Gender time : At the library where I work there is a very strange old man who is here every afternoon, working on the same stack of twenty historical volumes. He is a general weirdo who wears a huge leather belt above all of his clothes, uses a cane that is clearly a curtain rod (…)

I adored that book (even though I read part of it through my fingers).

My whole life has been shaped by reading Andersen and being pissed off the Snow Queen never came to kidnap me. I guess I will have to journey to her by myself, and kneel.

Language is the most important thing to me, and it’s also always the first thing to be taken from me. Too much work, I’m not allowed to prioritise writing. Stressful political times, I can’t write. Insomnia, I fall into a grey country without words. Meltdown, I loose my entier capacity for speech.

A moment of softness. This is Gytha, she is the light of our life, and we named her after Nanny Ogg from Terry Pratchett’s discworld because it suited her general gremliness. She can sometimes look very judgy.

Nothing better that spending a whole afternoon re-organizing the bookshelves! (With a note of the previous system in my notebook)

I've thought about this a lot.

Afternoon at the Bibliothèque des dominicains, my favourite place. (Yes it’s a former monastery, yes it has a cloister)

It’s genuinely interesting how many longues have come out in recent years here in France, about the French Revolution from the (wow what an original idea) point of view of the king and queen. It’s almost like people realise they are part of a ruling class in a collapsing world huh.

Things that keep me writing : remembering when I was 14, being taught the concept of magical realism in class, and feeling the world crack open like an egg.
Being 20 and picking up an Angela Carter book in a random shop in Scotland. Feeling her hand on my shoulder saying « you are allowed. »

30 years of insomnia and this thing is starting to feel like a spiritual ordeal. I find myself alone at one in the morning staring at nothingness and calling out to the goddess of sleep like to an unloved child to their mother. I feel the need to sacrifice an animal and cover myself in blood.

I’ve been thinking about rage recently. For context, I live in France. Today, my wife learned she would not be able to take her middle schoolers to the cinema, because our governement abrubtly canceled the program that gave schools a minuscule amount for field trips. (1)

I’m Novembre, a little non-binary thing from France. When I am not surviving I am reading and writing… first time having an online presence for this part of myself… let’s try.