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.)

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.

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.

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.

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?

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”.

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.