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]

Life After Sylv

Well folks... I only went 'n did it. Finished Sylv Vol II. Nbd 🤷

I actually finished it three days ago, about an hour and a half after telling everyone I was gonna take the rest of the day off and finish it tomorrow, and I didn't then tell anyone I'd finished it. It's... Every time you finish the first draft of a novel, it's... Sure something. I remember feeling underwhelmed the first time, especially because I'd been writing it in secret for years, and I distinctly recall that I finished it on Christmas Eve at my dad's house sat on the sofa opposite my aunt, who asked what I was doing and tried to start a conversation, only for me to quietly rebuff her because I was extremely keen to finish this f*cking novel. I feel quite bad about that in retrospect, and I no longer write novels in the corner of family gatherings while ignoring everyone, although I think sometimes my family wishes I would. I don't remember finishing the next few, except for maybe the first draft of Sylvestus Atrox Nigrum, which was upstairs at the house of a friend's family I think, who were hosting me while I visited other friends where I used to live. Generally... Yeah, there's never been much fanfare to finishing novels.

My anxiety is really bad at the moment, which isn't helping. I've been trying to be more positive with, y'know, everything, but especially celebrating my achievements and creations, but it's... Hard to write this post in a celebratory tone while my gut has been clenched so tight I can't take a deep breath for five days and counting. It's why I haven't really told anyone. I occasionally get a burst of excitement, the realisation that I did an amazing thing and I can be so proud and happy, but it's like my brain automatically shies away from it before it can properly fill me up with happy chemicals because any strong emotion is dangerous when you're in survival mode.

Plus, finishing and letting go of Sylv is... Well, it's a fairly big thing. The Red Prince and Seeking were both hugely personal; in comparison, Each Separate Dying Ember... It's still a very good story, and I love the characters and world, but it was a step back from personal writing if that makes sense. It was about bird people and death-VR and social justice, an exploration of a cool world idea with some moral preaching. It wasn't... For me.

Sylv is different. It feels cheap to say that it's the ~novel I've put most of my soul into~ because I feel like I'll say that again every time I write something bigger, but... Like, it is. It started out like Dying Ember, just a big story me and a friend had come up with that I wanted to write because I was lonely and bored and had nothing else to write, but it became so much more. I've never been as supported by friends writing something, never had so many people I'm excited to share it with, never known that there was an audience waiting who love this character and this world. I was going to say that Sylv means a lot to me despite having only been with me for x years...

But I wrote the first chapter of the first draft of Sylv in November 2014.

Nearly six years.

And I made him and wrote for him on the original website that was Anteria before that, I don't know exactly how long but most likely 6-12 months.

So, six years.

I guess I need to take a step back and re-orient my position. Until I checked just now, I genuinely thought I'd had Sylv for 3-4 years. Not six. I started writing him at the end of high school, and wrote him consistently through sixth form, three long complicated years of uni, and my first year of post-education adulthood. Sure, Rheimer has existed for eight years, but I write a few thousand words of Red every two years; I've been actually actively thinking about and writing Sylv through all of that. First kiss, first love, first heartbreak, sexual assault, suicide attempts, getting into uni, graduating uni, drunk blackouts, hangovers, moving time and time again, new jobs, volunteering, travelling... And he's always actively been there. And so much of that has bled into him and how he's written, his story. I want to talk in detail about the ending of Sylv, and especially the changes made from original story to first draft to final product, but I'll hold off on that until after publication at least - but...

Damn.

Okay, yeah, I'll say it sincerely this time: Sylv is the most important and personal character I have ever written. A 40 y/o ancient Roman man who has been with me, influenced me and vice versa, through the most formative and tumultuous six years of my life.

And now he's dead. No, that's not spoilers, it happens in the first chapter of Vol I. In fact, that first chapter - re-written more than anything else - is the first thing I had. Everything about it has changed, except for the simple certain fact: Sylv dies at the end.

