About three months ago, a friend approached me. Seems she had a trip planned to El Salvador and had a falling out with her travel companion. Would I be interested? Now, dear reader... I pass the hat for my Patreon when it comes to rent and groceries. I’m making ends meet, but not by that much.

Zephyra asks: I’m really glad to see you starting to share your experiences with polyamory on your new blog. I have recently decided to be consensually non-monogamous, and immediately, I had dozens of offers. I don’t really want to let any of these people down, and it’s so exciting to talk to them, but I don’t have any time for myself and I can tell my kids are starting to notice how absent I am. How can you tell when enough is enough?

When I was approached to do a piece about monogamous privilege, at first I Spock-eyebrowed pretty hard. I associate the word privilege strongly with identity markers that people can’t control and are usually born with—things like race, nationality, gender, cissism, sexuality.

The best book I've ever found on writing…actually found me.

Technically this is part four of my article: The Privilege of Daily Writing and the Ableism of Prescribing It, but I am separating this part as a stand-alone listicle.

Of course, some will continue to be jerkwad dill holes. Writers are not a monolith. Maybe they just have critical empathy failure. Maybe they answered too many “How do I make it?” questions from desperate twenty-year-olds and can’t pop their clutch out of jerkwad gear. Maybe they just have too damned much dill in their holes. Regardless, they will ignore that not all lives are as untrammeled as their own, and shrug and say, “[Insert shitty and problematic thing here]”.

The time, the energy, the ability to write every day—not everyone has these. And while most aspiring writers who “can’t” write every day may need little more than some brutally honest introspection about their really real true-when-they’re-leaned-over-the-volcano priorities, there will always be those for whom the privilege of writing every day simply doesn’t exist.

Once in a while, someone says they can’t write every day, and it isn’t about their raiding guild or their after-dinner drinks or their inability to skip their beauty sleep to get up half an hour early. Once in a while, they say, “No, I actually can’t write every day.” And they all mean it.

Let me start by saying I am fine...now. But surgery did not go well.

Just a quick personal/meta update today as I turn around and do fifteen things at once behind the scenes. Every two years I am required to do a handful of continuing education units to maintain my personal trainer certification through NASM, and the time is nearly upon me. So I spent last week and early this week going to CPR certification, learning about GROUP personal training, and learning about how to help people who are on GLP-1 drugs with their fitness journeys.

Dudes, if you opened up a monogamous, heterosexual dyad  for all the hot sex in the world you were sure you'd be getting just the MINUTE the ink dried on the agreement, and now she's off having hot dates with people she cares about, and you can't handle it, so you try to shut the whole thing down, understand that you are about to create a swirling vortex spew of your entitlement and her resentment, your relationship has a better than average chance of not making it through that.

As a reformed whiner about how hard it is to meet women, please let me assure you that you won't whine your way into anyone's DMs. You. Will. Not. EVER. Do This. Self confidence is hot and this is whatever the opposite of that is. They don't owe you attention. They don't owe you a chance. They don't owe you a date, sex….anything. I hear your complaints that some people are better at this. Some are hotter. Some are suaver. You're right. They are. They do. There will ALWAYS be someone to compare yourself to unfavorably.

Once upon a time I realized that the writing I do on my public Facebook page should totally count as work, and so I started bundling the posts up and posting them instead of a fresh post every few Fridays. It made my life easier, but still got up content. The end. (Also, my editor is on vacation and though she deserves to stay there for a month, she won't be back until next week, so I did my best, but this might be a little rough around the edges.

Due to the nature of this post, I will automatically delete any comments on social media of anyone seeking to do the reading themselves based on the picture. You can make comments on the post if you want. Note: Yes or no questions are usually not great for Tarot, so the client and I talked and adjusted the question to be more like "What should I know about romance opportunities before me?"

This is a job for me, so every once in a while I need to "call in." I spiked a 102 fever on Sunday and even though it had broken by Monday, I felt like I had been run over by a tractor trailer…a few times.

