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goose-books · 1 year ago

Note

3 for Anna and Errans, and also 20 and 21 :3

i meant to remember to answer these before the last day of pride month. and then! anyway,

3. How did your oc discover themself? Did something cause them to question, or did they always know?

(godsong WIP page with links) (for context, anna is god's specialest girl ever and the main character, and she's a transfemme nonbinary lesbian. errans is a minor side character with terrible sideburns and transmasc unswag)

anna grew up in a city where priests have a special gender and pronoun, and she was designated a priest at age 11 by the gods, so her transness started as sort of an occupational thing; she was like, "okay, i'm priestgender," and then progressed to, "wait, i like this gender stuff." you are allowed to be priestgender and also another thing, and getting to explore her presentation at the temple lead to the realization that her Other Thing was womanhood (nonbinary-flavored). more a sister than a woman etc <3

as for the lesbianism, i don't think that was ever a discovery for him; there's no homophobia in ivander and his parents are in a bisexual polycule, so i think he just always knew his future person would be a woman. (i say "person" because ivander doesn't have legal marriage, but there is a religious equivalent if you want to dedicate yourself to someone long-term; otherwise you can just do Whatever. city that is absolutely bursting with gender and fruitiness)

errans i'm less sure about dskhfkdsfkdsnfsd. i know he came out as trans when he was around sixteenish; i think he knew he was bisexual first, and the image coming to me is errans experiencing the "do-i-want-to-date-that-guy-or-be-that-guy" about someone he probably never actually spoke to. i don't get a vibe like he ever loathed being a woman, more so that eventually he just realized he could simply be a man. for free. and was like. "well this is clearly so much more what i'm supposed to be doing"

now i'm thinking about awkward teenage errans and his awkward genvy crushes. god bless him

20. Have your ocs helped you in self discovery? How?

sigh. well i have to tell the story don't i. POV: you are [max], age 12, working on the first iteration of the story that will become TMR (my on-hiatus YA transgender evil-faerie high fantasy). you give the character who will become moon marigold all of your uncomfortable feelings about your body, feelings that are certainly not physical dysphoria because you are cisgender. about a year or so later, you realize that this WIP is full of cishet white people (i have since remedied this), and you should really add some diversity. hey, moon's got weird body feelings! what if you made her genderfluid? that sounds great! you are not thinking at all about where those weird body feelings may have come from or how this may reflect on anything at all.

POV: you are [max], still age 13ish, and you've got a new WIP (it's my also-on-hiatus NA monsters-in-NYC thing). you are going to put a binary transgender person in it. not for any specific reason. you just wanted to. who can say why. certainly not you. anyway you've never done this before and you are a little nervous because how can you, as a cisgender person, accurately represent a trans character? you muse about how to write dysphoria as you dress up for an orchestra concert, in an outfit that is extremely feminine. halfway through, you get derailed by crying real tears about said feminine outfit, because now the boy who sits beside you in the orchestra will know that you are a girl (because your long hair and name clearly couldn't have tipped him off beforehand). could you draw on this experience to describe dysphoria, you wonder? or maybe that other time you cried in the shower? but that's bad and wrong, isn't it? because you're cisgender. so comparing your own... whatever this is... to dysphoria would be an APPROPRIATION of dysphoria! how villainously cis of you! how horrible! you'll have to figure out some other way to write this character.

...anyway. thank you to moon and augustus for that. my kings my brothers in arms. and they BOTH do arson in their respective WIPs, so maybe i have another plot twist in my future?

