Tag Archives: queer

Linkspam Friday: October 19

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Last week, I had four medical appointments at the end of the week and nowhere near the organisational skills required to get a post organised before then–a feat not helped by a dire lack of content to post about.

This week, I still don’t have a lot of @aroworlds content. I’ve been working on the long-awaited post collecting allosexual aromantic media and hammering out a last-minute first draft for a vaguely-Halloween-ish short story about a necromancer’s summoning her outspoken great-aunt’s ghost to talk about her struggles with cute girls and romantic attraction. It results in a whole horde of local ghosts coming out as various shades of aro-spec and a terrible overuse of the word “bosom”. I would have appreciated the idea coming to mind sooner than Tuesday night, but, on the positive side, I have a complete 7k first draft written in three days despite more pain than I like (because I am not recovered from Kit March, of course). I think that’s the fastest I’ve ever, without stopping, written a complete story like that; more often, I write, get distracted by something else in the middle and finish the story days, weeks or months later.

I want to publish it properly, because it works wonderfully as a prequel for Love is the Reckoning, but I’ll post it here sometime before Halloween regardless of its polishing. I think having a friend, the fabulous @crimsonsquare, encourage me on its progress has helped me be able to sit and work to get it done. It’s easier to write when I feel like someone not me is interested in the story…

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Authorial Rambling, March Style

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This week isn’t a linkspam post, because when I’ve hammered out 40k words on the conclusion of the first draft of the Kit March book, I don’t have time for anything else. At all. On the positive side, I’ve found a way I can strap my wrist and still type, although my occupational therapist may not be best pleased by this. I’m pretty sure that disability aids aren’t meant to assist my flagrant disregard of how one should manage severe chronic pain by enabling me to ignore it for longer. Because the strapping doesn’t decrease my pain; it just gives me a little more time before it goes from moderate to lying on my bed sobbing because I really want to type and my body won’t let me.

One day I’ll write about how I hide from being moderately depressed by throwing myself into a project, meaning that I’m often incredibly productive when showing a score of other signs mental health professionals consider concerning. But that isn’t nearly as important as the upshot. This monstrous book that I’ve been trying to write for three years, now? This book that was making me feel like my aspirations to novels were more illusion and less substance? This book that was defying my will to figure out a halfway-decent first act (first book) conclusion? This book I’ve spent the last six months despairing over while pretending that I hadn’t developed a desperate fear of being unable to finish it? A complete 190 000k word first draft.

I’m trying to find politer or more eloquent ways to phrase it, but I can’t move past the simplicity of fuck, it’s sweet.

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Linkspam Friday: September 28

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This is one of those weeks that hasn’t been all that remarkable, beyond the worst migraine of my life, to the point that I was considering discussing the terror that strikes the autistic-inertia of my heart every time I open up my dashboard and see WordPress cheerfully promoting the Gutenburg editor. (I still use the .org layout because it’s quicker to load than the current “improved” editor, which never seemed in any way improved to me.) In some ways I feel change doesn’t bother me too much, at least in the sense of someone asking me to go somewhere without little preparation or offering up an unexpected activity; I can handle the disruption of someone coming in and upending my plan for the day. When people ask me about change, that’s the sort of thing that comes to mind. Of course I can handle it … can’t I?

Thinking on any change to WordPress has my toes clenching. (Tumblr is a disaster of constant changes I don’t like; the new coloured text ability is just awful, partly from the glare of the green against a backlit screen and mostly because I’m not accustomed to seeing coloured text. Thank all gods for XKit.) Changes to foods I like are a nightmare of why did they do that made worse by the narrow selection of foods I do like and the horror of trying new ones. Then when I consider the nightmare in going somewhere new and how many panic attacks I had last week over a new therapist, I realise that yes, I do not handle change. Not to mention that all the worst mental health spirals I have suffered took place against the context of change for which I wasn’t prepared for or supported in…

In many ways, I don’t understand it myself. I like learning new things and I like experimenting with design: part of the reason I find Adobe CS enjoyable is the wealth of discovery! I love trying out new crafts I saw online. It seems as though these things should be similar, change and learning, but they’re not, and I don’t know why I like trying new things in a complex program while I fall apart at the thought of having to try a new brand of microwave rice.

