Welcome To My Darkness

Step into the darkness with me, my friend, and you will see a world unlike any other.

Hello, and welcome to my blog! I’ve decided to start using this regularly, and thought I’d start out with introducing myself and giving you some information about what I do and what is going to be on this blog.

First of all, I’m queer. I use that word purposefully and broadly, because I am very much queer in both gender and sexuality. I’m transgender nonbinary, specifically bigender with male and female aspects. I’m also asexual, specifically aegosexual. Aegosexual is a micro label under asexuality and indicates someone who is into erotic media and things of that nature, but not as much into the real-life eroticism. Basically, I enjoy the fantasy of sex and sexual interactions, but that’s really as far as it goes. I’m also pan romantic, as gender has no bearing on who I have romantic feelings for at all. Love, to me, is something related to a person’s soul, not their body, so that’s the way that works for me. In that vein, I’m also polyamorous, and have a very lovely boyfriend and wonderful enbyfriend. We form a triad together, and I’m their “unicorn.” (I claim that title because they’re married to each other. No, no unicorn hunting, we’re an organically formed triad.)

So, with that, you can kind of see why I write so many queer characters. I’m specifically trans masculine since I was assigned female at birth and suffer from sometimes crippling bottom dysphoria. That’s perhaps the reason I write in the m/m genre rather than any other group. I just feel very uncomfortable writing about vaginas and vulvas. I have, on occasion, like in my fantasy series, Legacy of the Phoenix, done male/female erotic scenes, but doing so is something I have to be in proper headspace for. In Chains of Fate, there will be some scenes featuring a female character, but that is down the road a way. I have been asked many times if I write heterosexual characters, and I’ve had people come to me requesting fanfiction with cishet characters in it, and I just can’t bring myself to write it. It wouldn’t be authentic to my writing style, and that’s important to me.

The asexual label often surprises people, since I Domme. It is very possible to be asexual and kinky, and there are many that find comfort in BDSM and bondage for more reasons than just sexual. I get asked, well, isn’t it sexual when you’re doing orgasm control? And I have to say, for me, it’s not. I’m doing what the sub has arranged with me via our negotiations. If they want orgasm control, then we’ll do that. If they want to be pegged and called degrading names, we can go that route. I do this virtually, which I know is controversial in the Lifestyle, but it is my only access to kink communities. In any case, it isn’t sexual to me at all. I get no “thrill” other than a top space afterward. I admit that sensation is somewhat addictive, and quite enjoyable, but again, it isn’t sexual. I can experience sexual arousal; I just generally only do so with fantasies.

Queerness explained, kinkiness explained, what’s next? Oh, how about the darkness?

I often get asked why I write things the way I do. Why focus on hurt and comfort as well as such traumatic events as I depict? Well, there are a lot of reasons behind my writing style, but I suppose most of it boils down to I write what is therapeutic and cathartic to me. I’ve wrestled much of my life with my demons, in the form of crippling anxiety, major depression, and later bipolar disorder and undiagnosed autism and other things. I’ve spent a lot of time in the darkest corners of my own psyche (seriously, read some of my poetry, you’ll see). Even though I’ve been in the dark, there’s always been a light at the end, and that’s perhaps where my desire to dabble in the area of hurt and comfort comes from. No matter how broken, how traumatized a person is, with the proper supports, they can reach the other side and find that light again.

Of course, I show every agonizing detail in my work, which makes it not for everyone at all. I know this. The realism I weave into the words I write is off putting for some. And that’s okay. Not every written piece is for every person out there, and I think that’s important. There will be those that read my works and follow me in my therapeutic relationship with characters and what they go through. And there will be those that just can’t take what I’m writing. That’s okay too. I warn people ahead of time in my works when there are violence and trauma coming, and I feel like that’s my responsibility as the author. I know there’s a lot of debate now days about “content warnings” and “content notes.” But honestly? It takes seconds for me to warn about coming disturbing material. I know what I write, and I don’t want people to walk into my works without knowing what’s coming.

