#pia rambles

but first some basics about the actual book

title: babylon boy (book 1 of the home habitat duology)

genre: literary fiction

category: i say adult because there will be no censoring of topics but in this first installment our protagonists are around eighteen years old. you might consider that ya but i wouldn't

a small summary: having independently run away from home for their own reasons, theo and maripaz meet while homeless on the streets and form an alliance of convenience to survive. while theo vehemently denies the drug addiction he’s nursing, maripaz tries to deal with the way both want and revulsion seem to exist in her at the same time. falling in love is probably the easiest thing they do.

teddy and i are co-authoring, as in we both write the words. they will be primarily working on theo's chapters and i will be primarily working on maripaz's chapters but we'll both be involved in fully crafting this story.

talking about your book is hard when all that happens in it is character work so even whether someone gets sick at one point feels like a spoiler you want people to be surprised by.

we created mari and theo in 2020 on a whim. i can't even remember what prompted it exactly. we wanted a new pair of characters to play with and we decided to make two assholes to bicker and be mean to each other. this iteration saw three reincarnations before we put the characters on the shelf and almost resigned ourselves to them being a miss... if not for one important detail... i really, really believed they should have kissed. this first version of them would eventually be known as the homeless au.

looking back it's Wild thinking about how different mari and theo used to be. we moved onto new aus to play around with, landing on a superhero-type beat that became their new canon for a while. we had fantasy and sci-fi and musicians and hadestown and the raven cycle (that last one did so much for us it's insane). every new thing we tried shaped them more and more until they were unrecognisable from their original versions. one day i really want to go through their threads from start to finish and look at that change in real time.

there was a new thesis to their characters and it was no longer "what if two awful guys with issues were forced together and tried to bite each other's heads off". instead we were looking at two characters that through every new incarnation became more sincere and gentle. they had meta-narrative character development.

(every new au also gave us more characters to populate the world including but not limited to theo's twin sister, maripaz's seven siblings, alex, philip, a whole lot of parental figures, a quirky cast of friends... but i'll talk about them some other time)

then i did it again. in the 2.0 version of the homeless au there was one scene i loved beyond words where an argument between our two protagonists resulted in maripaz punching theo right on the mouth. when she tried to swing a second time he stopped her hand and warned her that if she wanted to hit him he would hit back. they fought and the scene ended. i said to teddy: they should have kissed. we laughed and imagined how homeless au would go now that their characters had changed so much. we started thinking about it more and more until we were moving the pieces of their cinematic universe around to fit this new idea... and suddenly we had plot for a book that would revamp that original homeless au... and a sequel too! (but more on that second one another time)

teddy started a rp thread of what came right after the opening scene of babylon boy, where theo and maripaz would shoplift and he would steal the angel necklace she wore (<- this is important)... and we just kept going... and going. we'd already had a few keys scenes to work towards, one those being that punching scene that started it all, as well as the ending. teddy added two new scenes we began calling the halo scene and the church scene, and we moved something we called the pool scene into this book from another au. we just had to fill in the blanks... fill in the blanks we did.

these right here are the names i gave each individual thread of the roleplay-ification of babylon boy. their purpose is not so much to be chapter titles but to make specific scenes easy to find for future reference. though obviously i had to be a bit artistic about it.

i don't know if babylon boy will have chapter titles, and if they will have some sort of theme going on (usually i like just putting two words together to create some imagery). "angel face" is probably what i would title chapter 1, but i also hesitate on that decision because i think i would like to save angel for later.

these threads are less of a draft and more the skeleton of a draft, that's why i called it a draft 0. its purpose is to give teddy and i direction and reading through them i already know how i want to shift the timeline and how i'd rewrite some of the scenes to make them a lot better, but it did give us a great cause and effect look of things. the way teddy and i approach our roleplay threads is more loose than what i do with @on-the-river-lethe (with whom i'm currently roleplaying draft 1 of our book lupine trail and also a giant hunger games au). fluffy and i write responses between 1k-4k words, they are basically chapters. teddy and i instead do a quick call and response, mostly focused on dialogue, we build on top of each other and neither of us really knows where a thread will go when we start.

