Writing the Wrong Dang Thing

It's been, I have to say, a long time since I've really felt inspired for an extended period of time. The last time was through the entire latter half of Sylv Vol II in early-to-mid 2020, and it got me through most of that novel and The Unpleasantness.

Since then, it's been... quiet. My progress through Untitled City Novel has been a sort of inconsistent plod - I'm enjoying it, sure, but it's not quite hit the same. There have been other brief flashes of inspiration for other stories or art projects, but nothing lasting more than a few days and a chapter's worth or a single page of art.

That changed about two months ago, when I fairly spontaneously allowed myself to write half a short introductory chapter to a story that has been bouncing around my head for a few years, but which I very intentionally had not been focusing on yet. There are other stories more prescient to tell that are already underway; this one could wait.

But then, very abruptly, it couldn't wait. It had to be told right now, and it was ready and it was not waiting for permission.

I ended up writing fifteen chapters in the space of about six weeks, varying between a chapter every few days, and two chapters a day. Every time I thought the flow had ended and the spigot had sputtered dry, more would gush forth. It consumed me. I had to make the playlist for it; if I sat down I had to write it; my gym sessions and dog walks and drives to work were dedicated to it. I indulged it for the first week, then it just didn't stop and so I tried to make it stop, re-reading recent chapters of City and changing my listening habits, but that didn't help at all. It just left me creatively frustrated and resentful of the other things I was "supposed" to be creating.

So, I cut myself some slack. We missed a week of Sylvpod again, sorry, and I left City for a while. I appreciated the creative flow while it lasted, revelled in how competent and comfortable writing felt, how easy inspiration came. Of course, it did eventually dry up, and that's okay.

It's okay to just have a nice diversion sometimes. There is a long, long slog left of City - finishing the first draft; many more months of editing and reviewing; probably a complete re-write of some substantial chunks; and then the slow build of titles, blurbs, covers, and promotion. I couldn't live without it, of course, but something gentler is nice sometimes.

It's okay to wander down the easy road for a while, I guess. You do not have to repent for happiness.

The Next One

On the one hand, I feel like I'm sitting a lot more on my next project ("story" sounds too informal, and "book" is just too conceited) much more than I ever have in the past. But on the other hand, this is kind of my first time starting out in this position. In the past, for one, I've been like a third of the way into the next novel by the time I finish the one before, while when I finished Sylv Vol II I was a handful of chapters into several and still dancing between them; and for another, I've always started them while in full-time education. I did technically start my current project while in university, but again, only a handful of chapters and ideas - now I'm really "starting" it, working full-time and putting real concerted effort into this blog and promotion of my books. It was different for Sylv Vol II, but in a different different way: that was preparing the next installment for a waiting (small) fanbase; this is something totally unrelated.

I used to get the hype and motivation to keep writing by getting chapter-by-chapter feedback from a very small community of other writers and fans on deviantART. For Sylv, it was by discussing character development and plot progress with people who already knew him and his story, or by posting meta on this blog. So to get the hype for my current project (in my own motivation more than anything), I keep wanting to talk about it... but I don't.

It's not like I have an excited fanbase of thousands who are waiting for any hint or announcement on this blog. There are a handful of people who know vaguely what I'm working on - character archetypes, vague worldbuilding, loose plot summaries - and I'm sure there are more who would be excited to know, but there's both a crossover and a distinction between those groups that I struggle to define. And I'm not totally sure where to take it. It's way too early to start promotion or make a release date announcement - what's the timeline supposed to be for that stuff? For me, it's like... a few months. But everyone important to me will already know loooong in advance what the story actually is and everything cool or shocking or funny that happens in it. How much do I reveal now? What can I mention in funny posts about how different it is to write than Sylvestus? Do I drop character names in blog posts? Do I start releasing art?

That's another weird thing. This is the deepest I've gotten into a project without doing any art for it. A huge part of it is definitely skill deficiency and anxiety: it's been a long time since I've done art properly and on a regular schedule; and the setting of this story is so different from my artistic strengths that I freeze up when I try to go about it. But I have been saying recently that I want to get back into my art more, so maybe this is the opportunity to push my boundaries and develop my skills. But part of it is also definitely that I'm a reeaaall attention-slut when it comes to my art. I don't get internet-hype because my art isn't nearly good enough, so I have to rely on friend-hype, and... well, no-one really knows any of these characters or their story yet. Why would they care? Of course, in reality, my friends are great and would hype me up no matter what, and would probably get excited if they had some cool art to check out, but when I'm sitting in front of my laptop with GIMP open and my tablet sitting in my lap for half an hour without drawing a single line, it's the anxiety that's winning the logic battle there. Man, it doesn't even have a title yet, still. And what will the motif be? As I complained to a friend recently, I've been doing Sylv promo so long I don't even remember how to make a poster or banner that isn't "parchment, line drawing, faint cursive, blood splatters, serif black text". I already did eyes, feathers, skulls, and moths for my covers, the f*ck else is there?

So I'm slowly forming a plan. I'm going to talk a little about The Next One in this post, I'm going to make an effort to create some art for it in the next few months, and then I'll make the official announcement much, much closer to the uhh... release date.

As I mentioned, this project doesn't have a title yet, but it has been referred to on this blog and in my personal life as City, City Novel, [Untitled City Novel], or various permutations therein. Any posts about it from hereon out will be tagged as city. It has five perspective characters, which, I am discovering, is a lot to go to from one (Dying Ember has three but it's been a long time since I wrote Dying Ember), and presents its own new challenges. As you might have guessed, its main - actually, its only - setting is a city. It's sci-fi. It's crime. It's not a murder mystery, but there are both murders and mysteries in it. It's very queer etc etc, but frankly I'm getting sick of the "judging books' merits by how many diversity boxes they check and ignoring every other aspect of quality" trend.

As for everything else? You'll have to piece that together from all the posts about it in the next few months-to-years, until the official announcement, eh?

[Image ID: a photo of Griffin McElroy from the My Brother, My Brother and Me TV show, a mid-30s white man with glasses, short brown hair, and a white shirt. He has an electronic screen in front of him displaying the text ".. you know ;)" in red, and is holding his finger to his lips while looking into the camera with a coy smirk. End ID]

Identity in Sylvestus

CW: sexual assault, abuse, trauma.

This post contains unmarked spoilers for both volumes of Sylvestus. 

 

This is a post I've thought about for a long time, including many drafts and plans done on bus journeys and sleepless nights. I never wrote anything down, though; as I've explained before, how I want to say things evolves so continually that it would have been pointless and left me frustrated, and I knew I couldn't publish any thoughts on it until Sylv Vol II had both been published, and had been out long enough that I had a small chance of getting two or three readers who had already finished it and wouldn't find the contents spoiled. However, in the few months since that deadline actually passed... I find that my desire and inspiration to actually talk about it is nowhere near what it was. Maybe the pertinence has passed; maybe the brain-space I'm in is so removed from when it's at the top of my mind that I can no longer summon the words; maybe the theory of something I knew wouldn't see the light of day was a lot less intimidating than the practice of writing something that definitely will.

It's not the only reason this blog has been quiet for the past few months, but it's one of them, for sure. So, this post is about identity in Sylvestus, obviously, and... other stuff.

Here goes.

Superficially, I've talked about gender identity in Sylvestus before. That was just over a year ago now, and it's worth noting that at the time, I was out as a non-binary queer person. A few months later, I accepted myself as a gay trans man, though it took until recently to fully come out as such and begin transitioning.

I described in the above-linked post the view on gender in ancient Rome that based identity upon sexual acts. Now, we have gender identity (what the person feels), gender presentation (what the person shows to the world), gender role (what societal expectation the person fulfills), and all of those separate to sexual identity, romantic identity, sexual preference, and now the internet is getting very big on the politics of position and kink intertwined with all of those...

But back then, it was both simpler and, to us, more obtuse: men penetrated, women received. They may not have had acceptance for and understanding around "trans" people insofar as we would recognise it today, but that isn't to say that trans identities didn't exist in some form.

This isn't another essay about Sylv's gender identity, though. I think I talked around that as much as I can in that previous post. But what I couldn't expand upon then because of the whole spoileroonies thing was the whole "Sylv's gender and sexuality are both intertwined and linked to his trauma" part - specifically, the nature of the trauma.

 

I said to my friend after she beta-read the first draft of Vol II that I was amazed no-one had ever asked me, after reading Vol I, why Sylv was The Way He Was around sex, and what the trauma flashbacks and night terrors were about. I wish we had been talking face-to-face, because I want to say "she looked at me perplexed", but unfortunately this was a text-based conversation happening in the middle of a pandemic, so I can only say what her written reply was, and not the tone with which it was intended.

