Serious Weakness aftermath

“Art, in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice.”
-Marinetti

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Simone Weil wrote, “Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.”
Serious Weakness tries to do both.

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⚠️ (massive spoilers for Serious Weakness ahead) ⚠️

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I thought it would just be a quick story. I called the document:

later I named it Serious Weakness as a translation of myasthenia gravis.
my runner-up title was Blind Cleavage, a play on the art conservation term (“Blind cleavage…is a separation that has no visible rupture, but one can tell there has been an underlying separation of layers.” (the weakness Insul detects in Trianon under the mask)), crossed with Trianon’s mutilated chest.
X_X. blind cleavage!!

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Serious Weakness playlist

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making a novel is hard!! I couldn’t have done it without fRienDnship

1) Laevos proofread the final edition after I got burnt out from editing for so long. I’m so grateful!! I was a husk, already working on 4 other projects, I couldn’t stand to read another word of Serious Weakness! She’s the reason the paperback finally came out and i love her so much. Artisanal Femboy Productions Genuine Boy Blood 💜

2) so many books have shitty covers. for me, it’s as important as the writing itself. even if I’m doing a low effort cover for a smaller work, it has some stamp of personality. Sloane’s cover art is dipped in toxic acid and it looks sick wrapped around on the book irl, a slab of radioactive blood. i’m sure the hot pic was a huge part of selling this book that had no real description or marketing. 💜

3) my friends on discord who started a book club for Serious Weakness and gave feedback with each chapter I dropped. every person who read it kept me going. 💜

4) Greenie resized the cover to fit the paperback so it could be born into the world!! 💜

5) the people who got crazy about it. I sold so many copies by word of mouth, it was really encouraging. thanks for sharing my shit and making it possible. 💜

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LETTERS

(full ask here)

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I told her, and there was so much truth here, that I didn’t want the dog to die. I didn’t, and not just because I’d poisoned him. I’m afraid that I must tell you I wanted the dog to live so that I could see what our new relationship might come to.
-Zoo Story

Serious Weakness is Zoo Story for dark yaoi lovers. It was my favorite play as a teen (next to The Pillowman (which I hugely, violently recommend).

We neither love nor hurt because we do not try to reach each other. And, was trying to feed the dog an act of love? And, perhaps, was the dog’s attempt to bite me not an act of love? If we can so misunderstand, well then, why have we invented the word love in the first place?
-Zoo Story

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insul hyposensitive vs trianon hypersensitive

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the contrapasso of Spirit Halloween serves two purposes.
1) the running theme of “civilization will not save you”. the one night where Trianon is free but no one can see his injuries and his terror because it is a night of false injury and false terror.
2) Trianon’s purgatory is to drown in masks and costumes. Insul is a devil tormenting him for his autistic masking.

spirit halloween is the heart of America and the psychogeographic heart of the novel. Trianon in this soulless franchise, his real blood next to the fake blood, like a calf slaughtered and steaming in the middle of McDonald’s.

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BUSINESS REPORT

how many copies of a novel can you sell while only describing it as “it’s going to get really dark now”?
how many copies of a novel can you sell after presses reject it for being too gay, too autistic, characters too unlikeable?
how many copies of a novel can you sell without marketing, networking, ARC copies, and professional connections?
Turns out the answer is “a fuckload”.

I guess something people who want to be authors do is focus on amazon to try to break the top 100. I use itchio and amazon (with 95% of my sales from itch) because itchio is nicer to sell and to buy from. This makes my digital sales less likely to hit the amazon leaderboard but the royalty is so much better on itchio. Plus itchio gives the option of downloading PDF in addition to epub and about 50% of my readers choose PDF. Getting on leaderboards probably also requires some kind of concerted annoying push and kiddy fiddling and I already spend my energy writing.

as for presses…
publishers look for grocery lists. I make food.
I love when presses do pick my shit up, and I’ve had some good experiences, but a lot of the time the margins are so bad and the editors so conservative and the turnaround for submissions (years! decades! eternity!) so interminable and flaky that slinging my own shit works out for me.

another benefit of being my own press is getting to have an actually good cover by a great artist instead of some cheap stock image shit. when I write a story, I want people to have an extremely special experience on every level.

I’ve heard my characters called unrelatable and unlikable, so it’s strange so many people relate to them. it could be that the people I write for do not matter to the people who publish books. I’m having a very specific conversation with secret childhoods and histories. I’m not writing for an insular group of authors who are mandatory toxic pits of their network or whose stories are only read by other Writers. A lot of different people read my stories. Seeing people find something they couldn’t get nearly anywhere else makes me happy. So many people i don’t know left reviews and comments on various sites and i get a lot of messages about it, with so many beautiful reactions and ways of perceiving it.

My dream for a long time was something like the pink film or hardcore pulp mode of production, “the place where artists go to make weird, hugely explicit personal experiments, where they can do anything, so long as there’s sex“. Porn is the last free thing for me, where all my ideas fit, where my entire heart can spill through.

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This thing is constantly aspiring to be a man or a woman, and never achieving it — here, surely, is death but death strung out over a whole lifetime
-Simone Weil

Oenone and Insul both seek to actualize Trianon, to help him be “man” or “woman”. He is afraid of becoming, and many people live their entire lives that way. The system doesn’t need you to become anything, just vibrate at a constant aspirational tension.

“But I don’t know exactly how it happens. That’s why I’m so scared. Did my parents, did their brains subconsciously evaluate the economy, culture, weather, career niches, and decide, being a shitty boring person who doesn’t see their own kid, like really see their own kid at all, being that person is the only way this brain can mentally survive, and then snap, the neurons shift into place and harden and you’re that way for the rest of your life and I don’t want to go back outside because I’m worried I’m going to freeze a certain way and never be like water again, um—”

you have to become your own thing or you’ll be someone else’s.

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It is not truly affliction unless an event that grasps a life and uproots it attacks it directly or indirectly in all its parts—social, psychological, physical. The social factor is essential. It is not truly affliction unless we are under some form of social degradation or fear of such degradation.
-Simone Weil

When I write violence, I start from the social. If a twink is mutilated in the woods and no one is around, did it really happen?

By social, I mean three things:

• Family.
• Work/school.
• Romantic partner.

I find the relation each character has toward all of those things:
Insul and Trianon were both victims of school and family but had different reactions.
Romantic partner is where the blood begins. Family and school have a background impact but are in the past. Uncool, boomer, fading tyrants.
The romantic partner is the question mark. The romantic partner is status, and future.
In Trianon’s case, his possible romantic partners are entwined to a form of work, and a form of education.
One partner promising to make him more part of society, the other promising to tear him free of it.

Observation, real or imagined, is required for maximum abjection. The expectations of others and our desire to become something are what sets the heart beating with desire and terror.

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During this absence there is nothing to love. What is terrible is that in this darkness when there is nothing to love, if the soul ceases to love, the absence of God becomes definitive. The soul must continue to love in the void—or at least want to love...
-Simone Weil

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The desert house and penthouse are dark mirrors of each other
-surrounded by desert vs surrounded by water
-Insul references rape on first meeting then actually does it at the penthouse
-Trianon thinks of himself as a Monster energy drink vs being forced to drink one in the penthouse
-the rich art collector is dead in the desert, alive in the penthouse
-fantasizing about being successful at an art career vs being actually offered one

By the end of the story, desolate sand has turned to fertile mud, dry air has turned to rain, night has turned to day.

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The strong are, as a matter of fact, never absolutely strong, nor are the weak absolutely weak, but neither is aware of this.
-Simone Weil