Author: ariaaers

Featured

Act One/One Act

Hi, you made it. I’m so glad you’re here. Things are scary right now, and no doubt they’re going to get worse before they get better, but there’s one really important thing I need you to know first.

We need you.

More specifically, I need you. I need to know I live in a world where there are other people who are scared, who don’t know what to do and don’t think they have anything of value to offer but they’re still trying their best (and yes, you are doing your best even if your brain is shouting the exact opposite at you).

It’s not one static level of performance, it fluctuates because your life fluctuates. Some days waking up and breathing is a victory, and I need you to count those little victories up with the big ones, because little victories is what it’s going to take to get through this.

I want you to do me a favor. Give yourself one act of kindness, right now. It doesn’t have to be big.
Take a breath and focus on blowing out one long exhale. You can stretch, drink some water, get up and move from the chair or bed if you’ve been doomscrolling, find one beautiful thing around you, have a delightful snack, make yourself a cup of something warm and cozy, or, if you can, change your clothes and put on something warm and cozy.

How did it feel?

Congratulations, now you’ve got one small victory under your belt. Now imagine all the friends and allies you hope to find, think about them having little victories of their own too. Of taking the unknown chaos of the day and finding one small moment to stop and change the narrative.

This is your resistance. They want you scared and exhausted, unable to think or do anything but obey. They are big, but we are many, and those many tiny victories will add up, I promise.

NaNoWriMo, eBooks, and Permission Slips

Welcome to November, the time honored month where every writer suddenly feels painfully behind on whatever their project is (myself included). Everything feels daunting, the air is colder, the days are getting shorter. Family holidays and the rising tide of compulsory gift giving capitalism are sneaking up on you, and you’re pushing yourself as best as you can.

It’s a lot, and I’m here to tell you that you are indeed doing your best, and your best is always enough, no matter what anyone else tells you. 

I ended October with a delightful bout of COVID (my second one within 6 months after 3 years of not catching it, so please be careful at those family gatherings) and while quarantined from my family, and unable to do 80% of my normal daily household responsibilities, I had a lot of time on my hands. When I wasn’t feverish and my brain was actually working, I discovered a fascinating ebook genre: Sentient Object Romance.

Some of these books were 71 pages, and some of these were even shorter, including a 13 page masterwork involving Pumpkin Spice Lattes in dubious places. The average Kindle page is 250 words, meaning that a set publishable length can be under 18 thousand words.

I checked further, what about sapphic wlw romance in general? I found some that were 100k words, but there were almost as many coming in around 76 pages.

As someone who started reading fantasy written by Brandon Sanderson, George R. R. Martin and Patrick Rothfuss, this was mind blowing for me.

Yes, this is no magnum opus, and is likely classified closer to a novella, but for someone like me who is constantly fighting their dopamine seeking ADHD brain, a 40 hour work week, and parenting in the homework grade levels, it was a permission slip.

Permission to write something that didn’t need to be so long that it took years of my life, that didn’t need to jump out at a slush pile reading intern, it didn’t even need to be perfect. I looked at some samples and honestly I’ve seen fanfiction that was better beta’d and edited than some of these ebooks. I watched the author’s timeline waffle in the opening chapters, or have sudden POV shifts from tight third to omniscient, or even leftover pronouns from shifting first to third person. 

I sat there, and looked at these samples, and for the first time in my life I thought to myself, I can do better than that, so why aren’t I?

Cue 10 thousand words written in a quarantine induced flurry, of stuffing my inner perfectionist editor into a closet and going, “We can fix this later.” The absolute unfettered freedom of being able to write multiple chapters alone and going back to just add in a line of foreshadowing. In the realm of fanfiction you’ve got to have it perfect chapter by chapter, foreshadowing on instinct and the slim hope that you can keep your entire plotline in your brain across the multiple months or years it will take to get your gigantic fic (or 125k+ novel) to completion.

There’s a Voltaire quote that says, “Perfect is the enemy of good,” and I’d like to say that perfect is also the enemy of good enough, that you are good enough. 

I’m currently writing a seemingly self indulgent hair washing scene in a historical fiction hurt/comfort storyline. I went to check the stats to see if it really was as self indulgent as I thought it to be. Guess what? I discovered 20% of historical romantic fiction involves hurt/comfort, and furthermore there were no less than five books that included a hair washing scene.

Your words are good enough. That thing inside you banging at the gates to get out on the page? It’s good enough. You are good enough, and here is my permission slip for you to make the thing.

I can’t wait to see what you come up with.

Featured

Spiritual Toe Dipping, Pt 1 of 2

Or How Dionysus Shoulder Tapped Me

Lastly, and most importantly, thank you to Dionysus. Life has been much stranger since I invited you inside.

Sophie Strand, The Flowering Wand

I have spent a very long time being a lapsed Pagan: Falling off the sabbat wagon, letting monotheistic epithets sneak into my lexicon, letting our child periodically destroy the altar space, tucked away as it was on a pull out keyboard tray. I did not expect a random chunk of polished amethyst to both re-establish my entire spiritual practice and then lead me into personal beef with fifth dimensional parole officers.

Let me start at the beginning. I grew up in a house where both my older sister and mother were in the same coven. It was not unusual for me to pull back a curtain and see warding pentagrams drawn on the windowsills. We had an extraordinarily robust lavender bush that I was not allowed to cut under any circumstances, and my daily experiences included the smokey incense flavor of the month wafting through the house or walking in on my sister talking to a jar of moon water. This was my life and my prized possessions as a pre teen were a tiny leather pouch of rocks (Botswana banded agate, amethyst, malachite and falcon’s eye) that would live under my pillow, a bag of terra cotta runestones, and the pentacle medallion I got stamped at my first Renaissance Faire.

