Announcing ‘Not Ready To Make Nice’

I recently ran into a situation where a friend on Facebook approached me and asked when I was going to “calm down.” She said that I must get tired being “up in arms” about issues all the time, and that I can’t possibly care about so many issues at once. The fact is, as I’m quite capable of balancing many ideas inside my head at once, I do care about many important issues. And along with being a writer and a game designer, I believe being a person who is literate about and critical of the world around me makes me a contributor to my community at large.

To that end, I’m creating here an ongoing set of articles I’m calling Not Ready To Make Nice. It’s named after the Dixie Chicks song of the same name, which was written after the Dixie Chicks received death threats for speaking out against President George W. Bush. For those who want to just hear me talk about games, or comics, or LARP, I’ll still be posting about that. But I’ll be marking some articles under the NRTMN heading. And I’ll be letting fly with what I feel. In my eyes, the fictional work I do and the game design I do is just a piece of the ways I converse with the world at large.

I believe that the hallmark of a generation is marked by the ability and the willingness for people to be aware of the issues around them and to talk about them in the open. There are places in the world and time periods in the world where the mere discussion of dissent would send people to prison or to their deaths, and yet having opinions and writing about them, speaking out about them, even in the most casual sense has become taboo again in many ways. People don’t want to be bothered. People don’t want to deal with “the drama.” And those who do speak up often have to deal with unspeakable repercussions like threats, harassment, and stalking. People get fatigued, burn out, go quiet.

I was raised with the idea that a person should always learn, study, and become more aware of the world around them to have an opinion. That if you can, ask questions and have conversations to learn more and come to new understandings. And in that way, I am passionate about speaking about important issues that I feel strongly about.

I am passionate about ideas. Not upset. Not furious. I don’t need to calm down. Because passion, unlike is often the case with rage, drives from a place of earnest communication and interest in exploring ideas.

That’s what these articles will be about. I can’t promise they’ll always be nice. I will avoid personal attacks where I can and judgement when possible. I’ll even post trigger warnings and research material where I can about the issue. But I will be pointing a finger at things I find curious or interesting, from politics to media to social issues. It’s whatever strikes me because, hey, this is my blog. And in doing that, I am calm, but certainly not ready to stop writing.