She replied: "It was always clear what was happening to me, so I didn't want to ask more questions".

Just like that, I was fully knocked down. It's so hard to gauge whether things are too explicit or too unclear or the perfect amount of subtle, and all this time I had bemoaned the fact that I wasn't sure which it was but didn't want to ask anyone who'd read Vol I about it in case it drew their attention to something they had previously disregarded and spoiled the Vol II twist. But, to be fair... it was never about a twist. It's not even really a reveal - more of a confirmation. The only thing that she was surprised about who was who was committing the abuse.

Yeah, it feels good to finally be able to talk about it explicitly.

Throughout Vol I, Sylv has night terrors that involve having something shoved down his throat, being pushed to the floor, being struck and pressed down upon. They are no more explicit than that, made of shadows and metaphor, a bear that turns into a faceless man and a wine bottle that turns into a "hot choking weight" before he wakes with a scream. He is guarded because he does not trust anyone, including both himself and the reader, similar to how we get no real insight into his inner workings.

In Vol II, Sylv is much more open. He reveals a lot more about how he thinks and why he does things; the only time he hides his plans is when he is again doing something he is ashamed of or troubled by, like Pulex's trial. And even then he later looks back on it and reveals all in a demonstration of introspection that did not exist a few months prior. This is a good narrative tool, but also an intentional shift in tone for the reader and their closeness to Sylv. And, consequently, his night terrors become more explicit as well. He reveals actual truths to Pulex and Lavi after lying throughout Vol I even to the reader - and as we know him, so do other characters; Velleius and Scaurus deduce some aspect of his personal history after the trial even when he thought he was being as impenetrable and clever as ever. He is opening up as, for the first time in his life, he both comes to trust people, and is made vulnerable by his connection to Nahvo'que.

And for a lot of stories, that slight opening up would be enough. But for Sylv, it wasn't.

It had to be explicit, and the scene - the flashback in the temple of Nahvo'que where he takes Lavi into his past and vice versa - gave me more trouble than any other scene in either novel, even more so than Lavi's death.

Ever since I first started writing Sylvestus, I knew there had to be that kind of reveal, that kind of openness. Everything was obscure and shadowy because Sylv had not accepted what had happened, and he needed to.

Those early drafts - written maybe five years ago now - were brutal and explicit. I was bound by the age-old adage of "show don't tell"; for Sylv to accept what had happened, the reader had to be as uncomfortable as him, we had to see and hear and smell every detail, taste what he tasted, feel what he felt, it had to be awful and sickening.

And it was triggering as f*ck, and it sucked.

I've said before that Sylv shaped who I was in the six years that I wrote him, and that what I went through shaped his story. That first draft of one long novel that I later broke into two and re-wrote, I was a late teen recovering from some impressive childhood trauma... and going through some more. I was brutal inside, trying to write a story about accepting what had happened to you while I was still going through things I wouldn't accept for years more.

And about a year after I wrote that first version, while I was crawling my way through the first proper draft of Vol I, I was raped.

I had already "lost" Sylv, and this pulled me further from him. It had happened in a way I thought he would not approve of. I imagined him mocking me, cold and ruthless, for what I had let happen. He was the voice of my own shame, an echo of things my rapist's friends, my housemates, my family, had said to me.

I went through a lot of sh*t in that year I don't want to talk about here. Parts of it I think I'm still not allowed to talk about. I keep typing sentences to try and summarise it in a way that both demonstrates the horror and doesn't get me sued for libel and then backspacing them and staring off into the distance for a while.

The story of that year, I guess, is Pulex's, not Sylv's. Sylv says the things to him that I wish someone had said to me. That I had to say to myself.

There were small victories, but mostly, like Sylv, I did not get justice. Like Sylv, I walked away from a battle it was impossible for me to win. It felt like it must have for Sylv, running, shaking, into the night, concealed under a cover of darkness, the coward's way out, wishing I had the courage to do a Pulex and stand up there in court and declare it - but in truth, I know now and knew then that it would not lead to a miracle of justice, a happy ending. There was no Sylv to convince the judge, no Velleius to sway the public opinion, no Scaurus to make the arrest against his better judgement.

But I did not need to, because I had already done my Pulex. And I had had my Sylv.

I had stood up on stage and, to an audience of friends and strangers, performed a piece of prose about it I had written called Hell Hath No Fury. There is a recording of it, but I am not ready to show it to the world. I don't think I ever will be. I'm not even sure, again, that I'm allowed.

Sylv told Pulex that he had to stand with his own feet, breathe with his own lungs, speak with his own voice, and that was what I did. But it was not just that moment. It was the campaigning before to be allowed to even perform, the viciously polite emails exchanged with people who had once upon a time promised to fight for me now covering their own asses as we bickered about drafts of the piece and details I could and couldn't say, the friends I sobbed onto or watched movies and ate pizza with afterwards to gather the strength to go on with it. It was the ones who did fight for me, who argued behind closed doors without ever expecting me to find out they had done so, who wrote emails, who cut off contact with people who had spoken against me for no other reason than knowing it was right, who told me things I would later tell the audience in a second piece, performed with two other survivors, called The Things They Said to Me.

And it was worth it, because my counsellor told me, a week later, something she shouldn't have. She told me that another survivor had come forward since attending that performance to make their own testimony, claiming that my performance had inspired them. Further, the entire performance, and all of the amazing powerful people who told their stories that night, raised money for Swansea Women's Aid.

And if nothing else did, that alone made every inch of the battle worthwhile.

I found Sylv on that stage, and in the lead-up to it. And I've kept him with me since. It was the self-acceptance after that made me realise that he would never have hated, judged, or mocked me for what I went through.

The original Sylv did not care for Pulex at all. It was ambiguous, but it was implied that he only used Pulex for his plans, and did allow him - even drive him - to commit suicide afterwards. But in this version, I knew that was not right. Sylv cherished this child he saw himself in. He did not disapprove because he had been drunk, or because he had been attracted to his rapist, or because he considered Pulex's trauma lesser than his own. Sylv still manipulates Pulex and his life in canon, because he is not a good person, but he does care for him, more than he admits or anticipates. This is the way I have hinted at, so many times before, that Sylv shaped me and yet what I went through shaped Sylv.

I have a jaguar skull tattooed on my hip from around that time. It is not meant to be the Vol I cover, despite the inevitable visual comparison, but it is, without a doubt, a little bit of Lavi, a little bit of Sylv. Its meaning is refusal to be polite, a jagged-toothed agreement to never hesitate to rock the boat, to capsize it when necessary, to be teeth and claws when needed. I have another tattoo from a year after that reminding me to put away the fangs and be vulnerable sometimes.

But there's one last way - okay, so very many, but the last one of this post - that Sylv and I's influence on each other affected the novels you have today.

Let's go back to that scene. I'm not going to copy-paste a section into this post; if you want to read it again to remind yourself, it's chapter 40 (XL in Roman numerals) of Vol II. Like I said, the original was brutal and harsh and explicit because at the time, both as a person and a writer, that was the only way I could think to be shocking in a reveal of something that had already been shown more obliquely several times before.

But I knew going into it this time around that I had been looking at it completely wrong.

Sylv trusts the reader and he trusts Lavi and he needs to acknowledge what happened. So that doesn't mean that any of them need to be shown what happened.

Quite simply, for the first time in his life, Sylv needed to tell someone what happened. "Show don't tell" isn't an all-encompassing rule. For this, it was simple: Sylv needed to tell.

I had written and re-written and memorised and practised that performance of Hell Hath No Fury, I had carefully placed pauses, choreographed clenching fists and a furrowing brow, because I know how to perform, I know how to take words on a page and make them into something powerful. But the actual performance was so much more raw and hurried than I could have anticipated. Watching the video, I don't even remember it.

Except for the moment I actually said... it.

The layout of the piece was this: I described experiences from growing up, I described how society and teachers and peers and doctors reacted to them, and throughout it I built to how that informed how I had reacted...

"When I was r-"

And I hit a wall.

I can see it again, watching the video, feel that jolt in my chest. I had been powering my way through, barely holding it together, racing along the line between "too much of a practised performance with not enough raw emotion" and "too much hysterical emotion with not enough rational calm behind it", and then I hit that word, and I crashed to a halt.

Because I couldn't say it.

I had mumbled what had happened to people while I was drunk, implied my way around it with family members, called it "sexual assault" and "the incident last year" sitting stiff-backed in front of university staff, metaphored around it in poems... but I had scarcely said the word before. And now, in front of a faceless audience filled with just too many faces I did recognise...

