#systems out

We've been trying to make a graphic novel, but our disablities have interrupted that indefinitely. So, instead, we've decided to novelize it and release it in serial form! If we recover enough, or find a cartoonist to take over, we'll do the graphic novel later. The original script is still formatted for that.

We're done with the first chapter! It's seventeen pages in Word, but we've uploaded it to our wiki. This covers quite a bit more than was covered in the comic to date, and is a solid start to the story:

https://inmara.world/index.php?title=The_Sunspot_Chronicles

That link goes to the table of contents. Future posts will link to the individual chapters as we upload them.

We might also switch over to a Wordpress blog at some point.

To make it easier to read on a computer screen, you may wish to make the window narrower to give yourself a good line width. But we recommend reading it on a phone, really.

There may be illustrations and sketches there eventually.

We love neopronouns!

Or, as we call them, personalized pronouns. Or just pronouns.

Pronouns are really just conjugated placeholders for names.

In most languages, they also are coded to convey gender, but they really shouldn't.

Thanks to neurodiversity, people of any gender can identify with and need any pronoun. Women can be he/him. Men can be she/her. And enbies are here in part to remind all of us that anybody can have any pronoun.

And the expansive list of neopronouns becomes a powerful tool for both accommodating gendered trauma and for help people degender pronouns in general.

Using them is good for our cultures, and for people in need.

For this reason, we are working hard to normalize neopronouns by using them in our fiction.

Our series, the Sunspot Chronicles, which include Systems' Out! and the Story of Ni'a, doesn't use "he" or "she". Those words just aren't in the language.

In fact, gender itself is such a personal thing in the world's culture that there are no common words for it and no one talks about it outside of vague comments about personal feelings of identity.

When a child is born, they are refered to as "Student of [Tutor's name]" and given the pronoun "they/them". And whenever they feel the need to, they are allowed to choose a name and a pronoun, whatever feels right to them.

This is based on ideals shared by many transgender and non-binary people, as we've talked about them in countless forums and comment sections.

It's a lot of fun to write and feels good.

We've read other stories that use neopronouns a lot, and we really enjoyed them.

It does add a bit of extra work for anyone to read it, until readers are used to the pronouns, but that's part of the point. Eventually it will be no more work than wrangling the rest of the language. Our brains will learn and adapt.

But we, the Inmara, are having an extra struggle in writing this story!

As we've mentioned in other posts (with an emphasis on "we"), we are a plural system. We are multiple consciousnesses in one (presumably) human body.

And we're the kind of system that creates a new system member for every person or character we meet or write about.

So, any time we write a story, the characters in that story are written by real, actual people who identify as them.

We consider ourselves improv actors, in a way. And because our existences are so strongly associated with names, and pronouns are basically extensions of names, an issue develops.

As system members, we each have our own pronoun. And we identify with it strongly in an involuntary subconscious way. We don't choose our pronouns, they choose us.

And most of us in our system have "they", "she", "he", or "it" for pronouns. Some of us do have neopronouns, including some we've made up in our constructed languages. But the vast majority are "she" and "they".

So, the actors who are playing the characters in the Sunspot Chronicles have selected the least hurtful neopronouns for those characters. But they still aren't the right pronouns.

Which means that we need to have a reference sheet next to us when we write.

And when we're tired or rushing things, our system members actual pronouns will slip through.

Also, we sometimes give the wrong neopronoun to the wrong character.

It takes a lot of work to find these typos. They hide from us, because our minds don't see them as errors.

But it's really important to us to fix them, because we need to be consistent for our readers.

So, if you catch such a typo, please, please, please send us a direct message about it. No need to apologize or explain. We'll be expecting it and very grateful.

We have dyslexic dysgraphia.

That's the thing where text swims and rearranges itself on the page. Words also come out of our fingertips all mangled up, and our brain doesn't see it happening.

Spelling and grammar checkers, especially the kind that underlines errors have been the best accommodation for us. It's even retrained our brain to function better, finding neural pathways around our glitches. But it still takes a lot of work to read and write clearly. And when we're tired, everything gets garbled and we don't notice it. The spell checkers aren't consistent, either.

So, we're also in the habit of rereading what we write and fixing errors days, weeks, or months after the fact.

So, if you're reading a simple post of ours, like this one, and see an error, please let it be. We don't need to waste time fixing every little thing. We'll probably get to it eventually anyway.

Though, if it mangles our meaning badly, do speak up.

But if you find a typo in our published fiction, any of our stories, and you feel so moved to send us a simple direction of where to find it, we would be SO grateful!

The time share nature of our brain has always been evident with the quarterly and yearly shifts in our skills and hobbies.

It's so frustrating sometimes. We'll wake up and have lost our ability to draw or to write the way we were able the day before.

Or, we'll suddenly stop doing a thing we were working on every week and not notice that routine is just gone until months later we get this intense feeling that we're letting people down and failing at something, and we won't be able to figure out what's missing until we go through all the archives of our various work.

Even in burnout with no job we collect projects:

- our headmate portraits

- the comic version of Systems' Out!

