Gaby~ 22 yo~ she/they nonbinary ~ Asexual/Demisexual ~ Autistic+ADHD+Dyslexic ~ Writer ~ Creator of the Artemis Fowl Podcast~ Wip Athena: Traitor of Olympus. Follow me on Instergram for updates @autisitc_biscuit
As a birthday present to myself, I am finally going to talk about the book I've been writing for the past 3 years.
Athena. Traitor of Olympus
(This beautiful piece was a commission from @iesnoth right back at the beginning of this year, and she absolutely nailed how I saw the character. Thanks hun)
"The Fates had never been kind to Athena. From the day she was found it seemed as though their dark shadow had been hung upon her infant head."
Attendant to the Goddess Hera, unofficial advisor to the God Zeus, Athena has known nothing beyond the halls of Olympus since she was a child. But when the party celebrating the anniversary of the Gods and Titans victory over Kronos is attacked by Monsters, and the the fight between the two sides is reignited, it seems nothing can stand between the world and disaster. Nothing but a lowly servant.
Curses will be found, secrets will be uncovered, power will be unlocked. And Athena is far from ready.
Includes:
- Asexual/Aromantic, Autistic Athena (Yes, she got straight A's across the board, we're very proud)
- A motherly Trans Woman Oracle
- A Black Lesbian Amazon
- A chaotic Bisexual Prince, with Mummy and Daddy issues.
- Disabled representation.
- Hestia in a loving lesbian relationship with her Nymph girlfriend
- Women fighting with swords, spears, and arrows (I don't know if that's strictly important to mention, but I feel like the demographic I'm appealing to would appreciate that information).
The writer.
Hi, I'm Gaby She/They Nonbinary, Asexual, Autistic, ADHD, and Dyslexic. I've been working on "Athena" for over three years now, along side the Artemis Fowl Podcast (which is nearly out of Beta reading stage. Very excited for that). However, I'll be seeking to finish the first draft of "Athena" in the next few months and sending it to agents. In the mean time, ask questions, make suggestions, and destroy capitalism.
Since I've been going back to edit stuff I've already done for Athena, I have decided I'm going to do a series on here and on my Instagram where I take my favourite line from each chapter and share it.
This is the first line from Chapter 1, and its been the opening ever since I started writing Athena in 2019. I feel it really sets up the tone for the rest of the adventure, and the questions Athena will have to ask herself.
Its quote day, baby. This is an extract from chapter 2 of Athena. I really love the sweet rapport between Athena and Oceanus that only becomes sweeter, and a little bit heart breaking, as the story progresses.
You can ask me questions about Athena and how its going on my Instagram.
Hi all. Back at it again with quotes from Athena. Not the most uplifting lines to start the year off, but I think its befitting. This is from Chapter 3, and believe me this is when things start to get really interesting.
As always, more stuff over on my Instagram @autisitc_biscuit, so go check out there :)
Welcome to my favourite quote from Chapter 4. I wanted to establish Athena's love of the warriors arts from an early age, since she's you know a war Goddess, since then the readers can see a natural evolution to her as a person and into her future Godhood.
(I kind of messed up my schedule and posted this on my Instagram a day early, so here you go :) )
I forgot to to add chapters 5 and 6 to the post, so here we go!
This is my favourite line from chapter 5. I love it so much because it sets up for every major question that Athena has to answer throughout the rest of the story. Technically, they’re all present in chapter 1, page 3-4. However, this is the moment Athena starts to realise that something bigger is going on, and that she is caught squarely in the middle.
And this is my favourite line from Chapter 6. Gotta love a good old fashioned oracle prophecy. Fun fact, almost everything in this prophecy has at least two meanings throughout Athena's story, with a few exceptions. This is never made explicit to the reader, but its there simply waiting for analysis (can you tell I used to have a vested interest in poetry when I was younger?)
