Pantheon is a project, a build, a single case that encompasses, at this point, three distinct computers. And those are proper ones, all x86-64 and everything. This is possible because it was all built into the glorious Enthoo Elite case from Phanteks, which isn’t sponsored or anything, but a useful context for anyone wanting more of an idea of scale for this. In its 1.X iteration it housed two desktop PCs, enough for me, A J S, and for L M to game together. C L U was, sadly, as ever, resigned to being the peanut gallery.

Given how much of 2.1 was revision of 1.X, be it fixing mistakes, or building on strengths, I’m going to start this with what will attempt to be a quick summary of Pantheon 1. It was my first proper PC build, and, as might be a theme in my life, I didn’t pick a small project to start with. Pantheon 1.0 was already planned as a dual system, watercooled project from the off. In fact, I had already chosen to overcomplicate things by planning for a large shared reservoir which both systems drew from and fed back into. This solution, a dual pump, figure-of-8 style system that split the huge 480mm top and bottom radiators to the main system loop and a 360mm one to the second system, was . . . not ideal? There were improvements to be made with Pantheon 2.

If I might take a brief diversion here, naming the computer systems in the Payne household is a time-honoured tradition at this point. So, not just Pantheon as a project gets a name, but the internal systems; which were not the ‘main system’ and ‘secondary system’ but Gaia and Athena. Athena had been my gaming PC before the Pantheon build and by virtue of being in the ridiculous TRISTELLAR case was a mini ITX system perfect to go into the smaller second motherboard slot of Pantheon’s case. Gaia on the other hand was produced whole cloth for Pantheon 1.0 to be a new, at the time, high spec PC for gaming training machine learning models at home.

For what it’s worth, the rest of the house includes Zeus, the router and modem, Apollo and Artemis, the laptops, and Delphi the home server. Artemis was previously a gaming laptop of mine, replaced by a dinky little chromebook like Apollo, but we liked the name and the siblinghood. Delphi for what it’s worth is a LattePanda; a single board solution with a built-in Arduino, both of which are details we will get back to later. But for now I simply find it neat that it is the same CPU as both Apollo and Artemis.

Where was I? Pantheon 1.0! A build with the notable help of the Haxie Collective who saved it several times, including notably when the LGA pins on Athena’s motherboard got roughed up. Bonus points here for it being a CPU with no graphics and the only unwaterblocked card in the house at the time was a VGA output only Athlon card that meant for the universities recycling, n.b. not AMD Athlon. This was hardly the only issue with the 1.X builds however, oh no . . .

I’ll get a bit vague here on when things happened as the 1.0 to 1.1 change was actually a GPU reorientation and I can’t remember when that came in the cavalcade of errors. Specifically it was a move from a horizontal GPU mounting for Gaia that had immense coil whine, to a vertical one that fixed this, matched the orientation of Athena’s, and sadly did not work as a shelf for random collectables. In hindsight this was not a loss. Another incident in those early days was a PSU failure, perhaps unsurprising given it is a very bespoke and now out of production dual system PSU from Phanteks, though the replacement is going strong in 2.1 so . . . just bad luck? What was a surprise, to me at least, was that when I tried testing using the modular PSU from Athena’s previous build I needed to change the cables, not just the PSU. Don’t worry, it only resulted in some smoking components, no fire.

And finally, there was a flood! Well, actually just a, well no, flood is a good term. A rare defect in the EK components that have cooled Pantheon its whole life dumped the entire reservoir into the basement of the case in about a second. This of course is the reason that the PSU stands on little legs, so that even when the system is waterlogged and spilling all over the desk it is lovely and safe and dry and not dying just a few millimetres above the floodwaters. That was its own ordeal actually, with the original desks being torn in half by the screen mounts, meaning it eventually got replaced, through the window, by the kitchen counter that now serves to support it all. This did however make cleaning up the spill significantly easier.

Okay, so that’s a way too old, way too muddled by my memory, retrospective of Pantheon 1.X, and to wrap it up more nicely, Pantheon 1.1 was a case with one PSU, one reservoir, two working systems, two pumps, and two cooling loops. Oh, and as the cherry on top, it turned out I never managed to fix pump and fan control so both pumps span up whenever one system came on; and if Athena was on but Gaia wasn’t then Athena’s fans just pinned themselves at 100%; and this is before we get into the splitting of case fans between the two systems. This could do with some work . . . You know what I think would fix this? A third system in the case.

Before even the build for Pantheon 1.0 began the idea of an additional system was floated. At the time it was half-baked and I was eventually talked out of it by a faculty member that I won’t name directly. But the idea gestated. It moved from a Raspberry Pi to Delphi, our LattePanda; from combining the fan outputs of Gaia and Athena to processing the coolant temperatures directly; and crucially integrated a failsafe in the form of default 100% PWM splitters. Given I was originally talked out of this because of the danger of the cooling controller failing and letting the systems overheat, this last detail was a big factor in going for this and was discovered along the way with managing Pantheon 1.0.

Finally, we have got to the point where I can write up notes on the 2.X work! I realised now that this is going to be the better part of a year late, time is tough, but I want to write this for my own reference as much as anything else. Planning had been going on for a long, long while, basically since the 1.0 build was done, but specific work for the 2.0 rebuild began in August of 2024, it wasn’t much, but BIOS updates, clearing the massive desk and an OS upgrade on Delphi. Parts were ordered. This was finally happening.

It took us, L M lent me so much support through this, most of the first true build day to ‘debuild’ Pantheon 1.1. The only parts that remained in place in the end were the motherboard for Gaia, and the PSU. Having said that, the CPU would come out of Gaia, headed for new Athena, and be replaced. This was why the BIOS needed an upgrade; 3950X to 5950X is possible on the X570 chipset, but it isn’t possible on the early BIOS version that was still being run. On a less technical and less competent note, the new setup involved a very slick bridge between the CPU and VRAM waterblocks, which I might have installed before swapping the new CPU in and got myself some extra practice at installing it.

Remembering to do this however was crucial for the next step, where Athena gained a new motherboard and the ‘old’ CPU from Gaia, and will later gain the ‘old’ GPU. Every other part of Athena, bar the shared components, is basically new. Including having to order some functionally old components that aren’t stocked anymore from a German eBay reseller. Big thanks to ruixiu for that. Just goes to show how long the plans have been in the works.

In fact this first day of the build had all the systems, and the new reservoir fundamentally into the case. Delphi was moved over in the evening and ran in the new case for the rest of the build. Being a single board computer this was an easier piece of work than mounting the motherboards and then just had its own ethernet and power supply run in. That’s a third of the work done at the end of the first day right? Three systems, one done? Ha! 

The next day started very mechanically. Radiators had fans remounted, now in a push-pull configuration with fans on both sides of the thin radiators. They were also rearranged to all be driving air into the case, aiming for a positive pressure, in at the front, top and bottom, out, mostly passively, at the back solution. The front of case fans were swapped to the inside of the bracket to improve airflow, something made possible by moving the pumps previously mounted there, with one going straight onto the new radiator. Much of this extra space had been found from removing the 360mm radiator that was originally installed to serve Athena. In fact the new reservoir mounted onto exactly the same bracket. With this done and the front and top case panels back on the shape of 2.0 was definitely emerging.

The afternoon brought with it the most stressful parts of the build, those panels immediately coming back off, and signs of my serious skill progression at doing this. It is a time period I am very glad has passed as everything about it looks better in retrospect.

It started well. The new GPU, a well-binned 4090 bought at perhaps the lowest price point it ever reached, worked fine in dry tests with the original cooler. This GPU had already tried my nerves a little as while I bought it in a dip, it’s still an expensive bit of kit and I’d never before used the company that I ordered it from. They didn’t send an order confirmation. The money left my account. 3 days later a 4090 arrived. Some notes. However, right now, it was everything it claimed to be, and oh so shiny. 

Disassembling a GPU, breaking the warranty void stickers, it is always nervewracking, but when the alignment of reassembling the waterblock felt off it was doubly so. Don’t worry those of you with a nervous disposition; I am writing this post of Gaia right now, the PC lived. A brief note here though is that the 4090 that is in Gaia has an active backplate waterblock, a very slick piece of kit from EK that is basically two waterblocks, one for each side of the GPU. This meant it was the first waterblock where I was responsible for assembling a water tight seal. If you want context for how well I could be trusted with that, part of this build involved reinstalling some missing thermal pads on the 2080Ti that I had managed to overlook during the 1.0 build.

With the new waterblock installed the process of tubing went . . . well? Honestly, it was a painless experience. Minor adjustments were made because of things like the clearance between the back of the 4090 and the front of the bridge turning out to be, well, nothing. The two are literally in contact. I had planned to have a 90° joint coming out of that side. How naive of me. Overall though, the practice, the planning, the simplification, had it all come together pretty quickly and easily. Now just to test it.

For those of you out there who have never had the experience of watching water pour across the PCB of the four figure value GPU that you just took out of warranty I can only say that it sucks. It sucks in an anxious, sinking-feeling kind of a way. There was only one leak in the loop; it was exactly where you would expect it, the one place user error could really occur; and it did a grand total of . . . no damage. 

Seriously. Despite the fact that for what seemed like an eon–about thirty seconds–water was running uncontained over the most expensive part of the build, nothing bad actually happened. We took it apart again; it was reassembled with more care; the failed o-ring was replaced and the new one and its pair greased; and, when we leak tested the second time, everything worked. Including Gaia’s new GPU.

Pantheon 2.0 fundamentally lived. 

