You Fail At Accessibility

I genuinely do not understand why conservatives watch Star Trek at all, much less when they're fans of it. It was always woke. The Federation -- the good guys in the series -- are a post scarcity communist utopia whose citizens are the most progressive, accepting people ever (only Iain M. Banks's The Culture have them beat). A lot of the bad guys in the series are war mongers or capitalists or both. Hell, the Cardassian government was a fascist military-run oligarchy who did a genocide against Space Jews. If DS9 came out for the first time today, with nothing changed, the conservatives would be going absolutely batshit insane with rage about Star Trek being political and taking sides against Israel in their genocide of the Palestinians.

I have a character I'm thinking of giving "visual snow syndrome," where their vision contains something like TV static or a variety of other visualizations. Most of these are physiological, including some that are the result of seeing things going on inside the eyeball. Even many who don't have the syndrome can sometimes see things like this. Ever see things floating in your field of vision when looking into the blue sky? Those are apparently globs of proteins and lipids inside your eyeball. I always assumed they were bacteria, as that's what they look like to me.

This is something that's very recent, I think it was discovered in the 90's. Often comes paired with a proclivity towards migraines.

My main issue at the moment is how to bring it up in the story. As in, how to have it come up in conversation?

(Emetophobia trigger warning ahead, for the third and fourth paragraphs down.)

It is very frustrating, with ADHD, how it is possible to have done something just fine every time you've tried it for months or even years in a row, it looks even to yourself like you have memorized how to do the thing, and then one wrong thought and it all goes away, even if just temporarily.

Case in point: I have always struggled to swallow pills. It took me until I was in my mid thirties to finally sort out how to do that consistently without gagging on the pills. I even got to a point where I can swallow like seven pills all at once... as long as I am carefully paying attention to what I am doing when I do it, and as long as I don't jinx myself.

To whit, a few minutes ago I took two large pills (metformin) with one swallow and said "Look, Ma! Two large pills!" Naturally, when I then went to take the rest of pills -- which were all much smaller, a task that I have been routinely doing just fine nearly every time for the last few years, suddenly I am back to square one like I'm five fucking years old again, gagging so hard on those pills that I literally puked. I did manage to swallow one or two, but the rest came up with the puke, and ended up in the garbage because of it.

Thankfully, it wasn't very much puke, just a small puddle worth, and this jinx was temporary, as I was able to take the replacements without any problems, though I did need to focus extra hard. But yeah, took me 30 fucking years to master, been doing it fine for like a decade now, and my brain just completely forgot for a few seconds how to do it. Hurr durr I cannot brain, I have the dumb.

I'm very interested in supposedly true Reddit stories about anomalous towns. These are usually small towns that have something weird or creepy about the town itself or about the people in it, even if the only creepy thing is something like "this town isn't on any maps and we couldn't find it again later even though we know the area very well." Other times, these towns are filled with cultists or other xenophobic people who stare creepily at outsiders. Still other times, these anomalous towns are supposedly the result of the story-teller having slipped into an alternate universe. And so many other options as well!

Naturally, I am incorporating the phenomenon into my writing. Book 7 already features a small town in Iowa that is entirely comprised of witches. This town, called Vanishing Valley, is highly warded to ward off mundanes, and the bulk of the town is in a "hollow hill." Hollow hills, in the context of the Ravenstone series, are little pocket universes with somewhat programmable laws of physics, mainly used to make a space "bigger on the inside than on the outside." The first hollow hill we encounter in the series, that is actually confirmed as such in the book, comprises the basement of the Fae Springs school. So far, the hollow hill that houses Vanishing Valley, Iowa, is the largest confirmed hollow hill in the series.

I have other ideas for how anomalous towns might feature. Before I came up with Vanishing Valley, all the way back when I was writing book 4, I originally planned to have a chapter take place in an anomalous town filled with faeries. Not just any faeries, either, but dangerous species like the kinderbluten -- a species inspired by stories of changeling babies and by the modern stories of "black eyed children" -- and Blutgeists, among others. Blutgeists are a hybrid between humans and kinderbluten, and are based on lore about vampires. (There are adult kinderbluten, even if most people -- including most witches -- only know about their children.) But I've talked about Blutgeists before. Anyway, as fun as a town full of monsters sounds, it ultimately didn't fit well enough for me to even start writing that chapter.¹

Obviously, with the Ravenstone series having a canonical multiverse, slipping into an alternate universe by accident is also a possibility. I mean, I do have an entire book (book 4) centered around someone that happened to (her name is Ressa). But the idea of doing that just to visit a single small town for a tiny amount of time just hasn't fit into the books yet. Though I do keep thinking about an alternative. Ressa slipped physically between universes, but the alternative I keep thinking about is: What if someone's soul comes unglued from their body and ends up in the body of their double in another universe with a very different life? Or into someone else's body entirely? You know... replacing the other person's soul, like a Freaky Friday situation, but between universes.

~

1 = As a sidebar, I kind of like the idea of maybe a one-off book in the same storyverse -- not attached to the main story except by virtue of being in the same main universe (which is called Beta) -- featuring the secret lives of some of these faery species considered "monsters" who have immigrated to Earth, and to the US or Canada in particular. I've already been collecting little bits of lore that would be relevant, such as adult kinderbluten who work as nurses in maternity wards to more easily replace someone's baby with one of their own, or Blutgeists who avoid being hunted down by the magical government by mainly hunting serial killers (especially hunting the kind of serial killers who drive semi trucks and use their job to cover their tracks) or maybe they hunt the same grounds as serial killers and target the same types of victims as serial killers so their kills are attributed to the serial killer? Or even hidden communities of these or other humanoid species that avoid humans altogether and eat only animals, an idea inspired both by some things in the TV series Supernatural and by the vibes of some of these anomalous towns in the Reddit stories. I figure maybe the Uncanny Valley evolved for a reason... being afraid of something that looks human but doesn't quite act human being maybe a legit fear. So a whole town full of such humanoid predators, even if they've sworn off human meat, would be setting off someone's Uncanny Valley feelings.

There's other species of faeries or similar beings from around the world that would be fun to populate a town with. Like the Kumiho, the Kitsune's much more violent and dangerous cousins from China. In fact, in the lore of the series, Kumiho are the same species as Kitsune, but driven to mutilate themselves to avoid being hunted and killed, which -- because their tails are tied to their magic -- does some horrible things to their minds.