It’s that time of year where I wax rhapsodic about Klaus by Grant Morrison. I pulled my treasured original issues out over the weekend (there’s a trade paperback available) and will be reading them over the holiday, just like I do every year.

“Klaus is a Santa Claus origin story, reinventing Father Christmas as a crusader against injustice and a rough-and-tumble, Conan the Barbarian-esque superhero. The series draws upon early Viking and Siberian Santa Claus mythology, but also aims to be contemporary, portraying a much cooler and fiercer Santa than the one usually known to come to town every December 25.”

It might sound a little silly, but it’s rather magical, heart-felt and totally awesome. There are 4 one-shot follow-ups as well.

Grant Morrison wrote something special here, I still don’t know how, exactly, but it feels like it was written for me. The story even very subtly pulls its plot from one of my favorite Rankin & Bass holiday specials.

And this was the first of Dan Mora’s artwork I’d seen. He’s now one of my absolute favorites, up there with Becky Cloonan.

I can’t wait to curl up with some hot tea and a cozy blanket and revisit these very special adventures with Santa Claus.

I’m currently reading a gorgeously-written fanfic* that is one of my favorite things I’ve read all year. In the introduction, the author comments that it’s “the most goddamn self-indulgent fic I have ever written in my life”.

That made me chuckle at first, but as I thought about it more I realized that yes, this may be self-indulgent in that they can’t publish it for money, but that doesn’t mean it’s not just as good or worth writing as anything original.

From where I sit, all creative writing is self-indulgent. When I sit down to write it’s only ever for myself first. Eventually it will get polished up and be ready for others, but that first draft is all for me.

I don’t know how to write any other way. The novel I put out last year, that got my biggest and best response of all my work, was utterly self-indulgent. I wrote the first draft never intending to publish it. It wasn’t until a dear one read it and had a very strong reaction to it that I decided to edit it and put it out.

As most fanfic readers know, there comes a point where a good story is just a good story. As an editor and publisher myself, I’ve read a number of fics that I can clearly see being totally publishable. With a little bit of tweaking (change a few names and file off the serial number), they would be incredible books on their own merit.

Which brings us back to self-indulgence in writing. Part of the reason these fics are so good is exactly because the author is free to write whatever they want, purely for their own entertainment. Some authors are pros in real life, others just write for the fun of it. Either way, those awesome fics are what happens when an author gets out of their own way and falls in love with their own writing, which is something I heartily support.

So if you have a story you want to tell, but feel like it’s too something (silly, deep, weird, etc) I encourage you to write it anyway. It’s only my opinion but I feel like you should be the first person who loves the story. If you love it, others will too.

*It’s a well-researched, culturally-sensitive, historically-accurate, 65k word The Old Guard fic set during The Crusades (one of my historical special interests) and it’s utterly swept me off my feet.

My work slack is very active, partly of the result of having both a healthy remote-working environment and partly because I work with awesome people. Recently, I’ve been trying to manage the level of attention Slack takes up in my day, because folks are chatty and my brain wants to keep up with everything. I’ve tried a couple things to manage the drain on my attention, with mixed success and finally found a good solution last week.

Muting/unmuting channels in groups

This turned out to be higher friction than I would have liked. I had to remember to switch them on and off and “unreads” doesn’t work the same when you have channel groups. When you mute a group and then unmute it, unread messages don’t reflect in “All unreads” and you have to click into each channel to read the messages. (Something that I’d like to see Slack improve on)

Quitting out of slack completely

I tried this when I needed to deep focus, allowing my phone notifications to ping me with @‘s. But this proved cumbersome as well. I was getting pinged often enough that having to restart slack and then close it back down was a bad experience.

Turn off the “unread” indicator

Finally! A good solution! I turned off the little red “unread” indicator on my slack icon. I now only get a tag there if I have an @ mention. It’s made a big difference in my focus level. Turning off the indicator is zero friction and I can ignore slack unless I get @‘d. When I pop in to check on my @‘s, I can take a moment to get caught up on whatever chatter is going on and then minimize slack again and ignore it.

It’s getting cooler here in the NE finally and that means it’s time to start pulling out the cozy garments! My office is in an enclosed attic that’s still pretty dang drafty. I often use a space heater on the very cold days, but when it’s just a bit chilly I don’t like wasting electricity. So, gloves, hats, and blankets fill the void. I sometimes have trouble keeping my lower back warm and remembered hearing about haramaki. I could buy one, sure, but more fun to scrounge one! I grabbed an extra long, stretchy, wide scarf and wrapped it around my middle and my kidneys are thanking me right now.

I made this scarf a few years ago and felt like it was a failure. I somehow kept adding stitches because the bulky yarn was such a pain to work with, but now I’m thrilled to have it. Eventually, I’ll find a nice sweater pin or something less intrusive than a chopstick to hold it closed.

I have a dear friend who lives “across the pond”. We’ve never met in person (or even virtually) because we met on theforce.net fanfic forums 15 years ago. Back then we were both under the spell of Revenge of the Sith and spinning tales about Obi-Wan and Anakin, while chatting regularly about our lives as we helped each other grow as writers.

We’ve both moved on from that site long ago and we no longer stay in touch with any kind of regularity, but on each of our birthdays we write each other a long email and catch each other up. It’s not even something we decided to do in any official way, which is what makes it even more special.

We ask about each other’s family, we talk about our work and if we’re still writing. It’s always a little mix of happy news and a little about the struggles. As we go into middle age (we’re the same age) the stories change. Her oldest just graduated law school, I finally found a job I love, we’re both feeling our bodies start to ache in new and interesting ways.

It’s one of my favorite things in my life, that we still have this connection, still care about each other. If we met in person, it would be hard to get us to stop talking and sharing. We also expect nothing more of the other and even the birthday emails continue to be an amazing surprise and catch me off guard.

Oh yes, I remember you, you are my dear friend, I can’t wait to hear how you are.