practice resurrection

I’m not dead

The Good Stars is not dead

To elaborate: Last summer I started writing something new, in a fandom for which I am essentially the only active member as far as I can discern. It hit at a very particular time and quickly took over my entire creative brain, and for a variety of reasons I’ve essentially shelved everything else until it’s done.

To elaborate further: For a little while I was trying to write a weird kinda essay series about it, explaining what it was and why I was doing it, and I’ve given that up for the moment. Maybe at some point I’ll try to continue it. Suffice to say that… You remember I’ll Be Yours For a Song? You remember how it completely took over my brain for half a year and ended up being one of the most personally significant and meaningful things I’ve ever written?

Yeah, so that’s basically happened again, only this time I’m writing it for no one except me, which is something I have never done before.

It’s over 250k words long and I’m still not finished with it, although I think I’ve crested the peak and now I’m on the slope down.

I’ve posted some of it, but I stopped because I realized I wanted it to be done first. Although I’ve been back and forth on it a bit, I do intend to post all of it once it’s finished, for anyone who cares to look at it. But it’s only for me. In some strange ways it’s a spiritual companion to IBYFAS, almost a sister story. It’s about love and guilt and pain and growth and death, and living with a broken body and mind, and finding meaning and joy in a broken world, and art and truth and how we become who we’re supposed to become in spite of everything. In some ways it’s most fundamentally a very long conversation with myself about everything that matters to me at this point. It’s also a story about two soldiers in love who decide—or don’t, because they have no choice—to do one of the most difficult things they’ve ever done in order to find out what they can be.

(This is all set in a very mediocre and swiftly canceled and largely forgotten Chris Carter TV series because my brain is beyond perverse)

It feels very important to me that I finish it and see how it comes out before I give my brain back over to other things—first in line being—yes—The Good Stars.

I didn’t realize until tonight that it’s been ten years since I finished I’ll Be Yours For a Song. 

I was like …wait, wasn’t it 2015? Didn’t seem like it could have been that long ago, but I went and checked, and yep, AO3 confirms: Started 3/15/15, final chapter posted 9/2 of the same year. Which means I would have finished writing it in the last couple days of August. 

I doubt very much that the vast majority of people following me here don’t know this, but just on the off-chance that a few of you don’t: in the early days of my most intense period of activity in The Walking Dead fandom—specifically in the Daryl/Beth pairing—I wrote a story. It started out as a cute AU one-shot inspired by a friend, and as such things are sometimes wont to do, it blew up and absolutely wrecked my life. 

I’ve never had an experience quite like writing that fic, and I don’t expect to ever have it again. I’ve had more acutely intense writing experiences—I’ve spoken elsewhere about the two fics that I ended up writing in almost a kind of ecstatic trance—but the length of IBYFAS, the length of time over which I sustained its pace, the unexpectedness of it, the way it sometimes felt literally like dipping into a pool of magic, the bereavement I felt when it was over and I couldn’t write it anymore, and the wild emotional feedback loop that I developed with its readership… I doubt that’ll be repeated. 

Which I’m fine with. It wasn’t the kind of experience that could or should be sustained. And something of its magic would be dulled, I think, if it ever did precisely repeat itself. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about the readers lately. I actually think about the people who went on that journey with me pretty frequently. I still get new comments on that fic from people who are struggling to articulate their experience of reading it, and I never know what to say to them, not least because I struggle to articulate my own experience even now. It’s awkward to be—allegedly—a professional writer and try to describe to people just how overwhelmingly powerful that experience was without sounding at best slightly unhinged. Or perhaps merely as though I have my priorities hopelessly in the wrong place, because shouldn’t I feel that way about my Real Writing? My ✨Original Writing✨?

Fuck, I dunno.

Of course most of us who write want them. I’d venture to say the vast majority of us want them very badly. I’ve already told you—I probably don’t need to tell you—about how much of that likely comes from a place of loneliness, a need to be seen and affirmed, but I think for many of us it goes beyond a basic need for attention and adulation. For many of us it’s about reaching into some deep, raw, bleeding part of us, pulling out something that feels real and vital, hacking it into the shape of words and then showing it to people as a candidly kind of fucked up way of saying Do you understand what I’ve been trying to tell people, do you see it now, do you see this part of me, can you see what I’ve been needing people to see, anyone, even one person—but the thing is that one person is rarely sufficient to make the need go away. 

