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Good to see Allison back!
Hi Ms. Woolly! Allison’s excitement over finding someone and working out the emotion she felt was friendship was interesting. She doesn’t sound like she’s new to being female; she sounds more like she’s new to being human. Which makes me curious about Patrick’s existence before meeting One.
— Emma
Allison is new to being human?
This is why I've changed the structure (as can be seen in the edited titles) from Book 1 to Part 1/Part 2. What started out as, to me, a direct-ish story about a kinda messed up space station and someone being trans on it quickly became something much, much deeper. As I answered the questions I had about the station it just revealed more and more. This is still 'Book 1' but I know I need more space/words to really go into what's happening.
I've kind of approached this from the middle. When we meet Patryk he/she immediately finds out she's really Allison. She knows it, after her smoke with One. And there's the tobacco job with One (and you should all get by now the tobacco she has access to has very little to do with what we have in our day and age.) What this immediate transition meant was there was very little time to see what else was happening. You're immediately brought into a somewhat deeper, somewhat hidden part of the station.
I'm not too sure reading about normal life on the station for possibly tens of thousands of words would be very interesting. Patryk/Allison didn't really engage with that way of living at all; they ate at public dining halls, they worked infrequent, off the books job, the drank at parties, they slept, they didn't work any regular job, they'd go to the free, public movies. It was dull, really. I don't think I'm giving anything away to say she wasn't alone in meandering purposelessly through life, but it certainly wasn't common among people. There's no plans to jump back in time, do flashbacks or do any weird storytelling techniques but will Allison, in the coming chapters, find the normal part of the station less 'dull?' Who knows?
Where to begin?
I think your beginning was perfectly fine; please don’t read my comment to suggest otherwise. Every story has a frame that creates a beginning, middle and end, but the frame is necessarily artificial. Even if you start a story at the MC’s birth, the people who shape the child’s development have backstories.
I was simply struck by Allison’s response to feeling friendship. She sounded like Star Trek’s Data, after he got an implanted “emotion” chip. “Oh! This neat thing I’m feeling is what everyone has been talking about all this time!” As a reader, I don’t know why she never experienced it before, but the fact that she hadn’t speaks volumes about her prior life.
— Emma
Where Allison begins
Don't worry at all, Emma. I didn't take anything like that from your comments. All the readers on this have been incredibly engaged and seem very closely aligned to where I'm planning on going with it. Which really tells me I'm doing something right and my readers are top notch. ("Aren't we all wonderful!!")
I'm just using the space here to throw out my thoughts on writing this, and some of the things I'm grappling with. At the moment it's a concern that's been there for quite a while, and which went into deciding to write this 'Part.' The idea that Allison is quite unique, (Angie is too, to be fair.) "I don’t know why she never experienced it [her life] before, but the fact that she hadn’t speaks volumes about her prior life." Is accurate too. And we only have really gotten to see the station from the perspective of someone who's really sort of outside it. And there's upsides and downsides to that. For me it's how I explore that.
And part of exploring that is considering what it'd be like if there was 10k or 20k words at the beginning showing 'life before.' Personally I think it'd be rather dull, and wouldn't want to write it.