There is now a simple online guestbook where you may share memories and stories of Corey Alexander. You will find it here. 

I am hosting the link here so that we may have something a little more permanent than social media. It is nothing fancy, in truth, but it is what I found that was free, did not make claims to any content posted, or demand information I either did not want to input, or did not have at all. 

Regardless, it is less the format than the content that matters. Please click through to read and share, and thank you in advance. 

With love,

Claudie

It has certainly been a while since any official news have come from me. I’d love to act like it was all meant to cultivate a mysterious aura around all my awesome projects, but truly, “is this happening at all?” isn’t exactly the aura I’d aim for! 2019 has been a strange year for me. I have been well, for the most part! I have, however, stepped back from a lot of my current creative project, to do something different and unrelated, which has done wonders to replenish the well, so to speak. Where does that leave everything?

Common Bonds
The Common Bonds team (myself included) are hard at work on the anthology. We will have official news for you in a near future, so that’s all I’ll say for now!

Snowstorm & Overgrowth
My small collection of short stories is almost ready to go! It is, however, not among my priorities to finish it as of now. I’ll still publish it, but it’s unlikely to happen before 2021.

Isandor
And here is where the news get good! Once Common Bonds is out in this world, Isandor becomes my Number One priority. What I have been discussing as “Isandor3/City of Exile”, however, will be split into two novels. The series will thus contain four full-blown novels rather than three, and the next instalment of the series will be City of Torment. I (and my editor) strongly believe that this will allow the story to breathe as it should, and to continue showcasing the small quiet moments of friendships and discussions of queerness (particularly of asexuality and aromanticism) that make it so dear to my heart. Working my current plans into a single book would have meant cutting those, and I am not willing to do so.

Having written both drafts nearly hand in hand, however, means that there is a good chance I can have both books released in much faster succession than the gap between City of Betrayal and City of Torment. As I am still finding my way back into a more active professional writing life, I will keep official release dates to myself. I do, however, aim to have City of Torment out within a year.

The Aro/Ace Database and my recommendations pages
I have an enormous backlog of cool books to add to the database and people who have asked for the form. It’s awesome! But also, I am aware of how time consuming bringing the database up to date will be. I intend to start chipping at it a little every weekend, if only to keep the backlog from getting any bigger, but before, I want to update my recommendations with some marvelous books I’ve read.

In Conclusion
I’m back! I am in a really good place at the moment, especially with regards to my creative abilities. I’m eager to dive back into all of these projects, face their respective challenges, and keep learning. Here’s to a successful 2020, and perhaps even the following decade!

Below is the blurb, and if this sounds like your jam, you should buy it now!

Ciaan Gennett isn’t green, despite the brand of light hair that betrays her heritage: an Earth mother. A mother she remembers but doesn’t know, who left one day and never came back. Ciaan’s as metal as her home planet—cold and hard and full of so many cracks she’s trying to ignore that she doesn’t have time to wonder about questions that don’t get answers.

After one too many run-ins with the law, Ciaan finds herself sentenced to probation at a port facility and given an ultimatum: Prove that your potential is worth believing in. With help from her best friend Tidoris, Ciaan stays away from trouble—and trouble stays away from her. But when a routine refueling turns into a revelation, Ciaan and Tidoris find themselves forced into an alliance with an Earth captain of questionable morality and his stoic, artificially-grown first officer. Their escalating resistance against bureaucratic cover-ups begins unraveling a history of human monstrosity and an ugly truth that Ciaan isn’t so sure she wants to discover.

Now they all must decide how far they are willing to dig into humanity’s dark desperation—and what they are willing to do about what digs back.

Let’s start with some basics. Can you tell me a little about Orbit‘s main character? What do you and Ciaan have in common? In what ways is she completely different from you?

Ciaan holds a special place in my heart because she was the first original female character that I really committed to setting up as the main POV in a piece of long fiction.

Since all of us grow up under systems of structural political, economic, and social powers and disenfranchisements (with respect to the nuances of individual cultural backgrounds, mine being as a white American)—and those same systems dictate and influence things like mass media production and consumption, which is a core concept in the dialogues surrounding authentic representation—it follows that I grew up watching (and learning to identify with) white male protagonists, while simultaneously internalizing the misogyny bundled up with female “representation” (itself a false monolith with little attention paid to variations in experiences across racial, cultural, sexual orientation, gender, etc. identities). It makes sense, then, that I ultimately was left feeling completely uninterested in and uncompelled by female characters and their stories. Part of this, I’m coming to understand now, stemmed from my burgeoning genderqueerness and the ways in which I was (unknowingly) struggling for representation of that experience; but equal parts were my own internalized misogyny. Deciding to write Orbit (something that started more than a decade ago) was experimental in many aspects—an experiment on whether or not I could write a novel-length piece, an experiment on whether or not I could construct a cohesive world, etc.—but a primary part of that experimentation was addressing this question: can I write a female main character who I am compelled by, who is flawed and difficult and authentic in a way that I can stand behind, as her creator?

Though it was a fraught birthing process, the answer (in Ciaan) became yes.

