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A Tale of Bees
One day, I started working in video games. That dream quickly took a U turn into making my own games in my spare time. It’s been a decade. I still wonder if one day I will manage.Sad story, etc. This is not a new subject in this space, but humor me while I rant about it again.While feeling guilty during the Christmas break for not actively creating anything, I came to realize it is not just a matter of not finding the time or the energy, but also of self-pressure. I put so much pressure on myself to make my own thing; the inner dialogue blames me for not trying to put my voice into creations of my own, for not experimenting, for not, for not.That’s where working with games reveals a special type of cruelty. Most of us who work with this do it out of love. You rarely dream of a career making games if you are not completely enamored with video games themselves. It’s what we do for a living and also what we do for fun. To a lot of people it is the main gateway through which they push their art out there in the world. It’s a language you speak fluently all of the freaking time.So there’s pressure to perfect your language, to keep doing it, to ALWAYS do it. Be better, do better, do more. So many innovative games come out every day, why are you not doing THAT? Where were you while other people were making something great? Such questions fill me. Overflow. I feel like every spare minute should be put into my own projects, pushing me to an anxious state where I end up doing the exact opposite; my brain responds by refusing it, subverting it, and actually enjoying a good break like a loser would. But why does it matter, who am I trying to prove something to?Here I pause to remind myself why I got into games in the first place. I repeat it like a mantra, over and over, because most days I need it. I need this push. I chose games because here my voice is multiplied. It’s not just mine, it’s someone else’s too. Someone on the other side of the screen is making this their own story, and I’m here for it.There’s something about not owning a story that attracted me like a magnet, and kept me somehow hanging on to the spot I carved for myself with time, sweat and tears. Does it matter if it’s novelty, if it’s art, if it leaves a mark? Ideas are stubborn, they take roots really fast and spread at high speed. Our job as people who create entertainment in fact is to polinize and spread ideas, tiny possibilities that may or may not take roots... It doesn’t matter. I just need to keep spreading them.And I know for a fact not everyone buys into this logic if they don’t see value in the final product. The niche of video games I work in is constantly frowned upon and, believe me, I understand. I understand why some game devs call to their principles and refuse to work with free to play, trust me. But I am exhausted of feeling guilty or ashamed for doing a job I actually care for. I'm not making my own indie gems or game poetry because, well, not everyone will. There are different perks to what I do, and maybe they don’t appeal to everyone, but they do to me at this point of my career. Plus, keep in mind the words of the great (and fictional) Deborah Vance:A gig is a gig, kid.So shake your bee butt and polinize the heck out of it.-Maíra
Clarity
In this exceptional weather for a late fall - we already have snow on the ground and temperatures reaching mid-winter standards - my favorite part of winter has an opportunity to shine before its time: the bright sunny days with icy blue skies. In such days the air is crisp and cold, and at night you can see it glitter with microscopic ice crystals floating around under the lamp posts. Daylight has a permanent dusk quality to it, the snow muting the sounds surrounding you. Even though I quite literally can't feel my face in such weather, I'm struck by an amazing sense of clarity that accompanies it. Crystalline sensations in a slow, slow world.Clarity is an ironic theme to choose for this week. The end of the year to me brings with it a mental fog, as if the remains of the energy I have burnt through the year linger, glazing my mind's eyes. We feel tired and overwhelmed, our heads so full. It makes me wonder what happens in these couple of weeks we take to celebrate, or ignore celebrations altogether, when life is paused for everything else to happen afterwards. Nothing needs to or should be done right now, what's the rush? Let the fog dissipate first.I think it's this reflexive moment we take to mark the passage of time - the end of a year, to most of us who follow this solar calendar - that makes this the season of clarity. We are forced to look back and forward, feeling like standing in this line that separates both as we need to prepare our next step. But there's no way to go but forward; that's the principle of time as we perceive it. Yet we feel like we need closure for yet another successful orbit around the sun.My thoughts are foggy. I can't quite focus these days, let alone feel ready to start this year-in-review exercise. But I have a few outstanding points. I am proud of this space right here; I write, you read (if not all of you, I am proud at least I wrote it). It was also a year to reflect on loneliness and individuality, to learn and establish boundaries. If anything, a year to learn how to live the "end of the world" that COVID represented this time last year. We are still adapting and crossing the fog, looking for clarity in the road ahead.That brings me hope. Or suspense, I guess.-Maíra
Small talk
