The Wheel of Time Turns, I Just Didn’t Want to Admit That

I’m about to spoil episode 7 of The Wheel of Time. If you do not want to see spoilers for this week’s episode of Wheel of Time, do not continue until after you have watched it. This is your final warning.

Spoilers ahead …

Bridgerton – How Privilege Makes You Blind

Have you watched Bridgerton yet? If not, why are you here? Also, I’m about to spoil a little bit of the plot, so go watch it and then come back.

Obligatory Trailer Here

the Broken …

So it’s been like a year or so. It’s not too late to weigh in on a series that I didn’t watch after the first episode, right?

Yeah. While all of you out there were like “Season 5 is just too much for us, we gotta abandon this” an others were like “Oh my God! The show runners ruined this with Season 8” I realized there were serious problems in Episode 1.

I’m like the hipster’s hipster or something.

That said, while I have not watched the show, I have absorbed media around the show. While there are a lot of criticisms throughout, I want to focus on one thing with the ending … so Spoilers ahead for a show no one really talks about anymore.

Planting and Pay-off do not matter if you don’t place proper reminders.

Ned and Bran talking. Obviously this is from the show and not mine so be chill.

You see, it was planted that young Bran was going to become a king in the first episode (first book for the readers). If you paid attention, you might recall Ned having a conversation with Bran. When Ned has to punish a boy rather harshly, he doesn’t tell Bran, “I did it because I’m right, don’t question me.” He explains it to him the way that you explain your actions to someone you’re teaching to be in charge.

He talks to Bran like Bran is going to be a king.

But Bran isn’t even going to be in charge of the North. He’s Ned’s youngest child. He isn’t going to be the one likely to inherit Lordship. He’s certainly not in line to be king of Westeros.

An Open Letter to the Distinguished Gentleman and Lady Representing the Fine State of Tennessee

Dear Senators Blackburn & Haggerty,

I hope your day is going well. I am sure that you have a lot of things you have to deal with in Washington as you help see to the legislative governance of our country. It is understandable, then, that you would not know about me or people like me. Therefore, I wanted to provide you some context as you and your fellow Congresspersons continue to look at Stimulus packages and future legislation.

5 mornings a week, I wake up at 4am, or earlier, so that I  am able to get to work on time at 5am. I work for a Big Box Retailer, which we will refer to as BBR for the rest of this letter. My specific employer is unimportant. My job for BBR is a Personal Shopper, which means that I am one of the people who goes out into the store to pick items that customers are purchasing from their online orders. It is a physically demanding job, requiring 4 to 8 hours straight of walking (depending on the length of my shift any given day), as well as heavy lifting of products that can be 50lb or more  (dog food, cat-litter, birdseed, and the like) as well as pushing carts with loads that can exceed  two to three-hundred pounds.

I do this every day with a mask on. With my asthma, I found wearing masks troublesome at first. It’s funny, but when you have periods where you have trouble breathing, you often find anything that covers your mouth or seems to restrict that breathing difficult to bear. I have grown accustomed to it, however, because my asthma means that if I catch COVID-19, I will probably die.

But I have to work for my family to eat and have a roof over its head. I do not have what you would call a “traditional family model” so I will not go into the details. Suffice it to say, however, that if I caught COVID-19 it is very likely that our minor children would find themselves orphaned. I take this into account every day. I wear my mask. I do my best to stay as far away from people as I can manage (as I will expand on momentarily). I wash my hands frequently and use hand sanitizer constantly throughout the day, especially between my “pick walks” (that is the term for each round of going out and gathering items for customer orders).