I think that those are probably the best (and most succinct) descriptors I can use for her: flawed, difficult, authentic. Some people have said that they found her “unlikeable” which was interesting feedback for me, since I believe that many of the female characters we get in media (still, even those who are “strong”) are packaged to be palatable for mainstream audiences in a way that translates to marketable likeability. Female protagonists can be flawed, but they must be beautifully so—they can be frustrating, but only if they do sufficient penance for it before their narrative is resolved. Where cismale heroes get a great deal of leeway with their behavior and personality, female characters are still much more limited. That’s not to say that there aren’t “difficult” non-cismale characters being written, only that there continues to be pushback against them (much of it subconscious, which is something I find myself grappling with as well). Even as I was writing Ciaan, there were points when I had to stop from discomfort and concern that she was being too unreasonable or taking up too much space or not pulling everyone else’s emotional weight (all echoes of my own self-concerns). But I actively wrote against those instincts because I wanted to see if I could create a different type of character for myself, one who wasn’t so constrained by what is and isn’t acceptable from female characters.

Another stereotype about female main characters is that they are all idealized self-inserts for their (assumed female) authors—the “Mary Sue” false equivalency. I was hyper aware of that trope throughout Orbit’s creation and probably overcorrected myself in an effort to distance my personality from Ciaan’s personality. Where she is rash and reactive, I internalize and am overly cautious. Where she flies off the handle with her temper, I simmer to a boil. Where she is bitter and resentful of those who try to care for her, I take on far too much emotional labor.

Although, I see now that most of those delineations (and the defining traits I built her around) were flaws rather than strengths. I would hope that we share more of those: loyalty to those we love, resistance against injustices, and stubbornness in our convictions (even to reckless ends). As with every character I write, there is some of me in Ciaan—enough to be refracted back through the rest of her non-me facets. That helps me connect without blurring the line too far between what their story is and what my story is.

This all sounds like I think I broke some millennia-old mold with a revolutionary character; that’s not at all what I mean. It’s just that I can’t talk about Ciaan without giving this backstory for her genesis, as context for why I wrote her the way I did. She became a funnel for the things about myself that I felt (at the time, or even now) were unlovable—and worse, unlikeable—and though I wrote her somewhat specifically to be frustrating to myself, she ended up becoming something of a personal catharsis. I ended up liking her, not in spite of her flaws but because of them, which in turn gave me some hope for the potential likability of my own less-than-perfections.

Orbit‘s focus isn’t on romance at all (yay!). What are the most important relationships between your protagonists?

I have a lot of strong feelings about romance in non-romance genres, but I won’t bore you with them here! Suffice to say, I tend to find most secondary love plots (and especially love triangles) forced and one-dimensional, not because romance is inherently forced and one-dimensional but because I don’t feel like a secondary plotline allows enough time or development for a love story. I also tend to feel like—if, for example, you’re in the middle of a world-threatening dystopic event—you’d probably have more pressing matters on your mind than super-hot fellow rag-tag revolutionaries. But that is a reflection of how I experience romantic and sexual attraction, and I’d never want to yuck anyone else’s yum. Different strokes for different folks!

For me (and, I feel, a lot of other queer folks) some of the most compelling and emotional relationships to explore are those of found family. Whether or not any of those relationships are romantic/sexual, the overarching theme of finding people who—of their own volition, and not because they are “struck with you”—choose to love and accept and support you, even into world-threatening dystopic events, is a theme that drives almost all of my work. It is the fracturing of a “traditional” familial bond (Ciaan and her first mother) that directs most of Orbit’s central narrative, but the deeper story becomes one of how a disjointed group of hurting people can come become something more—both as a team, but also individually in their togetherness.

There were two specific common (and harmful) tropes that I tried to subvert here: that of best friends—particularly a cisfemale and a cismale—being either a cover for or a denial of secret romantic love, and that of the evil or villainous step-mother. A lot of these tropes’ toxicity lies in the incorrect assumptions of love hierarchies: that platonic love is lesser than romantic/sexual love, and that biological family ties are stronger or better than non-biological ties. Ciaan’s relationships with Tidoris and her second mother were set up not only to refute those assumptions but also to offer examples of what more complex alternatives could (and do) look like within narrative trappings.

So if someone wants to know “who do the main characters belong with?” the answer is simply: each other. All four of them bring different strengths and weaknesses to their group dynamic, and they all have distinctive relationships with one another that would be hurt by a division into pairs. They are better together, and together is where they belong.

Two of your four main characters are on the asexual spectrum, as you are. While it’s not explicit in Orbit, can you talk about ways your own aceness impacts how you write these characters?

At least two are; the others have not yet fully revealed themselves to me! I started writing Orbit before I realized that I was on the a-spectrum—before discussions about asexuality and aromanticism were really happening, even in queer spaces—and came back to edit it after I’d started working through those discussions with myself, so it was very interesting to go back in revisions and see where my not-yet-named aceness had already started to seep through the sentences.

Part of that subliminal aceness was undoubtedly my active resistance against explicit love plots. Even though I was already out as queer when I started writing the first draft, and even though I was already committed to making queerness central to my stories, I still didn’t want to write in explicit romantic relationships. I enjoy writing romances in, well, romances—but have no real interest in chopping them up and shoving them between the “real story” in my other genre works. (That’s the beautiful space for transformative fanwork!) So that ace-permeated mindset was already there when I started hammering out the story, but it wasn’t until I revisited it post-aceness that the specific impact that mindset had on my characters became evident.

The most obviously a-spectrum characters in Orbit are 1119 and Tidoris, which make sense since they are also the characters with whom I share the most similar emotional internalities, but even there I struggle with the discomfort of ace stereotypes and trying not to feed into them. Is Tidoris—easily the nerdiest of the main four—ace-coded because nerds in media are desexualized in general? Is the emotional disconnect that 1119 (and all Artificials) experience from Earth humanity something that also disconnects them from their sexuality? Desexual, robotic, cold, inhuman—these are all poisonous stereotypes that plague people’s perceptions of asexuality and aromanticism; am I perpetuating them through my own internalized aphobia?

