Ask Ironbeak

Anon, I’m so glad you asked! I was just thinking about Ironbeak this morning (as I often do) and about my plans for the story, and about how I’m not as artistically productive as I hoped I might be at this point in my life. My answer to this comes in two parts, but the short version is: I’m currently on hiatus. Here’s why:

1. I’m overwhelmed. In addition to working full time during a pandemic and having a second job, I volunteer with a handful of community organizations. It wasn’t until I started asking myself “why don’t I have the energy for art these days” that I made a list of my major projects and responsibilities and arranged them above my desk to help me prioritize. This is my list, with jobs in green, community orgs in pink, my Patreon in purple, and all the art projects I’m trying to work on in blue:

This is after I resigned from a board position with another community org and went on hiatus from a third parks job. It doesn’t factor in having five pets and occasionally wanting to spend time with the people I love (I use Habitica to keep track of that). So uh, there’s Ironbeak’s Journal down there on the right:

But, I hear you saying, the last update was over three years ago. Have I really been this busy the whole time? Well, mostly, yeah. There was like a five week span in which I was very unemployed during the pandemic. But MORE IMPORTANTLY, I’ve stepped back from my intended plans for it to revise them:

2. I’m thinking of ways to improve the story. When I started Ironbeak, I did so on a whim as an improvised field guide for Starbound’s procedurally generated critters, but then I Accidentally a plot. So a lot of what I had setup was spontaneous, unplanned, and just based around what I found fun to roleplay on Starbound servers.

As I love writing hapless, even clueless protagonists, and I love the Humans Through Alien Eyes trope, I originally wrote Ironbeak to be extraordinarily ignorant of not just galactic cultures, but also subcultures on his home planet. It was a fun way for me, a queer person, to normalize unexpected things and exoticize mundane things about humans (whether I was writing about that directly by writing about humans, or indirectly by writing about aliens). It gave our protagonist a lot of room to grow. It made him flawed in what I had hoped was a way readers could chuckle at.

Revisiting the story in 2020, though, Ironbeak’s cluelessness while coming from both a marginalized orientation and a marginalized allegorical racial/cultural group ... it hits differently. Some of it rings hollow and some of it is frustrating to read. This isn’t to say I want to rewrite him as a character (far from it), but the backstory I had planned for him had originally been one of self-discovery. I don’t really want readers (many of whom are queer) to have to hold his hand through all that because frankly, I think it’s kind of overdone, and not very exciting to read. And as a queer writer, I don’t find it very exciting to write. So his backstory is going to be a lot less about his inner thoughts and a lot more about the people he used to be close to.

The improvements to his backstory have, through my extreme slowness in hashing them out, also fallen into place more naturally in my head, and I think they lead well into a conclusion for his arc in the story. They also open up arcs for other characters.

“You waiting for someone, hon?”

“What? Oh. Unfortunately: no.”

“You want some more cocoa?”

“Thank you.”

This is like, an incredibly nice thing of you to say considering I just looked up a bunch of guitar tutorials on Youtube, printed out the tabs, and shoved some unwitting friends into my roommate’s bedroom with the lyrics and a portable TASCAM (because it was the only room in the house with enough carpeting and furniture for decent sound quality). It was the heat of summer but for the sake of audio clarity we turned off the fan, closed the windows, and built a pillow fort to block ambient noise (like the parrots that live in my house).

We could only do about three takes before everyone was begging to be freed from Tiny Recording Sauna Hell. I piped in some cricket sounds and campfire noises and dogs barking afterward to make it sound like were outside, but we were literally sitting crammed on the floor of a small room under a blanket with the lights off (because it was that hot). We felt really goofy while making it, especially me, since only half of the people in the room had even heard of Starbound so I had to explain that this was a recording for a gay space alien fanfiction on tumblr. But my friends are apparently game for anything, and when I told them to “ad lib some space marine dialogue” they delivered.

Yeah! I’m great! I’m!!

Keeping busy!!

That is to say, I’m actually a little stressed?

I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that folks still check in with my blogs. To be honest with you, 2017 was a really difficult year for me. My life turned upside down in a lot of ways, and I’m still trying to figure out what to do about it.

I’ve been thinking about this story pretty much every day since I had to set it down, though--and the main reason I haven’t yet picked it back up is that I wanted to seriously evaluate the direction it was going. I had a lot of backstory written, and I want to improve it before I get it illustrated and posted. I still care about these characters a lot.