I don't know what the future holds for him. I feel like I had Tas, North, Kiah, Dany, etc. all with me low-level while I wrote, while they were on my mind, but after I'd finished their stories, they faded away, locked between the pages. Rheimer, in comparison, has been growing and changing, with me but always in the background. I don't know what's going to happen to Sylv now. I don't know. He's been at the forefront - the first thing I think about when my mind drifts, the first comfort I turn to in uncertainty, the first face I try to put to every cool new song I hear - for a long and impactful time.

There's still a long way to go before Vol II is published. I had anticipated a late 2021 publication date, now we're looking at early 2021 because being on furlough and having all day to write has coincided with desire and inspiration to write, so I've blasted through the latter half of the novel three times as fast as I expected to. There's still a lot to do - countless re-reads and edits, the entire cover design and formatting and proof copy ordeal, publication, marketing, pre-orders... But before any of that, it needs room to breathe. The first step after finishing a novel is to put it away for a few weeks, work on something else, then come back with a fresh mind and pretend you're starting from scratch to take it apart critically. That's like, a genuine writing tip I stand by. And that's where I am at the moment, in those few weeks, waiting for it to sink in that...

I did it. Sylvestus Vol II: The Rise is done, and therefore so is Sylvestus as a whole, and therefore so is... The entire chapter of my life where Sylv was with me. Which is a bigger chapter than I realised.

In one of my first counselling sessions in high school, I mentioned how anticlimactic finishing The Red Prince was. As I have mentioned many times before, it was a problematic badly-written garbage fire, and none of the friends I asked to read it could get into it, and I felt like a failure and was getting more and more frustrated and upset - the counsellor compared it to another of her students who was upset her One Direction fanfic wasn't popular, which I tried not to take offense at (or rather, I took offense at the time, but now I'm like, that's fair), but then did make a very good point. I had been using The Red Prince to channel my insecurity, anger, anxiety, trauma, and creativity for eighteen months. Practically, this had involved hours of writing every day where I now just went home and sat on my beanbag staring at the wall lost for what to do, which worsened my dissociation and depression, but emotionally it had also provided a huge important service where I didn't have other outlets. I would learn to channels these in other ways, but in the meantime, she gave me a single important task:

Write something else.

So, I picked up Seeking (i'd already done like five chapters a few months before, but nothing really substantial). Finished Seeking and went straight to Dying Ember. Finished Dying Ember and had already been a year deep into Sylv. I have two stories that are hanging there, both with ~20,000 words to them waiting to be picked up as the next main project, and I still don't know which I'm running with. Neither of them... Well, neither of them is a Sylvestus. But that's okay, because they can still be an outlet for creativity and emotions. Just... Not yet.

Like y'all, writing Sylv Vol II has been exhausting. Y'know how I said a few posts ago that it's been way easier than Vol I? True. But also bullsh*t. Sylv Vol II has more personal... Experience and care and meaning in it than anything I've written before. It's emotional and heavy. Still funny in parts, and the slog of editing going forward is going to be making sure that there's balance of dark and light, drama and chill. There's a part that I hated writing both times, because from a storytelling perspective it's extremely good, but from an emotional perspective it's harrowing. There's two not insignificant sections that I planned and first clumsily wrote in ~2016 when I had not experienced those circumstances, and have now personally experienced and as such devoted a large amount of emotional energy into writing in the most powerful and sensitive way possible. Sylv Vol II doesn't pull punches, which is A Lot to write.

Frankly, I need a break from Powerful and Heavy and Emotional and Harrowing. And although both of my other possible projects feature adult themes and content, they're much less personal than Sylv. But again... I'm not in a place to get properly into those now. I frequently dip in and out of other stories and projects while writing my main novel at the time - hence why Sylv existed long before Dying Ember was finished, among other examples - but it's different when you start writing something with the knowledge and intention that this will be The Next Thing. It'll be like... Well, it'll be like acknowledging that I'm done with Sylv, that he is dead, and that it's time to move on. Which is scary and I don't love it. I still plan to write and write and write, but I need a hot minute to get my feet under me again, y'know?