I hope not. I believe not. Though these characters may—at least in the beginning—seem like they could fall into those stereotype traps, part of their journeys and revelations are the stripping away of those assumptions to expose who they (and Ciaan and Mael) truly are. Tidoris is not awkwardly desexual, 1119 is not robotic and cold; they are both warm and vibrant and complicated characters, capable of deep and fiery love that is not lesser for not being primarily motivated by romantic and/or sexual attraction.

That said, there are definitely undertones that can be read as romantic and/or sexual in Orbit, and I absolutely encourage readers to engage with and explore those too, if they want!

I’m always fascinated by the changes a novel undergoes between first draft and final. Without spoiling it too much (if you can!), what are some major changes Orbit underwent? Alternatively, what is one of your favourite, whether big or small?

Surprisingly, not too much changed in Orbit structurally from the first draft to the final draft—probably because I tend to work out a lot of those kinks in the brainstorming/outlining process! I’m also a very slow and methodical writer who edits as they go, so there aren’t usually major plot or character changes post-first full draft.

However, there were definitely extensive rewrites! They were mostly stylistic—both an attempt to update a manuscript written seven years ago to be more in-tune with my current writing style, and because I wrote that first draft after I’d been living for several years in a non-native English-speaking country (South Korea). Living abroad was amazing, and part of that included trying my best to learn and communicate in the native language of my new home, so a lot of my interactions were in Korean (or a Korean-English hybrid). That obviously changes how you speak and create in your own native language, and during rewrites (about five years after emigrating back to the States) it became very apparent that the tone and syntax didn’t flow in the way that I wanted it to. So most of those rewrites involved sentence restructuring and word exchanges—far more tedious and much less intriguing than substantial structural changes, I’m afraid.

There was one significant change—or clarification, rather—that is also probably my favorite: as with aceness, I wrote the first draft of Orbit before I had really started to come to terms with being genderqueer/non-binary so that wasn’t something that I had explicitly planned on exploring in the novel. When I came back to it, I’d also come out more fully with my gender identity and had been working to engage with it creatively; from memory, I thought that I might be able to do something with one of the main four (1119) but was pretty sure that it would need to be built-up implicitly in this story (with an explicit coming-out happening later) just to make sense. However, when I got into my rewrites I realized that most of the framework was already there for 1119’s gender identity to be authentically explored in a subplot, so I went for it! Finding out that I’d already subconsciously written a non-binary character was a delightful (and telling) surprise, and one that I was very excited about being able to make explicit in the final draft.

Finally, it sounds like Orbit has terrific and intriguing world-building. What’s one of your favourite details or aspect of the world you’ve created?

First of all, thank you! It can be an infuriating line to walk between threadbare world-building and overcrowded world-building, and I hope that I was able to keep it relatively balanced. I’m a stickler for as much consistency as possible, so I tried to ensure that I wasn’t creating details that were too specific—which might later have to be retconned—while also considering potentially unique ways in which our societies may (and may not) have evolved.

I never set an exact date, but this is a near-future story—the initial seeds were planted during a strange college course curriculum overlap, where I read Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game and Alex Kotlowitz’s There Are No Children Here concurrently. That odd combination got me thinking about what the future of public housing could look like, and all the racial and socio-economic implications that would go along with it. While I don’t think that metal housing planets orbiting Earth is the exact next step in our reality (although, given the current state of affairs, who even knows) I am pretty proud of that concept and the collection of metaphors and symbolism that it offered for the story.

One of my favorite pieces of individual imagery—regardless of its scientific veracity—is the artificial atmosphere. The idea of mimicked skies and weather but only a sheen, only a veil through which the wide void of the galaxy still presses in. The juxtaposition between those false horizons and the naked stretch of blackness and stars above the port base; it’s such a terrifying and yet inspiring visual for me. It represents all of the characters’ fear and wonder and potentials and dangers and, well, I’m always gonna be a sucker for space.

It’s almost entirely ready, but the cellphone on which my untransferred pictures (I know) were died, taking them all with it. This means I have to redo every recipe in the book to take new pictures, and while that is only 5 of them, bread-making can spread over an entire day. I am back at work on weekdays, and with the recent heatwave, it would have been cruel to run the oven too much.

Temperatures should break down soon. I will do my best to get baking ASAP, and I apologize for the delays!

I am incredibly excited to say, my latest novel is finally on sale!! So what more can you get if you buy it ahead of time?

1. A discounted price! Baker Thief will be only $2.99 for as long as it’s in pre-orders!
2. An unique cookbook (PDF) with five recipes for bread and pastries, including delicious, buttery croissants!
3. My eternal gratitude. Seriously, thank you for buying, and I hope you enjoy!

Buy it now on Amazon, Other Major Retailers, or Gumroad!

How to Claim Your Cookbook

There are essentially two ways this can go:

1. If you bought through Gumroad, I already have your e-mail and proof your purchase! You will receive an e-mail shortly after release day with the cookbook.
2. If you bought through another retailer, then I need you to e-mail me proof of your purchase. I will add you to the e-mail list, and you will receive the cookbook shortly after release.

That’s it! I promise your e-mails will not be used for anything else than get you the goodies.

It started with Claude, and it wasn’t conscious. As I’ve said yesterday, there was a fair amount of time during which I suspected I was aromantic but didn’t want to explore it, and had rather conflicting feelings about it (most of them rooted in internalized anti-aro ideas). Suffice is to say, I thought aromantic people were awesome, important, and too often erased, but also strongly felt that as a person in a romantic relationship, I didn’t need or want the label. (I was wrong).

