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Fiction

I'm sick of writing this. I need to write fiction. Whatever talent I have in stringing words together feels like it means nothing when I'm sending it into the void like this. It's kind of freeing writing for an audience with an uncollapsed waveform, but this is masturbatory, and I'm currently trying to abstain from onanism. Not out of any puritanical prejudice, but because it feeds my disease and spins the wheel of my addiction. Maybe I'm afraid that I'll get addicted to confessing to no one. But I can't stop writing, and I'm not at a place where I can create fiction again.

I really don't want to say this, but I may have to become a writer. Making games is well and good, but I haven't programmed a line since I declared my intent, electing instead to write the pamphlet of woe and deconstruction presented here. Fiction is my chosen medium, I feel, and even though this ain't that, I can hear it calling me. Even though my stories seem personally unsatisfactory.

Whenever I'm in a rut in my prolonged transition, as I feel to be right now, I end up consuming a lot of writing, fiction or non, by other TG people (mostly women.) I love it because, through the cypher of a somewhat familiar character, I don't feel as alone and my experience not as weird. And yet I cringe when reading most all TG-penned fiction concerning our plight, because the freshness of the scars always leaves an imprint of our pain visible from the moon. Half of it is blatant wish-fulfillment, most prominently any story featuring magical/technological transformation from sex to sex. A third of it, the not-so blatant wish fulfillment, the straw men masquerading as nemeses, the constant self-pity, the cliché characters.

And so much centered on high school, the unforgotten battleground of myself and my people, the place where many of us nearly died (myself included.) That I can understand all too well, as even at a small remove from my adolescence, I find that I would move heaven and earth to reenter prepuberty with the knowledge I have now.

The remaining sixth is what I keep coming back for. I'm overly critical, even with the knowledge that anything I wrote now would by necessity deal with transition, and assuredly suffer from the same laundry list of problems that plague everything I have read (save for, I should note, a single work penned by a XX woman.) There's a problem of selection here, as my range is limited to include a couple books and a crapload of webcomics, most of which suffer the aforementioned flaws anyway.

I feel that I just need a strategy for writing a story, a single one, and it will ... do what? I don't know. I'm really quick to seek peace in methods that don't involve doing scary things and altering my life. I distrust my impulse to write, but I can't stop writing. Even if it's sloppy and sounds bad and makes little sense to anyone but me, the sense of achievement earned by creating something of permanence is irresistable.