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I Hope the Darkness Holds You as Sweetly as the Light

By Margaret Killjoy · Birds Before the Storm · · 4 min read

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I finished a short story called “And the Clean Bones Gone” that is set in the Danielle Cain universe that is going to go out to the people who backed The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice on Kickstarter, digitally, and then in print to everyone in the zine of the month club over at Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness’s Patreon. Everyone who backs us there before Dec 31 will get our once-yearly larger than usual mailing.

Catch me on this and next week’s Behind the Bastards, learning from Robert just how bad the global nuclear annihilation system (sorry, nuclear deterrence system) is.

I hope the darkness holds you as sweetly as the light.

I hope you’ll forgive me if I write a bit less here this month, or less formally. We’ll see. I love the darkness of this time of year, because it feels like permission. Permission to want to hole up.

I can’t get mad at my dog for having tens of thousands of years of breeding to guard livestock and people, to chase deer and squirrels. So I can’t get mad at myself for looking inward at the end of Autumn. By tens of thousands of years of evolution or adaptation or whatever (we don’t call it “breeding” with humans, because it was less consciously a project), this is the time of year that I want to go into a low energy mode.

All of us, by rights, should be expending less energy right now. As pastoralists, our animals would be down from the summer fields, closer to home, and as agriculturalists, our harvest would be in. Either way, we’d be drying and canning and pickling and preserving everything for the coming winter. A few people I know are doing that, mostly as a hobby. Instead we’re working as if the natural world and its seasons had no impacts on us at all.

That enough is justification for us to destroy capitalism. But I’m always looking for excuses to justify the destruction of capitalism.

The economy demands that we keep working, for some strange reason, so I’ll keep working, but I want to do less with my time.

So I’m going to write less formally for you this month.

I’ve been back on my fiction writing, though, and that pleasantly takes up a lot of my time. Fiction writing is odd for me: half the work ...

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