All this has made me realise that my goal in Kit March is to get both Darius and Tes comfortable in a new place and circumstance: to showcase the growth of a sense of stability after a change neither can quite handle, and then (perhaps not metaphorically) burn the house down. I have no plan to end the story there, mind, but I do plan to disrupt what looks like a happy mid-point.

Lastly, my severe anxiety has left me struggling with a few ordinary things like checking my PayPal account. This is an extremely belated expression of gratitude for this reason, but I do want to thank the people who have been so kind as to buy me a ko-fi. Thank you, so very much, for your support: it means the absolute world to me!

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Linkspam Friday: September 14

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In the last fortnight, I’ve written twenty-eight thousand words on Birds of a Feather. It isn’t the reason why I didn’t put a post up last week–medical appointments and my birthday were the reason–but it is the reason why I didn’t work on the post earlier in the week, knowing that I had things going on which would likely stop me from posting. A complete 40k first draft, though, is worth it to me, and the time spent writing meant I didn’t have enough links for last week’s post anyway, so…

In personal news, I am yearning for the chance to have a proper shower. I’ve got stitches right where my thigh and hip meet, which is proving an inconvenient spot for conventional and commercial-but-affordable ways of sealing a wound against water. They should be coming out tomorrow and I’m praying that the wound will be okay to risk getting slightly damp after that. Showering as quickly as possible with my leg poking out is awkward, and not washing my hair every day (to try and limit showering time) is driving me to distraction. I’m sure this will sound quite privileged, but small changes like the amount of oils in my hair bother me. I can feel the oils left by someone else’s hands on my Tangle after they’ve touched it, so I can definitely feel two days’ worth of oil in my hair. Since short hair is a stim toy attached to my body for stimming convenience and I’m always running my hands through it, I badly want it back to its usual daily-washed state.

On the positive side, I have a new bout of lived experience to fuel a few fictional characters. Not that it was necessary, but I suppose there’s something to be said for fresh realism. I’ll now have Tes pacing back and forth because the stitches across hir palm won’t stop itching…

Photo – My Gaming Gear and Unicorn Squishies: In which I show off my gaming box, my Meren of Clan Nel Toth playmat and two unicorn squishies, still trapped in their cling-wrap packaging, watching over proceedings. I started going for viewed-as-feminine colours and decorations for my gaming things as a protest, because I had girls come into my old job afraid to pick out pink card sleeves from fear they’ll be mocked or harassed. Being misgendered because of it wasn’t comfortable, but I do feel there was worth in showing that gaming accessories don’t have to be masculine-coded.

Teaser Post – The Performance Magician: In which I post a scene from the first draft of the aforementioned work. Read this if you want spoilers for Amelia’s feline naming philosophy, more of March’s passive-aggressive renaming of elfish people and creatures, why Darius named his pony after the swordseller in Certain Eldritch Artefacts and hints of how Efe is going to drive Darius into throwing a dictionary at the wall. I will confess that Darius’s irritation at words being used the wrong way is mine, and I am also hypocritical enough to not mind when I do it…

Photo – My Redecorated Notebooks: I was given some rainbow washi tape for my birthday, so I covered a notebook and three scratch pads in stripes of bright washi tape. It was nice having an afternoon to be crafty in a way that isn’t writing.

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Linkspam Friday: August 31

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I’m still getting used to my new desk arrangement, but I’m finally able to sit at my desk chair for more than half an hour. Excuse me while I sigh, for I’d love to own a body that doesn’t react to new positions with migraines and pain in places that aren’t chronic pain sites. A former psychologist of mine used to argue that I’ve got the advantage of having experienced much of the pain and limitations that come with aging early, as though experience is a consolation prize for not being able to spend my twenties and thirties doing things I should take for granted. In truth, all it does is make me wonder how much worse my life is going to be when I’m sixty if I can’t cope now.

I rather suspect that kind of reframing doesn’t well work on the autistic and anxious.

It breaks me, sometimes, to think on how little I knew about good-for-me psychology and how much difficulty, struggle and trauma it’s taken to even recognise what my needs are. I’ve spent a lifetime trying not to be autistic such that, two years in, I only have an incomplete sense of what doesn’t work. What does work is a grey space of vagary, an eternal question mark. I think that question underpins everything I write–that it’s all one long, rambling conversation between an autistic and their subconscious trying to figure out what’s needed from the world.

