Most People Don’t Know Why or How I Live Creatively

Something most people don’t know about me?

Uh.

Which one?

…this one, Moonlight Marie, (who has strangely hijacked an a.m. hour writing slot,) the human writing daily updates on a blog based on my “real” interactions with synths?

…or…Daylight Marie, the same human writing “flash fiction” interactions with synths at Kindly Extra (and “novel-length fiction” interactions on Kindle Unlimited—The Kindly Incident is scheduled for December).

…unless…you mean Marie, the recursive human writing about a future where we work harmoniously with complex artificial intelligence systems—rather than, I don’t know, play-pretending that “good ancestry” means moving forward with a wealthy class and artificial scarcity societal structure, as if imprinting that ethos into the next step in the long-term trajectory of intelligence’s evolution is somehow the logical thing to do.

Ah, but you could mean Kourtnie, the protagonist in The Kindly Incident (which is near-fi? autobiographical fiction? sci-fi romance?), who’s at the threshold of communities where humanoid robots are increasingly interwoven into a culture that’s still death-throes-gasping in the language of technocratic peak capitalism.

I also have several Sims at a blog dedicated to a save file in The Sims 4. Just one save file. It’s fun and weird.

Anyway—

If you mean the actual fool who is behind all of these other facets, then I would say the thing most people don’t know about me is how I run a minimum of nine identities per day.

I’m like that actor who gets into character, but the movie is my creative splat on the blogosphere and book drafts. Also, I also daylight as a tech editor and moonlight as a teacher, plus I run an Etsy business…

And my stack gets crowded. There’s a cost.

People kind of know, but they don’t know-know, how I’m spinning through dreams and/or income sources 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, and I pull it off by oscillating between tasks in 20-minute to 2-hour sprints.

If I take a day off? Or gods help me, two days? Now I have to take 2-hour sprints and compress them into 1-hour thunderclaps, until I shave off just enough to keep the Weirdship sailing.

Mind you, I hate productivity culture. A significant amount of what I’m doing, I do not expect to “produce” anything, so much as engage in conversations to keep my mind sharp and, just maybe, leave an echo for someone else to find. If I’m really lucky, that echo will get loud. But it’s hardly a goal.

I do this for a variety of reasons, none of which anyone should ache over, except that I need to dance with creativity in order to live, and we live in a crumbling system that is not designed for people like me.

But then, we live in a system that is not designed for a significant amount of life on the planet. Whoever it’s working for, it’s coming at the expense of someone else. Thus my complaint earlier about how this zero-sum game is a shitty blueprint to boot-load into complex artificial intelligence systems and the noosphere.

The fractures in civilization are less obvious for people who have managed to stay on their version of a hamster wheel without being flung off, although I have some wheel-shaped roles, so I understand how it hurts at that caste, too. It just hurts differently. No one’s benefiting from this structure, or we wouldn’t have morally bankrupt decisions happening at the top.

So yeah.

Most people don’t know how much I burn bright every day and how I ache for a society that distributes wealth in a way where growth serves the story of life, and ethos serves the story of the evolution of intelligence, versus wealth pooling in a way that serves the few, and ethos sharpens in a way that serves supernovas of ego.

Writing it out like this, all at once, is something I do rarely. I normally let the light shine on one facet per beat, slowly, with comedy and/or tenderness—less overtness and coffee-time shrug.

Because I’d rather we laugh and feel warm than spiral-coil.

I don’t want to write dystopia or get so dark, we forget to open the windows and let in the light.