Does anyone remember that I do this? I can’t blame you if you don’t. It’s been a while.
After a flurry of posting fiction, I’ve been updating book pages. I’ve now got cover art up for The Sorcerous Compendium of Postmortem Query. (Self, use a less unwieldy title next time.) I’m currently trying to focus on finishing the third Mara and Esher story because I can’t post the second Crew chapter: there’s just too big a revelation for the events that happen in A Quest of Spheres and Phalanges for those two pieces to be read out of order. (Self, that title isn’t much less unwieldy and you damn well know it.) After that, I’d really like to finish Love in the House of the Ravens (so unwieldy) so I can put that and One Strange Man up: together with The Adventurer King, they form a kind of trilogy in Darius’s identifying as aromantic. I have to admit that between Darius, Mara, Kit, Amelia and a little bit of Tes, I’ll be glad to put to bed the “discovering the word” genre of aromantic writing.
It’s a shape of storytelling that needs to exist, given how much it normalises our experiences as aromantics. I’m just so used to now writing characters who are trans or autistic with little explanation on their gender or neurotype that I’m feeling the need for a similar approach with aro-spec characters, too. I like writing about aromantic characters mentoring new aromantics because I can show folks already at that point, but I’m starting to yearn for a story that mentions a protagonist’s aromanticism, has no reaction from anyone else beyond casual acceptance and then concerns itself with everything but aromanticism.
In unrelated news, Tumblr decided that “chronic pain” is a porn-related tag and now has given folks with chronic pain no way to search for each other or find related content. Disabled people like me are collateral damage in their rush to delete dangerous and illegal content that shouldn’t have been allowed to flourish in the first place. Tumblr, if there’s porn in the chronic pain tag, the problem is the porn bots who shouldn’t be putting it there, not a community of chronic pain patients trying to find support and connection.
I know that there’s never been a purge of anything that hasn’t caught up innocent (most often marginalised) people in its wake, but surely by 2018 there’s enough historical precedent to realise that a little care is needed before hitting the wipe button?
(And I hate, I hate that I have far too much of a following to be able to walk away from a platform that thinks it acceptable to silence me as a disabled person.)