21. Free ramble card wee

FREE RAMBLE WEE... hmm, well, since i've already touched on it a little in this ask, one of the most interesting things about worldbuilding for godsong is that most of the major settings don't have homophobia/transphobia/misogyny the same way that our world does. (i say most because ambergris is stuck in misogynyville. it's probably fine and i bet she won't get violent.) i honestly didn't think super hard about this; i just wanted to write a high fantasy world where women and nonbinary people and bisexuals and lesbians can hold positions of (sometimes corrupt) power, or where the chosen one can be a transfemme lesbian whose issues aren't transphobia but how to complete her quest.

except then i realized that not having homophobia/transphobia/misogyny invites so many other questions about the social fabric of a society. i mean, the modern legal concept of marriage is rooted pretty solidly in heterosexual relationships wherein women move from one family to another, right? so if gender relations are entirely different, do these places even have marriage? do these places even have gender? this is something i'm still figuring out (and honestly, if anyone has suggestions for media that pokes at this kind of thing, i'd love to hear them!). the two main cities in godsong are ivander (a theocracy) and farria (a democracy with a new revolution every tuesday), and i've been playing around in my head with some of the differences--for example, in ivander, being trans is generally considered holy, because the city's patron god is many-gendered; in farria, being trans is something nobody thinks twice about, because everyone is focused on Just Getting By. in ivander, there are at least three defined genders (man, woman, and priest) which can all overlap. in farria, gender doesn't define social relations so much as a parallel hierarchy of military and/or governmental power--eg, farria's very own neopronouns marc antony isn't afraid of "emasculation" in the gender sense, because xir gender is "if you like me you're gay," but xe's terrified of emasculation (for lack of a better word) in the sense of being seen as weak/submissive. in farria these things are way less connected than they are in our world. i'm still working out a lot of the details, but it's been a lot of fun to think about :3

wow that sure was a free ramble. thank you for the asks rook i love you so much <3

(pride asks!)

#max.txt #asks #long post #godsong tag #anna ivtouched #stella errans #and then also:#tmr tag #moon marigold #quark tag #augustus alexander #for my transgender brethren/mentors

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goose-books · 2 years ago

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view the image in higher quality here; thank you as always to my beloved @yvesdot for the template! last year’s year in review can be found here.

this was the year of godsong eating my brain forever and ever amen. and a good year for writing overall; i wrote a lot of very silly for-fun-to-share-with-friends stuff, and that felt very nice, particularly when i was in the Productivity Torment Labyrinth with school. transcripts and month-by-month details under the cut! (take the godsong character roster; you might need it.)

cws: alcohol (february), pregnancy (april)

january

i started the first draft of the first book of godsong for nanowrimo 2021; in january, i wrapped up the draft with the last plotline. godsong is split into three plotlines, each driven by a major character (our friends from the intro post!). though these plotlines will be integrated in the final draft, i wrote each of them separately, for coherency reasons; last to go was ambergris’s, which i think of, affectionately, as the HTTYD movie for dykes on mood stabilizers. interspecies pack bond except both members hate everybody else in the world. [forbidden friendship playing]

Vaska let her reapply the paste to injuries slick with saliva. Ambergris was aware of his gaze on her, his head tilted at the very corner of her vision, but she kept her focus on her unsteady hands, until she had finished dressing the wounds and she turned to find Vaska’s head right next to her own.

Her breath caught. This close, so near he could have pressed his snout against her nose, his eye was brilliantly bright, gold in the sunlight, shot through with darker rays. There were no whites, and a slit pupil rather than a round one, and yet Ambergris couldn’t shake the thought that he looked unnervingly human.

The other side of his face reeked with infection, so swollen she could barely see the empty eye socket. Long-dried blood trailed down his neck. The medicine was cold in her hand. She watched his gaze move, slow and deliberate, to the vial, before he raised his stare back to hers.

Slowly, tremblingly, Ambergris shuffled her crutches beneath her arms and held her hand out. Not reaching for his snout, nor straight for his injuries, but to open her palm beneath his head, just under his chin.

For a moment they stood in silence. Both of them frozen. Both of them, Ambergris realized with a quiver, afraid.

“Vaska,” she said softly, barely a breath, and the dragon laid his great head down in her palm.

february

2022 was the year of ash pyrris, aka godsong’s neopronouns-user marc antony expy, aka a bona-fide no-asterisk war criminal and the lapdog lover of the most popular butch milf in town. (can you imagine making an ancient roman read all of those words.) i spent the first three months of the year working on an extended second-person ash story (er. novella. it’s twenty-two thousand words) detailing xir backstory (referred to, inventively, as “ashbackstory”), and it remains perhaps my favorite thing i’ve written this year.

