is the emotional core of the story of Game of Thrones that holds the first couple of books together.

This is a powerful storytelling concept, and it’s also the reason the series fell the fuck apart. In book 3, when Caitlin and Rob Stark are horribly and brutally murdered, Martin threw a subversive curveball in the equation.

 However, killing family members means that the reunion is impossible before it happens. By killing off his probable king, instead of, you know, badly disabling him or injuring him in some way, Martin effectively slew the emotional core of his own story.

It’s easy to see the evidence; without the emotional anchoring of their protagonist family for us to cling to, books 4 and 5 are a rambling mess. Now that so many years have passed since book 6’s expected due date, it’s pretty obvious that Martin is hopelessly stuck.

 I’m not going to say he should pass the writing on to some other author because he might die soon. (In fact, you should never say that to an author; I can’t express how phenomenally rude and inconsiderate it is.) What I do think is that any remaining fans with a lingering sense of hope…need to mourn the series and move on.

By waiting too long to publish, and by destroying the emotional anchor point of the story, Martin broke the emotional contract.

What’s an emotional contract?

I hasten to add that I’m sympathetic to other authors who get partway through a series and get completely stuck, or who start a series and don’t finish it. After all, I have my own context with that.

In the current romance writing world, there’s a publishing norm that’s become so hard and fast, it’s getting ossified: genre romance novels must end happily, with the couple/people in relationships together. It wasn’t always like this, and I personally think that less predictable love stories are due for a comeback. However, it’s important to signal to people that a story may be tragic, or at least that it’s meant to be less predictable. Otherwise, readers will respond VERY poorly to a broken emotional contract.

There’s that phrase again! An emotional contract is an implicit agreement with readers to finish a story in a satisfying manner.

The thing is, this concept transcends narrative medium and genre. Whether it’s a twenty-five-part story time on Tiktok, a prestige TV drama, or a niche genre book series – the audience expects a satisfying ending.

The blowup around Mass Effect is a pretty great example of the ball getting dropped. Now, the writing was very complex there, so it was going to be hard to make everyone happy with the myriad different relationships – but by promising a happy ending with some characters’ romances, and showing the importance of teamwork and the hope of survival in previous games, the third game’s ending was in conflict with itself. Killing off Shepard might have been okay in a vacuum, but given the themes of previous games, a lot of people felt betrayed. People would even have been willing to sacrifice Shepard…if they felt more autonomy over the ending’s decisions. The backlash was so famous and so bad that the gaming company was bombarded with three-colour cupcake orders, among other forms of trolling, and eventually had to go back and remaster the ending.

Completely unrelated illustration, but it’s progress in my attempt at a year-long drawing-a-day effort.

What’s satisfying?

People tend to get hung up on specific details and what they think they’ve been promised, which is a huge issue – the amount of entitlement people have towards creative media is pretty frustrating, and that entitlement also transcends genre, unfortunately.

An emotional contract is formed in stages. You’ll all have to forgive me for referencing the Hero’s Journey structurally a bit – but I’m commenting primarily on what I’ve seen of stories that are either written or translated into English, and mostly, published within the cultural milieu of North America and Europe.

The first part is the setup, where the status quo is explained and demonstrated. Then we get a disruption, where the desire/goal is established. In, say, the game Mass Effect, which I’ve also spilled a lot of digital ink thinking about, the fundamental goal is “handle the Reaper threat”. In like 99% of romance novels, the fundamental goal is connection and union with one or more love interests. In a mystery novel, it might be the setup of the fundamental question – you know, “Who killed Roger Akroyd” or whatnot. Fantasy and science fiction can have a whole range of situations, including any of the previous questions, or others, but there’s still usually some sort of question being asked at the start of the book. (I mean, that’s why it’s called speculative fiction, really.) In a horror novel, the desire or goal is usually just survival, but horror has different expectations, and as long as the ending is satisfying, audiences are pretty tolerant of a range between happy, bittersweet, tragic, and deeply upsetting endings.

Through the plot arc or arcs, we see the establishment of stakes (i.e. the risk versus reward for a character pursuing their desire). We see hints of the consequences of not having the goal or desire fulfilled, as well as hints of what attainment will lead to. Different stories and formats have different stakes, structures, and interruptions; for instance, video games have a very different structure than a TV series, even though they’re usually both visually-focused mediums. Regardless of medium, the end of a story usually comes from either the attainment of the desire/goal, or the fallout and results of its attainment.

The problems come into play when either a) a series simply never finishes, leaving its question unanswered, or b) audiences are unhappy with the attainment.

The delicate dance of audience dissatisfaction

 A lot of authors claim to be writing for themselves, but while this is fundamentally true to an extent, writing is also a form of communication. It is possible to write entirely for yourself – if you don’t publish or share your work with anyone, ever. Communicating with yourself is still a valuable and worthwhile pursuit, but writing always represents an act of communication.

Writing is also the absolute cheapest medium in terms of raw production, which is probably why it’s so popular; it also underpins many other art forms and narratives. No matter how a story is produced, whether that’s a video game or a podcast or a grand movie, it starts with being written down.

However, the more expensive the production, the greater the weight of the audience expectations. Authors can often afford to piss off their audiences a bit more – in theory – but the greater one’s prestige or recognition, the more audiences will develop expectations based on previous works. This is unavoidable, since humans are pattern-seeking creatures, just like many other animals. And that’s fine! The existence of patterns is morally neutral, but much less so once we get into the specifics of those patterns.

