January 2017 | A.S. Akkalon

How to overcome your fear of spiders

Fear of spiders is unhelpful in the jungle

This post is about how to overcome your fear of spiders. Maybe. Sort of.

Don’t worry, I haven’t included any spider pictures–if you’re anything like I used to be, you won’t even move your mouse over a picture of a spider. They’re that evil.

I used to be terrified of spiders. Now, not so much. I’m still not fond of them, but I can sit in the same room as them without shrieking and flailing.

I’m going to share what I did to overcome my fear of spiders. It would probably work for you, but I almost guarantee you won’t want to do it.

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Two reasons I automatically trust you

I would trust this cat. — Now this is a trustworthy cat.

If you look around, the world seems like a big, scary place full of stalkers, crazies, and people out to take advantage of you. Plus a few Nigerian princes who really really want to give you a fortune.

With all the people you meet online and in real life, you need a quick way to determine who is trustworthy and who is lying about wanting to give you an inheritance from a great aunt you never knew existed.

I have a simple system for deciding who to trust that has very rarely let me down.

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Five reasons I stopped reading

Library

Today is book-hunting day! That wasn’t a thing until today, but now it is.

Book-hunting day means I go to Amazon and search for fantasy books with key words like “chosen one” or “elemental magic” (just, because). When a book entices me, I’ll start reading the preview until I either decide it sucks (ahem, I mean, decide it’s not for me) or buy it.

Of course, I’ll give you a commentary as I go. It’s mean to make fun of people in public, so I won’t name names and I’ll disguise some of the details. (I’ll use * to indicate the detail has been changed.)

Shall we head into the jungle?

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Things that died beside my bed

Cat in a suitcase — You left what beside the bed?

I can never stop things accumulating beside my bed. Tubes of lip balm, hair ties, and half-read books have a habit of piling up.

Going through them is a geological exploration. The deeper you get, the longer ago the sediment (or book) was deposited.

It seems like time to clear out the book pile, and I thought I’d document what I found.

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Why I write

Greek muse — It doesn’t matter whose muse is the prettiest.

Hang out in writer circles on this interweb thing for long enough and you’ll hear all the classic reasons people write. Because they’re bursting with stories that are screaming to be told, because they have something to say to the world, because writing keeps them sane in insane times.

Reading these reasons, it’s easy to feel inadequate.

If I don’t write for the same reasons does it mean I’m not a real writer? I’m not filled with stories wriggling inside me like intestinal worms. Does that mean I’m just making stuff up?

I like to think it’s the writing that counts, not the reasons behind it. If you write a stunning story that people love it doesn’t matter if it was driven by a stormy-eyed muse in a flowing chiton or by industrial quantities of coffee and a hard chair.

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