I’ve been writing fanfiction since 2013, when I ran into it for the first time. I spent a solid three months reading as much fanfiction as I could get my hands on. And then, of course, I had to write it. I’ve put in more than three million words of writing since then, and all of it has improved my writing skills so that I can focus on original works that I’m publishing. I tested out scenes, stories, and original characters in these fanfictions to see how they worked. I tried things, and I experimented with different genres and blending different things together. All in all, it has been a fun and rewarding experience for me, and I don’t intend to stop writing it despite my new focus on a lot of original works. My fanfiction may be slower, but it will still be worked on.

That leads me to this blog. Here, we’ll talk about fanfiction, fiction, queerness, autism, mental health, kink, and more, whatever the topic of the day seems to be. I’m an open person, and some of it may get personal, but that’s why we’re friends, right?

Love,

Bev

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Cover Reveal: Safe Haven

Featured Author

AUTHOR NAME: the Inmara

LINK TO YOUR WEBSITE: http://www.sunspot.world/

WHAT DO YOU PRIMARILY WIRTE? Fiction

HOW OFTEN DO YOU WRITE? Every day

TELL ME ABOUT YOUR STORIES, ANYTHING YOU WANT READERS TO KNOW. Our stories are about life aboard a generational starship called the Sunspot with what many people would consider “near singularity” technology. We’re not sure we actually believe in anything like the singularity, but our work is very adjacent to it. We started with the idea of painting a society and world that is very close to our own inworld, with some major differences to emphasize some social structures, ethical dilemmas, and conflicts that we wanted to focus on. It’s place where there is no assigned gender, and each person is born with wildly unique physiological abilities. Diversity is prized, including neurodiversity, and accommodations for everyone’s needs is prioritized wherever it can be done. But there are still some problems to work out, and improvements to be made, and a lot of them stem from what the people who created the starship had chosen to do with it to set themselves apart from their parent culture. But you could summarize it with the phrase, “Fully automated luxury communist queer furries in space.” The key thing to understand about these stories is that they star us, but they’re still fiction. We play parodies of ourselves, with certain traits and decisions altered or emphasized in order to serve a “what-if” kind of plot. There are no clear heroes or villains, but some of us make bad choices in order to play them out and see the consequences, or give the others something to work with. Sometimes it’s all in the service of self criticism. Mostly it’s been for our own entertainment. It’s a diceless TTRPG played out on the page, and then edited for us to reread and maybe gain something from it whenever we do. They’re also morality tails for our fellow system members. We do write them with some thought to the outworld, and share them with others, because there are people like us, autistic trans plural systems, who have been begging for this kind of literature, just as we were before we started writing it.

ARE THERE ANY THEMES THAT ARE COMMON IN YOUR WORK? Plurality, in all of its forms, is the key, central theme. The other big theme is how things like physical dysphoria probably can’t be stamped out through genetic or social engineering. We’re very pessimistic about that, but in an anti-eugenics way. And we think the only option is treatment. It’s certainly the only ethical option in any case. The people in our world are in the process of learning that. This also includes our perspectives on what autism is and how it really, probably can’t be stamped out by eugenics, and why. But also that it shouldn’t be, and the why about that, too. And because of these things, we do also tackle trauma, and suicidal ideation and events, and maybe how to handle those things. These are the things that drive the plots, and the counter efforts that bring our characters to respite and relief in the end. And also, there are moments of major social change, because we have experienced that within our own system. But it’s social change within the context of a system that is beset by dissociation and amnesia, where conflicts are resolved by cutting people off from each other, and where the most intimate levels of communication resemble telepathy. You might be able to draw parallels to outworld politics, but the story isn’t really informed by that. It’s really about our own struggles to overcome DID and develop a form of cooperative and peaceful multiplicity. And if you are singlet (or person with a single consciousness) reading this, we invite you to do so to absorb our descriptions of various conscious states and realize they are all from our own personal experiences! Even if we describe some fanciful technology being used, even if that technology doesn’t exist in the outworld, what the characters experience is still and analog to something we deal with regularly.

