life – Penny Stirling Speculation

Last Ocean Tide Lost in Sand

I’ve got a new story out: “Last Ocean Tide Lost in Sand” is available in Capricious #11! It features an aromantic family, a depressed spaceship and a magical fox all seeking a better life on a planet that’s un-terraforming into contagious, deadly sand. Every person is non-binary, there’s multiple sets of neopronouns, and it’s sort of Space Australia!

The kernel of this story is about a decade old and I was only able to finally figure out how to tie it all together in early 2018 when seeing Sword & Sonnet, so it’s really nice not only to have actually written it, but to have it published as well!

There is also an interview with me in this issue. I talk a bit about “Last Ocean Tide Lost in Sand” and a bit about some weird Australian animals.

Additionally, next month Sharp & Sugar Tooth is being released and you’ll find my short “Red, from the Heartwood” in it! There’s also an aromantic, non-binary family… but none of the other things! It’s set in modern day Perth and features arospec questioning, vegetarian cannibalism, polyamory with both a queerplatonic relationship and a romantic one, and weird apple stuff.

I meant to do a 2018 summary but I ended up too busy in December because I got top surgery!!! It went well and I’m really happy! Dealt with a lot of anxiety about Am I Queer Enough and Do I Deserve This and Can I Afford This, but the recovery so far has had some rough spots I have not for one single second regretted it. (Also I went back to full-time hours halfway through last year and that’s been a rough adjustment…)

Sometimes I Wish I Weren’t Aromantic

Sometimes I wish I weren’t aromantic. At various points in my life, I have wished this. Unspoken, because it is unspeakable: I would that I were not, that I were something else. I have fought so hard for so long to create understanding and pride and well-being about myself as an aromantic in an alloromantic world, and yet this is a secret that I have never shared: sometimes, even as an adult, even more than a decade after I first called myself aromantic and realised I wasn’t broken, realised I didn’t have to dread being broken or un-broken or broken in… sometimes I wish I weren’t aromantic.

some January news

New year is sure off to a start!

artwork — cover for Capricious #9, art by Laya Rose

New story: Issue 9 of Capricious, The Gender Diverse Pronouns Issue, is available now in ebook and paperback! It contains my story “Walking the Wall of Papered Peaces”, featuring a (sex-repulsed demiro ace) cis clockmaker engaged to a (allo) non-binary plumber, both of whom end up on a weird quasi-magical quest to find a wall made of origami animals because of communication problems in their relationship. I have some things to talk about regarding this story, but that’ll come in a later post. As you might expect, the other stories in this issue feature gender diverse pronouns and a lot of non-binary characters! Please check it out, and thank you to everyone who supported its fundraising and who has talked about it!

New poem: earlier this month my poem “Penelope’s body looming” was accepted by Strange Horizons! It’s inspired by Greek myth and my gender journey, and it’s the first poem I’ve written in two years so that’s very exciting.

New calendar: well this is a bit late now but at the start of this year I was convinced by some friends to make a calendar of my bird photos for them, and I did so, and now you can buy this bird calendar if you’d like! The individual photos are also available as prints and cards. I have been told I’ll be making another calendar for next year, which I’ll hopefully get organised before next January… :p

New page: I’ve added a wallpaper page to this site! It currently has a few 1920×1080 wallpapers of my wildlife photography (at present, black cockatoos and other native Australian birds) and I’ll be adding more birds to it soon as well as some bees and architecture and flowers. All the wallpapers are and will be free to download. If there’s any specific bird (or other) photos I’ve posted on Twitter that you’d love as a wallpaper, let me know and I’ll prioritise that!

New focus: the last few months I’ve been grappling with an issue that took up a lot of mental energy and time. An issue I started thinking about in 2016 but put off because of the toxic job/unemployment situation. An issue I have, as of this week, partially resolved in that I booked a date for top surgery.

meanwhile and far away

2017, huh? Okay, so. At the beginning of the year I quit my job because workplace conditions had repeatedly deteriorated to the point where my mental health was in a tailspin and dragging my physical health down with it. With no relief in workplace conditions and workload in sight, unable to reliably fill out job applications because my free time was occupied with being stressed out from this week’s workload and being stressed out thinking about next week’s workload, feeling constantly miserable and drifting towards… the bad end of depression… I quit. Luckily I had enough savings to weather several months of unemployment, and now I have a new job which I very much like and my co-workers are lovely and supportive and my manager isn’t toxic and I am not being overworked and underpaid! It’s nice and strange and good for me.