There is a fair amount of time between here and the end of the 2.0 build in my mind, but none of it truly meaningful. It was a very pedestrian, appreciatedly pedestrian, process of flushing the loop and refilling it; flushing it and refilling it; purging the cleaning fluid; and adding the opaque coolant. A process which I will likely be starting again soon with its 12 month functional lifetime approaching. But one that the new layout and construction made almost relaxingly easy.

There were some hiccups, for sure. Like Gaia hitting a bootloop the first night and needing a hard reset. But, that seemed to just be the once. I can’t say it’s never happened again. I found myself hard resetting out of a graphics’ driver update today due to display failure, but these moments are few and far between and despite that night trying my already frayed nerves, Pantheon 2.0 was a solid success. Gaia ran for multiple days without more than a few minutes off in order to sort the loop out and everything seemed to be working as intended.

After the loop was stable, the tempered glass door went back on, the desk was reassembled and Pantheon 2.0 entered daily use. There were a few minor mechanical tweaks to be made, GPU supports for both the 2080Ti and 4090 came in and straightened them up, easing the stress on both case and owner, and some cables got tidied. 

Things were . . . done?

Well, that title doesn’t say 2.0 does it?

The 2.1 modifications of Pantheon are where this transitions from a unique, but ultimately off the shelf, project into some bespoke engineering. During the course of the main build two things notably happened: one, we decided to not try splicing the power control cables for the case and the first two systems, Gaia and Athena, into an optocoupler board for Delphi, it was deemed to be too much work and risk for the reward; two, temperature sensors were added into the cooling system. Simple thermistors built into plugs, these would become the core of the planned cooling system.

The idea was simple. A water cooling system doesn’t really care how hot any of the heat generating components are; all the silicon will thermal throttle itself and manage its temperature just fine as long as it is cooled. What a water cooling system does care about is the water temperature as this is a more direct reflection of the deficit between what the radiators are dissipating and what the compute hardware is dumping into the system. So, I could skip the part where I had to get the live temperatures out of Gaia and Athena and just look at the water temperature to see how much work the fans and pumps needed to do.

Easier said than done?

So, getting the resistance of a thermistor is not a trivial task, and is in fact the point where learning to solder suddenly seemed inevitable. Despite the convenient two pin connector that the thermistors offered I had no way of connecting this to Delphi, or more accurately her embedded Arduino, that would allow the reading of the thermistor’s resistance, let alone the effective temperature.

But, I’m perhaps getting ahead of myself. Planning for this was a constant back and forth, pinging off of friends and trying to work out what seemed like very simple things. For example, letting the Arduino control the fans seemed very simple; just connect the PWM pin of a fan controller to the PWM producing pin of the Arduino and then controlling the PWM signalTo the chair with the Grimer. in software was simple. This, well, it still didn’t work on one of the originally intended pins, the goal had been to split fan and pump control. But on the other the issue, which if you’ve built one of these I’m sure you’ve already seen, was the lack of shared ground. The fan controllers were still fundamentally looking for ground at the PSU. That was a simple enough thing to add in and the ground rail for the breakout board was connected, via a fan controller header on Gaia, to the PSU ground and the PWM worked. 

This was the easier part of the soldering process to be done on the custom breakout board, just adding some headers for the custom cabling to go onto. The tough part to work out was coming back to the thermistor readings. Now, I will defend EK a lot for a company that nearly killed Pantheon 1.0 due to a reservoir o-ring failing. Most of their hardware had been great, but their brief dive into software control in the form of the EK-Loop Connect was just not it; a fact that they themselves acknowledged with blanket refunds. In fact one could argue that a good version of the Connect would have handled what Delphi was being called on to do. But we don’t have a good version of the Connect, and we still have the thermal sensors, the thermistors, from the EK-Loop Connect ‘ecosystem’. 

Look, I’m not going to say they were necessarily the best choice for the job. Especially given the details on what exact thermistors were embedded in the plugs wasn’t available, but I am obsessive about system components matching. Gaia and Athena have matching G.Skill RAM, CPU blocks, even motherboards from not just the same brand, ASUS, but the same generation so their aesthetics match. All the storage is WD, all the 120mm fans are the old EK ones, etc. As such, all the water cooling components obviously had to be EK.

So, relatively unknown thermistors. ‘NTC, 10KΩ at 25°C’ that’s what I’ve got. NTC is good, Negative Temperature Coefficient; this means that we know as the temperature goes up the resistance will go down. I did think I’d pinpointed the underlying sensors and so found the β value I needed to calculate the actual temperatures. The β value, you see, defines the rate at which the resistance will change with temperature, important as the relationship is rarely linear. There were even libraries available for the Arduino that would go from the resistance to the temperature given the β value, and a few others that were more readily available. They also provided examples for how to get that resistance. 

My apologies if this is still out of order, I am trying, mostly to follow the chronology of my thinking through the problem. This does mean that it will dive down rabbit holes and jump off in different directions, or, in this case, absolutely tunnel on solving step 2 without a solution to step 1. That solution to step one is, as I’m sure hardware folks have known for several paragraphs, voltage dividers. These neat little circuits allow you to, using a known voltage and resistance, find an unknown resistance by making use of the fact that voltage will split over resistors in proportion to their resistances. And voltage, voltage we can measure easily with the Arduino. 

With this settled, the plan for the breakout board was simple. A voltage divider for each of the thermistors, and then just the headers and rail connections needed to provide my ‘PWM header’ for the fan control hubs. It was tested with a simple breadboard, where the ground and PWM pin choice issues were solved and then a permanent solution was soldered. Just ignore the weeks where the ‘temporary’ solution was in use. Though this was my first soldering project, I: one, feel it went well, all the practice boards paid off; two, trusted it because of the aforementioned detail of the fan hubs failing ‘safe’ to 100% if they lost the PWM signal.

Now, we must finally get to the elephant in the room. The code required for the Arduino to do all the things that I want it too. And there is a small confession to be made here. Due to incorrect writeback settings on an SD card and a lack of backups, the original source code. What is compiled and running on Delphi right now is lost. 

There will now be a brief delay in the writing of this while I go and write that again.

Alright, one code rewrite later and Pantheon is cooled by a controller I have the source code for. And honestly, that rewrite didn’t take too long; about 13 rooms of my grandmother playing Blue Prince.

About two hours of them not focusing on it for those in search of a real number.

Thank you! Honestly, the story of this code is the story of simplicity being effective. All the talk of β values earlier and plans to work with actual temperatures came to nothing. The original plan used several Arduino libraries that were meant to make working with NTC Thermistors easy and . . . Yeah, no. The ones I tried had horrendous jitter in their readings even as they were meant to be providing smoothing. 

Briefly I flirted with the idea of coding the Steinhart-Hart equation myself, but the idea of working out natural logs in the Arduino subset of C did not seem like my idea of fun. 

Unlike you.

Anyway . . . I decided at this point on a choice that has defined the simplicity of this code. I would just work with the raw voltages. I knew how they would change as the temperature in the loop did, and I knew what reading from them was my ‘target’ temperature. The rest was just some experimentation with reading off those values while putting load on the system and monitoring the temperatures on the dies–dice?–dies.

There was some trial and error. For example, discovering that the position of the two ‘in-loop’ sensors biases them to over react to load on Athena compared to Gaia is a mistake that is easily fixed in theory, but not worth draining the loop for. In fact it’s down to that minor oversight mentioned above where the connections coming out of the 4090 had to swap sides. If it was being rebuilt today the connections would be swapped to put the second ‘in-loop’ sensor after Gaia’s waterblocks so it can react to the heat she is producing, but hindsight is 0.0logMAR. Maybe for Pantheon 2.2.

So, weighting heavily towards the reservoir compared to the other sensors works. I also found that, once I had the difference between the resistance and the ‘target’ number, raising it to a small power, and I mean small, <1.5, produces a nice curve. It tunes the fans to respond more intensely to higher temperatures, which is nice for getting them back under control.

The final part of the solution is to work with an exponential moving average, which is not just something that improves my machine learning models. This evens out the small amount of jitter that wasn’t coming from the thermistor libraries and also stops the fan speeds from jumping about. Win-win.

Oh, for some reason, which I never pinned down, instead just worked around, pin D13, which connects to the internal red LED didn’t work as a PWM output. It is however still enabled as an output because there is little to no cost to doing so, and the LED can be used as an indicator of the PWM output. In case you can’t see or hear the fans . . .

And that’s well, that’s Pantheon 2.1. My baby. One of the many computers in the house. Athena connects to a TV that is set up so we can watch things without any fan noise if we want. Gaia has the two monitors on the left, PowerToys is my friend when it comes to organising windows on the vertical one. Delphi continues to be the home server, hosting shared files; dactylomancy, Charly’s discord proxy; our home Pi-hole; and anything else that needs to be always on.

Would I recommend it?

Honestly, I can’t see any reason I would.

So many elements of Pantheon’s design are unique to my needs, my wants, and my situation. I need a low-power home server. I need two gaming PCs. I want a statement piece of a case. I can put those two PCs together. I can put all three together. I want to water cool. Etc. etc. etc.

What I will recommend is pushing the boat out on what you build. Get comfortable and experiment if you can. By all means, do not spend a few years of savings on a project you don’t think will succeed, but do invest in something that you will appreciate. Over the years Pantheon has often been compared to the tuned VW Golfs that other young folks take so much pride over tweaking and tuning, and I can’t say it's wrong to. Pantheon is most definitely not an ‘optimised’ solution to the problems and needs of me or our household.

But does it make me happy?

Fuck yeah!

Just ask L M about how I’ll talk to Gaia when she is reboot cycling for updates, or the joy I had in swapping the RGB over to neptunic pride colours; the satisfaction I have in finally having this done, or the amusement I still get at seeing the fans spin up when I reflash the Arduino controlling them. Pantheon takes way more care and attention than an equivalent setup on a server rack or just in air-cooled cases, but brings me so much more joy.

