göktuğ's blog

The last time I wrote one of these, I noted that it was number 19.

I guess this makes number 20? Ha.

I'm updating it because stuff has Definitely Changed, so, you know! Worth doing.



So, er, yeah, I'm Jenn, I'm 38, and I still live in the PNW. Western OR — if you're familiar with where OSU is, I'm in that part of the Willamette Valley.

I grew up in Salt Lake, relocated here for graduate school, and have been here about fifteen years now (fifteen in June). I live with my spouse, Max (been married five years as of last October), three cats, and the ghost he swears haunts the dining room.

I have a PhD in chemistry, and I'm currently unemployed for a bunch of complicated reasons that really boil down to, "I thought I had figured out what I wanted to be when I grew up, but as it passes, I didn't". I'm still sort of figuring it out? I'm at the point now where I will be looking for jobs and applying for stuff again, but...yeah, at the moment, there's not much to shape my days, and I'm okay with that. Prior to walking away from the company I helped build, I was suffering from pretty intense burnout, and I still feel like I'm recovering.

Because it comes up, albeit sort of rarely: I'm Indigenous, queer, nonbinary and autistic. It almost never comes up except when it does, whereupon someone is always vaguely surprised that I'm not white (er, sorry?), or that I'm queer (because I married someone who is pretty dude-ly, at least on the exterior), and, well, you know. How often does this stuff come up, anyway?

On here I mostly talk about my day to day life, as well as my hobbies and stuff I get up to. Less "stuff I get up to" at the moment, thanks to the whole underemployment angle, but You Know.

Names that will probably pop up a fair amount (at least, looking over other entries, ha):

Max (sometimes called Maximo or Maximus): my spouse of five years, one of my best friends since early 2013. I don't really know how to sum him up except to say that there are two things about him that I have been told by multiple people —

First: that he could tell them he had done literally anything, and they would probably believe him without questioning it. Some small facts about him which brought this up: he lived in Venice, Italy for a while and paid for the various and sundry little items he wanted that were not covered by his student stipend by busking; he has climbed multiple mountains; he used to go to bars with his (very obviously queer) friend and would fistfight anyone that tried to Start Shit with them (because they lived in rural Montana — yes, that might be redundant, but I mean very rural); he has had multiple pieces published in Publications You Have Heard Of (all satire).

Second: I have had multiple queer friends tell me that he is the only man they trust completely and without any reservations. I feel like this is the sort of thing that people prompt for, i.e. "don't you trust my partner, isn't he great", and so I feel a need to state here that this was something that was brought up absolutely organically by each and ever person.

He's a weird cryptid of a man who will not talk to you unless he decides you are worth talking to. He does not believe most people are worth talking to. He does LEGO and restores old guns as hobbies, along with listening to more leftist podcasts than anyone else I have ever met, and is number 2 in my life for "who knows the most about Star Wars" (number 1 will also be mentioned in this entry, never fear). He bought a 3D printer last year and has been enjoying slowly finding a reason why he has to 3D print a solution for everything. He's one of the most introverted people I have ever met and easily the weirdest person I know, and I absolutely adore him.

Amanda (sometimes called Manda): one of my best friends in town, who roped me into participating in Inclusivity Committee. I married her and her wife last year, because, as she put it, "turnabout is fair play" — she was the one to officiate for Max and I when we eloped in 2020.

She is an ADHD meme come to life, an absolute gremlin of a human being who nevertheless brings me a great deal of joy. She is probably closer to Max than she is to me these days, but I feel like that speaks to his character and how good he is. Oftentimes, the three of us will find something to do together — last fall, for instance, we roadtripped out to Astoria, OR to see Colin Meloy (of The Decemberists) play a solo show at the Liberty Theater. That trip involved staying across the bridge in Washington, visiting Cape Disappointment (which was, in fact, disappointing! 10/10), then driving back down, stopping at a local brewery I love (De Garde) and hitting up different beaches along the way, all while listening to actual play podcasts and discussing the most ridiculous topics known to man. The vibes are very, "I am twelve again and at a sleepover with my best friends" any time we do a roadtrip like this (which we usually plan on once a year).