"Dune" is a story that is centered on the weather. Being more specific, on how politics revolve around controlling and exploiting nature, and how entire cultures are shaped by their environment. It's an environmental cautionary tale / political drama, and also an eye-candy of a movie (the 2021 version, I mean) with plenty of desert shots and Zendaya looking great in the sand.I think a lot about an article on weather and food systems in worldbuilding (serendipitously republished this week and linked below in the new Recommendations section :D) . When we travel or for any reason are out of our element, what and when will we eat changes priority in our mind and becomes more urgent. We eat to survive and there is no downplaying it. Your brain wants to make sure it will be nurtured soon. Find food and everything else will follow.So in any new circumstance, or whenever a character is dragged into the unexpected, the logical lane would be for them to worry about basic needs. Food, shelter, hygiene. But survival instincts are boring when a character is not facing real danger. Who wants to know whether a character had a sudden urge to pee and couldn't find a viable toilet, if that doesn't move the plot? Who wants to hear about how much water a character drank when they were living the most distressing day of their life? Yet for worldbuilding these basic needs are important, especially when creating new worlds. How people seek food in this world, what can they find to eat, how does the ecosystem provide or prevent proper nutrition.A story with a pretty good foundation of how the weather and food systems work doesn't need, in any instance, to rely on this information to create conflict. Like anything in the ground work we call worldbuilding, this is privileged information that the writer/creator can use however they want, including not using it at all. It will help to solidify the rules of this fictional world and therefore have the conflicts and arcs surface. I might have mentioned before how "Game of Thrones" is a sociological narrative, a very well crafted world with its intricate rules where the plot moves as a response to the current status quo. It's not about specific characters or rooting for your favorite candidate to the throne, hence why they die like flies, but about what people in Westeros are capable of doing because of how that world came to be where it is right now. A sudden move and everything shifts, and the characters will react to it - ad eternum. That's where the story is coming from. Not what they do, but how it affects their world.With this love letter to worldbuilding I am reminded I haven't done much in a while. Hear, hear, the woman who is all words and zero writing! Maybe something to focus my energy in what's left of vacations...? Meanwhile, I left below some suggested reads, related to the craft of storytelling or just themselves good stories. Hope you enjoy!-Maíra
Realm of Ephemera
One thing I can say about airports after just having spent a whole day in them is how they don’t feel like somewhere you go to. In a way, it is an uncomfortable place. We all deal with some form of anxiety while walking through an airport terminal, or waiting for endless hours to leave this state of impermanence - waiting for someone or something, passing time as best as we can. We read, play, listen, write, surf aimlessly on the internet or work. I, like most people, make a point of preparing my “entertainment” for that time in the hallways of nothingness, to make sure I have enough to live this blank slice of time.But sitting in this space that makes an effort to smell clean like a hospital and warm like your own living room - failing miserably at both -, we have the comfort of knowing everyone else feels the same restlessness here. This is not a place where you are supposed to stay, enjoy or savor. The restaurants and lounges try to sell us another story, but it is a ruse; nothing can make it home-y or take its characteristic of somewhere we are simply not meant to stay in.Faces don’t repeat at airports. The chairs are rarely comfortable enough to spend more than a few hours sitting on. You eat poorly there because food is expensive. We all make our own rituals to survive crossing this realm of ephemera, a connection between different worlds.Although being in airplanes takes actual time, actual hours we live while sitting on a flying tin can, there is a strange quality to experiencing this hop in space. One minute you are in one side of the world, a number of hours later you are in another. Different place, different people, a shift.Somehow, it reminded of the genius of “Fleabag” and Phoebe Waller-Bridge. [I'll tread lightly on plot spoilers but there is a lot in this next paragraph on the meaning of season 2 of the show, so proceed with caution.]In season 2, the premise is that Fleabag is pining after the “hot priest” who will officiate her father’s wedding. She has no interest in religion, but her strange attraction to the priest leads her to spend more time with him and discuss matters of religion, faith and God. So, after everything she went through during season 1, we are lead to believe that Fleabag will, in her own very unorthodox way, finally heal. But what she learns - what we all learn, sort of like a moral of this season and the series itself - is that Fleabag too lives in a place of impermanence. Whatever feelings she harbors for the priest are a distraction, a way to run away from her own problems but ultimately be forced to face this as an attempt to escape herself. She lives with this permanent heaviness in her heart and expects a man who “understands” God could give her some answers, yet he can’t; no one but her can. This thing she feels is not a place she stays in. It is a stepping stone, another terminal in the realm of ephemera taking her from one place to another. If you've seen the show, remember the line the Priest says to her in that last convo (spoiler/refresher here). It's there. That's the moral of the story.So it's not just in fiction that some periods of life function like airports. They are not ideal but serve their purpose. They are not comfortable but we don’t plan to linger. Places, people, relationships, situations; anything and anywhere can be transitory, an impermanent place in the map of our lives, but we never know for sure until we feel ready to leave. Thinking of it makes me want to enjoy life better. And write better, find the transitory spaces where a story lives and explore their territory. Experiment more.Airports are funny. I don’t like them, but can’t say I dislike them either. They are their own little kingdom, with their own little rules.-Maíra