“Ash,” Julienne says, soft, calm. Not Captain. Your name, and when you look up she’s looking at you. And there’s something you have to say to her, and her face is hazy and huge as the moon—what were you going to say to her? Her eyes glitter coin-flip gold. Fuck, she’s beautiful. Like a saint. Like a god.

Your eyes fall on her lips, stained blossom-red with wine. And it comes back. “Julienne,” you blurt, voice too thick, too clumsy, “you’re drunk, you shouldn’t—”

“Ash,” Julienne says, low enough to stop your heart, and you fall silent. She’s gazing up into the stars again, and suddenly you want her to look at you again so badly it hurts like a kick to the ribs.

“I think my fate is coming together at last,” she says, voice breathy with wonder. “This city needs more than a high judge, Ash. This city needs a god.”

When you reach for your words, you have none. How can you argue with her? When you’d follow her anywhere? When you’d fall to your knees to kiss holy wine off her fingers?

You can’t.

You don’t.

That’s the horrific part, later. You don’t.

march

in march i read gideon the ninth, which is to say that in march i became a changed man. someday i’m going to get called out for the similarities between godsong and TLT, and to that i’ll only be able to say that the first draft of godsong came before i’d read GTN and i guess catholic lesbians just write the same shit about religion and devotion and grief and redheaded butches. anyway, lots of the character dynamics in godsong slot very interestingly into TLT necro/cav dynamics, so i wrote a scene from a godsong canaan house au. which then inspired my dearly beloved @lazarusemma to proceed to dream up and write an entire godsong/TLT au that i think is topping 20k words. if you’re thinking, “wow, i know stuff about TLT, i’d like to read the godsong edition!” then shoot me a message and brother, i will hook you up. (lines as featured in yves’s parallels post; in which ichari is felidore and spades is the ninth cavalier.)

“This ought to be good,” Sascha said, in a voice he certainly thought was a whisper. Ambergris did not answer; her gaze had slid past the Eighths.

The Ninth cavalier stalked to the middle of the room with the steady grace of a great cat. Though the skull paint muddled her features, Ambergris could pick out a square jaw, narrow eyes, dark hair chopped off blade-straight just above her chin. She was broader than Felidore, limbs taut with muscle; she stood steady and poised, statue-still in a breathlessly anticipatory way. She did not speak. She bent her rapier blade, as though loosening it like a ligament, and stood at ready position.

Behind her, Vanya Nonavulpa leaned back against the wall, and beneath the paint Ambergris saw its lips twitch into a smirk.

Felidore had disarmed Anemone in moments. They had disarmed the Second House girl in minutes, and even the Fourth House soldier had drawn them to a sweat but not a standstill. The Ninth House cavalier, Ambergris realized within the first breath, was a different sort of creature. The two of them crashed together with the elegant violence of a dance. Ambergris didn’t have the knowledge or reflexes to make sense of the flashing rapiers, or even follow their blurring arcs through the air. What she could recognize: the new speed at which both combatants moved, and the new intensity to Felidore’s dodging as they barely kept their ribs from the delicate touch of the Ninth’s black blade.

april

re: writing a lot of noncanon stuff for fun: thinking really hard about neopronouns marc antony led to an extended au where xe accidentally knocks up xir boringass coworker (stella errans), whom xe hates. this is colloquially known as “erranspreg” and i feel like i need to at least mention it in here because i can’t go fucking anywhere without one of my bastard friends bringing up the bland pregnant man. look, HE WANTS TO BE A DAD! his DANGEROUS AND MORALLY QUESTIONABLE POLITICAL POSITION shouldn’t get in the way! (say hi to the godsong roman triumvirate, btw, in which the role of octavius caesar is played by a teenage girl.)

“You are not pregnant,” Sisyphania clarified.

Stella blinked. He blinked again. “Well,” he said, rather uselessly, “I am.”

Which broke some sort of spell. Ash exhaled, hard, and reached expressionless for xir bottle. Leanna said, “Are you—really?,” and Sisyphania said, “Because that would be—”

“Inconvenient,” Stella allowed, shifting his weight from foot to foot and wishing she would look away. “Strategically. I know.” With a stiff shrug: “But the gods work in arcane ways. Better to take our blessings when they come.”

