If you could write a book, what would it be about?
(I hope your pain eases 🫂)
I have multiple fiction books I hope to have the brains to write one day actually. Here’s an example:
in a world where semi-immortal deityhood is a job, a blessing/curse depending on what you Represent, and those who do it are mostly-randomly chosen, a Black transfemme in the 1920s suddenly becomes the personification of Guilt. Her first few decades are spent in fear and confusion on the run, as her presence in one space for too long results in her accumulating the Responsibility for every unsolved/unknown “wrong” around her. This almost always ends in her murder and reawakening in a new place.
For those first few decades, she can’t stay in one place too long and doesn’t get close enough for anyone to explain what’s going on to her, and her own attempts at research don’t explain what’s happening to her either, until she finally meets someone else like her. Threat, a butch transfemme that has figured out a way around her “job” drawbacks by becoming a professional dominatrix. Threat is able to explain to Guilt that she’s not alone, and that she isn’t the only one like her out there. That there are whole hidden cities of the “gods” where she might be able to live unaffected by her curse.
Guilt is finally able to spend a slightly longer time in safety thanks to Threat’s curse warding away those who would hunt her, but the rise of the carceral state means that there are options beyond death as “punishment”. In a police raid, Guilt gets arrested and trapped within the prison system for the first time.
Her first time incarcerated is brutal but relatively short, as she ends up being murdered by a guard, causing her to reawaken free again. The knowledge of there being safe places for her out there makes her take bigger risks, spend more time trying to find them, anything for this singular hope.
The next time, she ends up in a nigh-permanent solitary, barely remembered enough to be fed, forced to stay alive but her time being extended over and over for things she never did, in a system that doesn’t care about her. Trapped in an endless hell of ever-changing guards and no way to kill herself and escape.
Eventually, the prison is shut down and every prisoner’s case is reviewed as part of a restorative justice initiative. The cases are being reviewed by the current Truth, and Guilt is not only freed, but finds that while she was cut off from the world, many of the hidden cities came out to force a change they knew wouldn’t happen on its own.
She’s able to reunite with Threat and find a space that will be safe for her, where her existence won’t be seen as an automatic admission of guilt, where’s she’s finally able to just be and exist without being afraid every single moment.
Where she’s able to be happy.
stormborns
izzy806
theartofmadeline
blakekathryn
areudirty
