Hi, I’m Wilder! I use they/he pronouns, and I’m a twenty-something American writer with roots in the rural Midwest—though NYC does hold my heart too.
I do poetry, short stories, nonfiction essays, journalism, and I have a published novel—which I don’t much like to talk about. I haven’t written on my own in a couple years, but one of my besties and I are working on a book together. Incidentally, it’s none of the current WIPs listed below. ;)
Outside of writing, I enjoy raising chickens, chatting with my local crow murder, fiber crafts, drawing, horseback riding, and a good cup of tea. One of my major ambitions is to see more of the world despite my failing health, though I have no doubt the countryside will always call me home somehow.
Current WIPs
— On a skybound island kept afloat by the sheer magic of belief, anxious prince Rafferty is relieved to be publicly deemed unfit for succession. When Raff and a notorious outlaw have their bodies swapped under mysterious circumstances, a now disguised Rafferty is forced to take up arms with the outlaw’s underground resistance—whose sole strength is its lack of belief in the very magic that keeps the island afloat. [Worldbuildy, gender fuckery, complex magic system, horror, parentification, how belief and reputation shape identity]
—Mired in clinical depression and the wasteland that is the job market, recent biology grad Padget laments the loss of her BFF June, who has gone abroad to graduate school to pursue more promising things than their friendship. But when Padge discovers something gruesome with a ghost-hunting app, she devises a plan to hunt down the supernatural and scientifically prove its existence—showing June she’s still worth their once unshakable bond by fulfilling their shared childhood dream. [Aftermath of a friendship breakup, roadtrip, ghosthunting, codependency, happiness is a cryptid but joy is real]
—In a rural Midwestern riff on the Selkie myth, Candor, a young deer-shifter, is shot and loses his pelt shortly before Hunting Widows Weekend. He is taken under the wing of a genderfluid poultry farmer named Kay, and as he heals, the pair bond over the freedom fluidity brings while Hunting Opener draws closer—and while the Deerfolk sharpen their teeth in the wake of Candor’s “death.” [More gender fuckery, romance, mild horror, the existential crisis that comes with straddling two opposing worlds and what it means to make a third that’s your own]
every time i start to feel cringe for being too deep in the hyperfixation i remember the intense depression i have waded through and have to remind myself that enjoyment is fleeting (so grab it with both hands), and life is for loving (so hold that love close), and if anyone thinks i’m cringe they must not be having a very good time (and i hope they can find a good time soon).
Okay, you know what? Given that over the last week I have seen at least one of the common myths of "things you should not do in the heat" come over my dashboard, let us quickly go over this:
If it is hot, you will need to drink more than normally because you are sweating. You can drink too much, though usually your body knows how to regulate it.
Yes, if it is liquid and not alcoholic it counts to your drinking intake. Yes, drinking lemonades, coke and whatever counts. All of it is still mostly water with some sugar and flavors added. It is fine. Be careful about taking in too much caffeine though, as it is a mild diuretic (means it makes you pee more and hence lose more water).
Yes, you also need electrolytes as you sweat them out. But you do not need to drink sports drinks. Eat some yoghurt with fruits, or some watermelon with salt, or maybe cold soup. It will refill your electrolytes.
No, it is not dangerous for you to sleep in front of a ventilator. This is a complete myth that has absolutely no basis in science whatsoever and literally originates with an Urban Legend. Especially with the recent heat wave in Europe for a lot of people the alternative is the possibility of heat stroke. It is fine. Sleep in front of that ventilator. Just make sure you are not getting too cold.
No, using sunscreen does not stop you from taking in Vitamin D, unless you are permanently using super high standard sun screen and are reapplying it every 6 hours as intended. And let's face it: you are not. Your skin gets enough UVB to make Vitamin D, don't worry about it. Skin cancer is worse.