“You are being serious,” Sisyphania said, still very calmly.

Leanna whistled. They were making eye contact, which unnerved him; usually they spoke without glancing up from their papers. Not unkindly, they said, “Who’s the lucky parent?”

Stella watched Ash’s hand tighten around the stem of xir goblet.

He let xim feel it for a moment. Then he exhaled and said, “I’m the parent. I’m the child’s father. That’s all.”

may

...and on the note of teenage girl octavius caesar. yves once described me as having “never worked on canon in my life,” and i would like to declare that that isn’t true. i wrote SO much canon this year! i just happened to write so much more stupid AU stuff. this one comes from a document known as “getalong au” because the premise is that every character is aged down about thirteen years and they’re NICE to each other, goddamnit! (no one is nice to each other in canon.) specifically, the plot of this is “ash and carron raise carron’s five-year-old adopted daughter,” which makes this technically the octavius-caesar-kindergarten-AU, i guess??? i love to say words

Still, Ash maintained the brief and futile hope that it might go well, that whatever poor little Dickensian orphan Julienne was taking pity on might actually be tolerable. This illusion lasted until xe saw her: a tiny round-faced thing with big goggly eyes and a puff of blonde hair, half-hidden behind Julienne’s leg. She looked way younger than five. She looked like a stuffed animal. She looked like xe could have punted her easily into the sun.

And she was staring. Unblinking. Owl-eyed. Ash’s stomach curdled. It was one of the (many, many) reasons xe didn’t like kids. At least adults tried to be subtle. Maybe they startled a little when they saw xim, maybe their eyes lingered too long on the scarred half of xir face while they stumbled over xir pronouns, but they did most of their gawking out of the corner of their eyes, sideways glances they thought xe didn’t catch. Little kids had no such instinct. Little kids stared.

The kid stared. Ash lifted xir chin and stared back.

“This is Mx. Ash,” Julienne said, and her voice, though not the babying tone in which people talked to cats, was lowered, softened. Rare for her. She let one hand slip down to tousle the girl’s unkempt hair. “I promise xe’s very nice.” Which was paired with a biting look that told xim xe had better be. “Ash, this is Sisyphania. Sisyphania, you want to say hi?”

june

OKAY WE’RE BACK TO CANON STUFF. godsong has an achilles character and i gave her narrative awareness. i really enjoy playing with POV and i really enjoy writing second person; you may have noticed that ashbackstory, from february, is also second person! godsong’s character backstories usually are: you are [NAME], they say, and here is your story, and you are whoever the narrative says you are. only one godsong character has been granted first-person arguing-with-the-narrative privilege and by god is she going to use it. (and by god, was this a fun exercise in POV.)

This story starts with a sacrifice. It ends that way, too.

Your legend begins before you are born. Your father is a wise man and a great king, ruler of the seaside kingdom of Pyrrinth, devotee of Orinaea famed across the land and seas for his piety. When his queen dies, when he is left bereft of the only woman he ever loved without a child to carry on her memory, he kneels before the ocean for forty days and forty nights and prays for an heir. Then he lines six hundred bulls along the beach, a row that stretches a lowing dappled half-mile, and his servants slash their throats into the sea. The legends will say the terrible cry of six hundred broken throats still echoes off the cliffs. The legends will say the shallows washed red over the beach for years. The legends will say your father cut his hand and let three drops of blood fall over the water, and when the tide washed out, you lay, tiny and red-faced and screaming, in the sand.

The legends will call you Blood of the Sea, Blade of Shysha, Hand of Death. They will call you the swift-footed lioness of Pyrrinth, the flashing-eyed daughter of Orinaea’s salt foam, she who outraced the winds and wielded the war god’s sword. Your body is the pyre that burns Ivander-in-the-West. You are the last true hero called great.