Mini update. Here's all 157 pages (69,292 words) of "Athena" thus far (Thank you @atalienart for the idea for this via their update on the story they're writing over here)
Back at it again with my fav quote of chapter 8. I'll admit, I'm still trying to figure out the character of Mandisa. She's both the least trusting of Athena, but also the first to start shaping the Goddess she will become. Balancing the two, while also making her likable and district un her own character is a challenge, but I'm really enjoying it
God, Hera is the WORST! But I'd be lying if it wasn't fun to write for her. This is my favourite quote from Chapter 9, and ooh baby, am I planning something that the readers are going to love.
Athena is certainly going through some shit at the moment. Favourite quote from chapter 12 people, lets GO!!!!
(Also, planning something really cool in the next few weeks for those still interested in Athena's development. All two of you (huge respect for you @xxfanenbyanonymousxx. Couldn't do this without you buddy) so follow my Instagram for more info on that)
Finally figured out how to get the video itself up (I know. I'm someones grandmother that went missing. I'm new to this, okay?)
transcript below the cut.
Oh, why hello there. I'm sorry I didn't see you come in. God, that's so stupid, I'm so sorry!
Hi, my name is Gaby, I'm they/she nonbinary. I'm Autistic, ADHD, Dyslexic, and I'm a writer... Yeah, I don't know how that happens either, since I have the attention span of a confused toddler. But I have a university degree saying I am, so let's go with that.
I've been writing a book about the greek Goddess Athena for the past 3 years-ish. And I have plans to turn it into a full fledged series. I'm also the director of the Artemis Fowl: Incident Report Podcast because Disney did that, and I'm still annoyed.
Other than that, I'm a tea enthusiast, an avid animal petter, and I like Piña Coladas and getting caught in the rain. Not really though, because I live in Devon and the weather here sucks.
Do you like Greek mythology? Do you like adventure YA fiction? Are you, you know, a little spicy in a neurodivergent or Queer way? Did you at any point have a Percy Jackson phase, meaning I did not have to ask the previous question?
Then, I may just be writing something that you'd like. Let me give you a quick run down.
Athena: Traitor of Olympus is the first in a three part book series I'm writing following the three maiden Goddesses of the Greek pantheon. Athena, Artemis, and Hestia, and their ascension to power.
Also, bit of a side tangent but look at this commission my friend Victoria (@iesnothnoth) did for me. Like... this is the coolest thing I own.
I liked it so much I got it framed! But that's besides the point. I just wanted to show off.
Traitor of Olympus is a reimagining of Athena's origin story where, instead of getting smacked out of Zeus's head like the worlds largest kinder egg, she's found as a baby by Hera and bound to serve the house of Olympus for the rest of her days.
Until, of course, "The Party" happens.
At the gathering celebrating the thousand year anniversary of the Olympians defeat over Kronos, they're inextricably attacked by an army of monsters, led by their mother Echidna, who is armed with a substance called Gaia's tears. A crystal capable of unaliving any being. God, Titan, or Monster.
And then Zeus gets shot!
Athena is blamed and gets sentenced to life imprisonment in Tartarus, because Ares is calling the shots now, and that is definitely not a good thing.
It's up to Athena to go off into the mortal world, untangle the web of conspiracies, find the cure of Gaia's tears, and find out the about her own mysterious past (spooky whooo noises).
Includes:
Asexual, Aromatic, Autistic Athena. Yes, she got straight A's across the board. We're very proud.
Trans female mother figures.
POC lesbian Amazons.
Twink bisexual princeses with daddy issues, and trauma.
Ancient Greek cottage core lesbians who have my entire heart.
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god gives her hardest battles to her cuntiest soldiers
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by the time canon rolls around mira's lovergirl goggles protect her from the worst of it. but zoey wearing crocs w socks still forces her to cycle thru every deep breathing exercise known to man
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The ones in the original post and in the 18th reply are modern humans (Homo sapiens) and zvaigsdelasas’ icon is a domestic dog (Canis familiaris) of the Chow Chow breed. All the other images shown in this post seem to not be of mammals.
