Category: Uncategorized

What it says in the title: the opening of Wishbone is available for free on TheoReads, if you’ve been wondering if the book would interest you. More soon!

Are you interested in reading the sequel to Wishbone, Names of My Beloved? The book is being serialized on my Patreon. You can now use the discount code DD75A for 60% off your first month. This discount is good through December 20, 2024.

Answer: He’s eighteen at the start of his eponymous novel.

Why? Because characters in erotica are supposed to be eighteen and up. Except in Nebraska and, I think Alabama, where they must be nineteen. Presumably fictional characters are completely asexual until they get close to eighteen, at which point they, I dunno, sprout genitals?

But the main character of Kushel’s Dart is old enough to be initiated into sacred prostitution the moment she turns sixteen. Why? Because Kushiel’s Dart is not shelved with the erotica. It’s fantasy. No, this doesn’t make a bit of sense. Certainly there exists erotica with younger protagonists. And sometimes there is trouble over it. There was a huge kerfuffle many years ago on LiveJournal over erotic Harry Potter fan fiction. Yes, someone went and deleted a bunch of blogs about fictional characters to protect real children.

Furthermore, fiction with gay characters will be scrutinized in ways that fiction with purely straight characters is not. If you don’t believe me, you’ve never struggled with Amazon “dungeoning” your books, even books that are not erotica, because they have queer characters. The bots that look for questionable content automatically categorize the love that dare not speak its name as, well, unspeakable.

Most authors know about this, but readers do not. Thus if you read the reviews of Wishbone, you may see people assuming that Wishbone is thirteen and being disturbed by this. I don’t blame them.

So why didn’t I come out and say that Wishbone is eighteen?

Because it feels really awkward to write, “Once there was a character who was eighteen.”

In real-world fiction it’s easy to handle this. A character is either old enough to drink legally (twenty-one in the US), or isn’t and has a fake ID. Or there are other cultural markers, like whether the character has attended or finished college.

In a secondary pre-industrial world, someone’s exact age isn’t important. They’re either functionally an adult–working for a living and capable of reproducing–or they’re not. They’re going to be married off as soon as there is a possibility of them having children. By the way, did you know that puberty for women is controlled in part by body fat? In a world without fast food, accumulating enough body fat to support ovulation is a huge struggle and takes longer. A woman is unlikely to get pregnant before she’s sixteen or so.

Wishbone was functionally an adult at thirteen or fourteen. He looks young for his age due to hard living and lack of regular meals, and is working in a profession where looking younger is a marketing feature. On top of this, he has lost track of his age because the number is not relevant, and because calendars are things that only rich people with secretaries use.

You can see me attempting to address this in Names of My Beloved. How’d I do?

I don’t travel well (except inside my own head). All of my writing is done sitting at my desk in front of a 2020 vintage iMac with a 27″ screen. The large screen allows me to use large fonts so I can still write even with the blurred vision and negative scotomata that are facts of life for me.

I type using a Kinesis Freestyle 2 Mac split keyboard and sit on an extremely decayed Aeron chair.

For writing software I use Scrivener, which is excellent for my pantser-style writing process. I don’t write character sketches. I keep files of quotes that I imagine characters saying and build the scenes where these quotes would be said.

I also use LibreOffice, especially for final formatting. In a few cases I’ve used Sigil, a free ebook editing application, to tweak an existing ebook.

As I said, I’m a pantser, not a planner. I was the kind of schoolkid who wrote the essay first and then wrote the outline because the assignment demanded it, not because it was going to help me write. Writing for me is largely a subconscious process where I have to fold away my thinking brain and connect my messy back-brain to my fingers and let the ideas flow out.

I have a cat who tries to help me write but isn’t all that good at it. She is very furry, though.