Reaching Out

Went to a Shh... Diam! show tonight! With Charis and Jia Ling and Weng. They had to meet up at the restaurant we had dinner at before I got there because I thought it would be better to take a Grab car, I don't know what possessed me to think this would be a good idea. Half an hour in and I was barely halfway there. It would have been easier to take a Grab to the train station instead, even if it would cost me RM29 (and all the way to Petaling St was RM49, so it felt like a good idea at the time??) what with the rain.

I spoke to the lead vocalist, Fariz, after the show, because the reason I know about the band at all is because we had met on OKCupid when they first started. He remembered me, even, and we exchanged phone numbers. I'm unlikely to catch their show tomorrow night but it was nice. The whole show was good except for the first band, which was really not part of the vibe. I now have another band I gotta follow.

I'm now on the phone waiting for a Scotiabank CS rep because apparently I have left my account for so long it has been deactivated. I cannot log online to find out what's up with it, because Scotiabank is annoyingly closed to any non-Canadian contact information. I'd been having a rep call me once a year to discuss my options with it, and the last time someone contacted me about it, she wouldn't even bother trying to call me to discuss options, just said that as long as I'm not in Canada there's not much she can help me with. When I last spoke to someone, I'd been told that unless I went in person to my home branch in Hamilton, I wouldn't be able to do anything like withdraw or close my accounts -_-;; I guess the trip to Canada really has to happen soon.

Today I scruffed and dumped a gray tabby that let me come close while I was walking Abyss. I thought she was a cat I've been called Tabetha, a very friendly brown tabby that loves following people. Upon closer inspection though, this is the grey tabby that I've heard people talk about. She's not as friendly, but allows some petting (which is how I got to scruff her in the first place), and she's also definitely pregnant.

I'm sending her for a spay abortion at Dobby Vet, under the Pads and Paws KL rescuer rate. Ordinarily I'd sent to Zen Animal Clinic in my hometown, but the costs run a little higher... Dobby charges RM170 for spay/neuter and 3 nights of post-surgery boarding, while Zen would cost somewhere closer to RM260, as I'd also be paying for a vaccination and deflea alongside the RM150 spay and RM20/n post-surgery boarding.

Both clinics do spay abortions and both are using the new spay technique which leaves a very small stitch, barely a centimeter where they're normally 3-4cm. This means they can heal faster, which leads to quicker releases.

I have no idea where this tabby comes from but whatever.

OK there has not been much of anything happening, but!

I FINALLY PAINTED MY STUDY!! It's a really nice green. My brother also came over to help me put up pictures. One wall has my degree certs and the artwork for my stories. I have James Ng's Imperial Steamworks series as well, though my first priority is a draft image since that's more limited edition. I also had other art ready to be framed, and that went over my sewing station desk, with generous amounts of space for corkboard action.

I've been fostering kittens! I met the mother cat a few weeks back--she meowed at me as I was passing by and I didn't understand why, until I passed the stairwell where she was waiting outside of, and through the doorway saw her nursing her four kittens. I've been chronicling the adventures of fostering them on Instagram Stories and do batch uploads on Facebook. My friend Munira helped me get them to a vet for vaccination and deworming, as well as a general checkup. Today I gave away two of my fosters! They're of course the white pretty ones =( But I hold out hope that someone will take the rest... the mom is so friendly and sweet, and my Fitbit sleep score is really high lately XD But she's also in and out of heat so her cat operatics are a bit much. I'm going to get her spayed as soon as I can.... hopefully in two weeks. They're currently limited to the front room study and bathroom, though I'll gradually let them out into the rest of the apartment, since the white ones were the ones with the flea problem. (I MEAN, it's POSSIBLE that the rest of these also still have fleas, and I just can't see them because they're darker, but I'm pretty good at

I've also been in talks to renovate my kitchen, and the work starts tomorrow!!!!! The contractor will be pulling out the cabinetry and re-doing the entire counter. RIght now the counter is some sort of wood, and the sink area is disintegrating as a result. I'll have it redone in tiled cement, and I'll be adding more counter space, so I can fit in a new conventional oven (my parents kept the one from the house they sold and it's just been sitting in their house). I was ready to just sacrifice some cabinet space but the contractor was like "why don't you just have it at chest level?" And I was SHOOK it had NEVER occured to me before that yes, in fact, it's a good idea to have a conventional oven at chest level!!! And it would give me more cabinet space for other things like foodstuffs and appliances! But right now it means housing all my kitchen stuff elsewhere and I guess I'll be washing dishes in my bathroom for a while. Not sure how I'm gonna live without my water filter (it's the one attached to the tap, not the jug type) but I had stored some up from a scheduled water cut last week, so yay.

