Fellow Sailors

I've been given permission to share this but this was written for an audience of people working for/affiliated with LIGO, so some of these actions won't apply to e.g. general "normal" US citizens.

I will try to make phone calls Monday, but that depends on my being able to speak audibly over the phone (due to medical issues ongoing for ~nine months affecting my voice). I may be limited to emails and handwritten mailed letters. (Good thing I'm not a singer-songwriter?!)

Dear all,
Answering some questions, here are a few more details about US advocacy for science funding:

Please only send emails or visit Congree people if you are a US citizen or permanent resident (so you are talking to people you can vote for), and if you feel comfortable doing so.

You can find actual numbers for funding from different agencies in different states by selecting a state in this link: https://www.aps.org/initiatives/advocate-amplify/policy/support-federal-science-funding-budget (which provides a template letter too), or using data provided here: https://www.aps.org/initiatives/advocate-amplify/policy/dashboards

We have been collecting companies and institutions where graduate students and postdocs trained in LIGO with NSF funding have gone in here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/13yMrZ9HdmjtDTxS7hr7quwGEX-j4Ri0TVjMk0hJmxms/edit?usp=sharing (the diversity of companies is a very effective message for Congress people)

You can find flyers with data about specific issues APS [American Physical Society] advocates for in Congressional Day Visits held in January; these can be used year-long, of course: https://cvd.aps.org/

Nothing beats a face-to-face conversation; meeting with your Senators’ and Representative’s offices is one of the most impactful actions you can take.
[This part is probably addressed to e.g. university faculty and so on rather than regular people.]

(In joke mode, as a Cornell alum, I preferred the less clown show timeline when my jokey aggro rivalry feelings toward Harvard were "catchy well-respected Latin motto Ivy League p*nis envy" rather than rooting for Harvard. Sorry, Harvard folks!)

[adapted from cross-post to Tumblr]
I'm over a year late on CROWNWORLD. My agent and editor are aware. The book is not likely to get done soon despite my being under 10,000 words / 3 chapters from the finish line, because I'm too stressed and exhausted to soldier on.

The parts that I haven't discussed much if at all in public:

- My health cratered a few years ago. I wrote most of STARSTRIKE in all lowercase while seeking ways I could write flat on my back in bed without making the pain worse. I spent a year bedridden, getting 0-4 hours of sleep per night (not a typo); I only left the house for doctor's appointments or to vote.

- This included uncommon bad med reactions like the one that sent me to the ER with internal bleeding. I'm cautious about new-to-me meds for a reason.

- I was making good progress writing early in 2025 but then I had a concussion. I'm mostly recovered but my balance is still not 100%.

- A family member had multiple health crises that could have killed them.

- South Korea's president attempted an insurrection (a common interpretation) by declaring martial law in December 2024. Almost all my family is in South Korea. I couldn't even discuss it publicly because there was a nonzero chance that it would endanger my relatives. (I've been to a literature festival in Seoul under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture, Tourism, and Sport. They know I exist, and South Korea has a history of dictatorships, censorship, and brutal putdowns of protests.)

- I learned my father had a cerebral hemorrhage that same month. He's in South Korea. I'm in the USA. The unstable political situation in South Korea would have made any attempt to visit him unusually fraught.

- The Trump presidency. Unfortunately, chronic health problems curtail the kinds and amounts of activism I can physically do even before we get to being burned out.

- My husband works at LIGO, which won a Nobel Prize for the detection of gravitational waves predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity. President Trump's proposed budget would (among many other things) cut funding for one of two LIGO sites, at which point why not defund both. (NSF budget news [science.org] but the link may be paywalled.) You need two gravitational wave observatories to verify a detection (triangulation/noise reduction).

What about other observatories internationally, you ask? There are two: VIRGO (Italy) and KAGRA (Japan). LIGO can detect out to ~150 megaparsecs, VIRGO to ~80 megaparsecs (best case), KAGRA to ~10 megaparsecs (best case). But space is volumetric, so for a comparison you need to cube these numbers.

LIGO's at ~3 million (let's call that 100% as a measuring stick). VIRGO's at ~500,000 (~20%). KAGRA is at ~1,000 (under 1% - worse by a couple orders of magnitude, in fact). These are estimates, but I've estimated conservatively.

Pictorially:

LIGO    **********
VIRGO   **
KAGRA   .

- This is a proposed US budget, not an approved one as of this writing, but if LIGO doesn't get cut, it's because something even more essential than basic research in astronomy/physics is axed (further).

- I am selfishly stressed about the possibility that my husband will lose his job. I'm on his health insurance, and did we mention my health? This has career implications for me as well if I become the primary breadwinner. If we knew for certain one way or the other, we could plan; but the uncertainty is wreaking havoc for pretty much everyone.

- I've had my books challenged and pulled from libraries for "DEI" reasons (Tiger Honor seems to be the usual "problem" due to the nonbinary protagonist; I don't think Phoenix Extravagant sold well enough to attract similar attention).

- A studio optioned Dragon Pearl but was stymied first by the Hollywood strikes (solidarity to the unions!) and then opted not to negotiate for another renewal because when shopping it around, the feedback was that a Korean space opera was too "DEI" to be a good investment in this political environment. (Whatever one's feelings about this, this is absolutely true in a business/economic sense.) So this makes career planning additionally selfishly fraught. Too bad I didn't go all in on het shifter romance? I started writing one! - het shifter romance is my favorite kind - and I loved it but somebody had a book contract to attend to.

- I am sad for the US wrecking ball clown show and I am sad for everyone everywhere who is affected by the US wrecking ball clown show. ("Lying low" politically is a lost cause when one is a semi-public figure.) I am, perhaps controversially, of the opinion that the despot playbook of North Korea and past South Korean dictatorships ought to be assiduously avoided, not enshrined as some asshole US administration's hashtag life goals. But I'm just a science fiction writer, not a politician, so what do I know.

Any impact to me is unimportant in the grand scheme of the world. My job is producing entertainment fiction and it's by definition nonessential. My household will lurch along; I'm not in financial distress. But I am selfishly stressed out of my mind and likely to spend June 2025 writing bad music, badly playing 16-bit videogames, badly designing/coding a visual novel and/or graphic novel only half a dozen friends will ever see. Maybe I will scribble at the het shifter romance without any intention of writing well, but rather stress relief, and continue moseying toward music composition/orchestration. Under better circumstances, this would make a nice mini-vacation; but these are not better circumstances.

My failings as a writer and human being are well known at this point; but if the book isn't delivered in June, that's why. It's not much of an apologia. Y'all stay safe and take care of yourselves and each other out there.

Note: I had planned to just delete this journal as having served its function but here we are.