During the eight years I lived in Wyoming, it snowed at some point during every single calendar month. June or July might’ve just gotten a few flakes here or there, but it happened.
I can’t say that I necessarily miss it, but there’s a certain comfort in experiencing the full range of weather options in a region. The electricity going out, the water well pipe freezing, the propane line freezing, and being unable to open the door because of the snow piled against it wasn’t the best, but there were good times in there, too.
Here in lovely North Texas, we are getting a winter. It’s only going to last a few days, but it did come with some actual snow.
Rumor has it we could get as much as eight to twelve inches of the actual fluffy white stuff before the end of it. We told Daniel’s attendant to stay home today (plus, her kid is hopefully staying home from school) because while snow isn’t that big of a deal in general, it’s such a novelty to Texans that I don’t trust anyone to go out driving in it. Plus, we’re dancing around temperatures that are just above and then just below freezing, and that’s a recipe for icy roads.
But look, a story!
I don’t know if it’s the ADHD or the autism or the vague attempt at common sense that has my mind jumping around, trying to prioritize which story over what. Remember I was talking about Paper Cuts and how much research and love is going into that? I hit a brick wall during one of the chapters with a nearly existential “why the hell am I writing this?” moment. I think it was supposed to be “why am I writing this chapter, and what kind of ethos is it leaning on”, but it interrupted the whole process. So, now I need to make a flowchart again to reconfigure the purpose of each of the stories so that they flow together in a cohesive way.
Well, there’s no better way to procrastinate on one project than to focus on a different project that you’ve also been procrastinating on.
I dusted off “Lost Ground”, the first story in All the Moons of Petrichor, about the colony ship that goes adrift during its journey. Since the first draft a few years ago, I made some significant changes to the cast and crew, changing up the gender distribution, fleshing out the culture, and completely rewriting one of the main characters from being a twitchy old het guy with commitment issues to a serene, ageless intersex enby with a robust polycule. When I sat and really thought about the kinds of people who would be managing end-of-life care in the idealized future, it definitely wasn’t the socially normative default we’ve got now.
And, I really do want to normalize non-normative individuals and relationships in my writing. If you’ve read Volume 1 of Thiside of Anywhere, in the story “Lucky Sevens”, there’s a very happy little triad right there, and the story that spans “Dressed to the Nines” and “Twenty-Two and Holding” shows an entire culture centered around polyandrous mating. “A First Date”, “Twenty Six Letters”, and “Thirty Is the New Twenty” all have queer characters, and none of them die. And it’s not a big deal.
I would love to live in a world where being queer or strange or ace or polyam or whatever is just not a big deal.
So, in the world of Petrichor, I’m imagining a society advanced enough that mothers who choose to remain single are totally fine, and queer couples using surrogates to make kids is absolutely normal. The enby Director of Reclamation (the death services division on the ship) is biologically intersex and has already sired a few children before the arc of the story begins, and when they reach the point where they feel their responsibilities can be managed by others, they want to carry a child maternally. Medical science doesn’t discriminate and actually understands non-normative-male bodies.
Because even though everything is on fire and collapsing at a nearly exponential rate, maybe we can write into being the future that we want.
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