For instance, in true crime narratives, there’s a common emphasis on the heroism of law enforcement. Given that I’ve gone on the record many times as being against the concept of policing, especially as it currently exists, myself and other people find this quite objectionable. Still, even true crime and other non-fiction narratives follow narrative structures that parallel those in fiction. “Reality” TV still uses a degree of scripting, and often presents unpleasant characters who eventually suffer downfalls and other inconveniences, in the morality plays of our time.

In The Last of Us’s TV show adaptation, audiences have been incredibly pissed off about the death of Pedro Pascal’s character, Joel. While shifting the focus to Ellie’s character is fine, killing Joel off broke the emotional contract of a found family. It’s okay to kill some members of a found family in a situation with multiple characters – after all, look at D’Argo’s heroic sacrifice in the big finale of Farscape, which also has a pretty satisfying ending. But when there’s only two people in the found family, killing one off…destroys the found family. Emotional contract, broken. Result? Not just a few grumbles, but an internet full of fans lashing out.

Why is satisfaction important?

Life is unpredictable, chaotic, and unorganized. Humans impose structural narratives to keep ourselves from going fucking insane and to make sense of the world. Narratives also help us articulate our desires or goals, or relay values. Stories mean a lot, blah blah blah, power of story is significant. (I’ll be dissecting the whole “power of story” fetishization in a future article, by the way.)

Basically, we crave stories so we can get something that real life seldom offers. Abusers go unpunished, loved ones leave us and don’t forgive our trespasses, and sometimes love falls apart. On the other hand, sometimes we can only make sense of our triumphs and achievements with the benefit of hindsight. Not everything in our lives is a story of perpetual loss, attrition, and entropy. Or, you can look at it that way, but you might go insane, and even the nihilists and existentialists agree that in a world without divinely ordered meaning, we have to make and find our own.

Enter the narrative.

The practical upshot of all this is simple: life is fundamentally dissatisfying, and to avoid getting lost in it, we want our stories to make sense. Having a story take a sharp left turn – for example, a conventionally plotted romance novel having a shocking twist ending that leaves the main couple forever sundered – breaks the emotional contract. Like a hull breach in a space craft, it exposes us to the deeply dissatisfying chaos outside.

Now, don’t get it twisted – it’s okay to have unpredictable endings, as long as you set the audience up for an expectation of unpredictability. To put it mildly, storytelling and its conventions have changed a lot over the centuries, as values and audience desires have changed, too. In mythology, whether that’s the Bible or the Bhagavad Gita or The Journey to the West, narratives served to organize and teach morality and apply structure from a divinely ordained perspective. Wealthy aristocrats and royalty ruled by divine right, but could be toppled if a particularly clever and righteous beggar or lower-class person proved to be their better. In this way, mythology tends to be fundamentally conservative. It’s okay for Zeus to assault beautiful women, because that’s how heroes are born, after all. (PLEASE NOTE THAT I AM NOT ENDORSING THIS REASONING; I’M JUST EXPLAINING MY BEST UNDERSTANDING OF ANCIENT LOGIC.)

The line between instructive and entertaining fiction and narratives gets more and more blurry the farther back you go. The modern era clearly distinguishes between these categories, but it wasn’t always so. Still, every story in every format sets up a promise, and has to deliver.

Promises, promises

Partly to organize the chaos of the world, both humans and social animals have come up with concepts of agreement and promises. A pack of wolves might not sit down and hash out a contract to share and divide up their kills evenly, but they have an implicit agreement to work together and share food. Domesticated dogs, cats, and other animals understand that doing a trick or obeying a command leads to some sort of reward.

A promise is inherently transactional; it means giving something to get something. The thing given in return might just be trust, but that emotional and social capital has a very real value. Audiences give us their attention and money; we give them entertainment, instruction, or a mixture of both. Again, I have to emphasize that even non-fiction follows this structure; you wouldn’t still be reading this essay, two thousand words deep, if not for the implicit promise that I’m going to explain something of interest or value.

So let’s circle back, at long last, to the beginning thesis: emotional contracts underpin all narratives, fiction or non-fiction, and creatives break those contracts at their own peril. An example of deeply satisfying emotional contract fulfillment would be, say, the ending of Return of the Jedi or Return of the King, just to choose the absolute simplest examples I can think of. In Jedi, Luke is at peace with his father’s legacy, the insurgent communal anarchist rebel Ewoks survive and escape, the Death Star is destroyed, and Han and Leia are together. It’s everything we’re told to hope for through the original trilogy. Return of the King foreshadows the bittersweet twist of Frodo’s parting throughout the narrative by showing how the Ring damages its keepers, even the most stalwart and resistant. But even so, we’re still promised that eventually, Sam and Frodo will be reunited some day in the West, aka Elf Heaven.

What do writers need to know?

Emotional contracts might be very specific (“This couple will get together”) or very broad (“This story will be completed”) but failing to fulfill them introduces discomfort and chaos. A little discomfort and chaos is absolutely a good thing, because a completely predictable narrative is boring. It doesn’t satisfy the fundamental need to create meaning and order out of our chaotic lives. Too much chaos, however, and too many arbitrary changes, result in something like season 8 of Game of Thrones, which was so widely reviled that it retroactively pretty much killed the fandom.

Metanarrative actions can also destroy an emotional contract. JK Rowling, for instance, made a big point in the Harry Potter books of standing up for marginalized and bullied people. (How well she succeeded at that is a matter of some debate, but the broad strokes were there in the original work). When she turned on trans people and revealed virulent hate in her heart, she broke the emotional contract implied by the values of her series.