I have had one close-call with this pandemic, so I find myself fortunate. Or perhaps my precautions work. I was put on COVID Leave once a couple of months ago not because I was sick, but because someone I had unfortunately come into close contact with had tested positive for COVID-19. I did not get ill, thankfully for reasons that I explained above. However, for reasons that I explained above, I had to quarantine from my family as much as our living situation and finances allow. That meant two weeks of no close contact with my spouse of 16 years (who would also die if he contracted COVID-19).  No cuddling. No kisses. None of the things we often find reassuring to our emotional connection with our spouse.  I could not hug or hold or cuddle my children. My teenager was fine with this. My toddler, not so much. But we managed. And hey, for two weeks I did not have to wash dishes or cook, so why not look on the bright side!

All of that is to say that I am very, very careful at work with how I interact with my co-workers and our customers. However, BBR is a busy store. While I have a good hour or two most days where I can do my work without customers present in the aisles, once those doors open (or before sometimes, as we have a few customers who literally pry the doors open in order to get into the store early …  I wish I was being facetious there) it is a very different story. I do not know what your life is like, so I do not know if you have to shop in large stores like BBR. Customers who shop in these stores tend to shop in the same manner. That means that even back when we had up directional markers for people to follow (which they rarely did, so while I was disappointed to see those go away, it really had little effect) people tend to cluster into aisles. The idea of maintaining 6ft distance between customers is laughable in stores, where aisles can be tight to begin with and tighter once multiple customers are in them. Understand that BBR limits the number of customers that can be in the store at a time. We are not even at that limited capacity but still, because of how customers shop, aisles can be crowded. This is worse on days where we do near our limited capacity, such as Saturday and Sunday (days I almost always work).

My ability to stay 6ft away from customers is … limited at best. Once customers clutter aisles, I cannot maintain distance from them because I have to be able to get the same items they are shopping for. When customers ask me for assistance, they almost always come within 6ft of me. Backing away is almost never a possibility as I either have my cart between me and space or other customers would then be within my 6ft radius.

While many of our customers now wear masks, some do not. Even those that do often wear them incorrectly, with their noses uncovered. Some do not wear masks; they wear bandanas over their faces instead. This is not to mention the number of times that customers feel it is okay to touch my cart (customers do not, for what its worth, wear gloves) or the rare but yes existing times that customers feel it is okay to touch me.

Even with my precautions, I can only do so much to mitigate risk at my job. Every day my job puts me at risk of contracting COVID-19 despite my precautions, and bringing the disease home to my family.

I am thankful for my job. I moved to Knoxville in 2019. Before that I had been living and working in Raleigh, NC. I had a good job there and was making good money at it. I will not give exact dollar amounts, but I was making about the median wage for an Administrative Assistant, which was my job title at that time. When I began looking for similar jobs here in Knoxville, can you imagine my disappointment to learn that the median wage here was between $2 and $4 less for a job with the same requirements and responsibilities that I had in Raleigh?

I did not want to work for BBR, but early in 2020, just before the pandemic blew up in the US, BBR was what hired me. I am making $5 less than what I made in Raleigh. I do not make a living wage, which is why I also work a 2nd job. I am fortunate, however, that this second job is a work-from-home job. I have a unique privilege in  that I know a lot of different types of people, and with that  a comes solid connection for a solid, though only part-time, job. So even when my shift is done at BBR, I still come home and work another 2 to 4 hours, depending on my workload for the day.

While BBR is not my first choice for a job, I am thankful for it. Had I gotten any of the other positions I had interviewed for in late 2019 and early 2020, I would probably have been laid off. Those same types of businesses were the ones closing their doors last winter and spring when the pandemic hit, and laying off workers. Being new, I would have been one of the first let go.

So between 2 jobs, I work over 40 hours a week. I actually work more than that, as I am a parent and I am a creative person (writing, making and editing videos, and livestreaming multiple times a week). The schedule that I keep in order to try to breakout into a career that would support my family means that I am exhausted a lot, which only adds to my risk of contracting COVID-19 from a job where I am already at high risk for contracting the disease.

In all of this, however, I have seen something unique. I am an essential worker. In early 2020 when the country shut down, people like myself – retail workers, fast food workers, delivery drivers, the postal service, and other service jobs – we were what kept this country going. We were the ones who helped ensure that people got food and goods they need for survival. We were the ones who made sure that lights stayed on. That food was picked, produced, processed, and delivered.

