AUTHOR NAME: the Inmara
LINK TO YOUR WEBSITE: http://www.sunspot.world/
WHAT DO YOU PRIMARILY WIRTE? Fiction
HOW OFTEN DO YOU WRITE? Every day
TELL ME ABOUT YOUR STORIES, ANYTHING YOU WANT READERS TO KNOW. Our stories are about life aboard a generational starship called the Sunspot with what many people would consider "near singularity" technology. We're not sure we actually believe in anything like the singularity, but our work is very adjacent to it. We started with the idea of painting a society and world that is very close to our own inworld, with some major differences to emphasize some social structures, ethical dilemmas, and conflicts that we wanted to focus on. It's place where there is no assigned gender, and each person is born with wildly unique physiological abilities. Diversity is prized, including neurodiversity, and accommodations for everyone's needs is prioritized wherever it can be done. But there are still some problems to work out, and improvements to be made, and a lot of them stem from what the people who created the starship had chosen to do with it to set themselves apart from their parent culture. But you could summarize it with the phrase, "Fully automated luxury communist queer furries in space." The key thing to understand about these stories is that they star us, but they're still fiction. We play parodies of ourselves, with certain traits and decisions altered or emphasized in order to serve a "what-if" kind of plot. There are no clear heroes or villains, but some of us make bad choices in order to play them out and see the consequences, or give the others something to work with. Sometimes it's all in the service of self criticism. Mostly it's been for our own entertainment. It's a diceless TTRPG played out on the page, and then edited for us to reread and maybe gain something from it whenever we do. They're also morality tails for our fellow system members. We do write them with some thought to the outworld, and share them with others, because there are people like us, autistic trans plural systems, who have been begging for this kind of literature, just as we were before we started writing it.
ARE THERE ANY THEMES THAT ARE COMMON IN YOUR WORK? Plurality, in all of its forms, is the key, central theme. The other big theme is how things like physical dysphoria probably can't be stamped out through genetic or social engineering. We're very pessimistic about that, but in an anti-eugenics way. And we think the only option is treatment. It's certainly the only ethical option in any case. The people in our world are in the process of learning that. This also includes our perspectives on what autism is and how it really, probably can't be stamped out by eugenics, and why. But also that it shouldn't be, and the why about that, too. And because of these things, we do also tackle trauma, and suicidal ideation and events, and maybe how to handle those things. These are the things that drive the plots, and the counter efforts that bring our characters to respite and relief in the end. And also, there are moments of major social change, because we have experienced that within our own system. But it's social change within the context of a system that is beset by dissociation and amnesia, where conflicts are resolved by cutting people off from each other, and where the most intimate levels of communication resemble telepathy. You might be able to draw parallels to outworld politics, but the story isn't really informed by that. It's really about our own struggles to overcome DID and develop a form of cooperative and peaceful multiplicity. And if you are singlet (or person with a single consciousness) reading this, we invite you to do so to absorb our descriptions of various conscious states and realize they are all from our own personal experiences! Even if we describe some fanciful technology being used, even if that technology doesn't exist in the outworld, what the characters experience is still and analog to something we deal with regularly.
WHAT GOT YOU STARTED WRITING? Reading! In middle school, we were so thankful for the novels we read that we wanted to create our own, so we set out to try doing that, way back then. It didn't work very well, of course. And we took a long detour into making webcomics through our early adulthood. Between scripting and plotting for webcomics and writing a massive amount on Livejournal, Facebook, and Tumblr for our own self advocacy, it got to the point where writing a novel just wasn't all that hard anymore and one just sort of popped out. It was going to be a graphic novel to begin with, but our disabilities have made drawing that many illustrations nigh impossible. So we switched to prose. A couple years later, we've just finished a 130,000 word sequel in one month. We marked ourselves as writing every day, which we do when we're writing. And we write to our social media daily with an equal intensity. When we're working on a book, we spend all day writing it, every day, until it's done. It's not a goal or a discipline. It's hyperfocus. And we take full advantage of it. And so far, if we take a year or two hiatus in the middle of writing a book, you can rest assured we will get back to it and finish it in a feverish month of flurrying words, eventually.
WHERE CAN WE FIND YOUR WORK? Right now, you can only find it on our website, available to read for free. We update it sporadically, as we finish proofreading each chapter (and we're still editing all of it continuously). At some point, we hope to offer the ability to order paperback books, with a soft goal of this June. And we've been trying to record audio books, but we're doing this with no budget and no assistance, and with disabilities that make it difficult, so those may take a while to get done. We have one audio book of a vignette we wrote, "Children of the Sunspot", up on Bandcamp, if you'd like that. The link is on our website.
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