#considered apocryphal

[ariaste]

I have sent Considered Apocryphal, the fantasy romans book, to my agent.

aaaaaaa

[ariaste]

does fantasy!Romans book have

G E N D E R ????

My god it has so much gender. It has more gender than you can possibly imagine. Think of the normal amount of gender that you know about? it's like seven times that much gender.

GENDER FACTS about the Fantasy!Romans book, which are actually just facts about the actual real-life Romans (or """facts""" as much as they count for academics, which is to say that some of these are more my own Scholarly Hot Takes based off of reading other people's articles and going "as a queer person it is killing me that you are saying these words and getting SO CLOSE to the point but missing it by a hair because you aren't nonbinary enough to Grasp It, this is glaringly obvious to me"):

The Romans did not have a gender binary and people need to accept that. Once you dismantle your assumptions about this, a lot of things about the Romans start making a lot more sense.

Gender to the Roman mind is as much a function of social class as it is physiological sex. The word "vir" which is usually translated as "man" DOES NOT MEAN "any male-bodied person". It means specifically "an adult, freeborn male citizen with intact genitalia". A male slave is not a vir, he's a different gender entirely. A freedman is not a vir, that's also a different gender. Someone who has been castrated as punishment for a crime is not a vir, that is quite literally a punitive form of gender reassignment surgery.

"vir" is the word from which we derive words like "virile" (sure, makes sense) but also, tellingly, "virtue". That's not just moral qualities, that is the moral qualities supposedly exhibited by the privileged gender-class. #yikes

The Romans invented Toxic Masculinity, but they were so much weirder about it than we are today. Check this shit out: Behaving in an unmanly way, perhaps by putting on makeup and dancing in public? Gay. Gay to do. Obviously. We are familiar with this kind of toxic masculinity. HOWEVER. Being too shredded and hypermasculine, such as by fucking other men's wives or having too much sex? EQUALLY GAY TO DO. The target they're aiming for is not "be as manly as possible", it's actually "a constantly-shifting goalpost of some impossible Goldilocks zone of manliness which is neither too much nor too little and can't quite be quantified because everybody's hyperventilating with anxiety about it and then worrying whether worrying too much is also gay". This is absolute middle-school shit. Everything is gay.

Many people have said things like "the Romans didn't have homophobia, they didn't care about men fucking each other, they only had bottomphobia" -- it is true that they had bottomphobia (because of sexism and toxic masculinity) but they did in fact have homophobia: A vir cannot go around fucking another vir. A vir can fuck male-bodied people of OTHER GENDERS all he wants. But a vir absolutely cannot fuck a vir. Why? bc Dat's Gay Bro.

The Fantasy!Romans book will teach you all of this hilariously fucked up masculinity calculus in much greater detail. :D These people are CRAZY.

[ariaste]

The great thing about writing a book about the Fantasy!Romans is that I can, like a cat making eye contact with you while pushing a glass off the edge of the counter, just pull Real Facts About The Real Romans and arrange them before you in a delicious buffet, and it is always so fucking buckwild and weird that I KNOW some chump is going to slide into my inbox like "can't believe you made up all that bullshit about the Romans ugh smh fake Rome nerd" and I'll have to be so fucking polite as I break the news to them that I didn't make up a goddamn thing. The Romans really were just Like That.

[ariaste]

I'm revising the Fantasy Romans Book (working title Considered Apocryphal) and I'm having so much fun that I'm gonna share a whole footnote with you guys :D