I’m not saying writers have to be as heroic as their characters, but if your work conveys broad-strokes values, it’s probably a good idea to try and follow those values in your professional life. Everyone makes mistakes, and the internet can be unforgiving, but if you develop a fanbase, it’s also like, worth having a personal ethos and trying to be consistent with it.

The slippery bits and caveats

Obviously, there’s a giant “But…” in my conception of emotional contracts, and that is – some audience members are going to misinterpret the specifics for the broad strokes. That is, there are going to be people angry that their particular ship wasn’t rewarded. Now, again, this is slippery, because we’re touching on the concept of queerbaiting just by implicating ships. It’s not 2009 or 2011 anymore, and the representation of queer relationships has definitely increased in the last ten to fifteen years, but I would caution my fellow authors in particular about watching out for queerbaiting. In my experience, the people who see a few minutes of contact and get excited about a potential ship are pretty self-aware and reasonably self-deprecating. It’s mostly when a relationship spans the long term, has a lot of focus, and is heavily built up that authors get into trouble for not fulfilling reader expectations.

Now, you’re just not going to make everyone happy. That’s human nature. But it’s very important to go over a particular project and make sure that the biggest promises that were set up actually get fulfilled.

(And that, among other reasons, is why I wasn’t happy enough with my first draft of Monsters and Fools, the sequel to Underlighters, and why I’m rewriting the whole damn thing.)

If there’s a particular couple that you’ve spent a lot of ink and time on, get them together OR have a damned good reason for them to not end up together. If there’s an underlying philosophical point in your work, even if you’ve outgrown it, just fulfill it and write something more mature in the next book or series, instead of trying to retcon the story to fit your new ideals. (ASK ME HOW I KNOW.) Villains don’t always have to die, but the fundamental questions asked by a work do need to be answered.

So get out there, and answer some questions!

I’m pretty happy with how this one turned out.

Meanwhile, I’m going to make progress on wrapping up the enormous private online tabletop roleplay game I’ve been working on. After that, I feel mortally compelled to work on the gothic horror rewrite of my first novel ever, a standalone that’s going to feature themes of gender dysphoria, colonization, and a tech oligarch villain. I’ve been struggling with Synchronicity (different title coming; I’m thinking “The Violent Ones”) since a former friend figuratively ripped its original draft to shreds and convinced me it was unsalvageably bad, in need of wholesale rewrites.

I kind of wish I’d just published that messy baby as my first novel anyway, buuuuuuuut I also know that my ideas for this complete rewrite are going to be a banger, and I’m going to do my best to do justice to it, on behalf of my shy, petrified teenage self, who hoped so dearly to release her first novel ever to the wide world, and to be a child prodigy.

Anyway, happy writing to all of us!

If you liked this article, and boy I hope you did, please do give me a subscribe, or take a peek at my Patreon and Substack. I’m trying to keep my stuff accessible and not paywalled, and your support helps me with that goal.

***

A writer and artist, Michelle Browne lives in southern AB with xer family and their cats. She is currently working on the next books in her series, other people's manuscripts, knitting, jewelry-making, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible. Find xer all over the internet: Website  Amazon  Substack Patreon Ko-fi  Instagram  Bluesky  Mastodon  Tumblr  Medium  OG Blog  Facebook

Creative People Aren’t Good (Part 2)

Last week, I had a few things to disentangle about the commonly-held societal more that being able to make stuff means you’re holistically smart. This week, I need to continue that train of thought to explain the cycle of sabotage plaguing online fandom communities.

As before, I’m talking about English-speaking communities in cultures I can access. I truly don’t know if other communities and other language-speakers are doing the same toxic shit that we are. If you know the answer, please reach out! I’m very curious, and I love thinking and talking about the ways that our culture and language shape us and feed into themselves.

I’m also obsessed with trying to understand exactly how things got so fucked up, why they’re staying that way, and how we can fix it.

Cultural self-sabotage: a case study

Let’s talk about Neil Gaiman.

People who’ve followed my career for a long time, or who know me personally, are aware that I used to really admire Neil Gaiman. I described his prose as feeling like a friend telling a whispered secret story to you in a dark room. Loved the atmosphere of his writing, his mystery-shrouded worlds and complicated characters.

 I’ve reconsidered an awful lot about whether he’s actually as good as I thought he was, but I’m not ready to reread his work more critically yet. (If you’re interested in seeing some critical essays, let me know.)

Obviously, a number of potent allegations about his predatory behaviour have emerged. Some authors and people in the writing world have quietly mentioned that his name was a sour one among the whisper networks. Long before the viscerally upsetting details came out in courageous articles last year, at least some people in the BDSM scene in Australia and in fan convention and expensive professional writing class scenes knew that Gaiman wasn’t to be trusted.

But Tumblr didn’t, and for a while, he was the internet’s beloved English teacher. All of the affection for queer or queer-affirming teaching professionals who saved so many of us from peers’ rejection and cruelty was projected onto Gaiman. He didn’t deserve it, but we didn’t know that.

And how could we? After all, there’s a persistent, clanging notion that to be a creative person is to be a good person. That’s not true, but how did we get here?

Gifts from god

Hang on tight here, because I need to contextualise this shit with cultural Christianity. I don’t think North Americans, especially ex-believers and non-believers and pagans and whatnots, really grasp the power of the background radiation of Christianity. Little turns of phrase represent the way our thoughts and feelings are shaped by this background.

Now, the idea of sainthood is particularly linked to Catholicism, which also happens to be part of my background, but it’s certainly spread beyond that. Like mildew and algae blooming in one corner of a pond, the idea that creativity is a divine gift is casually accepted – and pernicious. (I’m not getting into the Roman roots and how all of that affected the way Christianity developed ideologically because frankly, I don’t know enough about it, and I’m also not sure that it’s really relevant to the discussion.)

