Andréa, Canis Lanonbinary

As of this writing, Darks souls text: fish unsmelled, so we're good there. Obviously this post took me a while to finish, lol

The short answer goes like this. The first story I remember writing is a stort about a girl getting lost in the woods while hiking, then meeting a wolf who guides her out and becomes her pet. It's a fun little story, but there's not much there worth revisiting, and I'm satisfied to let it lie.

But here's the thing.

I assumed that story was lost. I wrote it for a grade school assignment 18 years ago, and that no copy of it anywhere remained.

I was so very wrong.

This ask took me for a fucking ride. Strap in, gang.

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As a woman (and headmates) who is several years past her third decade, I'm getting to the point where earlier memories are fading heavily. Having an upbringing where I was abused means that anything before about 13 years old is all but gone now, and I tend not to linger on my childhood when I can avoid it. I am happy as an adult. I do not want to go back to the powerlessness of before I turned 18. I tend to think of myself as someone who has defined herself in adulthood, that who I am now is defined by how much my self-image and gender has changed in the past 7 years. I figured out my gender, my sexuality, my plurality and therian feels. this is the point where I congealed.

It's also the point where my fiction writing has gone from "okay" to "thing I am most known for and considered pretty damn good at." After years of practice and decades of reading, certain things began to click for me, and suddenly I felt much more confident in what I do.

When I got this question, I decided to make an important distinction. I specifcally set 2 boundaries: it had to be a finished story, and it wasn't allowed to be fanfiction. What was the first thing I finished that was inherently mine, not derived from an existing work?

It's probably already clear, but I had an answer in my head almost immediately. On the edge of my memory, I recalled an english assignment from somewhere around 9th grade, where we were supposed to write an original story, and I went a little over the word count but I finished it. I don't even remember the grade I got on it, beyond it being at least an acceptable one.

I don't live in the same city I grew up in. I live probably 400 miles awayish, in central Ohio. I don't have access to my mom's house, where if the original computer file even still exists, it's buried on an old hard drive, and on the off chance I wrote it on paper, the notebook is there as well. It is also possible that the hard drive backups of old family computers are gone, that the notebook was lost or destroyed in the minor basement flood or thrown out by me personally in housecleaning. Last time I went digging for a backup of my student drive from high school, I couldn't find it.

I wanted to share a sample of my writing from back then even if I couldn't find that story, so I went digging in the one place everyone does for their teenage selves immortalized: deviantArt. At first, I was having trouble finding any writing on there at all, just a bunch of shitty ms paint drawings and photos, but after drudging through overwraught poetry for 20 minutes,

I found the story! fair warning, though, I have not had access to this account in years, and while this and the other story I mention there don't have anything particularly objectionable in them, I was an edgy teenage shithead in the late 2000s and there's a bunch of shit in there that I am pissed I cannot delete. I was fond of some words that I know throw hands if I hear, and it's also been a pleasant reminder about how much I've grown as a person(s) in the past decade and a half.

The post is dated to february of 2007, but in the description I noted that it was originally written in october of 2005, confirming that it was as old as I thought. As I said at the start of my post, I think it's a fun little story, but there's not enough meat on its bones for a second helping. Something else caught my eye, but we'll swing back around to that. While searching I also found a different story I had completely forgotten about, dated later but still in the early independent writing era. This one I am very tempted to come back to, and update so it doesn't have song lyrics in the middle of it.

And this where things wander off the path for a little bit. The second story is called No Quarter, dated October of 2006, and is a tale of three adventurers killing an evil wizard and breaking a curse.¹ It's got a lot of fun worldbuilding, some storytelling choices I am genuinely impressed with, and for something written by a 15 year old who clearly just played a bunch of old school NES RPGs I think it's fun. I was surprised that I had forgotten this story, and equally surprised at how much of the worldbuilding I remembered as I was reading it, my memory filling in a great deal of detail that never made it to page.

Why it threw me for a loop was I had forgotten the main character gets genderswapped by the evil wizard maybe 6 paragraphs in.

The main character handles waking up in a bed in an inn as a woman spectacularly well. Sure, she frets about how this will upend her life socially, and struggles with sudden new feelings for one of the other adventurers, but at no point does she seem that upset about it, and when an actual god tells her she cannot change back, she's like "aw shucks oh well, so what do you need me to do next, mister giant bird god?" Red picks up the new gender like it's just another sword, and trudges on to go do the whole heroine thing.

I talked about this in another post, but I wouldn't really get "oh, I want to be a girl" until 2008-9, and then after assuming that was impossible, proceed to avoid dealing with it for nearly a decade. I had very vague recollections of gender confusion in my younger years, but 2016 was where I started thinking about everything seriously, or so I thought. I thought that I rebuilt myself from the ground up, totally anew—

—but the stories gave me an itch that the truth might be deeper, and I started combing across them for little details that might help me figure out where I was back then, consciously or otherwise.

When I reread the description of The Wolf and The Girl, a BUNCH of things jumped out at me.

