For me the big focus of this retreat was to start working on plans for the layout of Roving Pack which I’ll be launching into June 1st when I get the book back from the final copyeditor! With that in mind I spent a good chunk of the weekend familiarizing myself with the ins and out sof InDesign software that I will be using.  The retreat was also a great opportunity to make headway on some practical work that I’ve been avoiding like turning the amazing cover art that KD Diamond created into a promotional postcard which two hours and a migrane later (that sort of work is not one of my strengths) looks awesome and is now at the printer along with my brand new business cards that are updated to include all three of my books.

Beyond the really practical work I did upstate on the postcards and some writing for an anthology I’m submitting to, I focused a lot on strategic thinking. In between forest hikes to a secluded swimming hole I was really focused at looking at the overal direction my work is going growing out of Kicked Out through everything Roving Pack represents and all that I hope Leather Ever After will become, and even beyond that into directions I imagine my future work going in. A lot of the thinking  I was doing this weekend  was about how my seemingly different works fits together and in actuality is extremely connected with the central core being about the creation of home and queer family.  It’s been exciting and inspiring  for me to see diverse directions that common theme can move into.

I did a lot of planning at the upstate retreat for the direction I’m taking this blog. Definitely stay tuned for a bunch of new posts coming in the coming weeks and months. I’m planning to talk in more detail about how as an author who believes in and continues to work with traditional publishers I still chose to launch my own press to publish Roving Pack, and share more intimate details of what that process looks like.  I received a lot of positive private feedback from folks who really connected on a personal level with the ‘lessons from Roving Pack: poly, leather, boundaries and whale legs’ blog that I posted last week and have several blog posts in the works that are much more vulnerable and talk in greater detail about the experience of living in a long-term 24/7 power exchange relationship, the ways in which Leather and sex are separate and how that influences the ways in which I write about queerness and specifically queer leather lives.

A huge part of how I understand myself and my place in the world is in connection to stories- especially first-person narratives and fiction based on a queerness I can relate to.  A huge part of why I write (both fiction and non-fiction) is about putting out into the world the kind of stories I wish I’d had when I was first exploring various identities. It’s about creating a home on the page for the worlds I love, and the kinds of queers – homeless teens, gutterpunks, kinky perverts etc. etc. that are/have been my family, in hopes that others will see themselves in my words and feel less alone. It was really exciting to have the space and time at the retreat to think about these core themes that run through all my work, and to brainstorm my plans for talking about my life and work more here on the blog. Stay tuned!!!

Fucking A. Sassafras Lowrey takes ‘queer punk’ to a whole new level of insidious drama. Roving Pack cracks out the microscope to examine this Portland-based scene circa 2002 – whether or not the rest of the world can take it. My guess? Hella no!

~Kristyn Dunnion, Author of The Dirt Chronicles and Mosh Pit

This morning I’m struggling with the news that Maurice Sendak has just died.  There is an obituary in The New York Times and I’m sitting here crying and thinking about the impact his words and pictures and the impact they have had on my work, the way I approach writing and the stories that I need and want to tell even when it’s dark or complicated. There is an incredible video of him  speaking about his work that I’ve posted before that I want to share again along with my favorite quote from it that was instrumental to me as I was finishing the writing of Roving Pack. I believe that if we’re not taking risks with our art, if it’s not edge play than there’s really not much point in doing it, and Maurice Sendak put that sentiment so brilliantly when he said:

“Artists have to take a dive. And either you hit your head on a rock and you split your head and die or the blow to the head is so inspiring that you come back up and do the best work you ever did. But you have to take the dive. And you do not know what the result will be.”

– Maurice Sendak

One of the other ways Maurice Sendak’s work has truly influenced my life is also in the way I approach joy and pleasure and living in the moment. Our youngest dog is very much a little Wild Thing – just two weeks ago I had her tattooed onto my shin with her face attached to the body of a Wild Thing…. she is full of Rumpus and takes pleasure in each and every joyful moment in life inspiring/reminding – and I always think of this wonderful Sendak quote/story

“Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters — sometimes very hastily — but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, “Dear Jim: I loved your card.” Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.”
― Maurice Sendak

“He saw it, he loved it, he ate it….. ‘ hard to find better words to live by when it comes to enjoying and living in the moment even really sad moments like right now

The Harder She Comes blog tour presents:

A Guest Post from Valerie Alexander, author of  “A Date with Sharon Tate”

I’ve always loved butch-femme themes. In college, I was always getting sniffed at for “looking straight,” so it was immensely gratifying to walk into my femme identity and own my girliness with pride. But of course it was finding butches -crushing on them, dating them, hunting for them – that made me swoon.

