I wish I was the kind of person who could write when things are hard. I wish I could just turn my brain and feelings off and vanish into the story, use it to escape the everyday pains. I know people who can do this. When I was younger, I could do this. But like the poem goes, the world is too much with us; late and soon.

I felt Renee Good’s murder like I felt the Pulse nightclub shooting. Sickened and not surprised. A wound in the brackish place where private life meets social role. A civilian is supposed to obey a cop, but more primally, a woman is supposed to obey a man. This is the patriarchal contract, built on the decaying (God willing) reality that socially, financially, physically, a woman needs a man to protect her. She’s supposed to comply. She’s supposed to be afraid of his anger and grateful for his mercy. All the time. She’s not supposed to laugh at him. If she laughs at him, he gets to kill her.

And don’t we all know this story? I’m speaking to the women here. Haven’t we all felt the bottom drop out of the world the first time we asked ourselves Is he going to hit me? Because when you violate the contract that says a man will keep you safe as long as you obey him, he gets to hit you to get you back in line. If you’re not tractable, he gets to do worse. We all know this story.

“She was with her wife, driving her sensible SUV. Her dog was in the backseat, for fuck’s sake. In a parallel universe, Renee Good could have been me.”

“Yeah,” my husband said. “And if that fucker had shot you, to them you’d just be another dead dyke.”

And there’s the brackish place: if the disobedient woman is queer, the man gets to kill her and history gets to redact her, boil her down to just a mother, just the identity most accessible to the heterosexual majority. The President gets to say she was with her “friend” when she was murdered. And that sanitizing, reductive story is the kindest outcome you can get from those people, because a mother is something society can recognize and canonize. They can ignore that the rest of her identity is a bunch of confusing acronyms and leering jokes about who the man is and turning you straight and fence-sitters and phases and choosing a side and scissoring. 

The percentage of society that leers is the same percentage that would say that being able to make those jokes is evidence that there was something wrong her in the first place, that would have lobotomized her two hundred years ago. If I were killed in the street today that same percentage would retcon my husband into my wife.

It’s enough to make you want to burn the world down.

And Renee Good is just one part of it. Alex Pretti helping a woman get off the ground. Liam Ramos, who is five fucking years old, and his Spidey backpack. All of the other innocent queers and mothers and helpers and children whose names we’ll never know because the crimes against them weren’t caught on camera.

I can’t think about it too long or I start to feel insane.

Anyway, I’m not good at writing when I’m upset, or when I’m sick, or when I’m heartbroken. January had all three of these problems in varying weights. There’s nothing to connect the macro of society’s evils to the micro of my personal turmoil except that I’m the one experiencing all of it, so suffice it to say that I suffered a lot in January and I am still suffering, but it’s hard to look at the big picture problems of the world and feel like my suffering matters very much.

I wrote slightly over 7,500 words in January—that’s words of fiction and for this newsletter, and not counting personal journaling and the once-daily journal I’ve been keeping since the beginning of the year. That’s not as much as I wanted to write, but hey, given that January included two different illnesses, an ER visit for my husband, an ER visit for me with accompanying X-rays, my first CT scan, and extremely intimate ultrasound, the rejection of the one thing I submitted for publication last year (didn’t even make it out of slush!), a slightly sprained ankle, a UTI, a significant personal heartbreak, and a baby goat who needs thrice-daily medical care for an eye infection, I’ll take what I can get.

I started 2026 with plans to update this newsletter twice monthly, at the new and full moons, but the day before the January new moon the aforementioned significant personal heartbreak occurred and I spent the day itself crying. I’m thinking about moving to a twice-monthly update schedule anyway, one public update for writing-related stuff that would be useful and interesting to everyone, and one gated updated for more personal stuff targeted at a smaller group. The primary motivation for that second set of updates is to stay connected to the folks who love me and who I don’t get to see very often anymore, but given that among its many blessings January gifted me with both approximately $3,000 in emergency room bills (I’m fine) and a surprise $2,000 homeowners insurance bill, I might enable some kind of paid subscription model for people I don’t know personally but who still want to read about my fucking feelings for some reason.