"When I was-" I tried again. I choked softly, physically jolting forward as I hit the wall a second time. The darkness began to swarm, a crescendo in my ears, like buzzing insects and an orchestra of out-of-tune string instruments all swelling and pressing in around me. I could see my friends in the wings off the stage, reaching out, gesturing to me to come back, to give up, to walk off and look after myself first.

"When I was- when I was ra-" I gasped for air, feeling the hand over my mouth like moths filling my throat, the soft "sshhh" like the shushing of wings, the weight on my hips like a tiger pressing against me.

"When I was raped-"

And I was through. In reality, I rushed through again, found my stride, continued with a shake in my voice and a clenching fist that had not been choreographed. But inside, I was gasping for air, and it was light and still and quiet.

I don't need to explain how directly that translates into what appears in that chapter, and much of Sylvestus before and after.

When he says it for the first time, when he finally acknowledges it, when he tells someone, when he admits it to himself, all of it goes quiet. And it doesn't mean that the happy ending starts now, it doesn't mean he's magically cured of his trauma, it doesn't right the wrongs of all the years, but it's the first step.

I remain proud of that piece of writing like no other.

People can get so accusatory around representation in media at the moment. Yeah, Disney does need to try a lot harder, but that doesn't mean that every indie book needs to be filled with every single identity of queer and PoC and disabled - but yes, I still get insecure about Sylv as the main character of my novel. He is so intentionally a subversion of "masculine soldier protagonist in historical fantasy" - ace, traumatised, chubby, short, autistic - but it's like every time I describe the book to someone in the creative communities I'm on the fringe of, I have to start with those things, rather than letting them be a natural part of the story as they read it. No-one wants to read Yet Another Story About a Straight White Man, but maybe, just maybe, a story isn't automatically sh*t just because it doesn't feature enough of whatever identity is the buzzword of Twitter this week.

Sylv's identity is complicated because mine is complicated. I am not trans because I was raped, but my discomfort and dysphoria around gender and sex cannot be untangled from what I experienced, because every source of strength and comfort I could seek in media about my experiences - music, movies, art, poems - is about women being abused by men. I was driven away from male recovery spaces by cisgender survivors because they did not consider me valid, verbally abused for daring to have a vagina when I was raped, and yet equally, constantly misgendered in and driven away from female recovery spaces. There are a lot of songs on Sylv's playlist by women about their trauma and how they reclaimed their identity and bodies, because there aren't many at all by or about men - and those songs and how I wrote and formed him as I listened had a huge influence on how I perceive him and his story. In Sylv's world, his understanding of his gender and sexuality cannot be untangled from that core Roman tenet of men penetrate, women receive.

Sylv's story and Sylv's identity is about being trans and being male and being sexually assaulted and dealing with all of that while you have a whole lot else going on in your life. I don't need to justify why he isn't a woman or pansexual or "more explicitly" non-binary.

It wasn't the story I set out to write. It wasn't the plan all those years ago. It's not the secret message behind the book. But it is true. Sylv will always be there, a part of me. A part of my identity.

I guess that's all I had to get off my chest about it.

Just Write, Dude

This post contains reference to spoilers for Sylvestus Vol II: The Rise. Spoilers will be clearly marked above and below in bolded text so the rest of the post should be safe to read.

 

People don't tend to ask me for "writing tips", as such, but they do ask me how I managed to finish a novel, let alone five of them, and how I stuck with one story for so long and got through all of the writers block and plot canyons, and to be honest I think that any "tip" that deals with any part of writing other than Just Doing It is rubbish, because everyone's process is going to be different. You can learn grammar and the theory of story structure and good practice for character development, but at the end of the day, that stuff can be edited and adjusted. Experiment and try stuff out - you might find that plot diagrams and timelines and character profiles help you, but they hinder me personally - but don't feel like you're failing because you don't follow the advice of Neil Gaiman or Stephen King. Just look at how different every major writer's advice is from the others.

But actually writing that first draft? That's the most important thing. And as mind-numbing as proof-reading and formatting and editing can be, I think writers united can agree that it's that first draft that juuust knocks you down most of the time.

That's where my only bit of writing advice comes in. It's not the only trick I have, but it's the only one I'd even pretend is helpful to anyone else. And I'm not promising it's universal, but whenever someone protests it, I do kinda wanna just be like... yeah. I know. I have been exactly where you are. And only sticking to my core tenet got me through it.

You probably guessed from the title of this post what it's going to be, and to be honest, it does kind of make me wince to look at it, because... condescending, much? It kind of feels like when you're sat at a desk surrounded by study materials staring off into space for three hours and then when they see your grades someone is like, "just study more", or when the executive dysfunction and depression kick in and you're laying in bed half an hour after your alarm staring at the clock watching the time until you're late tick steadily closer and chanting in your head "just get up, just get up, just get up", and you want to get up and you need to get up and it's not even like you're tired or don't want to go to work, every part of your brain is screaming to just do it, but your body won't f*cking move-

And yet, here I am, bein' all "just write dude idk", so like... yeah, it isn't as simple as that. I know. I don't mean that you should or will be able to just sit down at any time and pound out 5000 words. That's not what I mean.

More... change your expectations about what "writing" means.

We all know how it goes. You have a great idea, you get very excited, you pound out the first three chapters in the space of two days, you infodump to all your friends about the super great plot points that are going to happen right at the end, you make character playlists and consider commissioning character portraits from your cool artist friends, and then... it's gone. You try to write chapter four, and you just have no idea where this story is going or how to get from this boring-ass introduction into the real stuff, and then you've lost the momentum and you tell yourself you'll come back to it in a few weeks and maybe you get excited again sometimes and re-write those first three chapters, but four years later it's buried under a pile of other, equally-abandoned WIPs.

So you want to turn that into a novel? You want to stick with this one, because you know it's going to be the winner?

Just. Write. Something.

Write one sentence today. Even if it doesn't make sense and it's boring as hell. Write two sentences tomorrow. Write one sentence the day after. And in two weeks, you're suddenly at that exciting bit again, and with the boring stuff written and the renewed excitement for it, the words will flow out of you. And in a few days, you'll finish that exciting bit and they'll be gone again.

So write one paragraph. Write one sentence.

Here's the priority, the secret, the thing they don't tell ya in Year Eight English: it doesn't have to be good, bro.

I felt this in Sylvestus more than anything I've written before. Huge chunks of both of those books, the first draft was just... not very good at all. The sentence structure was repetitive, the language was boring, the plot was absent and full of holes, the characters had inconsistencies in name spelling and eye colour, and reading over it again would make me miserable because it would be like, man if I find this boring how the hell am I supposed to sell it to a reader in good faith?

But uh... no-one's gonna read that version, bro. It's okay.

 

Your characters are stuck in the cave and there's a deep emotional conversation you're excited to write to have outside the cave but f*ck the words just won't come today y'know? And suddenly you've lost all the momentum and you don't touch it for months because you just got stuck on how they leave the damn cave.

So today, write:

"They left the cave."

And tomorrow, write the scene outside you're excited about. And maybe when you come back in a few months or years, you'll have the experience and energy to turn that into a whole 'nother exciting chapter about the adventure as they left the cave. Or maybe you'll still not want to do it, and you can turn it into:

"It took some scrapes and a little effort, but in a few hours, they had escaped the cave. "I hate bats," Character shuddered."

They're out of the cave, the reader still gets a little insight into that something happened in the cave, and you probably didn't need those extra eight pages anyway.

Or maybe the whole plot is going to change, and they never got into the cave in the first place, and aren't you glad you didn't waste six months of your life frustrated about that one chapter that you ended up cutting?

The transition from A to B can be frustrating and disheartening and uninspiring, but as long as it happens, it doesn't have to be great first time. It just has to happen. So often we get bogged down and lost over one line of dialogue or detail or sentence, and it's so freeing to just be able to take the pressure off, lower your expectations, and write.

 

Major spoiler for Sylvestus Vol II: The Rise in the following paragraph.

 

It's not just those transitional boring bits that can bog us down. Sometimes we have such high expectations for a chapter - the conversation, the kiss, the betrayal, the battle, the death - that it's that part we struggle on. And that can be heartbreaking because this was the bit we were so excited about from the beginning and was motivating us to do all the boring bits and now it's sh*t and it's all ruined.

Yeahh you know what I'm going to say. Just do your best. No matter how good it seems, what you write now won't be the final draft of a part so important - which takes the pressure off to make it that good this time!