A watchmaker's hidden gift
It is a tale as old as time. When you work in a creative job and can art to pay the bills - what can be more of a dream than that? -, to do your job you tap into your creative reserve. Don’t worry, it’s just a sip. There is plenty of more in there to pour into your passion projects. Take another sip, your work deserves it. Maybe a bucket this time, will you? This might be your best work so far!You take, take and take. When you are nearly out of any reserve, it dawns. You have run dry. Burnt out. Blocked.I don’t think people take me seriously when I say this since, oh well, I make video games, not even the noble kind of games, you know? But yes: creative work is exhaustive and depleting. Creativity is not an endless black hole, it’s a pond. It runs out of water and you have to fill it again. It runs out of life, too, if you are not careful.And the (do I dare say only?) way to refill your reserves is to give yourself time to be inspired. Or to get in a zone where you are not worrying about creating, where your body is occupied with something trivial so your mind can wander. Oh, I am not the one saying that. If you ever had contact with “The Artist’s Way” or any other book or course in creativity, you will hear something similar. Picture your creative mind as a house. Sometimes you need to open the windows and let breeze and sunshine in. It takes work to make it a comfortable home.But you know what? I got trapped in self-help notions of creativity for a good part of my professional life and I can say for sure it sucks, don’t do that. Don’t buy in anyone selling you a proven formula to get more creative. There is no formula. I would go as far to say nothing in life is one size fits all. No solution is the only solution, no path is the only right way. We are all creative, we all have our own way to picture our ponds and fill our buckets. If you feel depleted, it’s not your fault. Look around; look at the world we live in. It’s hard to stay creative. Freaking hard.Every week I (try to) take some time to nurture my creative self (did I mention I TRY to?). Sounds fancier than it is, I merely take an hour or two and give myself space to try something alone. Visiting a museum, walking around the woods, dancing. I tend to choose what I already know that clicks for me, but sometimes I force myself to just try whatever, like learn a new sport, or sit by the balcony and watch the neighbors live their lives for an hour straight. The aspiration is that this will be a breathing moment to open myself to the world, to acknowledge what is around and experiment different perspectives. And I don't know how well it works, to be honest. At the very least it feels good to have this sense of effort, like I am doing something to help myself. In truth this exercise is just what I like to call the watchmaker’s hidden gift: making time (bad pun, watch me care). I can’t blame myself for having low reserves every once in a while. All I can do is give it time.-Maíra
Illusion of choice
We know the term "multiverse" all too well these days (thanks to Marvel's and what started in comic books and recently expanded to movies, TV series, video games and pretty much any piece of entertainment you could put a super hero on). But the quantum multiverse is a very real and widely-debated theory that states that whenever a diversion event occurs all the outcomes exist in different versions of the universe. Simply putting, that means that there is no picking between this or that - there is always this and that, happening in many versions of reality. Our choices define who we are, where life leads us, the people we meet and relationships we build. And at the same time, they are an illusion. What you choose might change this universe, but all the other possibilities are still happening to millions of different versions of ourselves in other universes.One of my favorite comfort movies is About Time. It's a light rom-com about time travel but also about going back in your choices and getting a do-over. And the moral of the story (spoilers, I guess?) is that there is no do-over. One choice, big or small, and you changed your entire existence by connecting this choice to a thread of billions of other choices you and other people will make through your lifetime. Changing one bad event wouldn't simply put you in another branch where everything went fine. That branch would also have a whole different "reality" - it's nearly impossible to cherry-pick one little thing we would like to change and still end up in the same place and situation we are right now, right at this moment while you read this.Choices are power, but the heaviest of powers, even though we make them every day of our lives, all of the time. Some are bigger and more evident on how they fork the path in front of you - the very unique moment in each of our lives when we realize the weight of choosing, and ultimately the weight of taking up the consequences, no matter what they are. Of closing doors and choosing to open another. Maybe that is why we obsess with multiverses, do-overs and second chances; we wish to have the illusion of control by knowing what's behind