Becca Miles

@rubecso.bsky.social

693 Followers 1116 Following

Writer and editor | Associate editor for @castofwonders.org | They / She | Performance poet | Autistic | Queer | Jewish BUY MY POETRY BOOK (pls): https://www.stairwellbooks.co.uk/product/steel-tipped-snowflakes-1/

Text: What is a Golem (X) golem /ɡəʊlɛm/ From Hebrew: גולם – n. (in Jewish legends) a figure made of clay that comes to life – n. a machine that behaves like a human – n. an inchoate object, a formless mass – n. a body without a soul – n. a weapon with a face – n. a monstrous protector – n. a pupa for a paper butterfly – n. the name of G-D hidden under mud – n. an infinitely moldable symbol
Text: What is a Golem (IX) You ask me what it’s like to have my purpose carved beneath my tongue. I might as well ask you what it’s like to see the world in 380 to 750 nanometer wavelengths, or if you find the electromagnetic force that binds your atoms too restrictive. It is written. What I am. What I am for. Beyond the borders of those etched letters is not even a void. It is not. And if at times I sigh or struggle, or indulge in some facsimile of wistfulness, or vivisect myself in search of words unknowable, then that is also written.
What is a Golem (VIII) Mud brick wall I stand between the conquerors and conquered. Barbed wire blossoms from my hands. I am the soldier and I am the line he guards, jagged scar gouged into the land and I am the land that blood cries up from.
Text: What is a Golem (VII) The stuff that forms my body was once riverbed, until a portion was set aside, no longer a home for wriggling things. This is the sculptor’s power, to split the world in two: thing / no-thing. What became of the clay sheared away to leave mountain nose / philtrum valley, cave mouth lips / sheer drop cavern throat hands / light spilling through my fingers? Sometimes I wonder if that heap of wasted scraps came together into a new body and walked away.
Text: What is a Golem (VI) When Enki took dirt from beneath his fingernails to sculpt his spies to infiltrate the underworld, He knew to give them limbs, eyes, mouths to treat with the hideous queen of the dead, but to make these a grain too large or small, placed lopsided, just enough to draw a grimace. Ugliness is in the eye of the beholder, and it takes a not-quite human to soothe a not-quite-monster.
Text: What is a Golem (V) Here, take my arm. The stairs are uneven, your legs unsteady, and my body is most beautiful when it's useful. Look how my hand fits beneath your elbow.
Text: What is a Golem (IV) A gush of crimson spills from the skull I smashed at your command. I cup my hands, fill them to the brim, so you can see a universe swirling in an offering bowl. But when I hold it up, it’s only so much rust, soaked into already-red mud. If you had given me a mouth, I would tell you: even a walking grave remembers what you hid in it.
Text: What is a Golem (III) Before Data or Hal or Frankenstein, my grandchildren of flesh and silicon, I was the first to know the gap between life and unlife, false-life, never-was-alive is as narrow as an aleph, passing through the eye of the needle of the nerve cell ion channel in the eye that collapses emet to met and wipes away the wave-form self with a blink, leaving only a pile of clay that believed one day Daisy, Daisy Bell would give me your answer, do…
ext: What is a Golem (II) This body is not me, not this mound of muck air moves through the hollows of its throat, but it is not me. Its baked skin splits, its clay face rearranges: a grimace, a smile, but it is not me. My me is a scrap of light buried deep inside, slipped down through the cracks, too deep to see, to reach, to crush. It flickers signals up, waits to see what the thing that is not me will do.
Text: What is a Golem (I) Mud brick wall I stand between hammer blows and fragile bones. I hold a flock of song birds in my hand, breath in hollow limbs. They sing until the shadow of a hawk passes overhead. Then I gently close my fingers like floorboards or rafters.
(Yiddish, transliteration): Dos Lid Fun Der Filosof Golem Baym takh-breg, vi dos vasser rint royt, ikh khap a hoyfn: veykhe, sheyne leym, farrikht mayn blote guf, mayn blote heym mayn alte refue, leym hent oyf leym hoyt. Oyf mayn tsela, ikh gefin a fingerdruk. Gedank zey zenen ale bagroben, ober kuk: di resht fun a mensch lang farshlungen, durkh di erd fun vos ikh hob geshprungen. Mentshn vaksn alt nisht. Zey velkn. Ikh vaks yo alt. Ikh brekh un ikh mikh boyen, shikhtn oyf shikhtn. Mit azelkhe bleter, kh’bin mer vi der Matuselah boym. Nor a boym un a mensch hot otem, un ikh darf keyn. Ven yene shvotem zenen khoruv fun sreyfe un mabul, ikh vel zayn. A mumische ruml, a sheyne farzeenish, a yidntum fun eyn.
