Madison Rye Progress

This is the coolest thing that has happened to me in ages.

THIS PLACE HAS SWINGS AND THE VULP WHO WAS GIVING THE CONCERT GAVE ME A PUSH

Look at how cute my winter coat is!

That was by far my favorite shift ever. I kept 'forgetting' to eat (I would get a meal and feed it to an animal or the dragon or someone else) so that I kept getting slower and slower over time time like I was getting worn out. It ended with another person with vaguely kid vibes and I making a 'slide' by spilling space lube in a line and running at it really fast to slip really far, before True Name (@hamratza) had to literally drag me off the playground to the evac shuttle to make it home.

That was just so fulfilling.

A Finger Pointing made her lunch (grill chee, tomato soup, a rainbow snowcone, and a plushie) and also Mirischaev, the one who gave the concert yesterday, finished the snowman!

@hamratza has been such an unrelentingly positive force in my life, from giving me this lovely roleplay venue to encouraging me in my skunkery to just plain making me feel good. Hff.

Motes got too stressed because of $PLOT and started pulling out her fur, so the story is someone prescribed her a benzo to chill her out, which manifested in-game as having narcolepsy, which I played by waiting until others woke her rather than waking her myself. I could emote things, but not speak, so I kept emoting her curling around a plushie or hugging her own tail or whatever.

I did so in the bar by Silas, who has a habit of being a bit of a clown, and he just latched onto it as the cutest thing, replacing the steel flooring beneath Motes with carpet, and then slowly building an altar of plushies (and, for some reason, Black Russians) around her, putting out calls on the radio for everyone to hunt down or buy plushies to pile on top of her, trying to convince logistics to buy crates of plushes, even putting a blanket cape on her. Soon, there was a whole, like...Motes Donation Center complete with Silas and Mirischaev standing guard to keep anyone from waking her for nearly two hours. Since she wound up starving and dehydrated, she moved at quarter speed, so they even carried her to the escape shuttle.

Funnest shift in a while, and I spent 90% of it asleep. Things have been really bad the last few days, but this was a bit of brightness.

Today's shenanigans (and a bit of yesterday's):

• Motes, still dealing with narcolepsy, picks up a janitor shift anyway, asks the crew to wake her if they find her passed out. The paramedic, an android, asks what level of force is authorized, and Motes, joking, said 'Violence!' and the end results from the paramedic were:
  • being injected with a bit of epinephrine
  • being laid down in the puddle she was supposed to be mopping
  • being dragged off to the morgue and stuffed tht freezer. When Motes woke up, the paramedic said, "There are some who say that psychological torture is more effective than physical torture. Good day," and showed her out of the med bay
  • being dragged to a little altar of dead bodies the paramedic had built in corpse disposal
• Motes renaming the annoying side quest bot with tags like ENEMY and KILL ON SIGHT and WILL PERISH SAD AND ALONE, UNLOVED, UNWANTED
• Motes, despite being a narcoleptic pacifist, taking on a security cadet job, but when the captain refused refugees, she went Big Motes and quit very dramatically in front of him and went to go work in medical where they actually care
• mime Motes having an execution performed in front of her then getting drugged by the CMO
• Motes and True Name dying together hand on hand because the shuttle was spaced by a bomb (not canon, since that was kind of rule-breaking, and also that would be permadeath). There is a video (3:20 for the meat of it, sorry for discord link).
• May being a therapist and working in the med bay, and at one point calling all the station to the central plaza to award the clown and two doctors certificates of merit for "ABSOLUTELY rescuing the person who was VERY DEFINITELY VERY DEAD and not just pretending to die most dramatically."
• May helping out someone who was cloned into a different species and was overwhelmed with frantic dysphoria leading to them trying to steal her old body back.

to be good at writing fiction you must first stop looking at it as an escape from reality but a mechanism through which to process it

Thank you, tumblr user catmask, for summarizing why a huge chunk of popular speculative fiction published in the last few years fell incredibly flat for me

• Squid Maids helped me put into words why the desire to be something is confirmation enough to seek it out
  • and helped me realize I was neurodivergent, whoops haha
• Cat Wishes started me down the long road of accepting that it's okay to be selfish when it comes to your own needs
• the beginning of Substitute Familiar was about my fears of complications from upcoming major surgery and learning how to trust the people who take me in their care (another really long road)
  • ...and if/when things go wrong, if you have support, you can still make it work
• and conversely, Feline Therapy was about how sometimes you're right and they're wrong and people trying to help you don't, in fact, always know what's best for you, even if their intentions are in the right place
  • ...but that doesn't mean you can't find a way to make up and work things out afterwards; we are all shades of greys
• the longest short story in Substitute Familiar Stories was born from my fervent, desperate desire for class solidarity and punishments other than exile within already fragile communities
• Plant Lamp was a big ball of feelings about (often self-imposed) isolation and what a giant mess I was when I started transitioning
• Cat Wishes Stories was about a lot of things, but primarily about how it's okay to change
• and Her Majesty The Prince is about all of the above and so much more
  • ...but has increasingly been a way for me to discover how freeing it is to write flawed characters, and through that, how I can learn to accept my own flaws and love myself regardless

• Restless Town — written to process life after school. "Disappearance" in particular was written to process the feeling of wanting to get away from traumatic and abusive situations. Spoilers for later in life, I guess.
• A Wildness of the Heart — "Jump" was also written for similar feelings surrounding "Disappearance", and "Limerent Object" came during a strange process of spiritual discernment.
• Post-Self in general has been a way to explore burgeoning feelings of identity, and how the various limitations and freedoms of the world impact those.
  • Qoheleth — All those feelings on mental health and anxiety? All those thoughts on gender and how it works in society? That intense phobia of being trapped? Yeeeah...
  • Toledot — Fears of manipulation and how it appears in myself, how to be earnest, how to engage with others in my life nudging me about on both a grand and also very personal scale. May's fears are mine, as are Yared's.
  • Nevi'im — Helplessness in the face of forces well outside your control, such as those True Name experiences during [SPOILER], and those that Codrin feels early on. Consider also: coming to terms with the necessity of vulnerability.
  • Mitzvot — How to work with fear — true, primal fear — as well as an overriding need to help that is a) good and admirable and a loveliness, and b) has the potential to be unwelcome or intrusive, or even counterproductive. Also hello plurality.
  • Marsh — I lost so many friends in 2020-2022 and wrote so much on processing grief for my MFA, and it was so hard. It was so hard. I needed to externalize that.
  • Idumea — Oh hi graphomania. Hi worries about dreams. Hi worries about suicide. Hi yet another instance of writing my own fucking recurring dreams.
  • April May Yet Come (in progress) — The anxiety of holding onto a less than idea situation because you do not know what the alternative holds for the future.
• Hapax Legomenon (in progress) — Big feelings on subtle influencing, but a different sort from that in Toledot.

I want to get things out of what I write, and I want readers to as well. It is through these works that I have grown, and have grown closer to the types of people I cherish in my life.

And despite it all, they were loved. Not for a world of colors and patterns and sounds and lights, but for the simple canvas beneath it all- black and white.

“I’m badass! I’m a monster! I’m a beast!” I yell a bit too loud and a bit too emphatically to sound legitimate, scales and claws and fangs sloughing off of what looks more and more like what is ultimately just a cinnamon bun of a skunk with a paintbrush

“Push me away! Neeneen!” I squeak, trying to hide my big, fluffy tail behind me, “Can’t you see I’m unworthy of love??”

But it’s too late. The love is there, and no amount of illusion will hide it any longer.

Standard skunk mood~

(💞)