Category: writing

stone

My hypertext poem “stone” is up at Interfictions Online! I hope you enjoy it!

In the portion of my life between working out that I wasn’t straight and finding the word “aromantic”, all I knew was that I wasn’t normal. It’s not uncommon amongst aromantics: feeling alone, broken, inhuman, monstrous, alien. I’ve written about it before, in “Even Robots Learn”, but “stone” is more personalised. If I wasn’t human, if I didn’t have a normal human’s normal heart, then I had to be stone. Even though I loved my family and my friends, even though I cared about people and engaged with people, the fact that I could not love in this very particular way meant I didn’t love at all. My heart was concrete, my body was rock, my flesh was stone. I couldn’t feel, I couldn’t love, I couldn’t be hurt. It was an incredibly toxic, unhealthy, self-destructive way of thinking, and it took me years to recover from it.

“stone” is a scar of my lithic years, and I show it to you because it is starkly visible against my heart, my human heart full of love and confidence.

Getting into the more technical side of things, why hypertext? Well, I was looking through some writing drafts when I found a document with the first few lines in it. I had no memory of writing them, no idea what ideas were supposed to follow them. I liked the lines—there was a solid aro sentiment that echoed my late teens, and of course some consonance—but I wasn’t sure what to do with them. I added to them, cautiously, and soon emerged something that was a bit similar to “She is, there—amongst the Mango Trees—a Flytrap Garden”. I decided to bam it up a notch with more elaborate repeating clauses but it soon became obvious that trying to rely on simple formatting like in “Flytrap” would just end in unintelligible mess. I tried different things in Word before I remembered Twine.

Twine creates choose-your-own-adventure stories and games such as Depression Quest. I’d never used it before so I had fun adventures figuring out the basics and getting it to do what I wanted it to do, but it does it superbly. I’ve got some rough ideas for more things I’d like to try in Twine someday! In “stone” I’ve not really delved into what the format’s capable of, but ohh the things it is capable of if you try.

Thank you to the friends who encouraged me while I was experimenting with this poem’s presentation!

Love Over Glass podcast

You can now listen to “Love Over Glass, Skin Under Glass” over at the GlitterShip podcast! And also read it, as there’s a full transcript provided! This is the first time “Love Over Glass” has been free to read or hear online (it was originally published in Aurealis and then reprinted in Heiresses of Russ 2014) which is super exciting! It’s a creepy romance about obsession, compromise, differences and self-discovery.

GlitterShip is a new podcast focusing on queer SF&F stories. Definitely check it out!

the aroace I wrote before I knew what those things were

When I was a teenager I wrote an epic fantasy that was inspired by the fantasy I read and liked at that age. It wasn’t very good. For a lot of reasons! But I enjoyed it and I wrote a lot about the main characters. And then I decided that two of them should have children, because that’s what happens in epic fantasy. :v

One of their children was the first asexual and aromantic character I ever created, when I was 16 I think it was. However, at that age I didn’t know those terms. I didn’t know those orientations. I was them, of course, but I didn’t know; I didn’t have the language or the confidence or the support to know.

At first he was going to be a rakish dandy, he was going to flirt and scandalise and have liaisons. That didn’t last long; I’m not even sure if I wrote anything of that version. The second attempt at characterisation, however, stuck. He was still attractive, but he was cold and difficult to like, pessimistic and acerbic and spiteful, shy and angry and depressed, unimaginably gifted with magic but self-loathing and without a teacher. Things, finally, went horribly unfixably wrong for the main characters and though his conception delayed matters, when he was young his mother was taken out of space and time, his father fell apart without her and became distant from this youngest son. And then things got worse, as they did in everything I wrote around that time, and most of his extended family were killed. And then things continued at their worst and his best friend betrayed him, and fell in love with him. He got his revenge, but it came with a high cost, and then, ah. And then he was betrayed by goddesses who had cared for him and protected him. Gods who decided he needed to grow up. Goddesses who bewitched him and a female friend into having sex. And after a time perhaps it did work, for as the story rolled around to the next few generations he gained godhood and a happily ever after with one of the very same goddesses.

One friend drew fanart of him, naked but with a nebulous Ken doll-like groin void, and I couldn’t explain why it made me so uncomfortable. Another asked me to write about when he lost his virginity–that aforementioned rape, but of course that wasn’t a connection I had made back then–and I did so with a fade-to-black, and I couldn’t explain why it made me so uncomfortable. Of course, I couldn’t explain why most of the books I read or why most of the films and TV shows I saw made me so uncomfortable.

I didn’t know how to write an aroace without giving them a reason to be aroace. A traumatic, broken, pitiable reason. And then he was raped and then he stopped being aroace because he found the right person.

Imagine what kind of aroace characters I’d be writing now if I hadn’t stumbled across certain webpages.

(Not to say aroaceness can’t stem from trauma or that they would never coincide–just that at that point in my life I had no idea what I was, that I was okay, I couldn’t understand/explain what I didn’t want in my life and what I did want in my fiction. I was mirroring the only understanding I had at that point: people who don’t fall in love are ill and cruel and pitiable and monstrous.)