Text (written center-aligned, with the latter half of the lines arranged so the words outline a splodge in the negative space between them) --- Nature Poem I sat beneath an old, tall tree (a yew, I believe), and listened to the chorus of the birds, their loud, primordial poetry: the laughing trochees of the great tit, the wood pigeon’s wheezing spondees, the lilting dactyls of the blackbird, the robin’s belligerent free verse but then one of the little feathered bastards shat on the page. So I guess I’ll write about flowers instead.
Text: Between Two Membranes Look closer. All of this– the words in bird song follow-me, follow-me the unfolding in my chest when the earth tilts into the sun a few hours longer, the greenhouse scent of warm, wet soil, the urge to thrust my fingers in, the tug in my gut at the dandelions forcing through paving stones the fractal tree of memories exploding from the robin that lands nearby– all of this exists in a three nanometer gap, with no difference between a sodium ion, a lightning bolt, and a ghost.
Text: Hand-Sewing When the fabric is taught the needle punctures, drags the thread like schunk-schoo, schunk-schoo, schunk-schoo, stitches bold, solid, hands mechanical, mind somewhere away to the side but when it stretches, frays, bunches, slips away from the needle’s point, you become a tiny bird, carrying each stitch, like twigs, arranged in a row that may blow away on a breeze.
Text: 16.4.2026 - Graceless Nothing you do every day is graceful. This month, I’m making myself write graceless poetry, inefficient, meatball poetry, bucket loads of wasted words, bulked out with extra syllables, first-thought-least-thought poetry, pithy Instagram nothingness, banal, didactic, honest; all these abstractions I deny the solidity they’re begging for. I let them float untethered.
Text: Half-Jewishly I exist half-Jewishly. My hair curls inconsistently. I digest dairy intolerantly. My diet is kosher occasionally.
Text: Title: Least Resistance I don't know. Maybe I am just a Luddite. Maybe the Luddites were right. Maybe trading imperfection for convenience has been killing us since… when? Since we chose to stay still and plant seeds and let priests and kings take their cut? I've never lived in a time without supermarkets, so I don't miss knowing the butcher by name. There are people living now who won't miss knowing everything they read was written by a person. I struggle to write about this without regressing to the cliched notion of the soul. So much of writing is trying to reroute a river by hand. The water flows down paths of least resistance, the desire path carved by everything you've heard already, so if you don’t concentrate, if you don't tear muscle and tendons wrenching against that gravity, you end up saying the exact thing that's been said a hundred times before. ‘There is nothing new under the sun.’
Text: Chest Pains My dad told me, for a long time he knew his heart was crystalising, felt stalactite shards lining his arteries, burrowing inwards, stabbing fractions closer to the core, and all he wanted was to squeeze out a few more years, a few million grinding beats, until they cracked his sternum, dug out the fist-sized geode gleaming there, inevitable as geology.
Text: 12.4.2026 - View from a Train Window Yorkshire is fresh green over chalk pale earth, with the occasional neon yellow flash of rapeseed, border trees with tentative new leaves, long, corrugated iron barns, the odd scattering of sheep, blocky graffiti under bridges, and pylons like huge steel walkers, sliding past. When I was small I made a game of watching them sync up and drift apart. I do it now. Not much has changed. Somewhere a bomb has just fallen.
Page with sections blacked out so these words remain: You're pursuing an intimacy nobody can understand. you want to remain un erased: Of course, that advancing tide will carry you
Text (first half of the poem): 10.4.2026 - Golus Az ikh volt koyekh hobn Volt ikh in di gasn gelofn Un volt geshribn “Golus! Oy, golus, golus golus…” you hear it humming, my love, too high to hear but making my feet twitch, it sits between us, beneath my tongue, when I whisper what if, what if we just run? golus, golus, golus is my oldest heirloom, the first one out the box in each new house my mother flung us at, when I sat in the moving van, so high up I’d imagine I was riding an elephant, it followed like a panther in the undergrowth
9.4.2026 - Untitled My colleague wishes me a Happy Easter. I try talking about my Passover plans without spitting up a leviathan in pieces, stinking of salt, iron, white phosphor. It's rude to do vivisections at the office.