So, what am I doing? I'M GLAD YOU DIDN'T ASK. This was what the post was originally going to be about, before I realised how old Sylv is and got all emotional.

• I re-watched Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency s1, and watched s2 for the first time (Netflix). 11/10 recommend. I don't typically watch much, given that both when I was studying and when I'm working in a restaurant most of my time is occupied by those, and the remainder of my time is typically split between gaming, housework, and writing f*cking novels, but oh boyzy there's only so much you can write and clean the bathroom every day
• I'm now watching Avatar: The Last Airbender for the first time, because I never watched it as a kid and everyone touts about how it's amazing and it's been on UK Netflix for a few months. Everyone's right, it is amazing. I love Zuko too much to be healthy. This is all
• I'm watching Community, because it's easy and doesn't require much attention and is good in the background of doing art and other stuff. I watched sixty episodes in the space of a few days and then decided to take a break lol. It's not groundbreaking hilarious, but it's had a huge meme cultural impact and it's definitely funny. The meta jokes get me in a good place. I'm very worried Jeff x Annie might be endgame couple though, which I don't love, although admittedly it's better than Jeff x Britta. Obviously Troy x Abed is the best couple and OG bromance, no competition
  
• Speaking of "in the background of doing art", I blitzed through Polygon's content on YouTube long before lockdown started because I was off work with a broken foot for a month before that, and Gill & Gilbert, Monster Factory, Unraveled, and the Video Games, Explained series got me through tbh. I've now started Awful Squad because I didn't expect to like it but I wanted familiar Polygon voices and now actually I love it. Hard to focus on for extended periods exclusively, but good as background
• Speaking of "in the background of doing art", lots of art! My fine-point black pens are all nearly run down to nothing, which sucks because I use those constantly, and several of my more-used colour markers are running out, which also sucks because they're very difficult to replace (want to support my art/creating? remember i have a ko-fi!), so I'm focusing on digital art at the moment. Trying to be more positive and constructive rather than constantly tearing myself down for everything not being perfect. I've done some really neat Sylv pieces recently, which can be found exclusively on the Sylvestus Facebook page!
• Podcasts. Podcasts. Obviously podcasts. I live and breathe by podcasts. I have genuinely listened to almost everything ever produced by a McElroy or a Smirl (Sawbones, MBMBaM, TAZ, Shmanners, Wonderful!, Still Buffering, Besties, The Empty Bowl...) but also am currently on My Dad Wrote a Porno and Hello From the Magic Tavern. Taking a break from Critical Role because it turns out I tended to listen to it while doing specifically work-related activities, and... Lockdown. Furlough. Sigh.
• D&D. Love it. Ran a one-shot loosely based on the Dalish origin of Dragon Age Origins, now playing in a game every week which I haven't done in years, bangin'
• Not really been reading tbh, it was one of those periods where nothing new I read could really hold my attention and I just wasn't enthused about re-reading old stuff - just before lockdown I breezed through both The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man's Fear in just over a week, and then my reader-brain crashed from overuse so I gotta wait until the next big thing restarts it
• Gaming! I re-played Dragon Age Origins, and I've just bought Awakenings so I can do that before I re-play DA2 and Inquisition yet again. I also bought Stardew Valley which I've played to death, and continued Hollow Knight, which I started in January but then kind of lost touch with just through life interfering. I also started Mass Effect 2 the day after I finished Sylv, so that's holding my obsession at the moment. Before that, the best thing I was enjoying was Avatar: The Legend of Aang for PS2, which was far more entertaining than it had any right to be

That's... About it. For the past few months, my life has been writing from when I wake up until about 4pm, then either gaming for a few hours then putting on Community or Awful Squad while I do art until bed, or watching something properly for a few hours then gaming until bed. For the past few days, I've had a non-stop migraine so it's mostly consisted of trying to ignore that as much as possible to play ME2, or trying to nap it away. For the future... Who can say?