So when I read about a butch femme anthology submission call, I knew I had to write something for it. My story, “A Date with Sharon Tate,” is about a cheating (and now repentent) butch desperately trying to woo back her ex-girlfriend. Eventually they reconnect at a Dead Movie Star Party but it doesn’t go smoothly at first:

I walked over until I towered over her. Shandra had always liked how tall I was and she bit her lip now and looked up coquettishly as if waiting to be kissed. I didn’t touch her. Instead I leaned in close to her and said, “I built a treehouse too. You should come out and see it.”

She frowned. I had made a tactical error by using my sex voice. “Don’t hit on me. You know I’m here with April.”

“Fuck April,” I said. “Just go on one date with me. We’ll start over. You can have all the time you need to trust me again.”

Shandra made a scoffing noise. “I’m a married woman now.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it, it was such an obvious exaggeration intended to hurt me. Now Shandra looked furious, her face going red under the makeup. I’d forgotten how gorgeous she was when she was mad. She started to leave and I took her arm to stop her.

“Don’t manhandle me,” she said.

I released her arm. She didn’t move and I leaned my leg against hers. She looked at the sink, looked at the new tiles. Then she looked at me.

My mouth was on hers in less than a second, recapturing all the heat and sweetness of her tongue. She kissed me back just as passionately and I leaned in to pin her against the counter. I wanted to smell and taste every part of her but her tight vintage dress had her pretty much imprisoned as my hands stroked her breasts and legs. “One date,” I said in her ear, “one date, your terms” because I wanted her to agree to a meeting beyond this momentary lapse in sanity. I lifted her up and sat her on the black granite countertop and she leaned back and opened her legs for me. Oh my god. She was wearing a thong, just a little scrap of white fabric, and before I could even go near it, she slid it down herself, spread her thighs and looked at me. She wanted me to fuck her. The sex between her and that stupid girlfriend was as boring as I’d guessed, and she needed me to fuck her hard and good just like I used to.

I like writing from a butch perspective (even though in real life, my bathroom looks like a Sephora blew up in it) which I suppose is kind of an alter-ego thing.  At any rate, the entire book is a hot read, with a lot of titillating diversity in the stories. You can get it at from Amazon or Cleis.

Don’t forget to stop by the rest of the tour, or check out what you’ve already missed. And of course you can always stop by and visit me (http://www.Valeriealexander.org), too.

Schedule:

May 1  D. L. King  http://sacchi-green.blogspot.com/

May 2  Anna Watson  http://dlkingerotica.blogspot.com

May 3  Evan Mora  http://donutsdesires.blogspot.com/

May 4  River Light  http://sapphicplanet.com/blogtour_sapphicplanet.php

May 5  Sinclair Sexsmith  http://www.sugarbutch.net/

May 6  Crystal Barela  http://kathleenbradean.blogspot.com/

May 7  CS Clark  http://bethwylde.wordpress.com/

May 8  Valerie Alexander http://pomofreakshow.com/

May 9  Andrea Dale   http://lulalisbon.wordpress.com/

May 10  Beth Wylde  http://adrianakraft.com/blog/

May 11  Kathleen Bradean  http://cyvarwydd.blogspot.com/

May 12  Teresa Noelle Roberts  http://lisabetsarai.blogspot.com/

May 13  Shanna Germain  http://lantoniou.blogspot.com/

May 14  Charlotte Dare  http://madeofwords.com/posts/

May 15  Rachel Kramer Bussel  http://lustylady.blogspot.com/

It’s interesting for me to think about the different lessons projects unexpectedly teach us about ourselves. I didn’t go into working on Roving Pack thinking that I would walk away with a novel, nor did I certainly think that I would end up learning so much about myself – not only where I come from, but perhaps more importantly where I’m going.