Post – My New Desk Arrangement: Here’s a photo of my desk, my new chair height, temporary footstool and test sideways mouse, along with a little rambling on the lack of conversation about office accessibility for tall/short people.

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Fletcher Ace Preview: Magic and Mermaids

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Magic and Mermaids: An expensive education and a growing eldritch library hasn’t helped Fletcher Ace, local witch, end the drought gripping the town of Shadowdale. The town council may have a better solution than waiting on hir magic, one that involves the selling of romance to people “out there”, but Fletch isn’t prepared for just how it will involve hir…

Word count: 7, 549 words.

Content advisory: Several references to amatonormativity in romance narratives and fairy tales; several descriptions of romantic and sexual behaviours, including kissing, in the context of these tales. No character, though, experiences sexual or romantic attraction. This story also depicts drought, which may bring this too close to home for some of my Aussie readers. There are also death mentions and references to the presumed, entirely-theoretical suicide of those older people who choose not to leave Shadowdale.

Setting: This takes place on the Stormcoast, a region north of Malvade on the Western side of the Straits, a good many years after Kit March. Other than a few place-name references, there is zero crossover with the other Marchverse works. Readers may like to know that Shadowdale follows the Eastern family contention of a child taking a parent’s use/common name as surname. (Fletch’s mother, therefore, is named Ace.) The conceit of Shadowdale is that everybody is aro-ace, but, just like talking corncobs, I don’t plan on explaining the why of this.

Note the first: Due to pain and multi-day migraines caused by my new desk set up, there’s no point in a linkspam post for this week. So I’ll combine everything next week and today post the first section of Fletcher Ace as a preview. Please note that this is not a final draft and I expect to make a few changes between this and the completed novella, but this section does have an ending in its own right.

Note the second: This story came into being because I am an annoyed, petty aro who decides to make a town of aro-ace in response to the common trend of television adaptations erasing the aro (and sometimes the aro-ace as well) from aro-ace characters. If you’d like to know more on my thought process and plans for this story, please check out the Fletcher Ace tag on @aroworlds. I will allow that this story has ended up taking the somewhat absurd concept of selling romance seriously, which may not work for all readers.

Stories preach the same cruel truth: romantic love pounds through artery and vein, as essential to life as air and water.

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Linkspam Friday: August 17

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This week, for various reasons, my anxiety has edged far too close to intolerable. Much of my response to it involves my trying to minimise the outward appearance of said anxiety, which saves me from judgement but denies me the release of expressing it. I’m falling apart so terrifically inside this membrane of skin while Western society is structured in such a way that I have limited ability to safely voice this experience outside it. Not only do I have to survive the pain of a brain that is disabling me, I have to survive both the lack of support this disability gets and that lack making it difficult to try and talk even to those few willing to listen.

In a way the ordinariness of anxiety, as something so common a significant percentage of people suffer it at least at one time, makes it difficult for those of us with severe forms (especially severe forms complicated by other diagnoses, like autism) to be acknowledged and treated as such. In therapy, I’m more often handed things that work for people with mild to moderate anxiety, with the expectation that’s all that’s needed to help me. The psychologists think I’m not trying hard enough, while I don’t feel seen or understood. I’m going back to a normal psychology program to be treated for my current peak of anxiety (this way I don’t have to ring or email anyone, just show up) but I am anxious (oh hear the bitter laughter) that this is going to be another disaster with another psychologist who treats my anxiety as moderate and ignores the autism.

I’ve had a good psychologist in the mix, and I like my current psychiatrist a lot, but that hasn’t erased my trauma. In many ways, it makes me feel that my trauma response is invalid or absurd. I know good medical professionals exist, so why do I panic so much about seeing them? Why can’t I trust that a new one will also be good? But I do and I can’t. New medical professionals terrify me, especially new mental health medical professionals.

I’m thinking about pausing my current projects to work on Ein’s next story (the sequel to The King of Gears and Bone). It might be more distressing than is good for me: that story cut far too close to the bone to write even at a time when I felt (more) stable. It might also give me a way of talking through my character at a time when I am so silenced. I’m feeling the pitch of anxiety, distrust and isolation, so if I must endure this again, perhaps I should make what use of it I can by channelling it into my character.

It’s not as though I’m accomplishing anything off my to-do-list right now, so if writing that out gives me somewhere to go with it all, maybe that won’t be a bad thing.

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