Brandon O'Brien @therisingtithes@wandering.shop

Is it strange of me that all of a sudden I want to make a media commentary video about how... 'complicated' The OA is?

The @BrokenEyeBooks@twitter.com serial fiction roster is getting bigger! Broken Eye is pushing out some fascinating work, & @wcdunlap_tales@twitter.com is @fiyahlitmag@twitter.com family. Look out for CARNIVÀLE when it drops!
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RT @BrokenEyeBooks@twitter.com
Pres@BrokenEyeBooks@twitter.com Serial Fiction by WC Dunlap coming at Eyedolon - Carnivàle

https://www.brokeneyebooks.com/news@wcdunlap_tales@twitter.comc-du@fiyahlitmag@twi…
https://twitter.com/BrokenEyeBooks/status/1164267831883468800

In every project of documenting marginalized truth and imagination through SFF, including black speculation, disabled speculation, queer speculation, and more,
Nothing About Us Without Us includes how we are defined. We participate in that lexicology, or it isn't our lexicology.

Don't let anything other than Blackness brand Black Speculation. Don't let anything other than Blackness tell the world that such speculations are the whole Black Speculative soda when within that genre-space, there are so many flavours some of us have not tasted them all.

It will probably always be this complex, I feel. But we should face that complexity as part of engaging with the words and ideas we use, instead of rejecting it, and that scholarship should always be at the Black dinner table, and scarcely anywhere else.

As I may have mentioned in that panel, artists should always be playing the game, and not letting the game play them⁠—know what they mean and want, and never let anyone else redefine them for them unless it somehow serves its artist's goals, even if that goal is just to eat.

Sometimes the majority will take even the definitions we create or reclaim as pens to trap our own context, instead of allow us to continue crafting complex Black speculative lexicologies that free us up to be able to make the complex, weird-ass shit we want to make.

Listen carefully to how people use those words. Sometimes the majority uses those words so they can keep things walled off, even when the work itself uses that word. Sometimes the majority wants a thing to seem bizarre even within the radical project of reimagining history.

And sadly, perhaps that lexicology is distant, but at the end of the day should be the agreement that Black Speculations have radical transformative/transgressive potential regardless of the conflict, and you can seek work through that fact, regardless of those lexicologies.

I'm sure I've mentioned before that I feel like black creative communities have a responsibility to discover internal lexicologies, which is hard because, again, Blackness is not a monolith, but we should be beholden to our own language & our own deliberate acts of reclamation.

The issue is merely that we are often bound to external lexicologies in ways that try to codify⁠—and ultimately, when given to us externally, feel like attempts to cordon off⁠—that exploration sometimes, especially when Blackness is not a monolith.

But make no mistake: works of Black Speculation, no matter what Black artists themselves call them, are all valuable in the project of rejecting, reclaiming, and repairing. Giving Black people any space in the centre of such stories is revolutionary.

That this lexicology is so fraught comes from a place of hostility *external to blackness*⁠—it comes from the same place as the external complications of words like 'postcolonial', or sometimes even words like 'diverse'.

Even when two internal Blacknesses agree over the fact that not every Black Speculation is Afrofuturist, they often still disagree about what individual works are or aren't. The word⁠—all the words⁠—mean so many different things to different communities.

But what I want to reiterate elsewhere in the world is that it is important for Black artists to be able to determine what their art is, and to come to internal understandings about the words they use to define those things.

I will say this in hindsight: I have a lot of thoughts about how afrofuturism as a term is codified, and that came out a lot in my panel. It's... tense. I never forget how tense it is, and how fraught even entering in the discourse can be sometimes, even from inside the house.

Thanks to @winterhazelly@twitter.com’s diligent journaling of ‘That Was Unexpected!’ at @Dublin2019@twitter.com through such astounding art, I only just remembered that I asked “What is prom garbage?” The answer may surprise you! (Or most likely not!)

@catvalente@twitter.com @charliejane@twitter.com @LordGrimdark@twitter.com
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RT @winterhazelly@twitter.com
Last for #@winterhazelly@twitter.comurday is @therisingtithes, @catvalente…
https://twitter.com/winterhazelly/status/1164620978070216710

No longer being at Worldcon really did hit me hard this time, didn’t it?

I want so badly to learn how to make White Russians with this hazelnut Soplica that @karigrafia@twitter.com gifted me so it can get me through all of the new inspired writing I wish to do

Anyway, I still have a lot of Worldcon feelings (I keep saying!) & I am going to write another Magic Camp poem soon,

but in the meantime, here is a post-Hugos pic of me surrounded by friends, where it is miraculously not obviously apparent that I am an absolute joyous wreck.