A UTS is an Unrolled Tweet Storm. I find that I’m doing a lot more of my super-short and short work on Twitter, not because I especially like the platform (I’m ambivalent) but because the 280 character limit makes me edit my words.
Since a woman who writes 700,000 word epic fantasies actually needs to learn to brief it up. (There’s gonna be an update on that here in a couple days.)
It’s not going to happen, I’m going to continue to gush words like I’ve opened an artery, but at least each paragraph I write will have a limit, and Twitter only lets me have 25 tweets in a thread before it tells me to either wrap it up, delete it, or post the bastard and let people react.
I’ll add each tweet storm as I unroll them (or as someone else does for me, because that happens, too, and it makes me blush every time.)
The first one I wrote worth keeping is this, written a week after Parkland. It’s no secret I’m not a huge fan of guns. I grew up around them, but on base, the regs keep them locked up, secured. Only MPs have them. Having them in the house is a terrible idea, especially with two adults who abuse the hell out of each other. I can admit I had both suicidal ideation and homicidal ideation when the legally responsible parties were getting their Narc Gas Supply from each other. (Long years later, it’s more that I wouldn’t direct a stream of pee at either one, even if they were on fire.) If a gun had been in any house during my childhood, there’s a very good chance someone would not have survived. But they weren’t, and we all did.
And then my cousin (not first cousin, but effectively so, because my 8 great aunts and great-grandmother were enmeshed in one another’s lives, and so where their kids and grandkids, and we’re all part of the same generation) was killed by a responsible gun owner — a gunsmith! — in 2012. The gunsmith test-fired a gun across a small lake. The bullet went through the wall and into my sleeping cousin who’d just come off a night shift. He died before he got to the hospital and left a devastated widow and three children, with very little life insurance or compensation from his killer. The gunsmith got 60 days suspended and pled down to a misdemeanor so as far as I know, the gunsmith can still own guns. That’s how easily a responsible gun owner becomes a murderer.
My professional life is full of trauma, and a gun plays into most of the situations that gets a client and me in the same room. I can’t say I’ve seen all of the scenarios, but human dramas are like narratives: there are only so many possible ways for an incident to go. TVTropes is not just a time suck, it breaks down most of the personality archetypes and story arcs available to bipedal mammals who sexually reproduce and have decoupled reproduction from emotion.
As always, I moderate comments. I have rather little patience with apologists or those who want to claim they are the exception. I doubt they are. We can have a conversation about it, but we’re going to do it on Twitter, and I have specific questions I start with. I think if they went into a therapeutic relationship with openness and honesty, they’d realize they’re not unique, not nearly the hero they think they are, and have harmed those around them for a long time. But I don’t see that happening, because people who are so afraid of neighbors are also terrified of themselves, and cannot face either fear. I mostly pity them, but if you’re reading contempt, it’s not subtext.
Sometimes the UTS will be related (1 and 2; 3 and the one I’m planning for tomorrow, for example). We’ll see how this goes.