At the end of the day, what other reason do I need than enjoying it?

Before I get into this further, and not just because I know the groom is aware of our online presence, I want to say I have not even a hint of regret in going. It was a truly amazing celebration, and I am so glad we were able to make it. It was my cousin’s wedding, that was my connection to it, and as someone who does not make it to many weddings or other large gatherings, it reminded me of how wonderful they can be. From some truly beautiful vows that were some of the most reflective of true, enduring, and lasting love I have ever heard, to a small concert culminating in the bride reclining on the edge of the stage as the groom sang love songs he wrote about her. I am always going to look back and be happy I was a part of it.

Especially so as my cousin has been greatly supportive of me in finding my identity. If for whatever reason you ever see the family photos from the wedding, well, I’ll just say I’m the aggressively queer one and you’ll be able to pick me out; bright hair, colourful jacket with pride patches, and a shockingly muted skirt. L M was looking lovely in a smart waistcoat and trousers, while Charly . . . Charly. We had a conversation about the fact that her traditional formal approach of dressing like a Greek goddess in a flowing white gown wasn’t appropriate. Her compromise was to instead go with a three metre wide rainbow-coloured skirt. What can I say? The girl is extra. It was honestly a delight to be welcomed into that space as I am though, with brilliant support beside me. As someone still finding themselves it was a wonderful feeling.

I would love to be able to say that I could separate the wedding cleanly into the jubilation of the first few hours and the sensory overload that started with the wedding breakfast. But no, the nerves, the anxiety, that intense stress that needed to be managed, that all started about two hours before arriving. Now, I’ll get to my thesis on all this in a second, and again, I’m sorry for the long ramble, there is some context and just some thoughts on my mind in it. But I want to make a note here before I get to the issues I did have. I coped better with the anxiety and frankly everything else than I would have years ago. I’ve worked a lot on coping mechanisms and it has paid off. That, however, is only half of the matter.

The title of this took a while, and I’ll confess it still feels lacking, but it captures the two crucial threads that have been on my mind as I’ve recovered. The wedding is not a part of my day-to-day life, and because of that it showed me how different my day-to-day life had become. Being shown how much I struggled, how I was drained, and the state I was left in, reminded me of the sheer extent of how much I have shaped my life in recent years to make things easier. By the end of this piece, or my processing of it, it might take on another. Because I did survive it all, after all. Maybe I can push more and do more day to day? But right now . . . 

Right now I’m feeling disabled. And gods, I went back and forth on using that word. I am physically capable enough, and I mostly have good days. There is very little practically I cannot manage, if, and that is a huge ‘if’, I put everything else aside. I sat with that feeling a lot these last few days, as simple things like prepping food, any concept of work, getting physio done, were all put to one side to make sure I got through without breaking down and sobbing in the corner. That’s the coping better, the fact I could sit with the urge to do that, a desire to just let all my performative normativity fall away, and not bow to it. I spent most of the wedding breakfast sat, in my own space, knowing that nothing was going to hurt me, and politely letting the time pass until I could be somewhere else. That’s not coping with things in a neurotypical, stable, or sustainable way.

There is a lot I could put here: the paralysing fear of approaching anyone; the issues of auditory processing, and the escalating anxiety as I once again caught one word in ten; the oppressive feeling of a hundred voices, scraping chairs, and clinking glasses; paranoidly checking if half the things around me were real; being in a fight or flight state for hour after hour, but I don’t think those are worth lingering on.  Honestly you’ve got a picture there of the day’s struggles, and there were definitely things there that didn’t help. I knew, fundamentally, six grown-ups at the wedding, and with them being the bride, the groom, and the groom’s family, they were busy folks. I had never presented as I do now in front of that many people before, and I have to say people were incredibly chill on that front. Indeed, even Charly ended up being  upstaged by one guest, who if you were there you will know exactly who, and that did make me feel better.

Though there were moments of fear, and struggles in the early patches, there is a solid four hour chunk from the beginning of the wedding breakfast where I mostly just remember Charly being there, stroking my back and speaking very softly. One of the odder effects of being so, so incredibly stressed is a lack of emotionality. I appreciated the beauty of the vows and speech, I was caught off guard and really touched by the mentions of my father who passed earlier in the year. Any other day these would have made me cry, and indeed I did cry a little, thanking my cousin for the space he’s made in his life for me, and helping me feel I still have family after the loss of my father. In case the fact that I only knew six other wedding guests didn’t give it away, I’ve been sadly distant from this part of my family.

Why I know it was the stress state– And yes, even internally I spend my time justifying the simplest observations about my life. Why I know it was the stress state, is that on the train home, as the stress began to come off I started crying and did for the next hour until we had to navigate the London underground. I knew it would come, I knew I needed to let the emotions out somehow. I had proposed a movie that would make us cry for the evening once we were home, as I knew it was something that had helped me before. L M politely vetoed Grave of the Fireflies as she wasn’t prepared to cry that much. Hell, writing this I’m tearing up over a Crow Time update, that’s where I’m at now I’m not stressed.

Looking forward, I have a PhD to complete; Charly and I had more books to write than we can truly count; I’m still rebuilding a PC; I’m working on a commission for Lana; I’m working on projects to help Charly express herself; I’m trying to make sure we read enough to not get lost in our own idiosyncrasies as writers; I’m trying to stay physically capable; I’m trying to make sure the house stays clean and the family stays fed. I spend a lot of my energy on any given day picking away at the edges of my life’s goals while trying to keep the lights on. Part of me really wants to look at this last week as what impressive things I can do and push through even though they are tough. I wanted to look at the next week and fill up all the space that rest and self-care takes with more and more ‘productive things’. But doing so would ignore that being able to do this, being part of this incredible celebration took so much planning, and support, some of it paid for, and just putting everything else to one side for a bit. I say I’m disabled because I know I could get almost anything that I need to done, but only if I don’t have to handle life at the same time.

But I have to live my life as well as do things with it . . . don’t I?

Where does this begin? In Bristol, with a small, red sheet of paper.

Alexander Joshua Samuel Dewfall

‘Sascha’

That first collection was the name I was born with, and the second the name I was called in my early years. It might serve well to define some terms here, at least as far as we will be using them. Let's start with forenames and surnames, that full name can be broken into the surname, ‘Dewfall’, and forenames, everything else.

The surname is the family name, also a last name, at least to us. It is the hereditary part of the name, and here is a good opportunity to say that I’ve never felt a huge connection to it. How far it dates back in the family is something that’s been questioned, and in terms of being part of a big family, for me that has always been the broader Glasspole clan. My mother’s side. I’ve also had a difficult relationship with my direct family and with that name being constantly misspelt and mispronounced through my youth, as well as riffed on by bullies. I would be lax here not to note however that it is, as I’ve been told by a handful of people, a pretty name in concept, and I have always appreciated that.

The forenames I’ve less context for I’m afraid. I know that I was given a first name, ‘Alexander’, what one would typically be called, as well as two middle names, ‘Joshua’ and ‘Samuel’, in order to give me a lot of choices. And I know some things that I wasn’t called. ‘Icabod’, ‘Mordekai’, ‘Jesús’ and a handful of other more eccentric forenames were proposed by my dear father. My mother’s intention had been for me to be a girl named ‘Charlotte’, however I was assigned male at birth and somehow ‘Charles’ was overlooked.

Hbomberguy is a youtuber who makes a recurring joke about . . . Oh, and on the subject of names, he’s actually called Harry, not Harris.

But we will put a pin in that for later and instead I want to talk about ‘usenames’ as we are going to call them; the names we actually use in our day to day lives. And we’re going to say ‘usename’ and not nicknames, because these might well be legal names, they might be contractions or they might come from somewhere else entirely. In my case ‘Sascha’ was my usename for the first half dozen or so years of my life, taken from its use as a diminutive of ‘Alexander’ in Slavic tradition. However in the UK many people’s exposure to the name was seemingly as a feminine one which resulted in my frequent . . . misgendering, for lack of a better term, during my early years. It certainly created incongruence with how I presented and my superficial self-image at the time, and provided fertile ground for school bullies. Not to mention folks were quite weird, bureaucratically, about the fact I wasn’t using one of my names, or a diminutive they recognised, as my usename.

So, with all these things considered, and a change of school on the horizon, for reasons we won’t touch on further here, I resolved to change my usename.

‘Sam’

I think the time for that to become ‘Samantha’ was a few weeks.

Yeah . . . I’ll add to that that ‘Sam’ was not an uncommon name at the time, two of the five boys in my year used it, and though it solved some of the bureaucratic issues it didn’t solve all. Nonetheless I wore the name for the better part of a decade until my mid-teens. Before we get to that name change though it's worth gesturing at, of all things, an EveWho page: ‘Aleksi Aksan’.

Or two? ‘Charlotte Aksan’.

We will be getting to that. But the first is, in case you’re not familiar with the site, the game or the concept, a video game character, a fictional character in a role playing game. And one that was very much mine. I can’t remember the specific origins of the name ‘Aleksi Aksan’. I know I liked ‘Alexi’ and I think ‘Aksan’ might have emerged from just combining syllables. I remember as well that the ‘ks’ spelling was a product of EVE running on my PC, but their Carbon character creation process didn’t, so a friend of mine had to create the character for me. Spelling was something that got lost in communication.

At this point I’d stepped away from mainstream education, was being home educated, and though I was using ‘Sam’ with the other home educated kids and around the house, the name ‘Aleksi Aksan’ was seeing a not insignificant amount of use for me. It was in later years that I would come to know EVE players offline and being called ‘Aksan’ became a prominent part of my life. And the significance of that we’ll get into later, because back in the A-plot I’ve just made it to 6th form.