Poem where stanzas are arranged with the 'Down' stanzas on the left side of the page and the 'Up' stanzas on the right side. (First 'Down' stanza:) " the river valley carved from run-off from the building works concrete bedrock, sawdust silt splits off from itself, rejoins Tigris and Euphrates" (First 'Up' stanza:) "white dead god bronchioles the birds who nest in them their calls turned to words in the machine between twenty, twenty follow-me, follow-me" (Both stanzas meet in a centre-aligned line) "wheat, wheat, wheat" (Second 'Down' stanza') "grown by tiny civilisations my feet devour the sun the sun on wet tarmac a burnt offering smell the machine loops a song" (Second 'Up' stanza) "rerouting the river English > Yiddish ikh zeh, ikh zeh nishto, nishto, vemen, vemen, vemen" (Stanzas meet up in the centre again) "vemen zol dos land gehern? dumai, dumai, dumai"
Text: 5.4.2026 - A Mathematic Proof For Pain What perfect signs could I use to explain this howling mass of signals, deaf and blind? I lack a mathematic proof for pain. At three a.m it rattles through my brain, that if I just tried hard enough I'd find the perfect signs I could use to explain. So I pick up my chalk and try again to scratch a trap for screams to be confined. I’ll craft a mathematic proof for pain. For all I've raked myself against this vein, somewhere in these depths, yet to be mined, lie perfect signs I could use to explain. When the calculations all are plain, they can't deny it once it's been defined. I need a mathematic proof for pain. But every time that fatal gap remains, between the universes of our minds. What perfect signs could I use to explain there is no mathematic proof for pain?
Text: 4.4.2026 - Small Talk If you have a car that runs smoothly, you can go for years never making it past small talk. But if it rattles, groans, makes that clunk a few too many times to ignore, if it refuses to let you forget its shuddering physicality, you have to spend time with the hood up, asking questions like why does this loose bolt make everything shake? or does this part even do anything? or what is our purpose? or are we trapped in a web of cause and effect that only seems random from the inside? and by the end you'll still have a neurotic mess of a machine but at least you'll understand each other better now.
Text: 3.4.2026 - Exterminator The man who came to kill things in my house wore corduroy trousers held up with suspenders and when I asked if he had to use poison, the lines spidering from his eyes rearranged in the shape of an apology. 'I've never seen a dirty rat,' he said as he shone a torch into the dusty corners of my basement flat, and before I could explain the cardboard taped over the skirting boards, the plates piled as an offering to the future, the shopping bags left in the hallway the day my hip turned to concrete halfway back from the shops, he stopped me. 'You've done everything right.'
Text: The Wicked Child The wicked child says: ‘Whatever does this mean to you?’ (Trad. Passover proverb) Sharp teeth, sharp tongue, sharp edge, sword who bites the hand that tries to wield it, back straight, eyes burning, finger pointing, pointing at the fingers dripping wine from a cup, ten drops for ten plagues what does this mean, in the age of daily genocides what does ten drops mean, better to tip the jug, flood the room what does it mean to you, you who is not me, who can’t be me when you tell me we were slaves but now are free, who is this ‘we’ you would wrap me in, like the Red Sea slamming shut?
Text: Sponsored poems for NaPoWriMo National Poetry Writing Month is here again. Last year I wrote some poems as sponsored ones; this year I'd like to do that again.
Discord screen shot reading: "Alright, I'm off to bed, none of any of these words are in the Talmud (not even the Midrash), we need Moshiach now, I'm gonna go hide in the Chabad tunnels, I'm out of Jewish memes, good night"
Text: Rain and hot tears soaked my cheeks. My scarf was heavy on my head. I pulled it down. Someone splashed past, shooting me a wary look from under his hood. I recognised him as the brewer from whom my father bought his schnapps. How soon, he must have thought, has the mad Jew’s daughter gone mad herself with grief.
Text: “Why doesn't your father come himself?” asked the porter at Ingolstadt University. Because he's dead beneath the ground, and has been less than a week, yet instead of sitting shiva here I am chasing up his debts. I didn't say that, because as useless as my father had been, he did leave me with a few good lessons. One of them was to never let a goy know your bargaining position, especially if it's a weak one. I didn't know if the porter would know the ins and outs of Jewish residency permits, if he could figure out that my time left in Ingolstadt was limited by the Prince’s patience. But why risk it? “He’s busy,” I replied, unblinking. There, let him think me the messenger of an important scholar with little time on his hands, rather than the beggar daughter of a dead madman.