“Talent” is considered a gift from god. A blessing. An arbitrary state of being bestowed by deities or fate. Even secular people tend to talk about artistic skills as though they just happened overnight, as though someone simply woke up with them one day, a divine act of reward or caprice.

Creativity is a blessing, so the corollary of that is: creative people are blessed, and blessed people are sanctified, and sanctified people are better than others.

This simple assumption manages to hold firm against every single disproof imaginable. Simply put, we expect famous creative people to be saints, and then we get pissed off, shocked, and disappointed when – surprise! They’re just people. Even the goddamn saints weren’t saints, as any hagiographer will tell you. (I’m not a biographer of the saints myself, but I have a few scraps of passing knowledge.) St Jerome was famously cranky. Don’t even get me started on the Apocrypha, the fig tree incident with Jesus, or any of that.

There was a time when we saw the imperfections of saints and gods as inspiring and relatable, but in the current era, all of those flaws have been sanded away. Some mistakes have a degree of acceptability, but others are too deep to bear. The measures for which sort is which tend to be painfully arbitrary. (Trust me, I have a lot more to say about our internet cultural standards and how fucked up they are, so stay tuned for that in the future.)

What is talent?

Here’s the goddamn problem. Because we see creative skill as a Thing, an inherent quality rather than a gradually developed one, our culture has a very toxic relationship with it. We don’t want to talk about the hours upon hours of skill grinding required to improve at something, and we certainly don’t want to admit that sometimes, people will just not get very good at something they practice. We don’t understand why some people are good at a thing and others aren’t. Some level of enjoyment or satisfaction, plus the willingness to spend time and outlast frustration plateaus, are the only concrete metrics we really have.

But those aren’t sexy and mysterious, unlike the concepts of talent and inspiration. Can anyone grind their way to looking talented? Can everyone do everything if they work hard enough at it? The first one is a maybe, and the second one is too expansive a claim to earn an honest “yes”. That whole Malcolm Gladwell “ten thousand hours” thing has been debunked by a bunch of people more patient and possibly more spiteful than I am. (As usual, misinterpreting and overapplying a scientific study was to blame. Who’s surprised?)

And anyway, repetitive work and practice means embracing failure. Failure is stigmatized here, in the English-speaking Western world, and is thought to indicate a moral weakness or faltering of some sort, so who the fuck wants to embrace failure? No, better to sigh wistfully over the idea that talent or inspiration simply passed us by. Never mind that creativity works the same way as other muscles, including the need for rest days.

Above: my own slow, patient, grinding efforts to improve my drawing skills. Drawing gems is really damn hard.

Who should we be?

The thing is, as I talked about last week, just making stuff well doesn’t indicate anything about the quality of a person.

Let that sink in. None of the artists or creative people you like are guaranteed or even likely to be good, kind, or otherwise lovely by mere dint of their creative skill.

However, that means something rather nice – anyone who’s kind, patient, or otherwise lovely got that way by choosing to be so. Anyone can develop patience and kindness for others. It’s not a god-given talent; it’s a skill that’s trained.

Artists are not better people than the rest of the world – and we ought to forgive them for it, and the rest of us artists need to forgive ourselves for being messy, complicated, mistake-making creatures. We don’t owe the world goodness because we happen to be skilled at something. Kindness and generosity are their own rewards, not the side effects of a skill. Learning to give yourself and others grace, benefit of the doubt, kindness, and help? We can all earn those skills, regardless of whether we can paint a good sunset or write a brilliant string of code.

If you believe in God, maybe this is God telling you to give yourself some damn credit. If you don’t, then hey! Take it from me and my multiple therapists; recognizing your own achievements is a requirement for survival. It’s very hard to be nice to others when you’re busy being shitty to yourself, and not having been “blessed” with a “talent” tends to make people beat themselves up. It’s not easy to stop hating yourself, but just fighting the ideas about what makes people good, important, or generally better than you is a vitally critical start.

***

A writer and artist, Michelle Browne lives in southern AB with xer family and their cats. Xe is currently working on the next books in her series, other people's manuscripts, knitting, jewelry-making, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible. Find xer all over the internet: *Website * Amazon * Substack * Patreon * Ko-fi * Instagram * Bluesky * Mastodon * Tumblr * Medium * OG Blog * Facebook

Creative People Aren’t Smart (Part 1)

 

Another day, another discussion about media where I find myself mildly dismayed by the creative implications of someone’s choices, or lack of thought about said choices. Now, it’s always easy to Monday Morning quarterback things, and god knows there’s no need for the literary equivalent of Cinema Sins. We had that in the early 2010s, it was on blogs and Goodreads, and frankly, I’d rather leave the trend of gleeful dunking and fake outrage in its grave, where it belongs.

But that said, once in a while, I stumble across a piece of information so hard to comprehend that I’m staggered by it. Often, it’s related to a particularly stupid bit of worldbuilding that, say, a world-famous billionaire author who wrote children’s books did. Just as an example.

As I was discussing some particularly nonsensical creative decisions with some friends and colleagues, however, I had an absolutely staggering realisation about JK Rowling – one that applies more broadly, in fact.

Being creative, and good at creating things, can coexist with absolute stupidity.

A defining of terms

Some people are going to read the title of this and fire off an angry post anyway, but lend me a few moments’ indulgence before that happens.

I should probably explain what the hell I mean. I’m not talking about the fake, racist metrics of IQ tests. Developmental delays and birth differences are entirely unrelated to these skills, although they sometimes have an impact on their development.