I mean. There’s Vriska but I don’t know enough about Homestuck to know if the trolls are actually mammals or not. All I know is that there’s one guy who has been raised by crabs or something along these lines and a dog girl. That’s about it.
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the first chapter of Moby Dick rewritten in tiresome modern idiom
CHAPTER 1. Loomings.
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago - it's none of your business how many - being mostly broke, and bored with the land part of the world, I thought I would sail around a little and look at the watery part of the world. I'm probably the most mentally healthy person you know. Whenever I feel my face getting grim; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself accidentally reading the ads in the window of funeral homes, and following funeral processions through traffic; and especially when I'm hangry, and only my extremely strong moral principles stop me from deliberately going out in public and methodically slapping people's earbuds out - then I know it's high time to get to sea, ASAP. This is my substitute for getting in fights. I'm too mentally healthy to kill myself; I quietly and considerately put myself on a ship and sail myself away instead. There is nothing surprising in this. Everyone feels exactly the same way, and if they don't, they're lying.
You think I'm lying? Exhibit A: a city. Go to your local coastal city. Everyone is looking at the water. They drive over from other neighborhoods just to come to the water. They make a day of it. They're not doing anything, they're just staring at the ocean. Why? Is it because they all work office jobs? No! Here come more of them! They cram themselves up to the edge of the water and stare at it. WHAT DO THEY WANT? WHAT ARE THEY LOOKING AT. Perhaps the ships themselves all packed together, each one with several compasses on it, creates some kind of critical mass - all of the small compass-magnets on all the ships in the harbor combining into one really big magnetic field - and the people get sucked into the field and trapped there. That's science.
Exhibit 2: the countryside with lakes in it. Every path you follow in the countryside brings you to some water, such as a stream. There is magic in it. If you take your standard fool with ADHD dissociating in the middle of a supermarket and put them outside and give them a shove, they'll automatically lead you to water (if there is any nearby) (try it). Another good experiment to try is to get lost in the great American desert in a caravan supplied with a metaphysical professor! Try it in the great American desert at home!
Yes, as everyone knows, meditation and water are a match made in heaven. Married forever. That's science.
Here's an artist who wants to paint you the dreamiest, most enchanting landscape. What does he put in it? Trees, meadow, cows, a cottage with smoke coming from the chimney, obviously. He will probably put a path in it and make lots of triangular mountains in rows and have them be different shades of blue (naturally.) But there's gotta be a stream in it. Go visit the prairies in June, and wade for forty miles through knee-deep through tiger lilies. What's missing from this picture? Water!
If Niagara Falls was made of sand instead of water, would you travel your thousand miles to see it? Why would a guy given a handful of cash have trouble deciding whether to buy a coat (which he needed) or go to the beach? Why are all the best, healthiest, sexiest and most mentally healthy people obsessed with the sea? (You get me.) When you were first on a boat, did you not succumb to VIBES? Consider ancient Persia. Consider ancient Greece. They understood about vibes, and also gods.
SURELY ALL OF THIS IS NOT WITHOUT MEANING.
And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all! You get me! You understand it now.
Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I get weird, don't you dare imply that I buy a ticket and get on a boat. I have never had money in my life. How dare you. Anyway I don't go as a passenger - that's bougie, and something boring people do. Passengers never have a good time. And although my C.V. is incredible - I go to sea SO MUCH, you guys, I have lots of experience - I don't go as a boss, or a cook. That sounds like far too much work. Hard work. Disgusting, respectable, bougie, and far too responsible. I can literally only look after myself. Do not ask me to look after ships or shit. In fact, I have only a vague idea of what a ship is. There's so many different kinds of ships - don't get me started and DO NOT GET INVOLVED. Also, I'm allergic to glory.