Roving Pack began as a group of short stories that came out of text messages sent between me and an old friend who is sick. We began texting snippets of memoirs, punk houses, spoken word basement shows on stages built with pallets, our mutual ex-Daddy and the scars he left on us both.  As we texted, I couldn’t hold the stories in anymore. They flowed into the note app on my iPhone during subway delays, and started squatting in haphazardly named word files across the desktop of my computer.  The idea that they would become my second book and my debut novel could not have been further from my mind.

This week I put the final polish on the book reviewing the last of the line-edits from my editor saved the book as “RovingPackFINAL” and hit send, now leaving it in the capable hands of the copyeditor.  Writing Roving Pack book came at a really pivotal point in my private life where I have been thinking a lot about what it means to exist in the world in the ways that I do. The last year has been filled with big changes and lots of instances of processing, self-reflection.

A big piece of this, and something that I haven’t been particularly public about has involved a serious reexamination of my boundaries especially around polyamory, what works for me, what doesn’t.  Roving Pack is in some ways about failed boundaries and desperate attempts at connection.  It’s about the way that we hurt ourselves and each other when we are injured and trying to survive in the most basic of levels.  I am in so many ways lifetimes away from the crusty punk trans boi I was, who this novel is based on, and yet over the last year I’ve had to reconcile that some of my boundaries were his, and still were coming from a place of survival.

In our house, we call edgeplaying with boundaries “Whale Legs.”  Let me explain, whales have little  vestigial leg bones hidden in their tales, that are left over from a time when they roamed the earth instead of swimming through the sea. Sometimes there are boundaries I’ve held unexamined for 10 years, holdouts from a place and time where I was a very different person, and sometimes as scary as I imagine it must have been for the little whale to realize that it no longer needed its legs, it’s equally powerful for the whale to realize it can glide through the water no longer inhibited by unnecessary boundaries uh…. Appendages

In the last year while vigorously working on piecing together this novel, I’ve simultaneously been doing intense work in my personal life.  I’ve vanilla dated someone for the first time in years, playing hi-femme to their butch proving again to myself that there is no lasting spark in that relationship structure for me, that I’m regardless of the gender presentation that works well for me, I’m just a funny boy and that without the D/s I’m just bored and uninterested. At my core I’m an edge player and pushed myself to the limits this year challenging one of my oldest and most deeply held boundaries by giving consent for my Daddy to travel half-way around to world to visit someone who had become their long-term girlfriend, and I didn’t break.  Let me repeat, I didn’t break.

Working on Roving Pack gave me this level of healing and closure that I didn’t even know I was looking for. A month ago I sat in tears, the realization washing over me that all these years later my boundaries were still constructed out of fear. I realized in that moment that nearly all of the boundaries that I’d set especially around polyamory were about trying to prevent myself from ever being hurt again in the ways that ex’s had nearly destroyed me. I realized in that moment that my boundaries had always been set in survival mode that they were the boundaries of a young orphaned leather boi whose heart was bruised.  These were boundaries about trying to prevent something bad from happening, to prevent someone from leaving me. It was scary to realize that all these years later I was still working through the scars left by others. I came to a place as I finished Roving Pack where I could say that I don’t want to wield boundaries in an effort to keep myself from getting hurt, it didn’t work back then, despite my fortress of boundaries I was always left and hurt.  I have been my Daddy’s Private Property for nearly eight years now. I know intimately and daily that I am safe, and cherished and cared for, but it’s not because of the boundaries I might set.

Fear is a powerful weapon in my history, and it fucked me up a little to realize that there was this big area where I had subconsciously still been giving it a lot of power in a false effort to keep myself safe.  Working through Roving Pack was a major part of getting me here.  As I laid down the final edits to the book, hit save that final time and sent it to the copyeditor I was left with an overwhelming sense of calm. I get into the most trouble when I attempt to be something that I’m not, or attempt to align myself or my life with someone else’s (even queer folks) perception of what is normal, or good.  This year has been a lot of challenging these norms for myself. It’s been about owning on a deeper level that my life doesn’t look how most queer folks think it should – my primary partnership is built on love and D/s but not sexual attraction, I’m not interested in egalitarian dating folks in my community, and despite the presentation that works well for me “femme” isn’t a community or identity that holds much pull for me, an I was able to reach these places of deep understanding because of my work on Roving Pack.

