We Write Because The Night Sky Is Too Quiet For All The Things We Want To Say. So We Spill Galaxies Onto

Tragic indeed

Bad news, y'all

You really gotta write the damn book to become a published author

I’ve never written anything that didn’t cost me a piece of myself.

Brainstorming at 3 AM: This will be an epic saga of love, betrayal, and redemption.

Drafting the next chapter: Uh...they eat soup, I guess?

It will never not be frustrating to me that amputees appear in fiction ALL. THE. TIME. and yet they're almost never acknowledged as such. The Cyberpunk genre is especially guilty of this: amputees and prosthetics becoming a normalised part of life are a defining part of the genre/aesthetic and yet no one even consults with any amputees about how we get represented there. Most writers in those genres don't even consider that giving your characters cybernetic arms and legs means they're an amputee.

CW: Ableism, dehumanisation

This makes it REALLY uncomfortable to engage with stories in the genre because another common aspect of cyberpunk is the idea of losing yourself and becoming something distinctly not-human anymore because you have too many cybernetic augmentations/implants. Shadowrun even has mechanics for this, which state if you get too many prosthetics, which is what cybernetics are 9 times out of 10, your character becomes a monster. These mechanics and discussions surrounding "how many robot bits make you not human anymore" are really, really uncomfortable when you remember this isn't something that's unique to a far-off future setting. Those people you're discussing the humanity of already exist. They're called amputees. If you reframe the question as "how many amputations can you have before you stop being a person" I hope you can see why an amputee like myself is not going to feel safe around you or in your fandoms.

And it's a shame, because I REALLY want to like Cyberpunk. I really, honestly do. I love the aesthetics, I love the idea of big corporations being the villains and the anti-capitalism at the heart of the genre, and I love the idea of prosthetics being not only destigmatised, but desirable. When written from a disability-inclusive lense, it honestly has the potential to be an incredibly uplifting and empowering genre. but as the genre stands right now, it's actively hostile to the very folks who are usually the stars of its stories: amputees, all because people just refuse to acknowledge us.

Cyberpunk isn't the only genre guilty of this, it's common all throughout sci-fi as a whole, but Cyberpunk is the only one where it starts becoming a serious issue due to its rampant dehumanisation of a real group of people. In other sci-fi settings, it's just kind of annoying and while it can be a form of erasure, it's not usually harmful, just...frustrating. Fantasy does it on occasion too, think pirates with a hook and a peg leg, but nowhere near as much.

If you, as an author or creator, use any of these words to describe a character or their tech in a sci-fi setting:

cybernetics/cybernetic enhancements

bionics

robot limbs

cyborgs

augmentations

You are probably writing an amputee. Please, at the very least, acknowledge it, and be mindful that those are real people who actually exist, not just a fantasy group you can speculate about.

if you talk to other disabled people and listen and hear some of the shit we go through i think you'll find that on the whole disabled people are not nearly angry enough

#56

Writing and words are all that keep me going. I cry and bleed and yell and scream through my words, each one cutting me as sharp as a blade. 

If I cannot live the life I wanted to, then I shall live it through the sorrows and joys of words. Words and books and poems and characters for all those feelings that were never felt. 

masterlist

if you feel like you forgot how to write: good. forget the rules. be ungovernable. invent a new genre.

Okay, I made some hard decisions, and we’re down to 10 wips. I think this is a manageable amount. Let’s see how many I can finish this year

love me some world building like yeah these words are made up but damn are they cool

I want to be reading fanfic, not writing it. Unfortunately, I want to be reading very specific fanfic which I will in fact first have to write.