It's kind of attractive to go as a cook. I mean, I'm allergic to glory and there's some glory attached to the position of the ship's cook, but, like, you're not management-track and so it's still credible. But I don't really want to cook (say) roast chicken. I really fucking love to eat roast chicken. I'm one of the best at doing it actually. I really appreciate when people go out of their way to butter, season, baste and roast a chicken for me. Picture a roast chicken and I am Looking Respectfully at it. Maybe something more, maybe I'm worshipping it. Don't make this weird. If you want to get weird about my relationship with roasted chicken, why aren't you getting weird about the ancient Egyptians? They ate roasted hippos (look it up) and the pyramids were basically pizza ovens. So it's pretty hypocritical to think that I'm being weird about roasted chicken when I've never made mummies out of chickens or built a religious pizza oven dedicated to honoring them: check and mate, haters.
Anyway - I like to go to sea as a manual laborer. A simple sailor. Salt of the earth… er… sea. Yeah, true: as a job it sucks. They make you jump around, order you around, treat you like shit. They expect you to jump around the boat like a grasshopper. And yes, at first, this sucks. It's degrading, especially if you come from a middle-class family. Worse, it's awful if you've already had some kind of professional job before signing on to be the dirt on the boss's boots - like, if you went to college and worked as a teacher and actually got kids to pay attention to you, really feeling this connection to work/teaching/identity or some shit, and now you are just literally the scum on this captain's boots, in the lowest possible job in the world. It hurts! It hurts your dignity. But the hurt, and also the dignity, both wear off in time.
So what if some old bastard sea captain orders me - ME! - to get a broom and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, compared to the shit in the Bible, compared to the shit in the news, compared to the shit everyone else has to take. Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who ain’t a slave? Tell me that. We're all just serfs under capitalism, right, so why not just be honest about it: I prefer the honesty. Anyway, however the old sea captains may order me about - slapping and punching of course - I have the satisfaction of knowing that it's the same experience everyone else on Earth has, but more honest. Everyone else in the world is being served the exact same way. Either in a physical or a metaphysical way - sometimes people get the shit beaten out of them in person, sometimes online, sometimes emotionally, it happens to you in EVERY JOB, you sign on to get pushed around and slapped in the teeth: so the point is that when you're a sailor, it's a clean and honest slap. All the workers of the world share the same universal slap to the face that gets passed round, one slap passed all 'round the chain, like paying it forward, but it's a slap; and we should all accept this Universal Slap as the price of living, and then offer each other healing back massages, brother to brother, and slap each other and then kissed the places we slapped, and be happy.
I could examine that but I'm not going to.
Anyway: I always go to sea as a sailor. I've said that already. You're welcome. BUT THE POINT IS, they pay you. If you're a passenger, they don't pay you, at least, not that I've ever heard of [citation needed] (do they pay passengers?? Is there a job I can get where I can be a passenger and get paid?? Look this up.) Yeah so passengers have to pay. And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. (That's Adam and Eve. You get it.) But BEING PAID. GETTING PAID IS THE BEST. NOTHING COMPARES TO GETTING PAID. EVERYONE LOVES THAT SHIT. Which is surprising, since we also apparently believe that money is the root of all evil, and isn't there something in the bible about "no rich people can get into heaven," right? And yet it's universal, literally everyone loves payday. Ah! How cheerfully we send ourselves to hell.
Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor (I've said this already) because it's FRESH AIR AND EXERCISE. Okay so think about ships. Normally, bosses stand on the "bridge" thing, and because we're sailing a boat, the nose is going into the wind and the butt part of the boat is at the back. That's how wind works. But if you think about it, winds usually go in one direction more than other directions (unless the men have been eating beans and farting: it's Pythagoras, look it up) SO if you're a boss standing on the boss-deck, the wind is blowing FROM the sailors TOWARDS you, and YOU ARE ACTUALLY BREATHING THE AIR THAT SAILORS ALREADY BREATHED. The boss THINKS he breathes it first, but he doesn't. He gets the air at the BACK of the boat and sailors get the air at the FRONT. So it's better to be at the front of the boat (sailor) for health reasons. This is a metaphor for life and work, etc.