Stupidity and smartness are actually rather nebulous concepts in English, but here, stupidity refers to a mixture of willful ignorance and stubbornness leading to overlooking things.

In contrast, the particular type of smartness people expect from artists is critical thought, both analytical and creative; in particular, the ability to contextualise fiction and reality.

What’s that mean?

The ability to contextualise fiction and reality can keep you from, say, writing a cozy, sweet book about a magic school with elements based on real-life cultural genocide, for instance.

Stupidity can make you say “but mine’s different!” even when thousands of people are begging you to understand that no, your portrayal of a particular character type isn’t different or subversive enough to avoid ableist harms.

At least in the English-speaking parts of the internet I’ve seen – there’s a cultural idea that being able to make stuff automatically bestows other forms of intelligence. (I blame European colonizers for this.)

But…doesn’t artistic skill make you a genius?

Things like the Masterclass program and TED Talks are particularly pernicious for spreading the idea that people who can make stuff are superior in some way. We often use the term “gifted” for creatives. The problem is, this leads people to the idea that skills in one or two areas indicate skills in all areas or most areas. Sure, people *say* “you can’t be good at everything”, but we sure as shit act surprised when someone famously talented turns out to be skilled at one thing and terrible at another.

The truth is, the ability to create something isn’t the same as the ability to understand either the act of creation itself or the context of that creation. Analysing your own work is a pain in the ass, as anyone who’s ever had to write either a grant or an artist’s statement will tell you. Part of the problem is that it’s really hard to have perspective on your own work, but the other part is, a lot of people have a drive to create that they struggle to explain.

Now, I need to underline that I don’t want to demean people who struggle with the analysis and critical thinking part of creation. Everyone can’t be good at everything, and as the world of media critics shows, there are plenty of people who can analyse things brilliantly and can’t make things worth shit.  There are others still who can teach and relay skills very well, even when they struggle to apply their own skills. And still others are brilliant at applying creative skills, but can’t communicate their methods to others.

Why bring this up now?

As I look around and try to cope with the rising tide of fascism, I see a lot of people, myself included, searching for leadership and hope. One of the first places we turn to tends to be those we admire. A lot of people we admire tend to be skilled in multiple areas of creation and the arts – say, Brennan Lee Mulligan, who’s a very good performer, storyteller, and roleplayer, among other things; and who is something of an online darling right now.

Don’t get me wrong; I think he’s great, but I’ve also seen the rise and fall of creative figures before, and it’s really getting to me. Lin Manuel Miranda and Hank and John Green were similarly lionized in the 2010s, and when they made even the mildest of human missteps, or even just did things that a few people disliked, it was enough to dislodge them from their pedestals.

So what’s going on there? Next week, I’m going to talk about the painfully human nature of people we admire – and why we, the English-speaking internet citizens, need to absolutely chill the fuck out with our standards.

***

A writer and artist, Michelle Browne lives in southern AB with xer family and their cats. Xe is currently working on the next books in her series, knitting, jewelry-making, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible. Find xer all over the internet: *Website * Amazon * Substack * Patreon * Ko-fi * Instagram * Bluesky * Mastodon * Tumblr * Medium * OG Blog * Facebook

It's LIIIIIIIIIIIIVE! Get your fix of university student cozy academia, with maturation, love, and just a little revenge, on Patreon or on Substack!

And of course it's queer. I'm physically incapable of writing something without queerness and multicultural backgrounds. Also featuring such hits as:

• disability representation
• trauma
• friends fighting
• sick 2010s setting and playlist
• people kissing

So yeah, pick your preferred platform and get reading!

***

A writer and artist, Michelle Browne lives in southern AB with xer family and their cats. Xe is currently working on the next books in her series, other people's manuscripts, knitting, jewelry-making, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible. Find xer all over the internet: *Website * Amazon * Substack * Patreon * Ko-fi * Instagram * Bluesky * Mastodon * Tumblr * Medium * OG Blog * Facebook *

Fix Your Life: Notes From Reconstruction

Fix Your Life: Notes From Reconstruction

 So, I don't really do self-help, for a variety of reasons, but I've had this article jangling around in my head for a minute. 

I'm in the middle of working on a bunch of health conditions, and changing my lifestyle and habits to actually try and improve or manage them, and I couldn't help but think about how deeply ineffective and frustrating most self-help tends to be. 

This, then, is a quick rundown of techniques I've been relying on and making use of while I've been trying to improve my functionality. 

 

Where I started 

For some context, I've been struggling with really terrible burnout from my editing practice for a few years now. Life stuff happened, it was bad; it left me with mental health scars. I won't bare every inch of my soul for the internet, but suffice to say that the Tolstoy quote about how unhappy families are unhappy in their own way is not that accurate. Trauma can follow exhaustingly repetitive patterns between people's lives. It's not particularly exciting or salacious, although there were a few dramatic moments here and there. 

What matters is, I got better, and I got back to editing, but I also got worse. As anxiety and depression paralysed me and depression weighed me down like pocketfuls of stones, I couldn't finish projects, letting down clients and friends one by one. I dragged my feet, though, terrified to change my career and lose all the progress I'd made. 

I'd been suspecting I was burnt out for years, but I was too scared to let go. My wife's pregnancy, two house moves, and our son's birth let me delay the decision, even though I'd already made my mind up in private. Then I had a mental health backslide a couple of months ago, my partners got together and insisted I deal with my shit, and well, I had to do exactly that. 

 

What I'm doing 

For most of my life, I've struggled with body image and weight issues, with a glaring exception - in the first year of university, I had to bike to school every day and was also swimming regularly, and it made a stark difference in my mental health. Accepting that I needed to work out regularly whether I liked it or not, but not worrying about weight loss or gain, has been shatteringly effective. I've also changed my language around working out, avoiding the term "exercise", which is too loaded with trauma and negative associations for me personally. I considered my options and went with biking and swimming, with a surprise addition of some gardening, which I really enjoy; in addition to some housekeeping and chores, which I was already doing, of course. Biking and swimming make me feel fast, strong, and graceful, and having physical ways to move that make you feel good is absolutely vital. 

You will not fix your life by suffering. You'll just exhaust yourself and end up in the same place you started, or worse. Find ways to move your body that are a) safe for your physical constraints, b) cost-effective, and c) sustainable for you personally. One person's torture is another person's pleasure, and vice versa. Don't just do what everyone says you should do if you absolutely fucking hate it. 

I'm also in four different kinds of therapy right now, doing a short-term intensive for three months, which I'm about halfway through right now. It's pretty tiring, and yes, it can take a lot of time each week. Finding therapy and groups that work for you is essential. Again, it's not going to be easy, but there's a difference between difficulty and pain. Free therapy groups are abundant online and more available locally than one might suspect, and I have to admit that group counselling has been surprisingly helpful. The dominant approach is called Dialectical Behavioural Therapy, an improvement on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, and it's working really well for me. 

Subsequent to the therapy thing...I'm using mindfulness a lot, and for me, it's working well. Now, mindfulness is actually a hazardous technique for some people, and can worsen their mental health, but many others benefit from it. However, it actually refers to a bunch of techniques. For me, that's colour breathing, grounding, and exercises to create sensory awareness of my body. Sometimes fully tensing all muscles and releasing them can really help. Point is, mindfulness involves a variety of concrete techniques and approaches; it isn't just a sort of vague mindset thing. It's a bunch of stuff. Try things, carefully. Those therapy groups often talk about techniques with more expertise. 

Frustratingly, the whole thing about scheduling has also been proven true. It's often told to neurodivergent people that we need to schedule our shit, and...yeah. I use a digital calendar app to block off my time and handle both regular obligations and appointments. For instance, I have reminders about when to scoop our cats' litterboxes, my therapy sessions, and my intended swimming times all colour-coded out. Adjust your reminders' frequency to help you actually pay attention to them. 

Self-care often gets described as either really unpleasant, important tasks like doing the dishes and scrubbing the toilet and making phone calls, or as a sort of fuzzy, vague, indulgent thing, like baths and eight kinds of skincare. However, it's a balance of these things. The most important thing I'm finding is re-framing what I consider a reward or a treat. 

Very recently, I've been shifting the perception of a treat from physical rewards to actual time. Setting aside my little chunk of time to read a book and have a little snack and a cup of tea, or to draw some words for my daily drawing challenge, has immensely enriched my life. The way I even have time for those things is that I've had to identify where I was wasting time. Doomscrolling can take many forms, and it's important to remember that our phones and social networks and apps and Netflix and games and such are designed to keep us watching. Spend time on people, things, and actions that either make you happy or challenge you. 

Another thing has been moderating the content I take in more carefully. I'm limiting some of my interactions with politics, because quite frankly, a lot of people are just fucking using the news to self-harm, and I don't want to be one of them. To quote Propaganda the rapper and activist, tapping out is vitally fucking important right now.

I will never advocate for people to wrap themselves in a bubble of ignorance either. Completely disengaging from the news is really dangerous. But limit your exposure, and especially if you're on multiple social networks - for god's sake, don't try to be politically focused and active on every single one of them. That's a shortcut to burnout. Internal boundaries are required for survival. Don't let anyone guilt or shame you into thinking otherwise. They're not respecting their own limits, and they'll end up paying for it or hurting other people along the way. 

 

Caveats 

There are several important components that are making this possible for me. One is, frankly, financial support from my parents and partners. Now, I realise that's not doable for most people, but I'm not going to be one of those people who pretends they've hauled their asses up by their bootstraps with no help or support. My family isn't wealthy, but the small amount of money and more generous supportive time, has been a huge advantage. My unconventional family structure with my partners also makes things a hell of a lot more doable and accessible. 

One of the most important components of this whole thing is just time, period. I'm lucky enough to live in Canada, where we have a flawed but still extant social service and safety net. I also have health insurance that covers my therapy. Being white and having an English-speaker name means I get the benefit of the doubt in a lot of situations. I think about these things a lot, and I'm grateful for them. 

We're often taught to be ashamed of privilege, rather than practical about it. If you have it in any area of life - and most people have it in one or two ways - lean on it and use it. Play into it, if you can do so without harming yourself mentally. Use privilege as a ladder for yourself, and then extend the same help to others who don't have it. 

That said, it's important to get your shit together enough to survive, and balancing that with community care and help is tricky. I'm not going to say "fuck everyone else, save yourself" because frankly, that's also bad for you, but it's also really important to learn your limits and know how much you can do without hurting or exhausting yourself. 

What should you do?

Still, if you find yourself in need of help direly, the best thing I can suggest to anyone is to stop trying to do it alone. If you have a few poor friends, band together. If you're living alone, move back home or find some kind of co-living situation. A bunch of disabled people working together, or family or friends, can patch each other's holes both financially and situationally.