I’m there a year early; I’m struggling to process suddenly being in a crowded social environment; and I end up in a relationship which, though I will love that individual until the day I die, neither of us were mentally prepared for.

‘Charlotte’

Not their name, but mine, and I’ll be taking up the narrative here for a few reasons. First among them, I remember it better. Second, though these years carry no less emotional charge for me it is a more manageable emotion. I was, to put it bluntly, a viscous and hateful bitch for the first few years of my being. As such I would take some of my opinions on it all with a grain of salt. As for the name, that came from exactly where you’re thinking it does. Sometimes things are just that simple. With it I framed myself as exactly that, what the then-still-masc-presenting Alexis should have been. But I get ahead of myself with that name.

‘Alexi’

The precise ordering of events here gets tough. If they started using ‘Alexi’ during the relationship, a little before, or mostly after is lost to us. Something about memory forming being poor in stressful situations. Case in point the other person in the relationship barely remembers it because 6th form was so tough for them that those two years are fragments at best. Certainly in retrospect it has been a lot easier to assign the change to my first manifestations, bundling all of these changes together into one moment where ‘Sam’ became ‘Alexi’ and ‘Charlotte’, but life rarely works like that. The name change was gradual, my manifestation from glitch in their vision to fully realised person was gradual, the change in self identity was gradual. But, for lack of a better understanding of it, the name change has been easy to assign to the split in our psyche, part of a clean delineation of our history, in the process attaching more meaning to it than it perhaps had at the time.

‘Alexi’ as a name ticked a number of boxes. It wasn’t as common as ‘Sam’, it acted as a spiritual successor to ‘Sascha’, and in being more obviously related to ‘Alexander’ it made for a less frictious bureaucratic experience. It did make things confusing during a short-lived relationship with an ‘Alex’, during which I picked up ‘Lexy’ as a nickname, one that’s been riffed on more positively over the years. It wasn’t the only nickname in use at the time, ‘Indy’ which had started from a choice of hat was fading out, and my chemistry class were all calling me ‘Jesus’ at the time.

I soon made it to University, for my first, failed, undergrad. I remained ‘Alexi’ but it is worth noting that a fair few people were already putting me down as ‘Alexis’ here and I didn’t correct any of them.

This blog post has ended up a fair bit more raw than we first thought it would be.

That’s okay though, nothing we haven’t said before in different places. But we are cognizant of how much this has come to be a telling, if an abridged one, of our history. A name is often our first, and clearest, knowledge of a thing, it makes sense that understanding a name requires understanding of what it names.

There was nearly an Earthsea quote here but we thought better of it in the end.

Lack and absence often define how we think of the half-decade of life that comes next. Even in our more moderate reflections on the matter I’ve a starring role in the struggles we faced. Before the first year of the undergrad was done we were back with Alexis’ parents. My behaviour here was not as confrontational as it had been during my emergence, it had been tempered some with moments of peace and shared joy, the beginning of a process that would take years to complete.

For Alexis this came with a lot of accepting themselves; giving themselves space and permission to struggle or fail; and recognising the emotional resonance between us, the way we echo and amplify each other’s feelings. For me it was, at its core, a very simple paradigm shift; I would never have a life despite Alexis, but I might have one because of them.

Time has brought with it an appreciation for Alexis, for my other half, and for the role I can have in their life. My initial position of feeling I was beyond retaliation so I could do what I want shifted. As many children do at three or four, I came to understand the way in which the emotions and wellbeing of the people in my life are worthwhile ends unto themselves. I began to take a role in writing, not just being a foil for Alexis’ work, but engaging actively and creatively. Through this I started to have an impact on the world, beyond the harm I had done, and an impact on the relationship that existed with L M Payne.

‘Charly’

It is hard to pin down a turning point in particular, we’ve mentioned this before, but the change from ‘Charlotte’ to ‘Charly’ definitely came with a move to being friends, and in things together. It’s worth noting that even with ‘Charlotte’ being her name, and hence the name on her EVE account, it's very rarely what she’s been called, especially as we move into the era of more people than me talking to her. That’s easier to describe nowadays, with Dactylomancy and our Discord, or even just post authorship, but back then it was a mess of quote blocks and single versus double quote marks.

Despite that I’ve a lot of memories of building relationships with people in this time, building worlds with L M and generally just beginning to make myself known to the world in my own words. The people around Alexis at the time were some truly wonderful individuals; understanding, supportive and genuinely lovely.

They always are when they’re around.

One in particular, was, beside L M, the most important person in our world. I behaved awfully towards her in a number of ways I deeply regret. These were mostly forgiven at the time due to, I would say, a mix of: being written off as childish behaviour; my incorporeal nature meaning that they didn’t carry the weight they might have otherwise, and avoided earlier correction of my behaviour; them not having found how they wanted to approach boundaries with us; and a saintly amount of grace and patience that they showed us. Certainly more than we fairly deserved. 

You might, rightly, be wondering why I am spending words in a blog about our names talking about the ways I wronged someone who was once very dear to me, and in many ways still is. It is because, as I learnt how to be a better person, and continued to be head over heels for them, I asked of them a number of things. One was permission to raid an abstract version of their wardrobe, declined, and another, crucially, was if, when creating my first full name, I could use their surname.

Charlotte Amelia Tillyanna Shalliker

The surname you have the context for why, and why too it is no longer my name for I have no doubt had I asked later, or were I to ask today I would, reasonably, be told no. My forename too, you know the reasons. ‘Amelia’ and ‘Tillyanna’ are more frivolous.

Just a bit, part of the reasoning was so your name spelled out ‘cats’. 

Hey! That might be entirely true, but I get to confess my own silliness.

Then confess away.

Well . . . ‘Amelia’ was inspired in no small part by Amelia Pond, linked for those who don’t know who she is, though I’m delighted to see she’s notable enough to have her own page. I can’t say much for ‘Tillyanna’, bar liking how it rolled off of the tongue and added a nice, somewhat silly-sounding, name. As for having two middle names, Alexis did and does, so I had to as well.

With a formal name came some more introductions over the years, and the beginning of collecting an inner circle of people who knew, and spoke with, Charly on a discord server. It also began the question of what to call ‘us’, and more existential questions about what ‘us’ even was.

‘The Twins’

The idea of our siblinghood was nothing new at the time, we’d been saying ‘my sibling’ and ‘my sister’ almost since we’d had separate voices to outside people. Two related people from one origin, twins just made sense as a rationalisation. Not to mention the ways that we flitted and flicked threads of conversation between us, or operated on the same wavelength was often covered by the strange, connected vibes of twinness.

This was around the time I made a conscious effort to move from calling L M ‘my other half’ to ‘my partner’ and reserving the term ‘my other half’ for, well, my other half.

Being two halves of a whole is a simple concept, and a core one to trying to explain our nature, but for some reason ‘the Whole’ was never meaningfully considered as a name for us. 

‘Aksan’ meanwhile was one that had been drifting forward, more so in my use than ours, but nonetheless it began to be a general handle and not just the surname of our EVE characters. The morphing of that into ‘AksanDotDev’ was a process that took a few years and was influenced by, of all things, a desk furniture company. The main impetus behind it however was to unify our presence under a unique and singular handle, and ‘Aksan’ was, oddly enough, taken.

If I may though, I feel like that shift to a singular point of presence online went with a shift in what we shared about our life, though not yet being public about my existence, and I definitely think of it becoming an identity for us, and what we did.

Alright then, let’s put it up there.

‘AksanDotDev’

Not what we are, but our handle.

Now, for anyone that read the in conversation draft of this, or who has simply followed me as an acquaintance, what you might have expected to follow from ‘Alexi’.

Alexis Jasper Sascha Payne

Charlotte Lilith Unity Payne

With a little extra, for good measure.

So, to start unpacking this, ‘Payne’. We didn’t get married, and there are currently no plans to, but we wanted to take L M’s name. This wasn’t just because she is our life partner and it is inherently a form of commitment, though that is the core of why, and meant that it was something we had viewed for a while as happening eventually. It happened when it did as part of an overall choice to change my name, and by extension Charly’s, and that was prompted by wanting to earn my PhD under what would be my name for good.

And . . .

And . . . I wanted to be ‘Dr. Payne’.

It is a good name.

I much prefer it to the alternative. It is startling the impact that school bullying can still have on how you think of things later into life. Meanwhile, ‘Payne’ is a fresh canvas, with only the associations of my beloved on it.

It is a delight to be a part of the Family Payne.

As for the rest of my names. ‘Alexis’ was an easy choice, it feels less masculine than ‘Alexi’, though the stats are marginal, so that might just be how I feel, and lets me use either comfortably, which I do to a degree. It also means that my name on the uni systems, in any bureaucratic system, now matches the name I use. I do introduce myself as ‘Alexis’ now, for what it is worth, and have told the people that knew me as ‘Alexi’ for a long time, but I don’t mind if they don’t update. 

Middle names were more about the overall impression than specifics, I like my initials and I set the restriction early for myself that I wanted to keep them. I had been writing under A J S Payne for a while already, a nod, in effect, to the inevitability of taking our partner’s name.

Something I mirrored when we opened up about me, being credited as C L U Payne wherever my other half was A J S. 

Just to differentiate I have ended up using ‘Alexis J S Payne’ in academia. And though it was suggested that I use simply ‘Alexis Payne’ it turns out that’s far from unique. With several being military researchers, so I’m happy to avoid that confusion.

Back on topic . . .

Back on topic, the initials were set, and I was left with the goal of changing the names behind them to suit my needs. That is to say, updating them to a more gender neutral presentation.