“What did that boy mean by 'soft mouth'? Is this horse a cinaedus? Why would I need to know that? Was he reassuring me that it wasn't unmanly for me to ride his cinaedus horse?” FOOTNOTE: This thought must have really stuck in his head over the years, because Talius' friend, the philosopher Melinius in his most famous work, The Forum, expanded this question into an entire debate between fictionalized versions of himself (Hospio) and Talius (Esuritusculus): Is it effeminate to ride a horse, or is it manly? Hospio argues that it is effeminate, because riding a horse is much like riding a cock: you straddle something and bounce. Esuritusculus disagrees--it is manly because riding a horse is much like sexual intercourse when the other partner is on their hands and knees: “The man is upright and his ride has four legs.” In response to The Forum, the moralist Cavilla published a reply, Pro Virtua (In Defense of Virtue), modeled as a lawyer’s speech on behalf of a client, in which he declares that both of these options were shameless and effeminate, because riding a cock and fucking on all fours are utterly equivalent signs of the moral degeneracy rotting through the core of society. This led to at least two actual physical fights between other writers and fringe members of the literary circle (Icilius and Sentio, as attested by Cavilla in a letter to a friend (Fam. 19); and Mescinia and Titus Scapanus (cousin of the more famous Scapan, the dramatist) in the former's personal journal (Diur. 97). The whole furious debate was settled, evidently, when Abluvius pointed out in his only surviving work, Pro Tranquillo (outright plagiarizing the structure of Cavilla’s Pro Virtuae), that calling the entire cavalry effeminate, while probably true, was even more of an effeminate thing to do because it undermined the prosperity and power of the empire. (Abluvius was sued for libel by a cavalry officer and died in bankruptcy and heavy debts several years later (Melinius, MFr. 52).)

(There's also a whole lot more of this on Patreon fyi)

[ariaste]

Nearly finished with the revision draft of CONSIDERED APOCRYPHAL (the Fantasy!Romans book), AMA before i send it off to my agent and have to get all secretive and discreet about it 👀

[ariaste]

Ok I’ll bite. What’s up with the new wip? What weird and wild shit is happening here? What’s prompted the wip? Can we get a small teaser of what’s happening?

Oh man, what prompted the WIP was a wild and wonderful and very twisty story.

So last year I was writing and posting a Vampire Chronicles fic called Daniel Molloy's Incredible Showstopping World-Famous Model Train Extravaganza for Children and Easily-Awed Vampires (Please Knock), and then when I finished posting I was still sad and upset about the election results and needed further distractions, so I started writing the Unpublishable Sequel. This was a great comfort for several months. (tangent: I have continued to write it and it's nearly 600k long, the length of War And Peace.)

Around the beginning of March, I think, I started having the thought, "Wow, I am having such a good time writing about vampires. Y'know, I could write my OWN vampires. Everybody writing vampire fiction in the last 50 years has ripped off of Anne Rice to some degree, Why Not Me." So then I started writing a thinly-veiled Devil's Minion ripoff.

The current WIP is not that book, because 15,000 words into it, I started realizing that to really understand where my Armand-ripoff was coming from, I needed to understand his maker. Which meant I had to understand Marius.

So I read bunch of Wikipedia articles, read their bibliographies, found a source with the very exciting title Roman Homosexuality: Ideologies of Masculinity in Classical Antiquity by Craig Williams. Impulsively ordered it from Thriftbooks. Read it. Experienced a divine revelation that changed my entire understanding of Marius and my opinion of/attitude about him. Posted about Williams' book and lamented the state of the fandom that I could not write essays about Marius without inviting tedious drama into my life.

@twobeesornottwobees (local Ancient Romans enjoyer and academic) responded to this post and we became friends. We started talking about Emperor Hadrian and Antinous, and Antinous' tragic death, and how he Deserved Better, and how fucknuts crazy Hadrian was for grieving worse than anyone has ever done it before, to wit: commissioning ~2000 sculptures of his dead boyfriend, raising him to a deity, spreading a Cult of Antinous around the Roman empire, and generally making it Everyone's Problem.

"Hang on, hang on, wait a sec, Bees, hold my beer," I said. "I'm gonna do a cool flip."

So I started writing about Fantasy Hadrian and Fantasy Antinous Who Deserved Better, and it's about the tragedy of studying history and realizing that there are some things that we will simply never know without an archaeological miracle, and how those miracles just don't happen -- except once in a while when they do. So the book is a fictional "academic text" written by someone in a fantasy world with a fantasy PhD in Fantasy Classics, and it's got about five layers of narrative framing, in between the academic essays and the translated text of an ancient journal which fills in the gap of one of the biggest unsolved mysteries in the entire field of history.

It's like the fictional-academia vibes of House of Leaves meets Margaret Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian. It's for people who get really excited when they read a news article about a recent major archaeological find and then scream and wail and bang their fists on the door like "LET ME IN!!!!" when the news article doesn't tell them absolutely everything about EVERYTHING there is to know about this new discovery.