In 2020, we finally got to hear from the rest of the country that yes, we matter in the work we do. We already knew that. We see the important work that we do every day. But finally other people saw and understood that too. We got a new name:

Essential Worker.

We were praised. We were thanked. For a while, we were thanked multiple times a day. I still have customers who thank me for working.

You acknowledge that we are essential to the functioning of our society and the economic stability of this country.

And yet … you don’t treat us like we are. You see, praise and thank you’s are not what we need. What we need is to be guaranteed a living wage.

Let me break this down for you.

I do not make a living wage. While I make slightly more than the current minimum wage, it is not enough to live on. To give you an idea of just how much it is not enough to live on, to help ensure that I had the money to put gas in my tank or scrape up enough to get Christmas presents for my family, I was donating Plasma twice a week, every week. On top of the job that I described to you, I was also exhausting my body further by giving plasma twice a week.

Do you know what that entails?

I go into a building. I get my finger pricked to make sure that I have enough blood protein and iron to safely donate plasma. Then I am hooked up to a machine via an IV needle. It is not a small needle, for what it is worth. My blood is then drawn out of my body and into a machine where it is run through a centrifuge to separate the plasma from the red blood cells. The red blood cells are then returned to me with a saline solution and blood thinner into my body. The blood plasma, by the way, contains the protein and sugar in my blood that my body needs to operate. So already exhausted, I give up a large portion of this, leaving me feeling weakened. I did this twice a week to help ensure things like gas money, lunch money at work, and Christmas for my family.

I DO NOT MAKE A LIVING WAGE.

Again, I am fortunate that my part-time 2nd job now offers me enough work that I do not have to give plasma. Now, if I choose to, it is to just have something extra. But it is not required as a part of the basic functioning of life and the special occasions that I really want to ensure my children have to build special memories.

I do not make the $15 an hour that people are currently pushing for as a minimum wage. I do not make near that at BBR.

While $15 is not really enough to be a living wage, especially in some urban areas, a $15 an hour minimum wage would be significant to me and my family.  It would mean that we are not living paycheck to paycheck (in a good month). It would mean that with my 2nd job, I could actually begin a significant savings that could go to purchasing a house (I am 47 and still renting … no it is not just millennials that were crushed by the 2008 crash, they are just the majority of those who were crushed by it). It means that I would have money the money to afford a sudden medical bill or sudden breakdown of my vehicle (things that would cripple us right now ) without having to decide what bill doesn’t get paid this month. It would mean that the months of looking and going “well, this is a lean month, so this bill will have to wait” would be behind us. Yes, that happens, even working 2 jobs.

I wanted to write this rather long letter to you because when I saw that the Senate took out a $15 minimum wage hike, it hit me. You and/or your peers in the Senate do not understand what it is actually like for workers. You do not understand that we struggle every day to make ends meet. Retail and service workers, as much as you like to imagine are teenager and college students, largely are not. We are parents. We are people who work the jobs that YOU ADMITTED OUR SOCIETY NEEDS. But you are not willing to actually give us a living wage.

I could advance, you say? I could apply for supervisor and manager jobs, you say? I could. I more than meet the qualifications for them. But here is the thing. I do not want to do them. I am, again, 47. I am not interested in doing to manager-climb. While my job is very exhausting and BBR is not the best company in the world, I actually enjoy the work that I do. It is tiring, but I am also physically active. I used to go to the gym multiple times a week when I liven in Raleigh in order to get in shape and lose weight. I cannot do that safely in a pandemic, so this job has been good for me, even when it also puts me at risk of a deadly disease.

But those benefits: liking my job, my job keeping me active which is good for my health … those do not replace the necessity of a living wage. And when my job is, as everyone has put it for over a year “an essential job” it is stupid that I cannot make a living wage at that job. It is not just stupid. It is cruel, unethical, and immoral. And it is ludicrous to suggest that when we work an essential job that if we want to actually have a living wage, we have no choice but to compete for supervisor and manager jobs that are fewer in number than the essential jobs we already work.

