Happy March #WritingWonders, gang! 🙏✨ We're kicking it off with the softball questions, I see...

Since I'm still wrapping up Part 3, I'm back again this month with our queer epic switchblade-and-sorcery novel #ThoseWhoCreateAndDestroy and, for today, its precocious young alchemist co-protagonist, Jules. (You can check out the complete Parts 1 & 2 here: https://readformandvoid.com/the-nullweaver-cycle/those-who-create-and-destroy/ )

How is Jules *not* me, would be an easier question to answer. He's a prickly pear with a heavily guarded warm heart and a rarely seen or acknowledged effusive side, who escapes his trauma by trading in human realities for cosmic conceptualizations. He reaps the social rewards of high achievement (not so much me now, but me in grade school) and toxic self-sacrificing (also me until recent years), while continuing to feel vaguely but deeply unfulfilled in both his intimate and his inner life (once again, me till recently).

Jules lives as a mostly-out-and-visible trans man in a largely socially conservative magic wainscot society in the aughts—which has a range of social ramifications. I, by contrast, am usually taken for a cis woman (outside my inner circle) and (usually) let it slide. 🙃 But I think Jules and I both feel essentially genderless, while at the same time experiencing dysphoria, to no small extent, at times, with our "female" bodies, but more intensely and persistently with the social roles and perceptions traditionally associated with femaleness in our cultures of origin (although we're both also able and willing to lean on "feminine" expressions in limited circumstances, when it serves our purposes). Part 3 flashes back to trace the arc of Jules's gender experience from childhood, and, while his journey differs in many ways from mine, the book's climax finds us both in more or less the same place (albeit still using different pronouns... I seem to be more partial to "they," at least for now).

I could go on, but instead I'll just say that, aside from being (rather aspirationally) more organized and more accomplished, more action-oriented and more abrasive, Jules is about as "me" as any character I've ever written—though I wasn't at all aware of this when @dontdoitneil and I first started drafting TWCAD in 2016. Jules, I like to think, came along to help me see myself more clearly, at a time when I'd all but lost sight.

@emrys

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