Text: “Why doesn't your father come himself?” asked the porter at Ingolstadt University. Because he's dead beneath the ground, and has been less than a week, yet instead of sitting shiva here I am chasing up his debts. I didn't say that, because as useless as my father had been, he did leave me with a few good lessons. One of them was to never let a goy know your bargaining position, especially if it's a weak one. I didn't know if the porter would know the ins and outs of Jewish residency permits, if he could figure out that my time left in Ingolstadt was limited by the Prince’s patience. But why risk it? “He’s busy,” I replied, unblinking. There, let him think me the messenger of an important scholar with little time on his hands, rather than the beggar daughter of a dead madman.
A screenshot of a discord exchange - User 1: Lost in the (cheese) sauce) The fondue, as it were Wait Hang on I gotta google something so I can know if a pun works User 2: I adore you User 1: (in all caps) PERDU DANS LA FONDUE
Text: 24.4.2025 – tbd Forgive me, my love. You often stroke the fine hairs on my chin. I stopped shaving to give you more to play with. Today, in the ladies’ toilet, I saw a stranger’s eyes flick down and up again. My mind betrayed me. It might be safer (in these times) to try and look more “biological”.
Text: 23.4.2025 - ADELINE AND SOLOMON Meyn teyerer, why do you visit me in this smoky city so far from where our wedding was blessed? In Odessa, your eyes were black as the clay on the banks of the Dnieper. Here, they are brown like your rye bread, which I have not tasted in years, and here is your hand on my chest, fixing a button on my sooty schmattes jacket, and you say I look thin and tired. But teyerer, why is your voice in the throat of a woman who never spoke Yiddish before, who looks at me with such soft sadness, when I call her by your name?
Text: 22.4.2025 - OBSERVATIONS OF A PAINTER AT WORK (II) An image sparks your mind and electrifies your mouth, vitality twitching in your grin. Sketchbook on your lap, you pull your smile in, as you do when putting lipstick on. Bent over an unruly canvas, you bite your lip with such ferocity it makes me flinch, as if you were digging into my own flesh. When satisfied, your lips curl back, revealing your tongue’s pink tip between your bright teeth. Belladonna, you need not tell me how your work progresses. You have done it without uttering a word. Even so: tell me again. J.B, 1931
A screenshot of an old newspaper, text reading: SO far as lies in my power, my contribution to the Garbo- Dietrich controversy shall be reasoned, impartial, and judicious. Having many years ago done my bit in the
Text: 21.4.2025 - MAENAD (For Olwen) She stands with arms outspread, screaming hideous delight to a world that wants her dead and for a second I see snakes coiling round her head, smell the blood of tyrants ripped apart by prey they failed to fear, hear the drums thumping in my chest, and their rhythm is the rhythm of her defiant roar: WE WILL NOT GO QUIETLY. WE WILL NOT GO AT ALL.
Text: 20.4.2025 - INJUSTICE When a howl is clawing up your throat, listen. Your lungs hold more love than your heart. They will warn you when the wolf’s jaws have got your flock by the neck. Don't forget: the first lesson you ever learned was how to scream.
Text: 19.4.2025 - CHANGE (For Ellie Sparrow) I saw a rock face smile as it split apart. Its stone lips, its mossy brows, shifted with a crack that echoed in my bones. Its eyelid boulders rolled back and let a rivulet flow down its carved cheeks. A glowing fissure opened wide, and from the wound escaped a winged figure, who left its broken mountain prison smiling, far below.
Text: 17.4.2025 - VESTIGE Under siege, I retreat to the heartland of my eating habits. Crackers and jelly. Dry / wet. Snap / slurp. Ying / yang.
Text: 16.4.2025 - IT'S NOT ONE LIGHT it's scattered pinpricks in the dark, flickering in and out, sputtering candles with hands cupped around, lighting off each other when the wind blows them out, trusting there'll be enough to keep the constellation going.
Text: 9.4.2025 - [TBD] (After Daniel Kahn) Olaria olara, daffodils and fa-la-la, oh the daffodils are growing on the verges, I can see them through the window of the train. Spring is here and soon it will be Pesach, and in Gaza bombs are falling once again.
