For a while now, about fourteen years I think, Brenna's hip sometimes decides that it is completely done being a hip and it's time for something else to happen. It doesn't want to get pigeonholed as a rigid structure that connects the torso to the legs. It can be so much more. Where does it end up, you might wonder? It never decides. It's an eternal student situation. But in the meantime what it means is that she essentially can't do any stuff. I haven't really done any research but I came away from all of that thinking "Wow. Hips are a big deal."

I try to help out but there was always something fundamental about that experience that I couldn't really understand. Now I do! I completely get it. Sometimes I will try to do a normal thing, like go to fucking bed - historically a place of recreation for body and mind - and wake up as though I've been fighting all night in secret underground cage matches. Batman-tier, emerging into a grisly dawn somehow less of a human being than I was the previous day. It's so fucked up that I haven't even gotten to the part where I've done anything but the basic maintenance - the pain is so genuinely surprsing that I'm still genuinely trying to decompress all the information in it. It hurts to the point where it becomes philosophical.

Also, I didn't understand until I was an adult that chiropractors exist in a novel place medically speaking. I know that some people swear by it, and who knows - there has to be some kind of "reform chiro" that does away with some of the woo. My dad saw one regularly my entire life, I thought that the practitioner was just a kind of Bonesman and that sometimes you had to have your skeleton beat up. Maybe bullied, a little. Now I'll read something that talks about how they twisted a lady's head off like a bottlecap or they're doing adjustments on cats or whatever. He really hated doctors - any member of our society's secular priesthood, essentially, he was not down with. If it meant getting one over on a doctor he would absolutely receive his medicine from a witch.

I'm gonna keep pushing on the book while I have the momentum - but know that #Fridabe continues apace, and out stalwart allies ThatBronzeGirl and the energy booster himself, Vitamin B12, Lord Balvin are on the case. I'm sad that I have to miss it because they're playing Remnant 2; I eventually stopped playing Remnant 2 because I knew I should be playing it with other people! Maybe I can have a little Remnant as a treat once I become an actual novelist. Novelizer? No, I think it's the other one.

(CW)TB out.