It’s way too easy to find someone who will take an industrial-sized leaf blower, fill it with unicorn farts, and blow magical rainbows straight up your ass so that you become distended and rainbows come leaking out all of your mucus membranes.

In the world of writers, we want a lot of things. But there are things no one can ever give us, things no one ever WILL give us, and things the world may even do its level best to take away from us if we let it. We writers always and forever have to find these things, make these things, create these things from sheer force of will, forage for these things in the blistering fires of our own determination, and hunt down these things

I'm a fake geek guy. I like most geek things, but I don't like them enough to delve into the obsession that is a bit of a defining characteristic of the subculture. I watch the main movies or read the main books and call it a day. I can't quote Game of Thrones. (“You know nothing about snow, Jon?” Right? The character is dealing with snow for the first time because winter hasn't come yet? That's right, isn't it?) I've only read the first two Dresden books. (This seems kind of misogynistic. You SURE it gets “way better”?)

If you want to try to cite Death of the Author, it helps if they’re actually dead. And J.K. Rowling is a little bit like the toxic mold on her own wall—she’s alive and spreading like rancid musty evil in search of old cheese... It never fails. A writer does something horrible, and their defenders suddenly become these absolute experts on Roland Barthes’ Death of the Author and the art/artist divide.

I had a lot of side gigs last week. I was pet sitting, helping someone who had stuff in their house going back to 1965 to dig out, pack, and load in a trailer so they could move, AND babysitting. I even did a shift at a bakery that stocks events like Dickens Faire and Ren Faire with scones, shortbread, and rum cakes…

Folks, you've probably noticed that I'm absolutely trying to get back to posting more regularly. But maybe you noticed that last week, I didn't get going until Wednesday. That's because I had a side gig passing out fliers that I had to take. You see, where we go from here is sort of up to all of you.

Food service and linguistic pet peeves may seem like they have nothing in common, but just stand back and let me work…

Hi, my name is Chris, my pronouns are “they” and “them,” and I’m a pagan priest. Now here, that doesn’t mean much, and out in the world, it means even less. But I work with an Irish deity—one who few have heard of outside of pop-culture misconceptions, and even fewer understand. But “pagan” doesn’t tell you much. Though reclaimed in modernity, the definition of “pagan” is an umbrella so large that it encompasses any belief outside of “recognized religions” (and today, at least, I won’t get into who is doing the recognizing).

Avoid negative people and habits, but don't confuse those who make you feel bad about negative habits for negative people, for those who call shenanigans on your shenanigans are more valuable than gold. Believe in yourself. But don't fall to pretentiousness or hubris. But believe in yourself. But don't fall to pretentiousness or hubris. But believe in yourself… Consider things from every angle. Your characters can't all be you. Don't give up. Don't give in. Don't stop.

The easiest way to get a quote is just to talk to me about your pet(s) and their needs, where you live, and I will just quote a price, but if you want to get an estimate of what the cost will be, add the basic service you want to any additions or discounts that may apply (below).

[Once upon a time I wrote Facebook posts for hours a day and then turned around and wrote a blog. Then one day, someone asked me, "Are you counting the hours you spend on Facebook as writing. Because, that's writing." So now I bundle the best of them up and take Thursdays off.]

She’s always in another castle’s dungeon and therefore… Your overalls would look better In a pile on my floor

It's really shocking to me how many people on both sides think 47 is not going to do just EXACTLY what he says he's going to do. They just keep thinking THEIR water's edge will be HIS water's edge. And it won't.

When I was pretty young, my grandfather's best friend took eight or nine lowballs of bourbon, my step-brother's bike, and a tree that was minding its own fucking business, and got himself killed—though not before one of those heart-wrenching concussions and a non-responsive coma that make the decision about what to do impossible.

So I’m over a decade out of a creative writing program* and I carved out my place as a writer, got cancer, had a series of unfortunate events, and am now trying to build the whole thing again. [*I got tired of editing this every year. I graduated in December 2011] And as I do, I’m going to post it right here.

