rawbonedhound

Rogan: I like doing sensitivity reads.

I don’t get those jobs super often, and I wouldn’t want them to be my main thing (there’s a reason it’s expensive), but I’ve discovered I really enjoy hearing other people’s ideas and acting as a sounding board to help bring out their best! It makes me happy. The people who hire me bring so much heart and hard work to the table, and they often have really creative ideas that I never would’ve thought of! It’s wonderful when that happens.

There can be a lot of anxiety around sensitivity reading, I think. There’s this image of going to some knowledgeable person who tells you self-righteously how wrong and awful you are. But that’s not how I see it; I see it as a collaboration, me working to help someone do what they’re already doing. We state our hard limits on the webpage, and by the time someone’s gone through all the trouble of reading that, contacting us, and paying me, they’ve taken that into account. (And if they didn’t, it’ll come up long before money’s changed hands.) And if it’s not a hard limit for me, my reaction is generally curiosity and excitement. More multi in the arts! Woo yeah!

I definitely used to be more sanctimonious about this, long before I did this for pay. (Indeed, part of why I CREATED that “hire me” page was, I wanted to stop people from asking me to survey their Jekyll/Hyde murderer multi characters for free. It worked!) But I’ve mellowed as I’ve aged, in large part because I have read enough good multi stuff that I no longer feel that starving urge for Perfection Or Nothing. You don’t need the One Perfect Story when you have a bunch of good enough stories already! I have Paprika, and the Book of Autonomancy, and Mefisto in Onyx, and all the rest of it. I’m no longer culturally starving! (It’s also a nice side effect of Sneak running pluralstories.)

I also have more realistic expectations of what fiction can and cannot do in the world. Nobody who has hired me has been a blockbuster creator of the next Sybil. They’re folks who make nice little webcomics or play D&D. They are not responsible for single-handedly removing ableism from our society via the power of story. Come on. They don’t want or need a politically expedient parable of plurality, and neither do I. It’s the friction of our experience and hopes meeting reality that gives stories their charge, that grate of imperfection and frailty that comes with being a being. The agony of the relationships in Pipe Up! make it way more compelling than if the singlet friend was perfectly, utterly accepting right off the bat, or if he was just not worth the emotional investment. But that messiness? Oh man, that messiness makes it POWERFUL.

My job isn’t to remove the mess. It’s to go, “ooooh, you know what would make this mess EVEN STRONGER...”