A side note here, and I will say in advance that Alexis can use whatever pronouns they want and I will love them regardless, but their move to using ‘they/them’ pronouns that went with this name change had a minor frustration. We used to be able to neatly refer to ‘he/him’, ‘Alexi’; ‘she/her’, me; or ‘they/them’, the Whole pair of us. It was a nice side effect we’ve had some variations on.

I am, in a very small part, sorry for the loss of that, but like many of the changes I’ve made in recent years, it was a sacrifice of ease and convenience in favour of authenticity and openness.

Back to my names, once the initials were set Sascha slid in very nicely, it was another part of my initial naming that I could keep, and now, with a better understanding of myself, adapt to my purposes. Just nobody point out how two of my forenames are basically the same name.

‘Jasper’ looking back was odd, is odd, I like it though. It’s the most gendered of my forenames, and was nearly ‘Jaspet’ to mitigate that. In the end though, I will live with it as is. It is traditional, something I am in a number of ways. It’s masc, the same. It’s biblical, and though that is most definitely something I am not, it is something that my middle names were. I was in fact christened though, though no one in my immediate family can really work out why. Jasper is a variation seen for Caspar, one of the Three Magi, or wise men, the latter being a reference I definitely appreciate.

As Alexis has managed to omit it I will mention it; ‘Alexander’, ‘Sascha’, ‘Alexi’, ‘Alexis’, they all share a root and a meaning, and that is protector, defender. It seems apt in the end that they would bear the name twice given it is the role they so often play and paint themselves into. Even if it is in a more abstract, often wellbeing and mental health related sense than begin out there fighting battles.

Nottingham isn’t that rough. Thank you.

Quite alright, now we can get back to talking about me! When Alexis changed their name, and took L M’s it only felt right for me to do the same. ‘Charlotte’ stays because, despite some negative associations with my early years, that is me, and I’ve come to appreciate it as the more formal ‘me’ too. So I’ll happily keep wearing that.

It’s even been actively reclaimed with an art series, the Four Seasons of Charlotte Payne, currently in the works.

Now, I didn’t have any issue with my middle names really, aside from them being perhaps chosen without giving them due consideration. However . . . My initials now spelled ‘cat pee’. They had to go.

What they would be replaced with, well, not unlike my dear sibling, I like working within restrictions, so I decided the initials first, and though they don’t spell anything there is a pattern to them.

I’m just going to tell people here as she would genuinely sit with each and every one of you dear readers until you not just gave up but begged for the answer.

My hobbies are limited when I’m incorporeal. 

C L U, is a right shift of two, a Caesar cipher if you will, of A J S.

L and U to fill, my first suggestion was ‘Lilith’ and ‘Ursula’, both very witchy and the witchy vibes are something I have lent into and cultivated over the years. They pair well with being a magical being with moving tattoos and the ability to teleport around a room. However, and I’ve come to agree with her, L M suggested this might be a bit much. Instead I went with the random religious forename front and ‘Unity’. Okay, being honest, the religious connotations are secondary, and something I chose the name despite. The reason for picking ‘Unity’ and why I am so happy to have it in my name is as a nod to how far my other half and I have come. I have ‘Unity’ in my name to celebrate having unity in my life.

The Dyad Payne

We like specific words, especially the ones that are just far enough from the average lexicon that you can make them into something a bit alien and a bit magical. We like good ideas, even when the execution isn’t there, the things that stick in your brain and keep you thinking about what they could be. We like formal addresses, ‘the widow Ranter’, ‘the Baudelaire children’,  ‘the Family Payne’.

I feel there must be references more contemporary, and more relevant than The Widdow Ranter.

How about Star Wars: Episode IX?

That is, in fact, an apt reference. At least where the seed began for this name and this title. It is a word that works, it feels uncommon enough to reflect our nature, but also: we are the smallest possible social group; we are a committed intimate two-person relationship; we have twoness, and otherness; we are a pair treated as one.

We are the Dyad Payne.

First amongst these changes has been the new About Us section, which is now, well, about us. With sections to try and explain some more what that even means, Living Differently was very sweet as a post but we know it left a lot of people with more questions than it answered. For folks that do still have more they want to ask, then ask, on whatever platforms we are present on, or feel free to hop onto the community discord where we have a questions thread, for everything from do we share the same sleep cycle to what colour our light sabres would be.

We also enjoyed the chance to just take a fresh look at what we’re involved with, and what we are working on next, and represent our work, designing it rather than hodgepodge-ing it together over time based on what we thought we needed. This has meant being able to give more space to things like the worlds we write in, or the books we have planned. We can’t wait until they aren’t all plans, and one of the big things with having this done is we should be back to writing on the regular. Foundations has been planned out, and now we get to write it.

Finally, to make this a true sequel to the Solstice post we must sadly share that Alexis’ father passed in early January. He is, and will be, dearly missed; Alexis is spending a huge chunk of their time lately looking through old photos that their father’s friends have shared. There will be a celebration of his life later this month, reach out to us if you do want details, and he’ll be interred in the Memorial Woodlands Bristol next month.

In all, between everything that has been happening, it feels like a new chapter in our shared life, even as we have said some farewells. We are changing how we write to focus on the new goal of delivering books. Alexis’ relationship with their parents is obviously changed by all this, but likely with their PhD too. Charly is now known to the world, and enjoying being seen for herself. There is a lot of joy and contentment around, with hope and paths we see to more. Here’s to writing the next chapter, and all that it entails.

That’s going to mean being more open, and radically honest about who I am and how I live my life. And that’s an odd direction to feel I have to move in as someone who was once told by their long term therapist that: you know, maybe I should lie more? He had a point at the time, and he has since passed and is dearly missed now, so I can’t ask his current thoughts on the matter. But he also had another observation that I feel apt today: that it is hard to interact with a part of me and not the whole of me. At the time he was musing on how working with me was the first time politics came into the therapy room, but it can be applied to what I’m talking about today.

Here is the threshold, I guess, from darkness into light.

So, hello!

Well, that worked a lot better in our head, and it might yet, on rereading. We will see. But it seemed the most logical place for this to start. I’ve had this conversation with individuals a half dozen times now. Usually mental health professionals, a handful of friends. I always thought I was developing a schema for how to do it. I guess in future I’ll be linking this.

You know at least someone will have noticed the authors listed at the top of this? Shall we stop beating about the bush?

Indeed. The voice in purple, the voice in my ear, lying on the sofa, helping and heckling as I write this, and anything else that I write, is Charly.

Charlotte Lilith Unity Payne, to be precise, or sometimes The Muse Who Insists Upon Herself. But Charly is fine. I am very real.

And very intangible, hence why I do the typing up. What she is is a consistent part of my reality, and has been, bar a few brief episodes, for the last thirteen or so years. Nearly half my life, more than half of what I remember. It’s not always been good, like a great number of similar things, Charly was born as a coping mechanism during a time of trauma. Not that helping me cope seemed like her goal.

It was about the worst things have ever been for us, and I wasn’t a positive influence in my early years. But this is about life now, and those days passed, and we, I . . . It took a while, but I made peace with how I am, and the fact that any life I had would be through the life that Alexis and I share.

It has certainly been a journey together, but I can say that I am incredibly glad that we are on good terms now. Because living with Charly is a genuine joy. And you see her shining through in so much of what I do, particularly with my writing, my collaborations, so much of the poetry is very much her. It is hard to interact with a part of me without interacting with the whole of me.

Me and us become confusing terms. My other half, my sibling, the other part of this dyad, is the same person they always were. I recognise I am a part of them, I just happen to have my own voice and my own presence, and through Alexis’ grace I can have an impact on consensus reality. That is, mine gets to be one of the stories that makes it out of their, our, head.

It’s a form of multiplicity, for what it’s worth, not DID, or anything with any kind of fronting or switching between us. I am always the one with physical form.

And I am always the one beholden to my scribe’s poor typing.

We are stable and comfortable enough in our roles.

Me as much as I can be . . . given . . . you know . . . Honestly though, we are stable, and my happiness—

And by extension mine.

—has grown significantly for having an active role in what we now think of as our life. I get to talk to folks, I get to write, I get a say in what movies we watch, and, if everything goes to plan, I will get to see my name on the books that I’ve, collaboratively, written.

That’s been one of the big drivers for this, with the work going into Foundations, which will happen, we promise. But all that work has us thinking about what the book is going to look like, what we are offering the people who support us and are along for the ride and here is where we settled. Opening up more, talking about our process, our creativity and our life together.

So, expect more blog posts, and more of my little purple pop-ups in them. Potentially more presence of me in things like the retrospectives and around the server, we are still working out details as we draft that. (Ooo, do I get to do my first plug for joining the server and supporting us?)

Yes . . .

Yay! Well, one thing is certain and that was the seed of all this.

A J S & C L U
Payne

And that’s the plan, but there are a few things to clear up, so perhaps now is a time to address the elephant in the room.

Gods help you I will—

Not you, not exactly. But there is a point here, as real as Charly is to me, as much as she is a part of my reality, I am aware that physically, practically, legally Charly is not a separate person, but simply a facet of me that I’ve chosen to give a name and a life to. And I am happy with that.

We are happy with that.

If you look into it, hallucinations are way more common than most people think, with more than a quarter of the general population experiencing them. Our brains do some truly incredible things in the way that we process and approach the world and how we form our sense of identity in it. From direct senses, to memory, to perceptions of time, interpretation of facial expressions and vocal tone we all experience the world differently. My experience of it includes Charly, and to some small degree if you’re reading this, now so does yours.

