#writing flails

BUT

THE BOOK

I am 90% done with the first draft of my book

Holy fucking shit y'all I have never made this much progress on such a large project in my life. I really genuinely think I'm gonna finish this thing!

I use he/him for both, but neither Space nor Ventro are male. They’re aliens; their genders are alien.

Ventro’s gender is drone, and he’s trans. What that means is that he was hatched and raised a soldier, and is soldier-sized, but his gender identity (and, now, hormones) is the small, brightly colored interitrask caste that carries eggs in their bodies until those eggs are fertilized and the shells have hardened.

Space’s gender is nonexistant, and his species is unisex. His social role is non-parenting grunt worker; if he ever became a parent, a leader, a teacher, or someone who held community life and death in their hands (doctor, clergy, mortician, farmer, environmental support systems engineer, sanitation worker, etc.), his social status and pronouns would change.

All of which is to say that I could change their English pronouns to she/her without changing a single other thing about the book,

And that this would absolutely change the vibe of the book for many English-speaking readers (including myself tbh let’s not pretend I’m immune to subconscious influence),

It’s certainly given me Clemcy thoughts. Namely, it’s made me realize I need to think about something that’s actually rather character-defining:

On the precipice of his first soul-split, did Clemcy know he was selling himself into service, or did he expect half his soul to meet oblivion? I could certainly see the potential for ambiguity, negotiating with an extradimensional alien entity as he was. 

Either way, the two parts of his soul do eventually cross paths once more. I’ve been pondering what that first conversation with himself might have been like.

So! Has anyone had the experience of feeling compelled to perform certain relationship styles, and if so would you be open to talking about that experience a bit? Could be anything from just feeling like you needed to pretend to have crushes all the way to actually entering relationships that weren’t right for you.

A lot of my alien character designs tend to be nude mostly because I have very little patience for (or skill with) clothing design 😂

BUT

Realistically: Ventro should have clothes most of the time, and I need to get around to designing both what that looks like and what potential nudity taboos his culture might have.

I think most tellurian cultures wouldn’t have any kind of nudity taboo, but would probably still wear clothing a little more often than I’ve so far depicted.

I think one part of how Ithadel has managed to stay so isolated for so long is that… at his emotional core, he simply cannot accept that someone else might find it fulfilling to be able to do something nice for him.

I don’t think he can even fully accept the notion that someone else might find it pleasant to know that he likes something about them.

And that’s kind of a hurtful thing!

ii/iir/sier/siers/sierself

The vowel sound is "ee" as in "meet." (That would be "i" by IPA notation.)

Subjective: ii. "I think ii is a fun person."

Objective: iir. "I saw iir at the party last night."

Possessive determiner: sier. "It's not sier fault we got lost."

Possessive pronoun: siers. "That scarf is siers."

And then I'm still sliiightly undecided on the last form:

Reflexive: iirself. "Ii is at peace with iirself."

Alt reflexive: sierself. “Ii is at peace with sierself.”