Lavi's death in Vol II was a huuuge example of this for me. Technically, it was very difficult to write (the fast action versus making it clear what's happening versus Sylv's disassociation versus all of the emotions versus reality conflicting with delusion), and it also has the huge pressure of being a controversial and upsetting plot-point. So, it went through more re-writes than any part of any book I've written so far. I have entire documents on my old Sta.sh of drafts of it, when normally for me a re-write means literally writing over the original in a No Going Back determination. I originally wrote it in 2016 or so, and it annoyed me a lot because it just wasn't right. Each re-write I did approached it from a different angle - focusing on the fast action or the clarity or the disassociation or the emotions or the reality or the delusion - and none of them were good enough. This amazing character and the very serious and traumatic nature of her story deserved more than I could give.

Because I just wasn't a skilled enough writer then. It bogged me down and annoyed me and made me feel like I could never do her justice.

And maybe I'll look back in a few years and realise that I didn't anyway - in fact, I hope I do, because it means I'm still getting better - but I definitely learned and grew and became a lot more skilled of a writer the second (or uh, eighteenth) time around. In the new first draft of Vol II, I just wrote it one clumsy bold go, rather than getting caught up and delayed in expectation and hesitation. I got over myself and wrote something that wasn't very good, and then I finished the novel, and then I left it alone in a proverbial drawer for a few months, and then I went back and re-wrote and re-wrote and edited and edited and crafted and crafted until I had something that I could truly and confidently say lived up to the standard Lavi - and the story and the reader - deserved.

The same could be said of the reveal of Sylv's history to Lavi in the silver pool a few chapters before that, but that's a conversation for another post.

End of spoilers.

 

There's other stuff alongside that.

You really, genuinely cannot figure out what happens next? Make that one sentence something buck-wild or unexpected or random or inconsequential.

"Lavi was upside-down." There's one. I wrote that one day, and the next day I wrote:

""Lavi, why are you upside-down?" asked Sylv."

And the next day I wrote three sentences about Lavi being upside-down, and the next day I wrote the rest of the conversation they were having, and the next day I wrote the rest of the chapter, and I like it quite a bit.

Kill a character. Bring a new one in. Have someone walk in and say "what the f*ck?" and figure out what made them say it later.

 

You're completely jammed into a corner and hate where your characters are and the whole thing? Do something drastic. Delete the entire chapter where they got into the cave in the first place. Send them to a shop or a lake instead. Sometimes they need the change of scene.

And so, to be fair, do you. Get up, walk around, stretch, make a cup of coffee, then sit down and write that one damn sentence and then let yourself off the hook for the rest of the day.

 

If you set a daily goal of 1000 words and you're never hitting it and hate trying, make the daily goal 100 words. Sh*t, make it ten words. Achieve something every day, and realise that what you have done is still an achievement.

Maybe just don't write this novel at all for a while. Write a self-indulgent few chapters of something unrelated that you're more excited about. If it becomes a chore, you're not going to want to do it, and the more resentment and anxiety you build up around not being able to write well, the less you're going to want (or be able) to go back to it when you do have the inspiration again.

I read a thing by Terry Crews a while ago where someone asked him for gym routines and tips, and what he said always stuck with me. His advice wasn't to work until it hurts or to have body goals or to stick with discipline and all of those parts of the diet and fitness industries that normalise exercise as self-harm.

His advice was just to enjoy going to the gym.

He said he sometimes just takes a magazine and sits in the changing room for half an hour; he doesn't work out if he doesn't feel like it. He uses the machines that make him feel good, he goes because he enjoys it. When you have the pressure of hating your body and comparing yourself to other people and wanting to lose weight or get buff or any of that sh*t, you aren't living for what your brain and your soul need: you're making it a chore.

I've tried to run, I've tried to use ellipticals and do yoga and push-ups and punches, I've tried to force myself to enjoy it because everyone promised that the dopamine hit would override the pain eventually. It never did, I was just hurting myself and hating myself because people told me I should and it was another way to self-harm without visible scars (and one that was praised by people around me, no less), and like writing without love, I stopped as soon as I skipped one session because of a bad brain day or an inevitable injury. People say that you should write every day as discipline, like you should work out regularly as discipline, but that's not true. You don't need discipline if you love it.

I love swimming, I can bring myself to get up an hour earlier in the morning when normally I can barely drag myself to the bus on time if I know I have a session booked before work. I go four times a week now, and if I wake up in the morning and don't want to go... I don't go.

I don't swim to lose weight or build muscle - I love my body as it is and have no desire to change it in those ways and won't let anyone try to convince me it should be changed - I just do it because it makes me happy.

And that seems to confuse people. The idea that if I didn't want to go one day, I just wouldn't. That I'm not doing it to keep fit or slim or even to "exercise the depression away". People have such a hard time living for the joy of life, I think.

Similarly, I don't write to be famous, or to spread a message, or for discipline or therapy. I write because I love it, because the stories bubble up inside and want to be shown to the world, because the characters push their way out and I love giving them the stage.

Go to the gym to read a magazine. Draw a small frog in ten minutes and then put the art stuff away. Write one sentence.

Just write, dude. Not for discipline or because you have to. Because you love it, and you want to see where this story goes, and because even if it's a sh*t sentence, at least it exists now, out there in the world, and you can make it a better sentence later.

See? You made a thing! You tangibly impacted this world! That's amazing, bro. Take the afternoon off for all that good work. You get to write one more sentence tomorrow.

[Image ID: a digital painting of a small dark green frog wearing a hat. The painting was clearly done in less than ten minutes. The frog is smiling benignly and has big eyes staring blankly off past the viewer. There are clearly no thoughts in its head. The hat is a purple party hat with gold spots that is secured around the frog's head with string. End ID]

On Sylv, Spoilers, and Triggers

Yet again, I find myself preparing to start a post along the lines of "This seems like a dumb excuse to write a post, but..." but...

 

Okay, I got nothin'.

 

Sylvestus Vol II is currently undergoing a beta-read by a good friend and fellow writer. It's weird for a couple of reasons, all of which kind of come down to this being the first time in a long time someone with investment in the characters and world has read something I've written pre-publication, and as such has creative and editorial input... as well as just being able to yell "OMFG THEY DIDN'T" and spam me with exclusive memes sometimes. Friends used to read chapter-by-chapter as I wrote and vice versa, but as we all grew up this became impractical, and the last few times I've asked a non-professional to do a formal beta-read, things have gone badly (mostly in terms of them making promises and never coming through, which we all do sometimes, but it puts a strain on relationships and creativity, and made me hesitant to ever ask anyone i cared about to do it again). I'm glad I did, because she's great and it's going to be really healthy for the final product, but it still has weirdnesses.

 

For one, it's nerve-wracking as f*ck; I care deeply what she thinks as someone who I know has investment in the world and characters, and also as another good writer. The first time she sent anything approaching a negative piece of feedback (pointing out that a paragraph i already knew was sh*t was, though she phrased it much more politely and professionally, sh*t), I had to sit motionless and regulate my breathing for ten minutes so I wouldn't throw up with anxiety. I still have to manage that response every time it happens though it's gotten easier, and that's in no way a criticism; I wouldn't want someone who pulls punches, because sometimes as a writer you need to be punched out of your annoying foibles and punctuation habits (listen, i know i overuse the "mid-sentence ellipses to indicate a thoughtful or hesitant pause in the narrator's thoughts", but consider sylv makes a lot of thoughtful or hesitant pauses altho i will concede, yes, yes that is far too many, you could turn it into a drinking game and be unconscious by chapter 10).

It's also exciting, and the best feeling when she picks up on exactly the hint I was laying down, and amusing when she picks up exactly the red herring on the next page, and perplexing when she points out a character's response I barely thought about when writing it, and frustrating when she questions something I thought was obvious...

All of which are super important and the exact reason for a beta-read of someone who understands and cares about the story and characters. It was definitely the kind of care that was missing from Vol I, but there was just no-one I trusted who also had the time, and while a professional paid editor can point out your ellipses obsessions, they just don't have the same dedication to the story as a friend and, dare I say, fan.

That feels weird to say. Fan. Do I have a fandom?? It has like four people and a German shepherd in it if so, but I'll take it.

Anyway, there is one specific weird thing I wanted to highlight because it's relevant at the point she's at, and also kind of... where I'm at in the write/edit/publish/live journey. As the title says: Sylv, spoilers, and triggers.

Writing Vol II was triggering as all hell at points. It's triggering to read. In a couple of different ways. I want to talk about it when I'm on the bus listening to the Sylvestus playlist. I want to talk about it when I'm writing those parts. I want to talk about it when I re-read them. I want to talk about it when she reads them. I want to talk about it when a new reader mentions the allusions in Vol I.