The working title right now is Considered Apocryphal, and $1 on my Patreon will get you access to nearly 100 pages of what I've written so far. :D (and yes, it's still set in the same world as all my other books!)

[ariaste]

hi!! just saw the reblog and your tags were hilarious (I cannot believe how weird people are being about *vampires*), and if you ever did write the rent-lowering gunshot book, I would pay 200 crisp fresh dollars for a pre-order and I’m not kidding. Is there anything I can do to bribe you to write this? 👀

Well, the current book I'm working on -- Fantasy!Romans as a fictional academic text -- is perhaps sort of a rent lowering gunshot book on account of the Fantasy!Romans are fucked up in all the ways the real Romans were fucked up. Then I am also working on a vampire book, and the vampires are fucked up in all the ways they usually are fucked up, plus these ones can get sleep deprived and that makes them more fucked up. Possibly a rent lowering gunshot book but I can't help but slide into satire on that one, so maybe it will not make people accuse me of war crimes on the internet 🤔🤔🤔 So perhaps I will need to devise some new exciting crimes for them. (Chunks of these are on my Patreon if you were serious about the bribes LOL)

Basically at this point in my life i am too old for the drama and I would like every person hyper-obsessed with Morals In Fiction and virtue-signalling to just block me on sight. I'm tired. If they tell me I'm a bad person for the rent lowering gunshots, clearly the rent has not been lowered far enough. Get outta here. No one wants your organic vegan non-problematic cupcake bakery that never offends anyone.

I think I might have said it in the tags on the post you're talking about but I can't remember so it is worth saying again: you know the way that people desensitize horses when they're being trained? Waving plastic bags and moving around in weird ways and touching them with different materials and tossing blankets and ropes over their backs and around their legs so they get used to unfamiliar sensations? Holding a cat in the air and slowly walking toward them? And you know how desensitizing them is REALLY FUCKING IMPORTANT if you love your horse, because it teaches them that they don't have to freak out and injure themselves or other people if they encounter something unfamiliar that bothers them a bit?

I feel like a lot of readers need some of this. They're too jumpy these days. Spooking too easily at imaginary shit. Can't tell the difference between a rope on the ground and a real snake, so every rope or stick or broom that has fallen over has to be treated the same as real snakes. They think that every plastic bag or styrofoam cup blowing across the path is a fucking demon that's going to kill them. This is not good for them, because it makes them fearful and unconfident and easily spooked, and thus they are going to get increasingly intolerant of new things, because they keep accidentally reinforcing "new things are bad and scary and upsetting" in their brains.

Bringing it back to the rent-lowering gunshots... Fun facts, when they were training horses for war in the old days, they would shoot guns with blank rounds near them until the horses weren't scared of loud noises anymore and wouldnt even flick an ear about it. Because it was just fake, it wasn't real. Just big loud noises and smoke and no one gets hurt. And then you end up with a BOMBPROOF horse, the safest horse you can get, who will never ever ever panic and hurt themselves or someone else when an actual bad situation comes up. Nobody screaming and falling over with a spontaneously broken leg. Nobody running themselves off a cliff. Just a calm, secure, confident horse.

Fiction is really good for desensitizing a brain and showing the difference between a rope on the ground and a real snake, so maybe writers need to stop being afraid that readers will freak out and stomp them to death. Put a couple blank rounds in the gun. It's fake. It is just sounds. Drag some ropes around, make em wiggle in a snake sort of shape.

You know why the OG fans of Anne Rice's books don't flinch at ANYTHING? Cause she got those bitches BOMBPROOF. Everybody say thank you for the ropes on the ground, Anne.

[ariaste]

A fun thing I am doing with the fictional citations on Considered Apocryphal (the Fantasy Romans book) is that since there aren't very many women characters in the book, I'm trying to ensure that the vast majority of the sources cited are women -- and when they're not women names, they're neuter/ambiguous or, at the very least, not a White Dude name. And any time there's two or more authors listed, there is ALWAYS a woman involved and her name gets listed first on the paper.

Probably no one will notice this, but *I* know it's there. :) (Edit: an anon was confused about what "there aren't very many women characters in the book" meant, and I realized i have a different perception of that than most people. Nine. there are nine women characters in the book.)