Please send me the training or tutorial in a written format with maybe some screenshots if necessary. I don't want a video tutorial. I don't want to waste time trying to scroll to the exact moment in the instructions that I need and then have to pause and replay it because I missed the .01 seconds of actually relevant information.

Would you like to fuck him, though? In that car?

Hey, y'all. It's...been a rough couple of weeks. So, I thought--better to light a single candle, right?

If you're familiar with wildlife conservation success stories, then you're likely also familiar with their exact polar opposite. The Northern White Rhino. Conservation's poster child for despair. Our greatest and most high-profile utter failure. We slaughtered them for wealth and status, and applied the brakes too slow. Changed course too late.

We poured everything we had into trying to save them, and we failed.

We lost them. They died. The last surviving male was named Sudan. He died in 2018, elderly and sick. His genetic material is preserved, along with frozen semen from other long-dead males, but only as an exercise in futility. Only two females survive--a mother and daughter, Najin and Fatu.

Both of them are infertile. They still live; but the Northern White Rhinoceros is extinct. Gone forever.

In 2023, an experimental procedure was attempted, a hail-mary desperation play to extract healthy eggs from the surviving females.

It worked.

The extracted eggs were flown to a genetics lab, and artificially fertilized using the sperm of lost Northern males. The frozen semen that we kept, all this time, even after we knew that the only living females were incapable of becoming pregnant.

It worked.

Thirty northern white rhino embryos were created and cryogenically preserved, but with no ability to do anything with them, it was a thin hope at best. In 2024, for the first time, an extremely experimental IVF treatment was attempted on a SOUTHERN white rhino--a related subspecies.

It worked.

The embryo transplanted as part of the experiment had no northern blood--but the pregnancy took. The surgery was safe for the mother. The fetus was healthy. The procedure is viable. Surrogate Southern candidates have already been identified to carry the Northern embryos. Rhinoceros pregnancies are sixteen months long, and the implantation hasn't happened yet. It will take time, before we know. Despair is fast and loud. Hope is slower, softer. Stronger, in the end.

The first round may not take. We'll learn from it. It's what we do. We'll try again. Do better, the next time. Fail again, maybe. Learn more. Try harder.

This will not save the species. Not overnight. The numbers will be very low, with no genetic diversity to speak of. It's a holding action, nothing more.

Nothing less.

One generation won't save a species. But even a single calf will buy us time. Not quite gone, not yet. One more generation. One more endling. One more chance. And if we seize it, we might just get another after that. We're getting damn good at gene editing. At stem-cell research. In the length of a single rhino lifetime, we'll get even better.

For decades, we have been in a holding action with no hope in sight. Researchers, geneticists, environmentalists, wildlife rehabbers. Dedicated and heroic Kenyan rangers have kept the last surviving NWRs under 24/7 armed guard, line-of-sight, eyes-on, never resting, never relaxing their guard. Knowing, all the while, that their vigilance was for nothing. Would save nothing. This is a dead species--an elderly male, two females so closely related that their offspring couldn't interbreed even if they could produce any--and they can't.

Northern white rhino conservation was the most devastatingly hopeless cause in the world.

Two years from now, that dead species may welcome a whole new generation.

It's a holding action, just a holding action, but not "just". There is a monument, at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, where the last white rhinos have lived and will die. It was created at the point where we knew--not believed, knew--that the species was past all hope. It memorializes, by name there were so few, the last of the northern white rhinos. Most of the markers have brief descriptions--where the endling rhino lived, how it was rescued, how it died.

One marker bears only these words: SUDAN | Last male Northern White Rhino.

If even a single surrogate someday bears a son, we have erased the writing on that plaque forever.

All we can manage is a holding action? Then we hold. We hold hard and fast and long, use our fingernails if we have to. But hold. Even and perhaps especially when we are past all hope.