Text: 8.4.2025 - TO THE MAN WHO SITS BEHIND ME ON THE BUS every day I get to hear what phrase your tongue is playing with. Today it's … snakes don't snakes don't snakes don't walk they don't walk they snakes dont walk they don't walk they slither, slither, slither… my favourites are the ones where I can feel the shape in my own mouth … snakes don't walk walk waaaalk snakes don't snakes snaaaake-ke-ke-ke they ssssssslithhhher… you say them again and again, until they aren't words anymore … snakes don't, snakestone, snakestownt snakestowntwork snakestowntworkthay slitherslitherslitherslither… I wish I could join in with you with you with you withyuuwithoo withwithwithwith join in with you.
Text: 5.4.2025 - THE FOURTH NEURODIVERGENT LOVE LANGUAGE, OR: please crush my soul back into my body, my limbs are floating. Drag them down and hold them under smooth, cool stones, please crush my soul back into my body, I need to be engulfed. My mind is leaking, seeping through my skin, hold me in, please crush my soul back into my body, lie flush against my chest and hum a long, low note that thrums to my knees, please crush my soul back into my body, and when you're done, see if you can squeeze in here with me.
Text: 4.4.2024 - DREAM BOARS Sun bleached stone ruins, yellowed grass beneath bare feet, cool shade beneath a half-crumbled archway. Somewhere, a blue harbour, and before a rushing weir, crashing beneath a metal grate underfoot, cutting in. Between, a line of horses leading a procession of boars, honoured beasts with broad, brown backs. Are they going to the water or the stones? You wake before you know.
Text: 3.4.2025 - LUCKY Sat up, lamp on, trapped in sleepless limbo. The door opened enough to let in a black cat. Leo, the shy one, attracted by the light, jumped up and settled on the bed. I felt the weight and warmth of a creature who chose to give them to me. “I'm so lucky.” Fifteen years later, another dark-haired creature curls up next to me at night. But you (my love) you say it back.
Text: Kneeling by the river, I take a handful of wet, red clay, and with a practiced gesture, patch over the latest crack in my mud body, my old remedy, clay fingers on clay skin. I find a fingerprint, on my rib. I thought they were all covered, years of smeared repairs, but there it is, the pressed-in remains of a man whose hands have long been unmade by the earth he made me from. Humans do not grow old. They shrink. (I think a lot about words – along with clay, they are what I am made of.) I grow old, I expand, I add to myself, with layers more like the ancient Methuselah tree than the people my body mimics. I break and remake myself. My light will not fade. I take from the earth and am not unmade. I bake in the sun but do not breathe as trees or people do. When these are taken by fire or rain I will remain. I am and I will be a beautiful blasphemy.
Text in one, centre-aligned block without punctuation other than apostrophes: I'm not tired it's just my heart won't stop quivering fist-sized lump of meat and electricity poor thing's doing its best it just wasn't built for 2025 I'm not tired it's just taking a few microseconds longer for the ion channels in my nerves to creak open and pass my thought-sparks down the wire I'm not tired I just need to read the scriptures backwards to find the secret name of whatever vitamin I'm deficient in I'm not tired I'm just missing something something’s holding up the production chain some shipping channels blocked I'm not tired it's just some skirmish on the straits of my synapses I'm not tired I just need to drink more water get some fluid to the hydraulics I'm not tired I just can't stop thinking about that machine scraping blood that wasn't blood back into its body again and again I'm not tired
Text: 'Yes. But also--' I crumpled my apron as I tried to put my feelings into words. Yet even those feelings seemed to slip from my grasp. Which part of the creature made my stomach tremble? I kept thinking of those pale eyes, but that made no sense; they were the most human part of him. It was their placement that was wrong, in that yellow face with blood vessels pulsing just beneath the surface of his skin. 'I can't tell what he is.' I concluded, lamely. 'Before he woke, he seemed like... like a corpse. Then, like some kind of animal. But he listens, and he learns, and when he speaks I see a man.' Mordecai didn't reply at first, instead responding with a slow, deep nod. He sat down on the edge of his bed with his hands on his knees as he pondered my words. 'So we're unsure what he is,' he said when his musing was done. 'Dr. Weiss will return this evening. He's a smart man, I'm sure he'll find an answer. It might be our guest is just a man. An stranger, one with some odd affliction, but a man nonetheless. Until we know more, I believe we should treat him as such.'