Yes, switching between a very hot outside and a very cold context (be it super high AC or just jumping into cold water) can be a danger for your cardiovascular system, though unless the weather is very hot or the water very cold making the contrast very extreme, it is normally not a danger to people who do not have otherwise issues with their cardiovascular system. Though being a bit careful and allowing yourself to acclimatize is not a bad idea in general.
Yes, you should definitely not leave any living thing in a car while it is hot. Just don't. Cars heat up while standing very quickly and will become a death trap. If you leave an animal or a child alone in the car for even just 5 to 10 minutes, they might die. Don't do that shit.
Yes, you need to be extra careful about your medications. For once, most medications are not meant to be stored at above 25°C (don't ask me what this is in American units). But also a bunch of medications - especially psychoactive medications - will make your body worth at temperature regulation. So be careful.
Yes, you need shadow. Ideally the shadow of trees, because there is indeed a difference between that and the shadow of a building. But any shadow is good, especially during extreme heat.
In the same vein: be also careful about drugs during heat waves - like, the recreational type. Some of them work differently when your body is warmed up like that. Just... ideally read up online on possible side effects that might occur/be worse if taken during the heat.
Generally speaking: stay hydrated. Stay cool. Try to do it as well as you can in your respective situation. Stay safe.
unfortunately very true. Doing Better does not always mean never being upset or never being triggered or never having trouble. often Doing Better means experiencing those things and being able to keep going/cope healthily/move on. if you’re in a bubble with no sensation, if you’re numbing yourself out, that’s not what recovering really is. it won’t help you have a happier life it’ll just make your world smaller and smaller until you can’t fit anywhere anymore. gotta learn to make peace with the hard stuff too, that’s the only way to keep going
An educational post for writers: the effects of malnutrition/starvation:
Malnutrition/starvation has a bunch of really fucky effects, and I see whump people use malnutrition/starvation from time to time, (i am utilizing it now, hence the post) but rarely do they depict the horrific suffering. I have actually starved before, so here's my medically accurate advice on what that looks like:
Among the most prominent of effects of lack of food/lack of nutritious food ironically not depicted, for it is the most common nutritional deficit on earth, is anemia - lack of iron means your body doesnt produce blood like it used to, which at a point makes you cold all the time! It also messes with your bodily sense of blood pressure, making you more likely to notice tiny changes, which in turn can trigger dizziness, severe anxiety, heart palpitations, fainting, and vascillations between cognitive clarity and a foggy feeling. Lack of iron causes lack of red blood cells, which means you can't distribute oxygen as efficiently. This causes fatigue, a general sense of unwellness, called "malaise", and causes you to breathe and your heart to beat faster than they normally should. This, in turn, can trigger more anxiety! Anemia is a very anxiety inducing deficiency on its own because your body knows it's in trouble and it definitely wants to tell you about it!
It only takes about 3-4 days without food to develop anemia to this degree, though it can take as little as 2 if you already have deficits. If you are eating food but it's lacking in iron this transition can take 2-3 weeks, as your body uses up its iron reserves located in your liver, spleen and bone marrow (where red blood cells are produced).
Malnutrition and especially starvation also screws with your electrolytes, making you prone to dizzy spells and vertigo, and can seriously affect the myelin sheathes around your nerves and the delicate proteins in your brain, which combined with electrolyte imbalance and probable anemia can cause anything from blurred vision, headaches, fatigue and cognitive impairment (pervasive brain fog), at best, all the way up to the moderate landing of muscle spasms and ataxia (loss of coordination) and functional loss of senses like sight and hearing, to the severe landing of seizures and total organ failure. Also, malnourished muscles hurt!!! They hurt to touch, they hurt to move, it hurts to exist!
I once went 8 full days with little to no food, so I know this stuff from experience. Let me tell you, hunger pains are God fucking awful and paradoxically make you feel very nauseous and can cause vomiting, (your body wants to get rid of the concentrated stomach acid) and are truly indescribable in their instinctual ability to instill desperation, depression and terror. You would eat a lot of things you never thought you would after just three days without food. At 8, I was very strongly considering eating my pet birds. I had already begun eating their seeds. The only thing that saved them was one measly bag of potato chips, the very last thing resembling human food in the pantry (the vending machine size chips) on day 6, which gave me just enough salt and fat to rethink that idea.
