gryphonsegg

Today I ran into a friend I hadn't seen in months. I'm going to visit her tomorrow afternoon.

I was able to pick up a little work as tutor for a few weeks before I leave for grad school. My two students are so fun! I let the older one use Hunger Games examples in her math work. XD

I have lots of different ideas on my mind, all begging me to write them. They're weirdly split between "escapist fluff for people whose tastes are more similar to mine than currently popular genre trends" and "post-Tiptree feminist rage." It's like I'm trying to get my patriarchy-smash on, but my imagination can't decide whether to retreat to a less sexist world or just howl in pain.

I think I'm going to have to put aside all my Telepathic Animal Companions + Gender Critique fic-scraps for a good, long while-- or maybe cut them into smaller pieces and recycle characters and scenes from disparate projects into something new that ties together the themes I was using them to approach from different angles. Today I had an inspiration that fits it all together.

( Cut for book blather )

Okay, at this point I am making up Zoo City fusions for everything except My Little Pony (and I considered even that before deciding that it wouldn't be possible to do in a non-parody way that left both sources recognizable). Here's the one I wrote for Kansan Entrails-Surrealist Dreamer, transplanting her characters into Zoo City-- warning for racism and homophobia in the backstory. Up next, supervillains, hat-obsessed mercenaries, and multiple attempts to merge worldbuilding with ATLA.


( Zoo City Grey, ~2200 words )

This is the beginning of an animal soulbonding story that was inspired by the conversation in comments on this earlier post. Warnings for the kind of backstory that fantasy protagonists so often have (dead mothers, abusive older men, bullies and wicked step-brothers of sorts), but the story concerns the aftermath of that. I think the piece is coherent in itself, but the comments on that post are necessary for understanding why I made the specific choices I did (no wolf-women, downtrodden and abused protagonist, a mission led by a female wolf and her partner). Oh, and the fey-wolves and wolf-men in this story, while they're not angels, are certainly not into gang rape.


( 3,364 words, in which Cinderella's fairy godmothers are an interspecies duo of grumpy badasses )

Following up on yesterday's post, I have finished my kid-friendly SF scene. Now I'm working on gay YA.

( 654 words below the cut, aliens help kids learn about SCIENCE! )

This post explains my Blue Lantern character, Lally of Achiem. Let’s start with a description of zer appearance: Lally is short and round and curvy and purple. Ze has small black antennae and hair that is a darker shade of purple than zer skin. Lally’s default on-duty costume consists of long black pants, black knee-high boots, and a loose-fitting blue jacket with long sleeves and a high collar. If zer hair gets in the way of work, Lally makes blue light constructs to keep it out of zir face. Lally rarely wears purely decorative things, such as makeup or jewelry other than zer blue power ring, although ze has started occasionally wearing blue light construct bracelets after meeting Wonder Woman.

For some reason, I feel like presenting Lally’s backstory and personality in Q&A format.( Cut for length and potential triggers at the beginning: reproductive coercion and miscarriage, but the reproduction is tech-mediated, so no sexual abuse as such )

Some notes about sexual development and gender (or lack thereof) for the sapient species from the planet Achiem:

( World-building infodump; Warning for governments mucking about with people's hormones toward the end )

I've been reviewing what I've written for my main Naraya story, and I've noticed a problem with one of the characters, or at least with his initial description. The way I described him just doesn't feel, upon re-read, like it fits with the descriptions and the general tone of the first few chapters. A lot of parts of this story are supposed to be implicit critiques of genre and fandom trends, and each character exists for specific Doylist reasons. The viewpoint character Yaera is a scarred, ugly, stocky, middle-aged warrior who is also female and therefore bound to be erased from history because she doesn't fit her culture's notions of what a woman has to be like in order to be interesting. Other characters include the physically realistic female paladin, the brilliant science-magic nerd who had the misfortune to end up with a female body that can't be disguised anymore, the two visibly scarred rape-and-revenge story heroines (the one who will recover psychologically and the one who won't), the healer whose traits would be recognized as signs of genius in a male character and might get a female character recognized as a genius or at least fairly intelligent if she were in a non-helping-people profession, and the gay wizard who is not and never was and never will be a skinny pretty boy and has the emotional scars from Boarding School Hell to prove it. And this other character, Lohyu . . . well, he is a skinny pretty boy, and one whose backstory contains elements that are popular in the "angsty pretty boys angsting prettily" sub-genre. He's in this story instead of a typical "angsty pretty boys angsting prettily" story because I wanted to try a character who seems to fit the type but whose troubled past and ongoing issues are neither trivialized nor fixed by falling in love. The problem is, his introduction comes off as too much "Ooh, look at the prettiness!" I'm trying to work out how to change that so that it's clear both that the character does look a certain way and that he's there for honest thematic purposes rather than fan service. Right now, it looks like he's from a different, more prurient and morally simplistic story than everybody else.

Yesterday I went to a rally in support of the protesters in Wisconsin. At first it was difficult to be in such a public place with so many people, but I kept telling myself that I had to do something and this really was the least I could do.

Today I had a great time celebrating KE/Surrealist Dreamer's birthday. We both talked about our fictional characters, and she helped me work out how to handle a potential Unfortunate Implication that emerged in my Naraya project(s).

( Cut for going meta on my own original fic )

One of my preferred policy in writing secondary world fiction is to take some care not to base any fictional culture too closely on any one real world culture. Another preferred policy is not to use many made-up words for anything except character names and place names. I usually try to write so that status titles, clothing descriptions, names for courses of study, descriptions of psychic phenomena, and many other things are "translated" from a hypothetical otherworld language into English (or, much more rarely a loan word that most English-speaking SF/F fans would already be familiar with).

( cut for worldbuilding chatter )