When I started Baker Thief, I was already writing cool aromantic characters (hello Cal, hello Hasryan). Besides, the project was supposed to be a f/f romance full of Good Tropes, the result of a hour of nap while furious The 100 fans discussed Lexa’s brutal death. It took less than two weeks for it to turn into “bigender aromantic MC, demi “LI”, and a queerplatonic relationship”, which I’m pretty certain is in part due to how Aromantic Awareness Week wasn’t so long ago, and the questioning it had brought in me.

I did not set out to explore my aromanticism by writing Claude. Heck, I was still fairly solidly in denial about it. That is nonetheless what happened. I started slipping tiny bits of my experiences with romantic attraction, and articulating them within a character that proudly claimed the label made them hard to ignore. In hindsight, it feels obvious that I was validating myself through a character who had long finished his own questioning.

By the time I finished the first draft, I knew deep down I was aromantic. I wasn’t living it the same way Claude had and did, but I certainly had a lot of crossover in my experiences, and I was growing increasingly comfortable with the label. I never really came out as aromantic so much as I just started talking as one, and starting sentences with “as an aromantic person”, and everyone rolled with it (it was lovely and fairly low stress).

You won’t find exactly me in Claude, though, no matter how much the name makes it sound like a self-insert (that was an accident, I swear!). Although some of my unease and self-discovery is part of his experience, Claude’s aromanticism is in many ways more clear-cut, at least as we find him in the story, in the sense that he has figured most of himself out. It’s my personal belief that I needed it that way–that I needed something stable and firm to lean into.

I’ve gone past that point, though, which brings me to the second important aromantic character I’m writing into Baker Thief (there is more than these two I promise!): Livia, Claude’s twin. Livia is an important arospec character to me because she has very similar experiences to my own, and as the story picks up, she is still figuring herself out. This only comes up at the end of Baker Thief, since this particular novel doesn’t focus on her at all, but Livia is one of the two centres of the second book, and will be exploring her identity in it. I’ll likely be doing a mix and match of my own and fiction again, but much closer to home this time around. And unlike in Claude’s case, I am very aware of what I am doing, and quite excited about it!

So here’s to exploring yourself through fiction, and to just squarely putting yourself in it, no matter how “weird” or “off” you feel your experience is. The bottom line is that it still matters, it deserves to be out there, and you may be less alone than you think.

Small note: if you don’t want to miss Baker Thief’s release, the best way is always through my newsletter! It goes out monthly, or for special occasions.

“Sometimes I think I want to be with someone, but it never lasts. It’s… like a flicker—a few days of intense pining for romance, and then it’s gone. Does that ever happen to you?”

So… the above is a small excerpt from Baker Thief. It’s also the closest thing I’ve written to my aromanticism. It’s still not exactly mine, but… closer, you know? I’ve never really talked at length about where I fit on the aromantic spectrum. For a while I used “grayro” as an ID in my bios and twitter conversations, but over the last few months I’ve reverted to using the very vague “arospec”, or straight up “aromantic”. It’s a lot simpler than trying to reexplain every single time. The reason for that is that I more or less fit under several different labels, but none of them really strike me as mine. So while I feel like I match them and am part of these groups, they’re not my labels, if that makes sense? Anyway. I still want to go over them and ramble about how I relate to each. Please note that me not claiming them doesn’t mean someone with very similar experiences shouldn’t, either. (Plus I did claim some at times SO).

Grayromanticism is generally defined as experiencing only rare romantic attractions, or as experiencing very transient romantic attraction. I have always related closely with grayromanticism because transient is a very core aspect of what little romantic attraction I experience. It’s hard to really pinpoint flickers, honestly, but sometimes it lasts a little longer—a few days—and then I confusedly wonder what’s happening and how I missed it before (I assumed it had been there but I had been in denial instead of concluding it was new).

Akioromanticism (lithromanticism) is generally defined as feeling romantic attraction towards others, unless and until it is reciprocated, at which point it fades. Essentially, it’s amazing while it’s in your head, and when the target of your affection gives it back, it slowly goes out. I tend to both recognize myself in akioromanticism, and think it’s not really me? There’s no concrete reason not to use the label, except that I don’t feel it, and that there are specific ways in which my attraction develops. I don’t really know what makes my romantic attraction vanish after a few days in a relationship (anywhere up to two weeks), but it does. So as a general rule, akioros’ experiences speak to me.

Demiromanticism is generally defined as experiencing romantic attraction only towards someone you already have a strong bond with. This is absolutely 100% my case. I have never had anything even vaguely romantic for people I hadn’t known for a while and shared some really great moments with. Except… most of what I’ve read and heard of people who ID as demiro has been about fairly stable romantic attraction. Which mine isn’t. At all. So kind of like I have the same prerequisites for romantic attraction as most demiros, but don’t share that much of the “after”, experience wise.

Those are the big three I feel close to, and I have claimed all three at different times. The short version is that I seem to only experience romantic attraction to people I already have a strong bond with, and it’s never lasting–whether it’s reciprocated or not. It was still there when I initiated relationships, though! That’s how I, an aromantic person, can have a romantic relationship. That’s how we defined it, and that’s still what it is, even with my attraction long gone.

