Madison Rye Progress

Today’s story is the first of two parts of “Unseeing” by Madison Scott-Clary, whose graphomania occasionally gets the better of her.

Unseeing is one of the stories featured in the prehistoric furry anthology When The World Was Young, available December 1. Excavate more information at fhfs.ink. You can find more of her writing, from short stories and poems to novels and a memoir, over at makyo.ink.

Read by the author herself.

Yay! Check out the first part of my story "Unseeing" over on the Voice of Dog podcast :D Really exciting to see this out in the wild. It's gonna be out in the historical fiction anthology, When the World Was Young, coming December 1~

Qoheleth had two origins, both hailing from 2016, not just one.

The first and larger origin was a random conversation I had with some postfurries ages ago. What if you could just create a copy of yourself who could go to work while the rest of you could be a furry piece of trash online for the day, or perhaps you could have parallel monogamy. I still have those notes, by the way!¹

The other beginning, though, was AwDae’s story, which began as a serialized novella called Getting Lost (and, later, Exocorticies). These were merged when I briefly lost my contracting gig during the beginning of COVID and the project became something else entirely.

However, I still think about the origins of that second story. In a similarly innocent way, I was thinking about how, in flow state, I cease to exist as Madison, and simply become whatever I’m working on. What brings me back to being are the petty discomforts of having a physical existence. My hands hurt, or perhaps I have to use the restroom.

Better, I say, to truly become whatever I’m working on, to have my body disappear and simply become the computer, willing words into being (or, at the time, Python).

Thus AwDae, delving in and becoming the sound system.

It was becoming the room. It was a new sensory experience. No limbs, no torso, no face or eyes or ears. Or maybe all ears: ey became the room, feeling the way sound echoed or didn’t, knowing the limits of the speakers in a deeply physical way. Mics peppering the walls a new sensory input. The wires nerves. The speakers muscles to flex. Instincts, reactions, and actions responding to whole systems of stimuli.

This extends (in several ways!) through the text to living lives as furries online, continually aligning one’s form to one’s self image in ever finer ways.

Well, it turns out that there’s a whole entire term for this: homuncular flexibility — the human ability to expand the sense of the body (the homunculus, the mental map of ourselves that lives in our brain) to shapes other than our own.

This essay seeks to explicate an unorthodox idea that spans psychology, neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, and computer science called homuncular flexibility (HF). HF posits that the homunculus—the part of the cortex that maps movement and sensing of body parts—is capable of adapting to novel bodies, in particular bodies that have extra appendages or appendages capable of atypical movements.

How neat is that?

You can read more here.

1. This originally appeared as part of a newsletter I send out. I'll doubtless be posting everything I write there here, too, but if you're interested, you can read the whole thing with images here.²

2. I hate linking out, but this isn't actually markdown, so ok.

Hello, friends. I've been very overwhelmed of late, and my ability to piece together how to use the Internet going forward is not up and running at full capacity.

That said, I'm happy to be here. I'll be bouncing around between a few platforms, but I want to ensure that I a) don't lose track of the people in my life and b) still find ways to meet new folks, so it just kind of is what it is.

I'm really appreciative of the ability to do all sorts of neat things with posts here, and the fact that the staff is really responsive on both a technical and social level is an added layer of goodness.

I trust you'll understand some shaking-out of social interaction in this process. I'm spread currently between three Mastodon instances, three Twitter accounts, a Tumblr, a Substack, and here, so finding out what works best where is going to be an adventure. I've been putting my writing up on Substack because some of what I've done in the past lends itself to serialization, but do I do the same here? Will there be a community of authors and readers? What does writing look like on a site like this? I don't think any of us will know for a good while yet, but I'll try to stick around to find out!

Until then, I look forward to finding folks here, and will keep up as I'm able.