There was a particular encounter that really was a big part of cementing our life together, for me, and I am getting a nod before I say it, but for both of us. When we were first being friendly, and Alexis was talking about that to their therapist the therapist was really happy with it. They talked about how often the conclusion of therapy, processing, healing, whatever the path, for people who hear voices isn’t not hearing voices; it’s getting on with the voices you hear. It was the first time that a professional had addressed me as just a part of Alexis’ new experience of life and explicitly not as something to be fixed.

And that is what Charly is, a part of my life. One that I wouldn’t give up for the world, because she does so much to make every day of it fantastic.

I do try. I will try. Now at least, and my life has been unimaginably better for it.

Writing this has been a process. A lot of back and forth on what exactly this is, hell it started as a whole different post on someone else’s blog and which might still happen there yet. There have been a lot of delays to figure things out. A lot of just sitting with each other and smiling.

It’s been a good process in a lot of ways. And hell, this is part of us working out the next stage of, well, us. We threw out the idea early of this being a mental health awareness post. There might be one in a bit, but this post is mine, and about me. This isn’t how everyone’s brains work, it’s not how all multiplicity works. But it’s how we work, and sometimes that’s all a post needs to be.

So are we happy with all that? No last notes?

Not from me.

I think I have one about a technicality of ‘A J S & C L U Payne’ being for legal purposes simply my own pen name on the books, because, legally, Charly is me, I think that’s how this will work out.

Avoids having to arbitrate any royalty splits between us if we fall out. And well, you’re the one that pays the bills and eats the food, and . . . That’s probably a post best left for another day.

I’d say so.

Oh, one last thing.

Hello, world!

I’ve probably been on this track for a week or two, but there has been a huge amount going on behind the scenes and complicating life, and I don’t like breaking commitment, but I think this is worthwhile. I was a bit eager in the book plans and thought I’d thought it all through, I had certainly given it a lot of thought, but that’s not quite the same thing is it? The biggest hurdle was working out what the book was. Which came in the form of thinking how to blurb it, and, to no one’s real surprise, a web serial of short stories over about 1,600 years is a little incoherent. That’s the big change that’s coming coherence. 

Foundations will be coming as soon as it's done. ‘Done’ is perhaps a bit of a vague thing, but I’m not going to rush, I do have a PhD and potentially a whole heap of other things on my plate, and I am planning on giving myself a bit more space to make the book all it can be. There is going to be far more new material being written for the book, and the majority of what I’ve cut is going to be turning up later in some form or another, just not here. Instead, I’m aiming for Foundations to be a collection of short stories that tells the story of the First Era, it will be something that makes sense on its own and acts as a self contained collection for new readers. That’s the big change.

As for week to week, expect less new stories being posted, though I will be sharing some as well as illustrations and other fun. There is one story that I’m currently writing, Two Threads of a Grand Tapestry, that is going to be wrapped up before I fully focus on Foundations, but that’s the goal from here, fully focusing on Foundations. I will also be aiming to share more of the process behind the scenes on the Community Discord, particularly for folks supporting me on Kofi. I cannot thank my community enough for supporting me in this and I fully intend to bring everyone along on this journey who wants to come. And I definitely want to start the fireside readings, at least when my life allows. Finally, I’ve no idea where I’m publishing right now, I’m very tempted into going wide by a number of factors, but I’ve been having conversations with Lana and there is definitely still going to be an illustrated edition. 

So yeah, I’m still writing a book, it’s still going to be about dragons, and it is still having some amazing art. But it’s going to take a little longer, and I feel it is going to be a significantly better book for it. (Also maybe Coruscant might get a stand alone print release sooner rather than later, would people like that?) 

Perhaps bold to start with where this is going, but when we aren’t there yet I feel like one of the most important things is the goal that it's all working towards. With that idea in mind, as people on the Community Discord heard a few weeks ago; I am writing a book. This may seem obvious, I write a lot and books tend to be the goal for fictional poetry and prose, but I have a specific plan for it now, which is what this blog post is here to share. 

Teryte Chronicles: Foundations

In the first half of next year, I aim to self-publish a collection of the last two years of Teryte-related stories, all the ones you can find shared on my site, and more to come. The current plan is Kindle Direct Publishing, which means it will be available around the world through . . . Amazon. Perhaps not my first choice, but the site that began as an online bookstore is looking like the best option for my time and mental health, as such things often do. The crucial thing is that Teryte will be in print and in a much bigger way than the small run of Year Zero that you might have seen in the hands of close friends, family and collaborators. 

The plan, and why this is a whole blog post, is a bit more complex, and I’ll expand later, but the goal right now is to publish the best version of this collection that I can. Well, the best several versions for your reading pleasure. There will be paperback, hardback, and eBook versions of the standard, text-only edition, and then a large format, hardback illuminated edition that aims to not just include, but celebrate Lana’s incredible illustrations, and a matching eBook. All of these will be including all of the stories written so far, and, to make this something I can be truly proud of, all of these stories are going to be remastered.

Two years and a quarter of a million words later a lot has changed. As proud as I am that I have written all the stories that I have and as much as I really do appreciate them, there is room for improvement. To try and convey why I think this is worth doing and how I’m going about it, I want to take you back to where it all began for some context. 

A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death: for, in relation to who or what is making it, it can only be one stage in a series of inner transformations.

- Paul Valéry

The Origin

Teryte is, as I suspect many fictional creations are if you are able to dig into them, an amalgamation of various inspirations and elements. Many of which were read and half-forgotten, blatantly stolen, reinterpreted from reality, some were even conceived over a decade ago. In fact as the nature of magic in Teryte becomes a little clearer it may become oddly familiar to those that I bent the ears of in my Oxford years, after all it was stolen from a long-shelved project with far less dragons. In honesty if I was going to go back to the real beginning I could no doubt speak of well-practised hands sliding in the next tape of The Hobbit’s 1968 Radio 4 adaptation into my childhood stereo, or the disks of Rob Inglis’ reading of The Lord of the Rings that followed it. I have a particularly singular memory of trying to acquire His Dark Materials in matching covers from eBay and infuriating my mother by needing postal orders to pay for them. But those are stories for a different kind of blog post. 

Telling Each Other Stories

I think it’s fair to say that Teryte began in conversations with my partner over the little over a decade that we’ve been entwined. Of course it wasn’t called Teryte then, and lacked a lot of the geopolitics, and geography in general. But stories of dragons, snowy castles, shape-shifting mages - patience -, cosy libraries, and books by the fire were a staple of shared escapism. Having included those others we’ve held dear over the years, I don’t think it's a huge revelation to say that the Teryte Chronicles began as a friend fic. And so like many of my creative endeavours over the years, it began to grow out of hand. Crucially though, I did something different this time.

Writing Things Down

There is writing of mine before Teryte, that much is certain, and more world building than I would care to admit to. A single scene or maybe two of a project called Ascaria that I might one day return to. A Dauntless fic that won me a battle pass, and some respect from their then community director. An EVE-based story that won me a handful of logistics cruisers, notably there was a play in one of the other categories of that competition that cast all the ships as actors wearing cardboard boxes and I still love that idea enough to shout it out all these years later with a foolish grin on my face.

All of that though goes to say I’ve a long track record of having lots of ideas, and the urge to tell stories and build these fantastical worlds, and sod all of actually writing words down on a page. In fact my journey into writing properly didn’t even start with Teryte, but instead with Bubblegum, Lana’s webcomic project that some may know I edit for when it’s releasing. And not even that but a piece of smut Lana wrote between two of her characters that I asked politely if I could do an edit pass on. From that I ended up being brought on as a beta reader and I want to say “swearing consultant” was my first role within the project. Much like The Thick of It’s Ian Martin, I soon became a more core part of the writing team, providing everything from line editing to structural workshopping. To my partner’s great amusement this would often involve table reads of the comic scripts, complete with voices. This practice even extended to editing sex scenes with all the windows open due to a heatwave; Lana cannot complain that I am not dedicated. 

A month or so into this I took up the idea of writing a short story within Bubblegum’s world and with its cast as a way of further fleshing them out, at least from my more external perspective to them. The short story that was produced remains unpublished due to spoilers, resigned for now to sit on Lana’s shelf in a small volume. I thought it worth noting however as the first, to my mind, proper piece of prose I had written in years. It would be far from the last. 

Bringing Teryte to Life

When I talk about where this all began it is difficult to overstate Lana’s role in all this. From getting me back into writing prose to the glorious illustrations that serve to inspire and depict this world. It was her pen strokes that were the first ink put to the page in Teryte, with my words following after. ‘Memoirs‘ is where this all began. This is all digital, real ink on real pages is coming sometime next year, that’s why this blog post began all those weeks ago, keep up. From stories that accompanied the early illustrations came many drafted moments from Castle Caerulea and tendrils that have reached forward and back in it.

Teryte was in no small part writing practice, something which didn’t have the weight of a project like Ascaria, something I didn’t mind getting wrong, and so something to hone my craft on. I started writing because I didn’t mind making mistakes and just wanted to get used to putting words to the page. And even things like the weekly release schedule were a part of that, making it routine and making myself used to the craft. But somewhere in the quarter of a million words, the quarter of a century of illustrations, and the more than a hundred stories I’ve written for Teryte, I’ve fallen for it. 

But I’ve also progressed a long way. 

The best training is to read and write, no matter what. Don’t live with a lover or roommate who doesn’t respect your work. Don’t lie, buy time, borrow to buy time. Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.

- Grace Paley 

The Path

It feels like a lifetime ago I began writing properly, I have come to love it. With the transition from aspiring, always talking about it but never doing it, to actual, still always talking about it but now also doing it, writer I found something that I didn't know was missing in my life. I am also confident enough to say that I am good at it, without fear of delusion. But I am under no illusion that I started writing as well as I can now, nor that I did not make many mistakes that were all but necessary to dive into this project in the way that I did.