WHAT GOT YOU STARTED WRITING? Reading! In middle school, we were so thankful for the novels we read that we wanted to create our own, so we set out to try doing that, way back then. It didn’t work very well, of course. And we took a long detour into making webcomics through our early adulthood. Between scripting and plotting for webcomics and writing a massive amount on Livejournal, Facebook, and Tumblr for our own self advocacy, it got to the point where writing a novel just wasn’t all that hard anymore and one just sort of popped out. It was going to be a graphic novel to begin with, but our disabilities have made drawing that many illustrations nigh impossible. So we switched to prose. A couple years later, we’ve just finished a 130,000 word sequel in one month. We marked ourselves as writing every day, which we do when we’re writing. And we write to our social media daily with an equal intensity. When we’re working on a book, we spend all day writing it, every day, until it’s done. It’s not a goal or a discipline. It’s hyperfocus. And we take full advantage of it. And so far, if we take a year or two hiatus in the middle of writing a book, you can rest assured we will get back to it and finish it in a feverish month of flurrying words, eventually.

WHERE CAN WE FIND YOUR WORK? Right now, you can only find it on our website, available to read for free. We update it sporadically, as we finish proofreading each chapter (and we’re still editing all of it continuously). At some point, we hope to offer the ability to order paperback books, with a soft goal of this June. And we’ve been trying to record audio books, but we’re doing this with no budget and no assistance, and with disabilities that make it difficult, so those may take a while to get done. We have one audio book of a vignette we wrote, “Children of the Sunspot”, up on Bandcamp, if you’d like that. The link is on our website.

A Dark Night of the Soul

I know, the title is very dramatic. But that’s okay, so am I. It might be my mood, but I’ve been in the mood to explore the dark for a very long time. Today, we’re going to talk about mental health and my journey to find a good place for myself. We’ve talked about sex, so you’d think I’d be firm in my willingness to share anything, but there’s something even more personal about delving into the area of mental health.

So, as a teen I suffered in silence. I never talked about my mental health, never explained to my mother what was going on, and never told my friends. I was never popular, but I was also never really bullied (except by one person in middle school). I was more often ignored by the majority of my classmates. It was alright with me. I had a small circle of friends, mostly older, and that was okay. We were all outcasts of some sort or another, and we did our own thing. I put aside my mental health and just focused on graduating and moving on.

I then, after graduation and starting school in college, got manipulated by my then boyfriend (now ex-husband) and his mother into moving between states. I see now the manipulation, but in the end, I agreed, though with the thought in my head I’d move back home. Then, while I was away, my mother grew very ill and died from stomach cancer. Talk about guilt for not being there. Again, though, I didn’t tell anyone. I thought I was strong enough to deal with it.

I had a kid, and afterward, things just did not improve. I was depressed. I couldn’t shake it, and it cycled. Sometimes, it was worse than others, and it just didn’t go away. I finally talked to my doctor about it, and she suggested PMDD (Pre-Menstrual Dyphoric Disorder). So, I started taking Prozac. It seemed to work, but for a while it killed my already non-present sex drive, which led to strains on my relationship with my then husband.

For a while, this seemed to work. I quit noticing the cycling of the depression, but the doctor then, nor I had recognized it for what it was.

Later, my now ex husband called things off. This threw me into a tailspin of a severe depression. We’d been together for seventeen years, and I didn’t have an identity without him, or so I thought. So, I was referred to a psychiatrist after my primary tried adding Wellbutrin to my medications. It seemed to help, but not enough. I was still in a dark place and having trouble pulling myself out. To the psychiatrist I went, meeting him and discussing things about my kids, and my career. I’d gone to school to be a psychology person and a counselor. I knew about mental health concerns. But, in talking about this stuff, it came up that my one kid had been diagnosed at one point with DMDD (Disruptive Mood Disregulation Disorder). The psych looked at me when I said they thought that he could be bipolar. He said, have you ever thought you might be bipolar?

And I swear to you, it was like a dozen lights went off. Was this it? Was this the answer to my mental health puzzle? He explained it sounded like I was suffering bouts of hypomania in addition to the depression that I was cycling through. This explained the mad rushes I made to write nearly 10,000 words in a day sometimes, and also explained the strange reaction I had to a steroid shot. (Let’s just say I was wired to the max for almost 24 hours, and then some). So, he wanted to try me on Abilify. Wow! Bad reaction there, heart racing, sweating, you get it. That was off the table. We tried one called Rexulti, a new one, an atypical antipsychotic. It is often prescribed to boost antidepressants as well as to regulate moods in bipolar disorder.

I noticed a change soon after I started. My mood was elevated, but not to the manic point. I wasn’t as depressed, and I could function. It was working. And that was the answer.

