Madison Rye Progress

She played in color. She played in paint. She painted the backdrops for the productions. She painted the props that sat on the stage or rested in the actors' hands. She painted the stage itself, the matte black of so many past productions long abandoned. She painted her nails, her claws, herself. She got it on her fur. She got it on her clothes. She got stripes over her ears and polka-dots on her nose. She painted her dreams, those serene and idyllic landscapes interrupted by hyperblack squares, unexpected and unexplained holes in the world that depicted a nothing-ness, a missing-ness, a not-there-ness that slid easily between the border of absurd and unnerving. She painted the holes in the world that she dreamed about but was afraid to touch and yet which would not stop touching her mind in turn...

Motes Played will be out August 1! It is available for pre-order, and the ebook is currently 20% off for Pride, along with all my other ebooks~

Lovely cover by Astolpho!

Man, Astolpho knocked this out of the park. There are a few refinements to be made (this is just draft text), but I wanted to at least pull this together to get ready for the book!

Motes Played will be out August 1 and is available for pre-order as paperback and ebook now~

Edited to actually include the URL because what the heck!!

I have a lot of books for you, all 20% off. I got:

• memoirs written as a conversation between two parts of me but I promise it is not plural!!! (It was totally plural)
• A making-of zine for the totally-not-plural memoir
• Sad, queer animals in a flyover state
• Sad, queer animals in a flyover state 2 — the return of sad, queer animals in a flyover state
• I wrote enough poetry in five years to put in a slim volume
• Skunks
• Skunks 2
• Skunks 3
• Skunks 4
• Instead of skunks there is genocide
• This skunk is very small
• An anthology in which some of the stories feature skunks but I promise not the one I wrote
• A bunch of Q&As from skunks
• Three collaborative historical fiction anthologies that I have helped with

Help a trans girl out on pride month!

Tell me your lore. Make it up if you would like!

I wanted to see what you all posted before I started talking about mine, and it turns out that you are all super cool and now I feel a little silly! Part of the reason for this is the order in which things happened. I wrote all of the Post-Self Cycle before it became quite so entwined with my identity. Like, I adopted Slow Hours as an OC partway through writing Toledot, but I chose her specifically because I had no plans to include her in any of the books (yes, she makes an appearance in Mitzvot, but as a human, and only as a cameo where she is stated as 'having the outline of the world', because, as the author, I literally had the outline of the world).

I have spoken before about how I kept writing stuff that touched on a lot of plural adjacent themes, yet kept viewing plurality as something I did not have...permission for? That I did not feel like I was allowed to lean into? That I was somehow appropriating? I do not know. I considered myself an ally, perhaps, but felt some combination of invalid and shut out from plurality.

Anyway, Mitzvot came out in January '23, and then later that year, thanks to my partner, I capitulated and acknowledged that I just kind of am¹ plural and had been for ages :P

When writing, you will often hear that authors will put a lot of themselves into their characters, and I am certainly no exception. The flip side to that is that, as I started to lean into this identity,² I had a ready source of names and more expansive personalities to take onto myself. I suppose that makes them all fictives, but since I wrote them all, I am not quite sure how the directionality works, there :D

Anyway, I suppose some brief lore synopses below the cut, which have some mild spoilers for some of the stories.

1. The copula fits weirdly here. On further thought, I think I might say something like "I am partaking in plurality" or "I am expressing plurality" or even "I am acting in a plural way".

2. Or identity play, perhaps, as it does feel like a joyous form of splashing around in identity.