I’ve been trying to work on improving my mental and physical health this year. Reclaiming it, I suppose. De-stressing from that awful job, unlearning the unhealthy habits I formed trying to cope with the stress, forming better betters. It’s been going okay. It’s difficult sometimes, when you have mental illnesses and physical conditions that feed on each other to make you feel like shit, to work out what healthy is, what you can actually aim for, what you can actually achieve. When I look back on how I was this time last year versus now, though, I can see the difference in my life. I can see how far I’ve come, how much of me I’ve rediscovered. I still have ways to go—reading and writing is still very difficult, mental energy-wise—but I’m buoyed with my progress so far. …I think I say that every couple years and then I have a downslide so we’ll see what Terrible Stressful Things next year throws at me.

I’ve continued to delight in photography this year. I’ve had two weekend road trips down south. I’ve tried to see more of my friends. I’ve done 50% of my Pokemon blackwork sampler and I’ve made some embroidery pieces I’m really proud of, like this rainbow lorikeets once.

I sold a story I’ve been editing for what feels like forever, it was on its fifth or sixth revision and I’d actually trunked it. That is “Walking the Wall of Papered Peaces” and it’s going to appear in Capricious in 2018. It is a story I don’t think I would write now—about the insecurities between an asexual clockmaker and her non-asexual romantic partner—but I’ll go into that when it’s published.

“Kin, Painted” will be reprinted again, this time in Queerly Loving #2 by Queer Pack in 2018. (Queerly Loving #1 will be released very soon!)

And I also actually wrote a story this year, and sold it too: “Red, From the Heartwood” will be appearing in Sharp & Sugar Tooth: Women Up To No Good in 2018 or 2019. “Red…” features a dryad who works at Bunnings, her two partners, a light smattering of body horror and lots of apple desserts. There is a queerplatonic relationship between two arospec enbies, and a romantic relationship involving a queer woman. Given my dislike of when non-aro people write non-human aro characters and when non-NB people write non-human NB characters I think I will have some things to talk about when it comes time to talk about this story! I still can’t really believe that I wrote a whole short story. The last one I finished was “Kin, Painted” in early 2015. Since then I’ve had trouble just writing a single scene. But when I saw the theme and Octavia Cade’s name attached I was instantly inspired with the core idea (ha ha… apple pun). It was still a struggle to write and edit it inside three months, even though I was unemployed and it was only 5,000 words, but I did it and it was a huge accomplishment for me, and then even more amazingly Octavia accepted it! I can’t wait to share two new arospec characters with everyone, to talk about this story and to see what other stories are in the anthology.

Unfortunately I haven’t written much since “Red…” but I’ve been settling into my new job and routines and dealing with, uh, well let’s talk about that now. Last year I started binding occasionally, on the weekends sometimes with close friends. I started researching top surgery, not sure if I wanted it or not—not sure if I could even access top surgery here as a non-binary person not taking testosterone and not transitioning in other ways to masculinity. Binding made me happy, but sometimes I was indifferent to my breasts or mildly liked them rather than hating them, so I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to get top surgery and, if I did want to get surgery, would I still want to get top surgery if I had to fly interstate or overseas to get it. But then I put that all on hold when I decided to quit my job. Now it’s a year later, I’m employed again, my health is better than it was to boot, and I’ve started researching and thinking about top surgery again. If I like the surgeon I’ve booked a consultation with then I can get it done at home, and if not then I can go interstate. While I’m not 100% decided yet—hopefully the consultation will give me the answers I need to finally, fully, make that decision—I feel clearer in my feelings, though if I need to go over to Melbourne or Sydney I’ll have to consider whether the added expense and difficulty on top of all the other expenses and difficulties will still be worth it. I don’t mind if, after all of this, I decide I don’t want top surgery. But if that happens, I want to decide this because I want to keep my breasts, not because I’m too intimidated by the logistical difficulties, the pain and the potential awkwardness.