It took a long time for me to figure these bits out. A lot of it was because I kept linking romance and sex, and attributing elements of my aromanticism to my asexuality. Essentially, everything that I could have read as a sign of aroness, I linked to asexuality. Then I perceived the rare and brief experience of romantic attraction as proof that I was absolutely, 100% not aromantic (I also had a lot of latent aromisia and I did not want to be aromantic; it felt like betraying my boyfriend). The truth is that in my case, aceness and aroness are very tightly tied together, and the ways asexuality adversely affected me where so much more obvious that it made it easier to blame everything on it. But through all that, I still didn’t understand how people fell in love, what the heck crushes (of all types) were supposed to be like, why I was so weird about everything… I spent two years ID’ing as asexual and avoiding the romantic question. I distinctly remember uttering the words “I think I’m some sort of aro too but I prefer not to think about it” to friends… several times. But in public, officially, I would self-describe as ace and leave romantic orientation unsaid.

By then I was adding aromantic side characters into my work, or rethinking the unstated aromanticism of others. And in February 2016, I started Baker Thief, which I wanted to be a bunch of tropes I loved and as much of myself as I desired, no restraints. And made the MC aromantic. YEP. Nothing suspicious there, nothing at all. But more on that tomorrow!

The point to all this… I’m not sure. It’s Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week. People constantly self-reject because they don’t fit enough in their mind. But the aromantic spectrum is complex, and lived experiences can be hard to describe or fit to a definition. But, look, I don’t fit either and I belong. So do you. If aromantic labels resonate with you without perfectly matching up the way you experience (or don’t experience) romantic attraction, you can still join us. You should!

Meanwhile, I will carry on with my muddled labels. Who knows, perhaps one day I’ll change my mind and claim one more officially for myself! Maybe writing Livia, in that quote at the start, will lead me to it. But really, I’m in no hurry. I sit at this spot where I have an umbrella ID but no specific label, and I am comfortable in myself—and in the end, isn’t that what matters?

From January 26th to February 1st, 19 indie authors have put their awesome stories with queer heroes on sale. And what’s more, we put together a personality quiz to let you see which of our queer heroes you are! You can learn more here.

For today, I am hosting one of the 19 authors, Austin Chant, whom I’ve had the pleasure to read this month! I may have been smitten with his work, and I’m really happy to have him here today!

1. Why southern gothic? What appealed to you in this period or genre?

I think of Caroline’s Heart as Southern Gothic-inspired more than strictly Southern Gothic, to be honest (it’s not in quite the right location and doesn’t engage with a lot of the history that specifically makes that genre what it is). But Southern Gothic deals a lot with the idea of decay being hidden behind façades, which is Cecily’s character in a nutshell, and it contributed a lot to the atmosphere/aesthetic of the book – hot, oppressive, quiet, and dead-but-not-dead. What pulled me firmly to the historic setting was the idea of a trans cowboy, which I obviously couldn’t resist.

2. How does Caroline’s Heart relate to your other works? What parts of it are very characteristic of your writing? What is unique about it, compared to your other stories?

All of my love interests have significant ex-lovers, for one thing, and they’re usually dead. I’m working on being less consistent about this, but there you go. A lot of my favorite tropes show up in this book: characters who manage to be their own worst enemies, love interests who are taller and/or older than the protagonist, etc.

I think the worldbuilding is where it stands out from my other works. I got to lean into creating a magic system, which was a lot of fun, and the setting in general is richer and more integral to the story than it is in my other books. Plus, it’s spooky!

3. I love Roy’s quiet stubbornness. It feels really calming to be around him. Can you talk about the challenges writing him? What was the hardest, and what was the easiest?

The toughest part of writing Roy was getting him to stand out next to Cecily! She’s this glamorous, all-powerful sorceress, and she has the personality to match. Meanwhile, Roy is not only not magical, he’s someone who does his best to be inoffensive, unremarkable, unnoticed. He’s a trans dude trying to blend in to the scenery in 1885. But I wanted to bring attention to the ways that he is remarkable — he’s steadfast and loving and very, very determined under the easy-going veneer, and those are qualities even an all-powerful sorceress can appreciate. He struggles to fit in with the loud, performative masculinity in his surroundings because he doesn’t need to stomp around and prove himself, he can just be at ease sipping coffee with someone he loves. That’s what lets him keep on an equal footing with Cecily in spite of the power dynamic between them.

In general, I think Roy was one of the easier characters I’ve written. I’m also a very laid-back person even when I’m screaming internally, so I was usually in tune with his way of navigating the world.
4. I’m not exactly a big connoisseur of all things witchcraft, and I’d love to hear more about the research or spark of idea behind Cecily’s resurrection spell.

My original idea for the resurrection spell was a little more sci-fi or at least steampunk — Cecily was going to be constructing a full-on robot body for her lover with clockwork! and gears! and bringing it to life ala Frankenstein’s monster. Ultimately, though, that clashed with the way I wanted Cecily to do magic. She’s a very airy person, and I liked the idea that her witchcraft is about capturing intangible power from the air around her and weaving it into something tangible. Rather than a literal body being brought to life, I wanted Cecily’s resurrection spell to be about trying to recapture Caroline’s spirit. Her resurrection spell became a sort of spiderweb as a result, like a net to catch a ghost. It’s intangible because that’s the exact thing Cecily is wrestling with, trying to rebuild a person out of memories and associations.

5. What’s next? Are you working on something right now, or have a book slated for publication?

I don’t currently have anything with a set publication date, but my next book will be the sequel to Peter Darling, and it’s currently in a second draft-y state of being. I also have a secret project that will involve at least two romance novels, but I’m also interested in experimenting with more traditional sci-fi and fantasy — those are the stories I grew up with and the ones I’ve always wanted to queer. I also might be working on a tabletop game? Whoops.