there are no actual non-roleplay words written for babylon boy thus far. teddy is in charge of chapter 1 as we open with theo's pov but we are both busy or focused on other things. right now we're enjoying the playing around stage of the process (which i don't see going away even once we start seriously writing, i know for a fact we'll probably do various roleplay-type passes to babylon boy).

you've probably noticed the christian imagery is rampant here. it happened kind of by accident and the already mentioned halo scene is entirely to blame for it. like i said, teddy and i have this very "yes, and," approach to storytelling together where we kinda build on top of what the other puts down. teddy gave me the description of one (1) scene where theo sees a halo of light around maripaz's head and i decided "well, this is now i thing that is here to stay". church scene really brought it all together and there is a scene in book 2 adeptly nicknamed the angel scene that is kind of the culmination of this.

the imagery is almost exclusive to theo's pov as mari is more the subject of the imagery than the one pushing it forward. teddy and i will be doing our most to fill this book with visuals: characters lined with stained glass windows, lights shaped like hearts, signs and graffiti that say meaningful stuff.

babylon boy, as the title suggests, is more theo's book. both he and maripaz have meaningful arcs but theo's is really at the core of it, mari takes centre stage in book 2 (titled gossamer girl). i think i talked about this somewhere before but the titles just kind of... happened. gossamer was relevant for that superhero au and it's just a word i really adore so i wanted to use it on the title. you can't go wrong with alliteration so gossamer girl it is. and because i love when books in a series match i had to do something with boy. like gossamer i adore babylon for some reason, and so we got babylon boy. i wasn't sure about that one because while gossamer girl made sense with the theme, what did "babylon boy" even mean, exactly? teddy came in clutch and analysed the title for me. they connected it to theo's drug addiction and now i can't think of any two titles that are more perfect for this series.

like i said, there are no actual words written for this book so sadly i cannot share any excerpts. but i will share

Festival was very much the result of teddy and i having just watched before sunrise, 1995

we watched before sunrise, 1995 because the mannerisms of the two leads reek of maripaz and theo

"until a miracle happens" became a recurring thing said in the draft and it wrecked me

Our Fears is probably my favourite thread both thematically and visually. followed closely by Church Angels, though that one is mostly visually

The Pool is the longest thread with about 90 responses and all of it is beautiful. i would probably consider it the companion to Our Fears

"mutual pining they're both just idiots"

the closing image is probably my favourite one of the book

the core themes are very much trust, love, and communal help. we've got such an array of npcs who simply... help. i love the human race.

i'll probably do another update before we start properly writing talking about maripaz and theo as characters specifically. a bit of a crash course on who they are, really.

anyway. i'm giving you a golden star if you read all of that ⭐ do ask me or teddy about this story!! we'd be happy to talk about it. or even just about the characters.

genre & category: urban fantasy, adult

here's the short summary: people wear animal masks to ward off the monsters prowling the city, there are eyes painted on the faces of buildings, and the dreamers are on tv... not malcolm and adam though. after failing to stop their old team members from killing one of the oneiroi, the dreams walking among the regular people, they take less glamorous jobs and stew in anger (or at least adam does, malcolm says he's moving on). when adam's patron gives him instructions on where to find their old team members they find with them a bomb waiting to go off: a dreamer kid with the ability to kill people in their sleep.

and here's the long summary:

welcome to a world just like our own! if nightmares prowled through the cities and everyone had to wear an animal mask for the chance of warding them off. in this world dreams walk among the people and dreamers are what you call the people whose lives belong one half to wakefulness and one half to sleep. they are the only ones who can enter the domains of other dreams and take special artefacts, and for this reason dreams — or oneiroi — seek them out and make the agency known of their existence. with nowhere else to go that would teach them how to navigate this double life safely, the dreamers stay and they respond to the call of the oneiroi. in return, they get a good helping of recognition and a chance for their oddity to be seen as the perks of a celebrity.

luke's* team was the best in the business. teamed up less as a necessity and just as a matter of friendship. despite of what it seems like, being a dreamer isn't all that glamorous, you get tired of hearing you're fated for greatness without seeing the results. mutiny stirs within the agency, with luke and three others going rouge. culminating in the biggest sin of all: luke traps an oneiros within himself. their remaining still loyal team members, malcolm and adam, are set on their trail with clear instructions of not letting the oneiros come to harm. the only witnesses of what happened that day are their three remaining disgraced team members, luke is dead and so is the oneiros within him.

