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What Shame Is There, If It’s You: A GISHWHES Story

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This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series Modifrant Menagerie


Modifrant Menagerie

I’ll start with something that’s an important reference – No Man is An Island.   I say this because there’s a chance there are new readers here.  A quick summary of that series is that I stepped forward and talked about that last six years wrestling with Clinical Depression, getting out of its grip and essentially fighting everyday to never be back there again.  It’s work.  It’s frustrating and fatiguing- the constant inventory taking, the timeouts to talk myself down if I start to panic…but the thing about that is, for me, it works.  It might be overkill, but I never want to be blindsided the way I was six years ago.  I never saw it come for me and once it had me, couldn’t see it for what it really was for a long, long time.  I live in fear that there will be a particularly shitacular day and it takes the support out from under me.  And I have to be careful compensating and navigating that.

I start with that because my joy was taken from me, as depression is wont to do to those it seizes.  I love writing.  I love reading, but when I found myself splayed stomach first our living room floor, pencil furiously scribbling a story for my art class in primary school, impatient to get to the finish I had in mind, the accord was struck.  I can vividly recall that excitement of getting all of it out of my head.  I didn’t even mind the hand cramping.

It’s a honest clarifier to say I love stories.  And that I am born into a family that loves stories.  They love to tell them, craft them, exaggerate pockets of them for entertainment amongst ourselves.  I am where I am with that, largely in part because no one I trusted in my formative years made me feel silly for writing things.  Usually I was the one making me feel silly, because I can’t stop myself when reading past work and drive the reminder home that it.is.past.work.  I’ve learned and grown since then.  That’s on me though and there’s more factors to that, something for a later post.

Then something happened.  I still loved to write, but I kept it to myself.  I’ve had this site for…well…nearly two decades now, and never once did I truly carve out an area for all things writ.  I had self-published a collection of works because I had done so early when a few people expressed interest in reading.  But I wrote them in a time of pain and chaos.  I was acutely aware that sharing them meant lowering the shields.  I guess I wasn’t quite ready for that for a long, long time.  It would explain why the URL was one of those you had to know it to see the content.

As a balancer, or maybe a life raft even, before Inclement Weather was a glimmer in my future, I stumbled upon a collective of Vampire: the Masquerade (VtM) enthusiasts that decided to try and take LARPing to the Internet.  I was sixteen, and I can honestly say I immersed myself with a talented and perhaps moderately creepily imaginative set of people.  Many of whom I am still good friends with today.  But I was surrounded by all sorts of people, putting out all sorts of fiction set in worlds of various bounds.  I still suck at roll mechanics, but I latched onto role mechanics fiercely.

Maybe because I didn’t think of it as writing a story since it didn’t fit my preconceived notion of what ‘real writing’ looked like, I was able to keep writing and in turn, improve.  Maybe I benefited from the only pressures were either getting a character out of hot water (and if I’m honest, I was always in it because my command of the gaming parameters often paled compared to the others in the fray), or trying to keep to a post schedule just to keep the intrigue going.  I don’t think I was exceptional at it, but I love my later work and that is partly because I cut my teeth in this manner.  I had people whose style and cadence I admired tell me they thought similarly of mine.  If anything I take away from looking back on this, it’s to gravitate to the love.  I love writing.  Even when I’m flustered because I can’t figure out the next step for the next stream of words, I. Love. Writing.  I had lost that.

Writing took a hike to the far ethers – I let a quick and dirty explanation of Yog’s Law without it being called Yog’s Law get to me.  I felt stupid.  I internalized that to the point that I was ashamed .  I kept that part of myself hidden away save from the few that already knew it and let it be forgotten. It happened in a Creative Writing class I chose to fill some of the elective requirements to finish out my degree while in University.  If they were going to make me take electives that weren’t of the antenna wafer etching variety in clean rooms, then dammit, they’d be at least something that sounded like I would enjoy for a semester.  I had a give and take relationship with the hours of Humanities I had to have to finish my degree.  I like them, but man, there were so many cool science electives out there too.

I figured I would get to do something that wouldn’t tank my GPA while writing something that wasn’t a report, or persuasive argument – something I’d do for myself in the little down time I had.  That class was my first foray into what has since been better explained in a tumblr post I came across by Neil Gaiman.  It re-framed that moment of embarrassment and shame, positively I might add.  Actually it’s part of a bigger cascade, but that’s a post for another week.

So those anthologies, published fourteen years ago and that shall never be named, were a swindle; money most certainly did not flow to me.  And I wouldn’t be saying anything about them, except for GISHWHES.

If GISHWHES looks like a jumble of letters, or you suspect I’m stretching ye old Ogden Nash principle, it is an actual acronym (The Greatest Internet Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen). I participated in 2011, am now a Guinness Word Record Holder but far beyond that it was an enriching experience.  I had a stressful blast tugging at the fibers that make up my creativity. I can also credit working with a team of strangers that became great cohorts to revel in the absurd fun as being counted among the lights I looked to when my life felt blanketed in the dark.  And believe me, in those years, I needed what little sparks of joy and happiness I could hold to.   It kept me waking up every day and trying.