I actually LOVE our uncompromising leftist idealists. They keep me honest, and they keep me focused. I want to do everything to give their idealism expression. They are the ones that call for change, force the mirror up to society, and often spill blood to bring about a world that institutional and entrenched power will resist. They do not accept incrementalism because liberation and equality should never have been lost—to say nothing of taking decades to acquire.

Ah, love.The sweet caress of twilight. The magic in the air. Mental synchronization so amazing that you finish each other’s… sandwiches. And, of course, that complete torpedo of vasopressin, adrenaline, dopamine, and oxytocin straight to your ability to sit down, sit still, and have a coherent thought.

[CN: Mention of sexual assault. R*pe.] Hi, folks, I think it might be Thursday before you see this officially, but I've been writing it for most of Wednesday while Pam Bondi memes drift up my Facebook feed with a disturbing regularity.

Note: The events spoken of in this article are nearly 20 years past. What has happened within publishing since then has cemented many changes that were predicted. People will do web searches on your name as soon as you are in the public sphere. Make sure they find something worth finding. It was my second-to-last semester when I heard the best advice of my entire writing program…

I didn’t give up writing these last two months. And I haven’t been fighting rabid lemurs. I’ve just been going through a lot. I’ll tell you all about it… Well, okay, I’ll tell you about some of it. Some of it is not my story to tell. Some of it is just Rashomon interpretations of the same story. It’s pointless to lay blame and unfair, given the size of this platform, to tell my side of the “my side/her side” things.

I’m about to start writing about The Morrigan again as we tick up our content here at The Cookie Crumbles. And I need to add a very special word about Unverified Personal Gnosis.

Folks, I'm sorry it's come to this, but I have no choice. Like most, I can no longer ignore the effects of inflation. I held off as long as I could, knowing that the economic future was—at best—rocky and mercurial. But I have succumbed as well to the rising cost of everything. I have to retire my $3 Patreon tier. …

Driving cars and writing. Totally different things right? Stephen King might be able to compare the process of character based writing to driving in the fog, but there's no way driving could be a ridiculously awesome extended metaphor for writing is there? Well, buckle up. Because yes there is.

“Dems are just as bad,” they say. You’re going to hear this a lot more in the next two years.

OR Would Someone Polyamorous Ever Date Someone Who Wasn't Question: If someone non-monogamous wanted to date a monogamous person, would they consider it? Would YOU consider it?  Short Answer: Not really. Unless you’re asking me out. But then, actually, probably not. Unless…  👀 Longer Answer: Okay, so it turns out that this is a place where there’s like a 99% answer, and then a brilliant rainbow of nuance in that 1%, so I’m going to drill down a little…(read on)

Blogust is an idea… a concept. It's not just an actual time. You can have Blogust in September. You can have winter Blogust. What's important is that you hold Blogust close to your heart. —Chris Cookie, probably

My uncle died on the night of September 8th.

For everything my stepfather was terrible about—and occasionally even abusive he was actually pretty decent at these little Pez-dispenser bits of wisdom.

It’s been a few years, but it’s time to renew a time-honored tradition of perhaps the worst play on words imaginable. (Except for maybe the joke about going to the dentist at 2:30 [tooth-hurty].) W…

The Internet is teeming with (often great) advice, but it’s all blobbed together. You get advice like “don’t comply in advance” in the same listicle as “learn gritty survival skills involving bowie kn...

A collection of the most shared posts from My Public Facebook Page. I do a lot of writing there at the moment. So I use a compilation (with some revision and editing) to fill a post once or twice a month.

Either these people dropping these comments don’t know how libraries work, or they don’t know what a company like Amazon does to make money off the efforts of writers. Fortunately, punching holes in this kind of shit is just exactly my wheelhouse, as long as folks let me put on my snarkiest cestus before my pugilism of ignorance-bashing begins. Also my sweatshop-calibre-overworked metaphors.