#lightning falls

Now available to all tiers of Patreon (including Free)

I am REALLY EXCITED for Hum of Glory. It's promising to fill a content/lore niche specific to my Weeping Cedars interests. The following is basically a bingo card, I recognize that not all of these things will probably fit in the short story collection but if we get any of them at all, I'll be over the moon:

-Campers start of darkness plotline

-doesmccormickhasthedeathtouch.exe

-Elton, Tammy, Linda or Joseph content (I'd say Earling too, but based on the teaser letter we got I'd be more shocked if he WASN'T in this one)

-Specifically with Joseph I want to know the nature of his relationship with McCormick, whether everything we saw in Wrought of Amber represents an alleyship between them or something more insidious/complicated. I am ready for the Cornerstone lock box to finally pop open

-Erika turn on your location I just want to talk

-Mike content??? Kayla content??? Both??? It's her Hilltop Sacrifice year and he's in a position to fuck that up severely

-The last episode of Good Night Faithful Friends made Jacob sound a bit shady, what is he hiding?

-What is the connection between Eyes and the Sams. Is Eyes an iteration of Sam, and if so, is he one we've seen before or a new one? What are his relationships to the others, given the whole "unfettered prince claiming to free his brothers" and how it seemingly contradicts what we saw in A Thing, A Thing?

-Speaking of A Thing, A Thing continuity- if Sams are capable of linear reincarnation, why do McCormick and Stroigois have so much lifetime overlap?

-Luke Bryer turn on your location I just want to talk

-Shawn Nosik content??????

-Hotel DuBois loredump???

-McCormick internal monologue, particularly in relation to Campers Hill Day?

-I'd be shocked if we don't get deity development for the Queen

-Possible plot hooks for Ursus spelaeus

AKA why at least some people who get into the WCU find the concept oddly romantic, and how a portion of the audience reacting this way is foundational to so many readings

So I'm a gore artist. As someone who grew up in a heavily pathologizing environment as an Autistic and intersex person (I relate way too much to Julian Bashir from Star Trek) I started to break free when I became aware that my own treatment was an extension of Nazi eugenics philosophy, basically. Eugenics was one of the first evil things I ever made the active decision to hate and fight against.

Part of how I expressed myself was by drawing a particular kind of violent art, I've always been a monster designer as well and my gore art often combined with my interest in creature design to create a lot of grotesque imagery around the bodies of genetically altered animals that were implied to be in incredible amounts of pain.

I am not a person who enjoys inflicting violence on other people or living things. I consider myself to have a moral obligation to minimize the harm I do to others. My partner can attest to how one of my proudest skills is being able to pick up insects with my bare hands without harming them, something I learned to do growing up in an area with lots of ladybugs, an insect that you can accidentally kill very easily by applying too much pressure to their wing casings.

The thing is, in order to get as good at it as I am, I first had to be a careless child who grieved over the ladybugs whose lives I accidentally but pointlessly ended when all I wanted to do was play with them. My own suffering as a pathologized disabled person made me so hypersensitive to any and all pain I caused. Contrary to popular belief, this is a way more common path to expressing yourself through violence as an artist than being a Sander Cohen caricature.

Hilltop Sacrifices very often center marginalized and downtrodden people; and their analogs in the audience are way more likely to respond favorably to the concept because the existence of violence in the life of a marginalized person is already ubiquitous. If you are already someone for whom life carries an implicit threat of daily violence, or if you've already had friends and loved ones taken by suicide for that reason, it's easy to imagine how making a choice like that might be favorable to someone over persisting under untenable conditions.

And if you're like this and also a gentle but downtrodden person who makes violent art, even if you yourself aren't actively suicidal, it's very easy to see your own underlying artistic impulses in the concept. The idea that years of mounting pressure and human suffering at the intersection of art and marginalization could erupt as a self exhibition of one's own suicide just seems second nature.

After all, all of the suffering lab animals in my art were reflections of me, and at the end of the day, the frankly ableist idea that violent art is a projection of destructive intent outward instead of destructive intent inward is another way that suffering people find themselves stifled from self expression.