Linkspam Friday: March 1

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Last week was Aromantic Awareness Week! If you’d like to see my posts and the awesome content I reblogged from other aro-spec creatives, it’s on the @aroworlds Tumblr under the #aaw2019 tag.

I’m also working on a post to discuss changing my pronouns from singular they to ze/hir, because the why of feeling unsettled by my former pronouns is something that needs more than a paragraph or two. For the moment, while I’ve a great many book files to update, I’d like to state that I am going by the ze/hir set. I’ll accept “they” as an auxiliary pronoun for people who can’t use ze/hir in spoken English, but as I don’t feel this set describes me, I’d appreciate it if folks avoid this in written English.

I’m not being misgendered, exactly; they still positions me as outside the female/male binary. But it also doesn’t now describe my shape of genderlessness, and since I’ve reasons to regard they (in my experience) as a sort of compromise or concession pronoun, I’m becoming uncomfortable with it. But I’ll save more of this for later…

(Aside from Tes in Kit March, Hallo, Aro: Unspoken and A Gift of Naming show this set in use from the perspective of the narrating protagonist. If you want to know the spoken pronunciation, I’ve been referring people to this mypronouns.org article.)

Header text: Aro Worlds: Connecting aro creatives and aro audiences. Header is in antique black type above an ornate divider.

A close up photo of a grey Sylvanian Families rabbit doll/figurine standing beside a plastic faux-wood wall against a background of fake foliage, purple fabric flowers, a white picket fence and a fuzzy green bush. The rabbit is wearing a handsewn dress in the colours of the aro pride flag: a dark green waistband with light green, white and grey stripes followed by a black lace trim. A yellow ribbon is sewn to the front of the dress and she wears a green ribbon bow on one of her ears.Photo – Aurora the Aro Pride Bunny: I don’t think anyone else celebrated aromantic awareness by making a dress for a Sylvanian Families figurine in aro pride colours, although if someone else did, I’d like to meet you because we clearly have a lot in common! Anyway, here’s an aro pride dress sewn for one of my figurines, who has been dubbed “Aurora” by a friend.

Playlist – Instrumentals: As a different take on low-romance music, I thought I’d put together a list of some of the instrumental/scene-setting tracks in my writing playlist.

A group of Sylvanian Families animal figurines in a dollhouse bedroom, either holding aro-spec pride flags or sitting around a pile of pride flags on the floor. Flags include aro, fray, akoi/lith, cupio, demi and quoi, and animal figurines include two brown beavers, a grey rabbit, a green frog, a brown rabbit and a black-and-white cat baby. The grey rabbit, holding an aro pride flag, is wearing a striped dress in aro-pride colours.Photo – Pride Parade Preparations: Here’s a photo of a few of my figures preparing for Sylvania’s first Aro Pride Festival. I also think it likely that nobody else made mini aro-spec pride flags from paper, alcohol-based markers and toothpicks for their Sylvanian Families figurines…

(I love how some of the babies come in green and yellow outfits. Pink for girls, blue for boys, green and yellow for non-binary Sylvanian Families. Right? Yes, I know Epoch doesn’t mean that in their world of very traditional animal families, but as far as I’m concerned, the Tuxedo Cat baby is canonically non-binary. And aro-spec.)

Hallo, Aro – Lucky: A short story on the way would-be-accepting alloromantics have this annoying tendency to treat aromantics as “lucky” for not having to deal with partners or romantic attraction. This is a rare instance of contemporary fiction also based on a real-life experience concerning the typeface Calibri.

A photo, taken on a green blanket background, of a cardboard spiral-bound journal decorated with stripes of plain and glittery washi tapes in aro pride flag colours. The cover displays with some journal card and scrapbook design pieces by Kaisercraft depicting arrows, cacti and typography over the tape stripes. There’s aro pride colours in a matte paper tape, silver and two greens in holographic tape, and two narrow tapes in glittery silver and matte light green. The striped cover alternates between the matte tapes and the glittery tapes.Photoset – Aro Pride Journal Cover: I took a cheap K-Mart spiral-bound journal and aro’d it up with washi tape, journal cards and other scrapbook elements. There are so many ways for aro-specs (or any queer, really!) to get our pride on in terms of making our own pride merch and displays, and I had fun this week demonstrating a few of them.

Hallo, Aro – Attraction: A sequel to Friendship on the terror that the sexual attraction I feel might be romantic attraction, along with a side note on the inconsistent nature of this thing called romance. We need more conversations of the “intensity of feeling doesn’t by definition make it romantic” sort.

A photo showing a Sylvanian Families village, comprised of a bakery and a florist. The village is crowded with small animal figurines set up to be either marching in a parade or waving the parade on from the sidelines, with many figures carrying handdrawn aro, akoi/lith, greyro, demiro, fray, cupio and quoi pride flags. Coloured pompoms in dark green, light green and white decorate railings and doorways, coloured bows in aro-pride colours decorate roofs and railings, and a banner comprised of pompoms and bows stretches from the corner of the house to the corner of the bakery, across the small village square. Animal figures include hedgehogs, rabbits, deer, cats, mice, dogs, beavers, bears and a frog.Photoset – Sylvania’s Aro-Spec Pride Parade: A series of photographs of the Sylvanian Families village displayed on a shelf in my wardrobe … now decorated for aro-spec pride, complete with pompoms, pride flags and ribbon streamers. While I packed away some of the additional figures used in the parade after a week, I haven’t been able to touch the flags or decorations. I just … how do I not enjoy my own personal, albeit miniature, aro-spec pride display every time I open my wardrobe?

A cartoony image of four book covers hanging inside wooden frames, nailed to a cracked brick wall with rows of bricks in the colours of the aromantic pride flag: dark green, light green, white, grey and black. Below the wall display sits a glass table with a potted plant sitting on top; a few crumpled sheets of paper and a green pencil sit on the wood floor under the table. The book covers inside the frames include the books Old Fashioned, The Sorcerous Compendium of Postmortem Query, The Wind and the Stars and Hallo, Aro, all by K. A. Cook.Fiction Master Post: A post, complete with a hastily-made aro-pride image, collecting links to all my fiction that depicts aromantic-spectrum characters in stories centred on aromantic-spectrum experiences.

It’s kind of nice to now have enough stories that I can focus this list just on “pieces mostly or at least partly about aromanticism”.

Header text: Allo Aro Worlds. Header is in antique black type above an ornate divider.Reblog – How to Make A-Spec Spaces Welcoming to Allo-Aros: I’ve been feeling that many conversations on how to make a-spec spaces more welcoming of all aro-specs often have little to say about specific allo-aro needs and approaches to allo-aro inclusion, even though we’re often mentioned by name. So when I saw this post asking for input, I went for it.

Post – Terminology and Definitions that Make Your Project Welcoming to Allo-Aros: This is in part a rehash of the above and in part a development of it, since I never get to assume that things labelled “aromantic” or referring to “queerplatonic” are inclusive of me.