As far as side effects, I didn’t have many. Still a reduction in sex drive (which my most recent psychiatrist of course wanted to know if me being asexual was that or actually being asexual), but most concerning, and what I’m dealing with still: creative block.

See, there’s things that happen when you’re bipolar and manic. For me, it was creative bends. I would go through periods of painting, of writing, of doing things like this. Then I would phase out of them and go to something else (also an effect of being autistic, but I’ll get to that part). So, since I’ve been medicated, I’m better able to function on a daily basis, I can hold down my day job, and I can have meaningful relationships with others, but I struggle with creative things more than I used to. I have less of a groove where I hyperfocus on a story. It can be infuriating, but the opposite idea, of bringing back my mania and depression, it just isn’t worth it. I have to push thorough.

Now, I touched on the autism thing. My two kids are autistic, so I’ve been through diagnostics and know what the signs and traits are. I brought up to the psych at diagnosed me with bipolar disorder that I thought I fit the profile of “autistic girls” that were missed as children (and as an AFAB person, I fit that profile perfectly). He said that was likely but at my age, it wouldn’t do any good to pursue an official diagnosis. And besides, insurance wasn’t going to cover it.

So, I’m self-diagnosed, but confident in that diagnosis. I may not have an official one, but my psychs have all agreed with me that I fit the profile and have autistic traits. And, if you know anything about the majority of the autistic community, they welcome people like me who have discovered their diagnosis through other means.

Today, I’m stable. I return to the psychiatrist every six months or so and talk to them. I take my meds regularly (though some days I do forget, but I think that’s everyone). I advocate for myself and others who have these diagnoses.

Love,

Bev

Featured Author

Welcome to a new idea I had! I’m going to try and feature authors on a weekly basis, so please enjoy our first one!

AUTHOR NAME: Kuro Runyon

LINK TO YOUR WEBSITE: https://www.archiveofourown.org/users/KuroBakura

WHAT DO YOU PRIMARILY WIRTE? Fiction, Fan Fiction, Poetry

HOW OFTEN DO YOU WRITE? Every day

TELL ME ABOUT YOUR STORIES, ANYTHING YOU WANT READERS TO KNOW. I like writing about things from a different perspective and/or what I have gone through in my life when it comes to certain events and things that I go through on a daily basis.

ARE THERE ANY THEMES THAT ARE COMMON IN YOUR WORK? LGBT for most of them.

WHAT GOT YOU STARTED WRITING? It was something that I discovered to help my cope with my life.

WHERE CAN WE FIND YOUR WORK? Booksie and Archive of Our Own

Another Foray into the Dark

And we come back to visit again. I hope all is well with you, all is well with me, both in the writing world and in personal life. So far on this blog, we’ve been rather personal. And that’s cool. You know a little more about me and can see why I write what I do.

Today, we’re going to discuss a very serious subject: Adult content and minors.

I was perhaps 15 or 16 when I first began my foray into the world of written eroticism. Should I have been allowed to? Probably not. But I was involved in mail order book sites, and I worked so I had my own money and a checking account. The first thing I encountered (which perhaps explains my later interest in BDSM) was in the Science Fiction Book Club. They offered The Story of O and the Sleeping Beauty trilogy by Anne Rice. So, being the curious teenager with the mom who let me start reading Stephen King at 12, I ordered them. My mom and stepdad never restricted my access to any media (granted, with the internet not a thing until late teen years it wasn’t like it is now). So, I got these books. And, teenage me was sucked in. They were lewd. They were explicit. They were exciting. Then I don’t even remember how, but I started ordering books from the Erotic Library or something like that. It was a book of the month club sort of thing, and I got some interesting volumes in that, like Victorian era magazines compiled into a large book, The Pearl. It fascinated me. And of course, being that young and inexperienced (I’d never dated, really), it just floored me to see what people did.

I’ll never forget the excitement of getting those unmarked boxes with smutty books contained within. My parents never asked me what they were, and if they had, I would have just said books (my mother wasn’t a reader anymore and didn’t care as long as I was reading).