My name is Atelanta Anankares. I am born angry. I am born great.

july

briefly leaving godsongland--over the summer, i tried my hand at writing horror for the first time, for submission to a shakespearean horror anthology! i think my piece (based off twelfth night) turned out, um, not very horror-genre. and i didn’t get into the anthology, which i’m not bothered about because i didn’t expect to (sometimes you submit things as a total crapshot in the dark). as a result, i’ll be posting this piece to my ao3 account on twelfth night itself; tune in this january 5th to see me do gender to another malvolio.

“Go to my lady,” you begged her. “Do not say that I am mad.” And again, a hoarse cracking scream: “I am not mad!”

Perhaps it is a lie. You would not know; you do not know if the cell is dark, though you cannot see your own bleeding hands, because the priest and the fool swore they could see as if wreathed in the light of God. If you are mad it is not your fault. If you are mad you are something to be cared for, something to be wrapped in woolen blankets with someone else stroking your hair, something that no longer has to fight and claw and cry out against the rest of the world. If you are mad it is not your fault. If you are mad she may feel sorry for you. How easy it would be. How simple. The price, of course, is being wrong. You play with the cuff of your sleeve, twisting it back and forth though it chafes against your wrist. You are not sure if you fear being wrong less than you fear knowing this. Than knowing she is in danger. Than knowing she is alone.

You are alone. Your shoulders have stopped shaking with sobs; your voice has given way. You are as sane as any man in Illyria, unless you are mad, unless you are wrong, and in truth you are not sure you know the difference anymore.

august

and we’re back in godsongville. in july, i started working on the first draft of the second godsong book. maybe i ought to edit the first one first, but i hate editing and i didn’t want to get bogged down. godsong1 is split into three plotlines, as mentioned; godsong2 (godspark) has just two, so i started with the shorter one, a continuation of the shakespeare’s-julius-caesar-themed plotline. in godsong1, this was narrated by local traumatized gladiator spades; in godsong2, her weird little roadkill-looking bestie has the reins, and they were biting my fingers the entire fucking time. yes, they have the same name as their patron god (a two-faced fox); they did this on purpose; i apologize on their behalf.

As Vulpa eased their box of matches from their belt, they thought fleetingly of the old story: their god and the sun. Sometimes it was both faces, in the story; usually it was only the younger half, pup-soft and arrogant. Leandros had crafted the sun between his hands like pottery, breathing a glow into its mouth to hang it in the sky and light the earth. One by one the other gods came to him to gaze at it; one by one they departed. Only the younger face—the one whose name they had taken—paused.

“I should like,” it said, “to hold it.”

When Leandros narrowed his eyes, the god Vulpa swore to the stars on his cloak that it should only hold and never take—“for if I flee with it,” it added, “I shall call Vasha, and you may have our shared eye.” And this concept made Leandros hungry, for the stories said that the eye the faces shared could see into past and future alike, and with that the art god might create divine things indeed. And so he drew back his cloak and stepped aside and allowed them to hold the sun.

Yet as soon as he moved aside, Vulpa cried out, “Our eye I promised, but not our blood, and there is no bloodless blinding! And the stars we swore to only stretch as far as the hem of your robes, and we can leap that distance in a moment—” and so saying, it snatched the sun and leapt the moon and fled across the sky, light bleeding from between its teeth. But Vulpa had spoken too quickly; the sun in its mouth seared hot as a fresh coal, and halfway through the sky it dropped its prize, smoke spilling from its jaws. No matter—it left Leandros to gather up the burning coin and fled laughing to the cave that it called home.

september

see above. i finished the vulpa POV plotline this month, and yeah, it gave me hell the whole way through. spades is relatively easy to write because she thinks like a normal person. vulpa can have thought spirals you’ve never even IMAGINED, babygirl. this is one of its only chill moments.

Spades sat still as marble, elbows on the bench, hands beneath her chin, staring at the far wall. Vulpa let itself gaze at her profile: the scar slitting over the low bridge of her flat nose, the hair chopped off knife-straight at her square jaw. Sometimes it recalled the way she had looked when they met, that very first moment with her hair falling past her shoulders, but it could never quite reconcile that with how she looked now. This was Spades, in front of them; the hapless half-gladiator with the grabbable silken mane was Cinquedea.