each door.There is a moment I remember clearly seeing my multiverse branch right in front of me. Back then I had a temp job as assistant editor in a film studio and had almost given up on working with games. It had been over a year that I was looking for some opportunity and nothing came up. My boss at the time offered me to take a permanent job at the studio as an editor. She gave me some time to sit on it.Now, I'm not sure the timeline I recall is right or if I'm romanticizing it, but as I remember, the very next day I received a message from an acquaintance saying a game studio he used to work for was looking for a writer and he gave them my name. That same week I had an interview and received the news I got the job. The moment I was sitting in front of my then boss, building up the courage to tell her I would take the other quirky, uncertain, video game job, it happened. I know for a fact (don't ask me how) that if I took the editor job I would have given up on games. I would be living in a different place, having had different experiences and never would have crossed paths with some of my now best friends.Every time I think of that, it leaves me in awe and also terrified. All of the time, we are making unconscious choices that can alter our reality as we know it right now. We are living in a branch where door number 2 was open, but how not wonder what does the world behind door number 1 looks like? That is the strength choices hold in video game stories. Great power, low stakes - after all, those will not change your reality, but the reality of fictional characters. And yet they can be hard to make in the heat of the moment. There is always something to miss, some possibility to discard. Video game choices make us realize that choosing does not come cheap.But we keep on choosing, every day, every minute. -Maíra
Tingles behind the eyes
There is a curious phenomena called Stendhal Syndrome, a term coined by a psychiatrist who worked in Florence and had attended, over the years, to countless foreign tourists who would fall ill when in presence of monuments and works of art in the historical Italian city. Stendhal Syndrome is recognized by psychology as a psychosomatic reaction to esthetic beauty in art. Its symptoms can range from depressive anxiety and euphoria to panic attacks and altered perception of colors and sound.A few times in my life I was lucky enough to stand face to face to a renowned work of art, and the experience of such beauty can be breathtaking, almost overwhelming. I cried only once, when I had the chance to see Monet's Les Nymphéas. I had a book about Monet when I was younger and was obsessed with the colors and shapes he could capture. Seeing it first hand was one of the most intense "famous art" experiences I've ever had. It wasn't Stendhal Syndrome, but it was a good cry.I don't know about you, but my feeling is that we are losing our sensibility to experience good art - and not just art like the Mona Lisa or whatever the British Museum would steal from other countries, but any sort of art. We have so much great art around, our quality bar is so high and our digital relationship with pieces of art is so detached that we barely have time to experience them. There is a dispute for our attention happening 24/7 - each sign on the street screams for your time, every color popping, every sound loud, every weekend 10 new things to consume on Netflix, of which five will be just meh but one will be absolutely great. Every. Damned. Week.
Rhubarb growing in the dark
One of those weekends brought a very specific curiosity around forced rhubarb, a peculiar farming practice where rhubarbs are kept in a shed lit only by a few candles so they can be tricked to rapidly grow in the dark. In fact, it happens so fast it is possible to hear the pops and squeals of their growth while their cells multiply at high speed. I know what you are thinking: let's hear it! My path in search of the actual sound (which, by the way, I was well aware from the beginning that would be nothing special besides, you know, hearing a plant grow) was paved by many, many unexpected memes on youtube. While they were not what I was looking for and made me doubt my skills to search for videos, they served me some great laughs.I love jokes, especially the nonsensical type and puns - oh, the puns! It's all about breaking expectations; you introduce a situation and deliver something that contrasts to what would be "logically" expected of said situation. Set up and punchline, classic comedy. One of the many theories around why some things are funny calls this benign violation, where there is a violation of expectations that is uncomfortable but ultimately harmless. But there is no one size fits all when it comes to why we laugh at some things. The absurd is also funny, the clicking of an idea or finally understanding something can be funny. Sometimes we laugh in the worse situations because for no particular reason they suddenly seem so funny.Somehow, some people just seem to have a special knack for humor. They are naturally funny or are very good at catching a joke where you couldn't see it before. Some studies show that people who are perceived as funnier tend to take more risks, in a sense risking that violation of expectation, and are more sensitive to how people react to them, like an innate ability to "read the room". At the same time, people who tend to self-deprecating and dark humor have more proved connections to depression and mental illness. Either way, our sense of humor seems to be reflective of how we perceive the world and most of all how we present ourselves.And there is also the question of what is humor for? To relieve tensions, for one; it makes situations lighter and relieves stress. But its part is much more visible in social living. Humor is a social lubricant, a way to bond with other human beings, to make them laugh and release serotonin, endorphins and all the good stuff we are hooked in. Meaning, when we are back into socializing in normality again, humor can be a great ally to muffle the fact we have been talking to ourselves for the past year and a half.Anyway, here is the sound of rhubarb growing. Not one of the memes. Enjoy.-Maíra