Thank you so much, Austin! And, I’m sorry, a tabletop game? That just sounds so great! Colour me highly excited.

I highly recommend everyone pick up Caroline’s Heart now. It’s only 99¢, and worth every sweet minute of it!

First, when I wrote the initial post, I did not take into account how other cultures relate to death, and how it doesn’t bring the same negative connotations. I’m sorry about erasing that. While this post once again focuses approaches it from a white european (or of european descent in my case) culture, it does so because I lack the tool to address other cultures’ relationships to death. Please keep in mind the framing as you read on.

Rereading the initial post also reminded me of the place I was writing from. I was hurt. Every Heart a Doorway had turned into an extremely offputting experience for me, and I had sought comfort for that in a story people described as one of queer people healing, but which relentlessly posited that recovery from trauma required love and sex. Between that and running into more death-related aces, I was raw, and I think it shows.

Finally, the post talks exclusively about asexuality. The examples are ace characters. At the time, I did not feel I could speak about aromantic narratives a lot (I was just coming to terms with that). It is my assessment that this discussion, however, absolutely applies to aromanticism too.

Anyway, enough looking back, more looking forward? Because I have learned amazing things about narrative structures that surround asexuality and how dismantle them. I wrote the first post to point at a problem. This time, I want to unravel the problem and connect it to the larger narratives to which it contributes.

I won’t review every example of ace and death out there. I will, however, underscore once more how two of the most recommended books for ace fiction play directly into this trope. Clariel (aro ace) (from Clariel [1], in the Abhorsen series) is the member of a family charged with maintaining the barrier between life and death and literally becomes the main undead antagonist in the series, a corruption her asexuality and aromanticism made far more likely and are thus directly tied to. Then we have Nancy (heteroromantic ace), from Every Heart a Doorway [2], recently returned from the Halls of the Dead and eager to find her door to get there once more. It’s worth noting that Every Heart tries to distance asexuality and death in the text, though it is disputable how much it succeeds, especially from a structural standpoint. If you’re interested about the analysis behind that conclusion and how intrinsically tied asexuality and death are in Every Heart, I heartily recommend Lynn E. O’Connacht’s essay on the subject. Absent from my initial post is Ellis (heteroromantic ace) in “You’ll Surely Drown if You Stay” [3], a Hugo-nominated short story which directly uses asexuality in conjunction with the death and exile tropes.

There are others—I had more in the original post, and I’ve found more since. I’ve also ran into several stories which reinforce this in subtler ways—descriptions of love and/or sex as a source of life, for example, or framing sex as the opposite of life. An excellent example of this from a contemporary ace story is in Tash Hearts Tolstoy [4], in which the teacher declares “that the motivation behind every single piece of literature is sex or death” which leads Tash (the heteroromantic ace protagonist) to wonder if that meant “the only driving force left to me is death?”.

I mention the smaller stuff because one of the characteristics of negative tropes is that they are pervasive. It shows up in narratives that have nothing to do with death because it is part of the way we broadly imagine aceness and the stories connected to it. This post is not meant to be a commentary on the quality of any of the individual stories mentioned, but rather to highlight some of the patterns in asexual representation. While death was the starting point of the discussion we’ve been having (at least in my circles), and very prevalent two of the most recommended ace stories, it is quite specific and doesn’t properly encompass what’s going on here, a fact that was first rightly brought up in a twitter thread by user Laura_The_Wise. So I want to look at two other related ace narratives that are directly connected to death and that show up in fiction: stillness and exile.

TL;DR: The ties between asexuality and death continue to be prevalent in fiction, notably in Clariel, Every Heart a Doorway, and “You’ll Surely Drown if You Stay” but also scattered through other asexual stories. They fit into two other narratives, that of stillness and exile, which this post will examine. This analysis uses a european/north-american view of death, something I had failed to acknowledge in my first post earlier this year.

Stillness

Stillness is the hardest of the two to pinpoint, in my experience. Some early academic essays looking at asexuality, such as “Toward an Asexual Narrative Structure” by Elizabeth Hanna Hanson [5], posited that asexual narratives were stories of stasis, in opposition to sexual narratives, which were stories of movement, of progress, and—dare I say it—of life.

This connection has never been more obvious as it is in Every Heart A Doorway. Nancy’s world is one without colours, where people stand still as statues until they have “earned the right to stand out”. She makes the connection herself within the story, such as when she finds the very colourful clothes her parents packed in her luggage.

Those were daylight colors, meant for people who moved in the sun, who were hot, and fast, and unwelcome in the Halls of the Dead.

It should be noted, too, that the main description of movement in the Halls of the Dead made by Nancy is when she attempts to dissociate her asexuality from being drawn to an Underworld.

[Nancy] would have thought her lack of sexual desire had been what had drawn her to the Underworld—so many people had called her a “cold fish” and said she was dead inside back when she’d been attending an ordinary high school, among ordinary teenagers, after all—except that none of the people she’d met in those gloriously haunted halls had shared her orientation. They lusted as hotly as the living did. The Lord of the Dead and the Lady of Shadows had spread their ardor throughout the palace, and all had been warmed by its light.

In short, the descriptions of coldness and stillness related to the Halls of the Dead become talk of warmth and light the moment sex is involved. This also happens in the only other Underworld we are presented, in which an allosexual and presumably alloromantic sex character wants to return in order to marry his skeleton girl. It’s described as vibrant and lively, and neither the character tied to it nor the events are remotely tied to asexuality or stillness.