I’m a little anxious to actually talk about the things that this novel has taught me, and the unexpected transformative quality of writing it. I’m nervous that it will make the novel or my relationship to it seem somehow self-indulgent, but that’s a risk I have to take if I’m going to be honest with myself, my family, and my community about what this book has meant to me. At it’s core my work is about a search for self, home, and community within queerness. If I truly believe that, which I do, then it’s important that I own my own struggles and work towards cutting free from the expectations of how our queer lives should or shouldn’t  look.

It was powerful to see an audience rise up against the oppressiveness of everything this man was saying, but sad that it was something that had to happen. Within seconds of this writer (who I have decided not to name in order to not bring more attention to his ‘work’) taking the stage the energy of the room shifted, his set relied entirely on a string of “stories” that were little more than a parade of racist, sexist, fatphobic, classist, anti-dyke, transphobic, misogynist, anti-sexworker “jokes.” It was in the end the rape jokes that got him booed from the stage.  As an aside, it’s interesting that was the turning point for the audience in mass.

It has been explained to me both last night at the event, and then when I initiated a private conversation with the event host this morning that I am simply missing the humor in his work, that as a comedian he is ironic, that comedy by it’s very nature needs to be “anti PC.”  I didn’t miss anything about his work, nor is it simply that I don’t understand comedy.  I understand completely what was taking place – a very privileged white man took the stage and filled a room with the kinds of hateful stereotypes and misrepresentations that most of us spend our lives fighting against.

In a way last night was a learning opportunity as well as a turning point for me as an author.  I have in my career been less diligent than clearly I need to be around doing preliminary research into the events I agree to lend my name and work to, and especially the content of other writers who I’ve been booked to headline with.   That was my mistake, but one that I will not make again.

With Roving Pack releasing this October I’ve started reaching out to authors and fabulous queers in the community for endorsement of the novel in the form of blurbs I can on the back cover and in other publicity.  The first one arrived today from a queer author I’ve admired for years – Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore!!!!!!!!!!!!!   I sat jaw somewhere around my knees for a little while reading her blurb of the book over and over and over again until I burned it into my memory and convinced myself it was real.  Not only is it a beautiful reflection of Roving Pack, but it brought me to tears realizing that she really understood my characters and what I am trying to do with the novel

Check out what  the incredible Mattilda has to say about Roving Pack !!!!

“ Remember that time in your life when you had just escaped the terror of childhood to create your own path in the world, maybe a queer path of chosen family, desire and love and lust and intimacy on your own terms, remember all the joyful pains and painful joys you were discovering? Roving Pack nails that bold and precarious time with a precision so rare it’s almost claustrophobic in its intimacy. It’s about a specific culture and place and moment – transmasculine queer punk kids in Portland in the early-2000s – but it’s also about the transition to self-actualization in all of our lives, and the scary and heartbreaking reality that often the pack mentality required for belonging in our new communities leaves us stranded. I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen a book that explores the intoxication and viciousness of peer pressure in queer lives with such candor. Goddamn this book is brave — I can’t wait to see the havoc it wreaks.”

       Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? That’s Revolting!: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, Nobody Passes

I didn’t have much warning I was leaving– the staff preferred to only give a week’s notice.  They didn’t want my eminent departure to give me an “exit mentality,” and it’s one of the first rules of maintaining control of another person: severely limit the information they have access to.   The staff at Provo Canyon School were very committed to control.

Provo Canyon School is a lock-down institution for “troubled teens”.  They have a website that I don’t care to link here, but you can google it if you want.  It’s also interesting to see what pops up when you add keywords like “abuse” or “lawsuit” to your search.

Sometimes you have to protect yourself (yes, this was my halloween costume a year after I left PCS)

Eleven years is a strange anniversary.  It doesn’t have the neatness of 10 years, or the “a lifetime ago” quality of 15.  Eleven is too much, and not enough. In ‘This is Spinal Tap,’ Nigel is very proud of his amps that go up to 11– it’s one louder than 10, an extra bit of power for when you need it.  I suppose eleven does feel like an extra bit of power, but it’s also slightly ridiculous, a palindromic anniversary.  I hesitate to follow that to it’s logical conclusion, because this 11 years certainly would not be the same backwards as forward.