Good soup
I finally managed to catch up on the summer special episodes of The Anthropocene Reviewed, one of my favorite podcasts where John Green basically reviews things that are part of our mundane existence such as air conditioning and sunsets. In the last episode he touched on a subject I am very passionate about which is the great wonder of seeing Earth from space, with no frontiers, no barriers, just a blue rock floating in the dark and orbiting around the sun over and over again.Obviously, I've never experienced this myself, and much likely never will. And John Green didn't either. Yet, it is something that conjures particular feelings in me and sits in the back of my mind.John speaks of how we are able to grasp things we never experienced before. We can see pictures of Earth as seen from a spaceship or watch a livestream of the ISS and see the Earth, live, from space, and have a good mental image of what it looks like. Still, it won't be a comparable feeling to being there. But you can see a drawing made by an astronaut, a rendition of his impression of living that, and you start to understand. It's not the fidelity of the image, but the implied wonder in it, the aspects of it that deeply affected the artist, like seeing the starry night sky through the brush strokes of Van Gogh and realizing there is much more movement in there than we usually notice.That got me thinking about how imagination sounds, in its definition, like the most magical power ever. Think of how you would explain imagination to an alien being. It's the ability to conjure all your memories and personal experiences to form things that don't exist or that are not right in front of you. You can create the concept of a thing that could never in fact exist as something tangible to our senses, and by doing that bring it to life. It's a super power that helps us live multiple different lives at once - the one our body is physically experiencing and the ones we are forming in our heads.It is still foggy whether other animals have imagination as well or the ability to translate such imagination into art, in an attempt to let others experience this made up thing they created in a way that is closer to their senses. But what we do know is that humans do that, all day, every day. The one experience we know unites us all is death. Fear of death and its certainty is what drives all animals into living. Many philosophers way better suited for the subject than me have reflected on what death means to the human creativity - we are creative and intense because we know our time is limited. We imagine and share our imaginations to live different lives in our heads while we can, while there is life to be lived and stuff to be imagined.I highly recommend to listen to the "Orbital Sunrise" episode of The Anthropocene Reviewed for the full review and the astronaut story (and while you are there you should also try "Humanity's Temporal Range"). Thinking big thoughts is good soup for the brains.-Maíra
Laser precision
There is a proverb of unknown origin, sometimes attributed to Plato, that goes something like “An hour of play reveals more than a year of conversation.” AnonymousPlato428 was not, of course, talking about video games, but it sounds very fitting to the medium (are you listening, Kojima?). There is much more telling of one's character in what they do rather what they say. Speech is filtered, so some changes are at play between thinking and expressing in words, whatever their form. You could say that this dimension of wordless expression adds much depth to a fictional character. It's been an underlying thread in this newsletter, this idea of letting your story flourish beyond imposing words that say "this is what happens". But make no mistake, words matter.I feel we - writers, game creators, name it - take words for granted. It's so easy to use them, so cheap to put some text on it. And it often becomes a crutch that evolves to a full-on handicap, when all you trust are the words to deliver a message. So what is everything else doing there anyway?Words are precious, much more than we give them credit for. And we as game developers - I am calling myself out here too - are failing to recognize it. There is a mix of uses for words in games. In one hand comes the practical, informative stuff about rules and where-to click-for-what. Then you have the umbrella term that is flavor text, encasing story, dialogues, barks, descriptions. You might have run out of hands but there is also the weird hybrid that is communication, the text that is not in the game but it is about it; store descriptions, player support messages, social media posts.More often than not, the weight of each of those is overlooked. How the right verb can explain a rule without the need for mental gymnastics, how much shorter a dialogue can be to express the same feelings or how a blunt support answer can make your players feel personally offended. But the aspect I want to highlight is the overuse of words.Think of copy editing as a waiting game. You write. You leave the computer. Go on, have a cup of coffee, live a little. Then come back. Rewrite. Get some sleep, go out, give it a day or two. Then come back and cut it in half again. The longer you spend away from your writing, the better you will be at chopping it. And chopping is great for you.When you are making a video game, of all things, don't underestimate how smart a player can be in getting the idea. You have to make sure they understand the rules of the game, but the idea, this illusive concept, can benefit a lot of the immersive character of this medium. Less words leave more room for subtlety, such a charming little thing, and the experience of playing gives the player a different perspective on subtlety. They are not trying to understand your genius, they are living it. If you allow other elements to shine, not just the words, more than enough will be communicated. And the words you do use will be important, precious and measured. Less is more in the sense that if you keep it short, you can laser-focus on what actually matters saying.So, cut the words. Do the work. As they say, trust the process. -Maíra
