#indrid caldwell

[midnight-scrivener]

🕊️🐓 for the quotes ask !

🕊️Ooh, a SWEET quote... This was unironically So Difficult to find 😭 I need to write more characters being nice to each other :')

This is from my finished novel, Aliens From Outer Space Don't Know How to Smile! In this scene Indrid Caldwell, an alien pretending to be a human, is chatting with a kid he's been taking care of, after taking them to prom.

When the lamp turned off, the darkness was only complete for a moment. Twig switched on their tablet, and illuminated the room in a blue-white halo around their head.  “Don’t stay up too long,” I said. “I will need you conscious tomorrow.”  “Whatever,” Twig said. “I’m fine, I just have to hit some people up.”  I nodded and buried my head in the pillow again.  “Hey… um.” “Mm.” I heard Twig shift around in the other bed. “Were you really taught to worry that everything in the universe was out to get you?” I nodded and waggled my hand in a so-so motion. “That sounds awful,” they said. “Being suspicious about everyone all the time. Seems exhausting.” I shrugged.  I hoped that my lack of engagement might deter them and let me sleep, but they continued. “Were you suspicious of me? When I first showed up?” I rolled over onto my back, looking up at the ‘popped-corn’ ceiling. “No.” I shook my head. “Not really.”  “Oh, so now I’m not worth your suspicion,” they said. I didn’t think they’d taken it too personally. Their tone was light, and they were looking at their tablet while they typed. “Well, for starters, you did not ‘show up.’ You were brought and left. If I were to be suspicious of anyone involved, it would be of Sara, as you—” I motioned to them. “Might be broadly interpreted as a sabotage attempt.”  “Oh please,” they muttered.  “Mostly, to start,” I murmured, my eyes looking for constellations in the plaster dots above me, “I was annoyed.” Twig made an affronted sound. “You did destroy my house,” I reminded them. “With a crowbar. My couch is still not the same.”  “Sorry. I get pissed off sometimes.” “An understatement,” I said. “You don’t still think I’m annoying, do you?” I turned my head to look at them. The light from their tablet illuminated them from below. The harsh shadows on their face made them look hollow and frail, and a huge silhouette was cast in harsh black lines on the wall behind them.  “You were never annoying. I was annoyed. There is a difference there, and while it might be slight, I think it is important. Indrid Caldwell’s life was simple. I had engineered it for maximum efficiency. I could do what was required of me. You were… not efficient. You were complicated, and you… needed things from me that I did not—do not—feel I am equipped to provide. My life, since you have arrived, has not gone to plan.” I did not smile, but I tried to arrange my features in a way humans might perceive as softer, less closed-off. “But without you I would not have found this place. And you do not make me worried about vivisection.”  Twig rolled their eyes. “You are so bad at compliments.” But they were smiling. Just a little. “And you do all right. I’m not dead yet, am I? And you have successfully taken me to more school functions than my mom has in years, and you aren’t even from the same state.” They shrugged. “I’ve had worse.” I nodded. “That is good to hear. Can I sleep now?” Twig shrugged, tapping away on their screen. “Go for it, big guy.” I closed my eyes, folding my hands over my middle.

And for a SUMMARY (🐓), here's what I'm working on now!

OUR LADY ALBINOCH

Ziggy Holiday is a private eye trying to make ends meet and balance his life with his undeath in the city at the end of the world. He has a professional policy not to care about the jobs he takes. He can't afford to get invested. But a mysterious knock at his door in the dead of night and a rash of grisly, bloodless murders will force him to re-evaluate the line between caring too much, and not caring enough.

The Shiprat is a man with no name, living with the Canal-boat dwelling nomads who found him bleeding out on the banks. He's looking for his identity, the answer to who gave him a janky brain chip and why they left him alone to die. But a missing friend and a growing sense of dread raise the question of whether chasing the past is worth it.

Our Lady Albinoch is a queer Cyber-Noir with gothic overtones, set in a crumbling megatropolis where Vampires rule the night. Its two protagonists are locked together by forces beyond them, but is their bond one of friendship, or mutually assured destruction?

This was so much fun!!! I wasn't expecting it to be this much of a head scratcher, haha, but I feel like I found things that met the brief eventually!

Thank you for asking!

Send me birds please!!!!

[midnight-illustrator]

The people of the planet that mankind has designated Lanulos are optimized for different walks of life. The planet's sapient species are designed in a lab, physically and mentally optimized for the societal Niche they fill.

The above is one such species. Explorers, usually around seven feet tall and fourteen feet long, are quadrupedal, hardy creatures once described by a particularly colorful human as "weird fuckin' ferret... Dinosaur... Centaur... Things." Nimble and adaptable, with transparent skin optimized for scattering the radiation of their home star, Explorers were designed for navigating the treacherous, mountainous terrain taking up much of Lanulos. Their four eyes allow them to perceive an expanded spectrum of light, and their long, agile tail provides important counterbalance as they scale the planet's crystalline cliffs and mountain ranges.

As Lanulos entered into play on the interplanetary stage, Explorers' blueprints were modified yet again. Their brains were optimized for pattern recognition and information retention, important tools for exploring new worlds, and meeting new people. As a result, though most explorers are solitary by preference, and telepathic communicators first, many are still polyglots.

Explorers have no mouths, consuming nourishment instead through the triangular valve on their chests. Specialized sections of their ribs undulate to crush their food into paste before it is properly digested.

*Explorers are original to the Blackwater County storyworld, and can be seen in more detail in the story Aliens From Outer Space Don't Know How To Smile.

