Long Time, No See

Hey, man, I know it’s been a long minute, right? Things got crazy, things got weird, but I guess it’s time to catch up, yeah?

Let’s see… oh, first thing, I got my bachelors! Psychology (total shock, I know), specializing in neurodiversity (double-shock), but then I went to go get my masters so that I could do research and social goods, and that’s when I found out that all my psychology courses weren’t APA accredited, so all that work was… well, it wasn’t for nothing, I got a lot out of it, but it definitely wasn’t going to let me work in psychology.

So, big bummer there…

But, I did indie-publish two books – Thiside of Anywhere and Throwback. The first one is a collection of day-in-the-life stories about cryptids, and the second one is a collection of stories exploring the question of what you could do differently if you could reset the last ten years. The Reset happened on December 31, 2020, and everyone woke up on January 1, 2011. Madcap mayhem ensues, kind of. They’re both first editions, and I’m thinking of releasing updated versions of each of them next year along with the audio versions, maybe as a podcast.

There’s a cursing parrot. You might dig it.

I got back into event planning, putting together the Roanoke Writers Conference in 2023 and 2024, and that kind of spun off into the North Texas Writers Collective. I’m waiting to see what kind of shenanigans happen over the end of December of 2024 to decide what big projects to do next, but I have a couple of books in the works, a couple of events I’m thinking of hosting, and then there’s the crazy food pop-up idea.

I’ll get to that later, if it looks like it’ll have some merit after the first of the year.

I collected a bunch of my school papers over on my portfolio site, and I’m thinking of cross posting them over here with some edits. I also had a couple of articles in the wings on this blog that were left unfinished when Life Happened.

Revisiting the “Normality Factor”

I’ve used the name Normality Factor for over thirty years, and it’s been a ‘zine or a comic or a site, and sometimes all of those things, at some point. When I came up with it all those years ago, it felt like a reflexive answer that held a hidden puzzle, that there was a secret meaning to it that would only be revealed if I stared at it or poked at it long enough.

Over the last couple of years, I think I’ve realized that the normality factor in this context is something not entirely different from the normality factor formerly referred to in chemistry. In simplest terms, the normality is the measure of reactive species in a (liquid) solution. In non-chemistry terms, we could consider our neurodiversity as the reactive species in the solution of our humanity. One of the reasons that “normality” as a term has fallen out of favor in science is that tends to be ambiguous; it can refer to a number of different properties such as acidic-alkali reactions or electrical conductivity, It seems almost appropriate, then, to adopt it as a neurodiversity term because we also ambiguous.

I’ve written before (and you will see again) how our neurotypes experience the extremes of the human condition: we feel emotions objectively stronger and for more sustained periods of time than allistic people do, and we can also exist in nearly zero-affect states at length. These are often considered disordered states, and in allistic people, that might be true, but the guardrails of what we experience as disordered is vastly different – and highly variable between two autistic individuals.

Am I Back? Time Will Tell

I realize that it’s been literal years since I updated here, and I doubt I have an audience anymore, but I still treat this specific blog as a kind of conversation. It’s not quite as “portfolio” as degeswain.com, and it won’t have the same writer-specific content as northtexaswriters.com, and it’s not so business-oriented as alchemias.com, so… oh, wait, that means that this really is an actual personal blog.

And I do need to give myself opportunities to blog for personal reasons more often. There are big feels and major impressions that I want to air, conversations that I want to have, about the direction of the world. I want to talk about the books I’ve been reading (yes, reading!) and what I think they might mean.

And… I miss you. I don’t know how often I can get over here to update, but I’m setting a personal goal of once a week. If you read it, cool. If not, that’s cool, too.