So, that was me as a teenager. So, I get teens coming into the erotic world and being curious. Teenagers have forever been trying to get into adult situations. Whether it’s trying to read erotic books like I did, or experimenting with sex with their friends, or trying to get fake IDs, we all know teens desire more often than not to be in an adult world. Some are sneaky about it, and like me, when they get online, create “adult” profiles with fake birthdays and the like. I got onto sites in high school, and I had this older persona that let me get into websites I shouldn’t have been. I felt like I was mature enough to handle it (and maybe I was, some teens are more able to handle adult themes than others), but I NEVER complained about what I saw because I wasn’t supposed to be there to start with.

Fandom, and media in general, has a problem with this. Adults can’t create adult content without minors invading adult spaces. Again, I GET it. I was that minor. However, the problem comes in with minors who can’t curate their own experience and get mad at adult spaces for existing when they’re not supposed to be there to start with.

I’ve always written 18 plus works. Ever since I started. Even my fantasy is intended for adults. Have I had the odd minor contact me? Sure, and in some cases, I’ve mentored their writing (not adult writing mind you). I’ve also told them they shouldn’t be reading my work at all, but I appreciated their interest. I’ve helped them by giving them writing advice and telling them where to post and where to gain audience, but not by “pushing” adult content. I have reminded them I think it’s not appropriate to talk about my writing, but I’m willing to listen to them talk about their writing. I do have a few fluff pieces that I’ve done that are teen and up, which I gladly direct them to. This is, of course, assuming they don’t lie to me about their age. Anytime I’m contacted online, there’s really no way to verify a person’s age, because it is so easy to create fake accounts. But at that point, it’s on them, like it was on me at that age. I made the choice to create an adult persona to access adult spaces, and they’ve done the same.

Now, the thing is, some minors have the maturity to handle adult spaces. They know they shouldn’t be there, and they don’t want people to find out that they’re minors. At least, that was how I was. I wasn’t about to reveal that I’d lied to get there. I wanted to access adult content without anyone realizing that I’d done something wrong to do it. I also knew when I ran into stuff I didn’t like, that it was my own fault for being there to begin with.

Therein lies the difficulty. Teens and other minors who AREN’T mature enough to handle adult spaces decide they are going to complain and speak out against adult spaces because they’ve managed to access them when they shouldn’t. They take the attitude that it is everyone else’s responsibility to make sure they don’t see things that offend or bother them. They aren’t mature enough to curate their own experience like adults and mature teens/minors are able to do. Their position is that spaces for adults don’t need to exist because they’ve lied to access them.

Here’s the thing: as an internet citizen, it’s not my responsibility to ensure another person is free of discomfort. That’s on them. I write my content. I warn ahead of time what I write, and it’s up to the person reading it if they can handle it. One of the more baffling comments I got recently was on a fic I wrote called Shadow Complex. If you’ve ever seen the Kevin Smith movie Tusks, this fic takes elements from that. And I tag it. And then I have about 500 words explaining the content in the author’s note. There is no way anyone can walk into that fic without being prepared unless they chose to completely ignore tags and warnings I presented. I had someone comment that it was too much for them, and they were out. And I GET that. I do. But you were warned ahead of time. That’s not on me, because I’ve done my job.

And that’s the thing. It is up to each and everyone of us to curate our experiences and ensure our own safety. If you’re in kink, if you’re in any sort of adult orientated space, you know this. Consent is key, and a cornerstone of things like Kink. Is it our job to redirect minors? Yes, of course. But the problem is knowing that information. I have no idea how many readers I’ve had that ARE minors but did what I did as a teenager and lied to get into adult spaces. If you are a minor, it’s time to learn these things, and not take it out on the fact such spaces exist. Your existence doesn’t mean that adult spaces don’t belong, especially when you don’t belong in adult spaces.

Is there an easy answer? Not at all. But adults who complain that adult spaces might be accessed by minors need to understand that it doesn’t matter how many barriers you put in place between minors and adult spaces, there are minors that will get around them. I KNOW this because I was one of those minors. All we can do as adults is steer minors out of spaces when they make themselves known, and help them see that they need to find spaces they belong in. So, just carry on, adults. That’s all we can do. Try to steer minors out of our spaces, but don’t treat them like they’re bad people for what they’re doing. They’re just doing what minors do and getting curious. If they’re trying to get into adult spaces, though, they need to understand that they are NOT made for them and know that they’re going to see stuff that might make them uncomfortable. They’re going to have to learn maturity and be mature enough to curate their own experiences, so that’s what we need to help them understand. So, that’s it for today, have a good one!

