#everybody cross your figners with me

[ialpiriel]

💕 self-love time! talk about which ones of YOUR creations (edits, artworks, fanfics) you like the most then send to other creators to do the same 💕 (No pressure to play, but I love listening to you talk about your art and writing :3)

Aw shucks, you're gonna make me play favorites :(

Lately, it's been the original fiction novel I've been working on! I've posted a series of assorted excerpts in the last few months. I started working on the novel sometime late summer last year, and attacked it with gusto for NaNoWriMo (and made wordcount!), then spent December and January finishing it (doubling my wordcount!). Just recently (as in, this last week) nailed down a first draft ending scene and titled the novel, which has been a really exciting milestone.

The origin of the novel came when I thought about a few scenes in my Obscenely Long F:NV Fanfic About A Lesbian Cannibal where I asked myself what the interesting backstory for an unnamed bit character might be (what if she was half-blinded before she became a gladiator? where did she come from? what did she sign up for, and what actions were forced on her?) When I looked into those questions I thought to myself "well, I might as well turn these ideas into original fiction, since there's literally not a single 'canon' character left in this that I might possibly be interested in writing about."

The novel, titled Up With The Star, follows "the gladiator," a stateless, legally-nameless woman who helped to lead a slave rebellion just a few days before the novel starts, and is nominated by her friends and co-conspirators to take the place of The Warlord, the nation's head of state.

She does not want this job.

She's talked into it not by the logic of the doctor who's spent the last five and a half years stitching her up after her gladiatorial bouts, or the gentle cajoling of her FWB who's a member of an annexed state and did most of the talking for this rebellion, but by the petty suggestion of The Iconoclast, the woman who killed (and ate) the Warlord, who asks her, basically, "wouldn't it be fun to make the whole world be polite to you, a person with no legal status, down to not having a name of your own?"

One of the really fun parts of writing the novel, to me, has been deciding all the different ways the characters are "American" despite living in a post-American continent. This character grew up in a christofascist community, that character knows the craving to see violence committed against someone else is a bad one but wants to see it anyway, this character commits themself to trying to heal a structural wound of the nation, that one spends years planning and executing a popular rebellion. I've had a really good time with "artifacts" also, all the pieces of past-America that are left: strip malls, suburbs, retaining ponds, someone else's photo albums, a little nylon American flag, manosphere self-help books, imperialism, mutual aid, hashtag vanlife, Sports That Kill You (here's looking at you, american football), apocalyptic christianity, weird New Religious movements, gender essentialism, the inescapable sense that there's no way out of the hell someone made for you seventy years ago.

It's been fun, also, to write a character who's got an extremely sharp sense for Being In Front Of An Audience. She may be bad at reading individual people's emotional states, plans, tacks, preferences, and sore spots, but she Gets having an audience. It's fun to write a showman! And it's fun to write a showman who's trying to carve out a little space for herself, to have a private life for the second time in her whole life, while also trying to be on stage.

Also, it's gay, and the main character is a transmasc and has no idea of how to explain that to herself.