So, very weird but Tea/Umamienne thought me worthy of an interview in her current series digging into artist/writer’s process. I’m really flattered and hope I gave some insight into the process of worldbuilding and my peculiar style of writing, but its short so I think we skimmed the surface of something good. Thanks to her for the insightful questions!

Go read it on Deviantart, or see the copy below (reposted for posterity, you all know how DA can be).

Cafterhomme and I talked shop about how to create a setting, and how that affects writing characters into existence.

You are best known for the Beta Academy. Before we touch on that series, were you posting stories before that?

That’s funny, I didn’t know that was my calling card, but its not a bad one to go by I suppose! I’ve been writing since 2017 or so, which was kind of left field. I read something that really struck a nerve and I reached out to the writer Dave Potter, because of his story The Tale of Anastasia, to chat ideas. I mean, so many opportunities of my life have come from rando messages and such, I should know better, and yet I was super nervous.

I think I can trace back to earlier, terrible writings (which no one will ever get a hold of) from some Yahoo Groups (RIP) focused on body-mod around 2012-2014, when some writing challenges and “I’ll illustrate your ideas” contests were running, and I did some literary sketches or captions. That kind of opened a spark where I could get a lot of ideas out quickly.

We decided on how I could evolve his Neo-Victorian bondage ideas forward 100 years, and so we partnered on An Artist’s Masterpiece. That whet my appetite to create what I wanted to read.

I wrote 4 stories before Beta, by the way. 2 partnered, 2 solo.

When you posted your own work for the first time, were you apprehensive of the response?

I don’t super remember, but there was a bit of hand-holding, in that co-writing allowed me to piggyback off Dave’s confidence and… normalcy? When I posted my first solo story Service Model, I was more nervous. I think the rush of working with someone, talking through ideas and being REALLY connected, just creates some of the most fruitful creative spurts I can have, so doing a solo story was more like finding my sea legs

I’ve asked this a couple of times, and the concept seems to be very nuanced. I read an album review, where the critic said they wished that a different band had created it, so that they themselves could hear it for the first time - Instead of slogging through the recording process.

That’s a long way of saying… “To create what I wanted to read,” where is the satisfaction in that?

I think in a lot of cases, I’ve read some smut that had fantastic ideas, but didn’t really milk all the potential out of it. I’m an offender of this in some cases, but you can really easily spot it in others’ writings, easier than your own. I think I had a mental tally of “itches,” or satisfying scenes that I wanted to see explored really well but had never been touched, and my early writing was simply designed to scratch those itches. In Service Model, there is a scene of Asa (spoilers) recently made limbless/blind/deaf, and she is trying to “escape”, wriggling her way down the bed. A nurse comes by and tenderly places her back up with her head on the pillow, destroying all her progress, even though there was no chance of escape anyways. I wanted to see some really subtle collapse of her will in very gentle gestures, and so I wrote it in for myself, knowing that someone out there would like that too. I don’t write for others, I write for myself and secondarily hope to attract like minds. I wouldn’t say my current itches are the same as they were then, but I operate in a similar way, with more focus on characters now.

The first half of your question is subtly different, and I don’t think they are the same. Would I want to detach myself from the product and read it fresh? I think yes when the writing is bad, and no when it’s good. When the writing is successful, every bit of my fantasy dripped into the text, and my brain kinda lets go of its need to hold onto that construct, allowing me to read it back to me. When it’s bad I can’t detach cause I’m still analyzing it in a meta sense. This is a long-ass answer.

Hard to say. For one, I’m at a crossroads of my subject matter and focus on low- vs high-concept. But generally I see myself in relation to a system of oppression or catering, like a puzzle piece inside of a grand machinery (add in your own mixed metaphors). I think of the lifestyle I want to portray and what it would take to accommodate it (I’m specifically thinking of Beta Academy here). Then I externalize that fantasy to a character, create something for them to do in this new world of theirs – what would they care about, where are their cultural/indoctrinated blind spots in relation to us looking in – and write from there. (edited)

To summarize, I think of the conflict between the character and world first, with world as priority, then work backwards.

When you have a story concept that includes worldbuilding, do you feel like you can write that character’s arc, or do you have to step back and plan the setting before you feel comfortable concluding anything?

Oh no, the world is a character itself, so it has to be relatively defined to conclude anything. I’ll often plan a simple day in the life exercise to see how things will even turn out. Also, endings vary wildly as I write, might be a personal failing.

Setting dictates the character, but as I mentioned before, that’s changing somewhat.

The Beta Academy feels like a haunting mix of the Handmaiden’s Tale, mixed with 1984. Some times it feels like The Road or The Dark Tower in the vague geography.

I think the first few are accurate but I’m not familiar with the last. The world of the Betas and Alphas over them was definitely inspired by Handmaid’s Tale in the sense of it being a fertility crisis, and maybe sprinkle in some Brave New World in there with the state controlled conception and “soft dictatorship” but I wanted to find a character dynamic closer to Never Let Me Go, with a group of friends completely at the whim of a system they don’t truly understand. I have no assumptions it will be as wistful or devastating as Ishiguro’s writing, the Nobel Laureate might be a bit out of my reach.

Truly it should be unique, but those are the foundation for sure.

A lot of work goes into a dynamic story. What advice would you give to someone writing for the first time?

Oh boy, I would start small. As someone currently writing a 100K word, (200 page in the word doc) story, I would recommend you get some of those imaginary scenes and write one well. Caption an image you find interesting/attractive. Picture yourself as one of the figures, or standing over the scene. Take it easy. Then when you want to tell a larger story, make those mental scenes into goal posts. How do you get from A to B to C believably? How do you make an unbelievable turn of events make sense? How do you empathize with the protagonist going through something unimaginable? All challenges, but take on one at a time and start small. We write these stories to hit that ONE moment, in a lot of cases.

Thanks again to Umamienne! Go check out her writing!