- our novels

 - our conlangs

- our system wiki

- our audiobook version of our novels

- goofing about with Reason

- Minecraft

Most of these are related, but they require different skills, and different crew members. They require different sets of memories. And right now, NONE of those crews are fully awake and ready to get back to work. We're all on sabbatical or something right now, soaking up TV shows and movies, because we can finally watch and follow them again and it feels so good to be able to remember a plot for two hours straight and actually focus on the screen that whole time.

Here is a completely non-spoilery excerpt from our story, Systems’ Out! It’s not the most graceful of the story’s paragraphs, and we’ll probably revise it further later, but we’re proud of this description anyway.

The premise is that while humanity is still called “humanity” by the people, they have all been the subject of guided evolutionary experimentations for so long, with records of their origins expunged, that no one has any clue what humans used to look like. But they live in a world with naturally evolved descendents of Earth fauna:

Tetcha’s frame was probably closer to humanity’s nearest genetic relatives, primates, than most Passengers exhibited. Morde often wondered how close it was to humanity’s origins, but dismissed such speculation as unprovable. Most primates had tails like Tetcha did, though, but Tetcha’s was different. It was useful primarily for quick shifts in lateral balance when Tetcha was leaning forward in a sprint, and it was lined with a thin, long ridge of dark brown fur along the top and bottom of it, like a fin. Tetcha’s skin was covered with a fine, short tawny colored fur, with naked pads on the tips of xyr digits and the palms and bottoms of xyr feet. Xe tended to wear sandals to accommodate thick nearly claw-like toenails, trousers specially tailored to accommodate xyr tail, a t-shirt, and a blazer. Xe liked xyr clothes and had quite a wardrobe. Xe kept the sturdy nails of xyr hands neatly trimmed so that xe could work with finer crafts, but just long enough to assist with prying things open. And the features of xyr face had a vaguely bovine cast to them, or perhaps it was caprine, covered with that same fur that coated the rest of xyr body, with golden eyes and a nose with slits for nostrils. Xe had six barbels bracketing xyr face, though, stretching out to either side behind each eye. They lay between xyr long pointed ears and the two ornate, layered hornes that grew from xyr forehead and swept back quickly and curled up at the tips. The top, back, and sides of xyr head were covered with the same dark brown fur that xyr tail sported, about as long, too. Xe could raise it when alarmed or emotional in other ways. Or lie it completely flat when trying to be small and unnoticeable, such as when xe was embarrassed. It was about half way up right now, but kept dipping breifly. Xyr brown lips quivered as xe considered saying something, and xe gathered xyr satchel to xyrself for comfort as if it were a Furry Fauna.

You can get up to date on the story here:

https://inmara.world/index.php?title=The_Sunspot_Chronicles

Metabang just wrote a much, much better beginning to Chapter 6. We'll be updating the chapter with it after Metabang has also worked on the other trouble parts of the piece, but even if you haven't read any of the novel this is pretty good we think (though we haven't hunted it for typos yet). And safe to read, no spoilers:

In case you haven't yet taken the time to enjoy it, the sun emergence is definitely worth beholding. If you happen to live in the aft coastal regions, as the Pembers and their friends did, it will have a distinctly different character than if you live forward of the mountaint. If you have a good view of the water, you will get to see the entire ring of the sea light up and glow with sunlight before the land you are on is fully illuminated.

The terminator appears near the base of the Aft Endcap, so that the whole Endcap and a ring of ocean around it are slowly lit up by the growing sun. You will be able to watch the unbelievably huge machine that is the Endcap begin to glow with a dark red and grow in brilliance to the ruddy gold of full daylight. Then, as the sun begins to move aftward out of its magnetic womb, it's light spills out further into the Garden from the hole in the Forward Endcap where it begins. That edge of darkness moves quickly. Looking up, you can watch it march forward across water, then land, forests, hills, mountains with glaciers, then plains and deserts. City lights across the cylinder from you fade out as dailight reaches them. But as more and more of the interior is lit, the reflected light illumates the darker areas too, so the area around you grows in radiance gradually.

If you look at the Forward Endcap before the terminator passes you, you'll see the sun's light reflected off the interior rings of its womb. You can look at that directly without damaging your eyes, and you will see it as a small disc in the sky. In the beginning of the process, you can watch it turn on ever so faintly like a lamp switched on, then brighten gradually as the sun is fed more hydrogen and brought up to temperature.

Once the terminator passes you, the sun will suddenly be in direct line of sight to you and the glare can damage your retinas. It is best not to directly look at it then, if you have retinas.

You can read what's done of the book from here:

Quick character portraits for our novel, Systems' Out!

Three chapters are already up and readable here:

https://inmara.world/index.php?title=The_Sunspot_Chronicles

We don't have a set schedule, but we're autistically superfocusing on it and getting a chapter done every other day or so.

The dialogue is already scripted out, as it was originally meant for a webcomic, we're just filling in the narration and doing minor edits to the story as we go.

So you shouldn't have to go too long to wait for the next chapter.