now, adam and malcolm are demoted. no longer the darlings of the agency they take less glamorous jobs. until adam's patron oneiros contacts him in dreams and directs him to the hiding place of their old friends. there they find they're hiding more than just themselves. they have with them a boy with a unique and deadly ability, that of killing people in their dreams.

woah, okay, so that's the setup! it was a lot, i know, but... worldbuilding.

what are the nightmares? the nightmares are me reusing the same monster concept for all of my wips because i find eldritch animals to be very cool. they're lovecraftian horror type animals that populate the world and are basically my excuse to why the characters are good with weapons because everyone is armed and knows how to defend themselves in case they're attacked. i also just adore the animal masks aesthetic so i wanted to use that here, and yes this also recycled from like 4 other wips don't even @ me. the masks' purpose is to sorta repel the monsters, as it gives you an uncanny appearance — sort of like theirs! so they won't attack on sight. the "eyes painted on the faces of buildings" are meant to help out with warding the nightmares, keeping them from overpopulating. sort of like the eyes on moth wings.

what are the dreams (oneiroi)? the well-adjusted cousins of the nightmares. they are my stand-in for the gods in pjo. they abide by their own laws and as part of these laws it dictates they can never cross paths with one another or grab each other's stuff. they don't affect the world around them, at least not the waking world, and a slight change in one of them would affect all of them. for example, if there was a gravity oneiros and they were killed, all the oneiroi would start floating. their appearance is very optic illusion-based. are they human? animal? something else? yes. the main thing people notice is they don't have to wear masks when walking around outside.

what are the dreamers and how do they work? with the oneiroi being unable of meddling with each other, that's where they dreamers come in. dreamers touch oneiroi artefacts, enter their domains, etc. just like demigods they are affected by both worlds, responding to human logic and dream logic. the core aspect of a dreamer is their ability of bringing things from their dreams (oneiric creation), though not everyone does it the same or is even capable of it... okay let me explain. most dreamers can bring things from their dreams, when they do they create dreamwaste, which'll usually correspond to their patron oneiroi (which is the oneiroi who found them and took them to the agency). it could be raw light, could be plants, could be cotton, feathers, paint, whatever. other dreamers have more niche abilities, such as dreamwalking, or they can only bring back one type of object but they create no dreamwaste.

and finally, what is the agency? i'm not exactly sure yet. i knew i didn't want an "academy of superpowered kids" type thing, but i still needed a central hub where the main cast met because it is essential that they know each other since they were kids. the agency, at least rn in the early stages of writing, is little more than an office where dreamers are taken to after being picked by a patron and it's a place where they can hone their abilities and eventually get picked for errands and jobs by the oneiroi. being a dreamer is kind of a big deal in this world. there is no veil between the fantastical world and the known world in this story, like pjo with the mist, no the fantasy world is everyday life. normal people know of the oneiroi, they live with the nightmares in their backyards, and dreamers for them are like small celebrities. the agency also takes care of the image.

let's talk characters! bullet point style

luke*. getting him out of the way rn. yes, this is luke castellan from pjo except he's my oc now. i'm probably gonna keep using luke as his name all through drafting and then find something new later to claim originality. if i wanted to explain him i would have to sit down and talk how he relates or doesn't relate with his pjo self... so i won't. instead i'll tell you his mask is shaped like a serpent (hermes). and he's a very special type of dreamer because he can bring anything from his dreams without creating any dreamwaste, making him the golden boy of the agency.

hudson moretti. fluffy's oc and originally a son of hypnos, so he fits pretty cosy here. his mask is the bear which just felt right as fluffy and i call him a big teddy bear all the time. his dreaming niche is dreamwalking! he can't bring anything from his dreams but he can visit anyone's dreams. he can also "discard" dreams, which essentially means taking dreams from others and getting rid of them. he does this a lot with his friends when they're having nightmares. as he doesn't bring anything out, he creates no dreamwaste.

piedad narváez. my girl! originally a daughter of urania which is why i have given her the rabbit mask, moon symbolism. another one with a particular niche. i'm sure you all know piedad's thing(tm) is she has premonition abilities which is essential to her character. when translating that into this story the obvious change was that she now receives those premonitions from her dreams, but this limits what she can bring back which always relates to those premonitions. her dreamwaste is glitter.

ericka mulligan. she belongs to royalbookblog and was originally a daughter of demeter. her mask is that of an antlered deer. she is a typical dreamer, capable of bringing anything she wants. her dreamwaste is plant life. probably the one most loyal to luke and would put her hands in the fire for him. makes up for her lack of niche by being the one making sure everything is running smoothly around here.

adam rubio. the previously mentioned wet cat of a man. originally a son of apollo, he wears the hawk mask. another typical dreamer, his dreamwaste is light. has a strained relationship with his mother, walking bisexual disaster, stands out in that he spent most of his time in the agency as a child as his mum tended to leave him there like it was a babysitting service.

malcolm*. oops we stole another canon character. malcolm pace is a son of athena we aged up and who became hudson's love interest. now thanks to pointed north he's also adam's best friend. he wears the owl mask and he's a typical dreamer, his dreamwaste is ink. unlike luke his name will stay as malcolm, i will only be changing his lastname.

nico*. OOPS ANOTHER ONE. i'm sure you all know who nico is, he's the son of hades. he wears the goat max and he's the kid with the ability to kill people in their dreams. he's a hudson type where he can dreamwalk but instead of being able to discard dreams, he can... well, kill people in their sleep. his name is definitely going to be changed don't worry. nothing will remain the same about him, no backstory or anything, aside from him being an orphan.

the story itself takes place after luke's mess has mostly fizzled out. it's been little over a year. piedad, hudson and ericka are missing in action. adam and malcolm are getting booed by tweens on the street because they're no longer the cool dreamers on the block. killing that oneiros had lasting consequences, remember what i said about them abiding by their own laws? and the hypothetical case of a gravity oneiros? there is no gravity oneiros but you catch my drift.

we have some carried over conflict from everything fluffy and i have developed about these characters in the pjo version. luke being a classical tragic hero who is taken down by his own fatal flaw. his friends believing in him to their own detriment in the end. piedad receiving a premonition of his fate but keeping it to herself. the rift between hudson-luke-piedad-ericka and malcolm-adam. piedad almost killing adam on purpose. ericka being in love with luke but luke never fully returning that affection. adam's patron (stand-in for apollo from the pjo version) telling him where to find the deserters. also apollo having a sorta thing with piedad (she has two hands).

i don't know what else to say! so i'll leave you with the opening line (this is from the prologue which will be a rewritten one-shot from the pjo version)

Piedad watched the dream and waited to wake up.

cheers,

august is now a completely different character! originally she was supposed to be ezra's "friendship interest" (like love interest but for friend) but i was having this problem about their relationship being too similar to that of ezra's mums xiomara and katalina. something that was bothering no one but if i didn't do something about it it was gonna bother me for all intended 70k words of this. i've aged august up and now she is running the radio station mentioned in the powerpoint (there's also something new and magical about her but [spoilers]).

it also allowed me to implement a dynamic i would have otherwise discarded with the changes i did to ezra's family, which makes me happy as i really liked it. see, since her inception august has been the someone new by hozier sorta character where she falls in love with pretty strangers on the bus. in the earlier versions of evergreen lung, ezra was supposed to live with her aunt who couldn't really hold down a partner and that was going to contrast with ezra who didn't want a partner. now that dynamic is the one shared between ezra and august! they have more of a "queer neurodivergent student who imprints on their cool teacher" vibe

juan diego figueroa! you may remember him as santiago figueroa from the powerpoint, i changed his name. the obligatory adam parrish-esque character because this is a book about a sentient forest. he's ezra's new platonic soulmate. a story about two aspec kids with lots of nature imagery surrounding them and whose relationship people are being extremely amatonormative about. after all, they're a boy and a girl so they should be falling in love

not only are they extremely cute, but their dynamic immediately puts me at ease with being Different(tm) from xiomara/katalina/caleb, which is what was bothering me if i had made a little trio out of ezra/august/santiago. as said in the powerpoint, his family runs the greenhouse where xiomara buys all her plant babies and it gives juan diego and ezra a fun thing going on. where they know each other but will grow to be each other's best friends much to their surprise

okay! let's talk chapters

i have named a few scattered chapters. these are the first five (at least for now some titles could be moved around later). as of rn i have only written chapters one and i'm working on finishing chapter two. yes, in my head that is more than enough to talk

I: CREATION ACT

so for the uninitiated: evergreen lung is about this girl named ezra who died and then undied. what felt like passing out overnight in the forest for her turned out to be a year of her being missing.

i'd written the opening scene of the book many moons ago, around the time when i first had the idea for this story. it remains one of my favourite openers. here's an excerpt!

I woke up again because I couldn’t breathe. It turned into crying. Blood smeared on my cheeks, my nose, my mouth. I think… I might have been having nightmares, but I couldn’t remember. The sun made nightmares go away.

Checked my phone again, mechanical. The dead screen spiderwebbed and mosaicked with the honeycomb light through the canopy of branches. I did that three more times, forgetting each time, until I sprung panicked because the weight of my own body made my arm fall asleep and I thought the fox was back and had taken it along this time. I pressed the power button on the phone like that might will it to work.

I also got bitten on the leg, the tender tissue on the back of my knee, and I kicked. A fox with shamrocks as way of ear tufts whined and sprang away. That made me sit up and I cried, whimpering apologies. Whimpering please forgive me’s to an animal that wasn’t there anymore.

i'm now gonna shout out @rxinbowbright and @chaoticdecember because it's thanks to them that i even conceived making any progress with this book at all. and it's all thanks to the characters of ezra's parents who are actually our ocs for a personal project we share. with katalina being teddy's and caleb being fluffy's, xio is mine. it makes sense for a story about the importance of queerplatonic relationships for our main character to be born into one imo.

a while back (a long while back) i decided to start using chapter titles. they add so much personality and i think they need to do a comeback in books. i'm especially fond of the two words structure which is what i'm gonna be doing with evergreen lung. it creates such vivid imagery with something as simple as creation act, especially considering the subject matter. ezra coming back home and all.

II: PRESSED FLOWERS

aka ezra takes a walk around town and reunites with raquel, they go to a concert. alternatively: sometimes the main conflict is the fact your best friend has a boyfriend.

the plot truly begins here: ezra realises there's a disconnect between her and the person who's her best friend, she missed graduation and we all know how much things change in not even a year of being done with high school. the people you saw 5 days a week aren't part of your routine anymore, friend groups don't survive, everyone's got their own goals and no one's worried about the same homework as you.

other stories might turn raquel into the villain but there are no villains here (except for amatonormativity). i love raquel, and i love the relationship with her boyfriend like i love any other ship in my wips. they've got this fun garage band aesthetic going on and damian is friends with ezra... sadly while she was gone they planned and agreed to move out of town together. and now instead of having time to process this, ezra's arriving a month (or so) before it happens.

the title of pressed flowers is supposed to be a metaphor about preserving things.

Raquel’s mum was a redhead like her two daughters. She was wearing an apron and a dress, hands clad with rubber gloves, she looked as if she’d stepped out of 50s USA nuclear family propaganda. Wendy was forced to stay outside and I stood in their kitchen on the verge of tears for an agonising ten minutes.

I kept asking them: Raquel? Raquel? Raquel?

And they put a glass of pink lemonade in my hands and hugged me until I spilled it on the floor anyways. You went missing, they said, as if I was a third-party stranger who hadn’t heard of the local tragedy. Instead of being the very subject of it. Yeah, I know, I said, objective, like speaking of the weather. Your parents— Raquel's mum started to say. They know, I said.

“She’s going to be so happy.” Marianela was holding the baby to her chest.

“Where’s Raquel?” I asked again.

“Not here,” her mum said. “She got this crazy idea in her head when she turned eighteen. Moved right out, said she was ready to be independent.”

“Where’s Raquel?” I asked again.

“She didn’t even have a job!” her mum said. “Now I think she’s working as a cashier.”

“Where’s Raquel?” I asked Marianela directly.

“The shopping centre downtown,” she said, patting the baby’s back as she became fuzzy. Warning of a wail. “They have these empty rooms serving no purpose at all.”

okay! i think that's gonna be it for now. i mainly wanted to talk about the changes i made (which also helps me it's the rubber duck method). and also hopefully this gave you a better idea of what the book's about, where it's headed.

the other chapters will tackle the following:

dead heading: the real weight of being gone

organic bodies: trying to reconnect

blink twice: ezra goes to a party with her old classmates

the sentient forest is coming, i promise.

i haven’t been dividing this into chapters proper. i don’t know if i will. for not all i care about is getting words on the screen so i’ve been cutting it up in “parts” instead that are down to my own discretion. with that arbitrary rule in place, i have 5 parts right now.

ONE.

[ image id: the silhouette of a woman with windblown hair against a sunset. “My sister would be the one to spread the word of my death if the ocean ever did me in, she was the last of my family who heard my voice consistently enough to be concerned.” written in serif on the bottom right corner / end id. ]

My sister would be the one to spread the word of my death if the ocean ever did me in, she was the last of my family who heard my voice consistently enough to be concerned. She would be told by my boss on the coast watch, after not receiving my daily check-in. He would call her, then she would prepare my funeral.

TWO.

the book (at least so far) is largely linear. part one opens with galatea dropping cruz off with marilú, and part two continues with marilú and cruz taking a towship back to the lighthouse. we get the first look of the relationship between marilú and her especial creature: haranza. the name for the creatures is under construction, if they’re even going to be called something.

I looked at Haranza and Haranza looked at me: three images with low opacity, stacked on top of each other, the details made out of glitter refracting light. Vaguely cat-like, vaguely deer-like, vaguely rabbit-like.

Answer her, Haranza said, after repeating for me what you said. I didn’t have the best hearing. Ships and the fog alarm will do that to you.

“That’s— that’s good, okay!” i put the corpse of a fish on the cutting board, pairing knife in hand, blade wiped clean on my jeans from dried blood of the beef i ate yesterday. “How do you take care of a child?”

She seems self-sufficient, Haranza said.

THREE.

[ image id: a blue sky sprinkled with stars, a crescent moon near the bottom. “I wrote: clear night, humanity feels minuscule.” written in serif font at the centre / end id. ]

I wrote: clear night, humanity feels minuscule.

Haranza hummed in my ear, or purred, but it was like a human rolling an ‘r’ to mimic a purr. Is that ‘humanity’ as in humankind or ‘humanity’ as in being human?

I shrugged. “Either works, I guess. They’re both true.”

Why are you crying now?

I shrugged again, using the peeking cuffs of my long-sleeved shirt under the raincoat to dry my face. “You think Tea made it back okay? I feel bad we couldn’t have lunch together. No, we could have—” my words whined at the end, “—and I said no.”

FOUR.

[ image id: a lighthouse on a rocky island besides a blue ocean against a cloudy sky. “Yes, I was scared all the time. It kept me Alive. It kept me in line” written in serif font towards the right / end id. ]

Why would they leave their heirlooms if they were so important? Haranza said.

“They were trying to get rid of them,” I said, “for a reason. What reason?” I asked for her. “I’ll think of one, couldn’t have been good, though.”

Yes, I was scared all the time. It kept me alive. It kept me in line. It made me smarter than the people who’d died in this house before I arrived. I didn’t fuck with the other residents that remained either because they were stuck or they chose to, I merely moulded myself into it.

FIVE.

Haranza kept pace with us. I always marvelled at her unreality out in the world, separate from the unreal house. She liked to walk behind me, like pretending to be a shadow would lessen the blow of laying eyes on her. Sometimes, I don’t know how, she latched onto my back. Standing with her back legs propped on my hip and her fore ones on my shoulder. Then I start to think: she stays behind me because there are things I just shouldn’t be privy too. I never felt her climb, she was simply suddenly there. Holding onto me with claws.

that’d be what i wrote last. this is a very blue project, i see it only in colours of blue and grey and black and white and brown. which is something that i have to change if i don’t want to exhaust the aesthetic before i even reach 10k words. i have to remember that just because i would shoot it with that colour palette if this was a movie, the real world doesn’t work like that and my characters are allowed to experience the full spectrum of the rainbow.

is that a weird struggle? too niche?? i’m very visual when it comes to my writing so just how something might look like could save a project for me lmao. it makes me excited for future scenes! orange and purple and pink sunsets, green afternoons, yellow mornings.

i think that’s it for now!