Buuut it's all huge spoilers for late-game Vol II, so I've kept my mouth shut for about four years, because precisely one (1) person knows the full story of Sylv, and it's not fair to overload them every time you listen to the playlist on the damn bus. And I'll have to keep my mouth shut for another four months or so, or basically as long as I can last after publication. I've considered writing something and just saving it as a draft to publish when the time is right, but it doesn't feel appropriate because things change so much; I could have done that dozens of times in the past four years, and my views and feelings now are different to what they were then. Yet I also want to capture how I feel about it now, y'know?

I don't have answers, which is why, yet again, I'm writing a rambling blog post with a roundabout point on the subject.

I'll be very honest, too; another reason I'm writing this now is that I encountered a fairly big trigger in my regular life, and Sylv is a big refuge for me from that. I've gotten into the habit of re-reading the chapters I know are triggering for me when I already feel bad, because together they form a cathartic arc. But I did that like two days ago and I didn't want to saturate myself by reading them again because that way lies madness and "every word i write is incomprehensible garbage" - aaand she's about to hit that point, which means that in the next two weeks or so I'm gonna have to go through them all in deep discussion/edit/ellipses-removal anyway.

And I wanted to tell her about it and what was going through my head, because it was very personal but also interesting in relation to him and the story, but I... didn't, because... it was spoilers. And it kind of reminded me of everything around this *gestures to previous paragraphs* which is weird for me.

I think it will be good to eventually be able to talk about Sylv in all the full truth of his story. Both books are, but especially Vol II, about openness, with oneself and others, with becoming known, with vulnerability and its rewards. Yet ironically, I've been uncharacteristically careful with guarding his secrets, perhaps because everyone I would want to tell makes up the biggest base of people whom I want to experience the story without spoilers or preparation. Sylv has become a huge intersection of coping mechanism, personal project, and professional interest, and the boundaries are hard to define and maintain. And it has been interesting, to see what people pick up on and miss, bring up and skirt around, but it will be good to be able to finally talk openly on this blog about Sylv and, idk, sh*t like the ending of the book.

Sylvestus Vol II: The Rise is going to be extremely good, and it's going to be in no small part because of this experience and the person behind it. But it's also going to be good for me, I think. I said when I was racing through the second half of the novel in April-ish that I was terrified of the end and what that meant - letting go of Sylv - but as that approaches, I see the catharsis it will bring. I am Sylv sinking into the blood-tinted water: he seems at peace, but in Epilogue, we do not know why, cannot yet understand what brought this man to this point.

By Prologue, we understand. Or, I hope we do. I guess I'll find out when she gets there.

Until then, it will keep being weird. That's nothing new, though, for me or this book.

Canon Sylv

CW: brief mention of trauma, dysphoria, and eating disorders

I was trying to find the title for this post because I was also trying to figure out the exact direction it was going to go in, but I'm still not 100% sure on that. I started yesterday wanting to write a post about one thing, then decided that the... Part of that I was comfortable writing about wasn't substantial enough to make a post about, and I wasn't willing to only tell half the story. So, I figured today I'd approach the topic from a different angle, see if I can slide it in there while talking about something adjacent.

It's no secret among my friends that Sylv's appearance is based on Cillian Murphy. Simply, the community writing site I first created him on more than six years ago required that you provide a "face claim" for all of your human characters, and he fit my character idea well enough. At the time, he was still less famous than he is now; series 1 of Peaky Blinders had only just aired, and few people realised how many big films such as Inception he'd been in already. But hey, I'm not here to talk about Cillian Murphy.

... no, I'm not.

Actually, I would argue I am here to explicitly not talk about Cillian Murphy or the not insubstantial Cillian Murphy Collection on my DVD shelf-

Listen. I am bad at imagining human faces, and "fancasting" my own writing helps me to visualise, describe, and draw my characters. I'm so bad at it, I have a character I described once as "as sharp and well-groomed as a Doberman" and then proceeded to visualise him as a man in a suit with a Doberman's head like some kind of furry-bait and/or modern Egyptian god art student painting until I went "okay fine he's Ricky Whittle now" and could start seeing him as human again. I don't have face claims for all of my characters, but it's a habit writing on those early 2010s RPG boards got me into that really does help with the creative process. So, yes, my Sylv looks fairly like Cillian Murphy, at least in that he was the basis to build an appearance from. That's what I visualise when I write about "silver-steel eyes, stone-carved skin, short dark hair", etc. But... I guess what I'm aiming to say is that your Sylv doesn't have to look exactly like that.

Ancient Rome was extremely diverse; where they invaded, they captured slaves, sent them as far away from their homeland as possible, then often granted the next generation citizenship, meaning that people born in Egypt were having families in Britain, people born in Germany were living in Turkey, and so on. This was especially relevant for the armies, who were often sent as far away as possible from where they were conscripted. Though the actual furthest borders of ancient Rome didn't go much beyond western Europe and the northern tip of Africa, evidence that trade and travel took place has been found all across Asia and Africa, I think the furthest to Japan. Thus, when I imagine the background cast of Sylvestus, it's correspondingly diverse, though the colour of anyone's skin is scarcely mentioned in-text. Clues can be found in names, because those second-generation families were often given names by the government that corresponded to their parents' origin - Cyrenaicus, for instance, Sylv's best immune, would have come from what was then known as Cyrenaica, now Libya; Hispania, a lupa, from Hispanium, now Spain - but otherwise I leave it to the reader's imagination.

So, though it's literally the least I can do, let me state clearly here for any future arguments to screenshot and quote: I welcome and encourage you to imagine, fancast, and draw Sylv as black, south Asian, east Asian, Hispanic, or however you prefer to visualise him. Sylv lies frequently about his past through various false identities, but does at one point reveal that he was most likely born in southern Italy. Aaand this should have no bearing on his race, because Rome was diverse af. Heck, my face claim for him is Irish.

There are a few canon parts of Sylv's appearance. "Silver-steel" eyes, or "blue-grey" when he's vulnerable; "dark hair" that is "slightly longer than the Roman fashion" (i just couldn't cope with a military buzzcut); the scars on his back and arms that are an intrinsic part of his character and backstory, mentioned in Vol I and expanded upon in Vol II.

The only other major part of Sylv's appearance that I'd like to highlight are his height and his build, because they are important to me. I'd like you also to remember during this next part that I am writing as a non-binary person who was assigned female at birth (afab), and generally still presents in a "feminine" way, because of my body type and my fashion preferences, but uses they/them pronouns.

Sylv is short, about 5'6" when adjusted for "people back then were shorter than people now". This is intentional, to undermine the stereotypical image of the tall buff manly protagonist. It makes sense; he was malnourished during his growing years, and it fits into the personality of someone who had to learn to be clever rather than simply powerful. He has an imposing presence, and people respect him, and it's all personality. Height is a small but insidious thing that toxic masculinity lands on, this idea of invalidating men for being small and women for being tall, especially trans people. We're going to come back to that point in a moment, but I want to clarify one final thing first.

Sylv is chubby. The exact definition of that is up to you, but it's a hard thing to mention in-text because it's ridiculously taboo.

Fantasy women are just always waifish and thin, with wiry strength but absolutely no stomach, either flat-chested or "unusually well-endowed" for being so skinny. It destroyed me as a kid and young teen. The models in the fashion industry and the photoshopping of women to remove all imperfections are obviously insidious and damaging to young people worldwide, but as someone who took their escape in fantasy, that was almost worse. Like many young people who read a lot, I took inspiration and hope from my favourite characters. Being trans played a huge part in why that was difficult, but fosure so did my body type. I will never be both skinny and healthy: my healthy, happy weight is what most people would consider fat, and it's taken a very long time to be okay with that. Not comparing myself to real or fictitious people obviously was a part of that, but even while I was learning, it was insanely demoralising to only ever see myself in the short fat ugly sidekick, while the sci fi heroines and warrior princesses went on being 5'10" and skinny with visible ribs and abs.

One particular moment, and one particular book, sticks out to me. It must have been sixth form, when I was still working on self-esteem, no longer starving myself intentionally but still struggling to accept that it was okay to eat when hungry even if it meant I didn't have a permanently concave stomach. I wanted a waffle from the cafeteria, because I was hungry because I was 17 and had been learning all day and only eaten one slice of toast, and waffles were only like 40p and it was another two hours til lunch and I knew I wouldn't be able to focus and learn if I didn't have something to eat. And I was reading Six of Crows at the time, in which there are two female characters, a "waifish" acrobat Inej and a "curvaceous" warrior Nina, and I scoldingly thought, "Inej wouldn't eat a waffle. If you want to be like Inej, you have to have more self-control." And I miserably resigned myself to dissociating through the next two lessons for the sake of an unattainable body type based on a fictional acrobat.

