Lucy Sante, with perhaps the most concise yet lyrical explanation of the phenomenon of genre literature ever committed to pixels:

In the 1990s, bookstores briefly ballooned to stadium size before succumbing to the internet virus, and that dictated new categories. Being old and innocent, I was taken aback when I found at my local B&N an entire aisle labeled Teen Paranormal Romance. Writing proliferated in previously unexplored genre substrata, which expanded to fill the nagging emptiness of the cubic footage. Of course the subgenres were merely old genres—home on the range, doctors and nurses, froggy went a-courting, what is this dagger I see before me, we have created the thing that will kill us—with added bells and bumper stickers. The goal, eventually, was to refine the salient points of your subgenre to such a degree of specificity (left-handed heroes only!) that the affiliated facebook group wouldn’t get totally out of hand. That was genre, a category that has produced more great things that you can name, but has always primarily catered to a core readership that wants to keep having the same experience over and over.

I really have to get hold of some of her books; if she can write like that, even if only in flashes, then something long-form will be an absolute delight.

---

As hinted at in my weeknotes over at Worldbuilding Agency, I’m experimenting with rearranging the tent-pole activities of the day. This basically means moving my daily session at the RSS trough to the end of the day, which frees up an hour or so in the mornings immediately after the practice, which I want to use for thinking and writing around long-game and long-form projects.

This is only the first day of the experiment, and I can already feel a huge difference in the texture of time—probably because the RSS binge has never been an effectively bonded timeblock, except in such circumstances that external commitments required it to be so, and as such it could easily eat a couple of hours at the top of the day. I can feel the nag of the old habit, of course; time will tell how easily I can resist it, but this feels like a promising start.

The real trick will likely lie in training myself to not extend the fag-end of the working day by clicking my way through the feeds for hours… it’s nowhere near so sticky as the socnet doomscroll, but it’s worth reminding myself that RSS was the forerunner, and it was sufficiently exciting that—for some of us, at least—the adventures of Manfred Mancx and the lifestyles of the Eastern Standard Tribe felt aspirational rather than admonitory.

But those books were written more than two decades ago, and much has changed, not merely the tech stack. We tried to live those futures—and they were even fun for a while! But those futures are now pasts, and as such the old saw about those who refuse to learn from history definitely applies.