 If you already have roommates, family, or housemates, moving to a cheaper living situation or talking to the landlord about a rent reduction might be necessary. Changing living situations to be around people who will actually support you might also be necessary. I know some people find the thought of living with others unbearable, but if it's a choice between living with others and dying alone, find a way to make it work. Have boundary and alone time talks. It beats working yourself to death for an illusion of independence.

I cannot recommend enough that, wherever you live, you take advantage of any resources available. Rent relief, affordable housing programs, any kind of food stamps, free therapy groups, and outreach centres. There are no prizes for not using the social safety net, while it still exists. 

Furthermore, the social workers I know have made it clear to me that their programs actually live and die on participation. Even if the waitlists are long, it's much better to get involved, because then local, provincial/state, and federal programs see that *the resources are being used, and therefore need to be funded.* Yes, I know what's happening in the USA right now, but they haven't actually destroyed the entire system *yet*. 

 

But Magpie, I can't do any of this stuff. 

Now, for those who are looking at this list and going, "I don't have a safe home, I don't have a regular diet, I don't have supportive people..." 

The truth is, your life is already in the process of collapse, and my type of recovery plan is not right for you right now. What you need is to work on stabilizing your living situation. You absolutely cannot fix your shit right now, and that has to be okay. I'm sorry to be the one telling you. However, some of these tips - utilizing program resources, talking to friends and family to pool resources, scheduling, and getting movement in - are all doable. Working through the panic and overwhelm is important. 

If you have any type of privilege or resources you can lean on, without harming yourself, use them. There's no sense in feeling guilty about it, and remember that what people think of you doesn't have to reflect who you are inside. Again, I stress that there's a line here about self-harm - other trans folks will know this line well, because it's common for nonbinary people to have to portray themselves as binary-gendered, for instance - but as long as drawing on a systemic or familial resource isn't actively hurting you, it's okay to do it. To be even clearer, approaching abusive family members for help is probably a bad idea, but may be required in survival circumstances. 

It's often said that "nobody can save you but you," and while that's got elements of truth to it, it's also completely wrong. Support networks of various kinds - systemic infrastructure and interpersonal ones - are the only way out. 

You have to ask for what you need. Yes, I know that's fucking scary. Yes, it means figuring out what you need. But it beats dying slowly and suffering all the way down.

The quick and dirty summary 

To fix your life and mental health issues, you need: 

1) Financial support - a stable place to live and food to eat, plus therapy fee coverage if applicable

2) Emotional support - people who will support and enable you to change and make changes 

3) Health plans - these are going to be different for every person, but movement is a basic need. Find a safe and sustainable way to move your body regularly. Figure out food supplies and needs. Same with meds or other therapy access. Procrastinating on health issues does not make them go away, and in fact, can make them get worse. They also won't make waiting lists for appointments get any shorter. 

4) Scheduling - I know, it's annoying and overwhelming, but you gotta do it. 

5) Advantages - if you have any form of privilege that you can use without causing yourself mental or physical distress, use it. 

6) Self-knowledge - this is fucking hard, and comes inch by inch, but you have to learn your own mental and physical constraints. What can you do sustainably? What help can you give others without tiring yourself out? 

7) Boundaries - limit your news exposure and pick a few areas you care about. Overwhelm and witnessing suffering can be a form of digital self-harm. People will try to convince you that this is cowardly, but it's not your job to perform enlightenment or empathy. Also, you can't know everything, and trying will exhaust you. Consuming media is not the same as actually doing shit for your community, whether local or global. Supporting and helping others is essential for building mental health, but you also have to nourish yourself. 

I realise a bunch of these need to be tailored and adjusted to each person's situation. I definitely have a bad-faith Tumblr/old Twitter ghost in my head arguing with every single point, but this is the best I can do to dole out some survival advice. 

I'm going to end with some media recommendations - for news, I really like Cool Zone Media's podcasts; It Could Happen Here, Behind the Bastards, Hood Politics, There Are No Girls on the Internet, and Better Offline are probably my favourites. I also like the journalistic coverage from Some More News, Vox's Today Explained, What Next from Slate, and Frontburner from CBC. 

For non-news, I'm really enjoying enjoying working through all the albums I've been meaning to listen to over the years, including new music from artists I already like and exploring artists whose songs catch my ears. I've been making absurd numbers of playlists, so if that's your thing, check out my Youtube and see if anything intrigues you. 

Oh, and I've gotten back into actually reading books for pleasure, which is amazing. I'll probably have an article about modern gothic horror coming out soon, because that's what I'm fixated on right now, but everything I'm reading has been wall-to-wall bangers. You can follow my reviews on Goodreads, Amazon, or Storygraph, but please be aware that I am *NOT ACCEPTING REVIEW REQUESTS* for books. 

A writer and artist, Michelle Browne lives in southern AB with xer family and their cats. Xe is currently working on the next books in her series, other people's manuscripts, knitting, jewelry-making, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible. Find xer all over the internet: *Website * Amazon * Substack * Patreon * Ko-fi * Instagram * Bluesky * Mastodon * Tumblr * Medium * OG Blog * Facebook *

Hi, everyone. Here's what comes next. -

 Happy Friday.

I was born on a Friday, and I’m thinking it might be a very good publishing day. What do you think? When do you usually read your newsletters and emails? (No, really, sound off and tell me.)

So, one thing about the blog articles I used to write, before I took basically a two-year hiatus, is that they were very structured and kind of formal. Now, I’m not saying I’ll never write essays like that again, but I think I need to change up my style because not everything that comes to me readily presents itself in that format.

Now - I want to try and publish regularly. This is how writers survive, after all. Although many writers affect reticence or suffer from social anxiety, we’re still a sort of artist, and all artists perform and communicate to some extent; and without attention, we dry up and wither away like a forgotten houseplant.
(Just a moment, I need to water my plants.)