But I have smelled the sea lots of times as a paid sailor and WHY I should decide to go on a whaling expedition - ok so you know how there's an invisible police officer of the Fates who has me under constant surveillance, who secretly dogs me, and influences me in some unaccountable way? YOU get me. You know him. "The poor FBI agent tasked with reading my search engine history" YOU GET ME. Anyway, "Ishmael, why, after having a perfectly well-reasoned, and very smart of you, part-time job as a spontaneous random sailor, did you decide to escalate that to joining a WHALING EXPEDITION, which is worse in every way?" Well, ask my fucking secret FBI agent, he can answer better than anyone else. Including me. You get me. Also, obviously, this was predestined, part of the Universe's Grand Programme for its talent show, which was all scheduled way before our time. The concept of sending me on the whaling voyage comes in as a kind of interlude or solo between the main performances of the Universe's great talent show. I bet it was advertised llike,
"PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF THE UNITED STATES EMBROILED IN ONGOING LEGAL DISPUTE.
Whaling voyage by some guy called Ishmael.
BLOODY BATTLE IN AFGHANISTAN."
Like a commercial break in between the big acts. A filler episode. Lightens the load for everyone else. Though I can't explain why the stage managers - the Fates - chose such a shitty role for me, a WHALING VOYAGE of all things, when it feels like others were given magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces - it seems a little unreasonable at first. Why doth Ishmael get shat upon, etc. But then I think about all the circumstances, the plot points and motivations that were cunningly presented to me under various disguises - FBI agents, bouts of random hanger, gay awakenings, you get me - and you can see that actually, I was set up. And worse, between them all, these Fates and Circumstances conspired to make me believe it was all my own choice and good judgment. Is Free Will an illusion? Are my decisions bad? We will NEVER know because I, Ishmael, am just a little guy that the Universe plays head games with.
One of the ways the Universe tricked me into starring in this performance and then mocking me for it was the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself (whaling expeditions usually contain whales.) Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity. Then of course, if you have a whale, you have the wild and distant seas where the whale rolls around with his body-the-size-of-an-island; the dangers and nameless perils of the whale; whales are also found in interesting places I haven't seen; this all tipped me over the edge. Maybe normal people could've resisted, but I am tormented with an everlasting itch for obscurity. I hate everyone else's oceans. I want the forbidden seas.
You know The Horrors? Of course you do. You might be surprised that I, the most mentally healthy person you've ever met, a person who is self-aware enough to go to sea when they're at their fucking limits, a guy who likes fresh air and manual labor and normal things, is familiar with The Horrors. Well, you'd be surprised. I know what's good, I'm an extrovert. But I'm still quick to perceive The Horrors. And how I deal with the horrors is a very extroverted thing: I'm social with them, if they'll let me. It's smart to be on good terms with The Horrors. You should always be on good terms with your permanent neighbors. That's how extroverts deal with The Horrors, and I recommend it.
I think that's enough explanation for why I welcomed the whaling voyage. The great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild figments of imagination that pushed me into doing it, the whales came marching two by two, hurrah, hurrah. They marched into my innermost soul in endless processions and occupied it, you see, I was quite helpless under this occupation - I consented to the haunting and the whales marched in to haunt me - and amidst them all was one grand shrouded white phantom, like a snowy mountain in the air.
You get it.
You know how it is, with whales.
(read the actual first chapter of Moby Dick here: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2701/2701-h/2701-h.htm)
I have a question: the original Moby Dick, in its original linguistic and cultural context (you know all the dick jokes in Shakespeare that we don't pick up on any more because language has shifted? That kind of thing), was it THAT clear that the narrator has Something Wrong with him?