Text: She sat down next to Lupa. Her grey fur was thick and full. It looked like if Rose stroked it, her whole hand would sink in. She reached out to test it, but Lupa flinched, lip curling to show her teeth. "Sorry,” said Rose. "It's okay. Just ask next time?" "Okay." Rose watched as Lupa sewed, working with quick, small motions that Rose wouldn't have thought a savage beast capable of. "I think I was rude to you before." "Mm," Lupa nodded. "But I've heard worse."
Text: I. Me. My. Mine. These words are wrong. How about this then... A hand presses into the floor. Nails scratch the concrete. The body pushes itself up. The knees twinge from where they hit the ground. Pain signals stutter up the spinal cord. Lungs inflate, deflate. A heartbeat shudders inside a heaving rib cage. There's a body. The body wants to keep living. The body doesn't want to be in pain. The body belongs to Miya, but Miya's not here. The body will have to take care of itself.
Text: She opened the jar of honey, put the bread aside, and picked up a piece of the kindling. Managing somehow to do so both conspicuously and as if it were the most natural thing in the world, she spread a layer of honey on the strip of wood. A Thought was spat from the darkness beyond the lantern light: WHAT ARE YOU DOING? Mother Enika looked up. 'Oh?' Her voice was expertly emptied of guile. 'Is this wrong?' There was a pause. Then a rustle, and for a second a waxing-moon sliver of a face appeared from the shadows. Cheeks drawn over a hungry frame, lantern light reflected in large, dark eyes. Then the face retreated into the dark. MAD WOMAN. Mother Enika shrugged. 'Mad feral child. We're a fine pair.'
Text: Anyway, let me tell you about the time Uncle Yeremy was almost killed by a fly. It happened that we needed to stay for three nights in Balta, to play for a gathering of wine merchants. Great-Uncle Zalman was confident that the Vintner’s Guild would be generous with their tips. “Why, last time we had the fortune to play for them, we left with a small cask to share on the road,” he said, the memory bringing a wistful smile to his face, “Now when was that… 1898?” “1897,” said Cousin Gavrel, nudging me with his shoulder, “This one’s father was still playing with us.” “Ah, of course!” replied Great-Uncle Zalman, and he launched into a story about their last visit to the city, one with my father as a central character. It was the kind of story one only hears about one’s father after he has died. But I’m not telling you that story now. I’m telling you the story of the time Uncle Yeremy was almost killed by a fly. What of that, then?
Text: As Teacher reached up to my forehead, I knew what he was going to do. He would wipe the letters from my forehead. The Light would go from my Body. He would remove the scroll from my mouth and place my Word-self in the new Body. I understood all this, for Teacher had explained it to me. So it came as a surprise to both of us when I jerked out of his reach, and my mouth clamped shut to keep him from reaching inside. Teacher snatched his hand back, as if afraid I might break his fingers in my jaw. It was one of the few times he looked afraid of me. He asked me what was wrong and handed me the slate to reply. I held the chalk between my fingers, trying to find the Words for what I felt. It was as though a chasm had opened up beneath me and I was standing on a narrow ledge above it. A Wordless abyss of non-existence lay before me. In the end, all I could write was: I AM AFRAID.
Text: I asked the Illuminate to ask who the newcomer was and why they provoked such excitement. 'A local to the settlement,' he translated for me. 'One who has returned after a time away.' I sighed; as always, I was going to have to dig for anything more than literalism. 'What was their business beyond the outpost?' I asked. 'Are they a trader? A courier?' 'No,' the Illuminated translated. 'They are...' There it was again, that hesitation I had seen before in him. Some instinct told me this had to do with that negative space I kept encountering around yeti religion. 'Are they something like your pilgrims?' I pressed. He cringed at the suggestion, but passed my question along all the same. 'One might consider xir as such, yes,' he replied, with palpable reluctance. This was it. A tangible example of yeti spirituality. I was determined not to let my guide's squeamishness get in the way.
Gru's Plan meme template. First panel: "Move my novel's setting to a heavily documented period". Second panel: "Have way more sources to draw on". Third panel: "Research forever and never start my draft". Fourth panel same as the third ( Gru looking disappointed) . Fifth panel (with Gru looking triumphant): "RESEARCH FOREVER" (all caps)