#AroAceJugheadOrBust

I’ve written before about the Korra finale, about how my elation at Korra and Mako not getting back together turned into my stomach bottoming out when Korra and Asami held hands, that I immediately felt guilty about being upset by something that would be groundbreaking for so many people, that I wrestled with whether I was allowed to feel upset that the ever-increasing hope of Aang’s successor finishing her show single was suddenly dashed. And I decided that I was allowed to feel upset, and I decided that I was allowed to talk about being upset, but only if I paired this with being explicit about how important it is that Korra and Asami held hands and stared into each other’s eyes, how important it is to me and to my friends and to strangers across the world that there is canon bi rep. There was zero possibility that Korra was aro and yet I had built up this hope that she could be happily single for the final episode because that is all I can ever hope for on television and that is fucked up.

But you know what? If in the comics Korra and Asami weren’t together, if the cartoon canon were changed and they had never held hands, they had never stared into one another’s eyes in a direct mirror of the wedding scene, if they were platonic besties? I would not be happy with that. I would not celebrate that. I would not call that a victory for female friendship rep. I would not say “isn’t the fluidity and journey of sexuality so important?” I would not tell women who are attracted to women that they should be happy about this. I would not tell them to shut up, I would not tell them “but this Korra is not that Korra”, I would not refuse to hear and boost their concerns, I would not write articles about how wonderful and important and nuanced this female platonic-only friendship is to me and to everyone without even mentioning that this is queer erasure and that this has hurt others. I would not go “fuck you got mine” at the erasure of a character’s canon queerness.

And you know what? If Jughead in Riverdale turns out to be aromantic and allosexual I won’t proclaim that a victory for aros. I won’t call that a win. I won’t tell aces that their pain at being erased doesn’t matter because fuck you got mine. And if Jughead in Riverdale turns out to be aroace but touch-hungry and romance-hungry, that’s not a victory either.

Continue reading #AroAceJugheadOrBust

my touch aversion

I’m touch-averse, though not repulsed. I do not enjoy the vast majority physical contact, it does nothing for me, I have no desire to touch or be touched, I read about skin hunger and I’m just baffled. I don’t feel violated or experience sensory overload or have a physical reaction to being touched, the idea of it doesn’t make me feel ill except when it’s in sexual contexts; I just don’t like it. I’m pretty asensual.

Continue reading my touch aversion

Queer Planet

Strange Horizon’s Queer Planet special (a month of queer-focused fiction, poetry and non-fiction) has begun, and one of this week’s items is my column, “Did You Mean ‘A Romantic’?” which talks about growing up as an aromantic in a amatonormative world, highlighting some of the media which has scarred me and some of the reactions and realisations I’ve gotten throughout life.

This is my first non-fiction sale! And the title is from before “aromantic” became a term Google knew and that was the standard search correction suggestion.

reprint & interview

My interactive poem “stone” has been reprinted in sub-Q! There’s other interactive poems, and interactive fiction and games, over at sub-Q which you can check out too!

And I did an author spotlight over at Pack of Aces where I talk about my published acearo characters and how much better my writing life is since I discovered the terminology that described me:

When I was a teen I tried to write characters who were like me. This was before I’d heard of asexuality or aromanticism. All of the characters were broken, like I obviously was, and they were all eventually fixed like I was told I would be. (Perhaps “they were all broken, and they were all eventually broken in” is better phrasing?) They should have been happy endings: the character admitted they were in love, sex was usually implied, hooray, the character is fixed. But they were all off. Stockholm syndrome was common, overbearing and wearing down of wills was common, power imbalance was common. The characters did not choose to fall in love, they didn’t really fall in love; they were pulled into love and sex and held there with a grip that only at a glance looked like a romantic holding of hands. Messed. Up. (But that’s what I thought I saw in books and films and TV, that’s what I thought was the only path for me. There were many stories which horrified me, which people insisted were romantic. He loved her, so it was all right. She ends up saying she loves him, so it was forgiven.)

There was a month dedicated to these author spotlight interviews with various acespec creators and you can check them all out here!

living aro

Today’s the last day of Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week and I thought I’d write about some of the everyday ways that being aromantic has affected me throughout my life.