I feel like I should have some pithy things about survival and growing into the self-actualized queer I am today.  Some people have asked me, “How do you know that PCS didn’t give you the skills you needed to grow?  How do you know that PCS isn’t the key to your survival?” It’s always hard to keep a straight face when I respond.  A PCS success story is the bland pinnacle of normal– for the girls, that meant sensible domesticity, (heterosexual) marriage, and children (in that order).

The person I’ve grown into is exactly the person that PCS tried to kill.  It was the realization that PCS wanted to kill that part of me that gave me the strength to hold on while I was there, to preserve myself deep within my skin and fight back against their poison once I was released.  They said they knew I was the enemy, and deep down, I knew that they were wrong.

Last year, on my ten year anniversary, I wrote a post to the teens that are still locked up in private facilities–or really, I wrote to the recent releases, because there’s no way anyone incarcerated in one of these institutions has access to the internet, let alone to this blog.  Remember what I said about the staff being committed to control?

From where I am now, I try to do what I can to educate people about the existence of places like PCS.  It’s always a bit chilling for me when someone responds, “I had no clue things like that still happened.”  Eleven years later, and I can still see the threads of control, and the way that the troubled teen industry limits and controls the information that the outside world can access about what goes on within their walls.

Still, for all their efforts, they can’t control those of us who survived, and they can’t stop us from speaking out.

It’s been just over a month now since I was officially able to go live with the news about editing this new and very different anthology and it has continued to be fun for me to see the different reactions I’ve gotten to the announcement.  People I know have pretty much broken into smiles or giggles and talked about how they see this as just about *the * perfect book for me to be working on because I’m such a funny little one. I really love realizing *just * how well my community actually knows me :p

I’ve been trying to talk up the anthology as much as possible on the internet and in person – I even went old school and made ¼ sheet printouts with the call for submissions.  I don’t know if folks do that anymore, but it’s always been my style, so I figured I’d rock it this time as well.  If you feel like your community/event needs some paper flyering and you’re up to helping out shoot me an email  ( LeatherEverAfter@gmail.com )and I can send you the file so you can print some out : )

It’s been exciting and surprising to already be getting stories submitted!   For me, opening my inbox to see stories is like a little mini Christmas (and if you follow me on facebook/twitter you know how much I LOVE Christmas ).  I hope, since the deadline for submission isn’t until August 1^st (that’s in your calendar right?!?!)  that this is only the beginning and that all of you out there are busy thinking about fairy tales and all the ways you can kink them up!  With that in mind, there have been a few questions/concerns/ideas I’ve been getting from folks pretty consistently so I thought I’d answer them publically

 5 tips for submitting to Leather Ever After (other than following the submission guidelines) :

 1) I have a REALLY broad definition of what can be included under Leather but as I’ve been saying “the presence of homosexual content does not a kinky story make.”   This is Leather Ever After so I really want to see writers turn up the kink (of whatever flavor).

 2.) Tell me a story. I’m a sucker for a really good story. I’m editing this anthology because I LOVE both leather and fairy tales.  If you want to get into the anthology I can comfortably say it’s probably not enough just to use the name of a well known fairy tale character and then write a completely different story that has zero reference to any of the key aspects of the original fable.  I’m not saying anyone has done this, rather just putting it out there as a general useful FYI.

 3.) You don’t have to be a fantasy writer.  Let me say that again, you don’t have to be a fantasy writer to submit to this anthology.  I’ve had some people approach me and say they would love to submit a story to a book I’m editing but they don’t write fantasy so this won’t work for them.  I imagine ::fingers crossed:: I hope I hope I hope ::fingers crossed:: I will get some fabulous submissions that really are deeply rooted in that traditional fairytale magic of dragons, witches and secret potions BUT that’s not all I want this book to be.  Let me let y’all in on a little secret, I’m not a fantasy writer either, and I can guarantee (because I already know what I’m writing ) that my story in the book is going to be a gritty retelling and restaging of a fairytale in our present world.  I certainly hope ::fingers crossed:: that I’ll be getting a lot of those sorts of stories too because I believe very deeply that while fairy tales are about magic, the world we live in is full of it’s own sorts of magic and I hope that writers considering submitting will take note and not feel limited but rather inspired by the idea of bringing fairy tales into today.