So I am going to urge you. If my story has moved you at all, understand that I am not alone. Understand, I have some benefits that other retail, labor, and service workers like me to do not have. Understand that for my struggles, so many struggle even worse than I do. While I make about $4 less than the proposed $15 minimum wage,  some of my retail, service, and labor peers, make even less than I do. So I urge you, if you have been moved in even the slightest, please push for your peers in the Senate to put the $15 minimum wage hike back into the Stimulus Package and pass it.

Thank you for your time and consideration,

Lynn Perretta

The Batman Trailer – Early Thoughts

So first of all, I like Robert Pattinson and when word came out that he was going to be Batman I was like, “that’s cool.” He’s a good actor and I thought, yeah, he could probably do a good job in the role. He would not be worse than some of the takes on the character anyway.

Well, the official trailer has dropped.

Grim Dark Knight

On one hand, it looks interesting. It’s dark, but grim dark is kind of a thing with Batman and has been theatrically for a long time. It’s just the vision of the darkness that changes.

Burton Dark and Nolan Dark are not the same. It’s not just ambiance. It’s also the themes and how they’re presented and in what characters.

So I’m watching the video and there is a lot to unpack in the general mood, theme, and pauses. Then we get to 1:43 and I get a glimpse of something that I don’t like. We have the beat-down.

Then we have the pounding. That pounding is not the fighting of a hero. It’s the fighting of someone pushed over the edge.

And that coupled with the general atmosphere of the trailer and the ending shots of Pattinson’s Batman has me a little worried about just what the themes and “author intention” on those themes is going to be.

It kinda seems like Reeves looked at some of the (leftist) criticism about the DCEU Batman and Superman and decided to lean into it. I’m hoping that I’m wrong. I’m hoping that my general anxiety about the shape of our country right now is coloring how I’m perceiving the trailer.

We’ll see when more trailers drop.

Alita: Battle Angel Review

Alita Battle Angel is a 2019 movie based on the Manga and Anime Battle Angel Alita that began life in the 1990s. The movie tells the story of Alita, a cyborg found in a trash heap under the last great floating city Zalem by Ido, a doctor living and working in Iron City. The movie is dense, covering about four plots from the original manga, all interwoven into one story. Alita seeks answers about herself, struggles with her relationship with Ido and his expectations of her, falls in love with Hugo, and strives to become a Motorball Champion.

First, I want to say – I loved this movie. It is hard for me to say what matched the manga because it has been a couple of decades since I read them. Alita has always been one of my favorites, so much so that when I first saw the theatrical trailer, I started screaming in the movie theatre.

I was excited.

I was also apprehensive. Anime and manga adaptations have not always gone so well into live action. Hell, comic adaptations period do not always work out so well. Rumors have floated for years about an Alita movie, but things never quite got off the ground. Worse, it is not a property that is as well known in the US as some other manga. It is not, say, Dragon Ball.

And we know how well that adaptation worked out.

Even with my apprehension, I was excited to see it. The movie exceeded my expectations. You can see that James Cameron truly loves the source material and while no, I do not remember all the minute details of the manga anymore, everything that I watched on the screen felt true to what I had fallen in love with in the 90s. The pacing was good. The CGI was amazing. The action was spectacular. More than any of that, though, I did not want to leave Iron City.

I wanted to stay in Alita’s world.

I still do. It is a rough world, but it is authentic and lived in. It is familiar to what I remember of the Manga, even if some details are adjusted, changed, added, or removed.

So yes, I loved this movie and I want to see more of it. I want to see this one again and I want to see a sequel.

But first, I want to dig a little into the movie itself and some of the things done. This is going to be the part where we get into some spoilers so … you have been warned.

