The Beginning

🎉🩷Same vibes🩷🎉

🩷🎉🩷🎉🩷🎉🩷 I have the Commissions open if you want 🩷...

fresh midnight Question for you:

are there any TAU worldbuilding elements or character facts or whatnot that you wanted to include in the book, but ended up cutting? or alternatively, have any specific story elements you have a burning desire to talk about?

Hm! Some thoughts on queer stuff! Which is ambiently in the text but not so much defined.

I was interested in writing a world with multiple competing theories of queerness, none of which are "perfect" -- in the sense that none of these societies have managed genuine queer liberation (i.e., everyone has the freedom to be who and love however they want). They're not necessarily awful, though some definitely are, but none of it's ideal.

The dominant queer culture originates in the Immaculate Empire and gives us "hermit" and "widow" -- pretty binary terms for a specific variety of desire, often linked with a kind of gender performance. There is no similar term for bi/pansexuality, at least not in the common parlance, so if you're, say, a cis bisexual woman, you'd still be described as a widow, were you engaging in widow-like conduct. The understanding and room for transness is highly dependent on where you are; some states have done that particular brand of evil thing where they see providing trans care as a way to enforce state power, because it's a way to police the binary and deviations from it.

Outside the empire, we get the legacy of downworld "third gender" -- which is actually a catch-all term for queerness. It also...doesn't have any further distinctions. They lump the entirety together in this one category -- which is itself somewhat binarist, as it distinguishes "cishet" from "not that," even though it's on a different axis. So if it's particularly important to you to be perceived in a more specific way, welp! Good luck!! This might actually be pretty chill in a world where authoritarian powers weren't keen on destroying your existence. Unfortunately!

I also have thoughts abt the ways different character relate to these systems of identity and meaning; like Sunai is pretty comfortable swimming between them and has a more fluid sense of self, while Veyadi cleaves more to "hermit" as a term, even though he has a somewhat complicated relationship with it. Jin has latched onto "third gender" even though they're not as bound up in downworld culture as say, Oyu, who is from a downworld caravan, third gender, and presents in a distinctly hermit-like way. And Imaru is the ur-lesbian! Widow supreme! Next question!

I, and I, and I--

some more The Archive Undying sketches! someday i'll be brave enough to do book scenes.

I return from my bg3 stupor with a fresh 2 am question:

was the TAU story and world a concept you were baking for a long time until you had a chance to write it, or was it a more recent creation?

Do you find it easy or hard to build out new story concepts? Like, do you need to sit on them a while until they feel right, or does it just come pouring out of you from the start? Or a secret, third thing?

Just anything about your personal creation process!

lol hi it might not surprise you to learn that i am also steeping in bg3 (i am still stumbling around act 1! i'm not allowed to play until i hit daily sequel writing quota, which is healthy, i'm sure, but does mean i am somewhat behind just about everyone i know who is also playing :P)

(my first Tav is an enormous nb tiefling bard named Faretheewell who is, imo, perfect. very beautiful. very kind. definitely does drag. lying a lot, but mostly just for funsies. has turned astarion into their little purse dog.)

ANYWAY, TO THE ACTUAL QUESTION:

TAU's an interesting case because it was cannibalized from a couple different ongoing projects into something entirely new.

The characters had been floating around in different iterations since about 2013, and their final forms in Archive are quite distinct from the original seed! Imagine Sunai as an exiled diplomat who got involuntarily apprenticed to a cursed king/the last magician in the world; imagine Veyadi as a disowned god-child tasked with murdering the last magician! I'm still probably going to use that world somewhere so I'll mum about it now (it's the one I call "grandma heist.")

((imo that's why you should always yoink characters you like from whatever source you enjoy, be it your own or something else -- they will inevitably change in their new context, often so substantially that they are nigh unrecognizable.))

The story concept also originated in 2013: "Pacific Rim, but the mechs are built out of the kaiju, and pilots must have survived being poisoned by those kaiju." The addition of strange and upsetting AIs of divine power was somewhat inherited from the story Sunai and Adi came from, where divinity was fraught, fractured, and hungry.

Here's a funny. In 2017 I thought TAU would be a nice, simple, clean project. However. I know some folks who turn out gloriously clean first drafts. I AM NOT ONE OF THEM. My brain is a hazardous work environment, very non-OSHA compliant. Basically I do a lot of thought work in the drafting, so the drafts are consequently messy, and there are a LOT of changes from concept to actual workable manuscript.

Which I suppose is to say that story concepts nest in my brain quite often when it is healthy. The frequency with which I land on new and interesting story thoughts is actually a pretty good indicator of how well I am doing ambiently! Right now I'm storing up a lot of them, some of which I am fairly rabid about -- nearly as rabid as I am about Archive, which is the real indicator of a project that is ready to transition from Thought to Work. They are described here as "apocalypse magicians" and other such things. There's one that's going to be kind of an argument with Lovecraftian unknowability via desconstruction of Enlightenment epistemologies + queer identity destruction, and another that's going to be the Le Carré approach to espionage + magic as divinity meets public service + interplanetary empires intruding on your bumfuck planet offering the solution to climate change might still be bad actually. (I want to write that last with my wife and we are making SUCH GOOD FUCKING SHIPS FOR IT.)

How to summarize this? 1) find a story notion/concept about which i can obsess, 2) actually start writing it, 3) mess up spectacularly for a few drafts, 4) finally whittle together something more or less correct, 5) that's my editor's problem now!!

what probably happened that night they met when sunai was too drunk to remember anything

god's infinite tits has made its way into my vocabulary thank you jin ily

Who is in the Pompous Pep ship? Given what you've said about it, I agree it's wrong and gross but I'm curious who the ones in it are.

It’s a romantic/sexual ship in the Danny Phantom fandom between:

Danny Fenton, age: 14

Vlad Masters, age: c. mid-40’s

It’s gross and pedophilic. Vlad is an abusive sadboy that tries to kill Danny’s dad and humiliate Danny at every chance he gets. There’s a platonic ship for them called Badger Cereal that’s more of a mentor/student dynamic. It’s better than Pompous Pep, but still strange considering the past that they have.

part one of the six fanarts!! I got enough requests that I'm gonna do two hehe