Insert a vicious divorce, high school, a long bout with depression, a desperate need to leave home and escape to any college that would take me, and a long stint with poverty.

Eventually I came out the other side with a fantastic partner and a residency in a multigenerational household in the suburbs, complete with a rescued pit bull that I adored, even after she ate the aforementioned leather pouch and those prized stones and waning spirituality vanished from my life completely. Or so I thought.

Fast forward to becoming a parent, a Saturn return I didn’t even know was a thing until I was far beyond it, and a blue collar career path after going to college for a pre-med degree.
Now throw in the Pandemic and reconstructing sixty percent of a fifty year old house during lockdown while seven adults, a dog, and a five year old were living in it. The detritus of our lives and the two generations preceding it were rapidly cleared from affected rooms, tucked away, reshuffled, and then crammed into every shelf, corner, and flat surface available to us.

COVID raged and as an immunocompromised essential worker I kept my head down and my mask up and hoped every day I wouldn’t be the one to bring home the virus and infect our family pod. Vaccines rolled out, the construction finished, and I began a sourdough culture free semblance of life.

It was fairly empty facsimile. I realized my friends had all been inherited from activities with my wife and that I myself had not acquired a new friend of my own in….
Years, it had been years, and my very dear internet pen pal had been lost in a flurry of 5G paranoia and tinfoil hats as my five years of daily emails transformed into empty, aching silence.

So I did what any lonely queer person would do, I turned to fanfiction.

Sweet sweet hyperfixations, I have not tasted thee since A Dance with Dragons fell from the nearest Barnes and Noble (because in 2014 Amazon had not yet become the monopoly it is today and we weren’t smart enough to understand how important it was to always buy from local independent bookstores, or local independent anything, for that matter…). Nothing had touched the razed earth ground of my fandom soul since the travesty of Game of Thrones Season 8, and then came Motherland: Fort Salem.

Witches with deep, lore heavy world building and alternate US military history? Sign me TF up.
And that was before I knew it was queer.

It kept me rivetted, and deep in the bowels of our collective lockdown trauma, it gave me back my words.

Those words gave me a community, a community of likeminded neurodivergent genderqueer weirdos (most of that likeminded-ness I have just figured out for myself in the last year, thank you, Discord and Betterhelp).

And it just so happened that these weirdos like to pull Tarot cards…

Review: The Priory of the Orange Tree

8.5 out of 10

So I’m not entirely sure how I Amazon click stumbled onto Samantha Shannon’s, The Priory of the Orange Tree, but I’m very glad that I did.

It’s a one book, self contained epic fantasy with very strong queer and feminist overtones with fully fleshed out characters, including characters of color with their very own plotlines and no sidekick tropes.

Yet the fight against the status quo for queer love is not the centerpiece for this tale. No, it is far more epic than that, and Shannon gives us not just one but two distinct groups of dragons (yes, dragons) with multiple subtypes and a menagerie of draconic creatures to inhabit this world. When the cover image scene hit on my commute home, I was glued to my seat until it finished, which happened to be ten additional minutes in my driveway with the engine off, but it was really that riveting.

The worldbuilding itself is lush in Act 1, and the individual chapters of character viewpoints are divided across the East and West continents of the world. She does a great job of making storylines and characters collide unexpectedly, and oh what characters they are. I find myself with a soft spot for grumpy gay alchemist Niclays Roos, and loved it every time his POV or character showed up in a plotline. This seemed odd, since there is one queer female canon relationship and one other that is implied, but I found myself rooting the most for Niclays out of everyone.

I listened to the Audible version and Liyah Summers does a fantastic job with the character voices and making the world of the Priory come alive off the pages. That said, a friend of mine picked up the hardcover edition and it seems large enough to use as a self defense object or a weapon to annihilate small mammals. It is, however, 26 hours on Audible and I believe one of Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive books clocks in at 55 hours on Oathbringer, so size is relative when it comes to epic fantasy.

Now for the Cons:

Act 2 was slow, gruelingly slow, with no real foreshadowing. One of the characters has depression, which makes for a more realistic character, but is exhausting to read on the page and makes for a very inactive storyline. This act was also riddled with random worldbuilding stories and anecdotes that were only relevant so that a character could make an idiom. My biggest gripe was with the introduction of the ichneumon, which is a bear sized mongoose (yes, a gigantic mongoose) which characters can ride upon. This would have been AWESOME to figure out as a reader, if the Mother that slayed the first, most evil dragon called The Nameless One that we heard so much about (and really, there were multiple versions of this tale in Act 1) had been mentioned riding a gigantic mongoose across the desert, I would have been salivating in wait to point at an upcoming part of the story and say “OMG! There’s the giant mongoose!”

I never got the chance. When the ichneumon showed up, we got a description of a bear sized mongoose and then the story of how they fit into the world, which showed up as an info dump that broke the tension of that particular plotline. The rest of Act 2 was like that, with the reader unable to figure out any puzzles because they were given none of the pieces and then just handed the whole picture. Luckily Shannon ramped it back up and the Act 1 foreshadowing and Act 2 info dumping actually made for some pretty good reveals in Act 3 that really kept me engaged. 

Overall, for how much of an epic fantasy world she crammed into this book, I’m shocked Shannon managed to pull off as much plot and character arc fulfilments as she did. It’s a fantastic read, and it has its weak points, as any work does, but I wouldn’t have missed it for the world, literally.

Final Score: 8.5 out of 10, I just couldn’t get over the frustration of the Act 2 foreshadowing, but the rest of the book is as good as the genre gets for all of us that cheer for queer fantasy characters.