A Very Fine Line That We Must Walk Responsibly

So let’s say you are an artist. You have a unique and distinctive style that has won you praise and even some fame. You’re not successful per se; you still struggle to sell work an make ends meet, but you are getting there slowly but surely.

Other new artists see your work, love it, and are inspired by it. Some take elements of your style and incorporate it into their own, both imitating you to pay homage and adding something of themselves to it to create something new.

You have become the first in a new art movement.

Pen Names

So the other night I looked at the Permanent Editor and said, “I’m going to write under an new pen name.”

He looked at me as though I had lost my mind.

So, here is the story.

Circa 2001 I started writing some freelance books for White Wolf Games. I did not have the foresight then to know that I would become Lynn Perretta, so I wrote as Lynn Davis. Fast forward to the future and connecting my work as Lynn Davis to Lynn Perretta is not that easy. Which is a shame because Mage, the game I wrote for, still has fans and with the resurgence in the Classic World of Darkness, I hold out hope that people will seek it out again.

So, you will probably notice if you pay attention that I have Harbin & Klai now under Lynn Davis and not Lynn Perretta. Yes, it is a pen-name thing, not marital changes. Sorry, not sorry, to all of my crushes.

So, I have a pen name for erotica.

I have Lynn Davis for paranormal and fantasy-type things.

Lynn Perretta I am going to save for “normal” things – that is stories that don’t involve vampires of varying types, angels, ghosts, and Nephilim.

Indies, the World, and Anxiety

So, I love independent publishing. When it comes to publishing short works, I find it to be ideal. I like anthologies and magazines, and for any writer they certainly have their value. Both are exposure to a wider market and a way to test the mettle of your work. Will someone else find it worthy?

In the 21st Century, that does not have to be the only avenue of an author wanting to get short works into the hands of readers. It is one of the things I love about independent publishing.

That said … I noticed that the last month or so, I have had modest but steady sales. It has been nice to see and has left me wondering how to turn modest and steady into moderate and steady. Marketing and exposure, obviously, but finding the right way to go about that … affordable, of course, to an indie still coming into her own.

Then the last few days happened and anxiety sets in. The problem with being an indie, I don’t have a marketing arm looking at figures and the market and interpreting what they see so that I understand what is happening.

I can only play guessing games.

UK sales had been strong for me the past month or so. I am wondering with the current events on that side of the pond, if that is affecting my sales at all. I hope not. E-books are not very expensive. I think the highest price book that has been going recently is $1.99. If it is recent happenings in the UK driving sales down – I know how tough things are for me if I am not willing to spend a dollar or two on things.

As anxious as I am about sales, I can’t ignore the news that comes across my feed. Things are turbulent and insecure, maybe more than I had realized.

Everything surrounding Brexit is complex and convoluted. It is also heated and I don’t think it is going to be resolved quickly. In discussing it on this side of the pond, we look at geo-political impacts and lessons we can take as an electorate with our own upcoming election. As with the UK, in the US we have a lot of disillusioned voters. Polls may point one way, but in this environment that is no guarantee of outcome.

In all of that, though, I hope that we don’t forget that for all of the politicians, elections, trades, and regulations, that there is a human element to this. People’s lives are being affected by this in ways we cannot even see.

We can only guess at them through a dashboard.

Strong Female Characters

I know, I just wrote about this, but I’m going to do so again. I’d like to do my small part in turning up the volume on this.

Disney has done done it again.

Star Wars Rogue One has a female lead. Hopefully, they remember that in the brand marketing. I mean really, did they forget when making the toys, cereal boxes, etc, that Rey was in the movie and, you know, central to the plot?

I digress.

I pretty much said everything I want to say about Rogue One. I love that there is another female lead. I love that my daughter will get to see that and will probably want her toy too. She got Rey for Christmas.

When Rogue One is successful – and it will be, oh it will be (it is Star Wars, after all) – we will probably see more and more female lead characters. Which got me thinking – what makes a good female lead?