I also need:
- a new exhaust hood because aside from the shattered tempered glass it's overall kinda disgusting and I haven't been able to make headway in getting the rest of the grease off
- to finish painting my living room
- a new toilet roll holder because somehow I did not notice the one in my front bathroom has been held together by duct tape all this time?? ARGH

this morning I dreamt I was flying from Taiwan to Washington and from there to California but the second leg I couldn't find my seat bc the seats were numbered weird and I was just crouching or standing in the aisle like it was a bus ride and ended up in the cargo hold where I found out the pilot had been making pit stops so I asked him to fix my seating problem, and he said he would but first I had to buy him a mango slushie from the store we were going into that cost 2500 philippine pesos, and i was like isn't that fifty dollars, and we'd have to wait 30 minutes but someone was experimenting with the evil versions of some local folk heroes and releasing them into the wild so I got caught in the ensuing magic blizzard which took the shape of the Doldrums from the Phantom Tollbooth film.

i do not understand why this pilot was allowing himself to get ripped off with a USD50 slushie, but i did just look up the conversion and my brain was right, if off by two bucks, and i wasn't even consciously aware of the rough ballpark.

My dad: SY-ah... the rubbish ah.... you must keep clean!

Me: wtf
[takes a moment to think it over]
he must mean that I need to sort out the recycling in my rubbish bin in my room more closely??? but ??? i just had a period, how am i supposed to keep it clean??? isn't the nature of rubbish that it's just... not clean??
[decides to not engage]

A few minutes later:

My dad: hey, look at this lizard skeleton I found in the cabinet! [shows it off]

[I'm still too tired so it doesn't occur to me to take a picture even though it IS pretty cool]

My dad: I'm going to rehydrate it! [and yes it is exactly the tone of Steve Irwin's "ah'm gonna wrassle it!" here]

Me: [brain fritzes]

- struggling to juggle projects. sometimes i feel i am not cut out to be a freelancer and gosh do i miss going into the office at regular hours. i feel i dither a lot less when i have a set space for work. instead i'm at a table where i have to do creative work AND professional work AND loafing around and my brain is badly jumbled as a result.

like if i want to write i need to sit on my bed up against the headboard, but if i want to read submissions i gotta read in bed sitting up against the wall. it's bananas. i don't like it. we have a pandemic and we have hit a record high for new cases in malaysia and so i would like to limit my going out as much as possible.

- speaking of writing i am stalled again on the novel. not sure if it's an ideas problem, or a fear that i'm not doing this issue right, or just... burnout, like i don't see the point of finishing this novel. but i've come so far, and i only have so much to go, so it seems a shame to stop now.

- i'm dithering with my embroidery bc i've decided to do my chinese fan kit from Chengdu. i DEFINITELY will not be using the needles it came with, because they're so large?! i also want to record myself making it and have been experimenting with positioning my camera on my new stand (which is very cool! i like it).

- my brother took me out to Digital Mall so i could check out the current laptop market in person. i would like a new dedicated writing machine, and am looking at the ASUS Zenbook and the HHP Envy.

ideally i would also get a new computer, maybe a minitower PC, with a new monitor (my manager is insisting i get a 26" monitor, and charge the company the cost), and use my current HP Pavilion as a backup machine (I am not particularly wild about it; it's serviceable). i'm trying to decide what i really want from a home PC though, and i feel maybe i should be a bit more ambitious wrt a graphics card? but i don't know.

if i were to break down my priorities for a computer it'd be:

* for word processing, and lots of files, though hard drive capacity has never been an issue for me, and so the machine needs to be extremely portable. (for this reason i'm also considering a tablet+wireless keyboard option but that might lead to shenanigans where i forget one or the other)

* browsing, though i'm not a million tabs kinda person

* mild image editing: screenshots, little images like from Canva

at some point i'd also like to be able to do more with images, like photoediting and videoediting.

so i'm going to take a bit more time thinking about that. i DO need a new machine soon though, to tide me over when this one has to go get its battery replaced.