Anyway, muscles! Hurt!!! Especially if you don't eat a lot of protein to start out. Muscular degeneration or "digestion" (ketosis) can happen surprisingly fast if you arent eating anything at all. 5-7 days usually if you are healthy, though 3 is not unheard of, especially if you are expending a lot of calories and have very little fat. It's quirky hallmark? A strangely sweet and metallic taste in your mouth. Like a penny coated in sugar water. The ache is hard to describe, but it is constantly there, and honestly wore me down psychologically more than the hunger pains, which curiously went away after day 4, only coming back with a vengeance when I tried to eat anything. It hurt to move, it hurt to think about moving, and the constant low level pain was absolute torture. The fatigue didn't help. I normally slept about 6-9 hours. During that time after day 3 or so, I started sleeping 15 or more, in bursts, and had very little energy to do anything but rest. Every now and then I'd get a burst of restlessness, my body pushing me to find food or drink water. It was unpleasant. The headaches were pretty bad too, at first.
Malnutrition, and specifically a lack of protein, also causes pervasive muscle aches and all the neurologic issues mentioned above.
My experience led me to the development of ataxia that has never completely gone away. I remember the panic of nearly blacking out while trying to stand too, and not being able to cognitively focus on anything, much less visually focus. (Started about day 5). Mind you, I was 15 years old and weighed only 89 lbs prior to this period, with a fast metabolism and very little fat. After it I weighed 81 lbs. 8lbs in 8 days is a lot of weight to lose, and boy did my body hate me for some time after that. But my insomnia was cured for a while!
Anyway, i hope this proves insightful for all your whumping and torturous needs. I didn't plan on making it so personal, but hey, I've lived through that, so it seemed relevant to add that here.
“Lack of iron causes lack of red blood cells, which means you can't distribute oxygen as efficiently. This causes fatigue, a general sense of unwellness, called "malaise", and causes you to breathe and your heart to beat faster than they normally should. This, in turn, can trigger more anxiety!”
This is fascinating. But how do you recover from such a starvation experience? What does it take, and how does one get better? Is recovery pretty fast, or is it slow?
I recovered my mental faculties first. As soon as I had carbs in me I immediately felt better, and all I wanted to do was eat and eat and eat. I wasn't even "hungry" exactly, there was just this overwhelming urge to stuff my face.
But I knew that was a bad idea.
When you don't eat for a while, your digestion goes out of whack. You can't process food the same way, cause you've starved the bacteria that digests your food for you in your gut and stomach. Plus your stomach acid isn't being produced as much, and the smooth muscle loses its flexibility somewhat and "shrinks" (contracts). It means you feel full quickly, but are not satisfied at all by it. You just want to keep eating, and a kind of war begins between the impulse to keep eating and the feeling of a full belly. Many people vomit because they lose out to the impulse and their stomach, not having the enzymes or acid to digest much, and being cramped up so it can't move things, can't take it. That's why you start with starches. Carbs. They digest easiest, and restore your electrolyte imbalance.
After eating enough bread to just fill me up, I noticed almost immediately that I felt more alert and springy. But I still ached terribly. In fact it felt worse as the sugars entered my system 20 minutes later and my body shifted out of crisis conservation mode and into damage control mode, sending help to damaged muscles and nerves. Healing those creates inflammation, which increases the pain.