I thought there was something wrong with me when I was a teen. I didn’t find people attractive like my friends did (or if I did it was in very specific “I like this hairstyle combined with this waistcoat” aesthetic ways), I wasn’t getting crushes like they were, I didn’t understand why they were talking about boyfriends and the like, I thought the idea of falling in love was suffocating, I thought the idea of meeting someone who would completely change my mind and make me fall in love was terrifying. But I knew of no one else like me. I knew I was broken, I was wrong.
I knew I wasn’t gay. At 16 or 17 I discovered the word “queer” and, although I didn’t use it, it was a lifeboat to me. There was a word which meant “not normal, but okay”. If someone could be not straight, if someone could be not gay, someone could be queer? Could… someone be like me? Be like me and be not broken, be not inhuman?
When I was younger I had many anxieties relating to my friendships, that they were all fake friendships, that everyone was pretending to like me for some weird joke. (One of my friends deciding, over a term break, that we were no longer friends and that I was someone whose existence she should ignore for no reason I ever knew of… didn’t help this.) I don’t know how related this was to the “once you get a significant other and grow up you stop having friends” trope I had seen so much of in fiction and life. I don’t have this anxiety anymore! I even have friends who’re in romantic relationships and -gasp- we still hang out together anyway.
I don’t know whether the zucchini situation will ever not be long-distance. It’s okay if it stays long-distance, it’s okay if the distance shortens, and it’s okay if drifts back down the queerplatonic-platonic spectrum.
I don’t think I’m currently healthy enough for a local QPR, to be honest. When work is busy and my sleep is poor (and it often is) I have very few spoons left for the evenings and weekends and, while my QPP is important, sometimes I unfortunately don’t have much energy for emailing.
I’m not out at work. Most of my co-workers don’t talk about their home lives and aren’t nosy so I’ve never felt a need to. I refer to my zucchini as “girlfriend”, which is not a lie but contains some omissions.
I’m not out to my family. My parents never once asked me if I was dating or why I wasn’t dating so it… never came up. My extended family have on occasion asked my father (“no, but she’s happy”) but never asked me. No one in my family knows I have a zucchini.
I think they might have assumed I was dating a male friend who I saw regularly, or mentioned him to my extended family in such a way that they assumed, because I got an invite to a cousin’s wedding which was Penny+MaleFriend instead of a PlusOne. *stares into middle distance*
When I was younger both of my parents separately sat me down for the If You Find Someone You Need To Know That You’re Totally Compatible Before You Marry Or Buy A House Together And I Mean Totally Compatible In The Bedroom talk and I nearly mentioned it then but I wasn’t confident enough and also my parents had just mentioned sex and I need to change the topic of conversation because ewwwww.
I never dated, which I’m really glad of. I had intense anxiety about the idea of someone finding me attractive or wanting to date me, whenever I suspected someone did I would panic, ask friends “IS THIS??” and hope they never acted because I didn’t know what I’d do. All I knew was I didn’t want that, I didn’t want them, I didn’t want anyone and I didn’t know how to communicate that. I was asked out a few times, every time I panicked and said no.
I was an asshole in my late teens/early 20s, and I also did nothing about my personal appearance, and I think part of that was to do with cultivating a more unattractive self so that fewer people would be interested in me. (As I became more confident about being aromantic and matured in other ways, I grew out of needing to be like that.)
(But I was also very bad at noticing flirting.)
I really like Unresolved Sexual Tension in TV shows because I’m bad at noticing it, so to me it looks like the main leads are good mates and it’s non-romantic and it’s happy and safe. Xena and Gabrielle? Scully and Mulder? Carter and O’Neill? Bones and Booth? Beckett and Castle? NON-ROMANTIC ROLE MODELS FOR THE MATURING AROMANTIC. Until it inevitably becomes Resolved Sexual Tension and then I feel stupid and betrayed.
I’ve been told I’m obviously a lesbian because I’m not interested in men; and then called homophobic when I said I’m also not interested in women.
I’ve been told I’m immature because I don’t want a romantic partner and children.
I’ve been convinced that a friend understood that I was aroace, having seen them use the words and be supportive, and then later found out they thought I was romantically interested in someone.
I’ve been told “If you weren’t aromantic we’d probably be dating”.