Meat castles, huh?Yeah, been there, literally, figuratively. Kind of impractical after the first story or so (prone to tilting). Better suited to single-floor endeavors, spread out that surface a-UNLESS...

Hello, friends and enemies! I’ve gotten several asks this month and I just wanted to assure you that I do actually plan to answer them but I am sick in bed right now. Hopefully I will be feeling up to it tomorrow!

Only marginally related, unfortunately, since my knowledge of Nahuatl is seriously limited.

I’m writing a story (which you can read here if you want) based in the universe of Starbound, a video game about space travel, which has some bird people whose dress and culture bear a superficial resemblance to the Aztec Empire. The game itself uses kind of a dog-Latin version of Nahuatl for a lot of its names (at least to my knowledge–I’m not sure how many of the words I see are actually words in Nahuatl, if any).

My recent post was an answer to why the naming conventions in my story are different from those in the game. Basically: I’m not a huge fan of using Nahuatl-ish non-words, but I don’t know enough Nahuatl to insert a lot of it into the story, nor do I think it would be terribly appropriate or necessary to do so when the entire thing is supposedly being translated into English from an alien birdpeople language anyway.

I’m trying to stay reasonably true to the lore of the game without straying into “other cultures but IN SPACE” tropes that often plague science fiction writing. Unfortunately it’s sometimes a difficult balancing act between referencing Mesoamerican culture/history carefully and pushing certain aspects of the story away from the history, because it’s actually about fictional people in space.

I have a bunch of other asks I’d like to answer BUT I have a lot of thoughts about this one, and they go into the lore that I’ve got in my head which these days has very little to do with the actual game lore, so, um buckle up:

I’ve got a good deal of Avos backstory written at the moment, and in it I use Nahuatl sparingly and purposefully. Obviously I’m writing the journal in English, but Ironbeak would “really” be writing it in an Avian language. English is a stand-in for Raptorine, the most commonly spoken language globally and in his region. I use Nahuatl as a stand-in for the Psittacine language, which was commonly spoken by Psittacine, Passerine, and Anatine people in the not-too-distant past.

So why doesn’t Ironbeak speak, write, or have a name in his own language, you ask?

The short answer is “colonialism,” and the slightly longer answer is: after the rise of Kluex, older religious texts that were written in Psittacine were deemed unsuitable for common folk to read (a la the Latin Vulgate bible at certain points in history). Sometime after the fall of Totomitlan, Psittacine became illegal to speak, write, or read in the region. Psittacine texts were mostly destroyed, with the exception of religious texts which were only accessible to Stargazers and some of the Clipped Council. Those that were considered suitable were truncated and translated into Raptorine, the new official language of Feathertop, AKA the city-state formerly known as Totomitlan.

That was long ago enough that the general population of Feathertop and the surrounding polities view Psittacine as a language spoken primarily by Stargazers, a little bit like how Latin is a language spoken primarily by scholars, or how the American government outlawed many Native languages and then a hundred years later decided to capitalize on them for use in cryptography because they had become so ‘obscure.’

In any case, there are still some laws on the books in Feathertop prohibiting Psittacine from being taught in public colleges, but a lot of wealthy Raptorine and Passerine folks are finding that Psittacine baby names are very trendy. Psittacine families, still facing no small amount of discrimination from the groups who expect assimilation from them, tend not to give their children traditional names.

In any case, I’m viewing both English and Nahuatl as translations of Avian languages, which probably sound like bird screeches and aren’t homologous to any human tongues. The game itself uses Nahuatl as a general stand-in for all Avian words, and I’m using it for a select few based on the politics I’ve written into the story.

Hey all!

After an EXTREMELY LONG HIATUS, I am back in the habit of writing an illustrating for Ironbeak’s Journal again. So where are the new entries? Well, this week, they are actually ... the old entries. I’ve been doing some editing of art and writing on the first 30 or so entries to bring them in line with the style of the more recent ones (the ones where I’ve actually planned out what I’m doing in advance and have a better handle on what Ironbeak looks and sounds like).

And I’ll be continuing to edit art and text through tomorrow.

Most of the text edits are minor, but I wanted to assure anyone who’s rereading and has a really good memory that they aren’t going crazy. The only major overhaul of an entry occurred with Log 20: The Reading Room, which is now quite a bit different to bring it in line with the lore I’ve decided on for the Glitch.

Here’s the old version for your enjoyment (or not--I always wanted to redo this one cause it bothered me, lol).