Stillness is also how Nancy tries to retain her serenity. She tries to move as little as possible throughout the story, and attempts to reproduce the statue-like immobility she had learned in the Halls of the Dead to control her emotions. Her ability to remain perfectly unmoving is frequently tied to a lack of emotion and to invisibility–two other elements often associated with asexuality.

Sometimes the connection between asexuality, aromanticism, and stillness comes up differently. For example, Hanna in Survival Rout [6] is strongly coded as asexual, and her power entails being indestructible. She cannot be harmed (though she feels the pain). Her body always heals and returns to status quo, however: she is the immovable rock against which injuries shatter.

When it comes to imagery, stillness is not always literal and might be better understood as stasis. Every Heart a Doorway provides a stark example, but this is a piece of imagery I most often find associated with other typical ace characteristics, whether they are invisibility, a lack of emotions, or death. I’m curious to see what other shapes it can take as I continue to read, and to understand better where it fits in the larger patterns of asexual representation.

TL;DR: Early academic papers on asexual narratives deemed in one of stasis. Life is often associated with movement and colours. Every Heart A Doorway clearly does this repeatedly, in addition to tying Nancy’s skills at becoming statue-like with invisibility and a lack of emotion.

Exile

One of the most frequent narrative for asexual characters is to have them removed from society by the end of the story. Sometimes they are straight up killed in a good old Bury Your Gays fashion, but often it is more subtle, though not less harmful. Asexual and aromantic characters are often depicted as loners. They have no friends, they don’t understand people, and they prefer to stay by themselves, a step removed from the community around them.

This is precisely the case of Clariel. She wants to be alone and live in her forest. Her happiness relies on being mostly in isolation. But hey, let it not be said the novel allowed that to happen. Instead, this desire to be alone–one that is deeply tied into her asexuality and aromanticism–makes her more susceptible to corruption, and she eventually succumbs and must leave everything behind, quite literally exiled. Clariel doesn’t even get her happy ending.

Yet it seems that even characters who do develop a community don’t get to keep them. Nancy, for example, befriends several other kids at her boarding school and even grows a romantic relationship with one of them. She arrives alone and treated as an outsider, but throughout the story builds a team of people on which she relies. Yet what happens at the end of the story? Nancy finds her door, and leaves everyone she met through the story to return play statue alone in her undead world. Since we barely get to know the kind of community she might have over there, the impact of this narrative decision is a self-exile. Similarly, Clariel leaves everything behind at the end of her narrative, to be transformed by ‘free magic’ in the series undead villain.

Another form exile narratives frequently take is when an ace protagonist leaves their romantic partners (sometimes along with the community, sometimes separately). While in Nancy’s case it is a consequence of her decision to return to the Halls of the Dead, the trope is played more directly in “You’ll Surely Drown If You Stay”. At the end of the story, Ellis pushes Marisol, the girl he loves, to leave him before he returns to the desert, where the bones of the dead await him. 

It’s important to note that this is particularly harmful because Ellis’ asexuality has been used throughout the story to reinforce his otherness, and that otherness has driven the plot. Asexuality thus becomes an essential component in why he leaves, and the underlying lesson here is that asexual people cannot integrate regular society, have fulfilling and stable romances, and that they will end alone. “You’ll Surely Drown Here If You Stay” even goes as far as directly stating that, directly following the line that implies Ellis is asexual to a reminder that he should not expect a happy ending.

God, you love her so much. And not the way so many men desire women; you’ve never felt that, for anyone, in all your life. But Marisol has never touched you that way, and the warmth of her body here, now, is more than enough.

Still, the preacher man’s words ring in your ears. You will always end up alone.

Similarly, the asexual protagonist of The Trouble With Grace [7] sends her husband after the man he love, promising that she couldn’t be happy if they weren’t together. This is the logical conclusion to a novel which has set her up as an obstacle to the relationship between two queer men from the beginning, and which frequently reiterates that she wouldn’t be enough to make her husband happy.

The idea alloromantic aces are unworthy romantic partners is so prevalent that it shows up in the form of aces pushing away their allosexual partners or trying to prove “this will be too hard”. As Tabitha O’Connell pointed out in a twitter thread, this happens with Tash in Tash Heart Tolstoy—she literally strips in front of her romantic interest to prove to him it would be too hard to resist, and that his attraction would make him miserable.  This was an idea often brought up in The Trouble With Grace, too, although Grace instead concludes that she would do her “marital duties” if her husband insisted. These attempted self-exiles also often lead to Allo Saviour tropes, as they make the ace’s happiness dependent on an alloromantic character’s acceptance of them–a whole other discussion we could have regarding asexuality in fiction.

This exile trope telegraphs to aces that they don’t belong, that they are outsiders to society, and that they cannot expect happy relationships. It relies on solid allo- and amatonormativity and posits that the only relationships that count—the only “normal”—are both sexual and romantic. Little room is made for platonic relationships (friends, mentors, family, etc.) and conversations between potential partners about what are the romantic and sexual components of the relationship (if any) are nonexistent. You either meet the standard or it’s an unhappy relationship. And if it’s unhappy, the asexual and/or aromantic character is to blame and must leave or make amends.

TL;DR: Asexual characters frequently leave their community at the end of the story. Nancy and Clariel both self-exile to effectively become dead, though in Nancy’s case it is noteworthy that she thinks of the Underworld as home. Other characters instead chase their romantic partners away. This happens in different forms in “You’ll Surely Drown If You Stay” and The Trouble With Grace. Tash also attempts to push away her love interest by stripping in front of him to prove a relationship without sex would be too hard. Exile tropes strongly imply that asexual characters are meant to be alone and cannot have fulfilling relationships, no matter their nature.

