Madison Rye Progress

Thank you so much! That is so heartening to hear, and I am glad that they have found a good home. The skunks really are sort of the main characters, with the Bălans being mainly embroiled by accident.

I picked up a brief fascination with the Romanian language shortly after highschool, how it has a very Romantic and Baltic feel to it. It lasted only a few weeks, I am sorry to say, before the fixation drifted, and I have since found it difficult to get back into; my attempts at learning have been largely unsuccessful. However, when I started writing Qoheleth, it popped back into my head as a choice. This was solidified in Toledot when some of the stories about how phys-side changed over time were explored. As the Western Fed and Sino-Russian Bloc were formed, it made since that central and Eastern Europe would find themselves stuck in the middle and thus rather torn, so Ioan's backstory was thus filled out further, and by the end of Selected Letters, you get a sense of what life was like, how ey related to the loss of eir parents, eir early life in Cristești, and just how close ey was to Rareș.

Tangentially, this is the reason for Yared (Ethiopia), Ezekiel (post-split Israel), user11824 (maori New Zealand), and so on: countries and cultures and languages I am fascinated with and wanted an excuse to research.

Sasha and AwDae are just from Boulder, Colorado, though, since I am intimately familiar with it, having grown up there :P

Thank you again! Means a lot to hear from folks~

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.

@hamratza and I read the first part of our book, Motes Played, at a party tonight. I did not get a super good feel for the reaction, but it at least seemed to go over well. I will admit to being kind of worried about the book, but oh well, all I can do is hope it will be fine.