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