A Conclusion

Few asexual narratives exist distinct from one another. For example, both Nancy in Every Heart a Doorway and Ellis in “You’ll Surely Drown Here If You Stay” explicitly consider that they belong with the dead, and call places where they roam ‘home’. Both of them choose to live in those places at the end of their respective narrative, combining the exile story structure with the strong death association. It’s also noteworthy to me that stories from ace spectrum authors reproduce these patterns too, although they tend to be less heavy-handed with them, or to try to detach them from asexuality.

I started this analysis to explain and bring to light some of the ways we collectively represent asexuality, and how these themes build upon each other to create was is at its heart a fairly negative imagery. The goal, however, isn’t to lay blame on any of the stories mentioned above—they are part of bigger patterns which we should all pay attention to. Asexuality is not a condemnation of loneliness and exile. It is not a sign of stagnation. But I remember how dismayed and hurt I was in January, in that first post, and looking back, I’m glad we are having this conversation. I’m glad that we have enough stories to see the patterns, and also that there are many characters that don’t follow it at all.

For all that ace and aro rep often feels abysmal, writing analysis like these gives me hope: it lets me believe that we can learn and do better, that this is a problem with clear solutions, and that I am doing something to change the state of things. So rest assured, this is only the beginning. There will be more (on Patreon, though!). 

If you learned from this, you can tip me!

TL;DR: Exile, Death, and Stillness often come up in conjunction with asexual characters and are tied in our collective imagery of asexuality. This isn’t meant as an attack on the quality of individual examples—they are part of a pattern, one we can now hopefully work on changing! Also, essays are fun, they make me feel like I can change things, and I will be doing more. Learned from this? You can tip me!

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[1] Clariel, Garth Nix, published by HarperCollins

[2] Every Heart A Doorway, Seanan McGuire, published by Tor.

[3] “You’ll Surely Drown If You Stay”, Alyssa Wong, Uncanny Magazine.

[4] Tash Hearts Tolstoy, Kathryn Ormsbee, published by Simon & Schuster

[5] Essay published in Asexualities edited by Karli June Cerankowski and Megan Milks

[6] Survival Rout, Ana Mardoll, published by Acacia Moon Publishing

[7] The Trouble With Grace, Jenn LeBlanc, published by Illustrated Romance

1. Larryn and Gray-Aceness

Larryn is one of those characters I haven’t talked about much yet, at least in term of aceness and sexuality. It’s just… there’s already a lot going on in his storylines, and none of it presented an easy opportunity. I decided if it fit better in the last of the trilogy, then I could roll with that. It does always bother me that it takes that long to make it canon, but less so knowing that I have other ace rep around.

So I have just released City of Betrayal, meaning I can finally look more closely at how this happens exploration happens in City of Exile. Larryn is the kind of gray-ace who experiences very rare attraction, often fleeting sensations that are gone before he can really put a name on it. But when it comes? It comes strong. Like… everything else Larryn does, really. No half measures with him! So this has happened to him once before, around preteen age, and it was very confusing and he hated it. When it strikes again, he’s more mature (I mean, *cough* Larryn has a strange way of being mature but y’know) and better able to handle it. Still not in a good place, and it still comes as an unsettling surprise.

And I very much chose this framing on purpose, because I often see acespec narratives where the advent of attraction is welcomed and exciting. That’s more Adèle’s case, too. The thing is, my experience with specness (as an arospec) is that it can be disturbing too. I feel like we don’t talk about this enough. Attraction descending on spectrum people isn’t the messiah—it isn’t systematically celebrated, and it also doesn’t suddenly makes us allo. So that’s where I’m going with Larryn! Really looking forward to it.

2. Yuri and autochorisexualism

Hey, so none of you really know Yuri yet, but he’s my secret favourite side character from Baker Thief. Yuri is a trans man part of Adèle’s new team—the mostly silent, benevolent sarcastic type. I’m preparing a spinoff series of small mysteries novella within the universe, and he would be the hero of those. Yuri is aromantic and autochorissexual. He lives home happily with a bunch of cool lizards and snakes as well as his wide collection of novels. I haven’t settled on the details of storylines yet (I have a very good grasp on the ID, partly from my own experience of it and would love to find… actual good rep for it), but this is still such a big hole in the ace rep out there, and I know it for sure affected how long it took me to ID as ace. So. This is also coming eventually.

3. Jessana and aces building a family

Jessana is probably not appearing in a story for quite some time, but she might be one of my most personal ace characters. Her story changed quite a bit through the time, and I’m not still certain of how I want this to go, but Jessana is… what happens when you’re an ace who really wants to have babies but struggles with the whole making them part. She is not strictly sex repulsed, but that stuff just doesn’t work for her. I have some trends of Ace and Family stories with Larryn, but Larryn is definitely building his by Adopting All the Children. With Jessana I am looking at a completely different approach, and I’m not sure how much my feels will handle this. These are not topics we often see addressed in ace fiction, because so much of it is YA and while Jessana is fairly young for them (she will be around 19-21, got to settle on a timeline for other things to decide), I really want dig at this. It certainly has been on my mind for longer than I knew what asexuality was so…

That covers most of the incoming and existing ace rep I have. There will be others among the Baker Thief crew, although at this point I am conceptualizing them as aro narratives and deciding if ace (and how that shapes the story) after, because Baker Thief is and will always be an aromantic series. With, you know, a lot of ace rep too.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the series!