I kept on a diet of pretty much nothing but simple carbs like bread and potatoes, for three days, spending most the time sleeping off the fever that sprung from the inflammation. (101F). I then ate some turkey the landlord had brought us (more on that below the cut) in small bits. I was surprised to find it tasted disgusting, since I normally like turkey, and took that as a sign my body wasn't ready for that yet. It was probably a wise choice. I craved fat, and salt, so ate mashed potatoes like they were going out of style. My body sang and I felt so elated at even the smell of them that I literally ate nothing but that for another three days. I had more energy and the fever was receding, though I had headaches daily and BOY was my gut unhappy, but luckily I only had diarrhea. Long enough, (2 weeks or so) and you lose the ability to digest much at all, leaving you with a gut paralyzed by gas.
So I ate mashed potato until the turkey caught my nose. It smelled good, so taking my bodily cues, I ate some. Slowly. My headache almost immediately lessened, and i got a jolt of feel-good all over me, so I stated mixing it into the potatoes and transitioning slowly over 4 days onto eating the turkey on its own. I didn't want to shock my system in its fragile state, since there was no way to a hospital except by medi-evac by helicopter. (More context below the cut), assuming the weather allowed. If something went wrong I had no real help. People often died in this town due to medical emergencies.
And so it went with everything. I focused on carbs and protein, since that's what I craved, and just took it as slow as I could. It took a week of damn near eating half a turkey before my muscles improved, and the headaches went away entirely. Then we had beef in the form of hamburger, which I HATE, but never in my life had I loved it more. It was iron, fat, protein and salt. Combined with fried potatoes I was in bliss, and began to recover much more quickly. I was still weak and fatigued for another week or so, and still had bad dizzy spells, but those improved by weeks end.
All in all it took about a month to recover to where I had been before, body and mind, though I was functional after 2 weeks.
Context below the cut, for the curious:
We lived in a small mountain town in Northern CA with passes at both ends, which was the only way in or out of town. Those passes closed from November to May, no one in, no one out. That meant that from November to May, there were zero supply or food trucks coming in. There were exactly two places in town you could buy food at all - a CVS and the tiniest Wal-Mart ever, which was only the grocery. We had to travel north to Ashland or Medford, OR, regularly, to bulk buy food and sneak it back over the CA border. Everyone in town did this. We knew the passes would close, but we severely underestimated the severity of winter weather on the eastern slope of the cascades, at 4.5k feet elevation. We expected the passes to open at least periodically, and stocked food accordingly. They did not.
We had just used up most of our food supply by early November, and thought we would have time for another trip north to restock. We did not. A freak weather system came in November 3rd, and stayed into Thanksgiving. I was ok until Thanksgiving break, because I was eating at school. But by that time we had used up nearly every edible thing in the house already. My mother is stubborn and proud and insisted we could make it until the storm passed and the passes would re open. They never did.
She got by being fed by her coworkers, and bringing home scraps, for that's all you could call them. A few mouthfuls does not ease the hunger at all, and actually makes it feel more torturous, so after a few days I just stopped eating them. It was too much. It wasn't until day 6 or so that i ate the scraps again after the chips spurred my hunger back.
My mother finally caved to our landlord on day 8 that we were unprepared for the "starving time" as they called it, which we thought was a joke since it was our first winter living there and we didn't really know anyone, since we were "outsiders" and thus not really received warmly by the 3k people living there.
The landlord was suitably appalled and would probably have contacted authorities if there was any that could have helped. Instead his wife spent two full weeks bringing food to our house, including a whole turkey. She stayed around with me while my mom was at work, making sure I ate and was doing better since my mom had mentioned I was sleeping all the time and she wasn't sure what was wrong. (DUH?)
There was no hospital. A urgent care was next to the jail, but it had two doctors and was only open three days a week for a few hours. They had three nurses between them. All they could do was stabilize, in the event of a rattlesnake bite (not uncommon) and prescribe meds. If you needed help, a helicopter had to come and get you from Redding, which was a 4 hour drive in good weather.
So yes. Lesson learned kids - listen to the locals! They're not usually half as crazy as they sound!
i'm sorry i didn't respond to your DM for 23 days. the number on the notification icon got really big and i began having irrational anxious thoughts such as "what if people are in there trying to contact me"