Sylvestus is done. I may re-read a thousand times, edit, re-write a few scenes, and continue to think about and do art of him, but his story is done. Concluded. He's dead, Jim. I want to reference the "He's dead, go away, he's dead!" bit of Bob's Burgers but I don't think there's enough of an audience who'll get it.

Sylvestus Atrox Nigrum would die on Anteria. Nothing Sylv hadn't done before.

Nothing I hadn't done before. But forreal this time.

Six dang years of my life, and I finished it on a Monday afternoon, then ate pasta and watched The Last Airbender.

Sure is something.

Removal of my Books from Amazon

Hey y'all, this ain't a fun one, so I'm gonna get straight into it.
After much consideration and debate, I have made the difficult decision to withdraw the sale of physical copies of my books from Amazon. This wasn't an easy choice to make; as I've outlined before, Amazon warehouse is my largest source of sales, though I was never happy about this. Now that I am removing my work from there, I can be more blunt, and say that when copies of my books are bought on Amazon, I get literal pennies per copy, compared to almost the full price of sale when you buy from another retailer. This sucks not just for me, but for you too, because it drove up the price of my books! If I was selling exclusively from Lulu.com, Sylvestus Vol I: The Fall and Each Separate Dying Ember would have been up to £2 cheaper for you, which I know can make a huge difference in a tight spot. I intend to drop all copies from now on to that price as soon as possible, though it will take some time as I do not have 100% control of everything on that end (Lulu is very good and i maintain most control, but as my distributor, they have management on how long it takes prices and distribution to change, nothing sinister). I have always been acutely aware that my books are a little more expensive than most people are comfortable with - if I'm in a book shop, I still make a face if a 400-page paperback is more than £11.99 - and would have had a lower price before now, except that if Sylvestus Vol I: The Fall had been any lower than its current price (£12.49), I would have been making a loss on every copy sold on Amazon. Comparatively, I will still be making a decent profit by dropping the price to £11.99 for copies sold on Lulu.com. Amazon is able to manufacture paperbacks at a lower cost than Lulu due to unsustainable ecological practice and unsafe work conditions, yet insist on taking at least £7 from every sale just in profit. This drives up the prices because they won't allow me to price my books lower on other websites (i would if i could), and allows Amazon to encourage people to buy from them rather than independent retailers because it's a "trusted household brand" and because they can offer free shipping and faster printing/delivery.

So, that's a positive of this change, and positives are good to focus on! By going completely independent, I am able to reduce the cost of all my books, past and future. I'll be blunt, I am emotionally exhausted right now from having this debate; I recently made a post on my personal Facebook page about it and I don't really want the same soapbox negativity on my writing blog, so I won't be going into much detail.
Amazon keeps unsafe work practices, drives out independent retailers to crash the economy, and its CEO is soon to become a trillionaire, paying no taxes on that whatsoever, while millions of people around the world are starving on the streets and dying in hospitals due to artificial scarcity created by the rich. Etc. etc. Shitty and negative.
If you're feeling shocked and confused right now or think I'm exaggerating, I encourage you to take a quick search online for Amazon human rights violations, unsafe work practices, warehouse deaths, etc. And I don't mean "well this article that Amazon pays for says that's not true", I mean actually look for a few different sides of the story. And if you can't be bothered, then just take my (and millions of other people's) word for it, and shop elsewhere. It takes little to no effort on your part and has a huge positive impact on other people's lives. Buying my books direct from myself or Lulu, for instance, gives me a huge step up and the chance to actually use my writing to supplement my income and be a happy person who doesn't slave away under capitalism because the only jobs available for a disabled working-class Zoology graduate are minimum-wage... Well, you know. I haven't used Amazon in almost a year, and it has had no negative impact on my life since to take that extra twenty seconds to find the same video game in CEX, household appliance in the local small-business market, and book from a more ethical retailer. However, I know that with every purchase, I am supporting the second-hand technology industry, putting food on a local person's table, or promoting sustainable book manufacture.