I’ve had friends and known people who didn’t think I was allowed to hate amatonormativity. They would get me to watch romantic films and then get upset that I deigned to dislike such endings like “She gave a rousing speech about how being an independent modern American woman means she doesn’t have to have a partner and then immediately establishes that it’s okay, she’s normal, here’s the guy she wants to date” or “She fell in love and grew apart from all of her friends” or “She had a argument with her boyfriend about how they nothing in common anymore and an argument with her best friend and broke up with both of them, but in the end she only apologises and makes up with the boyfriend”. Their desire for amatonormativity to grant them a romantic partner and a happy ever after was more important than any feelings I had about being erased for my entire life.
I feel very grateful to have a group of friends who have no problems if I go “I think this is a good TV show but the succubus powers make me uncomfortable and I don’t want to watch this”.
One of the reasons I stopped reading YA when I was a teen was the constant “teen girl just like you learns to fall in love”. The “teen boy or man who’s unlike you learned to fall in love” that was in most of the adult SFF I then started reading was easier to deal with.
Romcoms and the romance genre bore me and erase me and alienate me and I can’t do that.
I’ve had friendship break-ups that broke my heart.
When I was younger I tried to work out what made a romantic relationship so special as if there were some logical maths behind it. I’ve read a lot of “what’s the difference between…” blog posts and now I try to think about it more on an individual level rather than a universal constant.
I find writing romantic relationships interesting and frustrating.
I find it really difficult to imagine a sff world where aromanticism is completely ordinary. Asexuality, sure. Other queerness, sure. Aromanticism and aromantic relationships as unremarkable, though, is something I struggle with.
Sometimes I get really depressed and anxious about how uncertain my life is going to be without a partner to live with and support me.
I was a bridesmaid earlier this month and the whole experience—having seen the whole of their relationship, having found out about the engagement, the wedding preparation, the ceremony and the reception themselves—made me both sad that I’ll never have such an experience, and also really glad that I’ll never have such an experience.
I get depressed and anxious about how I’m too ill to write most of the time, and there’s no one I can rely on to write about the ace and aro (and agender!) characters I need to write about.
I don’t like touching people. Brief hugs from friends are okay (quick tangent: wow, if you’re someone who gets offended when someone doesn’t want to hug you or get massaged or be touched by you without warning then you are gross and you can fuck right off) and the zucchini is the only one I can tolerate holding my hands (and even then there’s plenty of occasions where I’ve had to go “nooo not right now”).
I’ve had sex dreams. Every time they’ve made me feel incredibly uncomfortable and like my subconscious has violated me.
I’ve had squishes, though the last one was five or eight years ago. The ones that I remember the clearest were both on writers who I did become friends with. I never told them 😮
I wonder how much my aromanticism and asexuality has influenced being agender, and vice versa. A large part of Being A Woman, to me, was Being A Woman Who Will Be Attractive To Guys, Being A Woman To Learn How To Look After A House For Your Family, Being A Woman To Get A Man And Kids, which I always rejected with varying degrees of understanding why I did so. Additionally there’s the idea of, well, if I don’t have to worry about which gender I’m attracted to, why even gender? There’s no answers there, of course. I am aromantic, and I am asexual, and I am agender, and that’s who I am.

It’s Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week!

I’m taking this opportunity to talk about aromanticism rather than just shaking my fist and hissing fuck you amatonormativity at the sky. Who am I? I’m Penny, and I’m aromantic and asexual (also agender, and if they’re necessary my pronouns are ou/ou/ous/ous/ouself or they/them/their/theirs/themself) and I’m in a long-distance queerplatonic relationship. I’m posting reading recommendations on my Twitter every day and I’ll be blogging about writing aromanticism later in the week.

See what else is going on at the Arospec Week tumblr!

So let’s get into it! Aromanticism.
You know.
Aromanticism? The asexuality thing that isn’t asexuality? Because one is a sexual orientation and one is a romantic orientation? Because while you can be asexual and aromantic, you can also be asexual but not aromantic, or aromantic but not asexual?

Continue reading It’s Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week!