Sibylla Bostoniensis

You're at a cafe. At the next table is a colorfully dressed woman. Her pale, expressionless face betrays no age, but her black hair, knotted at the nape of her neck and stray frizz in a nimbus about her head, is shot with white. She is bent intently over the sketchbook in which she's working, such that you can't see her eyes. Surreptitiously, you glance at the page beneath her hand. A few quickly sketched studies, a grocery list, a technical diagram, a few lines of musical score, a post-it note. She straightens and stretches, and as she sips from her cappuccino, you sneak another look. While her pen is still on the table, more words and pictures are bleeding up through the paper: annotations, corrections, drolleries, graffiti, commentary.

That's when you realize you are dreaming.

And you realize, in the logic of dreams, that the pictures in her sketchbook are made of words. They are pictures of ideas, of things that cannot be pictured. And that there are people somehow in the book, writing on her pages from the inside. It strikes you to wonder if there are not, perhaps, infinite cafes with infinite artists, each writing through the pages onto one another's books, in some great confraternity of sketchers.

Suddenly, you are looking her full in the face. It is impossible to read, cool and still. Her eyes are b--

Oh. The reason you can see her face is that you, too, are now in the book, looking up from the page.

She smiles slowly, as if she knows something, and closes the book.

That's when you realize you're not dreaming.

Siderea is a psychotherapist programmer (rhymes with "philosopher king" and "warrior poet") by trade, and a casual writer by incorrigible habit. She's been keeping an online journal since 2004 which is very much like an artist's sketchbook, for an artist who works in the medium of essays, or a naturalist's notebook, for a naturalist studying humans. She writes at the place psychology, anthropology, politics, medicine, technology, morality, justice, systems dynamics and personal introspection meet, making observations about the way the world around her as she encounters it functions, often from deeply personal perspective. On rare occasion, she detours through poetry and allegory to say true things by other means.

Some of her notable posts have been:

April 2005: Archipelago of Weird -- "Well, reality got a little klein-bottle-shaped there for a moment." An account of a graduate class on psychodrama and how subcultures exist in relationship to the mainstream. [2,200 words]

June 2013: Worth, Esteem, Self-Esteem, Validation, Appreciation, and the F-Function -- Self-esteem is not the same thing as the esteem of others, and they are both important. Also, how tyrannical parenting is screwing up Western civilization by stunting F-function development. [3,000 words]

Dec 2008: 302.0 Homosexuality -- A brief, moving, astonishing history of how homosexuality was removed from the DSM. [1,500 words]

Jan 2007: The Issue and I -- The awkward situation of being a feminist leaving STEM while still loving STEM. [2,100 words]

July 2010: The Moon Is Drowning While I Commit Industrial Espionage -- One psychotherapist's very frustrated and tetchy reflection on "Inception" (2010) and what we know we know of dreams. [3,700 words]

July 2004: The True Story of Atlantis -- Allegory. Prophecy. Infrastructure. [1,800 words]

Oct 2007: Attitude -- On how "The Secret" is like the Neiman Marcus Cookie Recipe chain email. [3,600 words]

Oct 2011: Addiction -- Understanding addiction as an unterminated positive feedback loop. [800 words]

Sept 2006: How to Make Friends (for INTPs) -- A program for INTPs (or anybody else) to run on themselves. [580 words]

Nov 2003: Consideration -- Of emotional needs, psychological predispositions, cultural practices, and social structures. [1,300 words]

Jan 2009: No One Will Ever Be Lost Again -- A psychotherapist who doesn't hate the internet reflects on how her own experience illuminates an under-commented aspect of how the shape of human social lives is being changed by the internet. [1,300 words]

Nov 2012: Review:"Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness" -- A review of an excellent and important book, but one with some critical blind-spots; review comes with a rant about what really comes between psychotic patients and their meds. [3,100 words]

Sept 2013: A Reply -- Poem. "The Dreaming has its own law -- // dear heart, did you not know this?" [1,000 words]

I miss writing. I miss writing so much.

I have such things to tell you! A thousand things clamor in my throat to be told, sizzle in my finger-tips to be written.

Maybe you miss my writing, too. Do you remember when I wrote? Maybe you miss what I had -- oh, and still yet have -- to tell you about the world.

I come to you with my hat in hand -- a hat I am placing on the ground between us.

I have not stopped posting due to not having things to say nor due to any reluctance to share them.

I all but stopped writing because, see, I'm chained to this here oar.

My financial circumstances are so very straitened, I literally cannot afford to take time away from paying work to write. Unless, of course, writing is paying work.

I would very much love to be able to take the time to write again. Would you help me do that? Would you help me by funding my writing? It would be a dream come true for me.

This is me, putting my hat on the ground, prepared to write for my supper.

Would you, excellent gentlebeing, throw some coin my way to fund my writing?

The Rules of the Game I Propose to Play

But what, you may be asking, constitutes a "Siderea Post"? In my case that's a really good question. After all, as loyal readers will note, the vast majority of what gets posted to my LJ is not what I am calling "Siderea Posts". I post pointers to other interesting things I've found on the 'net, I post recipes (both food and technology), I post a lot of n00b sysadmin questions (20 years a developer, and I'm only now figuring out how to run my own deck), I host open brainstorms, and random trivial stuff. None of that I am proposing for funding through this Patreon account.

No, I'm proposing funding the good stuff. If you've been following my journal, you know what I mean.

But you don't have to rely on a gut sense, yours or mine. After all, nailing conceptual jello to the proverbial wall is pretty much What I Do, so here you go: a rubric of what constitutes a "Siderea Post" for purposes of qualifying for funding through this Patreon:

To qualify as a Siderea Post, a post must be:

• Original -- note that this disqualifies posts such as " Calling" and "Emic and Etic" which are substantially a passage of something someone else wrote, with some commentary from me.

• At least 300 words -- while more typically my Siderea Posts are big, there have been some classics which were very short. Of course, with me, the way to bet is longer, and probably some folks are wondering if maybe I should have a word maximum.

• Be primarily a "What I Think" or "What I Made" post, as per The Seven Kinds of Journal Post Topic, or maaaaaaybe a "What I Felt" or "What I Did" if sufficiently entertaining -- no posts that are primarily "What I Found", "What I Want to Know", or "Coordinative" will be up for funding.

• Text only -- no posts primarily in other media will be up for funding. I do have one idea for a post with will come with illustrative sound clips, and there may be the occasional illustrative image, but posts that are primarily any other medium are not eligible for funding through this Patreon account.

• Be public -- while I do write posts "friends only", none of them, even if substantial and meeting the above criteria, will be eligible for funding.

I will tag qualifying posts "patreon", as well as linking to it on my Patreon account.

As a convenient side effect, I gather that people who want to subscribe to the Siderea Posts, and would rather give my cute cat pictures and flailings with embeded Debian a miss, can just follow this Patreon account for a "good parts only" version.

How Much Will Siderea Write, Or, If I Pledge What Will I Be On The Hook For?

I have configured my Patreon campaign to be "pledge by item", specifically by Siderea Post. This means each time I finish and post a Siderea Post, I log into my Patreon account and hit the "I just released a work" button. And, to a first approximation, when I do, all the people who pledged are collected from.

So this raises the obvious question, "Siderea, how many things are you going to write per month?"

I have no idea. Fortunately for you, Patreon has a solution for this: patrons can set a dollar limit per month. You can decide to pledge $X per post, with a maximum of $XY per month. If I write more posts than Y, you aren't charged for the posts in excess of Y.

I'd like to write a lot -- and I'm pretty hungry -- but I have no real sense of what's realistic. Trying it and finding out is the only way. I very, very, very strongly encourage all my patrons to set a bearable monthly contribution limit, lest I and my muse accidentally break your bank account.

Note that what I write will be affected by the total per-post level of patronage I get. If I am funded at a high enough rate, I'll be able to take more time on each post, and write longer, more deeply researched pieces.

Patreon is kind of amazing for me, in that, unlike every business model, crowdfunding system, or donation paradigm I've previously come across, it actually works the way I work.

The deal is this. If you pledge to fund my writing and if I write, then I get the money. If I don't write, I don't get paid -- and you're not out any money. I'm not held to any deadlines; I have made no specific commitments to produce.

That's huge for me because (1) my muse is a willful muse, and the stuff I write to deadlines is crap, and (2) my patients have to come first. Because I'm not committing to produce on a schedule, it's not a problem if one of my patients goes into crisis and needs a lot of my time. It's not a problem if I get sick and need to take time to attend to my health; it's not a problem if my arms need a break from keyboarding. It's not a problem if something I'm writing is kicking my butt and I need to wrestle it into submission for a while longer before it's ready to share with the world. It's not a problem if I'm all set to launch a post, only to realize there's something wrong with it, and I need to do further research or fact checking before releasing it into the world. It's not a problem if I want to go on vacation. (Hey, it could happen. Maybe. Someday.)

But at the same time, if I do write -- if can write, if I'm available and capable -- there is money on the table for me to work towards. I can write for my supper.

Something else that's a very big deal for me is that the Patreon model doesn't require that I sell my writing. A lot of people over the years have suggested that I sell it: that I "get published" or self-publish. Someday, I'll probably do that. But right now, that's not where my head is at. I don't want to sell it. I want to post it on the public internet and share it with the world. Selling it means only giving it to people who pay me for it. I would prefer to give it to everyone -- for a sense of "give" which means I retain full copyright in exactly the way you don't when you sell a piece to a publisher. And I would prefer the people I share it with be able share it with other people. If I hold my writing hostage for money, that can't really happen. Or I wind up in weird situations where my earning money from the sale of my writing is in direct opposition to my aim of releasing it on the open internet.

Patreon provides the one of the few funding models wherein I'm not pitted against myself. And by funding me through Patreon, you're not just buying my writing for yourself, you're sharing it with the world.

Also, no ads. Yech. *shudder* None of us would want that.

As an aside, can I also say: I like and approve of what I've learned about Patreon the company, itself. It's artist-run, nym-friendly, and their policies are creator-respectful is many ways; the guy in charge of this whole shebang answers emails personally and promptly; the website works really well in my experience thus far and doesn't discriminate against non-visual artists; they offer a model of patronage that work for me; and they'll let even me in. Yes, Patreon takes a cut of what artists earn through it, but I feel sufficiently positively about Patreon that I feel really okay with that: this is actually a company I want to support with my business.

I'm actually excited about working with Patreon. Even if I don't get funded to the point I need to support my writing habit in the face of juggernaut capitalism, it will sure be fun to try.

If being a scholar of human nature has taught me anything, it is that one of the things people most want in the world is to effect feelings in others. Therefore, my pledge support rewards are all opportunities to make me feel things.

Well, that and that I can't afford to do anything else, and it always annoys me when I contribute money to a cause and get random other swag back, quite other that the purpose I was giving the money towards. I figure if you're pledging money so that I can write, I should, you know, write. I understand that it's common for creators to reward patrons with exclusive chats or other social access to themselves. But time I spend doing that is... time I'm not writing. You're paying me to write, right?

Supporting patrons of my work can make requests for me to cover certain topics or ask me questions that might be the basis of a Siderea Post. But then, so can anybody. I love getting request and questions. I make zero promises to use any of them, and even if I do, it may be decades later, but I find prompts enormously inspiring. So I hardly want to limit my accepting the gifts of inspiration to only those from my patrons who support me financially; I want to accept that gift from whomever gives it.

Most excellent gentlebeings, I am asking for your help.

I know it's hard out there for a lot of us right now. If you're in a financially precarious situation of your own, please don't jeopardize it on my account; all I ask of you is your enthusiasm and good will.

But if you're someone who could spare it, and you're someone who has benefited from what I've written in the past -- if you have learned something from my writing, if you have been inspired, if you have been entertained -- please help me now.  This is the help I need.

Thank you so much for all your support.