4. ) Please please please look beyond what I call the ‘Disney Cannon’ when you’re thinking about what story you’re going to use as your inspiration.  There are so many incredible and pevertable fairy tales, don’t restrict yourself!  Go to the library and pick up a collection of Hans Christian Anderson or Grimm’s Fairy Tales, or google them. I’m not saying I won’t include the most well known fairy tales (Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, The Little Mermaid etc.) in the anthology – I most certainly will, but I’m not going to include 10 retellings of any of those stories (that would be awfully boring don’t you think?).  I guess what I’m saying is if you’re going to tackle one of those very well known stories be sure you’ve got a really good idea to knock me out of the park, and really I’m hoping folks are going to dig deep into the possibility of other stories.  There are literally dozens of fairy tales down on their knees just begging to be leathered up and corrupted

5.)  You can find the full call for submissions here.  If you have questions or concerns please send me an email LeatherEverAfter@gmail.com  I try to be really approachable and believe there’s no such thing as a stupid question. I’m also really happy to have folks bounce ideas off of me.

For the last several years most of my blogging has revolved around queer youth homelessness and experiences connected to the editing, release and subsequent touring with the Kicked Out Anthology.  it’s truly been a magical few years.  Kicked Out holds an important piece of my heart as my first book, and it will always be a piece of my work, but it is not all of my work.  Kicked Out has given me a foundation, and it was somewhat difficult for me to grapple with thinking about what it would mean to form an identity as an author after Kicked Out.  I confessed to my twitter/Facebook (where I’m much better at staying present and current than I have been on the blog) in the last weeks about how I had been uncertain if I could/would ever be able to love another book after Kicked Out, and that it’s rally deeply hit me now that I am utterly head over heals in love with my novel Roving Pack  that will be released this October.  Knowing that I am actually loving my novel is a really good feeling, I shouldn’t have worried – it figures that if I can be most comfortable as being poly in my relationships that it should be the same with my books

I’ve stayed away from blogging for a little while because I knew that I needed some distance from Kicked Out and to give myself time to move away from a space where my primary creative/professional identity  is as the editor/curator of that magical book that is so much bigger than myself, but also to figure out how to come back with an increased complexity that leaves room for all of who I am personally and creatively, without turning my blog into simply a reflection of my daily life- nothing wrong with that, and I’m sure some readers would love the 25,000 photos I take of my dogs, or my rumination on picture books and broken toys I find on the streets of Brooklyn, but not the kind of blog I want to be writing all the time (that content i feel is better for facebook/twitter).   Right now, much of my creative focus is on my novel Roving Pack which will be here in October!!!! I’m just coming off of a week-long intensive focus on the book, and am in the midst of final line edits and gleefully enjoying the submissions that are starting to come in for Leather Ever After.

It’s not that I don’t want to be talking about queer youth homelessness, I do, but I’ve felt a little trapped too. There have been times in the past years I worried that if I blogged about other things, folks might think I took queer youth homelessness less seriously, or that it was no longer a focus of my work, or…. I don’t even know.  Ultimately I don’t want to feel limited by my blogging, and I want my blog to be a place that can grow to include a more complete picture of my work.

In the time I’ve been away from blogging,I’ve thought a lot about the threads that run through all of my work and how that will continue to be reflected in the blog. Chosen/created family in many ways is the foundation for the work that I do, and also the thread that runs between all three of my books (I still need to pinch myself when I say that I have 3 books – and really there is a 4th in the works but that’s much more of a little tadpole of an idea right now than the very realness of the others). So you might be asking, what *exactly* will Sassafras be blogging about?  Good question.  I don’t have all the answers yet, but what I do know is that in the coming weeks and months you can expect a lot more writing exploring queer family and how that connects to this novel that has captured my heart for the past couple of years. I’m also really eager to share with all of you more about the process and experience of writing, editing and preparing to release these two new books.  More than anything, I’m excited to be back as a blogger and looking forward to seeing the way this space grows.