She is among those that told me that she trusts Max implicitly, and: "If you two ever get divorced, I don't know who's side I'm going to take. It'll depend on why" — which is about as high of an endorsement as you can get for your partner, I think.

shadaras: the third leg of the three-legged stool of my "ride or die" people, which is really funny considering that I don't think I started talking to them properly before 2024, ha. I met them through DW originally (glob only knows how, we've discussed this at length), they joined the tabletop server I run (more on that in a moment), and ended up in one of the open long-form campaigns I run, whereupon they realized that they like my DMing style, and I like their play style. Fast-forward about a year (they joined up in 2022), and they messaged me on Discord about a plot point they wanted to discuss with me. That turned into me being like, "this person is really cool and I want to know them better, ahhhhh, be good, don't scare them off!", and them apparently feeling similarly, which is wild. Many, many conversations later, we met in person for the first time last summer, when they were out on this coast in part to visit family (and me, but the "you flew cross-country to MEET me?!" is still wild, tbh). Four days of hanging out basically nonstop later, what we already knew about being ride-or-die BFFs was more or less cemented, and, well, yeah. Planning to get them out here again this summer for a slightly longer visit and more BFF time ♥ I would say more but they're already going to read this and honestly most of their journal is public so if you're like, "who is this person?", you can go look, they're great. The one other thing worth noting is that they are absolutely the person in my life who knows the most about Star Wars. :P

After people, I guess it's hobbies? So. In no particular order:

1). Reading — I read an awful lot. I am absolutely awful at talking about it, unless it was something I really loved or really hated, in which case you'll probably get a play-by-play of what it was that I loved (or hated) about it. Most recent read that was worth talking about (e.g. not a ridiculous romance novel) was either Middlemarch (I read it and understood why it's considered important, though it wasn't my cup of tea), or A Sorceress Comes to Call (didn't really care for it, but not enough to rant about it — I love some of what Kingfisher writes, but increasingly I find myself impatient with how she tends to have too much plot to fit into one book, or else picks the wrong characters to drive the plot forward — at least in my estimation). I'm currently reading Bel Canto by Ann Patchett; next on the list is The Spear Cuts Through Water. After that, who knows? I am pretty much always open to hearing what other people are reading about and welcome recommendations. I read really widely (I don't have a preferred genre; if it's good, I'll probably enjoy it, ha), and if I like something, I will read it fast, so!

One of the things I have done with respect to reading has been to build a tiny community where we talk about books. It's run via Discord and is open to any/all that are like, "I want somewhere small and positive to talk about what I'm reading". I'm currently in the process of trying to reboot the teeny tiny book club we do once a month (whereupon we all read something, preferably in the public domain or very easily library-able and talk about it). I

2). Tabletop RPG — I run a lot of it! Starting in 2020, I built a small Discord server where I run games regularly. It's been primarily 5e, but over time I have expanded into Monster of the Week as well as Blades in the Dark. I primarily run games on weekends (Saturday afternoons or Sunday morning/afternoon), and my focus of late has been on shorter-form self-contained campaigns. Over Halloween, for instance, I ran a short game called To the End, a horror-themed game I'm still proud of, which hinged on the players realizing they were stuck in a horrific cycle and making a terrible choice to break free. I'm about to start a game I'm calling Goodbye, My Darling which is noir-tinged and set in the 5e Eberron setting (more information on the campaign here).

I strongly believe that ttrpg is imaginative play for adults, an opportunity to explore other facets of our identities and engage in behavior that we otherwise wouldn't ordinarily get to do, and so I run tables that are open to any/all as long as they are willing to adhere to the server rules. I don't think the way I run tabletop is something that appeals to everyone, but the goal of what I run is not mass appeal — it's good (collaborative) storytelling and story-focused RP. I've gotten to the point where, having been at other tables and heard how other people talk about my approach to it, I know that I'm good at what I offer, and I am comfortable DMing/GMing for complete strangers.