“Is there something on my face,” Spades said, without moving.

“Stoic heroic torment,” Vulpa said.

For which it won the smallest of eye rolls.

october

this was the month i wrote the least; i was recovering from finishing vulpaplot and preparing to dive into the next plotline for nanowrimo! so take this scrap from a noncanon piece i wrote where vulpa (horrible little rat creature, hates rich people, eats cigarettes off the floor) and sascha (rich people, resident airheaded prettyboygirl) hook up. neither of them are having all that much fun. neither is anna, who walks in on it.

Their teeth knocked together. Vulpa hissed; Sascha cursed. Then his hands were on its shoulders, fingers digging in hard enough to bruise, and they clutched at each other, Vulpa like it could pull him off the desk and Sascha dragging it forward until it stood between his knees up on its toes crumpling his coat in its hands mashing its mouth against his thinking Here fucking taste it then get my blood in your mouth get my hideous heathengod filth all over you is this what you asked for—

“I—am sorry,” came a low voice from the doorway.

Oh mother fuck, Vulpa thought, and bit him.

Hard, judging by his shriek and the sudden burst of blood on its tongue. Vulpa shoved him away and staggered back, cold with horror, tinted glasses hanging off its face.

In the doorway, Annadrijanna Ivtouched stood silent and still, face betraying no touch of emotion except, perhaps, a deep and fantastic exhaustion.

november

set to work on the other plotline of the second godsong book! in which anna’s plot and ambergris’s plot intertwine, because everybody ends up in the same place: ambergris’s fucked-up family home with her horrible horrible parents who breed birds. “why not this,” anna thinks, “life as the chosen one is already so goddamn weird.”

“The man who drove us up the hill,” Anna said. “He said there has been… a god wronged.”

“Yes.”

One word, and an answer she had already surmised from Iv’s messages. Even so, it was a stone to the chest. “Which one?”

Ambergris shrugged. “Eggs have gone missing,” she said. “My father thinks it’s thief.” Her frown was a barely-there twitch. “Um—theft. He’s put guards around the mews.”

It took Anna a moment. “The—falcons’ eggs.”

“The falcons,” Ambergris repeated. “You must understand—” Another slight smile. “They’ve made us very rich.”

She looked remarkably unbothered. No bird perched on her shoulder or wheeled about her head, and Anna realized she had ascribed it in the back of her mind to the crutches, as if a falcon small enough to hold in two hands could unbalance her further. “And do you think it’s theft?”

Ambergris blinked at her, slow, almost feline. “I think if this house is cursed,” she said, “it’s a curse that’s been a long time coming.”

december

trying to do nano and school at the same time beat my ass, so i took a little break in december. i haven’t finished godsong2 yet, but i’m hoping to pick it up again in january! in the meantime, i went back and fleshed out some bits of godsong1 now that i have more lore. +10 trauma points for anna.

At some point they lay back on the gauze-soft blankets, just as they had in the cave: Anna’s arm under Cairo’s shoulders; Cairo curved into his side with her head on his flat chest; Anna running his hand up her stretch-marked thighs, her soft stomach, her small breasts—over her nightgown, not pushing for more, just marveling at her. Just to say with his touch a thing he couldn’t quite fit in words. When she reached out, fingers kiss-light, to trail her fingers over his shoulder and down his side, he wondered how long it had been since anyone had touched him this gently.

Even as he thought it, her hand drifted to his hip. His left hip. Anna stiffened.

“What happened to you?” Cairo murmured. One finger traced a line along the scar slicing over the bone, tissue thick and knotted as mooring rope. Easy to curtain with his robes; impossible to miss in his underclothes. “I mean here.”

Bile in his throat. A flash of memory, scalding sea-gray eyes and blood between white teeth.

“It was a war,” Anna got out, cupping Cairo’s hand to move it away. When she blinked, he managed a soft, “Please—it hurts.” A lie dropped from a holy tongue like prayersong. The scar only ached when it rained. The memory hurt.

i know it’s been a quiet year for this blog, but thank you to everyone who’s stuck around and taken interest in my projects! wishing you a very very peaceful and fulfilling 2023

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