Love,

Bev

The Darkness Welcomes You Again

So, I guess this week I’m going to talk about Kink and how I got into it. Which is really a discussion of fanfiction, and how I got into that, too. And that leads to how I figured out I was transgender. I really will be kind of open about my own sex life, so fair warning there. But anyway, I was SUPER vanilla most my life with my ex-husband. We had fuzzy handcuffs we played with a time or two, and I had a couple toys, pretty cheap, basic ones you get at any adult toy store. He had his porn and we watched now and then, but I didn’t really get much out of it. I was always wanting a story to go with the sex. I always had to use toys or be on top to get to an orgasm, which I thought there was just something wrong with me. Turns out, I just hadn’t realized I was asexual to start with, and Aegosexual to be specific. I wasn’t aware of my own transgender nature, either; I just knew that regular, heterosexual romance didn’t do anything for me. Oh, I tried so hard to be “normal” you know.

In private life, I decided that I liked girls too, so this got the ex-husband all excited for a threesome. It did not excite me because the whole sex part didn’t interest me, so I just put that aside. I decided on the term pansexual at that time because I thought that’s what fit. I hadn’t figured out I was trans masculine and non-binary at that point.

Then, in 2013, I found a picture. It was on DeviantArt. I’ll never forget it. It was of Ichigo and Grimmjow from Bleach together, and it had a quote from a fanfiction on it. It linked to said fanfiction, and I went to it. I was dragged full force into the fanfiction world from then on. I read and read fanfiction for months on end, just figuring out the strangest thing. I liked to read romance and smut after all, if it had two men in it. I even joked about how I was a gay man in a woman’s body. How little did I know that that’s a common comment made by eggs. (Eggs are people who are transgender, but they haven’t “cracked” yet, so they don’t realize they’re trans). I read about plenty of cis women that liked gay romance, I then got into yaoi and looked up manga. Totally got sucked into the world of gay romance and smut. Then, one day, it hit me. Maybe I was more male than female?

Really, it was a strange idea at first. But I was comfortable with my female side, so I wasn’t a trans man. I didn’t want to be a man, but I did want a penis. In fact, my idealized self I saw as I am now but equipped with a penis. But I didn’t think I was a woman either, not entirely. I was both. And could be either. Then I came across the concept of being nonbinary and the term “bigender” which seemed to fit me so very perfectly. It was quite the aha moment for me. However, this was incredibly confusing at first, and it was about the same time I started writing Bleach fanfiction. I guess since it was my introduction to the fanfiction world, it became my staple. I realized something, though. My sex life improved. I enjoyed sex more. Of course, I was playing out fantasies in my mind that were often scenarios from my stories during it. And I found that I didn’t fantasize like most people. I was never IN my fantasies. I was always watching others, like a movie. And that was a realization that led me to figure out much later that I was Aegosexual.

So, anyway, that’s how I got into fanfiction and figured out I was transgender. How’s that lead to kink, you may ask? Well, that’s the next part.

One of my early Bleach stories (which still is available online; I never pulled it down) was named Doctor’s Training. I had become fascinated by the idea of BDSM and went headfirst into research. I found some reliable sites (some of which I recommend on my site and in my books) and was really enjoying this foray into learning BDSM along with the characters in the story. Then, I was contacted by a person that read it. She liked what I had but had some pointers as someone who lived the Lifestyle. We got to talking and eventually decided that Doctor’s Training would be an awesome original novel. So, that’s where I met Kenyon, my coauthor. In doing research, I delved into some groups and thought I was a switch. (I just thought I hadn’t met the right dominant for my sub side). I have since settled on the idea that I’m a Domme (as I only Domme in femme mode). I just can’t submit the way I have others submit to me. I found a couple subs that I play with online, mostly humiliation and orgasm control, but it still is fun.

So, there’s a lot of my history there. I don’t know how much of that you were overly interested in, but now you have a bit more of a knowledge of where I come from with my writing. Of course, there are more stories to be told, and much more to be revealed, but this is the start. This is where my writing came from, and how I got to where I am.

Love,

Bev

Cover Reveal: Stolen Innocence

Stolen Innocence

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