And then I thought for a second and went, "Well fuck that, because Nina would eat a waffle, in fact Nina is described as eating many waffles throughout the book, and no-one thinks less of her for it, in fact her body type and her appetite are two things her love interest likes about her", and I bought my damn waffle and enjoyed it and suffered 0 negative consequences and was able to focus through my lessons and learn and do very well and be in a good enough mood to be nice to my friends.

Nina Zenik in Six of Crows changed something for me in my self-image. She was the first female character in seventeen years of reading who had been unapologetically fat and ate many sweet "bad" foods and was never criticised or vilified for it, but was instead just as badass, funny, and beloved as her skinny best friend.

Seeing Nina cast last week as an extremely skinny girl in the upcoming Netflix adaptation broke my heart. Even now, so much self-acceptance and fat-positivity later, part of me still relied on loving Nina to love myself.

So, Sylv is chubby and short. I can't think of any male protagonists of a fantasy novel who are anything other than extremely thin or exceedingly buff. Sylv is neither. He is strong, because he is a soldier who grew up performing hard manual labour, but he has realistic and visible body fat because he is a 39 y/o man whose day is not made up of pull-ups and flexing for a camera while dehydrated. TV has such a problem with demanding that women on-screen have no double chin, no love handles, no tummy roll, and it's just as bad for demanding that men on-screen have nothing except muscles and bones, which usually requires actors risking their health to dehydrate for several days before filming. And a lot of people still don't realise that's fake.

Sylv has muscles. He can grab a big dog by its collar, wrangle a rearing horse (terrifying), or swing a sword and cut a man to his spine - but you probably wouldn't be able to see most of those muscles, because he also has fat. Like a real human.

Another, similar note: Sylv likes sweet foods. I believe that seeing characters eat is important, as it normalises... You know. Eating. Without shame. It shouldn't be something taboo that we only see The Fat Character do, that the #skinnylegend heroes are polite enough to do off-screen. And the Romans loved a good feast! Hence why Aemilius, the brothel-owner who is described as "obese", is never seen eating (because fat people eating food shouldn't be a punchline), while Sylv (chubby), Velleius ("slim"), Capito ("paunchy"), and a host of other people with other body types are. Sylv especially enjoys honey-cakes, because it makes sense for his character, and because... Well, f*ck. If Nina liking waffles could help me, then maybe Sylv liking honey-cakes could help someone else. I was always self-conscious writing those things, as I am describing Sylv's body in-text, because it's so taboo. It shouldn't be. It's just another type of representation.

Further, and less politically, I believe it's one of the things that makes him human. I've been told that my characters feel real in a unique way, and I certainly believe that's true for Sylv. He has conversations with his dog when no-one is around. He complains when he has to walk up a steep hill. He raises his sword toward a giant eagle, then goes, "nope" and dives for cover when he realises how big it is. He puts so much honey on his wheat-cakes that Velleius makes fun of him for it. He cuts cheese for a spread, then uses the excuse that one slice is thicker than the rest and it would look untidy to justify eating it. He makes silent judgemental eye contact with his friend every time someone they hate says something dumb. Those little realities, little bits of humanity, make him as fleshed-out and real and relatable as he is, and those which relate to food, weight, or fitness shouldn't be taboo, yet they're the kind which never seem to appear in any other text. The characters never eat. Fat people have no place being badass. The actors starve and dehydrate themselves for days to flex on-camera for thirty seconds. I wanted to draw chubby Sylv yesterday to illustrate the point, but I was embarrassed to, because someone drawing their character slim or muscular is just someone drawing their character, but someone drawing their character fat means that it must be their thing. Taboo. Gross. Unusual.

So, yeah. I put my foot down on that one, I guess (and what do u know, the post did mostly end up being about the thing i decided i was too uncomfortable to make it about, hwoops). It's not like a content creator can or should control every piece of fan work created (and let's be honest, at this point i'd be thrilled to have any fan works), but like... Hey. As a bro. As a friend.

Don't make Sylv skinny. Or tall. Those are more important to me than his eye colour, his skin colour, the exact location and positioning of his scars. There are thousands of buff, 0% body fat men for u to draw. Let me n my thicc friends have this one.

OKAY, one last point to touch on because I did promise earlier, and I tried to re-write this post and slide it in earlier so I could end on "me n my thicc friends" but it just wasn't happening.

I mentioned my gender identity, and I mentioned Sylv's height, and I mentioned trans people. So, like, a lot of trans men's gender dysphoria is worsened by their height, partially because "men" are seen as taller and they feel less valid being shorter, and partially because it can make it harder to be recognised as your gender when you don't match people's image of it. Normally, people read me as a woman about five years older than I am - they have since I was twelve. If I make significant effort to present as male, they think I'm about seven years younger than I am, because I can make my face and outline masculine, but no adult man is 5'4". Another reason short guy rep is important, but that brings me onto the final like, canon slash flexible part of Sylv I wanted to talk about.

I was re-reading Vol I thoroughly this week, for the first time in a while, to just skim for any inconsistencies between its established canon and the current draft of Vol II, and the time away made me realise something that... Honestly made me wince a little.

Simply, it kind of baits the implication - at least to me - that Sylv is a trans man. He's described a few times as short. He's self-conscious about his body, not allowing anyone to see it. He reacts very badly when it's implied that he's going to have to show his body due to... uh... plot reasons. He obviously goes by a different name than he was born with. He lies about his past. He doesn't "identify with" masculinity.

Reading from distance, I was like, "Shit. I would 100% think that this was building up to the reveal that he's afab, and be extremely disappointed when it didn't". The reason for all of those things is different, and a key part of Sylv's character that is also very important to me. But it doesn't change that I really don't want to have accidentally led anyone on.

But... When you get down to it, there's nothing that really goes against that idea, if anyone were to continue preferring to think it. When someone does see him naked, they don't point and yell, "By Jupiter, it's a vagina!!" - but if you want to see that as a more tolerant Rome than might have been the reality, this is one case where I'm like, it's all yours to headcanon. Sylv's genitalia is never described because I ain't about that life. But on that note, I would like to clarify what I think of as my Sylv (which is to say, the canon if you want to know what the author thinks, but like, i'm not gonna get mad if your sylv is a trans man instead).

Sylv is genderqueer. In the same way that we can't know for sure what historical figures would have identified as in today's terms, I'm not comfortable putting a more specific label on it. Gender identity in ancient Rome was different to how we see it today, and linked intrinsically to sexual acts; a man who bottomed would be mocked for being feminine, but wanting to be a top was seen as perfectly natural and masculine. Similarly, sex workers were referred to as lupa (she-wolves) and made to wear male clothes when not working because they were seen as having given up their femininity for their profession. They probably used she/her, but they were not "women", like a man who admitted to receiving during sex probably used he/him but was seen as "un-man".

In today's terms, Sylv would identify as aromantic asexual. This is another thing that is important to me and as representation, and that I am not flexible on. He's also sex- and romance-repulsed, but this is more flexible; he's deeply traumatised, and maybe in a modern setting with a lot of therapy would one day go on to invest in a healthy relationship, but we will never know because that isn't the Sylv we see. Asexuality doesn't have to arise from trauma, but also someone identifying as ace because of trauma is still valid. Though I created him, he is so much a product of his setting that I don't feel comfortable just declaring "oh yeah in the college au he'd be x".

Sexuality and gender for many people are separate. For both me and Sylv, they are complicated and intertwined and too tangled up in trauma for them to be separated and easily defined. This is likely also related to autism; many autistic people also struggle with gender roles and identity, and that is apparent for Sylv. He isn't the stereotypical teenage savant written by a neurotypical woman in her 50s who finds autistic people "fascinating", but Sylv's experiences should be recognisable to anyone who is autistic. Further, autistic people are often assumed to be asexual and aromantic, a stereotype to avoid - which happens to be true for Sylv in this case. His aversion to touch is a mixture of autism and trauma, and is a basis for his sex-repulsion, which plays a part in his aromanticism and asexuality; in reality, in many people these do not occur together, but in Sylv they do.

Maybe, in that modern setting after all that therapy, Sylv would decide that he was comfortable with his masculinity. Maybe, with a better lexicon of terms and access to trans resources, he would realise he was more comfortable identifying as non-binary and going by they/them. As it is, he's stuck in ancient Rome knowing he isn't "a man" but with no other options than he/him, vague discomfort in his own body, and an aversion to nudity, sex, and emotional intimacy. So! My Sylv is amab and genderqueer, acearo, autistic, and sex-repulsed. If you prefer to think of him as non-binary, as a trans man, as a traumatised cis guy, or anything else that helps you to see yourself in him, I can only encourage it. Like, it feels cheap to be the author and say "oh yeah sylv would totally use they/them except that he never does in-text at all", but it's the... It's the context and setting, y'know? I know there were non-binary people throughout history, but Sylv's story relates specifically to his masculinity and trauma.