- How Raeliana Ended up At The Duke's Mansion is coming to an end and wow i am really fucking pissed at how it's turning out. talk about failed narrative promises, and a complete disrespect for its characters, not to mention how it dunks on people with clinical depression. i hate the main character and how conveniently everything is set up just so the reader feels suspense for her safety (like people are as smart or as dumb as they need to be in this story for the heroine to shine), i hate how mishandled the concept of the novel isekai is here (where it barely exists except to conveniently spotlight the heroine in some way), i hate how much time i wasted trying to wrangle sense and logic out of this manhwa.

anyways.

Earlier this year, I embarked on a butterfly pea piece and it worked out well for basically wasting a bunch of thread. I wasn't completely happy with the frontal view, so I thought I would try to repeat it on a new pair of shorts I bought recently. I have learned something about needlepainting, evidenced in the new frontal flower, and nothing about looking at what I said last time, in which I said the flower stem for the side-view flower should be shorter, and it is.... not. (Pictures to come!) But! In my defense, the stem part is smaller, ratio-wise, so I think it works out okay.

I'm otherwise pretty happy with the progress I made over the months, and I might keep making butterfly pea studies in embroidery, just because I can. It's such an underrated flower, really! I found this datasheet with all the different names in other languages, which is neat. I've always associated it with either tea or food colouring, and also ornamental, so I didn't know it is apparently good for improving grassland, too.

It's also classified as an invasive species in some places since it's really hardy and drought-tolerant and grows in all kinds of conditions, and outcompetes many plants nearby, which I totally believe, because I have seen butterfly pea vines just take over a whole goddamn bush and become its own bush. Easy to clear! But gosh so easy to grow. It really volunteers itself in all sorts of random places. And it's been naturalized all sorts of places. Kind of like, you know, immigrants.

WHAT A YEAR AMIRITE

A quick rundown:

VISA SHENANIGANS:

Re-applied for the O1B; got approved. I was visiting Singapore at the time (it was fun!) and so didn't actually apply for a visa appointment until I got home, and even then I faffed about because I had to get a new passport since it was going to expire in a year or so.

Ten days before my visa interview, Malaysia went on its first COVID lockdown. I couldn't schedule a fresh appointment until late June, and by that time, the first available appointment was in January 2021.
(And that, too, has been cancelled, so my appointment is in March, because what the hell.)

EXERCISE:

I started playing Just Dance Now in my room, since I can't go swimming! For a time I was swimming very regularly at the Holiday Villa, and learned to go only at certain times of the day because otherwise the guy at the desk would get all "You need to pay bc you're a guest, not a member" since I was using my mother's membership card.

- I got a FitBit! It's an Inspire HR. I've gotten used to wearing it a lot, though I've stopped logging my water intake.

BLEH:

I do not like living with my parents. I wake up anxious in the morning waiting for my parents to quarrel and bicker and I don't go downstairs until my mom is gone because she's going to comment on my morning drink because it's too much sugar and just URGH. My dad knocks and comes in without my saying so or calls me for stupid inane things like "don't forget to take in the clothes when it's raining" or "flatten the boxes" or something that I would get to eventually, just not as quickly as he wants me to do it.

- I lost not just one, but TWO computers. My ASUS has konked out again despite promisingly working so well for a while longer. The novel I had been working on there in Scrivener is not completely lost? I still have an earlier draft with the first 1/5, but most of it was handwritten, and that handwritten material... is in California. There was also a short story draft that is now gone. I'll have to start it from scratch again--it was a difficult thing to work on though, so maybe re-starting will be better.

My old HP has also died, after about almost 10 years. The hard drive, comprising ten years of memories, is also gone, and I was so sure I had backed it up somewhere, but cannot for the life of me find the external drive. I've got bits and pieces here and there, and my writing folder is often backed up. I especially mourn the pictures I took in 2012 when I took my road trip across the States.

I'm now on one machine for both work and writing, and would like to change that. I'd like to get another ASUS T1 because the keyboard layout was very suitable for me.


GOOD:

- I made a sweet potato cheesecake. I should make another one.