[midnight-scrivener]

🖊

Hello! Sorry this took me a few days, I Could Not Decide who I wanted to infodump about 😭

Indrid Caldwell

Is a human accountant who lives in Coulton, Kentucky. He doesn't have any friends, he doesn't like nut brittles, and he owns every season of classic courtroom drama The Good Wife on special edition DVDs.

He's also. Fucking Dead.

In his place is a shape shifting alien from Outer Space who's continuing to live Indrid's life as a Perfect, Flawless Facsimile of a Normal Human Man.

Alien Indrid (who I'm just gonna call Indrid from now on) is here on Earth looking for three of his friends that vanished around what we humans would call 1967. He has to get them back to his home planet before an asteroid belt intersects with their world's orbital path.

He hasn't found them yet.

What he has done is memorize every episode of classic courtroom drama The Good Wife (on special edition DVD), befriend a coworker named Hank from New York City that he likes enough to grab a beer with every once in a while, and get Super Into Birdwatching.

Indrid's the kind of guy that will order the same thing every time he goes to a restaurant, always has a script ready for any social situation, and can talk at length about his favorite topics (native Kentucky birds and classic courtroom drama The Good Wife).

(he's the kind of guy that would be diagnosed with Autism if it ever occurred to him to talk to anyone about it. But he's Very Normal. So why would he?)

Indrid's alien brethren are a species literally lab designed to be hardy and adaptable to any environment. Called Explorers, they're built to fulfill the niche of mapping their world, studying its ecology, traveling in deep space, and undertaking long term transit and delivery work. They're laborers, scientists and genetically engineered Discoverers Of New Things. Indrid is part of a special contingent of Explorers trained to operate off-world as well as on it, blending into the population of alien planets using a special piece of shapeshifting technology to perfectly copy the genetic codes of the indigenous population. Because all explorers are artificially created, they're naturally sexless and genderless, but Indrid has decided he actually likes being a dude, so that's how he rolls now.

Explorer's mouths are in their chests. They have three hearts and two stomachs, and communicate telepathically, using a special resonance chamber in their skulls. They stand about eight feet tall and can get up to 20 feet long (including their tails).

But most of the time indrid just kind of looks like some guy.

Explorers need to consume high levels of mercury to survive, so to avoid arousing suspicions for buying a bunch of poisonous metal in bulk, he's become an impromptu collector of vintage thermometers, and has Strong Opinions on Brands and Quality.

He eats onions like apples and has memorized the names of all your bones. :)

[midnight-scrivener]

I FINISHED MY MASTER'S THESIS!

I started writing this thing a year ago, almost to the day, and I can't believe it's done. I did a whole novel!

The book is called Aliens from Outer Space Don't Know How to Smile, and it's a story about Appalachian queerness, neurodivergency, space aliens, prom, the redneck Mafia, and finding a family. It's also going to be the only thing I talk about probably forever now 🥰

[midnight-scrivener]

YOOOO MY DUDE CONGRATS!!!!!! :D :D :D

Wow you have been working on that project for a hot minute! Tell me about it! (Also we can jump to twitter if that's easier)

So this book started out as a short story about a kid and the alien who had to look after them. But I loved the dynamic between the two of them so much that I couldn't leave well enough alone, and now it's a monster lol

But basically.... Indrid Caldwell is dead, and there’s an alien imposter wearing his face. This new Not-Indrid is on a mission from beyond the Solar System to find a missing crew of fellow extraterrestrial life forms. But things get a little more complicated when the real Indrid’s estranged sister shows up with no warning and a moody teen in tow. After being abandoned by their mother in the house of a near-total stranger, Twig Caldwell-Gray doesn’t have much patience for their life getting any weirder—which is a problem, because the new Indrid’s human-act isn’t as convincing as he thinks. As the clock runs down on Indrid’s rescue mission and Twig comes to terms with the idea that sometimes, family doesn’t have your best interests at heart, these two outsiders will have to find a way to live with each other, even though the gulf between them spans galaxies.

Twig's angry at the world for failing them, and slow to trust. They're hard-headed and smart-mouthed. The first day they meet 'Uncle Indrid,' they threaten him with blackmail 🥰 truly a friendship written in the stars

'Indrid,' on the other hand, is working as an accountant. The normal kind, not the spicy kind. He's been spending most of his time obsessed with keeping his head down and perfecting his cover, while crawling the mountains of eastern Kentucky in his spare time looking for the crashed ship of his predecessors. He's learned everything he knows about human culture from the Good Wife and Pride and Prejudice, and he's obsessed with birdwatching.

Twig is explicitly non-binary, and uses they/them pronouns. Indrid is an allegory for my own experiences with neurodivergency. Both of them deal with different versions of social estrangement, and at times both of them feel like outsiders. But despite how different they are, they can both take solace in each other.

I just. I just love them 🥺

[midnight-scrivener]

I have a sinking feeling that people are going to read my novel, where an average of once per chapter I talk fairly in-depth about the 7 series long television legal drama The Good Wife, and assume that I know things about/have an opinion on/have seen an episode of the 7 series long television legal drama The Good Wife

[midnight-scrivener]

The queer urge to spend hours making detailed floorplans of your protagonist's house in order to better judge where a character could hide for Maximum Drama™️ in said protagonist's secret alien identity reveal

[midnight-scrivener]

Me, after running calculations on how good the protagonist of my alien novel could jump and realizing his Terrifying capacity to Attack From Above: