(Part the Second)

A couple months ago—maybe a year ago? heck I can’t remember off the top of my head—I made a post about a novel project I was working on with an autistic 11yo girl, asking about the way y’all behaved as 4th/5th graders, since my memory is a little patchy and heavily influenced by the haze of Unconscious Passing. A couple of you answered, and it was really super helpful!

I’m still working on that project, and I noticed that in the last couple chapters, my little character has been drawing into herself, kind of teetering on the edge of shutdown. She’s got other kids around her that are doing their best to be helpful and keep her grounded, but her best friend just disappeared and she thought it was her fault and a lot of the supports she relied on are shifting and she’s just really out of her element. Which, honestly I don’t blame her for the shutdown.

(It doesn’t help that that’s one of the parts of the autistic experience that I’m most familiar with. I’m hyper-empathetic, but I’m also alexithymic, so I feel lots of unidentifiable emotions outside of myself, but my interior emotions are kind of hazy, especially when I get overwhelmed. I tend to default to neutral-to-negative, unless there’s a specific positive stimuli that I react to automatically.)

However, my little character is still the protagonist of this story, and as such, she kind of has to do some protag-ing at some point. Preferably sooner than later. I want her to have agency, and even the barest amount of control in a situation that is way beyond her comfort zone. I want to make sure she experiences a full range of emotion, positive neutral and negative alike. Even in the face of this shutdown, it is incredibly important—even vital—to her to look for and find her friend, and the stakes only raise as the story goes on. The pull to DO SOMETHING needs to be stronger than her desire to curl up in a ball and let the world move on without her for a bit, but I’m having a bit of a time with that.

So, my question: When y’all find yourself in a haze/near a shutdown, but there’s something important to you that you need to do, what do you do to exert some amount of control and move toward your goal? What do you do to make decisions, big or small, when your executive function has checked out because of overwhelm? Bonus points for things you did as a kid.

And if you can’t think of anything you DO do, is there anything that would be comforting or reassuring, both for young!you and current!you, to see in a story with an autistic character? She’s still young, and hasn’t had any professional therapy or anything (yay fantasy novels!), and so her coping strategies will probably start out shaky and not always work, but they’d grow and be more successful and she’d become more confident in them as the story progresses.

If you can’t think of anything, I’d appreciate a simple reblog just to get this in front of a few more people on the chance that somebody somewhere has some thought or another. I’m okay with NT people reblogging for the same reason.

So I commissioned @rubbersoles19 for this lovely piece of art as a birthday present for my sister @nikkilbook and as today is Nikki's birthday I can post it now! It turned out super awesome! The people are 3 of Nikki's original characters from her writing, and the quote is something she says frequently in her One More Day of Productivity posts on her side blog @a-blrofonesown

She wasn't doing so great a few weeks ago and I wanted to give her something that would help her through the rough patches.

Hey everyone! I think I mentioned earlier that I took a creative writing class this semester that was specifically for Young Adult and Middle Grade novels. We had our finals today, and it was to read four minutes from any part of the manuscript. I had a classmate record me since I had a couple friends who couldn’t make it, and I thought I share it with you! If you’re interested in reading more about these characters, you can find the WIP here.

Transcript under the cut, and there are captions for anyone who needs them! 

The final project for my character design class is to put together a portfolio page of some of the related art we’ve worked on throughout the class. I chose to do a page dedicated to art from the world of my story GOBLIN MARKET, or, as it’s recently been rebranded, SEVEN FOR A SECRET.

This is just the dummy page, to try and figure out the layout and which pieces to include. I’m going to be spreading my time between each of these projects and I’ll be updating this portfolio page as I go along. It’ll be really neat to see it all come together. :)

Hey, dudes! So, I spent all of last week at a freaking awesome writing workshop where I got to work with some amazing people on the middle grade novel I’ve been working on since last fall. (This is the story that the shepherd boy I’ve been drawing over and over is from.) I have the first act of the story all written out, but I’m currently working on building myself a roadmap to help me get from here to the end of the novel in one piece.

While I’m working that out, I thought it would be cool to post that first act on my Wordpress account. I’ve always enjoyed having readers/cheerleaders along for the ride—it’s what helped me finish my first novel back when I was in high school. I’ve got the chapters of the first act scheduled to post once a week from now until like mid-August or something. Once we get to the end of the first act, I’m going to switch over to a site called BetaBooks, which is a service specifically designed for getting feedback on novels-in-progress without plastering the draft all over the internet where anyone can see it. You can only see the draft if I give you an invite, so it functions similar to sharing a Google Doc, except I hate Google Docs with every fiber of my being.

Anyway, this is SEVEN FOR A SECRET, a middle grade novel about Siobhra, a young girl who lives on the moors near a goblin market and a mysterious stone circle. Though there are many rules that govern the lives of human, goblin, and changeling alike, not one of them seem to apply to Siobhra, and she has no idea where she is supposed to fit. After she meets a dark, chaotic man in the circle, children start to go missing from the market and the village around her. With her closest friends gone or out of reach, Siobhra doesn’t know who to turn to or who to trust, and has to decide whether or not to take a dangerous deal to finally make sense of the world around her.

(Let me know if you want to be added to the tag list for this!)

Thanks so much for the ask!

🖤: Well, there are a bunch. For all my other projects, I’ll just link to this, but for my current project (GOBLIN MARKET, middle grade fantasy), we have:

Siobhra, our main character. She’s an anxious little bean who likes to visit the goblin mound and the mysterious stone circle near her village in the moors. She doesn’t seem to fit anywhere, and this upsets her. She is one of the fosters of the hall, and never knew her parents. (Also, she is autistic! She’s my baby.)

Modhl, Siobhra’s best friend. She’s a changeling that lives in the village, but she often misses the market.

Apple Core, a young goblin boy that Siobhra likes to talk to. He helped her come up with a kind of sign language for when she can’t talk.

Aidan, a shepherd boy who lives in the village, and Aisling’s twin. Knows his way around the rules of the market and the moors. Very protective of his friends.

Aisling, a shepherd girl who lives in the village, and Aidan’s twin. Quick to empathize with others and very protective.

Warp, a young goblin girl who was close to Modhl before she was placed above ground.

Liadan, a young human girl who was swapped for a goblin three human generations ago. She’s very clever and likes to try and game the system of rules that control the market.

Momma Weaver, a old goblin woman who watches out for Siobhra and tries to figure out why the deals of the market don’t seem to work on Siobhra.

The Lady, an ethereal woman who lives in the stone circle. She cares for Siobhra, and her circle is one of the only places where Siobhra feels completely safe and like she can be herself.

The Quiet Man, a strange man who appeared in the Lady’s circle a few days ago. He seems familiar, but Siobhra doesn’t know why.

💘: (Ooh, this is like pulling teeth—aaaah!)

Siobhra isn’t human. She is part Tuatha and part Femorian. Only two people know this, and Siobhra is not one of them.

I was also in a Destiny server until recently, the people on there were considerably more chill but my friend said that Cayde was “poorly written” (Which to be fair, he was, just as much as many of the characters are.) and the mod got so upset I thought she was gonna ban him on the spot. She obviously didn’t but boy were tensions high.