You might be questioning why, up on my grand soapbox, I have not made this change sooner. It's something I've grappled with myself. Part of it is moral, part of it is practical; although I make more money selling one book on Lulu than I do five on Amazon, I generally still sell more on Amazon due to its wider reach. While my books are available on such a large retailer, it can be reviewed and found randomly, whereas people never just "stumble across" Sylvestus while browsing Lulu. Every potential sale is a chance to break big, as it were, so maybe it's better to lose some money in the hopes of maybe one day a film executive coming across it in the Amazon "you might also like..." section, right?
Further, Amazon's stranglehold on book distribution described above means that I cannot remove my books from Amazon without also removing them from Barnes & Noble and Goodreads, among others. This is bad. This is bad and not fun or good. I am fine with my books being on there, and I wish they could stay there, and for a while I reasoned that it wasn't like Jeffrey Bee's-arse is actually profiting from my books so much as I am losing money...
Except that, like, he is. While my books are available on Amazon, and I promote that, Amazon is getting £7 straight to untaxed offshore accounts for every copy sold of my work. Hence, as memes go around on Facebook and Instagram about how he's making a trillion dollars while people literally die in his warehouses trying to get people's make-up and fairy lights sent to them on one-day delivery, I have made this decision.

There is a small compromise to balance the two sides I've presented, which I'll again be blunt about. Amazon Kindle currently has a stranglehold on ebooks, and like with the physical copies, I cannot make my books available to its competitors - Kobo, iBooks, and a few others - without also making it available to Kindle. Using my Kindle and buying books on it is something I am still guilty of, for cost and efficiency and to reduce carbon emissions by book manufacture etc., although I am trying to reduce that and buy second-hand physical copies or borrow from libraries where I can, or find other ways to support authors.
So, while I am removing all of my books' physical copies from Amazon (and, by unfortunate extension, other retailers except Lulu.com), all of them will still be available in ebook format for Kindle as well as iBooks and Kobo. What's my moral stand on that? Well, I look at it this way. While the issues of unsafe warehouses and human rights violations is no longer valid when it comes to digital copies of books, some money still will be going straight to the CEO's profit. But it's significantly less money than from the physical copies. Amazon still takes its significant cut, and my ebooks would be slightly cheaper if they could be sold only on Lulu, but it's way less of an issue than for the paperbacks (like £1 difference per copy sold, rather than £6). And... I get it, y'know? While it has been far easier than you'd expect to cut Amazon out of my life in most ways just by altering my shopping habits (if i can't buy in person in the ways listed above, i just go to ebay or straight to the retailers' websites and can always find the same items at the same price, knowing that the profits go straight to the business now), I just can't afford to buy a Kobo Reader right now and start using that instead. So, honestly... I haven't been comfortable with people buying physical editions of my books on Amazon for a long time, but I'm okay with people going there for ebooks. And it allows my work and name to still be available for that fantasy film exec one day to stumble across.
A jackdaw can dream, eh?

Tl;dr - due to Amazon's Just Entire Thing Right Now, I am removing the paperback editions of Each Separate Dying Ember and Sylvestus Vol I: The Fall from Amazon, and the paperback of Vol II: The Rise, anticipated to come out early 2021, will never be made available on there. As an unfortunate side effect, this means they will also be removed from other distributors. Paperback editions will now only be available direct from Lulu.com, or by emailing myself at emberfell@outlook.com. However, the ebooks of all my books will still be available on Amazon Kindle, as well as other distributors (and Lulu.com). This is a good thing for everyone, as it means that you will have to go to a different website for your paperbacks, but you will pay less money and I will get more money and the economy will be happy and we will get into The Good Place.

The only other note I have is that removal of distribution from Amazon will take 6-8 weeks from time of writing, and the price changes for my books a little longer as a consequence.

So, it's a happy thing overall! We just had to skate through some negativity to get there. Stay safe, enjoy your sustainable shopping ✌️