I wanted to participate again, but each year as I grew in honesty about my own self care, I was honest with where I must place my energies. I still needed to put them in the things that healed me. Or, as often was the case, buoy me up on particular shitty days that might have seen a dismantling of a lot of hard work. I could, though, offer to help, if there was something on the list I could lend myself for.

I got to do that this year.

78. IMAGE. Get a previously published Sci-Fi author to write an original story (140 words max) about Misha, the Queen of England and an Elopus. -Annie Houston 59 POINTS

When I heard of this, I had just read an article at The Mary Sue about requests to mark this item off the list gone awry.  I saw I could probably lend a hand, if I qualified.  How hard can 140 words be?  Spoiler, before I found my cadence, pretty challenging.  The shift with the self-publishing, the digital platforms – this meant that I fit the ‘previously published Sci-Fi author’ segment.  While my foray into Sci-Fi is eclipsed by the fantasy works I wrote and published in an online archive (or anthology I suppose) and anecdotes I write for Chells.me, it’s there and it’s previous in all of its 2004 glory.  That’s when I realized Chells.me didn’t exactly scream site of an author, though much like that clip of Roseanne with Darlene- I’m a writer.  This is my site, so it’s the site of a writer.

It was a peculiar exercise to go and actually append writer in the ‘Who the hell is Chells?’ sections.  And I don’t know why I pretended the places my work was published and available to see didn’t exist a part from after feeling stupidly embarrassed with those poetry anthologies, I just decided to keep mum about all it.  So, while I am unearthing, I guess I can also say I am an award winning poet too.  If memory serves, there was no fee for that determination, but I understand my skepticism with it.  I like the piece, so that’s probably all that matters.

The best part about this, that even threatens to eclipse just helping people out (that unexpectedly helps you in the process),  I didn’t know I was still harboring those kinds of conflicts with something that really brings me joy and maintains it.  I just assumed it was collateral damage from the depression.  It makes sense because I feel it when I miss it.  I feel it when I’m not doing some research, or continually cursing my lack of Latin, I feel it when I open the file, start writing and well, I’m positive I know what my father meant when he said that there was no feeling like when you pull back the yoke on an airplane.

In spite of that estrangement, even the inevitable cringe I always get when revisiting work that is a old (in this case a decade!) to see if yes, I qualify and could help with striking off Item 78, it was worth it.  Scratch that, it was fucking worth it.

I put out the call, lovely people retweeted and shared my #GISHWHES tweets:

While some authors ran afoul of those breaking the Commandment 4, I did not have that experience, not even remotely close.  And I had a blast.

I may have taken the Ogden Nash principle to its limits, but I have a whole host of words that I’m likely to make into re-positionable stencils just to plaster in places for an instant smile.  Each story was a exercise in quick editing too, since I always went over 140 words.  But the challenge of concept to ‘paper’ was as thrilling as it was fulfilling.  Only near the close did some panic set in, I wanted to make sure the last one could get to its team in time to submit.


I managed to crank out 23 stories, 140 words each in the hours between my regular work day over two days. It warmed muh wee half Scottish heart to hear the recipients when they got their stories.  My measure for a good day is to to look back on it and if I feel that it was well spent? King’s to Me.  I met my bed feeling that way.  Please believe me when I say that is a kindness in and of itself and you had a hand in that.

To throw myself a lifeline so I don’t get sucked back into Elsewhere because fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice, fuck you depression its my joy, not yours.

So I want to thank the team members that gave me the opportunity to try and put a little awesome out in the world, get you some points.  For giving this thinky-thoughter a few puzzles in the way of 140 words stories that couldn’t rely on previously written ones.  I want to thank you for the kind words, they are beautiful. I sincerely hope you look back on your week and feel it was well spent.

While I wrestle with two concepts wanting to be out of my head, I committed myself to make a effort to start writing regularly here, at Chells.me once again, like I used to.  Which means it would largely be anecdotes and with some recent conversations, I’m certain I have another series in the works, ‘Stories My Mother Tells Me,’ that entice the same excitement at the thought of going to my workspace and having at it.  I didn’t know if I could crank out 140 words of Mishian Malarky, but I wouldn’t until I tried.  Now I know that I can (and quite possibly may not be able to stop).  Thank you GISHWHES, thank you GISHERs; I’m pleased as punch to have been a part of it and I am that kind of impatient eager to share them with anyone that has the teeniest interest in giving them a read and they will be posted on the morrow for just that.

Although GISHWHES can’t be given all the credit for my barreling back head first into something that I look forward to (writer’s block and all), I can credit it with yanking off the sheet I draped over the the ‘I’m an author.1‘  Who knows, maybe I’ll yank those anthologies out and enter a truce.  I can always find a place for some floating book shelves.

  1.  Well OK, I like ‘Writer of Things’, but tomato, tomahto.
  2. If you caught some references of a multi-‘fandom nature,  may I just say that you are pretty stupendous.
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