Right. So, I’ve spent this week wrapping up my editing practice - contacting clients, deleting my website and Facebook page, and kind of saying goodbye internally. But that means I’m now freed up to, you know, actually pay attention to things like both writing and marketing (and writing articles again, something that got awfully thin on the ground over the last few years).

What will go here?

In addition to returning to non-fiction essays and opinion pieces, and in addition to a less formal style for quite a few of them, I’m going to be serializing my next work, Prairie Weather!

Prairie Weather?

My Canada Council of the Arts Grant-winning novel project is 155,000 words long. A cozy academia with many PoVs, it’s about exploring queerness, coming of age, and navigating friendship, love, and heartbreak. Set in my hometown of Lethbridge, Alberta, It’s a fun and sweet romp with plenty of interpersonal drama.

I mean, as long as your definition of a fun, sweet romp includes things like a stabbing, revenge, and a men’s help group going deeply awry.

I’m thinking that, since the trilogy is complete, I’ll post a chapter each Friday, and essays or nonfiction on Tuesdays. Partly to warm up the space and break in my Patreon and Substack, I’ll be posting some of my best works from the archives - possibly with updates and commentary.

I’ve also been reading actual books lately (gasp!), so I might talk about that a bit, especially where it relates to my creative journey(s). Right now, I’m enjoying a “Gothic Girl Summer,” where I’m getting around to a whole bunch of gothic horror novels I’ve been meaning to tackle for a minute. It’s giving me some serious ideas for the style and direction of the bottom-up rewrite of my trunked first-ever novel, then called “Synchronicity”.

Not just writing?

For the Patreon specifically, I might also post about my art, but if people are into it, I can do that elsewhere. If you don’t know, I make jewelry and knit, and I’m getting a little more serious about drawing, too, for the simple reason that I’ve always wanted and meant to, and now I’m doing a drawing challenge. (Follow that on Instagram!)

That should be everything for now, but I’d love to hear from you! If you’ve been following me for a while, what would you like to see more of? Less of? If you’re new here, say hi!

***

A writer and artist, Michelle Browne lives in southern AB with xer family and their cats. Xe is currently working on the next books in her series, other people's manuscripts, knitting, jewelry-making, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible.

Find xer all over the internet: *Website * Amazon * Substack * Patreon * Ko-fi * Instagram * Bluesky * Mastodon * Tumblr * Medium * OG Blog * Facebook *

This post has been incredibly hard to write, but here we are.

So, before I get into the career necromancy, some housekeeping.

Who tf are you?

If you've never heard of my ass before - uh, hi. Thanks for reading this far! I'm an artist and writer; you can call me Magpie or Michelle. She/her or xe/xer. I'm queer and poly, and I live with my two spouses, our son, and three cats in southern Alberta, Canada. I make jewelry and knitwear and sometimes sew; I write science fiction, fantasy, literary fiction - and maybe romantic and gothics?! Ideas are cooking. I even have a non-fiction research project I want to work on and publish.

I got married in 2022, moved houses in 2023, and moved again in 2024, the same year my wife had our son. It's been exciting and busy and packed, and life keeps happening - but it's been pretty hard on my non-fiction writing output.

Also politics and mental and physical health issues have been a thing happening to me, so you know, those take time, too.

The rundown

So, what can you expect from this space? How often can you expect it?

• I'm hoping to post biweekly (every two weeks) or more.

• Content will vary between poetry and articles, with fiction excerpts or short stories, brain permitting, plus occasional publishing news.

• I may re-publish some of my best old articles from the blog archives. Re-published articles may be edited or rewritten, and both their vintage status and any alterations to the original content will be noted.

• Expect typos. Sometimes I need to say things more than I want to say them perfectly. I'm also going to be writing on my phone a lot.

I'm going to sunset my MailChimp newsletter and switch to publishing on Substack and on Patreon. I may still publish on Medium and Tumblr, but I'm considering sunsetting my OG Blogspot blog for traffic reasons. (SciFiMagpie is my handle on pretty much every site you can think of.)

Regardless, the same content will be accessible at each of these social media locations. I'm probably not ever going to do exclusive or paywalled content. At most, paywalled content might be early releases.

I'm also sunsetting my editing work. I'll be doing the occasional book for friends, but 11 years is a good run. I haven't always been as reliable or prompt as I would have liked, mostly from mental health, and it's time for me to let editing go. I need to make stuff.

However, if you like my fiction and non fiction, or my artisan stuff, this is probably good news. I'm also going to be posting more on my Instagrams, so follow @rainbowbazaarartcollective or @SciFiMagpie on Instagram or even Tiktok to see what I'm up to. Theoretically, I might be on Bluesky, but I'm more of a long-form or group-chat bitch, so I can't promise much.

I also want your opinion on all this! If you're familiar with my previous writing, chime in. Where do you want to see me?

If you've read all this way, leave me a 👍or ❤️ the post.

See you all soon - for real this time. Change is scary, but I have too much in my head, and I'm tired of closing my mental cupboards on half-finished ideas. Time to start releasing them into the wild.

***

A writer and artist, Michelle Browne lives in southern AB with xer family and their cats. Xe is currently working on the next books in her series, other people's manuscripts, knitting, jewelry-making, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible.

Find xer all over the internet: *Website * Mailing list * Magpie Editing * Amazon * Tumblr * Mastodon *Facebook * Medium * Twitter  * OG Blog* Instagram * Paypal.me * Ko-fi