She described it beautifully
The Swedish word for "science" is vetenskap. Its literal translation is something like "knowingship". The suffix -ship in English can indicate both the condition of being something and a skill as something. So vetenskap translates as to have the skill of knowledge. The difference to the English language here is that vetenskap does not only apply to formal sciences, but also humanities and philosophy, in the sense that it embraces any kind of knowledge that you can acquire by learning. Closer to the Portuguese notion of "tomar ciência", take notice, where the words for notice/knowledge and for science are the same (ciência).That small piece of trivia sparked some thought about what I will call descriptors for I lack the proper, probably existing, term. When I was a child I spent way too much time thinking about how we describe something. Who came up with the word "blue"? Where did it come from, what was the comparison to nature that lead the color blue to be described with that word? Eventually I would discover etymology (the vetenskap of the origin of words) and that it is a very dark pit in which I could live for my whole life - but to entertain you, "blue" derived from the proto-indian-european bhel that meant "to shine, flash" and in some different combinations would indicate colors, like bhel-was that meant, hear me out, "light-colored, blue, blond, yellow". Other languages just had a word for the color of the sea, blue or gray or green. Which means, nobody really knew what blue actually was, they just wanted to say that the sky was brightly colored.Picture this: you want to tell story in a world that is either a fantastical version of ours or an entirely new world where exists an entirely new civilization. Building from the ground up, you think of aspects of their existence that solidify the rules of that world. What's their history, their political system, their economy. Who are their celebrities, what is their culture, what do they do for entertainment, what do they eat, where do they live, etc etc. And when it comes to language and communication, I think of their descriptors. How do they describe stuff? Are they practical and logical or are their descriptors grounded in comparisons, meaning they name some essentials and everything derives from there. Are they romantic, synesthetic, describing from feelings or other senses that are not vision.Looking at things like that, descriptors sound like a "big picture" idea, something that helps with the foundations of your story, but my point here is that maybe they can be as important for the little things. Circling back to that topic of how characters communicate, some quirks of their personalities can be amplified by characteristics of their descriptors (I really need to find out the real name for this). Either because they were culturally trained to use a certain type of descriptors or because their mind processes things in a different way, hence they use different descriptors. Have you ever noticed that in pop culture happy-go-lucky characters, the type that is always wearing rose-colored glasses, are often portrayed as people who make up words, or invent little word games? Maybe it's a coincidence of a trope that kept on coming. Or they use similar descriptors.I vote for my theory, just because.-Maíra
Abandoned malls playing old songs
When I started drafting this issue three weeks ago, I had an idea of what I wanted to talk about but much happened in between. First I took some time off on vacations, tried to relax and buried my face in fantasy books. Nearly at the same time, a big games industry scandal broke out and sucked in all my energy, even if as a bystander. And I didn't know what to write about anymore. Although things have been slowly calming and I recovered some of my creative impulse, I still don't know what to say.I have been filling my free hours with joy and friendship, as much as possible. Also reading (Sweden has made me an avid reader again). That lead me to pick up a book by Fernando Pessoa in english, which is a whole experience in itself. Portuguese is a very romantic language, and Pessoa in particular explores it with beautiful prose, so seeing how it translates to another language is good food for a hungry brain. During these weeks I understood that this state of not knowing what to say is also out of fear of hurting others with empty words, to be out of touch or out of place. But it also weakens my own voice, the voice that wishes to claim its valid space as a woman, as part of this community. I still haven't figured out what to do with this. So while this plays out, I share here a bit of Pessoa, in english, an excerpt from the very beginning of The Book of Disquiet: "My soul is a hidden orchestra; I do not know what instruments, what violins and harps, drums and tambours, sound and clash inside me. I know myself only as a symphony."In that paragraph I realized the right stories do not get lost in translation or time - they persist.Good for all of us.-Maíra