let's go play, together.

What is this?

We all get a bit misty-eyed when we come across someone's old personal homepage, right? The ones where everything is in Times New Roman on a gaudy background, and it's hosted on Geocities (or would have been, before Yahoo decided to eliminate that vast repository of history for the sake of profits, the cads). And it's particularly exciting to stumble across a treasure trove of articles and writings on a subject that interests you, or is just plain intriguing.

Unfortunately, due to the popularity of social networking, old-style homepages have gone, well, out of style. And I admit, I'm not sure I particularly want to maintain a few dusty pages on an out-of-the-way webhost that nobody will ever see, either. But there's something about homepages that you just can't get with journalling, and to that end, I've decided to maintain a little tribute to the 1990s way of doing things: a small collection of public writings on fiction, identity and spirituality, and links to more of the same.

It won't be in Times New Roman, though. Sorry.

An important statement, before we begin:

If you have come here feeling that you need to give up your imagination, your dreams, your identity or your beliefs to live in the "real world"; if you feel that what you secretly hope for will never come to pass in this or any other world; if you feel that nobody else in the world could possibly feel the same way that you do about the things that matter most to you, because they're just too strange/weird/ugly/ridiculous; if you feel that it's impossible to balance what you've been taught to believe and who you are inside; or if you feel that you just have nothing to believe in at all....

Know that somebody cares, and believes otherwise.

May the writings here help you find your way.

Otherkin/identity work/dragons

Old:

Aspire to Dragonflight
An inspirational piece of mine from 2004, that several people linked to and found appealing.

Dragons, sleeping.
Some thoughts on Otherkin. Still fairly definitive, for me.

A reflection on alternative identities

A furry theory
A piece on furry as an expression of the wonder within us all.


New:

Does a dragon have Buddha-nature?

Dragons, again.

Further thoughts on being 'kin-not-'kin

There's only one way to be "wrong" about being otherkin.
A corollary to "Dragons, sleeping".

When they walk among you: otherkin, BIID, roleplay and other stories
On why an otherkin dragon would read about Body Integrity Identity Disorder, the thrill and pain of being among others of your "kind", and how roleplay can provide that experience.

In which I talk about phantom body parts, because nobody else is doing so.

On speciesism as metaphor, and why it (sometimes) bugs me.

Magic/spirituality

Old:

Memories of the Garden
I've changed a bit since I wrote this, and I'm not now sure if I would call these "memories" or not - but then, I don't know what else to call them. The majesty of the Garden, and my thoughts about it possibly being a recollection of transition between life and death - the joy and terror and breathtaking wonder of standing on the boundary between worlds - still feel very relevant. (Garden of Eden, much?)


New:

Drugging Jesus

On being moved spiritually by fiction

Fiction, and its essential place in spirituality for me
A bit different from the above essay: that one's more about raw feeling, this one's more about the "why". Also has otherkin content.

Sehnsucht

That unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World's End, the opening lines of "Kubla Khan", the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves. --C.S. Lewis

More than beauty

You would do what we would all do

Success stories

Others' writings: Friends

I Self-Create is a piece by draegonhawke in similar spirit to my Aspire To Dragonflight.

More draegonhawke, on storyteller as an Otherkin-like calling.

baxil's fairly definitive FAQ on what it is to say "I am a dragon".

siege has a compelling piece here on eliminating negativity from your life, in association with identity work.

(Archive.org) Thoughtful musings on draconity and other things, by Kaijima.

Others' writings: Found

Magical Messiah is a great blog by a Christian Hermeticist on alchemy, Christianity and everything in between. If you read one thing on this blog, make it this post on the importance of magical secrecy, which we found quite inspirational.

Two nice articles on morphological freedom, and why it matters.

From Fred Clark at Slacktivist: a compelling argument against the fundamentalist Christian stance on homosexuality, but this post is also so much more than that. It's an eye-opening guide to the way the Bible is really meant to be read, and ends with some truly choking (to me, anyway) words on "wishful thinking" that I couldn't agree more with, in a Biblical context or otherwise. Even if you think you've had your fill of articles like this, it's worth it for that very last paragraph.

Terry Lindvall on C. S. Lewis' thirst for fiction and the ethereal quality of "Northernness", through which he found spirituality. A great essay on the power of sehnsucht.

Art: Visual

A short comic on magic and surrender.

Reference sheet: dragon self.

Reference sheet: human self.

Art: Textual

Fictionbit: star dragons.

Fictionbit: Four Directions and a Finite Sky
Old, but still a good example of my writing.

Contact the Undragon

You can contact me by leaving a comment on any entry (except this one), sending a private message via LiveJournal or Dreamwidth, or by email, if you happen to know my email address. :3 Any of these methods will reach me at the same speed as any other (PMs and comments go straight to my inbox), so it all works out.


Look, it's a hit counter! Bet you haven't seen one of these in years.


Uncopyrighted, with the exception of others' content.

Okay, so. Thing I've had in my head to ramble about for a little while, partly inspired by these submission criteria-- which I do not think reject allegorical use of species or fantastic race issues for the same reason I'm uncomfortable with them, but still kind of made me squee.

So. What do I mean by this? Well, I am totally okay with use of species/fantastic race issues in fiction. It's actually one of my fiction kinks. I co-wrote a 170,000-word work set in a society where speciesism was the main thrust of the character dynamics and had a fair bit of influence over the plot. I've been thrashing out an awesome story with some people lately which involves the issue of species transition in a world where transspeciesism is (barely) acknowledged. (Well, that and a dozen other things. XD) When it comes to the species issues, I am all up in them.

My bugbear, in this instance, is the popular conception that all such stories must necessarily reduce to allegory or metaphor for "real-world" scenarios. I saw this view posited again today on Slacktivist, and it made my hackles rise such that I had to stomp over here and post about it.

( Cut for long )

Okay, that's not strictly true. But I feel like it is, a little, sometimes. Or rather, like that's true of a lot of things in the otherkin community: we talk a lot about feeling them, where by "talk a lot" I mean "we say the same one line about feeling them, in our multitudes", but there's precious little depiction, in-depth, of what that feeling is like.

I crave words I can sink my teeth into, always. When I do stumble across such descriptions, and the non-human longings are bothering me, I feel better. When I come across them in times of ease, I feel a pleasant solidarity. In short, I really get a lot out of it when people go on about these things, purely because it's nice to know you're not alone.

So as I was writing up a detailed description of the phenomenon for a friend yesterday, I thought I'd share it with the journal, in case it's useful to anyone else.

( Cut for length )

So this is me-- but tell me about yourself!


Speaking of such, and as a kind of surreal coincidence, I woke up this morning to find that my laptop... was growing feathers.

( Photographic proof )