Teryte has evolved a lot over the last two years, and my writing has too. This is why I am not content in simply bundling up these last two years of work and calling that a book. In pursuit of making Foundations the best that it can be, I am intending on revisiting and remastering the stories I’ve already written with everything that I now know. 

I referenced earlier the belief that no artistic work is truly complete, only abandoned, and I think that is true. Learning to accept that I have to put things down was a big step for me, but now I intend to pick them back up and treat them as not first drafts, but not final ones either. The happy place for me to abandon these works hasn’t been found yet, but I am hoping that the next six months will yield it. 

Writing

The next six or so months of writing is going to be a shift from following the ideas and themes of the different lineages to trying to fill in the gaps in the world building. I don’t foresee Foundations being anywhere close to the full story of this world, or the many stories I have in mind for the characters within it. But I do hope that it will frame the world, the themes, and the conflicts, being the groundwork for what will come in the years that will follow.

But that’s just the new writing, and as I’ve touched on, there is a lot to improve with what’s already been written. Fundamentally I am going to be viewing them as drafts when it comes to compiling the book, and alongside the new writing I hope to be redrafting all of them. What redrafting them will vary from story to story.

For some it will be a light touch, another editing pass that will catch any sloppy phrases and generally just bring up the quality of any prose that I’m unhappy with. I feel like the majority of things should fall into this camp, they will read as they do now but have a few less clumsy phrases or a few more elegant ones.

For others  it will involve work on congruence, that is bringing early stories in line with later developments to the lore of the world. This has been done to some over the last two years, often with simple date changes. In this effort the big internal wiki is coming out and all of the key points will be brought in line. More than this, there will be a number of additions, where they seem apt, of references to the new lore in the characters’ knowledge, beliefs, and practices. I will be happy with as many stories as I can find that fall into this category, but I’ve no urge to force it. Side note here, but there was already a set of “blushing edits” that happened, mostly around ‘Coruscant’ based on the realisation that draconic blushing wouldn’t be visible. Most of these changes will be more noticeable than that, they won’t change the overall feel of a story, but will certainly add a noticeable something that wasn’t there before.

Finally, there will be those that need a lot of work, these I’m most nervous about, but in a way happiest to be tackling. There are some stories, the likes of ‘Warmth‘ and ironically ‘Memoirs‘, where I just feel like what I initially wrote isn’t good enough. That can be because they don’t fit within the form that Teryte has taken, don’t say something meaningful about the world or characters, don’t set up or pay off anything, or just aren’t entertaining enough to stand on their own merits. But whatever the reason, these are going to be taken back to the drawing board. I don’t intend to cut any stories from the book, and I am still happy with having written these, but we will see complete reimaginings of some stories, finding the spark of that original idea and turning it into something that deserves its pages. 

How I’m going about this is going to predominantly be through rereading them, duh. But going back to reading them aloud. It always used to be the final edit pass, the one that caught all the mistakes that the eyes glazed over and put a certain emphasis on the lyricism of the prose as one of my beta readers once put it. Reading the stories aloud, telling the stories, is what I always see as the final goal of the craft, so it’s what I work towards. Not that I think the words on the page are lacking, but reading them as written leaves less room for me to gloss over the roughness of my work and reveals well where polish is needed. 

I explain this because there is something else I’m planning to add over the next six months. 

Reading

Telling the stories, reading them aloud to someone is a habit I lost at the tail end of last year as the friend that I would read them for unfortunately left my life. But it has always been something I’ve been missing from my life ever since. So, in combination with the goals of reading more for the editing, I want to try and read for you, my fans and community, as well.

There are a lot of motivations for this, personal enjoyment is certainly a big element, but a handful of things come into play. I think my readings do add something to the text, I know that a number of those closest to the project would really appreciate such a thing, that listening fits into people’s routines differently to reading, and it also lets me establish certain pronunciations. 

I want to sort a new, less annoying mic, and test out a new recording setup and a load of other fun before we start, but I am somewhat hoping that this is something that I can start doing on the Community Discord sometime around mid-October. I want to go for the middle of the month so I don’t pile onto the end of the month stuff I already do with the Q&As and retrospective for my supporters. As for what the actual day and time is, I’m thinking that sometime on a Friday or Saturday in my (UK) evening, but I am up for working out when is good for folks to have a nice little firesides with stories and maybe a chat.

I recognize however that no time is going to work for all folks, and that people may want to revisit stories, so there is a hope that I can also use this as a way to start producing recordings of the read stories. I even completely sidetracked myself during writing this section with working out how to have such things listed on all the expected podcast platforms. Basically, I’ve got some plans for this. But I plan to take it slowly so I don’t get overwhelmed and burn out.

Art

As one might have gathered from the earlier comments, or just knowing me, my collaboration with Lana is a huge part of my creative endeavours and I am honoured to be able to half as much as I have. I will personally always view the illuminated edition as the definitive version of each book of the Teryte Chronicles. With this in mind, a solid dose of the work in formatting that edition will be around giving that art the space to truly shine. 

There is also more art to come, which will be a bit of a change from previous artworks. As some of you may know, the illustrations so far have been guided by how Lana is feeling inspired, at least within a big swathe of ideas that were mutually agreed upon. From there I’ll normally find out which one was chosen when I see the final art and set about writing the short story to go with it. Originally this would all be done in the course of a single day, but it’s now done over a few. Though it's a fantastic creative exercise that I would definitely recommend to anyone who would be comfortable letting an artist have relative free reign with their characters. 

This, much like my trend of just writing what I feel like writing, is how the writing has come to have such a number of broad gaps I want to fill in before collecting the stories. So over the next six months we’ve sat down and agreed on a plan that will introduce a few new faces, illustrate some of the story ideas that are just begging out for it, and fit with the themes that are being filled in across the period. We’re very excited to see how these all fit together in the end.

Themes

Speaking of themes, you may have noticed that recent months have had overarching themes, though not fully connected with their lineage stories. As we move from the lineage stories to the remaining pillars of the world these themes are going to tighten up some, hopefully tying together everything from the illustrated story to the pillar and all the others. As I’ve previously been open about the lineage names and the plans for those I wanted to take this chance to lay out the plans for the themes and pillar stories of the coming six months: 

• September: Caspinarch and Sancthor, ‘Abjured‘

• October: The Krinaale, ‘Krinaale’

• November: The Inigne, ‘Inigne’

• December: Passantra, ‘A Week Between Two Worlds

• January: The Soul, ‘Picking Up the Pieces

• February: The Splitting of Caspinarch, ‘Manaforged’

Schedule

Throughout this chunk of writing I’m intending on keeping as much as possible to my existing release schedule:

• Stories every Monday

• Illustrated stories on the first Monday of the month

• Pillar chronicles, the slot in replacements for lineage chronicles, will be keeping the penultimate Monday of the month slot

• Q&As and Retrospectives, on the Community Discord, in the week after the last Monday of the month

• Fireside story reading, again on the Community Discord, sometime on the weekend before the third Monday of the month, if all goes to plan

I am also going to say now as fair warning, though I doubt anyone is going to complain, come March I might be taking some time for final stories to be included, generally all this editing work, and all the other work that’s going to be going into self-publishing a book. The goal will definitely be to wrap Foundations up entirely and then consider what will be coming after, I’ve two directions for which stories to explore after all this, and I may revisit my release schedule along with the other commitments on my time and see where we are at. I’m not intending to step back from writing or Teryte, when this book comes out, but I may look at whether four or five stories a month is how I want to keep writing. 

I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time

- Blaise Pascal

The Shortcut

Given this is now longer than the majority of my writing posts, I figured a TL;DR was in order.

• The last two years of Teryte Chronicles stories will be collected into a bound book early next year

• There will be a standard edition in paperback, hardback and eBook.

• There will also be an illuminated edition, a large format illustrated artbook, and eBook.

• It will be available on Amazon

• All of the posted stories will be “remastered” for the book

• This will include line editing based on the extra two years of writing practise since this project began

• There will also be some lore based tweaks based on the last two years of world building 

• Potential fireside readings of Teryte stories on the Community Discord in the middle of the month

• Recordings of these hopefully to follow on all good podcast aggregators

And I would be remiss at a time like this not to say, if you want to be part of this journey and get all sorts of fun behind the scenes things along the way, come join the Community Discord and please consider supporting me on Kofi if you can.

The Obstacle

An update, by way of bumps in the road and broken bridges. As many of you may know I have a lot of complications in my life between my MH, my PhD and a host of other things not worth enumerating here. Something has likely needed to give for a while, and as writing isn’t what pays the bills that is what is giving. I am hoping to stay on weekly releases of something, but it may end up being the remasters or small poems, not huge instalments each week. TL;DR, same plan, but I’m relaxing the deadlines for myself.

Well, that is true . . . But it is a very surface level answer. Nice for telling relatives and new acquaintances but not fit for my inevitable memoirs.

Honestly, I definitely started writing because I wanted to get better at it. Teryte, a project now closing on 200k words over 100 pieces of writing, was something that “didn’t matter” so that I could practise without ruining one of those huge stories I’d been talking about writing for a decade. Somewhere it became more, between the world building, the art, and the community that’s been building up around it, it’s definitely more than practice now.

But wanting to get better at writing presupposes an urge to write, surely? So that can’t be our final answer. And I think it lies in why I felt I should be good at writing, and don’t get me wrong, I am. I can get better, but I’m not going to suggest it’s not something I have some degree of talent at. But this writing, creative writing, it serves the core purpose not of showing that off, but of telling a story. No, telling a story isn’t the core of what I’m doing; exploring a world is. 