Obviously saying "In a lot of ways, she came to reflect me" is an obvious giveaway that I wanted to be her, that I was projecting myself onto her as hard as I could. So yeah, clearly gender is a subject and presence here too, but the next lines led down a whole separate path than gender.

she's still up in my head, and one of the characters really pushing to break out and start old projects over again. maybe this is her first push, I can't say.

Hey, did you know our oldest headmate is named Lex? That up until now we thought branched off in 2008-2009? That when she decided to rework her identity 2 years ago she chose the full name Alexandra, because it's what our mother told us she would have named me if I had been born a girl? Hahahaha. Haha. Haaaaaa. Yeah, Lex switched her last name to Stone after we found this again. It's wild.

As we wrapped that up,² I started wondering if any of our other writing haunts were still up and out there on the world wide web. 15-18 years is a looooong time on the internet, and sure enough, one such place, GreatestJournal, succumbed sometime around 2009, and no longer exists.

But what, I thought, about the fanfiction I wrote? Some of that definitely dates into that time range, and I can remember one title strongly enough to google it, because it was so bad no one has done anything like it. And what do you know, it's still there!

It's...not great. Most of this profile is a mess, and the fics on the account aren't great, and the site itself is fucking full to the brim with ads. Do me a favor and don't go digging on this one. It's not worth your time.

But! But but but—there's some wild things here, and top of the list is obviously the name Andrew.

"Hmm," Andréa says out loud to her readers, "I wonder if this name has any important significance to me. I do wonder, hmmmmm."

Listen, Andrew Mason was my pen name for a very long time, to the point where I was considering changing my name to it when I still thought I was cishet. I've told the story of why I go by Andréa Mason now elsewhere so I won't rehash it, but it was wild to be digging through all of this and go "oh, yeah, I have been using this name for almost two decades, huh?"

There's two other names here, both of note. One of them's familiar to us already. I had totally forgotten that I used to go by Red as an alias, and huh wait hold on didn't the character named Red in one of these stories we've talked about get their gender flipped by a god intervening to save her life? Hmmm.
Hmmmmmmmm. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm

You get the point. The gender shit's there.

But that third name and the claim that she wrote MOST of Andrew's stuff is twist #2. Naomi R. (Short for Riverston) is also me.

I had made up a group of five characters and called them AngelGust5, and pretended I was only one of the five characters under the alias of Red. Two of them were irrelevant video game characters, but Naomi and Andrew were also me. Like, they were treated as humans where the two puppets weren't. I cannot remember why I did this? Like now I am 100000% sure it was a plural thing when I did it, but I wouldn't hit plurality as a concept or a vocabulary until 2018. Why did Andrew and Naomi feel so much more real to me? This is the part where I wish I still had the GreatestJournal saved somewhere, I know we did a lot of effectively roleplay with AG5 there, and I'm sure it would be illuminating if I could accesss it.

Naomi never truly manifested into a headmate. A few flashing moments of something else trying to become real hovered around the name, but nothing came of any of those. Part of this in the older sense of it might be just because she is me. Why did I claim that my feminine counterpart wrote all my stories instead of me? Simple, I wanted to be her, I was her, she was me.

So the signs were there for plurality and gender pretty solidy spanning back that far, and I thought that might be the end of it, but I went reading through the stories and stumbled into one last surprise. By this point in my life, I was a furry. I wouldn't have a fursona quite yet, but I was already aware of what furries are. I thought that my current fursona design and species was an invention of 2016 me when I started being openly furry all the time.

In one of the shitty fanfiction stories, a hot anthro Huskey woman shows up, with Hazel eyes (my eye color irl) and an of black overshirt, tee with an amaerican flag on it, and cargo pants, an outfit I wore all the time irl back then.

...the Huskey's name was Annie. I let close friends and lovers call me Annie, and few other people.

Fuck.

Fuck me running.

I really did have a ton of shit figured out about myself, stuff that it took me more than a decade to get back to. A lot of that self-awareness disappeared in college, and I slipped into several types of drug use. when I got out the other side of addiction I had to pick up the scraps and start my life over.

And I did.

I just didn't realize I'd had it all figured out before.

Thank you for this ask! Obviously I'm grateful for the time spent on these diversions as well, and I'm glad I got the opportunity do deep dives like this one.

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1. Fun fact: this wasn't the last time Led Zeppelin's No Quarter inspired me to write a story. This ghost story from a decade later is the only bit of fan fiction I'm bothering to include in this post, if only because unlike any of the other fanfiction I could find it actually does a good job at meshing with the property at hoof, while still managing to be genuinely unsettling. Do me a favor on this one and don't look at the rest of the page. My MLP era was not great.

2. another thing that we realized off of the story description there is that abandoned project I mention in it, HOMETOWN, was an idea for a TV show that I pictured in my head a lot. Ideas from it would get re-used in non-starter projects again and again until they ended up as the original pitch for Lords of Nowhere.