I also try to set up and run GMless campaigns at least once a month. We've done a few now — Rusalka, the Quiet Year, For the Queen, Worldwizard, and Stewpot. I'm hoping to run The Ground Itself sometime in the new year, and if I can get it together, I may try to convince a couple of people to join me for Ironsworn (we will see).

If you are interested in tabletop, want to learn somewhere that is new player friendly, safe to fail in, and explicitly diverse and inclusive, hit me up.

3). Cooking — I do a lot of it! I make basically everything my spouse and I eat, because we live in the middle of nowhere and our best food options are pizza (which is very good, but man cannot live on pizza alone) or brewpub food (sigh). Of late I've been learning how to make American Chinese food (think: stir-fried lo mein, General Tso's chicken, etc), and it's been going pretty well. My cooking is pretty solid and I do talk about it from time to time. This December, for instance, I dedicated a fair amount of time to learning how to make my grandmother's tamales after she passed away in November, and I succeeded. I will pretty much always share recipes and credit where I got ideas, etc from — not everything I make is something that I think other people are up for doing, but I love talking about food science and what makes different things work.

4). Writing — okay. This will probably come up more this year, since I'm trying to be less, uh, shy? about it. To whit:

- I made a pact when I was 30 that I was going to get something published before I was 40, whether a short story or (glob help us all) pitching a novel. I am 38. THE CLOCK IS TICKING. I'm keeping an eye on open calls, etc, and noodling over what I want to submit and where, assuming that I do.

- I have also realized that simply writing stuff, dumping it into a document, and never showing it to anyone again was probably not doing me any favors. To that end, I've started posting to AO3 the stuff I know is not something I'm interested in pitching for traditional publication.

Stuff that I've written and I'm actually fairly proud of:

The gigantic Regency project with shadaras (I wrote most of the text, with cheerleading and help worldbuilding from them, ha). It was supposed to be a single story, under 7k. It has instead turned into a three volume series. Book 1 and 2 are written. Book 2 is updating weekly.

A summary is under here, so.

Mallon Ilizana realizes that he needs to marry, and quickly, to satisfy the magic that controls and wards the estate his family lives on. With the interference of his mother, he ends up wedding Elion Qinro, a minor noble, with the idea that together, their arranged marriage will result in something that the two of them will both find beneficial. The day that they meet, however, El tells him that they prefer not to be touched at all. Mal, being honorable, takes them at their word, and instead of digging deeeper into the reasons why, gives them a wide berth and tries to make them as comfortable as possible on the Ilizana estate, as he's certain that his prescence bothers them. El, meanwhile, is under a curse sustained after they saved a friend from death — one that can only be broken through being told that they are loved, exactly as they are.

Two years on, they are living more or less separate lives under the same roof, coming together only for awkward mealtimes, barely speaking and largely avoiding each other. The reality of their marriage is something that is known to all of Winter's Edge, including Mathienne Feywinter — Mal's cousin and would-be rival. Matty (as she insists on being called) torments Mal at every chance she gets, and when she is "gifted" a concubine in a trade deal, she sees a perfect opportunity to annoy her cousin and please her own wife: give him the concubine, make a dig about El, and bounce.

Mal, being a decent person, immediately files to have this other man — Benthos Haichen — freed, but it takes time. Knowing that he will need weeks if not months to sort it out, he tells Benny that he is an honored guest of House Ilizana, and, seeing the state that he is in and that he should not be left alone, asks El if they would be terribly bothered if Benny rooms with them. El, of course, says no — and so it is that after two years, someone in House Ilizana finally realizes they are under a curse...

Aside from the above, there's also The Road Through the Mountains, which is slow-burn F/F and features a lady-knight realizing that the vow of chastity and obedience she swore to her goddess is perhaps not all she wants out of life, after all. It's new — wrote and posted over Christmas — so. Much shorter than the other. :D

- I am also participating this year in getyourwordsout, so. You may see me talk about that.


I...think that's most of it? As always, people who have been here a while are free to ask questions; new people are also welcome to, too, but, you know.

One of my goals for this year is to be better about updating, so we'll see how it goes ♥

Real entry to come, but!


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