Wow, okay, that became a whole 'nother thing! I evidently have a lot of feelings about my boy Sylv!

... in my defence, I've been thinking about it for six years.

I don't have a good end to this post. One day, I should be so lucky that people are producing fan content of Sylvestus, and I hope that they will be respectful of the important parts of his character (short, chubby, genderqueer, asexual) while having fun with those parts of his character that are flexible. Oh, yeah, and while we're here, Lavi is like 5'0" and fat, no-one is heterosexual, most of the characters are PoC... I think that covers it.

T-dawg out.

[ID: a gif of Justin McElroy on the set of Dimension20 giving finger guns across the table]

Poem: King

I don't post poetry here often compared to how much I write it, but this one I wanted to.

Opening a Dialogue; or, It's Been Seven Months Since You Opened My Texts and Your Brother Messaged Me to Say You're Okay but Not Ready to Open Messages Right Now and I Get It but Also I Worry Every Single Day; or, King

1am, I sit hunched over, tears speckling
a page I don't know how to write on.
Loss is something to which I have
become accustomed, this past year
more than ever; in some ways, it
gets easier each time, or at least numb-
ness comes faster. This morning, I
barely cried as I held my dead rat, his
loss a dull ache - but losing you is as
bright and unbearable as ever, a white
flaring pain in my chest. Every time I
approach this poem, the angle seems
to suggest you have died, which isn't
true as far as I know and pray, so I
suppose these words are written into
the universe, that you may one day
read them, and know how much I love
you.

Needing space, I understand; I also
understand being given too much
space, becoming unmoored in it, grow-
ing terrified to accept anyone back
into orbit. I want to promise you that
you can ricochet around me as much
as you need, but I'm terrified my own
atmosphere is so strong the phone
notification will drive you away. More
times than I can count, you have been
my anchor, a rock-solid base, strong
arms to hold everyone's problems. I
know more than anyone how we must
bear our own burdens, but the searing
white pain in my chest tells me to
tell you, I would give up my whole
life to carry your pain for a single
day.

I want to discuss the Sonic movie with
you; the one time I saw you speedrun
the game on an emulator blew my
mind, and I know you'll understand in
a way no one else did my obsession
with Jim Carrey's feral scientist energy.
I want to share Critical Role memes
with you; I'm still thirty episodes behind
but I know all the spoilers, and I don't
want to catch up without you. I want to
thank you, too, for my Christmas pres-
ents, dropped off without a word the
day you left; the Jester fridge magnet
holds my rent agreement in place like
she's holding my whole home together,
and the Fjord bookmark declares the
exact place I got bored of reading a
book on how to write better poetry, an
irony that would be lost on neither of
us.

Maybe my missing you is selfish,
a yearning for your laugh, your solid
presence, your keysmashes at jokes
no one else gets, your beard prickling
on my forehead when you hug me,
your spice-and-warmth smell, your
beautiful gap-teeth - but right now,
what I want more than any of that is
for you to know. That you are loved,
of course. And that you are the funn-
iest person I have ever known. That
you are the kindest, most thoughtful.
That you move through the world
with a quiet confident grace, too
careful to break anything with your
easy strength. That your smile is
the brightest my heart has ever seen.
That I want you back, but more than
that, I want you to be okay. Anchor.
Mountain. Sparrowhawk. Best friend.
King.

Finishing Vol. II

I'm coming to a weird place in Sylv Vol II right now, which is to say, the end - which is to say, not at all the end, but about halfway through in terms of wordcount, but almost the end narratively speaking, which is to say...
Let me explain.

The first full draft of anything like Sylvestus was one 250,000 word novel. Looking at it even then, I knew that it wasn't one novel, though. I write big, and I do believe that there are other stories which could work at that size, but that wasn't the case for Sylvestus. There were too many plot arcs which required too much space and too many resolutions; the entire first 100,000 words were just setting up characters and plots, and while that's fine for Victor Hugo, it's not something I'd be willing to send out into the world; meanwhile, the last 70,000 words was just endings endings endings. No, Sylv was meant to be two novels, so there lay the challenge even before I could start writing Vol I: figuring out how to make that happen.
There was a neat point in the "main" plot which fell about halfway through that first draft, which gave me a starting point, but the rest of it couldn't simply be cut in half and tossed out as it was - like I say, that would be an entire book of character introductions and plot nuggets and then boom, tiger possession, author profile, come back for Vol II. Given that I was so certain that it was meant to be two novels, it was surprisingly damn hard to actually make that the case; I didn't want it to feel like someone had just cut something bigger in half, like this was just a prologue to the real story. I've read novels like that before, and rather than drawing me in and encouraging me to invest in a second purchase like the author/publisher intended, it just left me kinda disappointed and wanting my original money (and five hours of reading) back. Planning out Vol I and Vol II was the most work I've ever put into actually planning story beats in a decade, and it never worked out well for me then. But I knew I had to, and I put in the hard slog of... Like, bad drawings of mountains with vague plot points written on them (idk, we did that in year 5 i think?) and spider diagrams linking plots and characters together, and in the end, bullet point lists, because my brain just really likes bullet point lists, they make things go better. I don't know how much good that actually did, but it at least got me the skeleton of a story: Vol I.

Writing that fucking thing was difficult, y'all.
In some ways, I was going over old territory, and that made it boring. I was re-writing. I tried to copy-paste the bits that could stay the same, but hated my writing from the year before. Alternately, I was completely changing some things, and that was scary. I was either forging new ground with new characters, characters on a completely different angle, plots happening fifty chapters earlier than previous, and all of that was difficult; or I was going over old ground but vaguely trying to make it "better", which was boring (and difficult). Which makes writing Vol I sound horrible, which isn't entirely accurate because I definitely enjoyed it at points, but... Yeah. Sometimes it sucked.
The bits that didn't suck? Those made it worth it. There are two significant sections which are completely new to Vol I from the original story, and those were alternately the most difficult and the most exciting. One was the resolution to a plot arc that had been too rushed and crammed between others in the original draft to get the space it deserved; the other was a large section building on a plot which largely belonged in Vol II, but in being set up this way in Vol I, allows that anticipation to grow from the first book. Does that make sense?

Entering spoiler territory for Sylvestus Vol I: The Fall.

So much of the original draft happened in the second half. Yet so much of the "boring set-up of plots and introduction of characters" in the first half still had to happen.
Chapter one: Sylv steps off the boat. In the original draft, he spends ten chapters just walking around town introducing himself to the powers that will become huge players throughout the book. It was fifteen chapters before Lavi was introduced. Thirty before Nahvo'que is mentioned. I look at that stuff and I'm like, What's even happening in that!? But what's happening there was important enough to 2016 me to spend 100,000 words on it, so I spend days combing through the mush, trying to find the important plot nuggets, digging out shinies that had become buried and forgotten in the trash. Sylv is clever. More clever than me and more clever than the reader. Characters that are mentioned off-handedly in chapter three become the hinge point of chapter sixty. His plans are abstract and should never be clearly defined: there must always be the sense that he's thinking three steps ahead of both the person he's talking to and the reader. The sensible thing would have been to write all these things and plots and names down in an index I could reference when I needed it... But if I do that, I want to like, rip out my eyeballs and scream for a thousand centuries and throw myself into the ocean. I don't know what the curse is, but I can't write that stuff down in neat columns, it just stops the story working. Trust me, I've tried, and it ruins me. This is especially relevant for Sylv: if I try to nail down every second of every one of his plans, it won't work, because he's cleverer than I am. You just have to throw it to him, hold it in your mind, and let it fall into place. So, while I'm studying for a Zoology degree, taking a leading role in a society, rehearsing for shows, volunteering, forging a mess of a social life, drinking too much, and managing severe mental illness, I'm also combing through all this trash I wrote finding the important nuggets and storing them exclusively in my brain and trying to force them into a coherent story.
All of the important stuff in that 100,000 words has to happen, but I have to figure out what that important stuff is, and the trick is, it doesn't have to happen sequentially.
Chapter one: Sylv steps off the boat. In three chapters, he's not only introduced himself to the powers, he's already cracking deals with all of them, setting up the inevitable triple-betrayal he will play, and he's also meeting characters he didn't previously meet until forty chapters in. Lavi swings into chapter six, Nahvo'que is there one chapter later, but surprise! He's actually been there since chapter four, if you were paying attention. There can be no fluff and filler; every moment spent on characterisation must also be building plot, every seeming pause to take in the scenery contains details that will be important later, and right from the start, the tension is building. Chapter one: Sylvestus Atrox Nigrum would die on this island. Nothing Sylv hadn't done before.
That's it. That's the key to the story. There's the hook for the reader. Keep that tension. Don't let it drop. A huge cast of characters, keep them coming, keep the tension high, introduce more plates, keep them all spinning.
It's clever. It's working. It's not perfect, it'll still take months (and it turned out actually to be years) of editing, but the story is forming.