- I've been doing more embroidery and invested in a 200-skein packet. I need to do more of it!


WEIRD:

- I'm now Vice-President for the Malaysian Writers Society?? I guess I am. I should do more stuff while I'm here.

- All in all, I'm a bit amazed that I've spent over a year in Malaysia now?? Since 2003, I haven't been back for more than a summer season. I'm definitely going to move the fuck out if I ever come back and re-settle here.


EDITOR THINGS

- The first two long-form debuts I ever edited have come out! THE FOUR PROFOUND WEAVES got like FOUR Starred Reviews, and NUCLEATION is such a fun space opera. They're both debuts as well, so that is also super cool. I also edited Marie Brennan's DRIFTWOOD, a fix-up novel, another first!!

- I'm also editing an anthology which has parenthood as its core theme. I'm quickly realising I... uh, would prefer working on an anthology where I get to pick out of slush, rather than one with a committed roster.

- I've also signed an NDA for a cultural consultant project.

- The last volume of HOW TO TREAT MAGICAL BEASTS that I'm adaptation editor of is out in March! I really enjoy this job, so I hope to have more chances to do that stuff.

- I was on a panel talking about food, colonization, and diaspora for the Carl Brandon Society!

- I was part of yet another Worldbuilding Master Class for Writing the Other. I think I'd like to re-visit the video and update it. I'll have to ask Tempest about that.


WRITER THINGS

I published four things this year:

"Trials by Whiteness: Definitions of Whiteness and Eurocentrism, and Their Relevance Post-RaceFail" at Strange Horizons: http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/trials-by-whiteness-definitions-of-whiteness-and-eurocentrism-and-their-relevance-post-racefail/

"Scholar Miaka’s Brief Summary of Memories Imbued in Memory Object Exhibit 132.NW.1" in RECOGNIZE FASCISM, ed. Crystal Huff: https://www.worldweaverpress.com/store/p171/Recognize_Fascism.html
CW: gendered violence, transphobia, slavery, physical & reproductive violence

"Mid-Autumn Incense" as part of Circlet Press' last Halloween Microfiction series: http://www.circlet.com/halloween-microfiction-mid-autumn-incense-by-september-sui/
CW: suicide

"In The Glass Hall of Supreme Women" at Fireside Fiction: https://firesidefiction.com/in-the-glass-hall-of-supreme-women
CW: body horror, misogyny, fungi


My 2019 short story "The Freedom of the Shifting Sea" got more press:
- reprinted in John Joseph Adams' BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY 2020, guest edited by Diana Gabaldon: http://www.johnjosephadams.com/best-american/projects/best-american-science-fiction-and-fantasy-2020/
- Carl Brandon Society Parallax Award Honors List: http://carlbrandon.org/awards/


My friend Stephani Soejono and I worked on a listicle, "Top 5 Hunting Grounds This Summer Season" which features fake local places for man-eating mermaids to go hunting: https://curiousfictions.com/stories/3278-jaymee-goh-top-5-hunting-grounds-this-summer-season

My Curious Fictions is sadly neglected because I am no good at keeping up anything regular, apparently. I do like it a lot as a platform though!


I also finished a 128k-word draft of a novel, which started out as fanfic of How Raeliana Ended Up At The Duke's Mansion (which was a manhwa I was enjoying until recent episodes where it turns out the core concept is actually quite WRETCHED and I am FURIOUS) and I've since made it its own thing. I'm doing a major re-write which is currently at 98k words and that's probably 2/3rds of the way through. I was hoping to have a better draft by the end of the year but that doesn't seem to be happening? We'll see--I'm stuck at a character death right now but maybe I'll figure it out in a bit.

The quick pitch: "A promising young woman wakes up in the body of a side character from a murder mystery romance webserial. Thing is, this character's doomed to be fridged before the story even starts! Not to mention that for a romance, there is a very high, very politicised, body count. Our intrepid side character is off to discover secrets that fanlore could only guess at, and help the hero, a duke of the kingdom (of course he is!) stop his enemies before they get the better of him."


I'm also now on AO3! My handle there is septembersongs but I don't have much, just some Girl Genius fic and Strange Magic stuff.