Time for a tangent. There is a history in art, and media, of the peephole as an exploratory device, a lens through which to see something captivating. Sometimes this is a simple tableau, others an entire gallery. In the example that I want to draw in your mind there is a sealed room; you can walk all the way around it and observe the room from a dozen peepholes, each giving you a view of a constructed scene. Between them though, they build an image of the room that is much, much more than any single glimpse can give. Your mind fills the gaps, makes connections between the details you’ve been shown, in the end you take away something the artist has given you that was never explicitly stated. But the peephole itself serves this purpose of manufacturing distance between the art and the observer. 

One might contend here that many artforms do this in their own way, films giving you a message without ever stating their themes, a musical movement evoking emotions and movement and place without a single lyric, but I paint this particular picture for you because it is Teryte for me. The distance isn’t artificial though, it is instead the constant and painful distance that exists between all humans. I tell these stories, I help you explore this world because it gives you a glimpse into my mind, the sealed room, and the world I have built within it. 

I have always wondered how much to say on this blog, and I may say much, much more in future or I may leave it at this, but I have a lot of mental health issues. Not just mental health issues, that’s a simplistic view, but neurological differences, things that distance me from consensus reality and change how it affects me. I’m not going to say Teryte is my mind, it could never be that, but to share some part of my mind, when it feels such an alien place, so distant from the world, means everything. 

To write involves imagining, experiencing, in a way, and processing emotions, something I’ve had a complicated relationship with. It means saying things that are difficult to say, trying to bridge divides, or accepting that some things are just too much. And it gives an escape from the frustrations of this world, a chance to imagine a better one. In the end, it is an exercise in conveying meaning, to try and take something intangible and convey it to another mind. 

I don’t think in English, it’s looser concepts than that. I don’t even go directly from how I think to words on the page, they are sounded out, silently spoken before they are written. This leads to some very strange typos to unravel if you ask my partner. But it adds another layer to me, another step of distance between what I want to convey and even the medium of its conveyance. 

Time, and community, has evolved it beyond an internal process though, beyond the simple act of the writing. Storytelling has at times been a big part of my self, and finally writing, finally being able to more broadly share my work, has brought a sense of meaning. Here I think is where passion and calling come into it, seeing appreciation for it. Writing is something I do inherently for the process and the benefit to my own wellbeing. But it has grown into something that someday could be what I shape my life around, and that is a whole other question. 

Being able to write for someone, even if it's just one person, gives satisfaction that I will have some element of legacy through it all. That the world I’ve created in Teryte won’t die with me and the joy it brings might outlive me. I have for a long time, even when I’ve been afraid of writing, believed that the worlds I craft would be my greatest gift to the world. The jury is still out, but though my PhD is likely to do more practical good in the world, this is what I’d like to be remembered for. 

There is a lot I can do very well in life, my STEM background is full of notable, but fungible achievements. I can do maths quickly, program elegantly, write technically, mark efficiently, and I would even say problem-solve quite well. But none of it is truly unique. These creations, Teryte, the cast, the stories, are something that is solely mine, a product of my life, my experiences, my beliefs, my imagination, and my inspirations. No one else could reproduce them. 

Why do I write? To leave the world some glimpse of the ethereal chaos, the intangible constructs, and the unique gift within my mind.

So, in Old Blood (heavily recommend reading that first if you haven’t because this post is designed to compliment it) there is the following line from Passantra:

“Okay, not only daughters, Samuel is definitely your son,” she said, exasperated, “But, I just want to point out that one, slender, beardless, round-shouldered son, doesn’t really undermine my point that I haven’t seen one of your children born with anything between their legs!”

We, my beta readers and I, went back and forth on the language of this a lot during drafting. It’s obviously not the most progressive, but also reflective of Passantra’s character and general disinterest in humans and human affairs. She was, after all, joking moments before about branding humans to keep track of them. Characterful dialogue is all well and good, but can make talking about more complex subjects difficult. Hence this metatextual aside.

Despite Passantra’s ignorant transphobia, opinions on transness in Teryte are generally accepting with a few outliers, explored more in Coruscant, and I’m intending on exploring opinions within the Inigne aligned north in time. Samuel is here as an early nod to the presence of trans individuals with supportive families early in Emergence, suggesting they predate dragons in the world. 

But now to the meat of this post, though Passantra’s concession of “not only daughters” is true, and a step in the right direction, it’s not fully the case. Though the vast majority of Caspinarch’s children are, as we would describe it, assigned female at birth, not all of them are. There are a number of intersex identities that can co-occur with the factors that bias him towards producing AFAB children and we felt it important to acknowledge them, especially with the reasoning behind the bias.

And now we can circle back to Passantra’s point and part of what this section is designed to exposit. Caspinarch is arguably the eighth sister, or at least the eighth XX dragon. Caspinarch has been intended to be an example of XX male syndrome from the beginning, though I will admit that he is a poor representation of the condition. 

Now, I don’t want to get too deep into molecular genetics, because, well, it’s not my field of study –my uni doesn’t even pay for journal access to it, and yes I’m angry about that– and also because it gets very involved, very fast. But to stay at a more general level, we’ll just be looking at the tip of this iceberg. And as a warning, I’m going to use the term 'typical' or 'typically' a lot here when I’m describing things that are the common outcome or path, but aren’t always how things will turn out. 

To start with the basics; DNA in humans, and most other lifeforms, is present in a number of DNA molecules called chromosomes. We typically have 46, and typically 2 of them determine our sex. The information required for typical male development of the body is found in the Y-chromosome, meaning that in the absence of that Y-chromosome you would expect typical female development of the body. This can be shown even in other unusual chromosomal configurations with X and XXX aligning more closely with typical female development, e.g. XX, while XXY and XYY align more closely with typical male development, e.g. XY. 

However, this isn’t due to the Y-chromosome as a whole, simply genes and genetic pathways that are typically found on the Y-chromosome, and now you should be able to see where we are going with this. The main factor pointed to is a gene on the Y-chromosome the SRY gene which encodes a protein called the Sex-determining region Y protein (SRY) or Testis-determining factor (TDF), this begins the process of setting development towards a typically male course, rather than a typically female one. In most cases of XX-male syndrome it can be traced back to the SRY gene having been transferred from a Y-chromosome to an X-chromosome during recombination. Recombination is a process that occurs during the production of gamete cells, i.e. sperm and eggs; it is part of the process where the genetic material that is passed onto the offspring is selected.

This gene, or other genetic triggers for XX-male development, are not the entirety of the story however, and there are often complications that result from having only some of the triggers and genetic pathways that would be expected for typical male development. As a result there are often factors in an individual's development beyond simply having two X-chromosomes, such as infertility, ambiguous genitalia, a shorter stature, and typically feminine characteristics such as breast development. This is where external factors like hormonal therapy and cosmetic surgery, while not necessary, can be used to help an individual experience a development or body that better aligns with their identity. 

And this is where Caspinarch falls down almost utterly as an example. Though, say, I’m happy to explain the further masculinisation as being due to the high testosterone levels of all the Old Bloods, which also covers their musculature, behaviour and female infertility, there are other issues. He’s not infertile, as proved by the large numbers of children. He’s not short in stature, in fact he’s the tallest of the Old Bloods. He doesn’t display feminine bodily characteristics, though his hips were always designed to be broader than most men's, I’m not counting it. And finally inheritance, though there isn’t really much data at all on how this would be expected to behave in a better depiction of XX male syndrome because of the above mentioned infertility. In the case of Caspinarch, the inheritance of the condition is rare, with most children following typical XX development, and around 1 in 20,000 will inherit the condition with a similar presentation to Caspinarch’s.

I guess I could just wave my hands here and say “dragons,” after all, they just manifest their genetics differently. Which they do, and that might end up being part of another metatextual aside later, but, I feel it’s more important to acknowledge that these mistakes were exactly that. I started building this world before fully doing my reading and though I think that was valuable in terms of where I was in my life, actually starting projects and all that, it really meant that an opportunity to accurately represent XX male syndrome was squandered. As such, I wanted to admit my failings here and point out what was done wrong to try and avoid any harm that could come from misrepresentation. 

Well, if it’s not a good representation, why am I still talking about it? The fact that even though it’s not accurate to XX male syndrome as we know it, there is still something going on with Caspinarch that I wanted to touch on. As for why that is, and why a fair few things in Teryte are the way they are, it’s for the challenge and the constraints. Much like there are people who scatter dice and use that as the basis of building a map, I tend to pick up a few interesting if difficult topics that would shape the world and see how it works out. As is, the combination of the Old Blood’s initial cruelty with this detail of Caspinarch has a significant societal impact. I am also working on trying to represent more trans and intersex identities in my work, and though this was a messy and deeply flawed attempt, it will not be the last. 

I just want to close this out by saying that intersex identities are more common than you might think, with nearly one in fifty individuals experiencing something that differs from the typical sexual development that we are taught in school. You probably know someone whose experience falls under this umbrella, and for many the difficulties caused by this are due to the friction between societal expectations and the reality they live. When responses to intersex individuals include everything from discrimination to infanticide it is clear that something has to be done about the stigmatisation and pathologizing of intersex individuals. 

If you take nothing else away from this blog let it be this; there are a lot of intersex people in this world and sadly they often face a fight simply to live the life they are born into. And I will wrap up by providing some links to international advocacy groups and networks who I am sure will put this all far better than I have and who do some fantastic work to make the world a better place: 

• OII

• ILGA

• GATE

Under the hood details are far more boring this time. SquareSpace. Kind of the beginning and the end of it. Thinking of recommending of it as a platform to others as a no-code option and obviously I want to use it first. Plus, well, I want a website I don’t need to babysit, I’ve enough projects in that vein already.