Y'ALL. It was fucking difficult.

But it worked. Eventually. Sylvestus Vol I: The Fall is done, and it's not just the first half of a chopped-up big story, it's not just a prologue, it stands on its own while maintaining arcs which have yet to be resolved, links to the second story in the saga.

Crack your knuckles. Work on Scavengers for a bit. Do some shitty promo videos for facebook.
Start Vol II.

And actually? Surprisingly fucking easy in comparison.
Not easy, because it's writing a novel, and not just any novel, but a good one, and some would argue even more daunting, because it has to resolve everything, it can't skate by on leaving some strings untied, it has to finish the story perfectly, and this time it has expectations, people waiting for it...
But for me, really?
Easier than Vol I. The simplest reason, I think, is that all the good stuff of the original draft was in the second half. And while large sections of story were brought forward chronologically, those tended to be the ones which had been badly dealt with in the first place and needed the revamp. For instance, the betrayal and fall of Aemilius Germanus, the lecherous brothel-owner and rival to inn-owner and smuggler, Modius Capito. First draft, their feud lasts the entire story, but... Well... Not much really happened, until the end, when Sylv did his thing, no Vol II spoilers, and then it was all resolved but actually not really, it was kinda shoved between two bigger resolutions from other plots, which is weird because Aemilius had been a huge player through the story so far but then he just kinda... Vanished. A quick "also Aemilius was swindled out of his money and died penniless idk" footnote with a note to myself to flesh it out later.
If you've read Vol I (and i fuckin hope u have bc otherwise what are u doing here, smh, this was marked as spoilers! buy the book and come back when u've read it), you're probably like, whuuuut, 'cos the betrayal and fall of Aemilius is the entire. Main. Conflict. Of the second half of Vol I.
Yeah. Exactly. All of that feud had to be condensed into Vol I, and the tension had to be built properly, which meant a bunch of other little climaxes, and that involved tying other things together, bringing in new characters or fleshing out old ones, and the tension builds in the bathhouse scene and you don't know which one is going to be betrayed, you hope it's Aemilius but shit it might be Capito, how can you trust Sylv really, he's been driving Capito into the ground bullying Pulex, oh wait is THAT why that was mentioned two chapters ago, and there's the symbolism of the bathhouse when you think about Sylv's conversation with Velleius in chapter sixteen, and then even when it does reach its climax, betrayal and double-betrayal and poison and honey-cakes, hey fuckos, remember, this story isn't about Aemilius, because it's not over yet: it's Nahvo'que time.

... Where was I?

Yeah, so like. All that stuff was new. And fun, but difficult, because it had to work and I was writing from scratch but also rewriting bad stuff, and making a full story with its own resolutions out of... You get the idea.
Then there's Vol II. Starting it was difficult, because effectively I'm doing the opposite of Vol I: then, I had to make 100,000 words of beginnings into a cohesive, quality story; now, I'm turning 70,000 words of endings into a cohesive, quality story. And wait a second, that's only 170,000 words, what about the other 80,000!?
I don't know. I don't know what happened to them. They're in there somewhere. There's so much.
There's stuff in Vol I - plot resolutions - that didn't happen until the end of the original draft. In novel-time, we're talking that if it starts at the beginning of October, this stuff wasn't happening until the next August: when Vol I is published, that stuff - for example, the betrayal of Aemilius - is happening in February. I can't just look at the original draft and pick up where I left off when I finished that story, because although the "main plot" midpoint and ending of Vol I (tiger possession ajayi sacrifice partially freed nahvo'que) happens at the beginning of March, the next chapter in that draft is something that can't happen in March because it comes after something that in my new story-beat plan isn't going to happen until like May...
Oh, yeah, and the Romans only had nine 28-day months in their calendar, and we literally don't know what they did with the remaining hundred-or-so days. Some historians claim they did have three more months we just lost them. Some think they just kind of universally went into a seasonal depression through winter and stopped having months then picked them up again in March. Some claim this caused the invention of leap years. Some claim Julius Caesar fixed it by introducing three more months. Or made it worse! Apparently, even after he fixed the calendar, the calendar-keepers just fucked up for like fifty years before they noticed and fixed it again! If I stick with the canon of Vol I by keeping Sylv set in 43 AD, then some historians claim February doesn't exist yet, but I already mentioned it and the book is published now and oh fuck oh shit what am i doing oh no i can't do this what am i doing why am i what's happening fuck-

... Soooooooooooo, the draft of the first few chapters of Vol II is kind of weak at the moment, because it is just kind of "fuck me i don't know just start writing and the plot will happen". Which, to be entirely fair, did work. We start by picking up one of the plot threads that got left hanging at the end of Vol I, then quickly introduce an entirely new one (actually, the new one gets introduced in that first chapter, but it's one of those subtle clever ones ssshhhh), aaand we're moving.
It moves fast. And it still sucks sometimes and drags and some bits are rubbish and I'm just slogging through trying to get something on paper I can edit and make good later - but compared to Vol I, it's literally a dream. Why? Because I'm almost exclusively going over old territory, and that old territory is good. Unlike with Vol I, I no longer have the desire to copy-paste old bits, even the bits I thought were good at the time; too much has changed, there's too many small details that can be lost and my writing has evolved too much. But I have the beats clearly planned out, and it gives me something to hold onto. It's the closest I've come to having a written-out plan of the story structure - except that sitting down in advance and writing down every single thing that's going to happen doesn't work for me, and the written-out story structure is actually a 250,000 word first draft, y'know.
I've gotten into a pattern writing Vol II: I write ~7500 words in the space of three days as I hit a story beat, a plot climax or resolution, an event from the original draft I liked and have been looking forward to revisiting; and then I write ~2000 words in the space of three weeks as I slog through the connective tissue. The bulk of editing is going to be making sure that it doesn't feel like that for the reader, that the down-time is as enjoyable as the thrilling climaxes, and in making sure that the whole of Vol II doesn't feel like leaping from peak to peak, but at least I'm moving through that first (or, I guess second) draft at a fair pace.
Some things are still taking me by surprise, in a good way; I tweaked one small thing, which is actually one huge thing, just yesterday re-writing an important scene. I did this because the story I am writing now is not the same story, for several reasons, that I wrote several years ago. Sylv is not the same person he was in that draft. I am not the same person writing him. It was a few lines, the fate of one character who has no bearing whatsoever on the story after the climax of their arc. And that difference was everything. That difference is why I love the story I am writing.

I always reach this point, really, toward the end of a story. I rarely start out with the end planned (that just don't make a good story), but by about a third of the way through, I'll have the idea, and by two-thirds I'll have all the major beats between here and there planned out - in my head, if never on paper. I can skip through them, still hitting those hard-slog weeks, but otherwise leaping toward that conclusion, never letting it feel rushed, being respectful of the space it needs to grow, but nonetheless with my eyes set on the goal.
I've got that feeling now, which I guess just feels weird because I'm, in terms of expected word-count, about halfway through. And it won't be completely clear from here - I have no delusions about that. And when this draft is done, there's still hundreds of hours of editing to go, never mind formatting and publishing and promoting... Ugh.
But from my eight years of novel-writing, I am trying to learn to celebrate those victories for what they are: ding dang impressive victories, not just lame stepping stones toward the real (unachievable) goal.
It's scary and it's introspective, especially in this ~globally uncertain time~. Sylv has been a huge part of me for so long, always will be, and I get a little clench of fear at the thought of... Letting him go. So in a sense, it's comforting to know how far I have to go yet.
But every chapter I write, I feel like I'm not only making progress, I'm leaping forward. It's like, if I do another 2000 words today, then tomorrow I'll be closer toward that next big plot point, and that's, what, 15,000 words of content, and then a little filler to tie up those smaller points and introduce this nugget for the very last section, then we're onto that plot point oh that one's my FAVOURITE, we're so close to that, that'll be a lot to write but I'll blast through it, and then it's... Well, then it's really the home stretch, because then it's just that then that then...
Then the end. Sylv's end. The first chapter is the epilogue, after all. Sylvestus Atrox Nigrum would die on this island.

Nothing we haven't done before.