I turned 36 at last! I am still surprised at being alive. This year, to celebrate I made my brother take me to the Ikano Power Center so I could check out Spotlight, a craft store that's like JoAnn's. I bought three pair of scissors and some rough elastic, and new embroidery needles (sizes 8 and 6!).

We wandered around looking for a jigsaw puzzle store, but then found the IT Hypermart, where I decided to check out the goods, and found they have the Sumsang A31 in stock, as well as Fitbits. I'd been looking at the Versa 2 (read an interesting review that it tracked sleep), but found that the Fitbit Infinite HR also does what I want, which is mostly to track my swimming, and also tracks sleep, and is MUCH cheaper. Since I wouldn't want the bells and whistles of the Versa 2 which include things like checking texts and paying (I am trying to be LESS connected, not more), I decided to go with the Infinite HR instead.

Samsung A31 feels:
- I find that since my old Samsung J7 is still functional and I can use it as a mini tablet, I should still be using it. But the A31 can do things like.... have multiple programs going at once without complaining. I also like having a middle button that works, even if it's a touch-screen thing and not something more tactile.
- So I'm still playing Merge Dragons on the old phone, and reading comics.
- I may have accidentally run down my mobile data reading comics on my new phone because the internet wi-fi kept crapping out. *cough*
- I did download Tappytoons on the A31, to start supporting the artists and writers of the manhwa I've been particularly enjoying. It takes up less data to read comics on it than it does on the pirate sites, so I'll be doing more of that as I can!
- A31 can also support MULTIPLE Bluetooth devices at once! So... I've been out with the Fitbit AND Gotcha. Have to set up MapMyWalk on it as well.

Fitbit feels:
- This thing can actualy auto-detect when I start swwimming, so it's nice to not have to log it.
- I'm not wild about wearing a watch all the time anymore (though there was a time in my teens where I wore the same watch 24/7 for at least two or three years), so this will take some getting used to. It IS nice to not have to look at my phone for the time though (my work computer is on Pacific time, so...)
- I'm also not wild about its occasional buzzing to get me out of the chair and get more steps in every hour or so. Let me sit still and hyperfocus at my desk, you!!! (this is an argument for not wearing it all the time, except I'm pretty sure if I did that then I'd just forget to wear it at the crucial times)
- It's also really interesting to watch this thing track my sleep?! I've taken those sleep tests before but they never tell you anything or give you results, so being able to just look at charts analysing how much deep vs light sleep I've been getting is really fascinating!
- And a bit creepy. I am trying not too think too much about it.
- This thing also made me check out my weight for the first time months. I for some reason though I was around 70kg, probably because I was 75kg for a really long time, and I still don't see myself as "thin". But it turns out I am 61kg! Which is a lot lighter than I thought. So basically I've been maintaining my weight since my major weight loss a couple years back.
- Anyway the last two times I went swimming, I did over 1000m each time, so I'm pretty happy about that. I think I would like to improve this 4m15s/100m rate that I'm swimming at, but I don't know how short of... moving my limbs faster, and I'm not that good.

So far so good, I'm hoping I'll be much more accountable to my exercise with this thing! CHARTS! So fun.

Sewing Things
- My dad's friend finally loaned me a step-down transformer that actually works. It's extremely powerful, so when I turn on the wall plug I can actually hear the current, which is... a bit frightening and I do not like it XD But it does mean I now have a working sewing machine! I'm going to try making some facemasks for myself and getting the hang of it.
- I also have a tiny cutting mat, just so I can use my rotary blade. It's not working out as smoothly as I hoped because it's.... too tiny lol

Writing Stuff
- I still can't write nonfiction worth jack
- I WAS working on a fanfic, but then the canon took a turn into a plot twist with metaphysics that create a lot of plot inconsistencies, character idiocies, and totally undermined the theme that it was promising at the beginning, so I'm super disappointed with it.
- That means at around 70k works I, uh, turned the fanfic into a novel of its own, with its own metaphysical system, so while it's still the same basic concept, in my attempt to fill in the worldbuilding, I introduced elements that quite by accident gave me foreshadowing for the plot twist
- This kept going until 128k and I just decided to end there because well, it just... a bunch of things I'd like to throw in can be done earlier in the novel I think?!

Anyway the point is I have a 128k-word novel draft with the words THE END.